The Comparative Study of Iranian Spiritual Cinema from Two Main Approaches: Nativism and Orientalism (Case Studies: Life and Nothing More, The Color of Paradise, So Close So Far)

In this paper, the Iranian Spiritual Cinema has been analyzed from two approaches, the general and major ones that critics take to study this cinema. The first approach has been described through ‘orientalism’ and the second one as ‘nativism’. Orientalism is a critical discourse which describes the Iranian Spiritual Cinema as an ideological commodity for the western gaze. From this approach, this kind of cinema represents the East, as a whole, and the eastern culture toward the politics of western dominated cultural discourse. In this dominant discourse the eastern culture is described as the opposite point of the western one. According to critics, it is not only the matter of cultural difference, but also it produces some kind of hierarchical system between the East and the West, which leads to stabilization of the dominant western culture and the marginal eastern culture. Therefore, this critical point of view considers the movies of this cinema as the objects of reproduction of the hierarchical cultural difference. In the other hand, nativism is a way that the nations or some groups of people, determinate their own identity through it. In the beginning of nativism, it was some kind of responding to the colonialism, so that the colonized nations could have their own independent identities which have not been dictated by the colonizers. This kind of identification also has been used by black Africans as a reaction against racism. But nativism, in general, is a method of identification for any culture or community which has been ignored by the dominant powers. Thus, the nativists argue that the Iranian Spiritual Cinema, just like any other aspects of Iranian culture, is a politic for emphasizing their own specific cultural identity instead of the dominant western culture. Both of these approaches have their theoretical origins in the postcolonial studies. So the framework of this paper is the postcolonial theories, focusing on Edward Saeed’s definition of orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s description of nativism. With considering both orientalism and nativism as two discourses, the main question of this research is about the discursive operation of these discourses, on the Iranian Spiritual Cinema. Three famous spiritual movies, which have been awarded in both Iranian and western film festivals, have been chosen to be the case studies of this research. These are: The Color of Paradise by Majid Majidi; Life and Nothing More by Abbas Kiarostamio; and So Close So Far by Reza Mirkarimi have been analyzed from both of these two approaches- the supportive one as nativism and the other one as an orientalistic criticism. At the conclusion, the article argues that orientalism and nativism, which are from two different discursive contexts, have a same discursive function which is reproducing and reconstructing the concept of ‘cultural difference’ between East and West. In fact both of these discourses operate through producing the binary of West/East or western /eastern culture; so they both just reproduce the subject of cultural difference.