SHIRIN NESHAT

Perhaps this is an obverse comparison, but I can’t help but juxtapose Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s first feature-length film, Women Without Men, in comparison with Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev’s Men Who Hate Women (in the US, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Both films are adaptations of novels, and both use political struggles as their backdrop. Neshat’s depicts the 1953 CIA-led coup d’etat in Iran, which was reportedly prompted by the British government’s fear of Iran’s plans to nationalize its oil industry. Oplev’s film explores Swedish businessmen whose longstanding devotion to the Third Reich is barely hidden beneath a protective screen of money and power. Housed conspicuously within both films’ political agendas are extremely disconcerting visions of female subjugation and sexual assault. Unfortunately, Oplev’s film treats this type of assault as just short of fetish, with its lead female character as a vector for an extremely unrealistic and grotesque revenge fantasy. Neshat’s film, despite its pretty, color-washed views of Iranian landscapes, is a far more authentic (ergo more painful to watch) depiction of bodily violence against women. A devoutly religious female character, Faezeh, is assaulted, and her disassociated psychic state is rendered in perfectly calibrated images constructed by Neshat, who has long been known as a fine artist who produces aesthetically and conceptually evocative film works around the political, social and psychological lives of Iranian women. Many of the scenes in Women With Men were screened at the Gladstone gallery in New York over the past 5 years, and to see the work in completion is to place all the pieces together in an affecting narrative. The film will open in NYC in May. Rizzoli is publishing a monograph of Neshat’s work, due out on April 20. And, for those who wish to see the artist in person in NYC, the School of Visual Art’s great Art Criticism and Writing MFA program will be hosting a talk with Neshat on April 22 at 7pm, at the SVA Theatre (333 West 23 Street).

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