DVD of the Week: “This Is Not a Film”

The Iranian director Jafar Panahi made this film in 2011, under house arrest in his Tehran apartment as he appealed both a six-year prison sentence and a twenty-year ban (still in force) on moviemaking, screenwriting, granting interviews, and travelling abroad.

He packs a triple dose of irony in its title, “This Is Not a Film.” The first is the plain contradiction, borrowed from Magritte; here it rings caustically as the denial of the facts before one’s eyes that a repressive regime practices and demands. The second is the deceptive labelling of a film as a non-film—and Panahi’s careful practices to coincide with it—to avoid violating his ban. The third is mentioned by Panahi in the course of the action: barred from working on location for his film, about a young woman whose parents lock her in the family home in order to prevent her from studying in Tehran, the director acts out the story himself on his living-room carpet, but stops midway, citing the incommensurable difference between his mimicry and a real film.

It’s a distinction from which Panahi draws even more scathing conclusions about the essence of the cinema and cinematic authorship. He’s still at home and still under a ban, yet he has somehow managed to make another film, “Closed Curtain,” together with the director Kambozia Partovi, which has been shown at various film festivals around the world, though not yet in New York.