From the denials to the image to the assertions of the self – From the edges between auto/biographies/fictions as a reflexive act in This is not a film

Abstract

Directed by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, This is not a film (2011) is a documentary produced entirely in an apartment and portrays a day in Panahi’s life while serving under house arrest sentenced by the Iranian government. The filmmaker blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction when he performs a version of himself based on the aesthetic limitations imposed by a condition of censorship and denial of the image. In this film, he places his own subjectivity in a game that combines the reflexivity of the “new Iranian cinema” (MELEIRO, 2008; SADR, 2006; TAPPER, 2006) with a gesture of political insurgency against his repressors. This paper analyzes how the dimensions of subjectivity (TAYLOR, 1997; ROLNIK, 2018) and reflexivity (GIDDENS, 2002; RUBY, 1996) and autobiographical acts (LEJEUNE, 2014; LANE, 2002) and self-fiction acts (DOUBROVSKY, 1977; COLONNA, 2004) cross and confront each other in this film. With this analysis, we seek to understand how the writing of the self, in this film, tensions realities and fictions, body and image, denials and affirmations around the image, the self and the image of the self.

Keywords
autobiography; self-fiction; reflexivity; Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb; This is not a film