Allegory and The Aesthetics Day I Became A Woman

The Day I Became a Woman (dir.
Marziyeh Meshkini, Iran, 2000)

Allegory and the Aesthetics
of Becoming-Woman in
Marziyeh Meshkini’s
The Day I Became a Woman
Michelle Langford
Why should I stop, why?

The birds have gone off to find water ways
the horizon is vertical and moving is rocketing.
Shining planets spin
at the edge of sight
why should I stop, why?
— Forugh Farrokhzad, Imam Biavarim be Aghaz-e Fasl-e Sard
(Let Us Believe in the Dawning of a Cold Season)
A wide-angle traveling shot of a vast landscape opens the second

episode of Marziyeh Meshkini’s tripartite film The Day I Became
a Woman (Roozi Ke Zan Shodam, Iran, 2000).1 The camera glides
along at an exhilarating pace as it tracks a male horse rider
from a number of different angles. He appears to be looking for
something. “Ahoo,” he calls, his voice scattering a small herd of
gazelle. He searches yet further, calling again and again, his voice
Camera Obscura 64, Volume 22, Number 1

doi 10.1215/02705346-2006-019 © 2007 by Camera Obscura
Published by Duke University Press

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echoing through the landscape: “Ahoo,” “Ahoo!” Eventually, on

the horizon, we begin to discern a number of tiny black figures
toward which we accompany the rider. Gradually it is revealed that
these figures are in fact several dozen young women engaged in
a bicycle race, their black chadors billowing in the wind as they
pedal. The breathtaking mobility of the camera is paradigmatic
of the tale about to unfold: the tale of a woman’s desire for social
mobility. The mobility of the camera inflects and is inflected by
the pace set by the cyclists. In fact, the camera is constantly mobile
throughout this part of the film, like the protagonist, almost never
pausing to rest.
I choose to begin my discussion of this film in the middle —
in midflight — rather than at the beginning, precisely because of
the sheer mobility both in and of the image. The mobility exer-
cised by the women on-screen is transmitted to the viewer through
a sense of shared momentum, experienced, by this viewer at least,
as exhilaration. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear
that this virtual mobility may not reflect the actual mobility avail-
able to women in Iranian society. It is this problematic that forms
one of the film’s central themes, a theme that also highlights the
numerous limits placed on women — physical, social, political, and
representational — in any patriarchally and religiously controlled
society. The film explores this theme by focusing on three genera-
tions of Iranian womanhood.
The film is structured as a set of three episodic narratives,
each featuring and named after a central female protagonist. In
the first episode, we meet Hava on the day of her ninth birthday,
the day she officially “becomes” a woman. She must adopt the
Islamic codes of modest dress and will no longer be allowed to play
with boys. In the second episode we meet Ahoo, a young married
woman attempting to stretch the boundaries of a strictly patriar-
chal society by participating in a women’s bicycle race. And in the
third, we meet Houra, an old, unmarried woman who has come to
the duty-free island of Kish to buy all the modern household items
she could never afford in her youth. These three stories are decep-
tively simple, and a cursory viewing might lead one to read the
film metaphorically as a grand narrative of a woman’s life viewed
Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman •
sequentially from childhood to womanhood to old age, with Hava,

Ahoo, and Houra respectively representing these stages. But, as I
wish to argue in this article, beneath this deceptive simplicity lies
a complex, multilayered allegorical film that invites numerous pos-
sibilities for interpreting and, even more important, for engaging
affectively with the film. I believe that despite its apparently simple
and modest appearance, The Day I Became a Woman is an enormously
significant film from a feminist perspective, not so much because
of the representations of women it generates but because of the
way its filmic aesthetics and its use of allegory set into motion a pro-
cess of “becoming-woman” that has the potential to move viewers,
thereby setting in motion their own becomings-woman.2 In doing
so, I believe this film mounts a significant challenge to the Islamic
censorship that contains and restricts representations of women
in Iranian cinema specifically and, more generally, highlights the
epistemological assumptions that structure much representational
narrative cinema.
Allegorical Cinema
Just as allegory may be used by the powerful to build nations and
spread ideologies, as a mode of hidden or “veiled” discourse,
allegory carries with it an enormous critical, even subversive,
potential. Allegory is a mode of expression that often emerges
at times of religious, political, or social upheaval, constraint, or
censorship. As a number of postcolonial theorists have noted,
allegory has emerged as a force among postcolonial and third-
world authors and filmmakers. According to Jean-Pierre Durix,
magic realist writers such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García
Márquez have used allegory to “bring into existence places
and communities which traditional literatures had ignored or
misrepresented.” 3 In its ability to, as Bill Ashcroft writes, “disrupt
the discourse of history,” allegory could and does provide a possible
avenue for feminist artists, writers, and filmmakers to disrupt the
discourse of History and to bring the ignored or misrepresented
experiences of women into existence.4 This is perhaps nowhere
more possible than in Iranian cinema, which is certainly no
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stranger to allegorical modes of expression and where the image

of woman is greatly controlled and constrained by censorship.5 In
the postrevolutionary period, both the postcolonial and feminist
impulses of allegory come together. Although it is arguable
whether Iran can be considered a postcolonial nation, it is
possible to claim that Iranian cinema has indeed been colonized
by Islam, inscribing its codes of modesty into the cinema’s
representational system and greatly affecting the possibilities of
truthfully representing women’s experiences. According to Negar
Mottahedeh, women’s bodies may sometimes function as alle
gories of the nation, but in her conceptually rich readings of
Bahram Bayzai’s Maybe . . . Some Other Time (Shayad vaghti deegar,
Iran, 1988) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh (Iran, 1996),
woman does not so much represent the nation as allegorically reveal
the contradictions presented by Islamic censorship. Mottahedeh
argues that both the nation and woman are essentially
unpresentable in contemporary Iranian film. She writes that “due
to the problems posed by the issue of modesty in postrevolutionary
Iranian cinema, women’s bodies, as the historically repressed
site of the national statement, have become the places in which
the multilingual expression of the enunciation (production) of
the nation takes place.” 6 The prerevolutionary history of Iran
becomes literally unpresentable because it must conform to the
present image of Iran as an exclusively Islamic society. According
to Mottahedeh, Bayzai uses allegorical techniques and cinematic
language to generate what Walter Benjamin called a “dialectic
at a standstill” out of this impossibility, enabling the present to
be understood in a meaningful and “urgent conjunction with
the past.”7 As I shall demonstrate in this article, Meshkini also
uses allegory as a very powerful mode of expression to highlight
the limits of cinematic representation, but at the same time, she
generates a similarly urgent conjunction between past, present,
and future. In order to understand how she accomplishes this,
however, a greater comprehension of the workings of allegory will
prove useful.
With any allegorical text or artwork, one would expect to
access meaning on at least two different levels. There is a literal,
rather superficial level that depends, in the case of film, largely

on the narrative logic of cinematic images and signifiers, which
emphasize film’s capacity for verisimilitude. Embedded within
these images and signifiers, however, would be clues or ciphers
that could lead the viewer to another implied level of allegorical
meaning. This level of meaning tends to disrupt and fragment
the apparently neat linear narrative development of the literal
level, and it alters the conventional relationship between signs and
signifiers. In fact, according to Walter Benjamin, one of the most
important properties of allegory is that “any person, any object, any
relationship can mean absolutely anything else.”8 Furthermore,
by fragmenting narrative progression into a series of disjointed
tableaux and through the process of semantic slippage, allegorical
works also have the capacity to disrupt and dismantle hierarchies.
The critical or subversive potential of allegory is made possible by
deliberately making visible the mechanisms and conventions by
which they are structured. As Benjamin writes, “The writer must
not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was
not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality
that was the [principal] impression which was aimed at.”9 As we
will see through my discussion of The Day I Became a Woman, on one
level the film may be read as an allegory of Iranian cinema itself,
a critique of the very structural limitations placed on filmmakers
by rigorous Islamic censorship rules. I will argue that Meshkini
negotiates censorship by pushing film form to its allowable limits,
making these limits visible within the form of the film itself.
Beyond this interpretation of the film as an allegory of
Iranian cinema, I wish to demonstrate how the film functions in
an even more complex allegorical register. In order to see this at
work, we need to move beyond this provisional understanding of
allegory to a more specific conception of allegory suggested by the
film itself. Rather than functioning on two levels of meaning —
literal and allegorical — that run parallel to one another, The Day I
Became a Woman may instead be approached along two intersecting
axes — horizontal and vertical — both of which are interdependent
and allegorical. By reading the film in this way, I wish to argue
that the viewer is presented with two very different conceptions of
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becoming — one that proceeds in a series of stages or states, and

another through which becoming may be experienced as a process.
I will demonstrate that by activating a processural becoming that
takes place not so much on-screen but between film and viewer,
The Day I Became a Woman palpably resonates with a conception of
becoming-woman similar to that theorized by Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari and recently taken up for debate within feminist
theory.
Before moving on to my detailed discussion of the film
itself, let me explore the theoretical figures that will weave their
way through this article in more detail. I have suggested that the
particular allegorical work of this film takes place along two axes,
the horizontal and the vertical. In 1953, the American avant-
garde filmmaker Maya Deren took part in a symposium on poetry
and film, along with some of the patriarchs of twentieth-century
American literature.10 During the symposium, Deren outlined her
conception of poetic cinema by distinguishing between what she
called the “horizontal” development of drama and the “vertical”
investigation of poetry. Deren wrote, “In what is called a ‘horizontal’
development, the logic is a logic of actions” (178). In contrast,
Deren defined poetry and the poetic aspects of cinema — involving
such things as mood, tone, and rhythm — as “vertical.” Deren
stated, “The poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that
it is a ‘vertical’ investigation of a situation, in that it probes the
ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities
and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned, in a sense, not
with what is occurring but with what it feels like or what it means”
(174). Deren believed that cinema carried with it a great potential
to interrupt narrative development at certain moments and to open
the viewing experience to the vertical or poetic axis, which has the
effect of creating what I would call a voluptuous exploration of
pure feeling. Deren theorized the possibility of a form of poetic
cinema that offers viewers immediate access to affect through the
aesthetic possibilities of cinema. It is important to point out that
during the course of the symposium, Dylan Thomas and Arthur
Miller not only mocked Deren’s theorization but absolutely refused
to understand her. At one point Miller elicited applause from the
audience, exclaiming, “To hell with that ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal.’ It

doesn’t mean anything” (184).11 I mention this altercation because
I think it foregrounds a problematic that lies at the heart of some
recent feminist theory, particularly by those theorists who have,
as Rosi Braidotti writes, embarked on a “quest for points of exit
from phallogocentric modes of thought toward a more balanced
approach.”12 It appears to me that Miller and Thomas failed to
fathom Deren’s conceptual metaphor, which is both spatial and
temporal, because they remained incapable of thinking outside
of the epistemological logic of phallocentrism. For them, what
Deren calls the vertical simply represented moments of the action
taking a momentary detour without ever leaving the horizontal
plane, rather than offering an exit, escape, or flight from this
plane, which Deren appeared to suggest.13 Although Deren had
considerable trouble making her point to these men, it is clear that
for her the vertical had nothing to do with action, although the two
axes may well be combined, as I will argue is the case with The Day
I Became a Woman.
It appears to me that Deren was speaking several decades
ahead of her time, for she might well have been talking about
Deleuze’s conception of affect, or of the difference between what
Deleuze and Guattari have theorized as the molar and molecular
planes of organization. As Barbara Kennedy has summarized, the
molar “plane of organisation is that area of our lives through which
we are structured into behavioural roles, through specific morali-
ties and principles; the molar line — the family, law, the state, edu-
cation — where things have specific values and a specific place.”14
By contrast, the molecular is concerned with affect, sensations,
vibrations, durations, modulations, resonances, and intensities.
The molar and the molecular are intimately linked in Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of assemblages. Indeed, much like Deren did in
her conception of poetic cinema, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of
assemblages as similarly comprising two axes: the horizontal and
the vertical.15 On the horizontal axis, an assemblage comprises
“content and expression,” while the vertical axis consists of stable
“territorialized sides” and “cutting edges of deterritorialization,”
which work to destabilize the assemblage (88 – 89). According to
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Deleuze and Guattari, certain authors such as Franz Kafka are

capable of making these axes function together. Allegories, too,
may be thought of as assemblages. They at once appear to main-
tain the impression of an ordered, hierarchical world and simul-
taneously destabilize this order. In addition, allegories necessarily
form an assemblage between authors and readers, and they are in
a constant state of flux or becoming due to the fleeting and dia-
lectical nature of meaning. For Benjamin, allegory is both a mode
of expression and a “way of seeing.”16 It is a process that involves
a dynamic engagement between writers and readers, artists and
viewers. It is in the moments in which these ways of seeing intersect
that the allegorical intention reveals itself. In The Day I Became a
Woman, both the horizontal and the vertical, the literal and the
allegorical, must be seen to coexist and intersect, for it is in the very
moments in which the allegorical cuts through the film’s literal or
horizontal axis that we may begin to perceive the various becom-
ings generated by the film. I wish to argue that despite the film’s
rather conventional and deceptively simple narrative structure and
the apparently hierarchical logic of images, there lies within an
allegorical film that palpably resonates with critical potential and
brings into focus the complexities and contradictions embedded
in the very concept of becoming-woman in contemporary Iranian
cinema. My analysis shall be divided into two movements, “Hori-
zontal Negotiations” and “Vertical Explorations.”
Horizontal Negotiations
Hava: Negotiating Continuity
A black scarf secured by its four corners to a crude mast undulates
restlessly in the wind. Rendered translucent by sunlight, this veil-
become-sail only partially obstructs our view of the vast, rippling
expanse of the ocean. This image is shortly followed by a title,
“Hava.” We first meet Hava, the protagonist of this story, as her
grandmother awakens her and she steps out of a little white tent.
As she emerges, we initially see only Hava’s sleepy face, the flaps
of the tent’s opening forming a kind of veil around her body. Her
grandmother tells her that today she has become a woman. Hava’s
Hava (The Day I Became a Woman)
seemingly inconsequential and playful gesture of “veiling” herself

with the tent prefigures the central role that the chador — the
long, black Islamic veil designed to modestly conceal a woman’s
hair and body — will play in this episode. Literally meaning “tent,”
the chador has been described as the single most defining article
of women’s clothing in Iran since veiling was made compulsory
in 1983 under Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic rule. It has also
become a regular fixture in Iranian cinema, helping to ensure
that censorship rules governing the modest representation of
women are maintained.
Hamid Naficy has explained how Islamic rules of modesty
have been adapted to the cinema and affect the representation
of women quite profoundly. In Iranian society, rules of modesty
involving dress, behavior, and eye contact are designed to protect
women (and men) from the male gaze.17 Central to these rules of
modesty is the practice of veiling, designed to conceal a woman’s
body: to hide her hair and her figure from the eyes of unrelated
men. In order to further conceal the shapeliness of a woman’s
body, she should wear long pants, a headscarf, and a loose tunic.
Moreover, in many public places such as mosques, shrines, and
government institutions, she should also wear a chador. Unrelated
men and women must lower their eyes in order to avoid eye contact
because the eyes are considered very powerful organs. A woman
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may appear unveiled only in the presence of men considered her

relations: father, brothers, sons, husband, and uncles. In some
parts of Iran, rules of modesty are also even encoded into the
design of the home, which, as we see in episode one, consists of
an exterior wall and a series of rooms with an inner sanctum that
enables the segregation of women from unrelated men who might
enter the home. As Naficy writes, “Before entering a house, men
are required to make their presence known by voice in order to
give the women inside a chance to cover themselves, or to organize
the scene for the male gaze” (50).
This idea of “organizing the scene for the male gaze” within
the home takes on even greater complexity when applied to the
cinema and the organization of women in the mise-en-scène. Naficy
continues his discussion by pointing out that the codes of modesty
applying to women in society apply equally, if not more, to women
in the cinema. He argues that in the cinema, the code “tends to
distort the portrayal of family life and love relationships because
women are shown covering themselves from even related kinfolks”
(51). In the cinema, not only must women remain constantly veiled
but any physical contact between men and women is forbidden
even if they are related in real life. This is due to the fact that
the male viewer is always considered unrelated to the women on-
screen, and he must therefore be protected from the power of his
own gaze. These codes create the conditions for a cinema incapable
of producing either veracity in its representations of relationships
between men and women or accurate representations of certain
historical periods (51).18
In this first episode of The Day I Became a Woman, the practice
and concept of veiling is recruited for allegorical purposes. Through
Hava’s simple gesture of pulling the tent around her, an allegorical
slippage takes place between the literal tent and the chador. Just as
the tent, which is also a kind of living space, can figurally signify
a chador, so too the chador is prepared for emblematic purposes,
in this case as a border or boundary between men and women
encoded into all aspects of Iranian society and cinema. On the
threshold of her own socially determined womanhood, it is Hava’s
job, in this episode, to negotiate the limits of this threshold.
Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman • 11
Little Hava, not unlike the child protagonists of many other

Iranian films, including The White Balloon (Badkonake sefid, dir. Jafar
Panahi, 1995), Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye aseman, dir. Majid
Majidi, 1997), and Chicken (Choori, dir. Javad Arkadani, 2001), to
name only a few examples, is a highly skilled negotiator.19 Told by
her mother and her grandmother that today is the day that she
has become a woman and that she must begin to veil and may
no longer play with boys, Hava pleads with them to allow her just
one more hour to play with her friend Hassan, since she was not
born until noon. Nothing particularly remarkable occurs during
the last hour before Hava officially becomes a woman; however,
we are made aware of other obstacles that come between her and
Hassan.
The most notable of these is motivated by Hassan’s sister,
who has called him home to do his homework, thus preventing
him from coming out to play during Hava’s last hour as a child.
The final touching exchange between them takes place with
Hassan quite literally locked behind the bars of his home. We
see him framed by a barred window, showing that borders and
boundaries may be just as limiting to men as to women. Hava,
however, manages to transgress the limits of this walled (and by
implication, veiled) society, demonstrating her sophisticated but
simple skills of negotiation. Hassan tells her to go and buy some ice
cream, but since she is unable to buy ice cream, she returns instead
with some tamarind and a lollipop. In a scene that suggests a great
deal of intimacy between the two children, Hava shares the lollipop
with Hassan through the bars of his window. Meshkini is careful
to use continuity editing, cutting alternately between Hava’s arm
movements and the faces of the two children as they share the
lollipop, with Hava’s hand reaching into the shots of Hassan to pass
him the lollipop. But this technique merely suggests the sharing
of the lollipop, for in the absence of a two-shot of the children, we
cannot be sure that they actually share it. This is further emphasized
in what appears to be a rather deliberate lapse in continuity, with
the size of the lollipop varying considerably and inconsistently
between cuts: the children are in fact not sharing the same lollipop
at all! In this one scene, therefore, the film allegorically figures
the capacity of film to simultaneously transgress and maintain

borders by inserting a gap of framing and continuity between the
two figures.
Although the codes of modesty that apply to adults would
not necessarily prevent Hava and Hassan, as children, from actually
sharing the lollipop on-screen, because Hava is conceptually being
represented on the verge of womanhood, it would be in principle
forbidden. On one level, it is this principle that the film highlights.
But on another allegorical level, Meshkini demonstrates cinema’s
ability to transgress censorship through a virtual renegotiation of
cinematic codes of continuity. Just as the lapse in continuity allows
us to say the characters never actually shared the lollipop, we are
still left with the impression that they did, an impression made
even more palpable by the way Hava is seen rubbing the lollipop on
her lips and through the exaggerated close-miked sucking noises
we hear on the soundtrack. Furthermore, these sounds, in their
uncanny resemblance to a kiss, stand in for and bridge the gap,
separated by the chain of allegorically connected signifiers — edit,
wall, tent, chador — to virtually connect male and female bodies.
Meshkini’s premature separation of the children’s bodies further
highlights the extent to which filmmakers in Iran must push
cinematic codes and techniques in order to negotiate the limits
placed on them by censorship.
Ahoo: Negotiating Narrational Agency and the Male Gaze

In the second episode, Meshkini pushes this allegorical reflection
on the limits and possibilities of cinematic codes even further
as she shows Ahoo as a young woman attempting to renegotiate
her place in society. If the tone of the first episode was playful
and childlike in its mode of negotiation, the second is filled with
urgency.
The opening scenes of the episode described at the
beginning of this article visually set up a highly traditional and
conventional conception of woman. The scenes of the man seeking
out Ahoo could be said to visually represent the meaning and
connotations carried by the term zan (woman) present in the film’s
title. In Farsi, zan means both “woman” and “wife.” This implies,
Farzaneh Milani argues, that linguistically woman is always defined
in relation to man, since there is no distinct terminology, as there
is for a man, to signify a woman independently of her relationship
to a man. She writes, “Woman is defined with reference to man,
whereas a man is described as a person and not with reference to
her.”20 Indeed, structurally, the beginning of this episode seems to
apply these connotations of the word zan to the visual image, for it is
only through the man’s gaze, enacted by shots of him searching the
landscape for his wife, that the female cyclists are introduced into the
scene. Furthermore, as the man approaches the group of women,
there is little to distinguish one young woman from another. They
are all identically dressed in black chadors, and as they participate
in the race, they frequently change positions, suggesting that
one may easily be substituted for another. It is not until the man
brings his horse close to the group of cyclists in order to survey
their faces and identify his wife that one woman in particular is
singled out from the rest by way of a close-up of her face. It is
as though she may only be identified individually for the viewer
once her relationship to this man — her husband — is established.
Thus, according to cinematic conventions, the spectator is initially
encouraged to identify with the male perspective. Indeed, the active
nature of the husband’s gaze is further emphasized by the alle
gorical nature of Ahoo’s name, which means “gazelle.” He is the
hunter and she the hunted.
It is therefore only through his active, almost predatory gaze
that Ahoo may be introduced into the story, and it is perhaps for
this reason that she is shown constantly struggling to establish and
maintain her position in the race and to take on the narratological
agency of the tale. Until this point in the episode, one could argue
that the film quite literally extends the rules governing association
between the sexes in Iranian society to the processes of cinematic
narration and characterization.
The codes of modesty discussed earlier also affect the kinds
of roles available to women in the cinema and women’s abilities
to actively drive narratives. As Naficy points out, until recently,
“narratologically, women rarely have been the bearers of the story or
the plot,” and have been largely confined to static roles. Furthermore,
women must “avoid activities and movements that show even the
contours of their bodies through their modest attire.”21 This point
in itself makes The Day I Became a Woman significant as one of the
first films to show women engaged in a highly physical activity such
as cycling.
It is interesting that Naficy draws on ideas developed in
psychoanalytic feminist film theory not only to explain the codes
that govern women in Iranian cinema but also to describe the rules
of modesty that govern interactions between men and women in
Iranian society at large, which revolve around containing and
controlling the male gaze by way of covering and concealing
women’s bodies. Drawing explicitly on ideas introduced to film
theory by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema,”22 along with the work of other feminist
film theorists, Naficy concludes that in Iranian society, the male
gaze is not so much articulated from a position of power, enacting
neither a voyeuristic nor a fetishistic gaze, but rather from a
position that acknowledges men’s inherent weakness. This means,
for Naficy, that veiling in Iranian society implies a male gaze that is
masochistic. I would argue, however, that while it may be true that
the male gaze in such a context is potentially self-destructive, as in
Freud’s theory of fetishism in which the female body presents to
the male viewer a lack and a threat of castration — which must be
disavowed, covered over, made whole — so, too, we must remember
that the veil works to cover, to disavow, man’s inherent weakness
and inability to control his inwardly penetrating gaze. Rather
than serving to disavow woman’s lack of a penis as in the Oedipal
scenario involved in fetishistic scopophilia, the veil serves a dual
function: first, to protect women from a man’s voyeuristic gaze,
and second, to disavow man’s own lack (weakness) and protect him
from being placed in a masochistic position. This does tend to
complicate the male-female, active-passive binaries constructed by
psychoanalytic feminist film theory, since some Islamic feminists
from Iran and elsewhere have pointed out that the veil can actually
help to facilitate women’s entry into the public sphere and, by
implication, women’s entry into Iranian cinema as protagonists
with a high degree of narratological agency.23 But as we shall see,

this agency may only be attained by careful negotiation of the
limits of representation imposed on cinema by Islamic censorship
and must remain within the physical restrictions presented by the
veil itself.
With this in mind, returning to the second episode from
The Day I Became a Woman, the very fact that Ahoo is engaged in a
bicycle race and exhibits a degree of narratological agency as the
episode’s protagonist indicates that the film negotiates some of
the limits of representation imposed by these codes.24 The sheer
physical activity and mobility displayed by Ahoo can therefore be
seen in part as a reflection of the loosening of these restrictions,
and we might attribute part of the film’s wide appeal at interna
tional film festivals to the fact that never before in postrevolutionary
Iranian cinema have women appeared with such mobility. But I
would like to suggest that Meshkini is not simply celebrating the
apparent expansion of these limits of representation; rather, she is
allegorically testing their flexibility. This may be demonstrated by
examining the development of the narrative more closely.
The narrative develops according to processes of repetition
and intensification, which are complemented by the rhythm of
Ahoo alternately gaining or losing ground in the race. These are
directly related to the entries of men into the scene. While her
husband is pleading with her to stop and return home with him,
Ahoo is passed by many of her fellow competitors and remains
surrounded by other women, struggling to keep up the pace as long
as her husband is present. Once she refuses by uttering an almost
imperceptible “no,” her husband departs, and Ahoo appears to
regain her drive, begins to pedal harder, pulls ahead, and takes
command of the image as she rides through the landscape in a
highly mobile one-shot. Her feeling of liberation is expressed and
transmitted to the viewer through her sole command of the image
and her movement through the apparently boundless landscape.
That is, until we again hear the resounding gallop of horses’
hooves signaling the return of Ahoo’s husband, this time with the
mullah who had performed their marriage ceremony. Once again
Ahoo loses ground, once again she struggles, once again she falls
back into the pack of cyclists. The mullah pleads with Ahoo to
return to her husband or to agree to a divorce. She agrees to the
divorce, and as the men depart, Ahoo once again appears to take
a solitary flight into the limitless landscape. Three more times
Ahoo is approached by significant men in her life: her father and
grandfather, accompanied each time by the elders of her tribe,
followed finally by her brothers. Until the arrival of her brothers,
this rhythmic pattern of loss and gain, struggle and freedom
repeats. Thus the narrative progression takes on the elastic quality
of a rubber band, stretching and contracting repeatedly. Ahoo’s
“freedom” still seems to be constrained by the limits of a highly
codified world whose flexibility is brought into question by the
arrival of her brothers.
The effect of Ahoo’s brothers’ arrival on the scene does not
simply cause her to lose ground; it brings her to a grinding halt. She
stops by braking and placing her feet on the road as her two brothers
encircle her threateningly on their horses. As Ahoo dismounts,
the camera begins to pull away swiftly, leaving her stranded and
at the mercy of her brothers. At this point the film must abide
by censorship rules, and violence is merely suggested rather than
represented, since the camera has pulled so far away as to render
the scene between Ahoo and her brothers virtually indiscern
ible.25 This episode ends, therefore, at a point of indecision as to
the fate of Ahoo, a fate apparently unknown even to the other
cyclists. The ambiguity of Ahoo’s narrative closure is carried
through into the next episode of the film, when two of the other
women cyclists relate Ahoo’s story to that episode’s protagonist,
Houra. One young woman believes that Ahoo’s brothers took
her bike so that she was unable to finish the race, while the other
believes that Ahoo took another girl’s bicycle and did indeed
complete the race. I read this ambiguity, which exists both on the
level of the diegesis and in terms of what the viewer is allowed to
see, to mean that the limits of female narrative agency and women’s
social mobility can only be taken so far in the cinema because the
rubber band of social and moral constraint will eventually reach its
limit of flexibility and snap. The camera leaves Ahoo, and therefore
takes away her narrative agency, precisely because cinema, Iranian
cinema in particular, has limits — representational, social, politi

cal, and religious — that constrain its efficacy as a medium for
challenging the traditional roles of women in Iranian society.
Ahoo seems to be constantly attempting to escape the
constraints of cultural, religious, and moral expectations. Rather
than simply creating a story that offers a utopian vision of female
liberation, Meshkini works the notion of struggle into every layer
and every image of this episode. This is carried through even into
the area of costuming, through the use of the chador. Ahoo is
further distinguished from the other women in the race through
the way that she struggles to keep her chador in place. While the
other women appear to have their veils pinned firmly in place,
secured against the force of the wind, we continually see Ahoo
having to rescue hers from blowing away, sometimes even holding
it in place with her teeth. Our attention is drawn to the impractical
ity of such an item of clothing, something that restricts and hinders
women’s participation in certain activities. Nevertheless, the film
also seems to be saying that women still manage to participate
despite such imposed limitations. In a number of recent Iranian
films featuring women, including The Circle (Dayereh, dir. Jafar
Panahi, 2000) and Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi, dir. Babak Payami,
2001), the chador figures similarly as a metaphor for the struggle
of women against the constraints of society as the various female
protagonists attempt in vain at times to keep their chadors in place.
I do not believe, however, that these examples of struggle with the
chador represent simplistic arguments against veiling, but rather
figure the veil itself as a site of negotiation.
In her book Veils and Words, Farzaneh Milani discusses at
length the concept and practice of veiling in Iran. She writes, “In
recent years, a major shift has occurred in the meaning of the
veil, which no longer signifies women’s segregation but, on the
contrary, facilitates their access to the public arena, a means to
renegotiate boundaries. . . . Veiled or unveiled, Iranian women are
reappraising traditional spaces, boundaries, and limits. They are
renegotiating old sanctions and sanctuaries. They are challenging
male allocations of power, space, and resources.”26 This is precisely
what occurs in The Day I Became a Woman. Ahoo’s chador, a literal
limit, boundary, or gap between male and female, allegorically

figures the struggle she must undertake in order to renegotiate
the limits of her mobility in the public sphere.
Houra: Negotiating the Domestic Mise-en-Scène

And so we finally arrive at the third and final episode of the film.
This is the story of Houra, an old, unmarried woman who has
come to the duty-free island of Kish to purchase all the modern
consumer goods that she could never afford to buy before now,
having inherited an unspecified but apparently large sum of
money. She enlists the help of a small army of young boys to trolley
the items she has purchased — which include a bedroom suite,
a lounge, a refrigerator, and a washing machine, along with a
range of other domestic items, and a wedding dress — around the
shopping center for her, and one to push her in her wheelchair.
Houra appears to be something of a contradiction in the sense
that her age and her immobility appear to link her directly to the
past, while her desire for modern consumer goods figures her as a
woman very interested in the future. The allegorical nature of her
name is also highly ironic given her visual appearance. “Houra” (a
Persian girl’s name meaning “nymph”) recalls the houri (Arabic for
female angels), the beautiful young women who offer themselves
to “good” men in heaven.27 She may not be the ideal image of one
of the seventy-two virgins allegedly welcoming martyred young
men into paradise, but she is the epitome of the ideal modest
Iranian woman, a stereotypical fixture of postrevolutionary
Iranian cinema. It is also implied that she is illiterate, as rather
than coming to Kish with a list, she has tied onto her fingers many
pieces of colored cloth to remind her of all the things she wanted
to buy. But true to the allegorical nature of this film, the cloth
may take on multiple meanings. On the one hand it serves as a
rather antiquated device for aiding memory, and on the other
it reminds viewers that in some parts of Central Asia, including
Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan, women tie colored
strips of cloth to shrines or on nearby trees to signify a prayer or
wish to the saint.28 Indeed, toward the end of the episode, Houra
laments that she never had children, asking a little Afghan boy if
she can adopt him. Perhaps a last strip of cloth signifies her wish.
One piece of cloth in particular is the catalyst for the scene
I wish to discuss here. Houra has managed to match each piece
of cloth with an item that she has bought — that is, all except one.
No matter how hard she tries, she is unable to think of that one
last thing, so she asks the boys who have been helping her to set
up all the furniture and white goods on the beach. The effect is
the creation of a rather surreal mise-en-scène that literally trans-
poses an inner, normally hidden space — the inner sanctum of the
home — into an open, public space. The enclosed and private space
of the home is literally turned inside out. But this does not mean
that the scene is no longer organized for the male gaze. Houra
remains veiled, as do the two cyclists who arrive from the second
episode to relate Ahoo’s story to Houra. Furthermore, a kind of
implicit wall is still maintained around the space of this outer inner
sanctum by the fact that apart from the boys who help her, men
are entirely absent from the scene. It remains a space of exclusion
and seclusion, despite Houra’s attempts to renegotiate the limits
of such a domestic space. In a rather humorous way, Meshkini also
appears to point out the very impossibility of realistically represent-
ing a domestic environment in Iranian cinema.
The contradiction of inner and outer is further emphasized
through a highly emblematic object: a transparent glass teapot,
which Houra labels “indecent” and which builds on the allegorical
significance of limiting devices (edit, wall, tent, chador) already dis-
cussed. The teapot does not conceal (veil) its contents; however, its
seemingly invisible walls still function as a barrier, as a border — a
boundary no less capable of containment than the invisible walls of
her living room on the beach. Significantly, Houra gifts this object
to two young women from the previous episode’s bicycle race who
sit for a while in her living room on the beach to talk with her. It is
they who have inherited the task of negotiating not merely visible
and physical boundaries but invisible boundaries as well.
The final scenes show Houra floating off toward the hori-
zon on the sea with her consumer goods perched precariously on
a number of rafts. Little Hava, now concealed beneath her chador,
watches over her; she, too, is an inheritor of the task of negotiation.

Here, as in the other two episodes, Meshkini makes allegorical use
of various cinematic techniques in order to render visible some of
the limits by which the representation of women in Iranian cinema
is bound.
On the Way to Becoming

Each of these episodes manages to some extent to address the
question of women’s negotiations of limits and borders on the
levels of narrative and cinematic representation, and this could
be said to allegorically figure the negotiations that contemporary
Iranian women must undertake in the course of their daily lives.
In fact, the way the film draws our attention to certain aspects of
cinematic representation through its emphasis on continuity edit-
ing, narratological agency, regimes of looking, and mise-en-scène
leads me to read these codes of cinematic representation — which,
as I have demonstrated, all have significant limits in an Iranian
context — as allegories of the condition of women in contempo-
rary Iranian society itself. In an allegorical fashion, Meshkini
draws our attention to the highly constructed nature of cinematic
representation.
Viewing the film as a horizontal series from beginning to
end, we might say that the three parts of the film form a kind of grand
narrative of a woman’s life viewed sequentially from childhood to
womanhood to old age, with Hava, Ahoo, and Houra respectively
representing various stages in her life. We could imagine that each
episode is an image laid out one after the other in linear succession,
three images in a strip of film perhaps: Hava — Ahoo — Houra.
In such a configuration, becoming is represented as a series of
states or stages, rather than as a vital, dynamic process. Between
each of these images lies a gap, an interstice, a blank space that
falls between the moments of representation. It is in these gaps
where true becoming lies, excluded from the image that purports
to present it. As in the film’s title, becoming is rendered in the past
tense as “became,” inert and static, always already passed. In the
first episode in particular, Hava became a woman at a predetermined
point in time, imposed on her by social convention and Islamic law

rather than through a process of becoming. The division between
child and woman is marked simply and artificially by the chador,
an outward signifier of womanhood. Indeed, in a sense, none of
the three women in the film are actually shown in the process of
becoming-woman. All tend to exist in a state of not-woman in the
linguistic sense expressed by the term zan: Hava is not yet woman,
Ahoo, who receives a divorce, is no longer woman, and Houra,
the old woman who never married, has in a sense never become
woman/wife. In fact, perhaps this is what Houra has forgotten,
the thing represented by the remaining piece of cloth tied around
her finger. But, we could ask, did she simply forget to marry, to
become woman/wife? We could say that she is emblematic of the
social impossibility of becoming-woman in her own right without
reference to man.29
In some senses, then, when examined along this horizontal
axis, the film’s narrative impulse, while apparently celebrating
women and granting them the status of protagonists, also tends
to point toward the very failure of cinematic representation and
the limitations of its capacity to represent the becoming of woman
in Iranian cinema. I do believe, however, that there is yet another,
more complex, allegorical level to this film, which can be accessed
only if we turn away from the superficial narrative level and our
tendency to accept that these three supposedly successive states of
womanhood tell the whole story of The Day I Became a Woman.
Before I turn to explore how the film operates very dif
ferently along the vertical axis, however, a more detailed under
standing of the concept of becoming will be useful. In his book
Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson wrote of the difficulties of rep-
resenting true becoming to the intellect. Although we “change
without ceasing,” we tend to “disregard this uninterrupted change,
and to notice it only when it becomes sufficient to impress a new
attitude on the body, a new direction on the attention.”30 The
problem, according to Bergson, ostensibly lies in the nature of
the intellect itself, in our mode of thought, which privileges states
over processes. In his introduction, he writes that “our concepts
have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, pre-
eminently, the logic of solids” (ix). As such, these concepts and this
logic, which proceed by way of constructing a series of categories
in a mechanistic way, are not able to fully take into account “the
things of life” (x). As such, the “essence of things escapes us” (ix).
Here Bergson is pointing to an inadequacy in Western philoso-
phy and the sciences, the disciplines that have most profoundly
informed the epistemological structure of our intellects and ways
of seeing the world. Indeed, in chapter 4 of his book, Bergson, who
was writing in the decades immediately following the invention of
cinema, goes so far as to describe our “apparatus of knowledge”
as “cinematographical,” that is, cutting between a succession of
discrete “images” of the world, excluding the transformation that
takes place between these. Continuing the metaphor of optical
devices to describe human thought processes, he writes, “There
is, between our body and other bodies, an arrangement like that
of the pieces of glass that compose a kaleidoscopic picture. Our
activity goes from an arrangement to a rearrangement, each time
no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not interesting
itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture” (323).
Reading The Day I Became a Woman in a linear or horizontal
manner, therefore, we see only a series of these “new pictures,”
the stages in a woman’s life, rather than the “shake” or the trans
formation and modulation (becoming) that take place between
these culturally and linguistically imposed stages. Time and the
variable durations of bodies in process, which give rise to the con
tinual and multiple becomings that constitute all life, are effectively
excluded from such a reading of the film. Moreover, in its insistence
on showing how the women in the film must negotiate the limits
that constrain them without exceeding these limits, women are
shown to be contained within and controlled by an epistemological
structure that includes representational narrative cinema. Becom
ing, therefore, is presented along this horizontal axis of the film
as a state imposed from the outside, as with the veil designed at
once to hide the processural body of woman and to set up a clearly
visible barrier between women’s bodies and the becomings of
other bodies (especially those of men) that might interact with
it and create assemblages. Indeed, according to the philosophy
of Deleuze and Guattari, such a reading of the film deals only

with the molar plane of organization, which concerns itself with
specific categories, with states rather than processes, and it is for
this reason that at this level it is impossible to locate any sense of
becoming as process in the film. According to Bergson, the task
of perceiving and representing true becoming requires a certain
ability to transcend or transgress the epistemological structures on
which our intellects and social structures are based.
Of course, as a representational system, cinema may only
effectively represent becoming as reconstituted movement rather
than showing an actual process or change. Change may only be
captured as a series of stages limited to twenty-four frames per
second. While I am not trying to argue that The Day I Became a
Woman transcends this limited ability for film to represent true
becoming, I do believe that the film offers an alternative solution
to this age-old bind. It does this not on the level of representation
at all, but aesthetically and allegorically by developing a vertical
movement that cuts through the more rigid horizontal and molar
axis of the film. Whereas the horizontal emphasizes borders and
limits and a chronological passage of time, the vertical presents
the possibility of other kinds of temporal experience. According
to Maya Deren’s conception of the vertical, this poetic axis is
inscribed with a particular kind of temporality, not a temporality
in which one moment follows the next but one in which an entire
life may be contained in a single vertical exploration of a moment.
Deren states, “The chosen moment should be of such significance
that one can deduce all history from it.”31 Rather than simply
stopping narrative progression and exploring the vertical at certain
moments, as described by Deren here, the vertical axis of The Day I
Became a Woman is coextensive with — that is, forms an assemblage
with — its horizontal axis. It is this vertical axis that opens up a
voluptuous space within the film and not only allows us to begin
to see the hidden (veiled) meanings that are embedded within the
film but opens the viewer up to a more molecular experience of the
film. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is only at this molecular level that
a true process of becoming-woman may be registered.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of becoming-woman
is the key to all becomings, which include becoming-child, becoming-

animal, becoming-intense, and becoming-molecular. The term
woman in the phrase becoming-woman does not refer to a specifically
feminine or female biological or psychological subject, but rather
to a process that displaces or disorients any kind of fixed subject
position. Becoming is not aimed at becoming something; rather,
becoming “is a verb with a consistency all its own, it does not reduce
or lead back to ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equalling,’ or ‘producing.’ ”32
Furthermore, the idea of becoming-woman does not presume a
binary conception of sex or gender, since Deleuze and Guattari
conceive of “as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis” (242).
As Claire Colebrook has written, “If man is the concept of being
then his other is the beginning of becoming.”33 Becoming-woman
always exists in process, in the in-between, not aimed at an end
point of being-woman, but rather, in the words of Jerry Aline
Flieger, “it aims at tensile transformation and transgression of
identity.”34 In The Day I Became a Woman, therefore, it is not so
much the bringing into being of female subjects or identities that is
effected, but the instigation of a process of becoming-woman that
is part of the cinematic assemblage of the film and its becomings
with other bodies, such as that of the film viewer.35 This occurs
through the opening up of a vertical axis or plane, an allegorical
momentum, which disturbs and displaces the seemingly neat
division of woman into a series of states or stages and splits this into
a series of multiple becomings. The film, therefore, generates a
force that intersects dynamically with some debates on becoming-
woman in feminist theory.
In recent years, the concept of becoming-woman has re
ceived a great deal of attention from feminist theorists. Some have
engaged the concept productively, while others have approached
it — along with the work of Deleuze and Guattari generally — with
more ambivalence and skepticism. What is clear, however, is that
feminist theorists have engaged in diverse and provocative ways
with their work.36 Rosi Braidotti describes this “affinity” between
Deleuzian thought and feminist theory as a shared impulse to “undo
the straight-jacket of phallocentrism” and dualistic thought, and in
doing so to generate a “moving horizon of exchanges and becomings,
towards which the non-unitary subjects of postmodernity move, and

by which they are moved in return.”37 The concept of becoming-
woman offers feminism another way to think of sexual difference
by affirming “the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and
constant process of transformation.”38 Furthermore, this concep
tion of difference, which is not only sexual, is not constructed as a
binary where woman is the other of man. Deleuze’s emphasis on
embodied, affective entities, rather than biological ones, according
to Braidotti, enables the “embodied subject” to be thought in
terms of “a process of intersecting forces (affects), spatio-temporal
variables that are characterised by their mobility, changeability,
and transitory nature” (112). This is of enormous value in an
Iranian context, where feminism has, according to Shahrzad Mojab,
become something of a site of contestation between “Muslim”
women and “Western” feminists. Mojab argues that Western fem
inism has constructed an imagined category of Muslim women
that “ignores the heterogeneity of women in Islamic societies and
constructs them into a universal category shaped by one particular
characteristic, a common religion, Islam.”39 This, according to
Mojab, generates an adversarial relationship between Western
feminism and its others. Rather than the divisive binary generated
by such universalizing particularisms, Mojab advocates adopting
a “dialectical approach” that recognizes both the particularities
of a given historical context and the commonalities shared across
diverse cultural contexts (27). This may be achieved through a
more transnational approach, moving fluidly between “national,
regional, or global levels” (29).40 But, I would ask, why stop at the
dialectical? I believe that The Day I Became a Woman helps to posit a
becoming-woman of a multitude of feminisms, one in which vital,
productive, and embodied encounters may take place across both
space and time. Film’s capacity to move fluidly across borders offers
a wonderful opportunity for setting such a process in motion.
The Day I Became a Woman does so by motivating the viewer
to take an epistemological turn, to consider not only the literal,
horizontal, or molar reading of the film that I have outlined above
but to entertain the possibility of a further allegorical encounter
situated along a vertical axis and which then becomes suggestive of a
more processural and time-laden conception of becoming-woman,

generated as an intimate and immanent encounter between
two bodies — the body of the film and the body of the film viewer.
Vertical Explorations
In order to see how the film generates a vital, time-laden process
of becoming-woman, we must turn away from the chronologi-
cal structure by which the film is presented to us in the cinema.
There is in fact evidence within the film to suggest that each epi-
sode takes place simultaneously; however, we may not become
aware of this until toward the end of the third episode when the
two young women from the bicycle race arrive on the scene to tell
their conflicting version of events to Houra, or until later, when
Houra is floating out to sea on her raft of consumer goods, and
we see Hava from the first episode on the beach with her mother.
She still wears the same dress and the chador that her mother had
given to her at the end of that episode. Even more subtly, simul-
taneity is suggested through the use of shadows, to which our
attention was drawn in the first episode, as it is with a crude sun-
dial (a stick placed in the sand), rather than with a mechanical
timepiece, that Hava will know it is midday and time for her to
officially become a woman. In the second episode, we observe the
gradually lessening shadows cast by the cyclists on the road, and
in the third, the shadow of the large tree on the beach indicates
a time close to midday.41 These indications of simultaneity sug-
gest to the perceptive viewer that an alternative to the sequential
ordering of the episodes might be possible. In fact, I believe we
are asked to view the film as a layering of the “ages” of a woman’s
life, rather than as a progression from one (st)age to another.
We should therefore turn our minds to consider how each
image might affect the other when placed one over the other
in layers or sheets that may touch; then we are faced with a very
different film, a film pulsating with traces of allegorical temporality
and becomings-woman. Indeed, a further crucial aspect of Walter
Benjamin’s theory of allegory is relevant here. For Benjamin, it is
allegory’s ability to capture conflicting temporal states or processes
within a single figure, emblem, or image that sets it apart from other
rhetorical forms. He describes this quality with the evocative phrase
“petrified unrest.”42 Benjamin writes, “Allegory establishes itself
most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confronted
each other most closely.”43 Allegories are dialectical in a specifically
Benjaminian sense for they contain multiple levels of meaning
circulating between abstract and literal poles, which coexist and enter
into exchanges but do not collapse into a single, final idea. Allegories
are therefore not dissimilar to Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of
assemblages. Although homologies are constructed, there is always
a gap that prevents a full metaphorical translation from taking
place between the two things or ideas. This gap enables a degree
of ambiguity to be maintained in order to ensure that the reader or
viewer of an allegorical text will have to work at the production of
meaning and therefore enter into a dynamic relationship with the
text. Translated into a temporal concept, the dialectical nature of
the allegorical mode of expression allows not only for parallels to be
established between distinct temporal periods but enables different
temporalities or durations to rub against and inflect one another in
a highly dynamic way.44 Benjamin conceived the notion of dialectical
images as a way of understanding history not as a succession of events
in time, but rather as fleeting constellations of past and present.
For him, the past is never simply past but is made palpable in the
present. Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image, and what he has
elsewhere called the “dialectic at a standstill,” describes the moment
of virtual stasis when, like “lightning,” an image of the past “flashes
up in the now of its recognisability,” before “in the next moment [it]
is already irretrievably lost.”45 Allegorical texts frequently produce
these moments of dynamic contact between disparate things and
times. In doing so, filmic texts in particular produce what I have
elsewhere called “allegorical-images.”46 These are time-images, in
the sense coined by Deleuze in his second volume on the cinema,
images in which time is presented directly rather than subordinated
to movement.47 Allegorical images are, however, a very specific kind
of cinematic time-image in that they are capable of sustaining
seemingly incommensurable temporalities or durations, as captured
in Benjamin’s image of petrified unrest.
This conception of an allegorical image capable of sus

taining multiple temporalities simultaneously enables us to move
beyond the conception of time as a succession of moments marked
by the seconds and minutes on a clock face (mechanical time) —
or indeed the days, weeks, years, or ages marked by calendars
and chronicles — to a different kind of temporality that is more
processural and experiential, and based on the specific durations
of bodies. By conceptualizing the temporality of The Day I Became
a Woman as simultaneous and its structure as each episode
constituting a layer or temporal sheet, we can see possibilities
rather than limits as each of these women’s individual durations
“rub” against one another, affecting and informing each other in
the way that Benjamin’s dialectical image allows past and present
to come into direct and dynamic contact.
Vertically layered in this way, each woman in the three
episodes comes to embody a very complex set of temporalities both
in relation to the other women and also within herself: each bears
within her past, present, and future simultaneously, with complex
temporal flows being exchanged between each of them. Houra, for
example, as an old woman can be seen as both past and future to
Hava and Ahoo: a generalized past that also bears witness to the
history of Iran, particularly as it relates to women and modernity.
She has lived through the periods of forced unveiling under the
Shah, and the subsequent period of forced veiling that followed the
Islamic revolution. Houra has also been witness to the vast project
of modernization under the Shah, and the subsequent criticism
of “Westoxification” and the return to Islamic tradition that came
with the revolution.48 We must understand that she has not simply
passed through these periods of Iran’s history but that these
conflicting forces remain in her, embodied by her and evidenced
in a number of contradictory ways. Her body is figured as crippled
by the passage of time — twisted, stooped, and gnarled — yet she
has flown to Kish by airplane, thus utilizing a mode of transport
that alters the relationship between time and space. She employs a
rather antiquated method for remembering the things she wishes
to buy, yet the strips of colored cloth she has tied to her fingers lead
to the purchase of the most modern of domestic appliances. Despite
her apparently wholesale entry into consumer culture, Houra re

mains mildly critical of consumerism and attached to tradition
by not allowing the “immodest” translucent teapot to violate her
modesty. Her attachment to the past is figured evocatively through
the final colored thread, the meaning of which she has forgotten,
and her interest in the future is figured through the gift of the
teapot to the two young women cyclists, who she hopes will have
opportunities that she never had herself.
Houra’s is a duration that brings together past, present, and
future, not a “flash” in the Benjaminian sense, but a duration that
is long, heavy, voluptuous, and languid like her own movements.
Watching her sit on the beach trying to remember, to sift the vast
recesses of her memory for the forgotten item, we become aware
that time has welled up within her body, causing it to slow down:
her body has become heavy with time. Time, therefore, does not
force her body to go somewhere, but to reflect on where it has
been. Her duration is not driven by a pressing goal, but remains
an intensive force within her body: this intensive force is her
becoming-woman.
Similarly, Hava and Ahoo have their own specific durations.
Hava’s duration is perhaps the closest of them all to what we might
call an instant, an almost imperceptible fleeting moment of time.
As our youngest protagonist, Hava virtually has no history at all;
her duration is a tiny, insignificant fragment when compared to
Houra’s vast, seemingly eternal duration. But Hava, too, has her
own eternal duration, resonating from her name, which means
“Eve”: the biblical and Koranic “first woman.” As an allegorical
figure, therefore, Hava captures the entire history of womanhood
into an instant; she is the epitome of Benjamin’s petrified unrest.
Perhaps even more interesting is not so much what Hava’s duration
means in relation to any other, but what Hava herself does with her
duration. Hava is figured right on the threshold of womanhood,
but rather than passing instantaneously and unquestioningly from
a state of child to woman, Hava stretches out this moment. In doing
so, she demonstrates her virtual capacity to manipulate time, not so
much in order to delay her departure from childhood, but so that
she may begin to consciously experience her own becoming-woman.
Hava negotiates one hour for herself to experience becoming

by imposing a gap or delay in her predetermined accession to
womanhood. In doing so, she opens up a vertical space in which she
is able to engage in simple and seemingly inconsequential acts of
play. Not only do we observe Hava’s joy in playing with a windup fish
at the edge of the sea, in the taste sensations of the sour tamarind
and the sweet lollipop that she shares with Hassan, or in the
tactile way she scoops sand around the stick and measures time by
walking her outstretched fingers along the shadow, but we are also
provided with sufficient reaction shots of Hava experiencing these
things to remind us that everyday experience is not empty and
homogeneous, but minutely and infinitely diverse and textured.
Hava’s becoming-woman, therefore, involves first and foremost a
becoming-child.
Ahoo’s duration is perhaps the most complex of the three,
for it is subject to the most pressure directly from the molar plane of
family, society, religion, and the law. As mentioned earlier, her flight
from this horizontal plane — like that expressed in Farrokhzad’s
poem and in Deren’s conception of poetic cinema — involves a
struggle to push onward and upward despite the pressures holding
her back, represented by the presence of the male figures who
seem to inhibit her progression in the cycle race. In this episode, we
are presented with the most potent of allegorical images, in which
fleetingness and eternity confront each other most urgently. Ahoo,
mounted on her bicycle, forms a powerful allegorical assemblage
with the landscape through which she moves. This landscape, a
seemingly vast desert bordered by an apparently limitless ocean,
along with the male and female figures that exist within it, effectively
serves to represent some of the many tensions between tradition
and modernity that have run throughout Iran’s history since the
early twentieth century. The tension is expressed here through the
contrasting representations of men and women and the modes of
transport associated with them. All the men in this episode appear
mounted on noble Persian horses, signifying a premodern mode of
transport. Galloping across the vast landscape, they recall hunting
scenes from traditional Persian miniature paintings. The insert of
the scattering gazelle helps to reinforce this allusion to a somewhat
mythic past and seems to embed the men quite decisively in the
world of tradition, a world temporally petrified, frozen in an
indeterminate premodern past. The landscape seems to take on a
mythic quality as an indeterminate space: an archetypal no-man’s-
land where the land meets the sea. Although vast and open, this
landscape at times appears to engulf and overwhelm the group of
women cyclists. The mythic quality attached to the men is further
heightened cinematically by shots of the horses’ legs galloping
through the dusty earth in slow motion. Certainly a highly clichéd
image, the contrast between the mounted men — most wearing
nothing but a cloth wrapped around their loins — and the women
mounted on ultramodern bicycles and covered modestly in their
chadors is telling. The mobility that Ahoo seeks on the bicycle
is at once a resistance to being drawn back into a patriarchal
(mythical) version of history where women are concealed and
silent, and an attempt to write women into the future where they
can actively engage with the terms of a modernity that still finds
only an uncomfortable and contradictory place in Iran, even at the
beginning of the twenty-first century.49 The fact, too, that Ahoo is
approached by every living generation of men who are related to
her, and that all request her return to the fold, seems to associate
the men, regardless of the generation they belong to, with a kind
of cultural stasis, which contrasts dramatically with Ahoo’s mobility
on the bicycle. We are confronted, therefore, with a powerful image
of petrified unrest — the petrified, mythical landscape being sliced
through by the pedaling women, motivated perhaps by their own
unrest about their social mobility.
Through her constant pedaling, Ahoo experiences fleeting
moments of liberation, in which her own duration, a duration of
urgency, is made palpable to the viewer not only through the
visual movement within the frame but also through the rhythmic
twanging sounds of the music, the mechanical whirring of bicycle
wheels, and the sound of Ahoo’s breath. These close-miked sounds
bring us into intimate contact with Ahoo, so that we may feel her
urgency and her desire to speed up the pace of change, to generate
multiple transformations, and to effect a true process of becoming-
woman.
Much more than either Hava or Houra, Ahoo serves as the

site of a constellation of the past, present, and future of Iranian
women, but in a sense these women are not separate identities
meant only to represent individual selves. Together, they form a
vast and heterogeneous allegorical becoming-woman assemblage,
each one the present, past, and future of the other. This is inferred
through the verbal resonances evoked by their names. Spoken
aloud, their names become an unbroken and undulating wave: hava-
ahoo-houra-hava-ahoo-houra-va-hou-ra-va-hou-ra. Their names,
therefore, become less linguistic signifiers than pure sounds,
aesthetic affects ingested and aspirated by the body that utters
them. In doing so, we, the viewers, become a necessary and
integral part of this filmic assemblage. This is where the process of
becoming-woman is activated — between the viewer and the film.
This is a space that, when not limited to the realm of the gaze or
to representation, has the capacity to push well beyond the limits
of film censorship. This is an affective becoming-woman registered
aesthetically. This process has nothing to do with reaching states
or passing through stages, but everything to do with that “shake,”
the between states of the moving kaleidoscope, with the minute
modulations of life forming multiple assemblages — like the wind
that turns Hava’s veil into a delicately modulated surface when
two boys divert it from its social function and use it as a sail for
their homemade sailboat, reminding us of the image that opened
the film. The veil is therefore conceived no longer as a limit or a
boundary, but as an infinitely textured surface that may conduct
the energy produced by bodies (human, animal, and elemental),
without, however, ever having to show the contours of that body.
No Conclusion: Toward a Molecular Becoming-Woman

In my opening paragraph, I attempted to convey something of the
exhilaration I felt on viewing this film for the first time, and indeed
every time I have viewed it since. This feeling, my experience of
the film, however, runs contrary to much of the detailed analysis
I have performed on the film in this article, particularly the
way I have argued that, far from delivering scenarios in which
women are presented as liberated from the societal, religious,

and regulatory structures that define and contain them, it is the
very limited situations faced by women in Iranian cinema that
have in fact been brought to light here. I have argued that by
highlighting its own mode of construction, the film can be read
as a complex allegory of the status of women in Iranian cinema
and of the censorship regulations that seek to contain and control
the image of woman in Iran. At the same time, however, I have
attempted to show how each of the female figures in the narrative,
separately and together, assume complex and varying durations
that open vast and potentially limitless (vertical) possibilities of
becoming-woman, rather than a singular state to be aspired to.
It is thus that the horizontal, literal, or molar plane is exceeded,
interrupted, and transcended by the film’s openings of multiple
vertical, allegorical, or molecular spaces, which bring forth
affective becomings-woman between film and viewer. Although
the “flights” of each woman in this film appear literally to be
horizontal movements, parallel with the landscapes and seascapes
through which they move, the film does in fact generate the kind
of upward, vertical movement evoked by Forugh Farrokhzad’s
poem: “Why should I stop, why?” For the horizon is indeed vertical
and moving. The Day I Became a Woman is evidence that becoming-
woman is taking place in Iranian cinema(s).
Notes
1. Meshkini is the second wife of the prominent Iranian filmmaker

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who also wrote and produced the film.
This fact has led some critics to question the level of actual
female authorship or agency involved in the production of this
film. This article does not aim to deal with this question, but
rather seeks to read the film as a complex allegorical text in its
own right. For a good discussion of the role of women in the
Makhmalbaf filmmaking family, which includes Makhmalbaf’s
wife and his daughter Samira, see Adrian Danks, “The House
That Mohsen Built: The Films of Samira Makhmalbaf and
Marziyeh Meshkini,” Senses of Cinema 22 (2002), sensesofcinema
.com/contents/02/22/makhmalbaf.html. Although he
acknowledges the considerable influence and involvement

Mohsen has had in his wife’s and his daughter’s films, Danks
stresses the collaborative nature of filmmaking and notes the
fact that Mohsen deliberately absents himself from the sets of
their films.
2. This concept of becoming-woman and its importance within the

field of feminist theory will be discussed in more detail below.
3. Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-colonial Discourse:

Deconstructing Magic Realism (London: Macmillan, 1998), 120.
See also Bill Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformation (Florence:
Routledge, 2001), and Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature
in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986):
65 – 88.
4. Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformation, 108. For two useful

discussions of woman as an allegory of nation in postcolonial
cinema, see Gil Hochberg, “National Allegories and the
Emergence of Female Voice in Moufida Tlatli’s Les silences
du palais,” Third Text 50 (2001): 33 – 44; and Dorit Naaman,
“Woman/Nation: A Postcolonial Look at Female Subjectivity,”
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17 (2001): 333 – 42.
5. Iran has a long history of allegorical expression, dating back

at least as far as the Sufi poetry of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries through the long history of the taziyeh drama to the
surrealist works of Sadegh Heydat in the 1930s, the modernist
poets of the 1960s (including Farrokhzad), and the emergence
of new Iranian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, whose aesthetics
and concerns have continued into the present postrevolutionary
phase of Iranian cinema.
6. Negar Mottahedeh, “Bahram Bayzai’s Maybe . . . Some Other Time:

The Un-Present-Able Iran,” Camera Obscura, no. 43 (2000):
164. See also Negar Mottahedeh, “ ‘Life Is Color!’ Toward a
Transnational Feminist Analysis of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s
Gabbeh,” Signs 30 (2004): 1403 – 28.
7. Mottahedeh, “Bahram Bayzai’s Maybe . . . Some Other Time,” 178.

For Walter Benjamin’s discussion of dialectics at a standstill, see
The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999), 473.
8. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.

Richard Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 175. My understanding
of allegory is largely derived from Benjamin, who was one of the
first theorists in the twentieth century to develop a sophisticated
theory of allegory after it had been denigrated by the Romantics
in favor of the symbol. The present article builds on a theory of
allegorical modes of expression specific to the cinema developed
in my work on Werner Schroeter. See Michelle Langford,
Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time, and Gesture in the Cinema of
Werner Schroeter (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2006). What is important
about Benjamin’s book, which is concerned with the work of
seventeenth-century German playwrights, for an elaboration of
cinematic allegory as distinct from literary allegory is that he
foregrounds the importance of time, history, and the mechanics
of the allegorical mode. In addition, Benjamin also takes up the
notion of allegory in a modern context in his work on Charles
Baudelaire. See Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” trans. Lloyd
Spencer, New German Critique 34 (1985): 32 – 58.
9. Benjamin, Origin, 179.
10. Deren’s copanelists were none other than Parker Tyler, Dylan
Thomas, and Arthur Miller. The sessions were chaired by the
poet and scholar Willard Maas. See Maya Deren, “Poetry and the
Film: A Symposium,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney
(New York: Cooper Square, 2000), 171 – 86.
11. I would like to thank Amelie Hastie, who reminded me of this

altercation between Deren and the male panelists.
12. Rosi Braidotti, “Becoming Woman: Or Sexual Difference

Revisited,” Theory, Culture, Society 20 (2003): 47.
13. The best Maas and Miller could do was to think this through
in terms of the difference between narrative and lyric modes
or by thinking of the vertical in terms of a flashback. Although
Deren tended to agree, for the sake of argument that both of
these illustrate her point, this clearly makes for a dilution and
reduction of her original idea.
14. Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 99.
15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss the notion of

assemblages at length in their book A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Through the concept of
assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to break down binary
distinctions between such categories as inside/outside and real/
representation. The concept of assemblage is less interested in
a distinction between things or categories than in the dynamic
connections or flows between these and the processes involved
in the connections and the interconnections between multiple
assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari give feudalism as one
example of this notion of the assemblage, which they see as an
intermingling of bodies: “The body of the earth and the social
body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the
knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the
weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies — a whole
machinic assemblage” (88 – 89).
16. Benjamin, “Central Park,” 52.
17. I include men here because, as Naficy argues, in the “Islamic

system of looking . . . eyes are not passive organs [but] . . .
active, even invasive organs, whose gaze is also construed to be
inherently aggressive.” Furthermore, the sexuality of women
is seen as so excessive and powerful that it could “lead to the
wholesale moral corruption of men and society.” Add to this
the conception that “men are considered to be nothing but
weaklings in the face of women’s powerful sexual force,” and we
have a gaze, a reversal of the all-powerful male gaze conceived
by Western feminism, that is masochistic in the sense that it
contains the distinct potential of backfiring on its bearer. The
rules of modesty are therefore designed to protect men as much
as women. Hamid Naficy, “Women and the Semiotics of Veiling
and Vision in Cinema,” American Journal of Semiotics 8 (1991):
54 – 55.
18. Recall, for example, the period of enforced unveiling from 1936
until the introduction of compulsory veiling in 1983 under
Khomeini’s theocratic rule.
19. Iranian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s produced a large

number of films with child protagonists. The reasons for this
are several, including the role of the Centre for Intellectual
Development of Children and Adults (CIDCA), which has been
a major source of funding for filmmakers. In addition, children
presented fewer problems regarding censorship since they

are far less governed by the rules of modesty. Children have
frequently also been used as ciphers of unrepresentable adult
experience. For a summary of the representation of children
in postrevolutionary Iranian cinema, see Hamid Reza Sadr,
“Children in Contemporary Iranian Cinema: When We Were
Children,” in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation,
and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002),
227 – 37.
20. Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian
Women Writers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992),
72. Milani also notes that the word khanum, meaning both “lady”
and “wife,” describes woman in terms of her relationship to a
man as well.
21. Naficy, “Women,” 50 – 51.
22. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual

and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989), 14 – 26.
23. See Milani, “The Concept of Veiling,” in Veils and Words, 19 – 45.
For more debates on veiling as a complex social and religious
practice, see also Nilufer Gole, “The Voluntary Adoption of
Islamic Stigma Symbols,” Social Research 70 (2003): 809 – 28. Gole
argues that the Islamic veil can be read as a highly polysemous
and contradictory sign, ranging variously from Islamic stigma
symbol to a symbol of prestige in certain contexts, particularly in
Muslim societies where veiling is not compulsory or where veiling
in public institutions is banned. For a discussion of veiling in
the context of Iranian feminism and the gap that is perceived
to exist between Western feminism’s understanding of the veil
and that of Muslim feminists, see Shahrzad Mojab, “ ‘Muslim’
Women and ‘Western’ Feminists: The Debate on Particulars and
Universals,” Monthly Review 50 (1998): 19 – 30.
24. Indeed, since the early 1990s and in the wake of the relatively
progressive Mohammad Khatami’s election to the presidency
in 1997, the regulation and censorship of Iranian cinema was
loosened somewhat. For a discussion of the role of the cinema
and women’s movements in challenging Islamic dogma, see
Robin Wright, “Iran’s New Revolution: Islamic Theocratic
Government Yields Somewhat to Tolerate More Freedoms,”
Foreign Affairs 79 (2000): 113 – 45. It remains to be seen, however,

what effect the election of the highly conservative Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad to the presidency in June 2005 will have on the
Iranian film industry, although it is expected that censorship
will be tightened in line with Ahmadinejad’s plan to return the
country to revolutionary values.
25. Violence is also subject to heavy censorship in Iranian cinema,

and it would not be permissible to represent the brothers
touching Ahoo in any way.
26. Milani, Veils and Words, 9.
27. It is interesting to note that houri also appears in Bahá’ì literature

and translates as “maid of heaven.” Etymologically, houri is
said to derive from awira, meaning “black-eyed like a gazelle.”
“Houri,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houri (accessed
March 2006). She is, therefore, allegorically linked to Ahoo by
name.
28. Such a shrine appears in the film Baran (dir. Majid Majidi, Iran,
2001) and is also associated with Afghan characters. I have
found no evidence of this practice in Iran. See Mark Saroyan,
Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the
Late Soviet Union (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),
112. Saroyan also notes that “the tying of strips of cloth to trees
and other objects is a common religious practice in many parts
of Asia, from Christian Armenia to the Hindu-Muslim Indian
subcontinent to southern Siberia, where shamanism and Tibetan
Buddhism predominate” (119).
29. Indeed, it should be noted that in terms of profilmic reality, the

little girl who plays Hava must in a very literal sense not yet be
a woman, otherwise it would be forbidden for her to be filmed
without a veil as she is.
30. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell

(London: Macmillan, 1960), 1 – 2.
31. Deren, “Poetry and the Film,” 183. Although they are there
achieved in a rather rudimentary way, we could think of those
moments in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, Germany,
1998), where Lola brushes past a series of people on the street,
launching a series of Polaroid snapshots of possible futures, as an
example of a film interrupting the horizontal and opening onto
the vertical. Of course Deren’s own Meshes of the Afternoon (US,

1943) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (US, 1946) consist almost
entirely of vertical explorations of rhythm, gesture, mood, and
tone. Meshes, through its dream-within-a-dream structure, could
in fact be said to open a complex and voluptuous vertical mise en
abyme. On another level, the enigmatic veiled figure in Meshes
forms a further, rather spontaneous, association in my mind with
The Day I Became a Woman that I am not yet fully able to elaborate
here.
32. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 239.
33. Claire Colebrook, introduction to Deleuze and Feminist Theory,

ed. Ian Buchanan and Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000), 12.
34. Jerry Aline Flieger, “Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber, and

Molecular Identification,” in Buchanan and Colebrook, Deleuze
and Feminist Theory, 42.
35. I am greatly indebted here to Teresa Rizzo’s theorization of the

molecular qualities of film viewing elaborated in her recently
completed PhD dissertation, “From the Cinematic Apparatus
to Cinematic Assemblages” (PhD diss., University of New South
Wales, 2004). Rizzo theorizes film as an assemblage with the
viewer, not as an entity separate from the viewer. This enables
her to argue that it is possible to establish a theory of film spec-
tatorship that does not rely purely on the psychoanalytic concept
of voyeurism.
36. Examples include Buchanan and Colebrook, Deleuze and

Feminist Theory; some of the essays in Elizabeth Grosz, ed.,
Becoming: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1999); and the work of Rosi Braidotti,
Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary
Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994);
and Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Toward a Materialist Theory of
Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). Braidotti’s work is extremely
interesting for the way that she brings Deleuze’s work into
productive contact with that of Luce Irigaray.
37. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 69.
38. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 111.

39. Mojab, “ ‘Muslim’ Women,” 20.
40. Negar Mottahedeh advocates a similar transnational feminist

approach for analyzing Iranian cinema. See Mottahedeh, “ ‘Life
Is Color!’ ” Mottahedeh employs the term transnational as a way of
problematizing and moving beyond center-periphery models of
cultural organization. In Deleuze’s terms, she does this as a way
of deterritorializing the dominant centers of feminist thought
located in North America and Europe.
41. Although I am using the length of shadows to indicate one

further instance evidencing the simultaneity of the three
episodes, it should be noted that at times during the second
and third episodes, the length of the shadows are actually quite
inconsistent. I refer to them not because they offer conclusive
evidence of simultaneity, but rather because of the perceived
impression of their significance. I would argue that because
our attention has been drawn to the shadow of the stick in the
first episode, we as viewers are already predisposed to see the
shadows as a measure of time in the two subsequent episodes.
42. Benjamin, “Central Park,” 40.
43. Benjamin, Origin, 224.
44. Deleuze and Guattari would call this “contagion” or “epidemic.”

See A Thousand Plateaus, 241.
45. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 473.
46. This concept was developed in my PhD dissertation and then in

my book, Allegorical Images.
47. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson

and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989).
48. Westoxification (gharbzadegi) is the name, coined by the Iranian

intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad in the 1960s, used to describe the
supposedly toxic influence of the West on Islamic culture. The
term was employed to denounce all that is Western, with an aim
to encourage people to embrace a return to Islamic traditions.
49. For a sustained discussion of the role of women and modernity

in Iran, see Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in
Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995).
Michelle Langford lectures in film studies in the School of English,

Media, and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales.
She is the author of Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time, and Gesture in the
Cinema of Werner Schroeter (2006).
Houra’s inside-out mise-en-scène

(The Day I Became a Woman)

Allegory and The Aesthetics Day I Became A Woman

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The Day I Became a Woman (dir.

Marziyeh Meshkini, Iran, 2000)

Why should I stop, why?

A wide-angle traveling shot of a vast landscape opens the second

Camera Obscura 64, Volume 22, Number 1

echoing through the landscape: “Ahoo,” “Ahoo!” Eventually, on

sequentially from childhood to womanhood to old age, with Hava,

stranger to allegorical modes of expression and where the image

rather superficial level that depends, in the case of film, largely

becoming — one that proceeds in a series of stages or states, and

audience, exclaiming, “To hell with that ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal.’ It

Deleuze and Guattari, certain authors such as Franz Kafka are

Hava (The Day I Became a Woman)

seemingly inconsequential and playful gesture of “veiling” herself

may appear unveiled only in the presence of men considered her

Little Hava, not unlike the child protagonists of many other

the capacity of film to simultaneously transgress and maintain

Ahoo: Negotiating Narrational Agency and the Male Gaze

with a high degree of narratological agency.23 But as we shall see,

cinema in particular, has limits — representational, social, politi­

limit, boundary, or gap between male and female, allegorically

Houra: Negotiating the Domestic Mise-en-Scène

watches over her; she, too, is an inheritor of the task of negotiation.

On the Way to Becoming

point in time, imposed on her by social convention and Islamic law

of Deleuze and Guattari, such a reading of the film deals only

is the key to all becomings, which include becoming-child, becoming-

towards which the non-unitary subjects of postmodernity move, and

more processural and time-laden conception of becoming-woman,

This conception of an allegorical image capable of sus­

her apparently wholesale entry into consumer culture, Houra re­

Hava negotiates one hour for herself to experience becoming

Much more than either Hava or Houra, Ahoo serves as the

No Conclusion: Toward a Molecular Becoming-Woman

women are presented as liberated from the societal, religious,

1. Meshkini is the second wife of the prominent Iranian filmmaker

acknowledges the considerable influence and involvement

2. This concept of becoming-woman and its importance within the

3. Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-colonial Discourse:

4. Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformation, 108. For two useful

5. Iran has a long history of allegorical expression, dating back

6. Negar Mottahedeh, “Bahram Bayzai’s Maybe . . . Some Other Time:

7. Mottahedeh, “Bahram Bayzai’s Maybe . . . Some Other Time,” 178.

8. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.

9. Benjamin, Origin, 179.

11. I would like to thank Amelie Hastie, who reminded me of this

12. Rosi Braidotti, “Becoming Woman: Or Sexual Difference

14. Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss the notion of

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:

16. Benjamin, “Central Park,” 52.

17. I include men here because, as Naficy argues, in the “Islamic

19. Iranian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s produced a large

presented fewer problems regarding censorship since they

21. Naficy, “Women,” 50 – 51.

22. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual

Foreign Affairs 79 (2000): 113 – 45. It remains to be seen, however,

25. Violence is also subject to heavy censorship in Iranian cinema,

26. Milani, Veils and Words, 9.

27. It is interesting to note that houri also appears in Bahá’ì literature

29. Indeed, it should be noted that in terms of profilmic reality, the

30. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell

the vertical. Of course Deren’s own Meshes of the Afternoon (US,

cinema in particular, has limits — representational, social, politi

This conception of an allegorical image capable of sus

her apparently wholesale entry into consumer culture, Houra re