this is not a film

This Is Not a Film

Released 2012. Directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi.

When René Magritte painted a picture of a pipe and gave it the caption, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe,’ he was making a smart and humorous artistic statement: this is a representation of a pipe using paint, not an actual pipe. When, however, following a banal sequence of shots depicting Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s morning routine, the words “This Is Not a Film” appear on the cinema screen, the effect is very different. Despite the allusion to Magritte’s painting, these words connote something more aggressive. Panahi is making a political assertion, not a joke. His twenty-year ban on directing films, and six-year prison sentence, make this title defiant and powerful. On the one hand, it introduces the tricky question of what the boundaries of the medium of film are; on the other, it aggressively challenges the authorities that threaten his career and life.