The Emphatic Address of Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari's Feature Films

In a series of essays published in the mid-2000s, I argued that Shirin Neshat’s early two-screen installations were characterised by a displacement of the act of narration, away from the narrator and onto a gap that the spectator is summoned to fill (Vitali 2004). I noted then that the highly symbolic nature of Turbolent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervor’s (2000) iconography pointed to the absence of an organic, real entity in the images (the enunciated subject) that is doubled in the absence of a narrator outside the images (the enunciating subject).
Shirin Neshat has since made three single screen feature films, in collaboration with Shoja Azari: Zanan-e bedun-e mardan / Women without Men (2009), Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), and Land of Dreams (2021). In this essay/chapter I consider how the mode of address of Shirin Neshat’s early installations, marked by a double absence, metamorphoses as a function of the single-screen feature film, a format that relies on linear and often inconspicuous narrative agency. I take as a point of departure Neshat’s statements about the difficulty she claimed to have experienced in moving from ‘icons’, in her installations, to ‘characters’, in her feature films. Using Émile Benveniste’s concepts of histoire and discours, I hope to show that moments of these feature films are marked by a tension between two seemingly irreconcilable modes of address: a subjective voice that draws attention to itself and a historical, invisible ‘non-voice’. As I analyse the films, I consider the historical incrustations that may have shaped what manifests itself as a distinctly emphatic filmic narrator.