“This is not a film” by Jafar Panahi: denunciation against censorship by metanarrative language

Abstract

This article discusses metanarrative as Jafar Panahi’s strategy of narrative articulation and denunciation, who was banned by the Iranian government from making films. It aims to reflect on how the production “This Is Not a Film” radicalizes the tension the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, denouncing the injustice in which the director is a victim of. The analysis comes from three categories: a) the camera as an intradiegetic and metanarrative element; b) the mise en abyme, and c) the director as a character. It is concluded that the film is a production of contemporary aesthetics, stamped by narratives where meaning proposes problematic access to the real, in the supposed rupture with canonical rules of cinema when breaking the fourth wall, making the alleged concealment of the marks of enunciation an important narrative articulation, in order to transgress and also make it visible to the censorship imposed in the country, by incorporating the backstage to the main plot, in a movement of the film to turn back to itself.

Keywords
Metanarrative language; Postmodernity; Censorship; Iranian movies; Jafar Panahi