Women without men notes

Women Without Men depicts the struggles of four women against this backdrop of political tumult, as they each find themselves bound by various Iranian patriarchal institutions and power structures. Munis (Shabnam Tolouei), an aspiring activist, is virtually imprisoned in her home by her religious and conservative brother, Amir Khan (Essa Zahir). She listens to the radio, eager for some news into the fate of Prime Minister Mossadegh, while her brother rails against her for not yet marrying. Meanwhile Faezah (Pegah Ferydony), Munis’ rather naïve and pious friend, visits Munis amidst the street demonstrations in the hope of attracting the romantic attentions of Amir Khan. And then there is the character of Zarin (Orsi Toth), a prostitute in a Tehran brothel, who has withdrawn into a troubled silence as a result of her ongoing sexual exploitation. And finally, the narrative introduces Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad): a middle-aged woman who is unhappily married to a royalist General and who fantasies about leaving her husband and returning to a former and much more cosmopolitan romantic interest, Abbas (Bijan Daneshmand).

The film opens with Munis pacing the terrace roof of her home. Amir Khan has prohibited her from leaving the house and she can hear the tantalizing cries from the demonstrations in the streets below her. She steps up to the ledge of the roof and momentarily pauses, before jumping to her death. The opening scene of Munis’ suicide not only foreshadows the notion that paradise is a mythical ‘no-place’, a utopian fantasy, but it also establishes magical realism as a central aesthetic mode of the film. When Munis jumps from the roof ledge, there is a slow motion shot of the back of her head, her black hair billowing against the blue sky, as she is suspended mid-air. The call to prayer that was heard hauntingly in the background as she anxiously wandered the terrace rooftop, is abruptly replaced by an eerie silence once she jumps. There is a close-up of her face, beatific and resolute, as she falls gradually through the air. Munis is then heard, via voice-over, saying “Now I will have silence…and nothing”. Spectators never witness her body impact the ground, instead it is only her black chador, which crumples and flattens on the paving below, almost as if her body has vanished into the atmosphere mid-fall. The camera remains trained on the blue sky and the slow moving clouds after her jump. The scene of the sky then fades into a shot of the earth and a tributary with rapidly moving water. There is a brief moment, however, when both the sky and the earth appear in the same frame, the two opposing spheres temporarily aligned. In Neshat’s film there is no heavenly paradise awaiting Munis, only the suspended state of liminality. This indeterminate space is evoked literally through Munis’ floating form and, at a more subtle level, through the frame in which the image of the earth momentarily eclipses that of the sky. In pointing to this state of in-betweenness (in-between ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, life and death, peace and turbulence), Neshat emphasizes a third state of ‘nothingness’. Magical realism, and its way of infusing the fantastical with the ordinary, is the perfect vehicle in which to evoke this fraught space of liminality.(1)



(1)Holding a Mirror to Iran: Liminality and Ambivalence in Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/holding-a-mirror-to-iran-liminality-and-ambivalence-in-shirin-neshat%E2%80%99s-women-without-men/ 

Introduction
Summaries move, 2 sentences to be elaborated on.
Definitions, key words explain about the cia coup.
If they dont know what something is.
Magical realism.
Islamic garden
Garden of eden,
define and reference.

Your own definitions.
Rationale, why is the topic of interest, The purpose of your question, why someone else would find something interesting. Your purpose in asking that question.

because most people remember Iran from after the 1979 Islamic revolution so the 1950s coup is interesting as it gives us a glimpse of a different Iran.

Argument, questioning, Your actual question
organisation of body paragraphs in order of body paragraphs.

End of intro.


"this film is as much about the lives of these four women as they too aim for an idea of freedom and democracy from their difficult lives for all different reasons as well as the country of Iran"