Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1
PhD Candidate in Social Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran.
2
Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Sciences, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran .
3
Associate Professor, Department of Journalism and News, Faculty of Communication and Media, IRIB University, Tehran, Iran.
4
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Zanjan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
The film A Cube of Sugar by Reza Mirkarimi, which was screened in 2010, is one of the most acclaimed films in domestic and foreign festivals. In addition to receiving awards from the Fajr Film Festival, the film also represented Iranian cinema in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 85th Academy Awards. Most of the research conducted on the film has often focused on the obvious level of its cultural signs and meanings, and as a result, the underlying layers of signs, symbols, and cultural codes have not been explored as they should be. The purpose of this article is to answer the question of what broader and larger cultural meanings and discourses are represented and conveyed to the viewer behind the film’s nostalgic look at Iranian culture and traditions. The present study, with an approach based on cultural studies and Fisk’s semiotic approach that emphasizes the codes of reality, representation, and ideology, has explored and analyzed the film A Cube of Sugar and its broader discourses. In addition, the aforementioned film has been analyzed based on Stuart Hall’s three positions in reading the text, including reading media products. The three readings considered by Hall are the preferred reading, the consensual reading, and the conflicting reading. The findings of the present study indicated that, behind the representations of wedding rituals as well as funerals and mourning ceremonies in Iranian culture and traditions in the film A Cube of Sugar, aspects of myth-making and an ideological discourse regarding the past are also evident in the film’s portrayal. In addition, by preferring, highlighting, and praising the traditional lifestyle and its values and rejecting life in a contradictory and contemporary way, the film mythologizes the traditional life and lifestyle of the older generation. Besides, in its cultural narrative of the two families of the bride and groom, the film portrays the bride’s family as representing the traditions of Iranian culture and the groom’s family as representing the manifestations of modernity and Western life, and in this way, it presents an ideological and polarized representation of us who are good and them who are bad. The filmmaker’s attitude towards us, who are the bride’s family, is positive, and towards them, who are the groom’s family and have chosen a modern life, is negative. The Cube of Sugar is also important in at least two other aspects. First, the film can be classified as a “national cinema” film in terms of its emphasis on displaying our cultural traditions in holding two wedding ceremonies and a funeral and indirectly promoting a native and nostalgic discourse of Iranian traditions and customs in contrast to today’s modern and “non-native” culture. The Cube of Sugar is entirely dedicated to representing the objective and subjective elements of ancient Iranian culture and customs for viewers of both old and new generations. In this way, it is a film that also fits within the framework of the country’s cultural and cinematic policies. In this macro-policy, artists are encouraged to familiarize the new generation with ancient Iranian-Islamic culture and customs, in contrast to the global and Western “uniformizing” culture, and to prevent a generational gap in this regard. With these considerations, it can be said that A Cube of Sugar is a worthy film as it honors Iranian values and traditions and reminds the Iranian viewer of them through the “language of cinema.” The fact that this film, as a work aiming to represent aspects of Iranian-Islamic social and cultural traditions through the depiction of two ceremonies—weddings and funerals—in the cultural geography of the city of Yazd, raises the question of how successful it has been in this regard and what discourse it promotes, makes the film unique in its kind and worthy of research and study. The present study is based on semiotics, and among the various approaches to semiotics and cultural analysis, John Fisk’s semiotics has been considered. The choice of Fisk and Hartley’s semiotics better illuminates the way of representation and meaning creation and also the way of “transmitting meaning” in the film A Cube of Sugar and has deeper insights. In Fisk’s semiotic analysis, a media text and its codes operate in a hierarchical and complex structure, and these codes are already explicitly or implicitly encoded in the film/television.
Fisk’s three codes, which are completely simplified for analysis in this article, are the codes of reality, representation, and the level of ideology. The sequences were selected according to the research questions and with “purposive” sampling and examined through the three levels of Fisk’s semiotics mentioned above. The reading and analysis of this film has also been based on Stuart Hall’s three positions in “Reading the Text.” Hall identifies three ‘positions’ for the ‘reading/decoding’ of a text by the audience or analyst: The first position is a hegemonic one, in which the code appears natural and transparent, and the reader accepts the preferred reading intended by the producer of the text. The second is a negotiated/compromising reading, in which the reader, while more or less agreeing with the producer’s position and accepting their preferred reading to some extent, also resists it and interprets it in a way that reflects their own position, experiences, and interests rather than those of the producer. The third position is an oppositional reading. In this reading, the audience, based on their own understanding and social position, opposes the dominant codes of the text’s producers and reveals meanings beyond the preferred position of the text’s creator. In other words, the audience disagrees with the ‘preferred’ code of the text and attempts, in engaging with the text, to establish an alternative interpretive framework. Despite all that has been said, it should not be overlooked that, historically and geographically, Iran has always been a multi-ethnic and multicultural land. What has preserved this cultural diversity over time is the culture and ‘national identity,’ which manifests itself in various rituals, customs, and traditions. The capacity of cinema to represent the culture and national identity of different communities is so significant that this potential is recognized in virtually all countries, and nearly every nation has sought to incorporate its national culture and traditions into film and cinema as a widespread cultural subject.
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