Metanarrative, fiction and non-fiction in Jafar Panahi's Taxi

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss how contemporary cinema has been exploring the tension in the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction through the strategic use of metanarrative devices. Metanarrative exposes and brings into question the inevitable processes of fictionalization of the narrative and the intention to offer through it authentication proofs of the real, supposedly and dialectically constructed in the bordering relations of the subjective interference of an enunciating instance. Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s cinematography, well known for its self-reflexivity, propounds the idea that art should look inward and recognize itself as discourse. We analyze his 2015 film Taxi, whose choice of language and discourse is the result of the operational constraints to which Panahi was subjected, as he was forbidden by the Iranian justice to make cinema. Seeking to present ordinary life situations in Tehran, the director turns on a camera inside a taxi, where he plays the role of the driver while having conversations with random passengers. We conclude that Panahi makes cinema in order to bring that act into question and to position it as a political act. His work shows us the impossibility of limiting the nature of the audiovisual medium and, by extension, the very principles regulating filmmaking in Iran, and denounces the repressive system which dominates it. in the coon film pr.