How Will Censored Films Be Perceived in the Future?
Will Future Audiences Relate to Iran’s “Veiled Cinema,” or Experience It as Unreal?
The phenomenology of the veil can be rethought on the basis of the phenomenological understanding of the body, perception, and being-in-the-world—not merely as a physical covering, but as a mechanism that determines how the body appears in the world and how it is perceived by the other. In the tradition of phenomenology, especially in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Vivian Sobchack, the world is experienced through the body. From this perspective, the veil becomes a mode of structuring experience, a form of mediation that does not merely restrict sensory pathways but transforms them.
Vivian Sobchack, in her book The Address of the Eye, considers film not as a passive object or a mere system of signs, but as a “living body” that sees, hears, and understands—and is in turn seen, heard, and understood through our own embodied experience as spectators. Film has a body, and this body enters into a sensory and perceptual relationship with the viewer’s body. Within such an embodied connection, when the female body in Iranian cinema is visually concealed through the veil and disappears from sight, this disappearance is not the elimination of the body, but another mode of its “presence.” The veil, as a form of visual absence, activates imagination. That which is not seen is, in another way, touched. The veiled body does not vanish, but instead appears through phenomenological delay: a presence in absence, a perception through refusal.
The spectator of Iran’s official cinema perceives the body not through direct visual appearance, but via oblique pathways. Visual perception is suspended and replaced by a kind of internal, tactile perception: the eye sees nothing, yet it feels. This is precisely what Laura U. Marks refers to as “haptic visuality”—a form of seeing that is not grounded in distance and contemplation, but in proximity, in the desire to touch, and in sensory engagement. In Iranian cinema, the veil enables this haptic mode of viewing through absence: the viewer engages not with the presence of the body, but with its lack.
In this context, the veil does not merely serve a religious or social function; it assumes a phenomenological role as well: it shifts the body from the plane of direct appearance to a more complex level of perception. This shift constitutes a politics of the body in cinema: how can bodies, through their absence, affect the viewer’s sensory experience? How does visual erasure become a surplus of sensation? And how does a political structure like the veil penetrate the lived experience of the viewer and organize perception?
The fact is that “woman,” in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, is a “political body,” and the representation of her veiled image performs two simultaneous functions:
First, it renders her presence traumatic, offering the viewer an image of “lack”—a portrayal that mirrors the social absence of women in contemporary Iranian society.
Second, the viewer’s “haptic visuality” reduces the woman to something more than a sexual object—yet paradoxically, this overinvestment aligns with the religious, cultural, and legal framework in Iran, which treats the female body precisely as a site of sexualized control.
Thus, the phenomenology of the veil in Iranian cinema teaches us how social and religious structures affect not only the content but also the perceptual form of film. The veil does not erase the body; rather, it situates it within delay and imagination, drawing the viewer into a sensory experience in which absence and presence intertwine. Within this framework, the erasure of the body in Iranian cinema—particularly the female body—does not remove it from the field of perception. Instead, in a phenomenology of embodiment, the body re-enters the sensory field in a specific and complex manner. The veiled body becomes a "present-absence": an experience of untouchability and the desire to see, in which the viewer is compelled to interpret, to imagine, and to activate sensory memory.
But what does this condition mean for future viewers—or for viewers who live within different historical and cultural contexts? Will they be able to interpret these films as reflections of social reality? Or will they perceive them as unreal experiences, or even as allegories?
The answer to this question depends on the relationship between phenomenological perception and cultural memory. In the phenomenological tradition, our experience of an artwork is grounded in embodiment, temporality, and our entanglement with the world. Therefore, a future viewer who has neither lived under the conditions of mandatory veiling nor is familiar with the rules of censorship may have an “indirect” experience of these films. They may no longer interpret the veiled body as a social necessity or a constrained representation, but rather as a sign of mystery, or as a meaningful structure.
In such a case, what is currently perceived as “social realism” in Iranian cinema may, in the future, be understood as “symbolic realism” or even “cultural surrealism.” As Pascal Bonitzer notes in The Look and the Voice, the ideas in the films of Luis Buñuel—once considered surrealist in their time—now often appear real. Similarly, in the case of Iran’s veiled cinema, the erased bodies and mise-en-scène constructed around the absence of contact may no longer be interpreted as external necessities, but as internal, poetic possibilities.
Censored Iranian films may in the future be experienced as memories of bodily denial, as experiences of perception in the absence of visibility, and as allegories of resistance against erasure—whereas today they are often perceived as conventions or compromises. At the same time, the representation of women in the absence of their bodies may also serve as a reminder of “elimination.” The Iranian spectator, in confronting the veiled female body in cinema, is not only seeing an image, but confronting the absence of an image that they know ought not to be there—yet is meaningfully present. This presence-in-absence evokes a collective memory of what has been erased, repressed, and consigned to silence.
In this sense, censored cinema becomes a medium for archiving the social unconscious—a site where erasure itself becomes a sign of presence. Just as Laura Mulvey demonstrated in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema how classical Hollywood reflects a patriarchal and misogynistic unconscious, Iranian cinema’s veiling strategies archive the sociopolitical unconscious of an era through visual absence and aesthetic concealment.
As a result, the phenomenology of the veil in Iranian cinema not only enriches our current analysis of the spectator's experience, but also opens a theoretical horizon for reflecting on the future of meaning in this cinema—a future in which censorship will no longer be understood merely as a restriction, but as part of the very structure through which the body is imagined, perceived, and reinterpreted.
From another perspective, the phenomenology of the veil can also be examined in relation to the cinema of migration and exile. Some Iranian filmmakers working outside Iran, although no longer under the direct control of religious or censorial structures, still encounter a visual and formal cinematic memory in which the veil has become a form. Even in the absence of a physical veil, the representation of the female body in many post-migration films remains suspended, distanced, or marked by a cautious gaze. It is as if censorship was never merely an external law, but rather a structure internalized within cinematic language. Thus, the veil as an experience continues to exist within the aesthetic body of cinema, even in the absence of legal obligation.
This issue can be articulated in phenomenological terms: the veil is not merely a means of covering the body, but a mode of seeing and perceiving the body. The cinematic form in Iran—particularly over the past four decades—has been shaped by omission, concealment, distancing, and delay in relation to the body. In this sense, the veil is not only a social motif, but a formal logic: a logic of absence, deferral, and the desire to see. The viewer—whether Iranian or international—enters into a perceptual structure in which touch, proximity, and bodily contact are always mediated by a barrier. The veil becomes a site of resistance within cinematic experience—one that generates meaning rather than simply obstructing it.
Even when Abbas Kiarostami makes a film in France starring Juliette Binoche, the mise-en-scène, the distancing between characters, and the way the female body is approached continue to reflect a kind of ethical and customary/religious visuality inherited from censored Iranian cinema.
Ultimately, the phenomenology of the veil invites us to rethink the filmic experience and the place of the body within it—not in order to expose censorship, but to understand how the erasure of the body becomes a language, a sensation, and a mode of viewing the body. In this language, absence cries out, covering becomes tangible, and distance transforms into a charged moment of presence.