The following is a transcription of a recorded conversation between Alireza Rasoulinejad, Saleh Najafi and Pages, which was done on the occasion of the release of Rasoulinejad's recent film Minor/Major. Minor/Major is an 80-minutes experimental documentary made in 2010, in which we follow via a narrator, the process of the making of a film about the “lost object" of modernity in Iran. In the process the film crew conducts interviews with various intellectuals and cultural practitioners in Iran, follow Antonio Negry during his visit to Iran, and record scenes from the city. But also we are lead by the narrator's stream of consciousness through the history of cinema and various imaginary or actual locations and characters from around the world. The film constantly shift between images and sounds from “here” of Iran and the “there” of the Europe. In the end, the search for the “lost object’ remains unfulfilled and the film in making incomplete.Pages: Minor/Major is a multi-layered film. It is not easy to decide from which part of the film to start the discussion. Let us begin with the narrator’s voice. The narrator plays the leading and decisive role in the film. While he is invisible to the viewer throughout the movie, his voice guides us through. The cast for the narrator is Naser Tahmasb, whose voice is very familiar to Iranian ears, mostly because of the films he has dubbed. For decades he has been active in the film industry as a dubber. In fact, it is through these foreign (let us say Western) movies that his voice is well-known. In Minor/Major we are confronted with a narrator with a clear historical presence in Iranian cinema. Would you tell us about the process of searching for this voice? Why and how did you choose it?Alireza Rasoulinejad: When I started working on the script of Minor/Major I knew that we are going to use voice over, and particularly the ‘voice of God’. Of course, I was taken by Naser Tahmasb’s voice months before starting work on the plot of Minor/Major. I was familiar with his voice and greatly admired it. Actually, Tahmasb’s voice includes a wide range of modalities. He has dubbed Harold Lloyd as well as Jack Nicholson, Kevin Spacey, Henry Fonda and others and has managed to perform a wide range of modes: humane, diabolic, childish, playful…. I remember some months before the shooting, Iranian television broadcast About Schmidt. It stars Jack Nicholson dubbed by Naser Tahmasb. Narration plays an essential role in the film and you hear the voice of the main character throughout. After that, I started gathering films dubbed by Naser Tahmasb. I sat for months watching them, losing myself in his voice, living inside his voice in order to absorb his moods. It was a strange and special experience. All these happened before writing the script. I wanted to write the screenplay under the emotional, spiritual and moral influence of Tahmasb’s voice. I can say I spent a period of my life investigating the narrator’s voice. I wanted to understand the world of this voice. I didn’t even think of alternatives. Basically, I wanted to make a film for Tahmasb’s voice and it was a really hard thing to do because dubbing artists are most creative when they are able to see the character.P: The main theme of Minor/Major is ‘being lost’. You said you ‘lost’ yourself in Tahmasb’s voice through watching his dubbed films. It appears that it is not impossible to get lost in such a voice covering a wide range of characters and filmic atmospheres; it must have been intriguing. Here a couple of issues come to mind which you could maybe talk about them. For an Iranian audience, Tahmasb’s voice has an inescapable, unconscious and implicit reference to the roles he has dubbed. To be exact, the identity of Naser Tahmasb’s voice is the identity of a substitute voice, always alluding to the actors and narrators he substituted. This multi-accent nature of Naser Tahmasb’s voice has provided it with a hybrid cultural quality within the sphere of Iranian cinema. (It should be noted that in a scene of Minor/Major we suddenly hear the soundtrack of another movie from which we recognize the narrator’s voice. Due to the extremely cinematic atmosphere of the sound and the artificial tone of the character’s voice we know that it is a dubbed Western movie.) Although we don’t find Tahmasb’s voice in Minor/Major as being substitutive and literary nobody is behind his voice, yet the extra-diegetic presence of this voice as a dubbing voice (still a presence within the filed of fiction) is an inescapable appendix to the voice over which turns the experience of the voice of God into a very unusual one. In fact, the voice of God in Minor/Major is a plural voice and, similar to the title of the movie, hybrid and bisected. One can say that in line with the title of the movie which delineates the divided quality of the film in the oblique stroke between Minor and Major, the narrator’s voice oscillating between Iranian cinema (the Minor) and Western cinema (the Major) too is embodied in the oblique stroke of narrator/dubber. Such a divide also accentuates the narrator’s cultural and geographical concern throughout the film: on one hand, he is narrating the making of a film that is being filmed in a modernist house from the 1950s in Tehran with implicit yet key concerns for the social, cultural and historical situation of Iran. On the other hand, most of his mental references come from the western visual and musical canon.AR: First of all, I should say that the idea of ‘being lost’ emerged from a draft script I had written inspired by the television series The Lost, broadcast on Iranian television in the 1980s. In this programme, portraits were shown while a narrator stated that ‘this person is lost and has not returned home.’ As far as I remember, classical Western music was played in the background. I can remember one of Franz List’s rhapsodies repeatedly being played on this programme. The starting point of Minor/Major was the this draft I wrote after this television programme.As you mentioned before, we are faced with a mysterious hybrid voice in Minor/Major. The process of recording the narrator’s voice in the studio was different from the process of dubbing. Here, Naser Tahmasb is not imitating a Western movie character. He is rather confronted with a text. He is actually dubbing a written text. You can say that he is creating a voice for silent words. It is a very strange experience. However, he is also confronted all the time with the memory and archive of his own voice(s) and should take decisions at different points. Yes, through removing the object of dubbing, we are confronted with a wandering voice. However, I think here the memory of dubbing replaces dubbing. While reading the narration, he is unconsciously influenced by the memory and archive of his own voice and I think that memory always refers to history.However, to me Tahmasb’s voice is a reminiscent of a contemporary urban character, a complicated urban character with all the contradictions and qualities of a contemporary man. He succeeds in raising mixed feelings in the viewer. The experience of confronting characters dubbed by him was a very valuable experience for me. I believe urban cinema is the missing link of Iranian cinema. Most of the time, in Iranian cinema, the modes, attitudes, gestures and morals of characters are way inferior to that of the complicated Iranian urban person. In everyday life, people have a complicated relation with the city. Most highways, shop windows, passages, cafes, underground stations, parties, etcetera enter complicated relations with the urban man’s spirit which we do not experience in Iranian cinema. Where we do see these urban elements, they appear insipid and neutral. One should admit, of course, that a few good efforts have been made in this regard. For instance, Daryoosh Mehrjooi’s work and also some of Abbas Kiarostami’s: the wandering of urban man in the suburbs and in times outside the city. Iranian cinema has had, in a few instances, an urban tone. In many of these movies the location is urban, yet the tone of characters is not. It might be interesting to note that one of the few other places one might encounter urban Persian speaking characters in movies is in dubbed cinema. In dubbed cinema, we experience Persian speaking urban people. The absence of an urban tone and the avoiding of the city in general is not only seen in cinema but is also reflected in Iranian novels, poetry and even the tone of intellectualism. Particularly in the 1950s and 60s that was a time of expansion and development for two modern media in particular: the cinema and the novel. Here we find different works escaping the city and nostalgically taking refuge in rural areas. The city and the complexities of the metropolis are not understood and instead of extending and expanding the complexities of urban man and confronting it, the issue is excluded altogether.P: This is a very sensitive yet radical view. If we accept that the Persian urban tone is realized in dubbing, the question is: once we remove the object of dubbing from this voice, what would the real tone be? A bodiless voice, the voice of a ghost suspended in history, an extra-historical voice, for instance the voice of the narrator of Minor/Major? This splitting in two of the narrator, or narrator/dubber is the key element of this movie. This is where the film points to the situation of Iran with regards to modernity: the third person Iranian modern narrator is a dubber minus the object of dubbing. That is, he dubs a version of modernity whose object is lost and this object is nothing but ‘the West’. It is essential to the narrator/dubber to have its object as lost in order to narrate in his own right: finding it results in annihilation.AR: So, probably as you see, we are dealing with an extra-historical voice in Minor/Major. Certain material is taken from the archive of Western art: from the abandoned movies of the early twentieth century to a sonata by Haydn in the eighteenth century. In the West, artworks are accessible and cannot be lost. Yet in our contemporary experience, we see that many movies from the history of Iranian cinema are not preserved even with an ordinary quality. For whatever reason, I myself do not have a proper copy of my previous film, Exteriors. Abbas Kiarostami’s early works are not available. His movies aside, we cannot present many of the films that are currently being produced by Iranian cinema with proper quality. And this goes back to the governmental nature of this cinema. As long as it remains government controlled and movies are made and distributed in an uncompetitive condition, the situation will not change and private and individual ownership, profit and motivation will be a marginal issues. All around the world movies are made by the civic society and not by the government like any other cultural product and since the civic society is more aware of its material and spiritual interests it is much more successful in presenting artworks.***Saleh Najafi: In Minor/Major, we encounter the structural removal of certain archives; archives that can be described as ‘Iranian’. I say Iranian: archives of Iranian music, Iranian cinema, Iranian literature, Iranian events and Iranian history … None of these are present in the film. Everything in the film testifies to the fact that we are in Iran: everyone speaks Persian, women wear the hijab and the narrator speaks Persian … The narrator constantly resorts to his archives, to what he has read, his favorite films, music, journeys and so forth. All these, without exception, are Western. The removal of Iranian archives is structural because the form and structure of Minor/Major is a result of such removals. One can say that the removal of these elements has been the key choice of the filmmaker and in order to enter the world of the film, one has to start from here.Maybe we can summarize the film in this way: in order to create his own world, the narrator creates an archive that gives form to his character, identity, memory and desires: an archive from which he can borrow at any time the elements he wants, but which in a sense, is not his historical archive. It is true that Bach belongs to mankind and everybody can use his music in their films, yet one should be aware that he is borrowing from an archive not produced in his own history. The narrator (or the director) situates himself within the context of history, within the archival layers produced elsewhere, belonging to others, to the Other.In Minor/Major we see a group intent on making a movie, but the movie is not produced, or, to put it more accurately, it is not finished, just ending in a series of rushes. In general, the film and the narrator have an archival identity. Apparently, the main theme of the film is that of being lost, searching for the lost, understanding the loss: what is it that we Iranians have lost? And more importantly, who is this ‘we’ searching for that which is lost? (Identity? Natural man?) The narrator reflects upon all these issues, upon his loss and the ideas he had for creating his world, his love, his journeys to Europe … And in times he finds an answer: what he has lost is a good music, a good film, a good painting, etc. Good means a return to the archive, to a kind of cultural heritage: my point is that there is no sign of Iranian historical elements in this archive, in this heritage.P: Saleh, if according to you the Western visual and sound archive is not the historical archive of the narrator of Minor/Major, then which archive is? The historical Iranian archive? If we found him investigating Iranian cultural heritage, he would have not been the narrator he is. It is exactly due to this meta-historical presence of the narrator – for instance, being a dubber of Western cultural heritage – that the film exposes cinema and music to a complicated experience of modernity in Iran. If the narrator was not Tahmasb and was an unknown voice from outside the history of Iranian cinema (dubbed non-Iranian cinema is also an inseparable part of this history) then Minor/Major would have been a different film. Only then maybe we should speak of a true removal of the Iranian archive. The national identity of the dubbing artist is absolutely not at stake here. He is speaking Persian only because his audience are Iranian. In the end if there is a removal, the narrator himself is an outcome of such removal.SN: As I said before, the removal of these archives is a director’s decision, his key choice, a decisive and structuralizing decision. I cannot complain why he did not make use of certain elements. I should accept the narrator’s world for what it is: a world constructed from certain elements of Western culture; yet I believe that this absence, this lack, has certain repercussions which even the narrator himself, in a sense, undermines. To explain what I mean: we do not see traces of Iranian cultural heritage in the film, but we do have the presence of Western cultural heritage. Such presence, such direct, unmediated and comfortable access to Western cultural heritage is problematic in my view. I think we Iranians do not have an archive of our own precisely because we could not tolerate the absence of another archive either. Yes, modern Iranian (I insist on the word ‘modern’) necessarily struggles with a lack of archive: Iranian modern painting, Iranian modern music, Iranian modern architecture… It is true, in the exact sense of the word, that there is no such archive as an Iranian modern archive. For being modern, living modern and thinking in a modern way, modern Iranian has no other choice but to insist on historical consciousness, on historical thinking. Yet, when he refers to his own history, he finds nothing. This is probably the paradox of the Iranian modern consciousness. The modern Iranian must constantly refer back to the archive of the Other. It is true, there are exceptions, he could read Sadeq Hedayat for instance.Coincidentally, Sadeq Hedayat is a case in point when trying to judge the world of the narrator of Minor/Major. Both in form and content, Sadeq Hedayat’s prose appeared decadent to early Iranian critics: in its form, it was not the result of a natural evolution of the history of Iranian literature (if we take Tarikh-e-Beyhaqqi 2 as the starting point of Persian prose for instance and Zarrinkoob’s prose as its point of destination). In its content, it was a prose that, according to critics, encouraged pessimism, suicide and seclusion and seeded despair in society, etcetera. Moreover, when Hedayat approaches Western culture and literature, he chooses Kafka; when referring to the cultural heritage of his fatherland, he accentuates Khayyam… And furthermore, something happens in Hedayat’s prose, what I call the internalization of a sense of distance from the West or the experience of being a foreigner in one’s own language. To make it clearer, many critics consider Hedayat’s style of writing as translated: it is as if you are reading a text in Persian originally written in another language: in French or German for example. It is as if you were reading a text by Rilke or Kafka. In Blind Owl, there is a paragraph which is an exact translation of Rilke in his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Of course, Hedayat does not say that the paragraph is translated. He can be accused of plagiarism, but the problem is more fundamental: in general, we are dealing with a text that seems to be a translated Western text. The original text is non-existent of course. Hedayat actually manipulates a past: a kind of a retroactive causality. He translates a text which will exist after translation. Here, the cause is posterior to the effect. Or to put it differently, the narrator of Blind Owl is a Westerner forced to speak in a thoroughly non-Western language. As such, Hedayat is the first Iranian dubber; yet, a dubber suffering from a sense of guilt. He is constantly anxious. He finds a foreign element in the most inner structure of his being. To put it simply, Hedayat wants to express subjects in an expressive form that his mother tongue – as a historical phenomenon with its predetermined historical potentials– is not capable of. On the other hand, he cannot express those ideas in a Western language either. Hedayat is a perfect example of the Iranian modern spirit.Spiritually, he belongs to Paris, but physically to Iran: in Paris, he is a roaming ghost, a spirit that has lost its flesh; and in Tehran, he is a body without spirit; some sort of a Stray Dog. He wanders (writes) between two worlds and there is no possibility of bridging the gap between the two. Maybe dubbing has been an attempt at a different kind of bridging. As such, it is absolutely important that the narrator of Minor/Major be a dubbing artist. He is In Search of the Lost Time, but somewhere outside history. The real historical side of modernity is completely absent from his encounter with Western archives: war, colonialism, exploitation, capital: whatever there is, it is an accumulation of beauty and perfection. Hence, maybe it was the dubbing artists who made this possible without any historical tensions. They allowed us to remove that historical gap inscribed in our consciousness. For many of us they created a kind of misplaced memory. Dubbers where themselves the result of a traumatic encounter with colonial modernity. The point is: if anything called Iranian modernity is meaningful at all, it can be realized only as a result of such an encounter.P: It might be true that Iranian modernity is realized only through a historical traumatic separation from the West. The narrator of Minor/Major is exactly wandering in the historical divide between the minor and major histories (‘History’ with a capital and ‘history’ with small ‘h’). He is looking for the lost object of his narration/dubbing to escape the divide. You may remember that at the beginning of the film the narrator has lost one of his socks. At the end of the film, he solves the problem by buying some ‘new’ (for example, devoid of history) pairs of socks. Even the new socks do not put his feet on the ground. The movie he was making remains incomplete untill the end. In fact, this is the fate of the Iranian cinema: it does not find its historical place, from Farsi Film to experimental cinema. For, creating within a historical traumatic gap never results in the creation of a historical artwork. What is interesting and noteworthy in this film is precisely the fact that, due to the historically divided status of the narrator, the Western archive is presented outside the history of the West and from within this gap.AR: I think in their encounter with the West Iranians have developed a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, they were in love with modernity, whilst on the other they hated it… Western modernity was a singular, geographically specific experience that other countries will not necessarily share. Each civilization can, according to its mode, understand, absorb and internalize certain aspects of its truths. The importance of Sadeq Hedayat is neither due to his suicide nor to his being a vegetarian. It is because of his struggle and familiarization with Western literature and the extension of this experience into his literature. Personally, I do not share the miserable pessimist consciousness which most Iranian intellectuals and artists struggle with. It is this misery and hatred towards modernity that induces Iranian filmmakers to portray their characters in the middle of the desert or in the suburbs and among the ruins instead of Keshavarz Boulevard or Valiasr Street.Minor/Major neither hates Iranian tradition nor loves it. As far as the narrator of the film is concerned, it discusses Iranian problems, the experience of living in a unity without plurality which is the opposite of the Western experience. In the West, we see unity and plurality. The narrator considers himself the audience of Western classical cinema. Why? Because he wants to both learn and enjoy. In a strange experimental movie such as Minor/Major he is looking for his lack which is the classical cinema, the same phenomenon missing in the history of Iranian cinema. Iranians’ experience with classical cinema was materialized in Farsi film. Iranians’ ability in creating classical cinema was proven in Farsi film. It was going its way. It was struggling strangely with this complicated medium. Then, suddenly the development of Farsi films was blocked by government policy. Now, after many years we see that the same movies are reappearing in a vulgar form. Yes, the narrator is living in a place where the main movement in cinema is not that of classical movies. It rather belongs to all those so-called different, independent or artistic films mostly produced, ironically enough, by the government. Only a government cinema run with oil money can create all sorts of experimental films. Yes, the narrator is searching for what he has lost. One of his lacks is the form of classical cinema for which he constantly tries to appear to as an audience in order to understand and learn… In the 1980s, national television had to show old black and white movies that did not have hijab or pornography issues; some even carried spiritual messages. National television inscribed in our souls an unreachable taste for classical cinema. At that time, national television and the Farabi Institute were producing all sorts of strange movies for the people. But they were not aware that the original and good movies were being shown, though with manipulation and censorship, on television. By resurrecting the souls of these movies and television programmes of the lost the narrator creates his own world. To him, these television programmes are raw material with which to build his own world. The narrator’s search in Western archives is carried out only through a television set in his room. All these elements of the lost world, mostly belonging to Western archives, are experienced through television. It is from such a viewpoint that we can also consider the narrator’s defamiliarization of television at a time when everyone is discontented with it.Footnotes1- Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) was among the first generation of modern writers of fiction. His most renowned work is the ‘the Blind Owl’ (1937), which is considered a quintessential modernist novel in Iranian history literature. He has also translated works by, among others, Sartre, Kafka and Anton Chekov into Persian.

2- Tarikh-e Beyhaqqi is written by Abul-Fazl Beyhaqqi in Persian in the 11th century. known for its rich use of language, the book depicts the history of the Ghaznavid Empire, but also reports on notable writers and poets of the time. 3- Abdolhossein Zarrinkoob (1923-1999) was a historian and scholar of Iranian literature. He is most known for his book “Two Centurief of Silence”, which is on the history of Iran during the first two centuries after Islam.