Feminizing National Memory: Mossadegh, Milani and The Hidden Half

This essay calls attention to the historical critique formulated by Iranian feminist filmmaker Tamineh Milani in her 2001 film The Hidden Half. The film calls attention to the interplay of history and national memory in its recall of the repression to which secular forces were subjected as they attempted to assert themselves in the earlier period of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. In evoking this now forgotten moment in the revolution that deposed the Pahlavi dynasty, Milani illuminates a dimension of national political life that is now largely hidden from historical sight, one in which women and other progressive-minded sectors of Iranian society struggled for a different future than that envisioned by their theocratic foes. Milani further conjures the memory of the 1953 coup that deposed Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, an earlier moment of upheaval that Milani evokes in her effort to accord a central symbolic place to women in her cinematic recall of two decisive moments in Iran's fraught national past.