Throughout Baran, Majidi effectively uses images and sounds to engage the viewer in what Vivian Sobchack refers to as a ‘cinesthetic’ mode of embodied spectatorship.^[13] In her article, ‘What my fingers knew’, Sobchack argues that to experience a film is not simply a matter of ‘seeing it’. Rather, our body functions as ‘a ‘third’ term that both exceeds and yet is within representation’.^[14] That is, although our bodies are ostensibly located outside and separate from the representations that appear on screen, through the cinema’s engagement of our multiple senses, our bodies are necessarily also inscribed into or take part in the representation itself. In addition, she writes: ‘All the bodies in the film experience — those on-screen and off-screen (and possibly that of the screen itself) — are potentially subversive bodies. They have the capacity to function both figuratively and literally.’^[15] In coining the term ‘cinesthesia’, Sobchack draws on two psychoneurological conditions: synaesthesia and coenaesthesia. Synesthesia is an extreme, but rare condition in which the stimulation of one sense provokes a perception in another sense. Sobchack explains: ‘Synaesthetes regularly, vividly, automatically, and consciously perceive sound as colour, or shapes as having a taste’.^[16] A less extreme form of this ‘cross-modal transfer’ takes place in figural language. According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, because metaphors originate in concrete, sensate experience, ‘metaphor is experiential and visceral’.^[17] I would argue that the highly metaphorical film language used in Baran, combined with the clever use of off-screen sound, helps to engage the viewer in just this kind of cross-modal transfer. Not only does bread metaphorically evoke flesh, it does so largely because we have already heard/felt the potentially erotic fleshiness of the dough well before our sense of sight is brought into play. Similarly, in the scene in which Lateef discovers Baran’s true identity, the enhanced sound of wind serves simultaneously as a metaphor for the swell of emotion being experienced by Lateef, and may cause a cross-modal sensation in the viewer of being touched by such a breeze.

The dominant role played by sound in producing these cross-modal sensory affects in Baran also evokes the second bodily condition discussed by Sobchack. According to Sobchack, coenaesthesia is a common, yet under-recognised perceptual experience in which ‘our equally available senses have the capacity to become variously heightened and diminished’.^[18] This capacity is more evident in children where the hierarchical socialisation of the senses has not yet fully taken place, but given the right stimuli, this may also occur in adults. Cinema has the most wonderful capacity to do this, and certainly, as I have already shown, through his complex use of sound^[19] in Baran, Majidi certainly attempts to retrain his viewers’ sensorium to privilege sound over or in addition to vision. This adds a highly affective and potentially erotic or subversive level of meaning to the film that plays off and against the pure, selfless devotion on a collective level, and the personal love for a woman on an individual level.

It is my contention that a figurative and literal exchange between potentially erotic bodies takes place in Baran. As in the scene discussed above, Majidi deploys complex cinematic techniques (sound, editing, camera and character placement) and stimulates our sensory organs (through evocative sounds and images) in order to weave the viewer into the very texture of the film. In doing so, he effectively allows the viewer to experience that which cannot be literally represented on screen. Our bodies effectively fill the gap imposed by censorship between the characters’ bodies. In doing so, Majidi exposes the viewer to the possibility of what I would like to call ‘sacrilegious affects’, that is, a felt violation of the sacred modesty of the Iranian cinema screen. The cinema’s potential for cross-modal transfer enables the superficial modesty of the on screen representation to be undermined by a transgressive potential in the aesthetic realm, capable of activating the forbidden (haram) sensations of the flesh.

Throughout the film, the sounds of wind, rain, thunder, running water, the fluttering of fabric and bird’s wings, human breath, footsteps, voices, laughter and birds singing are all used to heighten the embodied sensory perceptions of the viewers and attune them to what must remain unrepresented, relegated to the space beyond the frame. Even a close-up of Lateef’s finger wiping mud from a coin he finds in the street works to heighten our sense of touch. By the end of the film, our senses and emotions have become so heightened that we are prepared for the emotionally (and sexually) charged scene that closes the film. In this scene, Baran and her family are preparing to leave for Afghanistan and Lateef has come to their village to help. As Baran crosses the grey, muddy pathway she trips and the contents of her wicker bag spill out onto the ground. This functions as a moment of metaphorical explosion, betraying perhaps the feelings she has kept hidden throughout the film. We see among a variety of other fruits and vegetables, several bright red tomatoes, and some dried figs. Lateef rushes to Baran’s aid and Majidi cuts to a close-up filmed in slow motion of Baran and Lateef picking up the spilled items. As their hands slowly and gracefully enter the frame a moment of tactile pleasure may be experienced by the viewer. Although, according to the rules of modesty, the characters do not physically touch, the framing of the image enables their images to overlap as they each reach for a ripe red tomato. They therefore ‘touch’ virtually in this brief and silent parting exchange, which is heightened by the contrast between the grey earth and the redness of the tomatoes, which provide a melodramatic sign of their passion. Here, the modest, restrained emotions depicted on screen overflow into the space between the viewer and the screen, into the dark space of the cinema where we may even ‘steal’ a publicly forbidden tactile moment. The almost-direct looks of the protagonists toward the camera that directly following this scene invite us to share in this intimate moment, further charging this affective relationship between the screen and the viewer. While, as I have shown, Baran adheres very strictly to Islamic censorship regulations, this relationship between screen and spectator set up by the film teeters on the precipice between the sacred and the sacrilegious, effectively pushing the limits of Islamic censorship that prevents intimacy between men and women from being depicted on screen. The modest bodies on screen are shadowed by the bodies of the spectators seated in the dark space of the cinema. But hush! Please don’t tell the mullahs, because Iranian filmmakers have enough trouble with censorship as it is!