The Mystery of Nodjumi’s Exile

A Revolution on Canvas, just released on Max, tells the story of Iranian artist Nikzad Nodjoumi, who fled his home country because of political persecution at the hands of Iran’s ruling mullahs, who came to power after the revolution of 1979. Or did he?

The position of A Revolution on Canvas is that he did, and you couldn’t really expect anything else from a documentary that Nodjoumi’s own daughter directed. But A Revolution on Canvas presents just enough information objectively enough that it allows an alternate reading of the events it presents, leaving one mystery unresolved: Who published the article about chaos at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art?

The backstory for Nodjoumi’s situation is that the museum invited him to put his paintings on display in 1980. Supposedly they were on display for only a day or so, alongside the art of many other painters. Nodjoumi himself was not present for this initial exhibition, and the directors of A Revolution on Canvas were only able to find a single person who claims to have attended this event. Shortly after the exhibition began, a newspaper article came out that convinced Nodjoumi he needed to flee for his life, which he promptly did, leaving his precious art behind in the museum.

Where the story gets murkier is that A Revolution on Canvas is actually able to get hold of the museum director who’d first told Nodjoumi he planned to put his paintings on exhibition. This museum director still lives in Iran, and still works in the Iranian art world. The museum director remembers Nodjoumi, and regularly flies overseas for his job, so he’s able to meet and interview with the filmmakers. The museum director corroborates everything about Nodjoumi’s story except that he doesn’t seem to think the museum ever actually exhibited Nodjoumi’s paintings. And his reaction in the scene where the director shows him the newspaper article about the exhibition is fascinatingly cryptic. He just goes…wow. So that’s why you left the country. Because of this article. Huh.

A Revolution on Canvas regrettably doesn’t interrogate this line of thought anywhere near as much as I was hoping. Since Iran has a totalitarian government, you have to interpret anything a person might have to say as if it’s being made in fear of an official reprisal. This is how the film treats the museum director from his entrance to his exit, though he otherwise seems like a fairly nice guy, and one who appears genuinely oblivious as to the idea that any of Nodjoumi’s work was unusually politically dangerous. Incredibly, when they ask him if  Nodjoumi can get his paintings back, the museum director’s reply is sure, I don’t see any reason why not, unless you’re actively trying to overthrow the government or something.

The overall arc of Nicky Nodjoumi’s life is interesting enough. It’s not exceptionally exciting, and the marketing for A Revolution on Canvas perhaps inevitably overstates his importance as an artist, but the documentary’s a decent enough portrait of the life of an Iranian man with strong political opinions in an age of political turmoil in his home country. But what makes A Revolution on Canvas such an oddly unconvincing portrait of a martyr is that this question keeps being begged–who wrote that article about an artistic exhibition that might not have actually happened, and why?

Any answer is inherently speculative. But any answer that assumes a more complex situation than just that the Iranian government was plotting to arrest revolutionary artists leads to an inherently farcical conclusion: The whole course of Nodjoumi’s life following his departure to the United States was based on polemic journalism that had little, if anything, to do with the content of Nodjoumi’s actual art. And now, having effectively lived for the last 40 years as a dissident in exile, Nodjoumi is probably now indistinguishable from any other political dissident in exile as far as the Iranian government is concerned, even if there was never actually an original grievance between the two.

All of this material is quite relevant contemporaneously, albeit almost certainly not as the filmmakers intended, as a commentary on the importance of censorship narratives. Which is, indeed, what pretty much all the censorship we see these days is really about. When ideologues want to ban books from school libraries, the issue at play isn’t the content of the books or even whether anyone reads them. It’s about declaring war on wokeness, or insensitivity, in pursuit of higher political goals, creating an environment so polarized that even not having an opinion on these arguments qualifies as having an opinion.

In Nodjoumi’s case, one such censorship narrative changed the whole course of his life. A Revolution on Canvas is bittersweet in telling his personal story, though, because throughout all the conflict, Nodjoumi still believed in his own art. Political though that art may have been, this touching, personal film never forgets its  original purpose as self expression in response to times of political turmoil.