Allegories of Passion: Ta’ziyeh and the Allegorical Moment in Shahram Mokri’s Fish and Cat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An image in Fish and Cat (Shahram Mokri, 2013) immediately catches the eye: a patch of blood (Figure Although it may seem minor, the blood illustrates the Iranian film's unique combination of well-trodden traditions in Iran's national cinema with surprising and unexpected novelties. It appears on the shirt of Babak, who, like his friend Saeed, works as a cook at a restaurant adjacent to a campground outside of Tehran. Fish and Cat tells the story of a group of university students who participate in a kite-flying competition held at the campground, and who interact with Babak and Saeed throughout the film. A title card at the beginning contextualizes these interactions: in 1998, a restaurant had been shut down due to a health code violation. The chefs were later imprisoned for serving inedible meat, rumoured to have been human flesh. This information suggests impending doom throughout the film. As the viewer watches, she wonders if and when the characters will die. Images such as the blood on Babak's shirt intensify this morbid affect, as do menacing set pieces in which he and Saeed pursue the students. Although no acts of violence are shown onscreen, these intimations of death more than earn Fish and Cat its designation as "Iran's first slasher film." 1 However, the lack of graphic violence also troubles generic categorization. This troubling continues through the tension between the film's single, unbroken take, which suggests the linear passage 1 The phrase appears in the following profile of Mokri: Ben Sachs, "Meet Shahram Mokri, Director of Iran's First Slasher Film," Chicago Reader, Feb 19,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".