Gender & the Jinn in the Work of Costume Designer Phaedra Dahdaleh

by: Wiam Milles & Abigail Whittall , February 6, 2024

This essay considers the importance and marginalisation of Arab costume designer Phaedra Dahdaleh through an exploration of her work in the Iranian horror film زیر سایه‎/Zeer-e sāye/Under the Shadow (2016). Phaedra Dahdaleh is a Jordanian costume designer. Having established her own house of costumes in the country, she takes the role of costume designer in most major films shot in the area. Some well-known films she has worked on are Rosewater (2014), Rogue One (2016), and War Machine (2017). Through an analysis of costume design in the film, we underscore her significant role as a costume designer in the construction of the film’s narrative.

Under the Shadow is a horror film rich in socio-political meaning which could be explored via a number of avenues. The attention the film has received has largely focused on its position as a film of the Iranian diaspora due to British-Iranian director Babak Anvari and the film’s setting in 1980s Tehran. The story centres on the protagonist Shideh, who faces numerous challenges in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution and during the Iran-Iraq war. As Shideh grapples with the trauma and upheaval of war, director Anvari artfully employs the supernatural figure of the Jinn to delve deeper into her emotional journey. Through this clever use of magical realism, Anvari offers a hauntingly vivid portrayal of Shideh’s struggles and ultimately explores the devastating impact of war on individuals and families.

Although Iran has a vast and rich cinematic tradition, horror did not gain popularity in Iran until recently, particularly after the 2009 failed protest movements against president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Kazemi 2023). Concomitantly, as a result of this lack in the genre, there is relatively little academic work which looks into the history of Iranian horror cinema. However, more recent scholarship has turned to explore a newly found wave of horror films produced by Iranian filmmakers in the diaspora (Khosroshahi 2019; Basu 2017; Kazemi 2023; Bledstein 2022). According to these scholars, films produced within the New Iranian Horror Film wave share a common theme of critiquing the socio-political status in Iran through the deployment of Persian cultural traditions combined with the aesthetics of horror.

Two of the most discussed films representing the New Iranian Horror Film wave are دختری در شب تنها به خانه می‌رود / Dokhtari dar šab tanhâ be xâne miravad / A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night directed by Ana Lily Amirpour (2014) and Under the Shadow. Zahra Khosroshahi (2019) explores the use of the chador, or the veil, and the figure of the Jinn to offer complex representations of femininity, war, motherhood, and religion. Notably, Khosroshahi maintains that the chador in these horror films offers both a critique of women’s issues in contemporary Iran while challenging stereotypical Western assumptions regarding the agency of Iranian women. Similarly, Shrabani Basu explores the use of the image of the veil in the two films and argues that ‘it defies the ongoing controversy of whether the “Veil” is an empowering choice for women or a symbol of domestic and societal oppression’ (2017: 73). Our exploration of Under the Shadow in this video essay follows the same line of argument as these scholars. That is, the account offered here seeks to reveal the complexity and nuance associated with the veil/chador going beyond the suggestion of the passivity and oppression of Iranian women. However, this work focuses on the costume designer and her creative role in presenting this complexity through the choice of costumes in Under the Shadow.

As Lucy Fife Donaldson writes in an accompanying statement to her own video essay (on colour-coordinator George Hoyningen-Huene), ‘the audio-visual essay has become a dynamic format for illuminating people and labour in film, especially those who might have gone unnoticed or unappreciated’ (2022: 107). This entails focusing not solely on directors and ‘above-the-line’ work, but other roles which have been obscured such as that of the costume designer. This is a highly gendered oversight as costume designers’ roles and experiences have long been overlooked and marginalised in favour of their above-the-line, typically male, colleagues (Warner 2018). While this statement is true for most women in the profession, for a costume designer like Phaedra Dahdaleh, the marginalisation is doubly invoked (i.e., being a below-the-line professional and an Arab woman who rarely has her work recognised). In this project, we thus consider Dahdaleh’s work and contribution to the film industry through an intersectional feminist lens as we reflect not only on her role in the film’s production, but also take into consideration the challenges and obstacles she faces as an Arab costume designer with limited resources.

Indeed, Dahdaleh’s marginalisation may be perpetuated by the lack of resources provided for those in below-the-line work. In the few interviews she has taken part in, Dahdaleh has expressed concerns around neoliberalism and the need to make do with thrifted items: ‘The instability [of the film industry in Jordan] means fiscal uncertainty even for successful types like Dahdaleh’ (Laylin 2017). This smaller budget has led to an understated and realist approach which could lead to further neglect compared to the more extravagant costume design displayed in the films of those such as Baz Luhrmann, and as Dahdaleh mentions in the same interview that she wants to work with Luhrmann it seems this is not an artistic choice but a necessity. Yet in this instance, her approach to costume design, drawing upon limited financial and material resources but a wealth of cultural knowledge and a desire for authenticity, is precisely what is valuable in a subtle horror film like Under the Shadow.

The video essay offers the potential to visualise and, to a certain extent, isolate the work of the costume designer, to layer evidence of costume production, realisation, and a designer’s wider career. Stella Bruzzi argues that costume designers significantly contribute to the cinematic fabric of film by stitching and constructing their own meaning. Costumes then become ‘spectacular interventions that interfere with the scenes in which they appear and impose themselves onto the characters they adorn’ (Bruzzi 1997: xv). Our work demonstrates Dahdaleh’s significant contribution to the film’s narrative and the ways in which her work constructs complex characters. Our audiovisual work brings together images from across the film to demonstrate the multiplicity of costume which for Sarah Street ‘frequently operates as a “system” governed by complex influences that relate to notions of realism, performance, gender, status and power’ (2001: 2). The importance of costume is reinforced by the similarities and differences to be found when comparing protagonist Shideh with other characters such as Mrs Ebrahimi and Mrs Fakuri, through which we discover nuances in their portrayal. In our video essay, we thus argue that Dahdaleh’s background as an Arab costume designer enables her to present viewers with nuanced and authentic representations of the characters. Through this level of complexity, Dahdaleh shows that it is not necessarily, or solely, enforced veiling which Shideh fears and sees reflected in the form of the Jinn. Rather, it is the traditionality epitomised by Mrs Ebrahimi and her floral clothing.