Gabbeh (Film)

Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Director)

Born: 1957, Tehran.



"The young Makhmalbaf, meanwhile, was growing up in downtown Tehran under the protective custody of three mother figures: his mother, his maternal grandmother, and his maternal aunt, who formed a modest, devoutly religious family. They also saved him from being kidnapped by his father, who had married Makhmalbafs mother as his second wife, for he did not have a son from his previous marriage; now he had a son whom he desperately wished to claim. Makhmalbaf thus grew up with three strong mother figures, no father, an overwhelming fear of being kidnapped by his father, all at a time when "the father of the nation," as we were told to call the king, was struggling to keep his shaky throne.
Leftist intellectuals for their part were meanwhile busy soul-searching. Religious revolutionaries were by and large silent. A literary and poetic form of resistance was taking shape. Makhmalbafs mother worked as a nurse in a hospital and his upbringing was entrusted to his grandmother and aunt. His grandmother was intensely religious and told him colorful stories of saints and prophets as lullabies during summer nights on the rooftop of their modest home. His aunt soon started teaching him how to read and write, and introduced him to literature. His mother was the breadwinner, his grandmother the pious storyteller, and his aunt his teacher. No father in sight.

Makhmalbafs mother married the lawyer who had assisted her during her divorce proceedings. Makhmalbafs stepfather was a devout religious man with strong political convictions; he was deeply committed to a young rebellious cleric called Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the young Makhmalbafs mind, the stepfather and the revolutionary father figure begin to replace his own estranged father and "the father of the nation," while the material evidence of his livelihood, soul, and intellect remained entrusted to three mothers"[Dabashi, M&M, 337]

"He once told me that his local mosque sent him on a mission to go to Hosseiniyeh Ershad, the religious establishment in which regular anti-regime lectures were organized, in order to plot the assassination of Ali Shariati. He went there, sat and listened to Shariati, and became mesmerized by his revolutionary ideas, and never set foot in his local mosque again, The active hostility of the traditional clerical establishment against Shariati remained a major component of the ideological movement of the mid-1970s. Shariati drew his constituency in part from disaffected youth from religious backgrounds, but also from secular activists disappointed with the legacy of the Tudeh Party."

"After a visit with Khomeini in Najaf in 1974, a group of Mojahedin-e Khalq activists seceded from their main body and formed a more overtly Marxist group called Peykar. This marked a succession of breakups in the urban guerrilla movement. But the general atmosphere of insurrection only intensified, and Makhmalbaf and his small band of comrades began plotting an attack on a police officer in order to steal his gun, rob a bank, and get more seriously involved in the armed uprising against the regime. Makhmalbaf was the leader of the group and chiefly responsible for disarming the police officer, which he failed to do, and was almost killed in the process. He was shot in his belly, captured, initially hospitalized, and then sent to jail in August 1974. He escaped with his life because he was too young to be executed. In the Pahlavi prison, he underwent severe and systematic torture, the scars from which still mark his body."

"Makhmalbaf had now completed his third year of incarceration. He still has bitter memories of how political prisoners who belonged to organized groups were vicious in their behavior toward people like him who were not part of their cliques. In prison, he once told me, he also learned the art of brevity, because he had to memorize instructions, abbreviate and summarize them, in order to communicate them to his cellmates. That art of brevity soon became a hallmark of his asceticism, and in turn found its way into his aesthetic minimalism, and from there into the virtual realism that defines his cinema."

"Around this time [1981, Iran-Iraq war raging] Makhmalbaf wrote Marg-e Digari (Someone Else's Death), an allegorical encounter between a general in his bunker on the verge of a massive military operation and Death. It is a claustrophobic reflection on the incomprehensible ability of people to kill other human beings. All through these years, Makhmalbafs cinema was being formed and imagined (in his mind alone) in the most traumatic experience of Iran's recent national history."

"During this entire year [1983] Makhmalbaf was busy making his next two films, Esteazeb (Fleeing from Evil to God) and Do Chasbm-e Bi-Su (Two Sightless Eyes)—artistically negligible and ideologically at the service of the Islamic Republic. Nevertheless, these films witnessed a noticeable improvement in his command over the camera, a distinct visual vocabulary, and a creative confidence. The critical community of Iranian cineastes began to take notice of Makhmalbaf beyond his ideological identification with the ruling Islamists."

"During this time, Makhmalbaf began to take his chosen profession more seriously and read extensively on cinema. He was equally prolific in writing fiction,. completing two short stories, "Valeh" and "Zangha" ("The Bells"); during the summer, he started working on his best-known novella, Bagh-e Bohr (The Crystal Garden), and in the fall he wrote Hoz-e Soltun (The Soltun Pond), another novella. These two works of fiction deeply complicate an appraisal of his early creative record, for there is not a trace of the committed ideologue in any one of them. It seems as if he had put his cinema at the service of the Islamic revolution, while his fiction remained the exclusive domain of cultivating his own aesthetic concerns. Most who categorically (and correctly) dismiss his early cinema have never bothered to read or consider his fiction of this very same period. They radically differ from his films, as if they were written by an entirely different person. As the war and the revolution raged, these two novellas saved Makhmalbaf for posterity."

"Makhmalbaf made Nobat-e Asheqi (Time of Love) and Shabha-ye Zayandeh-rud (The Nights of Zayandeh-rud). He also wrote Khab-e bi-Ta'bir (The Dream with No Interpretation) and Mard-e Na-Tamam {The Incomplete Man). Banned by the government, The Nights of Zayandeh-rud continues with the same philosophical relativism as Time of Love, this time casting a bitter look at events before and after the Islamic revolution. At the center of the story is a professor of sociology who loses his wife in a motorcycle accident before the revolution, because no one would help him take her to the hospital. In the course of the revolution, the same professor witnesses the love and care that people then had for each other. After the revolution, he sees the same indifference has returned. Not much of an addition to Makhmalbaf's cinematic vision, The Nights of Zayandeh-rud is more an indication of Makhmalbaf's own frustration and disappointment with the revolution"

"Iran remained neutral during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies in 1991. Iran also accommodated the release of more American hostages in Lebanon. During this year, Makhmalbaf wrote Nasir al-Din Shah, Actor-e Cinema {Once upon a Time, Cinema) and then turned it into a film. He also wrote Honarpisheh {The Actor). Once upon a Time, Cinema shows the birth of Makhmalbaf as a major filmmaker. It is an astounding tribute, a beautiful love letter, to Iranian cinema."

"Makhmalbaf made The Actor into a film along with Gozideh Tasvir-e dar Doreh-ye Qajar (A Selection of Pictures from the Qajar Period). Makhmalbaf himself does not like The Actor. He thinks it is too contrived, that he wrote and shot it formulaically, only to prove that art-house films could sell well. But I like this film a lot, precisely because it does not quite come together, and it is a window into Makhmalbafs subterranean layers of creative energy. The menage a trois that he manages to generate and sustain in this film exudes with an astounding eroticism, including homoeroticism, rarely dared or seen in Iranian cinema."

"In 1994 Makhmalbaf wrote and directed Salaam Cinema. During the winter, he wrote Qaziyeh-ye an Naqqash-e Doreh-gard {The Story, of the Vagabond Painter), Zendegi Rang Ast {Life Is Color), and Gabbeb. Salaam Cinema is a bitter and brutal examination of dictatorship, seeking its roots in the frailty of the human soul. It is also a strange revelation about the power of cinema, and what people do when faced with a camera. The power of a desk, behind which sits a figure of authority (the filmmaker, in this case Makhmalbaf himself), begins to assume eerie, inanimate, and frightful proportions. Salaam Cinema is a historic document about the significance of cinema in contemporary Iran, and the strange effect that it has on a people at large. Is Salaam Cinema also a commentary on the brutal dictatorship of Khomeini during the preceding decade? It might very well be read that way. But like all of Makhmalbafs good films, more than anything else it is the instrumentality of the camera itself that remains at the center of the cinematic event."

"During the fall [of 1995], he wrote "Nun-o-Goldun" and turned it into a film—A Moment of Innocence. During the same year he made the film Gabbeh. With A Moment of Innocence and Gabbeh, Makhmalbaf achieved his purest cinematic form to date, his virtual realism assuming its undiluted poetic style and parabolic narrative. This mature phase of Makhmalbaf's cinema has every trace of two brutal decades of political turmoil, a gut-wrenching revolution, and a bloody and prolonged war—and yet all of these transformed into the visual vocabulary of a deeply contemplative disposition. This poetic cinema is neither mystical nor mythic, neither forgiving nor forgetful. It is a cinematic realism of a very particular and definitive character—reaching for a reality stripped of all its distracting particulars and thus revelatory by virtue of its minimalist take on reality."

"Makhmalbafs cinema is scarred, just like his body and the soul of his nation. Makhmalbafs realism is virtual, because the full reality it wishes to convey and contest is too traumatic to bear. He has neither the panache nor the patience of Kiarostami to witness the actuality of reality (hidden under its overburdened symbolism), nor the steely eyes of Naderi to look reality straight in the eye without submitting it to any metaphysics. Makhmalbaf once told me of an idea he had for a film about a boy who was told never to look at evil, and whenever he ran into something evil or ugly to turn away. That boy ultimately became Khorshid in his film Silence, and Makhmalbaf made him completely blind. Have you ever wondered what happened to that boy? Makhmalbaf found nothing for him to look at that was not evil or ugly, except in his own mind, and thus he had to be completely blind. That boy is Makhmalbaf himself, having made his eyes blind to imagine a world inside his own head—one that is virtually beautiful. That's why Silence is so beautifully shot and beautiful to look Mohsen Makhmalbaf A Moment of Innocence at, because it is shot from inside Khorshid's (Makhmalbafs) mind's eye."


In his film, A Time to Love, he quotes from Rumi: "The truth was a mirror that fell to the ground and shattered. Each one picked up a piece and, seeing his own image reflected in it, thought he possessed the whole truth." This is a quote which he also repeatedly quotes in interviews, and which has seemingly come to be an indelible part of his own philosophy.



Minor motif: disembodied hands (e.g. at end of A Moment of Innocence in the famous final freeze-frame) but also women out of closed doors. Samira Makhmalbaf may have partly inherited this trait, see e.g. the hands holding out an apple in The Apple and so on. Often the hands are of a woman, perhaps hinting at their suppressed identities and roles in Iranian society.