The Spring (Film)

Cheshmeh. 1972. Dir: Arby Ovanessian.




The Film:

"Spring is narrated, to the degree that it is based on or is in need of any narrative, around a triangular speculation on love, lust, and loyalty. A man (played by the actor Arman) is about to die, and summons his son to tell him something important. We never see him actually telling his son anything, and the suggestion of a flashback is so visually attenuated that it remains quite unclear whether we are witnessing the story of this man's wife betraying him or else a visual reimagination of that story. From the tunnel-vision scene of a street, in which we see a woman approaching the camera while a little girl hops away from it, the story begins to re-unravel. The woman is Habibeh (Mahtaj Nojumi), going home to her husband. She becomes thirsty and tries to drink a handful of water from a spring when it suddenly stops flowing. She is startled; a door opens, a young man (played by Jamshid Mashayekhi) comes out, apologizes for having turned off the flow of water from behind the door, and offers to turn the water on for her to drink. She refuses and leaves, but the brief encounter is sufficient for the young man to fall madly in love with her. Habibeh's husband builds spring wells, and he and the man who has fallen madly in love with Habibeh turn out to be close friends. Meanwhile Habibeh herself is equally madly in love with yet another younger man (played by Parviz Pour Hosseini). When Jamshid Mashayekhi's character realizes that he has fallen in love with his friend's wife, he commits suicide at his own farm, at which point we find out that he was already married and has a wife and a little girl. The suicide adds fuel to Habibeh's already scandalous reputation, for having an adulterous relationship with the man she loves. The men and women of the village begin to gossip and plot to murder Habibeh. She too commits suicide, while the man she loves becomes desolate and, in despair, runs away to the desert, while her husband buries her body inside their home and on top of her grave constructs a reflective pool."

"On the basis of its astonishingly beautiful opening shot, Ovanessian proceeds with other staccato shots of an idyllic village, all edited beautifully with the syncopated rhythm of the chimes of a ringing church bell. As soon as these bells ring, about five minutes into Spring, you will start to realize that Ovanessian has been deeply influenced by the master Armenian filmmaker from the former Soviet Union, Sergei Paradzhanov"

"I believe Paradzhanov's Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, which is the tragic tale of two lovers separated by feuding families, was very much on Ovanessian's mind when he was making Spring, not so much in terms of narrative plot as in editing rhythm and melodic vision, in which terms he is also paying homage to Paradzhanov's The Color of Pomegranates."

"Cut against the rhythm of the church bell in the early minutes of Spring is a succession of staccato shots, lasting for a little more than five minutes, one shot after another, first of a wheel pulling a bucket full of water from a spring, and then the midday sun shining through a tree, a running brook, a shady veranda, an approaching man, a feminine hand fixing the white sheet and white pillowcases of a bed, that hand opening a door, and now the man who was walking on the veranda starts taking his shirt off, drops it on a chair, and the woman who was fixing the bed puts a jar and glass of water on a mantle, before we get a medium shot of an empty room with an empty chair, and then move to an exterior shot of a church, and then a village, its serene roofs, a horse in a pasture, another shot of the same spring, a sitting dog, the veranda again, and then a medium exterior shot of a wall and a door guarding an enclosed garden, and now the rhythmic sound of approaching drosh-kies, two of which appear, as a man comes out and knocks at that door, another man from the same droshky starts playing the naqqareb, a wind instrument, and finally a woman opens the door to an adjacent house. By now eight minutes and thirty seconds have elapsed from the first frame to this door, which a boy opens, saying, "My dad says come in!""

"Foremost in Spring is a minimalist mise en scene, confident long takes, melodic editing, and a very deliberate—almost self-conscious—rhythm that has over time become a hallmark of Iranian cinema. By the time the young boy opens the door, about eight minutes and thirty seconds into the film, and says to the man who has been knocking at the door, "My dad says come in!" the film has thoroughly established its melodic and space-conscious visual vocabulary. Thereafter, a dying man, laid literally on his deathbed, is the first narrative throw to enter the spatial universe that Ovanessian has already masterfully crafted. Who this anonymous man is, why he is ill, why his friends and relatives are paying him a visit, or any other piece of information of this sort becomes rather accidental to the rest of the film. Here is where I think Ovanessian's detractors and admirers have equally failed. Much of the anger and frustration with Spring emerges from habitually taking this suggestion of a narrative plot too literally, while much of the empty praise heaped on it comes from a fundamental failure to read the visual vocabulary that consistently takes precedence over the narrative. Almost flamboyantly, Spring calls attention to its spatial presence, rather than to what is taking place within that space. Ovanessian's cinema is a visual experience in the emotional charge of a space."

"imagination of space and verbal opacity of narrative, is that its terrible acting and even worse dialogue have a subtextual function of revealing what constitutes this film—its spatial reflections on moods and manners, gestures and sentiments, evocative tones and imperceptible temperaments. Ovanessian is neither a character director nor is he exactly a master of Persian prose. But he has a set of eyes that see otherwise invisible sights, and thus his spatial realism must be the principal point of any serious critique of his masterpiece. Spring commences, continues, and concludes with an intimation of categorical uncertainty. Nothing is ever conceptually clear about Spring. Because of this categorical uncertainty Ovanessian can intimate his visions of otherwise invisible sights; as if by turning down the volume of the narrative his camera's sense perception is increased."

"The reason that I keep emphasizing the bad acting, terrible (almost unbearable) dialogue, and the mere suggestion of a story in Spring is not to diminish a film that I consider one of the masterpieces of Iranian cinema, but instead to draw your attention to an organic link between these shortfalls of the film and what I suggest is its revolutionary, entirely unprecedented contribution, namely its spatial realism. The first scene in which Habibeh appears is in my judgment one of the best shots in the entire history of Iranian cinema. Nothing of thematic or narrative significance happens in this scene. It is of an empty, almost desolate street, with a mud-brick wall darkened by the shade of trees. Tall and wearing a white chador, Habibeh is walking toward the camera in a wide-angle long shot, while away from the camera frog-jumps a little girl in a dark shirt, playing what appears to be a game of hopscotch by herself. The camera remains motionless. It is an invitation for the soul of the space to breathe, to be fully present."

"Consider the mourning ceremony, after the death of the husband, Arman, on the banks of the brook. A group of men are sitting around a spread and preparing to drink to their fallen friend. The scene is entirely iconic, ritualistic, stylized, and visually mannered—and precisely in those terms Ovanessian has managed to generate and convey a spontaneous sense of space that never moves to make an atmospheric suggestion. We scarcely have any notion of those people's thoughts, emotions, reflections, or the nature of their relationship to their friend—and yet when Ovanessian privileges the spatial complexion of their gathering he manages to capture the soul of the reason why they are there. He does so not with dialogue but by the way he arranges his actors around their drinking paraphernalia, by the manner in which one of them pours the wine, by the solemnity of their dignified toast, by the murmuring flow of the brook that is running nearby, by the melodic incantation of the music that we hear, by the sound of the glass cups being thrown and falling into the brook, and ultimately by the sense of mourning that becomes evident in the space that Ovanessian has created."

[Dabashi, M&M]


Reception:

"As far as the box office was concerned, the film was screened for only five days at the Capri Cinema in downtown Tehran, with miserable sales. As for the critics, its detractors accused Spring of useless and boring formalism, of not having really anything to say. And, as I mentioned before, worse than his detractors were Ovanessian's admirers, who could come up with nothing better than calling the film "quiet and poetic."" [Dabashi]