1974. Dir: Sohrab Shahid Saless.
The last film Saless directed in Iran before emigrating to Germany in 1975.
The Film:
"The story of Shahid Sales' Still Life is, of course, no story at all—and that is how it borrows the spontaneity of modern Persian poetry and makes a permanent loan of it to Iranian cinema. An aged and anonymous railroad attendant and his equally old and sedate wife live in a remote and nameless spot in the middle of nowhere. The old man's daily chore is to go to a particular spot at a railroad junction and switch the direction of the tracks for an oncoming train, about which neither we nor the man know anything. People enter and exit the couple's life, very much like the train that punctuates their otherwise memory-less life. The mind-numbing routine is ultimately interrupted—ruptured—by a visit paid to the old man by an inspector from the central office, informing him that he has reached the age of retirement. As his successor comes to take charge, the old man goes to the city to ask to be allowed to continue to do his job. Denied, he returns home and collects his wife and belongings and they quit the premises.
If we were to locate Shahid Sales' translucent realism in this film somewhere other than its own immediate visual vocabulary, we would follow it to Kafka, and to Chekhov, and of course to the prophetic visionary of the translucent, Yasujiro Ozu. The anonymity of the bureaucracy that both gives and takes away the old man's solitary source of distraction is Kafka par excellence. The patient endurance of the microcosm of a stolid life that reveals the macrocosmic universe it hides is directly from Chekhov. Just as the stationary camera that has no rhyme or reason to move anywhere beyond the placid matter-of-factness of the old couple's numbing life is solidly Ozu. But the soul of Shahid Sales' vision rightfully belongs to the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri.
I also believe that Shahid Sales conceived of Still Life very much aware of and in conversation with Paul Cezanne, whose "Still Life with Compotier" (1879-82), with its deliberate outlines and contemplative shadows, is palpably evident in Shahid Sales' framing and mise en scene. Keep in mind that the term tabiat-e bi-jan is a Persian neologism for "still life." Sepehri, the principal poetic influence on Shahid Sales, was also a major painter whose aesthetic was formed while he studied in Paris. So what I am suggesting is that both through Sepehri and directly, Shahid Sales was very much conscious of the still life in general and that of Cezanne in particular." [Dabashi]
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Tuesday, 9 June 2015
Saturday, 6 June 2015
The Apple (Film)
Seeb. 1998. Dir: Samira Makhmalbaf.
"The Apple can be read as a feminist allegory about women seizing opportunities, disguising its wider socio-political implications through the figure of childhood for the censors' benefit." [Chaudhuri, CWC.]
"The Apple can be read as a feminist allegory about women seizing opportunities, disguising its wider socio-political implications through the figure of childhood for the censors' benefit." [Chaudhuri, CWC.]
Friday, 5 June 2015
Kandahar (Film)
2001. Dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Produced by Makhmalbaf Productions with French companies Bac Films and Studio Canal.
Context:
The Film:
"In Kandahar, as in Makhmalbaf's other recent films, actors play roles that approximate their own lives. Nelofer Paizira, an Afghan expatriate and writer of the story on which the film is based, plays Nafas. She returns to Afghanistan to save a sister, who is threatening to commit suicide before a solar eclipse, symbolising the impending eclipse of Afghan women's lives. As Nafas travels towards Kandahar, a destination she never reaches, she witnesses multifarious ills plaguing Afghan society under the Taliban following decades of intertribal warfare and the Great Powers' imperial exploits. Bandits, fraudsters and scavengers seize advantage of the breakdown in law and order. Innocent lives are wrecked by landmines: in a typically surreal image, Makhmalbaf shows a horde of landmine-maimed amputees hopping on crutches towards a supply of artificial limbs parachuting down from a Red Cross helicopter. In other remarkable images, women clothed head to foot in brightly coloured burkas move in groups across the desert"
Reception:
Kandahar premiered at Cannes in 2001 and drew sellout crowds in Europe and the USA in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. Its general release could not have been more timely: America was preparing to go to war; names of Afghan locations like Kandahar were on everyone's lips. It was even rumoured that President Bush wished to see it.
References:
Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema, 81.
Produced by Makhmalbaf Productions with French companies Bac Films and Studio Canal.
Context:
The Film:
"In Kandahar, as in Makhmalbaf's other recent films, actors play roles that approximate their own lives. Nelofer Paizira, an Afghan expatriate and writer of the story on which the film is based, plays Nafas. She returns to Afghanistan to save a sister, who is threatening to commit suicide before a solar eclipse, symbolising the impending eclipse of Afghan women's lives. As Nafas travels towards Kandahar, a destination she never reaches, she witnesses multifarious ills plaguing Afghan society under the Taliban following decades of intertribal warfare and the Great Powers' imperial exploits. Bandits, fraudsters and scavengers seize advantage of the breakdown in law and order. Innocent lives are wrecked by landmines: in a typically surreal image, Makhmalbaf shows a horde of landmine-maimed amputees hopping on crutches towards a supply of artificial limbs parachuting down from a Red Cross helicopter. In other remarkable images, women clothed head to foot in brightly coloured burkas move in groups across the desert"
Reception:
Kandahar premiered at Cannes in 2001 and drew sellout crowds in Europe and the USA in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. Its general release could not have been more timely: America was preparing to go to war; names of Afghan locations like Kandahar were on everyone's lips. It was even rumoured that President Bush wished to see it.
References:
Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema, 81.
The White Balloon (Film)
1995. Dir: Jafar Panahi. Scr: Abbas Kiarostami.
The Film:
The film's ending belies any reading of the film as charming fluff about cute children. Razieh retrieves her banknote, which disappeared down a grating, with the help of an Afghan balloon-seller [the narrative switches focus]. She departs without thanking him, buys the goldfish and returns home. The film concludes with off-screen sounds [important throughout the film as a tactic, e.g. the father shouting off-screen] of a clock ticking down to New Year and fireworks - and finally, a long-held freeze-frame of the Afghan refugee boy with his white balloon. Although both he and the white balloon have scarcely entered the film, this final, unexpected freeze-frame claims our attention and 'feeds back into and modifies the whole preceding "charming" narrative'.18 The Afghan is left alone; he has no home to go to. A harsh absent reality is rendered present - namely Afghan refugees, Iran's most mistreated minority.
Reception:
"A particular target was Panahi's debut feature The White Balloon, a story written by Kiarostami about a seven-year-old girl, Razieh, who loses her money in Tehran's streets on her way to buy a goldfish for New Year celebrations. The White Balloon won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1995 and became the most lucrative foreign-language film in the USA and Europe the following year. In Sight and Sound, Simon Louvish slated the film for shielding the regime's harshness, horror and despair, calling it a 'sentimental piece of slush [which] has had wide distribution in the West at the expense of far better Iranian films'."
The Film:
The film's ending belies any reading of the film as charming fluff about cute children. Razieh retrieves her banknote, which disappeared down a grating, with the help of an Afghan balloon-seller [the narrative switches focus]. She departs without thanking him, buys the goldfish and returns home. The film concludes with off-screen sounds [important throughout the film as a tactic, e.g. the father shouting off-screen] of a clock ticking down to New Year and fireworks - and finally, a long-held freeze-frame of the Afghan refugee boy with his white balloon. Although both he and the white balloon have scarcely entered the film, this final, unexpected freeze-frame claims our attention and 'feeds back into and modifies the whole preceding "charming" narrative'.18 The Afghan is left alone; he has no home to go to. A harsh absent reality is rendered present - namely Afghan refugees, Iran's most mistreated minority.
Reception:
"A particular target was Panahi's debut feature The White Balloon, a story written by Kiarostami about a seven-year-old girl, Razieh, who loses her money in Tehran's streets on her way to buy a goldfish for New Year celebrations. The White Balloon won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1995 and became the most lucrative foreign-language film in the USA and Europe the following year. In Sight and Sound, Simon Louvish slated the film for shielding the regime's harshness, horror and despair, calling it a 'sentimental piece of slush [which] has had wide distribution in the West at the expense of far better Iranian films'."
Monday, 25 May 2015
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]
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]
Saturday, 23 May 2015
A Moment of Innocence (Film)
1995. Dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Co-produced by MK2. The Iranian title, Nun Va Goldoony means 'The bread and the vase', but Makhmalbaf 's French co-producer MK2 preferred A Moment of Innocence.
The Film:
"This picture (and with it the sequence and the entire film) is a cinematic will to rewrite history, to remake the world, to revise its destiny, modify its verdict. Here Makhmalbaf the rebel is in full control of a cinematic urge to dismantle and dismember the fate of an entire nation. This is a deliberate act of mis-remembering history in order to let it forget itself—for its own good. Makhmalbaf himself may wish here to apologize, to seek forgiveness, to solicit absolution. But Makhmalbaf the filmmaker is after a much bigger fish—for there is nothing to forgive, and no one to forgive."
Kiarostami's influence is evident in the film's minimalist style and formal organisation, with title cards and clapperboards opening and ending scenes. But, more significantly, in the blurring between reality and its staged remake, A Moment of Innocence embodies the multiplicity of truth through 'a quiet erosion of the dead certainties, that separates the real from the make-belief, and that is precisely the trade-mark of the best of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema'. These 'dead certainties' include the single-mindedness of terrorists who believe that there is no other course of action.
In the final freeze-frame, the veiled woman (representative of Iran's revolutionary Islamicisation) and the Young Policeman (emblem of the despised Pahlavi regime) are the astonished recipients of peace offerings. The image 'arrests' the moment where the past - Makhmalbaf's original terrorist act - is transfigured by the present - the young actors' spontaneous refusal of violence. But the 'moment of innocence' of the film's title could refer to numerous other meanings embedded in this image: Islamic militancy, revolutionary idealism, terrorism, law and order, adolescent romance, unrequited love, revenge and pacifism, and so on. This freeze-frame, which holds multiple competing ideologies within the same image, succinctly expresses Makhmalbaf's revised stance on his past: 'I no longer believe in absolutes and have accepted that I don't have all the right answers.'
Reception:
The film won the Special Jury Award at the Locarno Film Festival in 1996.
The film was banned in Iran until 1997.
Co-produced by MK2. The Iranian title, Nun Va Goldoony means 'The bread and the vase', but Makhmalbaf 's French co-producer MK2 preferred A Moment of Innocence.
The Film:
"This picture (and with it the sequence and the entire film) is a cinematic will to rewrite history, to remake the world, to revise its destiny, modify its verdict. Here Makhmalbaf the rebel is in full control of a cinematic urge to dismantle and dismember the fate of an entire nation. This is a deliberate act of mis-remembering history in order to let it forget itself—for its own good. Makhmalbaf himself may wish here to apologize, to seek forgiveness, to solicit absolution. But Makhmalbaf the filmmaker is after a much bigger fish—for there is nothing to forgive, and no one to forgive."
Kiarostami's influence is evident in the film's minimalist style and formal organisation, with title cards and clapperboards opening and ending scenes. But, more significantly, in the blurring between reality and its staged remake, A Moment of Innocence embodies the multiplicity of truth through 'a quiet erosion of the dead certainties, that separates the real from the make-belief, and that is precisely the trade-mark of the best of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema'. These 'dead certainties' include the single-mindedness of terrorists who believe that there is no other course of action.
In the final freeze-frame, the veiled woman (representative of Iran's revolutionary Islamicisation) and the Young Policeman (emblem of the despised Pahlavi regime) are the astonished recipients of peace offerings. The image 'arrests' the moment where the past - Makhmalbaf's original terrorist act - is transfigured by the present - the young actors' spontaneous refusal of violence. But the 'moment of innocence' of the film's title could refer to numerous other meanings embedded in this image: Islamic militancy, revolutionary idealism, terrorism, law and order, adolescent romance, unrequited love, revenge and pacifism, and so on. This freeze-frame, which holds multiple competing ideologies within the same image, succinctly expresses Makhmalbaf's revised stance on his past: 'I no longer believe in absolutes and have accepted that I don't have all the right answers.'
Reception:
The film won the Special Jury Award at the Locarno Film Festival in 1996.
The film was banned in Iran until 1997.
Sunday, 3 May 2015
Crimson Gold (Film)
Tala-ye sorkh. 2003. Dir: Jafar Panahi. Scr: Abbas Kiarostami.
Based on actual events.
The Film:
Hossein is perfectly cast. His face is vacant, his demeanor forlorn; there is not a trace of connectedness to anything or anybody about him. He is sullen and apathetic, brooding with a subdued anger with no apparent origin or purpose. [Dabashi]
Based on actual events.
The Film:
Hossein is perfectly cast. His face is vacant, his demeanor forlorn; there is not a trace of connectedness to anything or anybody about him. He is sullen and apathetic, brooding with a subdued anger with no apparent origin or purpose. [Dabashi]
Thursday, 19 March 2015
Prince Ehtejab (Film)
1974. Dir: Bahman Farmanara.
Context:
Based on seminal novel by Houshang Golshiri.
Golshiri's novel is ostensibly set in the context of the decadent Qajar aristocracy (1789-1926)—as one ominous servant of the dynasty, Morad (Hossein Kasbian), keeps bringing to one of its last descen-dents, Prince Ehtejab (Jamshid Mashayekhi), the news of his cohorts dying, one after the other.
Farmanara's visual narration of the story gave a particularly poignant spin to its contemporary accent—all too evident in Golshiri's novel but far more pronounced in Farmanara's imagining of it. What is paramount in Farmanara's adaptation of Prince Ehtejab is the labyrinthine convolution of three generations of murderous decadence narrated and woven into each other. Memories of Prince Ehtejab's grandfather and father join his own translucent presence to form a multiplicity of successively degenerate reminiscences of each other, each engaged in one mode of murderous banality or another. [Dabashi, M&M]
"There is a cathartic release in the exercise, for it is as if both Golshiri and Farmanara take a mischievous, childlike pleasure in first identifying the source of a collective terror and then erasing it."
The Film:
Prince Ehtejab is tortured by the remembrance of his ancestral cruelties—the brutal asphyxiation of a disobedient family member on one occasion (his tied-up hands are used as an ashtray by the murderer prince), the massacre of a group of protestors in another. The ghostly character of his remembrances of things past assumes a generational depth and Prince Ehtejab traces the declining days of a decadent dynasty into the collective subconscious of a nation.
Prince Ehtejab is the iconic personification of two corrosive forces—congenital corruption and diseased memory—sitting in a dark dungeon of a room, compelled to remember that cruel history. (Almost a Borgesian touch?) Prince Ehtejab reeks in corruption and soaks in his memory of it, and by the time that Golshiri's pen and Farmanara's camera pay him a visit, the criminality in his blood is degenerating from a historically murderous tendency into an immediate and personally homicidal urge aimed at his wife and servant.
As suggested by his name, Prince Ehtejab is ostensibly impotent both sexually and politically. His wife, Fakhr al-Nisa, maintains an obvious moral and intellectual superiority over him, and as a result he much prefers the company of his servant girl, Fakhri, who is forced to accommodate the vulgarity of his dysfunctional sexual advances. He forces Fakhri to dress like his wife so that in her disguise he can claim to have a wife that, he knows all too well, he can actually never have.
As a psychoanalytical treatment of a historical trauma at the very core of our collective consciousness, Prince Ehtejab works through a simple suggestion of dream narration, in which the very act of telling the nightmare of the prince's memory structures its meaning and significance. Keep in mind that Prince Ehtejab is not a character but a persona, and as such he is a narrative device through whose memorial remembrances Golshiri and Farmanara tell this collective nightmare. Prince Ehtejab is both the narrator and the object of the narration, both the memory of the trauma he represents and the memorial evidence of his own testimony.
Golshiri's sinuous narrative, twisting and turning around its own insights, and Farmanara's tortuous imagery, probing the exterior of his set designs as if they were the labyrinth of his characters' consciousness, come together both to simulate that collective memory and make it visible.
Reception:
At the Tehran International Film Festival of 1974, Farmanara won the Grand Prix.
Context:
Based on seminal novel by Houshang Golshiri.
Golshiri's novel is ostensibly set in the context of the decadent Qajar aristocracy (1789-1926)—as one ominous servant of the dynasty, Morad (Hossein Kasbian), keeps bringing to one of its last descen-dents, Prince Ehtejab (Jamshid Mashayekhi), the news of his cohorts dying, one after the other.
Farmanara's visual narration of the story gave a particularly poignant spin to its contemporary accent—all too evident in Golshiri's novel but far more pronounced in Farmanara's imagining of it. What is paramount in Farmanara's adaptation of Prince Ehtejab is the labyrinthine convolution of three generations of murderous decadence narrated and woven into each other. Memories of Prince Ehtejab's grandfather and father join his own translucent presence to form a multiplicity of successively degenerate reminiscences of each other, each engaged in one mode of murderous banality or another. [Dabashi, M&M]
"Heads chopped off and piled on each other to make a pyramid, that was the enduring memory of the Qajar dynasty—eyes gorged out, bodies torched, living human beings buried alive, young men castrated, young women raped, visionary government ministers like Amir Kabir murdered in the prime of their noble endeavors, corrupt politicians put to preside over the livelihood of defenseless people. The record of the Qajar dynasty was one of systematic abuse of a nation at large, overburdened with cruel and unusual punishment for the slightest transgression against the whimsical, sickly, and torrid reign of terror historically identified with foreign invasions and inbred tyranny. The savagery with which the Babi movement was suppressed during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar was reminiscent of the legendary cruelties of the founding figure of the Qajar dynasty, Agha Muhammad Khan. The public rape and execution of young children who had dared to sing satirical songs ridiculing Agha Muhammad Khan while he laid siege to the city of Kerman led parents to hide their children in chimneys and between walls, covered with bricks and mortar for fear of their lives. Agha Muhammad Khan's generals would bring young people from Kerman to his court on top of a hill where he would have their ears cut off, their eyes gorged out, their throats slit, and their dead bodies tossed down the hill. Women were raped and murdered, children sold into slavery, men blinded and slaughtered. When Lotf Ali Khan Zand was brought to Agha Muhammad Khan, he had his servants sodomize him savagely and then blind him. None of these savageries were depicted in Golshiri or Farmanara's Prince Ehtejab. But all of them were at the forefront of its readers' and viewers' minds as they considered the sickly figure of Prince Ehtejab, brilliandy portrayed by Jamshid Mashayekhi in one of the legendary roles in Iranian cinema.""The terror at the heart of Prince Ebtejab had both a local and a colonial genealogy. Iran's dynastic history concluded its medieval longevity with the Qajar monarchy, which coincided with the rise of colonial modernity in Iran. As Qajars terrorized us in our nightmares, colonial modernity robbed us of our historical agency—by suggesting the possibility of that agency in its modernity and yet ipso facto denying it by the colonial manner of delivering it. What this miraculously important film did for the restitution of Iran's historical agency was not limited to its grasp of historical despotism immediately beneath the surface of our collective unconscious; it was equally critical in confronting our systematic de-subjection in the face of colonial modernity."
"There is a cathartic release in the exercise, for it is as if both Golshiri and Farmanara take a mischievous, childlike pleasure in first identifying the source of a collective terror and then erasing it."
The Film:
Prince Ehtejab is tortured by the remembrance of his ancestral cruelties—the brutal asphyxiation of a disobedient family member on one occasion (his tied-up hands are used as an ashtray by the murderer prince), the massacre of a group of protestors in another. The ghostly character of his remembrances of things past assumes a generational depth and Prince Ehtejab traces the declining days of a decadent dynasty into the collective subconscious of a nation.
Prince Ehtejab is the iconic personification of two corrosive forces—congenital corruption and diseased memory—sitting in a dark dungeon of a room, compelled to remember that cruel history. (Almost a Borgesian touch?) Prince Ehtejab reeks in corruption and soaks in his memory of it, and by the time that Golshiri's pen and Farmanara's camera pay him a visit, the criminality in his blood is degenerating from a historically murderous tendency into an immediate and personally homicidal urge aimed at his wife and servant.
As suggested by his name, Prince Ehtejab is ostensibly impotent both sexually and politically. His wife, Fakhr al-Nisa, maintains an obvious moral and intellectual superiority over him, and as a result he much prefers the company of his servant girl, Fakhri, who is forced to accommodate the vulgarity of his dysfunctional sexual advances. He forces Fakhri to dress like his wife so that in her disguise he can claim to have a wife that, he knows all too well, he can actually never have.
As a psychoanalytical treatment of a historical trauma at the very core of our collective consciousness, Prince Ehtejab works through a simple suggestion of dream narration, in which the very act of telling the nightmare of the prince's memory structures its meaning and significance. Keep in mind that Prince Ehtejab is not a character but a persona, and as such he is a narrative device through whose memorial remembrances Golshiri and Farmanara tell this collective nightmare. Prince Ehtejab is both the narrator and the object of the narration, both the memory of the trauma he represents and the memorial evidence of his own testimony.
Golshiri's sinuous narrative, twisting and turning around its own insights, and Farmanara's tortuous imagery, probing the exterior of his set designs as if they were the labyrinth of his characters' consciousness, come together both to simulate that collective memory and make it visible.
Reception:
At the Tehran International Film Festival of 1974, Farmanara won the Grand Prix.
Friday, 27 February 2015
Brick and Mirror (Film)
1965. Dir: Ebrahim Golestan.
Context:
The title is taken from a verse by Attar: “What the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.”
Golestan had come to make Mud Brick and Mirror after an impressive career as a major voice in modern Persian letters, as well as a successful career as a documentary filmmaker.
Golestan began shooting this film in the spring of 1963 and filming was interrupted by two crucial incidents: A very expensive lens in his camera fell and broke while shooting the courthouse scene; and Ayatollah Khomeini led his first, aborted attempt at toppling the Pahlavi monarchy in June of the same year. It was produced at a particularly poignant moment in the history of Iranian cinema. After decades of commercial and melodramatic filmmaking, something serious was bound to happen, and Golestan was steadfast in seeing that it did.
The Film:
The portrayal of the relationship between Hashem and Taji is by far the most successful such depiction in the Iranian cinema of the time (and perhaps one of the first of its kind, in its intimacy). Hashem is obnoxious and overbearing. Taji is, by and large, accommodating, and yet persistent.
His camera movement in the orphanage sequence is equally confident and fluent—competently conveying the sense of bureaucratic formality and emotive vacuity of the space. But by far the most enduring cinematic aspect of Brick and Mirror is Golestan's extraordinary competence in shooting on location, something quite rare that early in Iranian cinema. This was not without its contingent hazards. In the course of shooting the courthouse scene, an expensive lens in Golestan's camera fell and broke. He had to wait for months before he could secure another lens from Europe.
In an interview Golestan has said he had to choose and measure the length of the streets he shot (as the background of his protagonists), the street traffic, and the conversation between the couple in a way that would be compatible with the rhythm of their dialogue and the length of their exchange. The result is an astoundingly atmospheric depiction of the city of Tehran in the early 1960s.
In an interview quoted by Dabashi, Golestan has said of his film:
Reception:
Brick and Mirror was a box-office fiasco, a critical failure, and a victim of paralyzing official censorship. Politically, the timing of Brick and Mirror could not have been worse. Though it wasn't released until 1965, it was shot during the June 1963 uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini against Mohammad Reza Shah. Though the uprising was brutally suppressed, at the time government officials were in no mood for what they considered to be the dark and critical atmosphere of Golestan's first feature film.
Dabashi: "Socially, its release coincided with that of the most popular melodramatic film in the history of Iranian cinema, Siyamak Yasami's Qaruns Treasure (1965). While Golestan's Mud Brick and Mirror was stumbling at the box office, Yasami's Qaruns Treasure was breaking every record on the books. Mud Brick and Mirror, however, had been categorized as an intellectual film that was too arcane for even public intellectuals to grasp. But that was simply because Golestan's film was too new for the Iranian public, which was used to films like Yasami's, to understand. There was as yet no language, no diction, no visual memory or aesthetic parameter with which to understand Golestan's valiant effort to transform the Persian literary tradition and imagination into a contemporary visual art." [M&M]
References/Resources:
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2007/05/ebrahim-golestan/
Context:
The title is taken from a verse by Attar: “What the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.”
Golestan had come to make Mud Brick and Mirror after an impressive career as a major voice in modern Persian letters, as well as a successful career as a documentary filmmaker.
Golestan began shooting this film in the spring of 1963 and filming was interrupted by two crucial incidents: A very expensive lens in his camera fell and broke while shooting the courthouse scene; and Ayatollah Khomeini led his first, aborted attempt at toppling the Pahlavi monarchy in June of the same year. It was produced at a particularly poignant moment in the history of Iranian cinema. After decades of commercial and melodramatic filmmaking, something serious was bound to happen, and Golestan was steadfast in seeing that it did.
The Film:
The portrayal of the relationship between Hashem and Taji is by far the most successful such depiction in the Iranian cinema of the time (and perhaps one of the first of its kind, in its intimacy). Hashem is obnoxious and overbearing. Taji is, by and large, accommodating, and yet persistent.
His camera movement in the orphanage sequence is equally confident and fluent—competently conveying the sense of bureaucratic formality and emotive vacuity of the space. But by far the most enduring cinematic aspect of Brick and Mirror is Golestan's extraordinary competence in shooting on location, something quite rare that early in Iranian cinema. This was not without its contingent hazards. In the course of shooting the courthouse scene, an expensive lens in Golestan's camera fell and broke. He had to wait for months before he could secure another lens from Europe.
In an interview Golestan has said he had to choose and measure the length of the streets he shot (as the background of his protagonists), the street traffic, and the conversation between the couple in a way that would be compatible with the rhythm of their dialogue and the length of their exchange. The result is an astoundingly atmospheric depiction of the city of Tehran in the early 1960s.
In an interview quoted by Dabashi, Golestan has said of his film:
You ought to see this film like a prism. A prism can have some seven or eight parallelographic sides. If you were to look at it from just one side you would only see that one side. But if you were to turn it around, you would see that it has another side, and then if you turned it yet again, you would see yet another side. If you get away from it, you will see that its parallelographic sides will form a volume, and if you were to turn it around very fast, according to the famous experiment of Newton, all the colors will come together and form white. I have made the entire film on this principle. You should not consider any one of these parallelographic sides independent of each other. They all ought to be seen simultaneously, as they are set next to each other, so that the voluminous feel of the whole film is grasped.
Reception:
Brick and Mirror was a box-office fiasco, a critical failure, and a victim of paralyzing official censorship. Politically, the timing of Brick and Mirror could not have been worse. Though it wasn't released until 1965, it was shot during the June 1963 uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini against Mohammad Reza Shah. Though the uprising was brutally suppressed, at the time government officials were in no mood for what they considered to be the dark and critical atmosphere of Golestan's first feature film.
Dabashi: "Socially, its release coincided with that of the most popular melodramatic film in the history of Iranian cinema, Siyamak Yasami's Qaruns Treasure (1965). While Golestan's Mud Brick and Mirror was stumbling at the box office, Yasami's Qaruns Treasure was breaking every record on the books. Mud Brick and Mirror, however, had been categorized as an intellectual film that was too arcane for even public intellectuals to grasp. But that was simply because Golestan's film was too new for the Iranian public, which was used to films like Yasami's, to understand. There was as yet no language, no diction, no visual memory or aesthetic parameter with which to understand Golestan's valiant effort to transform the Persian literary tradition and imagination into a contemporary visual art." [M&M]
References/Resources:
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2007/05/ebrahim-golestan/
Monday, 16 February 2015
The Cow (Film)
1969. Dir: Dariush Mehrjui. Scr: Mehrjui and Gholamhossein Saedi.
Regarded as one of the seminal works of the 'First Iranian New Wave', and one of the first Iranian films to garner international recognition and acclaim.
Context:
This was only the second directorial effort of Mehrjui, a young and ambitious director, who teamed up with his friend, the famous dramatist and writer Saedi, a partnership which helped Mehrjui grow in stature as a director. In 1970, Nasser Taghvai would also film an adaptation of a Saedi story, Calm in the Presence of Others.
Hamid Dabashi writes of Saedi: "Saedi's particular manner of realism was anchored in an almost clinical psychopathology of the uncanny, and his perceptive articulation of psychosis (neurotic anxiety, to be exact) in his fiction was utterly unprecedented in Persian literature. Saedi's psychedelic realism, through its evocation of the supra-normal and the creative use of superstition, hallucination, and delusions, effected an acute intensification of a literary awareness of reality" (See also http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saedi-gholam-hosayn)
The Film:
Reception:
"The Cow premiered two years after its completion at the Venice Film Festival in 1971 to a very positive but altogether imperturbable reception. Both at home and abroad, the film suffered from a mind-numbing over-politicization by film critics who insisted on reading it as a mere political allegory. The principal culprit was, of course, the censorship that forced Mehrjui to preface the film with a disclaimer explaining that the story had taken place about forty years earlier, to insure that audiences did not associate the backwardness portrayed in the film with the modern image of Iran the Shah of Shahs was trying to foist upon the world." [Dabashi, M&M]
Regarded as one of the seminal works of the 'First Iranian New Wave', and one of the first Iranian films to garner international recognition and acclaim.
Context:
This was only the second directorial effort of Mehrjui, a young and ambitious director, who teamed up with his friend, the famous dramatist and writer Saedi, a partnership which helped Mehrjui grow in stature as a director. In 1970, Nasser Taghvai would also film an adaptation of a Saedi story, Calm in the Presence of Others.
Hamid Dabashi writes of Saedi: "Saedi's particular manner of realism was anchored in an almost clinical psychopathology of the uncanny, and his perceptive articulation of psychosis (neurotic anxiety, to be exact) in his fiction was utterly unprecedented in Persian literature. Saedi's psychedelic realism, through its evocation of the supra-normal and the creative use of superstition, hallucination, and delusions, effected an acute intensification of a literary awareness of reality" (See also http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saedi-gholam-hosayn)
The Film:
Reception:
"The Cow premiered two years after its completion at the Venice Film Festival in 1971 to a very positive but altogether imperturbable reception. Both at home and abroad, the film suffered from a mind-numbing over-politicization by film critics who insisted on reading it as a mere political allegory. The principal culprit was, of course, the censorship that forced Mehrjui to preface the film with a disclaimer explaining that the story had taken place about forty years earlier, to insure that audiences did not associate the backwardness portrayed in the film with the modern image of Iran the Shah of Shahs was trying to foist upon the world." [Dabashi, M&M]
Monday, 9 February 2015
ABC Africa (Film)
2001. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.
Context:
Documentary set in Uganda, commissioned by the UN organisation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, who invited Kiarostami to make a film there. Of course Kiarostami, who had worked for so long as the Kanun making commissioned films ostensibly for educational viewing by children, but which he shaped with his own intents, was no stranger to commissioned projects. It was Kiarostami's first documentary in a decade (since Close Up?). It is quite likely he had Farrokzhad's The House is Black as an ideal in mind. Like that film, the initial project gives way to very personal depths.
Marks Kiarostami's DV debut. He in fact travelled to Uganda, together with photographer/cinematographer Seidollah Samadian, first with the intention of shooting some practice rushes cheaply with a digital camera, but in the end liked this footage so much that it ended up making the film and no other footage was shot.
They had over 20 hours of footage which took them 8 months to edit into the final feature.
The film follows a similar template to many of his earlier films, having a stranger/foreigner (this time no more surrogates, it is himself) wandering around a foreign region which they at first do not understand at all but are eventually transformed and affected by. It can also be seen as the first step outside Iran of a filmmaker who would later make films only outside Iran. So it is once again a tale of journey and discovery, and also once again a film about children (the Ugandan orphans and AIDS victims).
The Film:
Several critics have noted that the film becomes worthy of interest as more than a mere commissioned documentary from the scene at the hospital in Masaka, moving from purely educational tone (a waste of Kiarostami's great talents as filmmaker naturally) to more personal and contemplative insights.
Context:
Documentary set in Uganda, commissioned by the UN organisation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, who invited Kiarostami to make a film there. Of course Kiarostami, who had worked for so long as the Kanun making commissioned films ostensibly for educational viewing by children, but which he shaped with his own intents, was no stranger to commissioned projects. It was Kiarostami's first documentary in a decade (since Close Up?). It is quite likely he had Farrokzhad's The House is Black as an ideal in mind. Like that film, the initial project gives way to very personal depths.
Marks Kiarostami's DV debut. He in fact travelled to Uganda, together with photographer/cinematographer Seidollah Samadian, first with the intention of shooting some practice rushes cheaply with a digital camera, but in the end liked this footage so much that it ended up making the film and no other footage was shot.
They had over 20 hours of footage which took them 8 months to edit into the final feature.
The film follows a similar template to many of his earlier films, having a stranger/foreigner (this time no more surrogates, it is himself) wandering around a foreign region which they at first do not understand at all but are eventually transformed and affected by. It can also be seen as the first step outside Iran of a filmmaker who would later make films only outside Iran. So it is once again a tale of journey and discovery, and also once again a film about children (the Ugandan orphans and AIDS victims).
The Film:
Several critics have noted that the film becomes worthy of interest as more than a mere commissioned documentary from the scene at the hospital in Masaka, moving from purely educational tone (a waste of Kiarostami's great talents as filmmaker naturally) to more personal and contemplative insights.
Saturday, 7 February 2015
The Wind Will Carry Us (Film)
1999. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.
Context:
Based on a story by Mahmud Aydin (who is he?).
The film is set in Iranian Kurdistan, and was followed by a couple more interesting films set in that region: Blackboards by Samira Makhmalbaf, and A Time for Drunken Horses, by Bahman Ghobadi, who actually was Kiarostami's AD on The Wind Will Carry Us and cameos as Yusuf. The Kurdish setting of this film is seen as some as an indirect political statement, recognising Kurdish existence by going to film there. Kiarostami, as is usually the case for him, has been far more guarded when asked about any direct political intentions. However the trip to a region that was new both for his films and to him personally, will mirror the trip made by the main character Behzad and hence deepen the autobiographical resonance (see further down) of the film. In some sense this trip, by the character and by Kiarostami, also figure as a reworking of Life and Nothing More.
The shoot itself was problematic, partly due to difficulties communicating with the reticent locals and due to conflict between Kiarostami and his DP Mahmud Kalari. Post-production was no less stressful, taking nine months, and Kiarostami has said that he was even close to abandoning the project at some point.
The Film:
Like so many other Kiarostami films, this is a journey of self-discovery, though a slow, unexpectedly tortuous one, for the character of Behzad. As usual there is a 'guide' to this journey, in the character of the doctor (a pir, an initiating teacher: see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pir_%28Sufism%29), who arrives after the accident of the gravedigger reawakens a sense of solidarity within Behzad. He offers to Behzad a new perspective and outlook onto the world and life (and he also recites an Omar Khayyam quatrain).
Kiarostami has himself stated that the doctor's advice to 'open the eyes of the heart as wide as those of the body' as the central theme of the film.
Like in many other of his films, set in rural Iran, the nature and countryside of these rural regions have a special meaning to Kiarostami which he moulds into a symbolic setting, transcending its actual material limitations. They represent something to him, closely tied to his deep love of nature and contemplating it (c.f. his photography), and this is partly why he used it as a setting so many times. (Think of a very loose analogy, like what Mexico represent to Peckinpah, an idyllic oasis and a paradise lost, but of course in his films far removed from any real Mexico).
We are not provided with all the information we usually expect from a narrative, but instead have to construct meaning from what little we do see and hear.
It is also a film about the gaze and the re-education of the gaze (ties in with the camera being used as 'mirror' during shaving scene and the autobiographical elements, and Behzad's outlook being altered, and the final scene where Behzad washes his car's windscreen - his vision of the world has now been 'purified').
The final shot then follows the bone thrown by Behzad, as it flows down the stream (mirroring the rolling apple earlier, and perhaps referenced in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), resonating with the ideas of cycles of life and nature. Of course, via the title, it also carries a resonance with the poetry of Omar Khayyam, where all things eventually turning into dust is a recurring motif.
Poetry plays an even more prevalent role in this film than in earlier Kiarostami works, with actual poems and passages being recited or referred to, namely the works of Omar Khayyam, Shohab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad (from whom the title of the film is taken). The sensualist poetry of Farrokhad, especially of the poem 'The Wind Will Carry Us' from her anthology 'Rebirth', ties in well with the strands of Khayyam's poetry Kiarostami uses to flesh out his themes here. Her poem implies we should make the most of life, take as much pleasure out of it while we can, before the cycle of all things inevitable comes to fly us away, like leaves, from the tree we thought we were rooted to. Behzad then himself recites Farrokhad's poetry, to the girl, down in the cellar.
In this film Kiarostami self-consciously tackles the issue of film directors, from a more urban, 'sophisticated' world, coming to spend time in a rural region they don't fully understand (and in the case of Behzad make no effort to) with only the single-minded aim of shooting a film and then going home. Kiarostami addressed this also, in more or less direct ways, in films like Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees. In the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum: "the particular ethics of The Wind Will Carry Us consist largely of Kiarostami reflecting on his own practice as a 'media person' exploiting poor people: Behzad may be the closest thing in Kiarostami's work to a critical self-portrait, at least... since The Report. ... Kiarostami is critiquing the whole premise of his film-making from an ethical standpoint"[from Rosenbaum piece on this film published in Chicago Reader]. Kiarostami has himself admitted an autobiographical element in this film [interview with Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana].
Reception:
The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Domestically however, and unsurprisingly, it faced the usual censorship problems.
References/Resources:
http://www.asharperfocus.com/Wind.html
Context:
Based on a story by Mahmud Aydin (who is he?).
The film is set in Iranian Kurdistan, and was followed by a couple more interesting films set in that region: Blackboards by Samira Makhmalbaf, and A Time for Drunken Horses, by Bahman Ghobadi, who actually was Kiarostami's AD on The Wind Will Carry Us and cameos as Yusuf. The Kurdish setting of this film is seen as some as an indirect political statement, recognising Kurdish existence by going to film there. Kiarostami, as is usually the case for him, has been far more guarded when asked about any direct political intentions. However the trip to a region that was new both for his films and to him personally, will mirror the trip made by the main character Behzad and hence deepen the autobiographical resonance (see further down) of the film. In some sense this trip, by the character and by Kiarostami, also figure as a reworking of Life and Nothing More.
The shoot itself was problematic, partly due to difficulties communicating with the reticent locals and due to conflict between Kiarostami and his DP Mahmud Kalari. Post-production was no less stressful, taking nine months, and Kiarostami has said that he was even close to abandoning the project at some point.
The Film:
Like so many other Kiarostami films, this is a journey of self-discovery, though a slow, unexpectedly tortuous one, for the character of Behzad. As usual there is a 'guide' to this journey, in the character of the doctor (a pir, an initiating teacher: see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pir_%28Sufism%29), who arrives after the accident of the gravedigger reawakens a sense of solidarity within Behzad. He offers to Behzad a new perspective and outlook onto the world and life (and he also recites an Omar Khayyam quatrain).
Kiarostami has himself stated that the doctor's advice to 'open the eyes of the heart as wide as those of the body' as the central theme of the film.
Like in many other of his films, set in rural Iran, the nature and countryside of these rural regions have a special meaning to Kiarostami which he moulds into a symbolic setting, transcending its actual material limitations. They represent something to him, closely tied to his deep love of nature and contemplating it (c.f. his photography), and this is partly why he used it as a setting so many times. (Think of a very loose analogy, like what Mexico represent to Peckinpah, an idyllic oasis and a paradise lost, but of course in his films far removed from any real Mexico).
We are not provided with all the information we usually expect from a narrative, but instead have to construct meaning from what little we do see and hear.
It is also a film about the gaze and the re-education of the gaze (ties in with the camera being used as 'mirror' during shaving scene and the autobiographical elements, and Behzad's outlook being altered, and the final scene where Behzad washes his car's windscreen - his vision of the world has now been 'purified').
The final shot then follows the bone thrown by Behzad, as it flows down the stream (mirroring the rolling apple earlier, and perhaps referenced in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), resonating with the ideas of cycles of life and nature. Of course, via the title, it also carries a resonance with the poetry of Omar Khayyam, where all things eventually turning into dust is a recurring motif.
Poetry plays an even more prevalent role in this film than in earlier Kiarostami works, with actual poems and passages being recited or referred to, namely the works of Omar Khayyam, Shohab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad (from whom the title of the film is taken). The sensualist poetry of Farrokhad, especially of the poem 'The Wind Will Carry Us' from her anthology 'Rebirth', ties in well with the strands of Khayyam's poetry Kiarostami uses to flesh out his themes here. Her poem implies we should make the most of life, take as much pleasure out of it while we can, before the cycle of all things inevitable comes to fly us away, like leaves, from the tree we thought we were rooted to. Behzad then himself recites Farrokhad's poetry, to the girl, down in the cellar.
In this film Kiarostami self-consciously tackles the issue of film directors, from a more urban, 'sophisticated' world, coming to spend time in a rural region they don't fully understand (and in the case of Behzad make no effort to) with only the single-minded aim of shooting a film and then going home. Kiarostami addressed this also, in more or less direct ways, in films like Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees. In the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum: "the particular ethics of The Wind Will Carry Us consist largely of Kiarostami reflecting on his own practice as a 'media person' exploiting poor people: Behzad may be the closest thing in Kiarostami's work to a critical self-portrait, at least... since The Report. ... Kiarostami is critiquing the whole premise of his film-making from an ethical standpoint"[from Rosenbaum piece on this film published in Chicago Reader]. Kiarostami has himself admitted an autobiographical element in this film [interview with Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana].
Reception:
The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Domestically however, and unsurprisingly, it faced the usual censorship problems.
References/Resources:
http://www.asharperfocus.com/Wind.html
Sunday, 1 February 2015
A Fire (Film)
1958. Dir: Ebrahim Golestan. Edited by Forough Farrokhzad.
http://vimeo.com/20373488
"By the late 1950s, Golestan had solidly established himself as a major literary voice with momentous poetic vision. The style he had carefully cultivated in his literary works—two impressive collections of short stories—was now fully at his disposal to transform a simple documentary about a runaway fire in an oilfield into a work of art. From this moment forward, the direct transformation of commissioned documentary to a work of art becomes the defining occasion of Golestan's aesthetic—navigating the creative distance between factual evidence and its affective sublimation. The lyrical diction of Golestan's voice-over in A Fire is strategically located somewhere between the poise of its contemplative nature and the pose of its poetic performance." [Dabashi, M&M]
Reception:
Won the Bronze Medal at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and hence became the first Iranian film to win such international recognition.
http://vimeo.com/20373488
"By the late 1950s, Golestan had solidly established himself as a major literary voice with momentous poetic vision. The style he had carefully cultivated in his literary works—two impressive collections of short stories—was now fully at his disposal to transform a simple documentary about a runaway fire in an oilfield into a work of art. From this moment forward, the direct transformation of commissioned documentary to a work of art becomes the defining occasion of Golestan's aesthetic—navigating the creative distance between factual evidence and its affective sublimation. The lyrical diction of Golestan's voice-over in A Fire is strategically located somewhere between the poise of its contemplative nature and the pose of its poetic performance." [Dabashi, M&M]
Reception:
Won the Bronze Medal at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and hence became the first Iranian film to win such international recognition.
The House is Black (Film)
1962. Dir: Forough Farrokhzad.
The scientiffic voiceovers were written and most probably narrated by Ebrahim Golestan, while Farrokhzad's narration is more 'poetic' and refers to biblical passages.
The film was commissioned, and partly produced, by a governmental agency responsible for curing lepers. However the filmmakers were allowed a largely free hand, and despite the scientific voiceover and leprosy-curing discourse in part of the narration, it is clearly possible to read in the film an underlying mood that is more poetic, personal and has nothing to do with leprosy in particular but more universal things instead.
Farrokhzad used a camera crew from Golestan Films, the company of Ebrahim Golestan, whose documentaries she had edited and helped to make. This had formed an apprenticeship to cinema for her, and hence she was at this stage ready to make her own project.
Shot in 12 days, at the Baba Daghi leper colony in Tabriz, north-west Iran.
Farrokhzad won the trust of the people at the colony and in fact adopted one of the boys after making the film.
Farrokhzad said of the film, that it is "about the life of the lepers and at the same time about life itself—an example of life in general. This is a picture of any sealed and closed society—a picture of being useless, isolated, insular, futile. Even healthy people living outside a leprosarium in the apparently healthy society may share these characteristics, without being afflicted with leprosy. There is no difference between a young man who aimlessly loiters in the streets and that leper in my film who keeps walking by the wall. This young man too has certain pains of which we are unaware."
Dabashi, making reference to the science-religion divide among other things, writes: "Farrokhzad used the leper colony as a metaphor for Iranian society and thus revealed the far more pervasive social leprosy of her time". But it must be remembered that this was the Shah's Iran, an ideologically different dictatorship than the later Islamic Republic. He also suggests that her own status as social pariah (due to the scandals following her and her supposed promiscuity) is what intuitively led her to relate to the lepers in The House is Black, for they too were marked, literally, as social outcasts.
Reception:
It was strongly criticised and ridiculed in Iran, even subjected to some sexist attacks on Farrokhzad's claims to being a filmmaker, with some sectors openly attributing the film wholly to Golestan. This reaction could be partly the cause for her never returning to the experience of filmmaking, and instead concentrating on her primary love, writing poetry.
However at the 1963 International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, it had a much kinder reception and won the top prize.
References
Dabashi, M&M.
The scientiffic voiceovers were written and most probably narrated by Ebrahim Golestan, while Farrokhzad's narration is more 'poetic' and refers to biblical passages.
The film was commissioned, and partly produced, by a governmental agency responsible for curing lepers. However the filmmakers were allowed a largely free hand, and despite the scientific voiceover and leprosy-curing discourse in part of the narration, it is clearly possible to read in the film an underlying mood that is more poetic, personal and has nothing to do with leprosy in particular but more universal things instead.
Farrokhzad used a camera crew from Golestan Films, the company of Ebrahim Golestan, whose documentaries she had edited and helped to make. This had formed an apprenticeship to cinema for her, and hence she was at this stage ready to make her own project.
Shot in 12 days, at the Baba Daghi leper colony in Tabriz, north-west Iran.
Farrokhzad won the trust of the people at the colony and in fact adopted one of the boys after making the film.
Farrokhzad said of the film, that it is "about the life of the lepers and at the same time about life itself—an example of life in general. This is a picture of any sealed and closed society—a picture of being useless, isolated, insular, futile. Even healthy people living outside a leprosarium in the apparently healthy society may share these characteristics, without being afflicted with leprosy. There is no difference between a young man who aimlessly loiters in the streets and that leper in my film who keeps walking by the wall. This young man too has certain pains of which we are unaware."
Dabashi, making reference to the science-religion divide among other things, writes: "Farrokhzad used the leper colony as a metaphor for Iranian society and thus revealed the far more pervasive social leprosy of her time". But it must be remembered that this was the Shah's Iran, an ideologically different dictatorship than the later Islamic Republic. He also suggests that her own status as social pariah (due to the scandals following her and her supposed promiscuity) is what intuitively led her to relate to the lepers in The House is Black, for they too were marked, literally, as social outcasts.
Reception:
It was strongly criticised and ridiculed in Iran, even subjected to some sexist attacks on Farrokhzad's claims to being a filmmaker, with some sectors openly attributing the film wholly to Golestan. This reaction could be partly the cause for her never returning to the experience of filmmaking, and instead concentrating on her primary love, writing poetry.
However at the 1963 International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, it had a much kinder reception and won the top prize.
References
Dabashi, M&M.
Monday, 1 December 2014
Taste of Cherry (Film)
1997. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.Context:
In its tackling of a subject (suicide) that remains a distinct taboo with the cultural boundaries of Islamic Iran, the film can be seen as one of Kiarostami's most directly provocative acts. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 1990 film The Nights of Zayandeh-Rood had previously dealt with this topic but was promptly banned, never to be screened publically again since its festival premiere.
Kiarostami has several times said the genesis of the film was influenced by a quote from Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran ("If it wasn't for the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself long ago"), but it is possible to also infer personal and autobiographical elements (related for example to the long slow terminal illness his father had to endure which deeply marked Kiarostami, but also perhaps to some suicidal feelings of his own although this is speculative as he has remained cryptic on this matter), with the film's idea seemingly having been in Kiarostami's head for a long time. Shooting finally begun in 1996.
The film shows the influence of the poetry and philosophy of Omar Khayyam, whom Kiarostami has often spoken about, admiring the precision and succinctness of his poems which manage to celebrate life while constantly being aware of death. The shadow of Sadegh Hedayat, the modernist writer who himself committed suicide and was deeply influenced by Khayyam in his work, can also be felt. One particular quatrain by Khayyam was a source of inspiration to Kiarostami for this film:
The cloud came and wept on the greenness
Oh rose-hued wine, there is no living without you;
This green is our pleasure ground today,
But whose pleasure ground will be the green springing from our dust?
The green here reminds of the video epilogue of the film (which could be possibly read as a vision of paradise too?).
The shooting was a rough ride, Kiarostami suffering a car accident later in 1996 which prevented him for working for a few months, and then some of the negative accidentally burning meaning certain scenes had to be reshot in 1997. Its last-minute permission in getting sent to the Cannes festival for its premiere (despite its sensitive subject matter and not previously having been shown at the Fajr Film Festival as it should have been) is also a well-known story.
The Film:
The film's structure consists of alternation between the main conversations with different characters and the driver (Mr Badei) and periods of silence, essentially allowing us to think about the meaning of the previous conversations. Marco Della Grossa has done an analysis of this structure, timing the various segments (See p124 in Elena).
We are told nothing about Mr Badei, who he is and what might have led him to want to commit suicide. Therefore we are in some way alienated from emotionally identifying with him. This is relevant to the film's technique which Laura Mulvey has described as using 'the uncertainty principle' in Sight & Sound, that is drawing our curiosity in by leaving us uncertain for long spells. This works up right until the end which also leaves us uncertain and without a clear resolution.
Kiarostami's motif of filming within cars is very much on display here and reaches its high-point (at least until Ten) with almost all the film being inside a car. Badei meanders around the roads of the outskirts of Tehran, often going around in circles (moving without really getting anywhere), rather than in a linear trajectory. This car motif here merges with Kiarostami's tendency for repetition (especially in the structure, see first paragraph above).
As in so many of his films, a journey is central here, but unlike those of his archetypal characters which end up teaching them a lesson and bearing fruit despite an uncertain/unplanned final destination, here it is far less obvious whether Mr Badei's journey takes him anywhere or bears any philosophical fruit within him.
The three central meetings/conversations Mr Badei has are with three characters of particular symbolic resonance, partly for their professions (soldier, seminarian, ordinary taxidermist) and their ethnic backgrounds (Kurd, Afghan, Turk). The three men are, in contrast to Badei, from underprivileged backgrounds, as well as marginalised ethnic groups.This, and the mention of wars, pulls back what is in many ways an abstract philosophical fable into a very concrete political context. (Some critics see in Badei a direct negation of the self-sacrifice of the soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War, whose only way of proving their existence was through death. Here Badei wishes to reclaim his own stake and control over death.)
The function of the Afghan seminary student is, partly at least, to pre-empty the kind of religious criticisms which Kiarostami knew would inevitably be levelled at the film's mention of suicide, by figuring them in the film first.
The in-car conversations are always shown in a kind of shot/reverse-shot and never in the film do we see Badei together with any of the 3 interlocutors in the same shot (in fact they were shot separately, the shots of the 3 people being filmed with Kiarostami actually in the driver seat asking questions which were then removed in post-production).
The earth seems to take up all the on-screen room in the frame, leaving hardly any for the sky. This earth constantly reminds of the idea of burial, and its ochre-yellow colour has associations with desolation and depression in Iranian cultural symbolism.
The theme of solidarity (one that echoes in importance with the allegorical depiction of a multi-ethnic Iranian society) comes up again, as it did in Life and Nothing More, but Badei unlike that film's protagonist cannot learn the lesson. He is already too detached, pained and distant to be touched by the help he is given by workers in pulling out his car. Does he even thank them or acknowledge them? (Check). This theme can also be seen in Kiarostami's script for Crimson Gold, where the pizza deliveryman does show solidarity in his distribution of the pizzas.
The video epilogue (Kiarostami's first instance of DV use which in the 2000s he would adopt completely), which Kiarostami only though of after several months of thinking over, must be seen as a natural progression of the rest of film rather than an added-on afterthought. It is possible to read in it some religious connotations, specifically linking to the verses of the Quran describing the Day of Judgment, in its imagery of clouds (seen in the film) and storm (heard) and of a trumpet-call blowing (the coda begins with the music of Louis Armstrong's trumpet from St James Infirmary, itself a funereal song which turns into a celebration).
Reception:
Sunday, 16 November 2014
The Travellers (Film)
1992. Dir: Bahram Beyzai.
Context:
The Film:
Reception:
Context:
The Film:
- Dabashi, on the film's ties to the Taziyeh tradition: "Consider the opening gambit of The Travelers—a woman facing a camera and telling the audience that she and her family are going to have a car accident and die. As you know, the stories of Taziyeh are pious remembrances of the lives and predicaments of Shia imams and saints, and the drama that animates a particular Taziyeh performance is not one of a plot crescendo in which a major crisis is generated, drawn out, and then resolved. The audience knows the story by heart, even before they have entered the theater (or the mosque or the street corner or wherever the Taziyeh is performed). So the challenge of Taziyeh is not to tell a story that no one knows and then let the hidden trauma gradually unfold. The challenge of the Taziyeh performance is in how to tell the story, for the plot of the story is already evident, or known. (In this respect Taziyeh is, of course, like European opera, where the audience again probably knows the story, or, if they have forgotten it, a summary is given to them before the opera starts.) So when Mahtab Davaran faces the camera and tells everyone what is going to happen, Beizai, in effect, is using a standard dramatic feature of Taziyeh—the audience has full knowledge of the impending tragedy before it even takes place. The result is rather shocking, because in cinematic narrative we are not supposed to know what the central conflict is until such time that it happens. But Beizai has here adapted a standard feature of Taziyeh drama, wedded it to a well-known principle borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock—that fear is when you know what is going to happen but you just don't know when it's going to happen—and alchemized the result with mesmerizing energy." [M&M, 263]
Reception:
Bashu the Little Stranger (Film)
1986. Dir: Bahram Bayzai.
Context:
The Film:
Bashu is a young boy from Southern Iran, close to the Iraqi border. Indeed he does not speak Persian but a dialect of Iraqi Arabic. His mother and sister are killed by a bomb during the Iran-Iraq war (glimpsed in brief flashback, and in the apparitions he - and perhaps even other characters- seems to see throughout the film). After surviving this he escapes on a truck, which takes him all the way to Northern Iran, somewhere around the Mazandaran province by the Caspian sea.
Bashu is completely bewildered in the jungles of Mazandaran. He hears the sound of an explosion and runs away in fear, thinking that these are the Iraqi bombers attacking, even though the sound has come from dynamite being used in the construction of a tunnel. He flees, bewildered and confused, through the rice paddies and woods, having no clue where in the world he has landed, for he was asleep when the truck left and he has no indication that he is even in Iran.
Reception:
Context:
The Film:
Bashu is a young boy from Southern Iran, close to the Iraqi border. Indeed he does not speak Persian but a dialect of Iraqi Arabic. His mother and sister are killed by a bomb during the Iran-Iraq war (glimpsed in brief flashback, and in the apparitions he - and perhaps even other characters- seems to see throughout the film). After surviving this he escapes on a truck, which takes him all the way to Northern Iran, somewhere around the Mazandaran province by the Caspian sea.
Bashu is completely bewildered in the jungles of Mazandaran. He hears the sound of an explosion and runs away in fear, thinking that these are the Iraqi bombers attacking, even though the sound has come from dynamite being used in the construction of a tunnel. He flees, bewildered and confused, through the rice paddies and woods, having no clue where in the world he has landed, for he was asleep when the truck left and he has no indication that he is even in Iran.
Reception:
Friday, 7 November 2014
Through the Olive Trees (Film)
1994. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.Co-produced with CiBy (France), the Farabi Film Foundation (Iran) and Miramax Films (USA).
Context:
Kiarostami had first noticed some romantic tension on the set of Life and Nothing More..., with Hossein's attempted courting of Tahereh in real-life meeting some hurdles.
The Film:
The film begins with the actor playing the director, Mohammed Ali Keshavaz, directly addressing the camera in front of a crowd of young, chador-chd village women auditioning for the film. One woman asks if the film will be shown in her village and whether there is any point in making the film if it is not shown: Tour last film went out on Channel 2, which we can't get here.' At the outset, the film activates self-reflexive anxiety, not only about the construction of the film artefact but also about who its main audiences are - not rural inhabitants whose earthquake tragedy the crew has come to film, but 'cultural consumers back in Tehran and in cities around the world'.
Hossein is in love with Tahereh in real life and wishes to marry her, although her family have rejected him because he is illiterate and has no house. The film director, acting like a matchmaker, gives Hossein a second chance, potentially enabling life to imitate art.
In numerous retakes, Hossein repeatedly fluffs his line, displaying the complexities involved when art tries to imitate life. The repetition breaks the naturalistic illusion, together with clapperboards [with the title of this film rather than And Life Goes On written on them???] announcing the start of each take and bleeps calling for retakes.
Hossein sees the silver lining behind the earthquake, as a leveller that has put him and Tahereh's family on an equal footing, since their primary (class-driven) complaint against him as possible suitor was his not owning a house, by destroying everyone's houses. He expounds his logic in the truck scene, to the surrogate-Kiarostami... ("The rich should marry the poor, the illiterate the literate, the homeowners the homeless...")
The motif of the zigzag path (from e.g. Where is the Friend's Home? where it recurs several times on a hill, and also arguably the winding roads of Life and Nothing More... especially the finale) appears here too near the end, when Hossein and Tahereh climb up one before entering the olive grove of the final shot.
Events are referred to before they happen. This begins in the prologue, where the fictional director, talking direct to camera, relates that 'actors were hired on location'. Past tense shifts into present tense as we see the actors being hired before our eyes. In another instance, Hossein reports his visit to the cemetery where he sees Tahereh at her parents' grave (they perished in the earthquake), then the scene is dramatised (and filmed). This 'flashback' to the cemetery, where Hossein makes his proposal to Tahereh, happens almost without warning, our only bearing being that we've previously been told of this moment in an earlier (later in time) scene in the film.
Point-of-view shots are rare in New Iranian Cinema; but there is a startling instance of one here in the cemetery, where the camera takes Tahereh's position and shows Hossein as the point of her glance. Later, Hossein reveals, 'Since [you gave me] that look, I've been following you ...'.
Off-screen sound is used, especially (again, a Kiarostami trait) in the car journey scenes, which restrict the audience's view to a POV shot through the windscreen.
A shaky camera that is never quite sure where to stand, a story line that cannot resist departing tangentially, a dialogue that oscillates between a Tehrani accent and the local Gilaki dialect, a fiction that is prohibited by a reality it cannot control, a paradise-like village ravaged by an earthquake and invaded by this oudandish camera crew, a director who while waiting for a new leading man casually leaves his set to mingle with the local children or chat with the cook in his camp, and scores of other, similar ends that release this film and all its narrative boundaries into the surrounding hills of the village are the defining moments of Kiarostami's deliberately free-form mode of storytelling. [Dabashi M&M, 312-3.]
No young woman speaks to a young man in this film. Tahereh in fact epitomizes forbidden speech, which elsewhere is equally present. Young men do not fare much better. There is an absolutely mesmerizing scene where Azim, a local man who was first supposed to play the lead role, finally confides in the director that he cannot talk to Tahereh, "because whenever I talk to a girl, I stutter." This is the ultimate sign of an arrested culture in which an unarticulated sense of fear and shame prohibits the most natural of acts.
The long shot is almost identical to the penultimate sequence of Close-Up, where Kiarostami again instructs his camera and sound crew to stay out of private, and supremely beautiful, moments in people's lives.
Gary Dauphin, in The Village Voice (on 21 February 1995), has brilliantly captured the essence of this hauntingly beautiful shot:
"How Kiarostami weaves together these disparate threads is the film's closing gift to its audience. The last scene is less an ending about Hossein and Tahereh than it is a revelation of what Kiarostami has been doing throughout the film, the image comprising a cinematic gesture so in keeping with his always gende intrusions that to even reveal its existence is to do Kiarostami something of a disservice. Let's just say that much like Hossein's final trip through the grove of the film's tide, getting the point of Olive Trees1 ending requires a certain measure of faith, not so much in Hossein's blind love for Tahereh as in Kiarostami's love of all of them."
[Car motif, relevant for later films] The last shot is even more perceptive if one remembers that Kiarostami's camera has learned to know its limitations and keep its nose out of people's business only after its very opening shot when the camera literally opens into a wall, from which both it and the car that carries it have to turn away as they begin their journey into people's lives. The initial version of this delicately constructed sequence was damaged in a film laboratory, and Kiarostami had to reshoot it. The camera and the cars of the director and the assistant director in fact have similar intrusive functions throughout the film. They always have to negotiate an uncomfortable passageway for themselves into lives and spaces in which they do not belong.
The ending was changed at the last minute, because of the director's own growing sympathy for his 'character' Hossein, whose importance grew as the production went along, helping Kiarostami shape it into something different than initially intended. (Note that at some point before the end of the shoot he'd described his film as a tale of social injustice and inhibiting traditions, but the final result is something more than this alone, in fact being the closest thing Kiarostami had ever made to a love story thanks to the ending.) Kiarostami's original ending was more pessimistic. Again the film shows the transformative power of cinema, as Kiarostami allows himself to show the ideal ending, the way he would wish real life were, as Tahereh finally (albeit we barely see it from afar) talks to Hossein. The music accompanying this memorable ending is a concerto by Cimarosa.
The extreme-long-shot of the end, where Hossein and Tahereh are reduced to mere dots in the distance, is of course partly down to censorship, but also displays Kiarostami's restraint in getting too close in moments of intimacy (think of the ending of Close-Up for example). It perhaps also indicates uncertainty in its open-endedness as Kiarostami himself knows no more than us of what will become of these two characters, hence adding a layer of real-ness to them. He has merely presented them to us. (But in many ways we know he also manipulates them while shooting, as the repetitive filming scenes show). This goes with the film's hybridity, as half-fiction, half-documentary.
The ending of course, also invites the audience's active participation, in choosing which interpretation or which ending they want to see (glass half-full or half-empty?),
Yet again in the same issue of Film, Naghmeh Samini gave by far the most insightful reading of the concluding scene of Through the Olive Trees, calling it a "magical long shot," and noting how the camera:in the most sensitive moment, precisely at that instant when because of our previous cinematic experience we expect an answer for all our curiosities and thus share in the emotional climax of the work, the camera shies away from the focal center of contention, and authoritatively imposes its distance on us too. As if it does not consider us intimate enough, or think us worthy of closely witnessing this love poem.On the same long shot, Ahmad Talebi-Nezhad, in his piece in the December 1994 issue of Film, offered a similar reading, emphasizing, however, that the intimate expression of love—of a sort that could persuade Tahereh to marry Hossein—is simply not permitted in Iranian cinema nowadays, and thus he accounts for the social and political imperatives underlying this hauntingly beautiful long shot. [Dabashi M&M, 292]
Reception:
As for his previous films, Kiarostami was attacked by some quarters of the Iranian press for this one. The magazine Naqd-e cinema accused (once again) him of taking advantage of the tragic earthquake in his filmmaking.
It met warm response at its Cannes screening however. The film was also set to serve as his 'breakthrough' into the US market, where it was shown at NY and Chicago festivals and purchased for distribution by Miramax.
Sunday, 5 October 2014
Life and Nothing More... (Film)
1992. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.
Context:
"In June 1990, an earthquake of catastrophic proportions jolted northern Iran, killing tens of thousands of people and causing unbelievable damage. Immediately, I decided to make my way to the vicinity of Koker, a village where four years earlier I shot Where is the Friend's Home? My concern was to find out the fate of the two young actors who played in the film but I failed to locate them. However, there was so much else to see... I was observing the efforts of people trying to rebuild their lives in spite of their material and emotional sufferings. The enthusiasm for life that I was witnessing gradually changed my perspective. The tragedy of death and destruction grew paler and paler. Towards the end of the trip, I became less and less obsessed by the two boys. What was certain was this: more than 50,000 people had died, some of whom could have been boys of the same age as the two who acted in my film (the two boys at the end of this film may be taken as substitutes for the original pair). Therefore, I needed a stronger motivation to g on with the trip. Finally I felt that perhaps it was more important to help the survivors who bore no recognisable faces, but were making every effort to start a new life for themselves under very difficult conditions and in the midst of an environment of natural beauty that was going on with its old ways as if nothing had happened. Such is life, it seemed to tell them, go on, seize the days..." - Kiarostami, in Elena, p.92.
Like Close-Up, this is in a way a re-enacting of a real event or experience, namely the trip Kiarostami actually made, with his young son like in the film, to the village of Koker in Gilan region after hearing about the devastating earthquake, to find out what had happened to the two Ahmadpour boys who'd starred in Where is the Friend's House?. Also, as in the latter film, the story revolves around a search for a specific person, which will turn out to lead to something else (a journey of exploration).
The film:
Reception:
References:
Elena, 104.
Context:
"In June 1990, an earthquake of catastrophic proportions jolted northern Iran, killing tens of thousands of people and causing unbelievable damage. Immediately, I decided to make my way to the vicinity of Koker, a village where four years earlier I shot Where is the Friend's Home? My concern was to find out the fate of the two young actors who played in the film but I failed to locate them. However, there was so much else to see... I was observing the efforts of people trying to rebuild their lives in spite of their material and emotional sufferings. The enthusiasm for life that I was witnessing gradually changed my perspective. The tragedy of death and destruction grew paler and paler. Towards the end of the trip, I became less and less obsessed by the two boys. What was certain was this: more than 50,000 people had died, some of whom could have been boys of the same age as the two who acted in my film (the two boys at the end of this film may be taken as substitutes for the original pair). Therefore, I needed a stronger motivation to g on with the trip. Finally I felt that perhaps it was more important to help the survivors who bore no recognisable faces, but were making every effort to start a new life for themselves under very difficult conditions and in the midst of an environment of natural beauty that was going on with its old ways as if nothing had happened. Such is life, it seemed to tell them, go on, seize the days..." - Kiarostami, in Elena, p.92.
Like Close-Up, this is in a way a re-enacting of a real event or experience, namely the trip Kiarostami actually made, with his young son like in the film, to the village of Koker in Gilan region after hearing about the devastating earthquake, to find out what had happened to the two Ahmadpour boys who'd starred in Where is the Friend's House?. Also, as in the latter film, the story revolves around a search for a specific person, which will turn out to lead to something else (a journey of exploration).
The film:
- In a sense, this deals with the quintessential cinematic theme of the helpless voyeur who can do nothing but watch the world without interacting or helping (e.g. Chinatown and countless other private-eye noirs and their derivatives, Rear Window, Code Unknown, etc), with the Kiarostami surrogate starting the film as such a character but gradually learning within himself a new way of looking at the world and being touched by it.
- The film begins to show Kiarostami's growing taste for playfully putting the viewer's expectations into question, and forcing them to re-think and reconfigure what they are watching.
- It also begins to show Kiarostami's increased fondness for nature, at this stage of career. This indicates possible influence from, as well as Persian poetry of course, traditional miniature paintings in which human figures were always small in comparison to the natural setting.
Reception:
- The film was, for the most part, quite harshly received by domestic Iranian critics. Farad Golzar writing in Sureh accused Kiarostami of trivialising the earthquake and human dignity, as well as, more generally, his supposed primary interest in foreign film festivals (see Dabahi M&M p.286). Massud Farasati (see again M&M, p287), in the sam publication, went further, matching Kiarostami's gaze in the film with that of a neutral foreign observer who is glad not to have been present in the worst of the disaster but nonetheless patronises it by his presence after-the-fact. Another critic was critical of Kiarostami's choice of Vivaldi's music as opposed to some Iranian composition. Shahrokh Dulku meanwhile called the film troubling, and described Kiarostami's vision as arrogant and emotionless, hiding being sunglasses.(see Dabahi M&M p.290-1 for Dulku quotes):
- In his essay Dulku gave a full description of how Kiarostami disregards the rudiments of point of view, but ultimately concludes with a moral condemnation of Kiarostami's cinema. Of And Life Goes On he writes: "I cannot disregard one crucial issue, and that is the moral lesson that the filmmaker wants to draw, following his previous film [Where Is the Friends House?], and yet, just like in the previous film, because of weak execution, structural confusion, misconception of truth, and a convoluted vision of man and life, he reaches precisely the opposite conclusion that he wishes to reach. And Life Goes On wants to say that the "human" life is something precious and praiseworthy, but [actually] says that the "bestial" life is dear and lustful. It intends to praise and propagate human life, but in reality it propagates the bestial life. In order to give meaning to life, Kiarostami reduces it to the level of animal instincts (eating, sleeping, sex, and defecation). As opposed to noble, conscientious, and selfless men, the people in And Life Goes On are introduced at the end as base and mindless animals, ready to pull apart the dead bodies of the members of their family like carcasses, and spend their wedding night under a few feet of 'palastik'"...... Dulku proceeded to denounce the European reception of Kiarostami's cinema and concluded with a sweeping condemnation of what he takes to be Kiarostami's arrogant view of his own country and its culture: "I could have finished this review right here. But one small item, perhaps even repetitious, is left which is troubling me badly and I am going to say it. Although I believe that content criticism is not criticism at all, and a film that in form and structure has not yet reached the point of "speaking" does not deserve to be discussed in terms of its content, nevertheless I am going to say what I have to say. There are things in And Life Goes On that are extremely troubling, so troubling that one cannot just pass them by.... I will just mention them in a list and leave them to the readers' judgment: A man with a touristy appearance, whitish hair, and a "European" and "emotionless" look among the victims of the earthquake, the presence of a Renault automobile, the French poster of the film Where Is the Friends House?. ..the repeated appearance of the Red Cross cars, overwhelming emphasis on the instinctual (and not intellectual) aspects of life, and more importantly, a train of thought that looks at life not face to face and eyeball to eyeball but from above (high on top), and with a pair of dark glasses.... This arrogant, emotionless, and calculating look inevitably represents an unreal picture of life, a picture about which (and in my view about Kiarostami's cinema in general) the judgment of Mohammad Hossein Ruhi [another critic] as an accurate doubt is applicable: "What kind of cinema is this?""
- On the other hand, the film was warmly greeted in Cannes, following its screening in the Un Certain Regard strand and winning the Rossellini prize. It helped cement Kiarostami's new status in Western circles.
References:
Elena, 104.
The Night it Rained (Film)
1967. Dir: Kamran Shirdel.
A precursor of Iranian cinema's self-reflexive traditions...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9fIl44qDLY
A precursor of Iranian cinema's self-reflexive traditions...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9fIl44qDLY
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