Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Iran

  • TIFF 2012 – Day 4

    TIFF 2012 – Day 4

    Like Someone in Love

    Dir. by Abbas Kiarostami
    To begin: my favorite cut at TIFF. Soon after arriving at the home of a new client, a melancholic call girl makes small talk before strolling into his bedroom, undressing, crawling into bed, and falling asleep. Akiko (Rin Takanashi) appears finally to be at peace here, alone with Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), an elderly sociology professor who lives quietly with his old books, old photos, and old music. Takashi covers the young girl and lowers the lights, leaving her to her sleep. In a blinding cut, the softness of Akiko’s profile and the warm light of Takashi’s bedroom is wiped away by a trademark Kiarostami image: white clouds and blue skies in abstract motion, reflections against a car windshield. A subtle drone can be heard on the soundtrack. (Is this Kiarostami’s first-ever use of non-diegetic music?) It’s now the morning after, and Takashi is giving Akiko a ride to campus. Like magic, a whore and her John have been transformed in a blink into an anxious schoolgirl and her doting elder.

    Like Someone in Love shares with Kiarostami’s previous film, Certified Copy, a fascination with the fluidity of identity and the pleasures and dangers of role-playing, particularly within relationships. Akiko adapts as best she can to the pressures of her life, shifting moment to moment from prostitute to student to girlfriend to granddaughter (both real and imagined) as each new environment demands. Takashi, likewise, steps bravely (if foolishly) into the role of grandfather and protector when called upon to do so, and the film’s most dramatic turn comes when a real-life threat shatters, quite literally, the fantasy he’d written for himself. I’m hardly the first person to point out the fun irony of the film’s title: each character performs like someone in love, miming behaviors learned from sappy songs and movie melodramas, including God-knows-how-many Japanese “fallen woman” and geisha films.

    I’m beginning to think of Like Someone in Love as Kiarostami’s horror film. Blake Williams has compared it to Chantal Akerman’s Les rendez-vous d’Anna, and I think he’s right. There’s a sense in both films that deep  trauma — both historical and personal — has been papered over by convention and cultural artifice, but  threatens always to leak through. Akerman is more explicit about it: think of Anna’s late-night ride on a crowded train that is populated suddenly by ghosts of the Holocaust. Kiarostami works, instead, with suggestion, with vague allusions to “what happened” in the past. The final moments of the film are a shock but hardly a surprise.

    Far from Vietnam (1967)

    A collaborative effort between Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Agnès Varda, and Claude Lelouch, Far from Vietnam lays out its position in the opening minutes: America’s military involvement in Vietnam is another “war of the rich waged against revolutionary struggles intended to establish governments that do not benefit the rich.” The bulk of the film then supports that argument via montage, juxtaposing footage of American jets taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier with images of Vietnamese women building make-shift air raid shelters out of concrete. Crowds of World War II vets chant “Bomb Hanoi!” while a young man holds his child and chants “Naaaaa-palm! Naa! Naa! Naaaaa-palm!” before adding with a sigh, “Kids like this are being burned alive. Kids like this.” A television broadcast of General Westmoreland discussing the “accidents and mechanical failures” that have resulted in a few unfortunate civilian casualties is cut against footage of a mangled Vietnamese child receiving CPR.

    Far from Vietnam is agit-prop. It was made as agit-prop and still reads as agit-prop (still-relevant agit-prop, unfortunately). It’s also a masterpiece. If tens of thousands of YouTube activists have co-opted the techniques of films like this, none have matched Marker’s violent cutting. The final sequence is as frenzied, exhausting, and incisive as anything I’ve ever seen. The film is also smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge and address the most obvious counter-arguments. “It gets complicated,” Claude Ridder says during the long, scripted monologue that is Resnais’s contribution to the film. The Ridder character plays the role of the conflicted intellectual, echoing (and complicating) a later, more biting charge from the film — that American society enjoys “the luxury of having students who protest” while slaves and farmers fight. Godard plays the role of Godard, critiquing the problems of representation and the very form of Far from Vietnam. His segment opens with a closeup of a camera lens, which in the context of the film becomes one more violent machine in a mechanized war. It’s echoed nicely by Klein’s section, a moving profile of the widow of Norman Morrison, the American Quaker whose self-immolation outside the Pentagon became a media sensation.

    Far and away the best feature film I saw at TIFF. I just wish it were easier to see again. Kudos to the festival for programming this beautifully restored 35mm print.

    Tower

    Dir. by Kazik Radwanski
    Radwanski establishes the formal rules of Tower in the opening minutes of the film and then, to his credit, follows them to the letter until the closing shot. The first image is of Derek (Derek Bogart) digging a hole in the woods. The camera is inches away from his face, where it will remain throughout the film, only occasionally panning or cutting away to the people around him. Tower takes the trademark cinematographic style of the Dardennes’ The Son to its logical extreme, performing a disarmingly intimate study of a 34-year-old man who lives in the basement of his parents’ Toronto home.

    The key word there is “intimate.” Derek is an awkward, unmotivated, and self-defeating guy, but he’s socially competent. He dates someone throughout most of the film. He’s invited to parties. He has friendly, if superficial, relationships with his co-workers. The camera, in effect, gets closer to Derek than any of the people in his life do, and as a result the film emphasizes real physical proximity. Think for a minute about the number of people you touch meaningfully on any given day. A spouse or partner? A child? Films often make physical isolation a metaphor for emotional detachment; Tower is about the thing itself. Intimacy is felt profoundly in the film because it is so profoundly lacking.

    Tower is in many respects a classic “first film.” It has the whiff of autobiography — Derek toils away in his bedroom on a short animated film that he’s reluctant to share with the world — and I quickly realized the film would stop rather than end (although a friend’s reading of the final sequence gives it a neater ending than I’d first assumed). Also, because it’s a kind of gimmick film (the form of it, I mean), I’m not sure what to think of Radwanski or how to predict his next move. But I’m eager to see what he does next.

    Wavelengths 3

    Just a quick word on Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, which was my favorite film at TIFF. The word I keep using to describe it is “breathe.” It breathes, and in ways that seem to mark a significant evolution in Dorsky’s recent work. The camera is moving more, and it’s moving into open spaces, even capturing portraits and ending on a long shot of a ship out at sea. For the second year in a row Dorsky’s film literally blew a fuse in the Jackman Hall projection booth, and I couldn’t have been more happy about it because it gave me a second chance to look at what might be the most beautiful filmed image I’ve ever seen. It’s a shot of a flag billowing against a dark sky, which Dorsky filmed as a reflection in a window across the street. That image alone is staggering, but it becomes downright transcendent when, miraculously, a mannequin appears from shadows behind the window. And that’s when you notice the clouds passing in front of the sun. Shadows and light. Shadows and light. It’s like all of cinema reduced to a single instant.

  • What Are We Talking About?

    Given the content of this here website, what I’m about to say might come as something of a surprise: Except under certain circumstances, I really hate to talk about movies, literature, religion, and politics. Yesterday Joanna and I went to a 4th of July picnic where we knew only the host and one other couple. At some point I found myself talking to a guy who, after learning about my dissertation and my film writing, used my interests as an excuse to tell me about Ayn Rand and Memento. I got the sense that this guy was accustomed to being the most knowledgeable (or at least the loudest) guy in the room, so I was content to let him talk until he ran out of steam, hoping all the while that Joanna would wander back in our direction or that a meteor would destroy the apartment complex across the street. Anything that would give us an excuse to change the subject.

    But nothing like that happened. And the guy wouldn’t let me off the hook. “So what’s the best film you’ve seen in the theater this year?” Um, Pin Boy, probably. It’s from Brazil, I think, or maybe Argentina. I forget which. It’s a great little film about . . . “I don’t know anything about Pin Boy. What about American films?” This year? I guess The Life Aquatic was the most interesting American film I’ve seen this year, but I was actually a bit disa . . . “Okay, what about the last ten years? Did you see Memento? How about Fight Club? The Usual Suspects?”

    And on and on it went. At some point his friend joined us and, after listening for a while, added, “Oh, I get it. You’re one of those ‘I don’t watch summer blockbuster movies’ types, right?” And if you’re guessing that he said that in an effete, high-pitched voice, then you’d be right. “Don’t stereotype the guy,” Mr. Memento said. Hey, sometimes the stereotype fits, I joked.

    Eventually the subject changed to The Lord of the Rings, which drew Joanna’s attention and which gave me an excuse to slide over to the one couple I knew. I asked them about their upcoming trip to California — a brief tour of Hollywood, followed by a four-day drive up the coast and a long weekend in San Francisco — and, quite unexpectedly, I soon found myself talking about movies again. After telling me about California, they asked if Joanna and I had any trips planned and I mentioned Toronto.

    “You know, many Iranian directors make films for that festival in Toronto.” Yeah, Kiarostami had a new film there last year. And I think Makhmalbaf’s daughter did, too. I forget her first name. “Yes, they make these films for Western audiences that are so depressing. Poverty is a part of Iran. I don’t deny that. But I can’t understand why festivals love these films.”

    Assana is in my ESL class. I had known her for several months before learning that in Tehran she had been a doctor. On Thursday I plied her with questions about the election, and she seemed grateful to have found an American who was interested. Yesterday, I told her a bit about Kiarostami’s Ten, which had given me my first glimpse of middle class Tehran.

    I’m not sure what this story illustrates exactly. (Joanna would say it illustrates that Mr. Memento is an asshole.) Sociologists have been saying for years that popular culture serves an organizational function in America. The people who line up on opening night at theaters in Anchorage, Kansas City, and Miami (or who watch the Super Bowl or who read the latest Harry Potter or Purpose-Driven whatever) are actors in a shared experience. Pop culture guarantees some kind of connection between strangers. But it’s always the most superficial of connections, and so small talk becomes a discussion of which film has the most realistic depiction of human evisceration, The War of the Worlds or Independence Day. And it makes me crazy.

    Maybe I’m the asshole.

  • Beautiful

    When I asked my ESL students last night about the great literatures of their native language, one of the Iranians told me about the Arab conquest of Persia. In their effort to erase all evidence of Persian culture, the ancient Arabs outlawed the speaking of Farsi, which, of course, only served to inspire a new generation of writers.

    “Our language was saved by the poets,” he told me.

  • Trying to Understand It All

    There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
    — Harry Truman

    I’ve become interested in Iran lately. For personal reasons. I have a new student in my ESL class who arrived recently in America by way of Switzerland and Tehran. He’s a religious and political refugee with nothing but contempt for the Islamic fundamentalists who dominate his country. Each time I’ve chatted with him, he has spoken nostalgically of the days under the Shah. I shake my head knowingly and listen with rapt attention, but my fuzzy understanding of his country’s history is formed mostly by childhood memories of the hostage crisis and by the snippets of wisdom I glean from Kiarostami, Panahi, Makhmalbaf, and those other brilliant Iranian filmmakers.

    It’s a start, though. When he mentioned that his last job there had been building an apartment complex on the outskirts of the city, I said that Kiarostami’s films make those mountains look like the most beautiful place on earth. His eyes lit up, then he told me about the hours and hours he had spent hiking and rock climbing there.

    With my new friend in mind, I read with great interest H.D.S. Greenway’s review of All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. In “The Iran Conspiracy,” Greenway offers a usable introduction to the political and economic rationale for the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government. The parallels with the current situation are impossible to ignore.

    In the current age of American unilateralism and preemptive military interventions, it is hard to remember that just after World War II America still stood for something quite different in the Middle East. Although the US emerged from the war as “the leader of the free world,” the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese still ruled over vast empires. To many colonized people the United States was identified with Wilsonian idealism and anticolonialism. . . .

    In the early 1950s Stephen Penrose, a president of American University of Beirut, wrote: “Until recently American enterprise in the Middle East has been almost entirely non-governmental, an important difference from most other national patterns. Americans have never been seen as colonizers or subjugators and it is hard even now for most Arabs to conceive of them as such.”

    When President Bush first mentioned the “Axis of Evil,” I nearly choked, knowing that, in doing so, he was drawing a line in the sand — a line that would re-establish a Cold War-like polarity and dominate foreign policy and political discourse (and eliminate nuance in the process). I’m only now beginning to understand, however, just how intimately the Cold War and Middle East have been bound.

    The war in Korea changed America’s outlook and policies as surely as did the attack on September 11 in the current administration. The invasion from the north came in June of 1950, and convinced the United States that the Western nightmare of expanding, militant communism was coming true. The Korean War coincided with the growing crisis over Iran’s nationalization of its oil industry, and had the effect of narrowing Washington’s differences with the British at Iran’s expense. Korea played into the American decision to reverse its early opposition to an anti-Mossadegh coup. Coincidentally, the Korean War ended in July 1953, while [Kermit] Roosevelt was plotting his coup. . . .

    In many ways America’s obsession with terrorism since September 11 is an echo of its obsession with communism fifty years ago. Today the United States and Britain claim they must occupy Iraq because of the threat of terrorism. Officially, both say they want to get out as soon as possible; but ideologues in the Pentagon dream of Iraq advancing America’s interests, and Israel’s too, in the Persian Gulf as the Shah once did. Talk of a new American imperialism is becoming fashionable among conservative academics, some of them in power. They forget the lesson of British experience, which is that when a people will no longer accept it, foreign domination is almost impossible to maintain. Kinzer begins his book with an apt quote from President Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

  • Children of Heaven (1997)

    Children of Heaven (1997)

    As an antidote to the American media, lately I’ve been spending my precious down time with films from the Middle East. Quick tangent: Long Pauses attracts an odd assortment of readers — undergraduates looking for “Benito Cereno” papers to steal, disenfranchised Christians seeking fellow travelers, and film buffs, mostly. For those of you not in the latter group, let me just say that, for the last decade or so, Iran has produced many of the world’s most remarkable films and filmmakers. Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, and Majid Majidi, to name just a few, are among a select group of active directors who consistently meld craftsmanship, beauty, honesty, and a vital social-political voice. For more info, check out my friend Acquarello’s invaluable site, Strictly Film School.

    Majidi’s Children of Heaven is a sweet little film that I can’t help but compare to two of my all-time favorites: Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). Like De Sica’s classic of Italian Neo-Realism, Children of Heaven concerns a hard-working father who wants only to provide for his wife and children, but who is trapped in a world that seems determined to frustrate him. Like Ray, Majidi tells his story from the low-angle perspective of the children, a boy, Ali, and his younger sister, Zahra. The plot turns on Ali’s having lost Zahra’s only pair of shoes and on their efforts to recover them, which are often pathetic but never overly sentimental. Majidi must surely have been thinking of Ray’s original Apu (Subir Bannerjee) when he cast Amir Farrokh Hashemian as Ali, for the two share that wide-eyed yearning on which the success of both films depends. (As a strange aside, both boys also remind me a great deal of my oldest nephew.)

    Like his predecessors, Majidi shoots on location and employs non-professional actors, which lends the film an urgency often lacking in Western productions. But it’s also quite beautifully filmed, contrasting stunning images of Tehran’s superhighways, mansions, and high rises with its alleys, markets, and elementary schools. Children of Heaven would be a great rental for any of you who might otherwise be reluctant to enter the “Foreign Films” aisle. Most reviews in the popular press have described it as “heartwarming,” which it certainly is, and it also delivers a deliriously tense finale. While the film lacks the explicit political critique of something like Panahi’s The Circle (banned by Iranian officials) or Kiarostami’s Close-Up, it offers a wonderfully told story, and it also performs a service that is terribly important right now: Our hearts should be warmed to the people of the Middle East, the people who are (or who soon will be) hiding out under the devastation of our bombing campaigns.

    (P.S. I realize that that last sentence smacks of stereotypical bleeding-heart liberalism. But, well, sometimes that’s a good thing.)

  • A Taste of Cherry (1997)

    A Taste of Cherry (1997)

    Abbas Kiarostami

    Images: Long, high-angle shots of Iranian landscapes, as Badii’s Range Rover climbs hills. The sky (until the final scenes) is rarely seen. Badii always remains outdoors, refusing to enter the taxidermist’s museum or the guard’s post. Only signs of civilization/technology are large machines that seem to be designed only for moving dirt and rock from one location to another.

    • • •

    Mr. Badii (played by Homayon Ershadi, an architect friend of Kiarostami) is a middle aged man who spends much of the film driving through the hill country surrounding Tehran, looking for someone to help him commit suicide. He plans to overdose on sleeping pills, then rest in a grave he has already dug for himself. He needs someone to come to the spot the next morning and either bury his body (if he has succeeded) or pull him from the hole (if he has not).

    The film can essentially be broken into three acts. In each, Mr. Badii explains his plan to a potential accomplice: the first, a young Kurdish soldier, who runs frightened from the car; the second, a 30-something Afghani seminarian, who objects to the plan on religious grounds; and the third, an older taxidermist, who agrees to help because he needs the money for a relative. The film ends without revealing Badii’s fate. Instead, we see him lying in his would-be grave, until Kiarostami cuts to high contrast video footage of the director and actors recording the sound of marching troops.

    A Taste of Cherry fits most easily, I think, into the Neo-Realist tradition of DeSica, Rossellini, and Ray, all of whom, like Kiarostami, employ non-professional performers, shoot largely in exteriors, and focus their cameras on “real” life, shunning sentiment in favor of objectivity. Kiarostami obviously adds a PostModern twist here, employing a bit of self-reflexivity to the film—his “it’s only a movie” coda. Some have criticized the move, but I agree with Rosenbaum:

    Kiarostami is representing life in all its rich complexity, reconfiguring elements from the preceding 80-odd minutes in video to clarify what’s real and what’s concocted. Far from affirming that Taste of Cherry is “only” a movie, this wonderful ending is saying, among other things, that it’s also a movie.

    In the interview included on Criterion’s DVD release, Kiarostami claims that he loves films that might cause viewers to doze, but that haunt them when they return home. I laughed out loud when he said this, because I have had that exact experience with A Taste of Cherry. I’ve been wrestling all morning with that old taxidermist. If Kiarostami is implying through him that life is worth living because of sensual pleasure (the taste of cherries) or because of human relationships (his family), then the film doesn’t really work for me. But hearing the taxidermist’s “tidy” story sandwiched between the conversation with the seminarian and the coda makes it all much more interesting and impressive. It’s that dialogue between faith, humanism, and (possibly) aesthetics that speaks to me personally.