VIEWING NOTES ARCHIVE
FILM CULTURES OF NORTH AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST
Sample Syllabus
ALGERIA
EGYPT
MOROCCO
MALI
IRAN
ISRAEL
⮕Gett
WEST BANK/ISRAEL
PALESTINE
TURKEY
Primary & Supplementary Film Titles
Secondary Reading
SAMPLE SYLLABUS: FILM 332: FILM CULTURES OF NORTH AFRICA
& THE MIDDLE EAST
SYLLABUS
Required Texts:
Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema.
Gonul Donmez-Colin. Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East.
Secondary Reading:
Abufarha, Nasser. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian
Resistance. Duke UP, 2009, esp. chapters 4-6.
Armes, Roy. Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film. Indiana UP, 2005.
Benin, Joel & Joe Stork, eds. Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. UC Press,
1997.
Dabashi, Hamid. Dreams of a Nation: on Palestinian Cinema. Verso, 2006.
Fischer, Michael M.J. Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian
Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry. Duke UP, 2004.
Mottahedeh, Negar. Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. Duke
UP, 2008.
Shafik, Viola. Arab Cinema: History, Culture, Identity. AU in Cairo P, 2007.
Stein, Rebecca L. and Ted Swedenburg, eds. Palestine, Israel, and the politics of popular
culture. Duke UP, 2005.
Tapper, Richard. The New Iranian Cinema. Tauris, 2002.
Goals of Course:
–To demonstrate the ways in which film production and reception are connected to social, spatial, ethnic, national, and global networks of exchange and meaning.
–To develop a specific understanding of the ethnic, national cultures, and film cultures of Egypt, the Maghreb, and the Arab, Iranian, and Israeli Middle East.
–To become capable of discerning what is distinctive about the approaches to film art of Arab and Iranian cultures on the one hand, and different Arab cultures on the other.
–To gain an understanding of the recent state of the Arab-Israeli conflict as that conflict is represented in Palestinian and Israeli film and literature.
–To recognize how censorship, self-censorship, and conflicts between artists and political bodies shape and qualify the nature of the films produced in the Maghreb, the Arab Middle East, and Iran in particular.
–To appreciate the extent to which the art-films of North Africa and the Middle East operate as privileged forms of cultural expression, not as windows into the souls of the people and nations they purport to represent.
Papers, Reading Assignments, Class Participation & Grading Procedures:
Three 2-page response papers, two 4-page papers, and a 6-page take home final essay. 2-page papers count for 10% each, 4-page papers for 20% each, take home final for 30%, with participation and attendance serving as a crucial variable in the determination of your final grade. Note well: no extensions will be permitted for response papers, which can be submitted only on the dates listed below. Students are expected to be ready, willing, and able to discuss all reading assignments as scheduled. (Please note: recommended reading is just that, recommended, not required.) If you do not print out and bring to class readings that are mainly available on Canvas, this will often mean having to do your reading online with a notebook on hand to record important points and your responses to them. Frequent and informed participation in class discussions is expected, not merely encouraged. Attendance alone is no substitute for active engagement.
Film Screenings:
Students are expected to view every one of the (14) films before they are due for class discussion, preferably at their scheduled Monday evening screenings. All films will be available in DVD formats for private or small group pre- or re-screening in the library after our initial class viewing. Students are also encouraged to make good use of the extensive number of additional films also available in the library (see below) to supplement their understanding of the work of the filmmakers and film cultures in question.
DVDs on Restricted Reserve:
Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966, dir., Pontecorvo)
Cairo Station (Egypt, 1962, dir., Chahine)
The Closed Doors (Egypt, 1999, dir., Hetata)
Crimson Gold (Iran, 2004, dir., Panahi)
Divine Intervention (Palestine, 2000, dir., Suleiman)
5 Broken Cameras (Israel/Palestine, 2011, dir., Burnat & Davidi)
Gett (Israel, 2014, dir., Elkabetz)
Horses of God (Morocco, 2012, dir., Ayouch)
Paradise Now (Palestine, 2005, dir., Abu-Assad)
Rachida (Algeria, 2002, dir. Bachir-Choikh)
A Separation (Iran, 2011, dir., Farhadi)
Viva Laldjerie (Algeria, 2004, dir., Mokneche)
Waltz with Bashir (Israel, 2008, dir., Folman)
The Wind Will Carry Us (Iran, 1999, dir., Kiarostami)
Recommended/Supplementary DVDs:
Ajami (Israel, 2010, dir., Copti & Shani)
Alila (Israel, 2003, dir., Gitai)
Bab El-Oued City (Algeria, 1994, dir., Allouache)
Beaufort (Israel, 2007, dir., Cedar)
Chronicle of a Disappearance (Israel/Palestine, 1996, dir., Suleiman)
The Circle (Iran, 2001, dir., Panahi)
Close-up (Iran, 1990, dir. Kiarostami)
The Color of Paradise (Iran, 1999, dir., Majidi)
The Day I Became Woman (Iran, 2002, dir., Meshkini)
Gabbeh (Iran, 1997, dir., Malhmalbaf)
Halfaouine (Tunisia, 1990, dir., Boughedir)
Jaffa (Israel, 2009, dir., Yedaya)
Kadosh (Israel, 2000, dir., Gitai)
Kandahar (Iran, 2001, dir., Makhmalbaf)
Kedma (Israel, 2002, dir., Gitai)
Kippur (Israel, 2000, dir., Gitai)
Lebanon (Israel, 2009, dir., Maoz)
The Lemon Tree (Israel, 2008, dir., Riklis)
Marooned in Iraq (Iran, 2002, dir., Ghobadi)
A Moment of Innocence (Iran, 1996, dir., Makhmalbaf)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Turkey, 2012, dir., Ceylan)
Rana’s Wedding (Palestine, 2003, dir., Abu-Assad)
A Separation (Iran, 2012, dir., Farhadi)
The Syrian Bride (Israel, 2005, dir., Riklis)
Taste of Cherry (Iran, 1999, dir., Kiarostomi)
Ten (Iran, 2002, dir., Kiarostomi)/VHS only
This Is Not a Film (Iran, 2011, dir., Panahi)
Three Monkeys (Turkey, 2008, dir., Ceylan)
Wedding in Galilee (Palestine, 1987, dir., Khleifi)
Where is the Friend’s House (Iran, 1989, dir., Kiarostomi)
Yom, Yom (Israel, 1998, dir., Gitai)
Useful Websites
http://www.al-bab.com/arab/cinema/cinema.htm
http://library.berkeley.edu/MRC/MidEastVid.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east
Class Schedule
Aug 29 Intro to course: film cultures of Egypt, the Maghreb, and the Middle East
Screening: The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966, dir., Pontecorvo,
121m), 6:30-8:45 p.m., TR B-02. Read chapter 1, Stone, Agony of Algeria (Canvas) for next class.
31 Discuss Battle of Algiers & Agony of Algeria chapter/Read over weekend: Shafik, Arab Cinema, Chapters 1 & 2 (Canvas); Cinema of North Africa & Middle East (CiNAME), Introduction & Chapter 2.
Sep 5 Discuss readings/Prep for Cairo Station. Screening: Cairo Station (Egypt,
1962, dir., Chahine, 105m), 6:30-8:30 pm.
7 Discuss Cairo Station/Read Chapters 7 & 23, Political Islam (Canvas)
over weekend.
Sep 12 Discuss reading/Prep for The Closed Doors. Screening: The Closed Doors (Egypt, 1999, dir. Hetata, 105m), 6:30-8:30 p.m.
14 2-page response paper due/Discuss The Closed Doors/ Read over weekend: Armes, Introduction, Postcolonial Images; Evans & Phillips, “Algeria’s Agony” (178-204) & Chapter 18, Political Islam (Canvas)
Sep 19 Discuss readings/Prep for Rachida. Screening: Rachida (Algeria, 2002, dir., Bachir-Chouikh, 100m), 6:30-8:30 pm.
21 2-page response paper due/Discuss Rachida. Read over weekend:
Armes, Postcolonial Images: Chapters 4-5.
Sep 26 Discuss readings/Prep Viva Laldjerie. Screening: Viva Laldjerie (Algeria, 2004, dir., Mokneche, 113m), 6:30-8:30 p.m.
28 2-page response paper due/Discuss Viva Laldjerie.
Oct 3 Screening: Horses of God (Morocco, 2012, dir., Ayouch, 115m), 6:30-
8:45 p.m.
5 Discuss Horses of God/Read over Fall Break: Dabashi, Close-up: Iranian Cinema, Introduction & Chapters 1 & 2. [Recommended: Fischer, Mute Dreams (Canvas), pp. 223-58.]
Oct 10 ——– FALL BREAK: NO CLASS———
12 ———YOM KIPPUR: NO CLASS——-
Oct 17 Discuss reading/Introduce Kiarostomi. Screening: The Wind Will Carry
Us (Iran, 1999, dir. Kiarostomi, 114m), 6:30-8:45 pm. Read Mottahedeh,
chapter 2, Displaced Allegories (Canvas), pp. 88-139,for next class.
19 Discuss Wind Will Carry Us & Mottadeheh chapter. Read over weekend:
Dabashi, Close-up, Chapter 7.
Oct 24 4-page paper due on either Horses of God or Wind Will Carry Us/Introduce Panahi. Screening: Crimson Gold (Iran, 2004, dir. Panahi, 97m), 6:30-8:30 p.m.
26 Discuss Crimson Gold. Read over weekend, Dabashi, Chapter 6 & Tapper,
chapters 11-12.
Oct 31 Discuss readings on women & children in Iranian film. Introduce Farhadi.
Screening: A Separation (Iran, 2011, dir., Farhadi, 123m), 6:30-8:45 p.m.
Nov 2 Discuss A Separation.
Nov 7 Introducing Israel & Palestine. Screening: Gett (Israel, 2014, dir.,
Elkabetz, 115m), 6:30-8:45 p.m
9 Discuss film/Clips from Beaufort (Israel, 2007, dir., Cedar, 126m) and
Lebanon.
Nov 14 4-page comparative paper due on representation of women in
Separation & Gett/Discuss readings. Prep Folman. Screening: Waltz with Bashir (Israel, 2008, dir., Folman, 90m), 6:30-8:30 p.m. Read CiNAME Chapters 9 & 20 (Canvas), for next class.
16 Discuss Waltz with Bashir. Read over weekend: Kanafani, “Men in the
Sun” & “Letter from Gaza” & Cleary, “The Meaning of Disaster.
Nov 21 Discuss readings/Screening: 5 Broken Cameras (Israel/Palestine, 2011,
dir., Burnat & Davidi, 94m), 6:30-8:30 p.m./ Read over break: Chapter 16, CiNAME; Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation, Introduction & Chapters 8-9; Alexander, “Is there a Palestinian Cinema?”
23 ———-THANKSGIVING BREAK————
Nov 28 Discuss 5 Broken Cameras/Screening: Divine Intervention (Palestine,
2000, dir., Suleiman, 89m), 6:30-8:30 pm.
30 Discuss Divine Intervention. Read over weekend: Abufarha, Chapter 5,
The Making of a Human Bomb. & Dabashi, Dreams, chapters 2 & 3 (Canvas).
Dec 5 Discuss readings. Screening: Paradise Now (Palestine, 2005, dir., Abu-
Assad, 91m), 6:30-8:30 p.m.
7 Discuss Paradise Now in context of Making of Human Bomb. Course
evaluation.
Dec 12 Final 6-paper due: 4 p.m., CA 263 (file-holder) or CA 255 (mailbox)
VIEWING NOTES
Battle of Algiers (dir, Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, b/w, 121m)
Select Director Filmography: Gillo Pontecorvo (1919-2006)
2002 La primavera del 2002 – L’Italia protesta, l’Italia si ferma (Video documentary)
2001 Another World Is Possible (Documentary)
1992 Ritorno ad Algeri (TV Movie documentary)
1979 Ogro
1969 Burn!
1966 The Battle of Algiers
1960 Kapò
Select Cast:
Jean Martin … Col. Mathieu
Yacef Saadi … Djafar
Brahim Hadjadj Ali La Pointe
Samia Kerbash One of the girls
Fusia El Kader … Halima
Background:
In the early morning hours of All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1954, FLN maquisards (guerrillas) launched attacks in various parts of Algeria against military installations, police posts, warehouses, communications facilities, and public utilities. From Cairo, the FLN broadcast a proclamation calling on Muslims in Algeria to join in a national struggle for the “restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam.” The French minister of interior, socialist François Mitterrand, responded sharply that “the only possible negotiation is war.” It was the reaction of Premier Pierre Mendès-France, who only a few months before had completed the liquidation of France’s empire in Indochina, that set the tone of French policy for the next five years. On November 12, he declared in the National Assembly: “One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation, the unity and integrity of the Republic. The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French . . . . Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession.”
As the FLN campaign spread through the countryside, many European farmers in the interior sold their holdings and sought refuge in Algiers, where their cry for sterner countermeasures swelled. Colon vigilante units, whose unauthorized activities were conducted with the passive cooperation of police authorities, carried out ratonnades (literally, rat-hunts; synonymous with Arab-killings) against suspected FLN members of the Muslim community. The colons demanded the proclamation of a state of emergency, the proscription of all groups advocating separation from France, and the imposition of capital punishment for politically motivated crimes.
An important watershed in the War of Independence was the massacre of civilians by the FLN near the town of Philippeville in August 1955. Before this operation, FLN policy was to attack only military and government-related targets. The wilaya commander for the Constantine region, however, decided a drastic escalation was needed. The killing by the FLN and its supporters of 123 people, including old women and babies, shocked Soustelle into calling for more repressive measures against the rebels. The government claimed it killed 1,273 guerrillas in retaliation; according to the FLN, 12,000 Muslims perished in an orgy of bloodletting by the armed forces and police, as well as colon gangs. After Philippeville, all-out war began in Algeria.
During 1956 and 1957, the FLN successfully applied hit-and- run tactics according to the classic canons of guerrilla warfare. Specializing in ambushes and night raids and avoiding direct contact with superior French firepower, the internal forces targeted army patrols, military encampments, police posts, and colon farms, mines, and factories, as well as transportation and communications facilities. Once an engagement was broken off, the guerrillas merged with the population in the countryside. Kidnapping was commonplace, as were the ritual murder and mutilation of captured French military, colons of both genders and every age, suspected collaborators, and traitors. At first, the revolutionary forces targeted only Muslim officials of the colonial regime; later, they coerced or killed even those civilians who simply refused to support them. Moreover, during the first two years of the conflict, the guerrillas killed about 6,000 Muslims and 1,000 Europeans.
To increase international and domestic French attention to their struggle, the FLN decided to bring the conflict to the cities and to call a nationwide general strike. The most notable manifestation of the new urban campaign was the Battle of Algiers, which began on September 30, 1956, when three women placed bombs at three sites including the downtown office of Air France. The FLN carried out an average of 800 shootings and bombings per month through the spring of 1957, resulting in many civilian casualties and inviting a crushing response from the authorities. The 1957 general strike, timed to coincide with the UN debate on Algeria, was imposed on Muslim workers and businesses. General Jacques Massu, who was instructed to use whatever methods were necessary to restore order in the city, frequently fought terrorism with acts of terrorism. Using paratroopers, he broke the strike and systematically destroyed the FLN infrastructure there. But the FLN had succeeded in showing its ability to strike at the heart of French Algeria and in rallying a mass response to its appeals among urban Muslims. Moreover, the publicity given the brutal methods used by the army to win the Battle of Algiers, including the widespread use of torture, cast doubt in France about its role in Algeria.
Annually since 1955 the UN General Assembly had considered the Algerian question, and the FLN position was gaining support. France’s seeming intransigence in settling a colonial war that tied down half the manpower of its armed forces was also a source of concern to its North American Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. In a September 1959 statement, de Gaulle dramatically reversed his stand and uttered the words “self-determination,” which he envisioned as leading to majority rule in an Algeria formally associated with France.
Talks with the FLN reopened at Evian in May 1961; after several false starts, the French government decreed that a cease-fire would take effect on March 19, 1962. In their final form, the Evian Accords allowed the colons equal legal protection with Algerians over a threeyear period. These rights included respect for property, participation in public affairs, and a full range of civil and cultural rights. At the end of that period, however, Europeans would be obliged to become Algerian citizens or be classified as aliens with the attendant loss of rights. The French electorate approved the Evian Accords by an overwhelming 91 percent vote in a referendum held in June 1962.on June 17, 1962. In the same month, more than 350,000 colons left Algeria. Within a year, 1.4 million refugees, including almost the entire Jewish community and some pro-French Muslims, had joined the exodus to France. Fewer than 30,000 Europeans chose to remain.
On July 1, 1962, some 6 million of a total Algerian electorate of 6.5 million cast their ballots in the referendum on independence. The vote was nearly unanimous. De Gaulle pronounced Algeria an independent country on July 3. The Provisional Executive, however, proclaimed July 5, the 132d anniversary of the French entry into Algeria, as the day of national independence.
VIEWING NOTES: Viva Laldjerie (dir., Nadir Mokneche, 2004, 113m)
Filmography:
Goodbye Morocco (2012)
Delice Paloma (2007)
Viva Laldjerie (2004)
The Harem of Madame Osmane (2002)
Cast:
Lubna Azabel Goucem
Biyouna Papicha
Nadia Kaci Fifi
Jalil Naciri Samir
Abbess Zahmani Chouchou
Lounes Tazairt Dr. Annis Sassi
Akim Isker Yacine Sassi
Related Films of Interest:
Man of Ashes (1986, dir., Bouzid, Tunisia)
Halfaouine (1990, dir., Boughedir, Tunisia)
Bab El-Oued City (1994, dir., Allouache, Algeria)
One Summer at La Goulette (1995, dir., Boughedir, Tunisia)
Ali Zaoua (1999, dir., Ayouch, Morocco)
Horses of God (2012, dir., Ayouch, Morocco)
Notes for Writing & Discussion :
Note the odd title, not just its conflation of the French word for Algeria, “Algerie”, with the Arabic “El Djazair”, but for what it suggests the film does and wants us to do, that is, say “Hooray” for, or “Long live,” Algeria, as if contemporary Algeria is a place worth celebrating. What in the film does make Algeria seem worth celebrating? What, by contrast, does not? How are we supposed to apply the title to the film?
Temporal & spatial setting: post 9/11 Algiers. How does the cinematography make the city look and feel? How would you describe the city’s street and night life?
Residential hotel: Why are Goucem and mother living there? What is nature of relations with other residents? What kind of world does hotel seem to contain? Why isn’t Goucem a prostitute like Fifi? Are we to assume that Papicha was a prostitute in her dancing days or is that just an impression influenced by those who associate dancing with sin?
Goucem as partly “kept woman” worried about future: How is she initially characterized? How does film “look” at her? How does she look back at the camera? At other people? What change in her attitude, temperament (if any) takes place in course of film?
Why is there so much frontloading of sexual explicitness, both straight and gay? How does sexuality seem to help Goucem define herself? Why does she seem to work at it so aggressively, even going out to a club the same night of the day she makes love with Sassi? What are we to make of her evolving friendship with Yacine, Sassi’s gay son? How is he relationship with Samir represented? What initially serves to keep him at arms-length? What eventually draws her to him?
The film’s secondary plot has Papicha try to bring the Copacabana back to life on one hand and induct Tiziri into the art of dancing on the other: How is this plot presented in relation to competing forces of Islamic repression? [Note that club is in the process of being transformed into a mosque.] What do you make of the dancing scene in the café? What does this scene bring to life that is otherwise repressed?
In what ways does this and other related plots work within established formats of mainstream Western cinema?
Why does Goucem steal Fifi’s client’s gun? What does she want to do with it? (What does she end up doing with it?) Why doesn’t she return it when she gets the chance? How are we to account for the policeman’s ultraviolent effort to retrieve the gun and punish Fifi for having stolen it? If none of this seems convincing on level of dramatic plot, why do you suppose Mokneche included it? What point does this subplot help him make about Goucem, Fifi, and the Algerian police, respectively?
How do we read the lengths Goucem goes in order to find and recover Fifi’s body? Does her toughness and courage on this front compensate for her failure in others?
To what extent can this be considered a woman’s film? Why does it only seem to be women who are capable of mounting any form of resistance to religious and governmental repression? (Or is this merely the nature of the cultural fantasy that the film works to cultivate?)
Viewing Notes: Rachida (2002, dir., Yamina Bachir-Choikh,
France/Algeria, 100m)
Cast
Ibtissem Djouadi … Rachida
Bahia Rachedi … Aïcha
Rachida Messaoui En … Zohra
Hamid Remas … Hassen
Zaki Boulenafed … Khaled
Amel Choukh … La mariée
Abdelkader Belmokadem Mokhtar
Azzedine Bougherra … Tahar
Problem of Film: 1) seeks to individualize a representative state of crisis in Algeria that stretched from 1992-2000; 2) seek to do so largely from one POV in which young Islamists are uniformly demonized. We don’t, e.g., learn the name (much less the story) of a single militant. We don’t see what presumably lies behind or beyond the innocent people they victimize.
That said, the film specifically aims to speak on behalf of equally unknown (and possibly unknowable) victims of the indiscriminate violence that has terrorized Algerians for considerably longer than the period in which the film is set. And though many different victims of violence are identified in the course of the film, it particularly targets the experience of one young woman—whose story is, intriguingly, based on that of another young woman who, unlike Rachida, did not survive a violent attack on her person. In doing so, the film also centers very clearly on the situation of women in contemporary Algeria, which may even involve being disowned by one’s father for the “crime” of being raped.
–to what extent is this film made by a woman a woman-centered film? how in particular are village women shown behaving in relation to other women? in the hamam (bath)? in receiving Zohra on her return to village? in wedding preparations?
–to what effect does film often fasten on images and behavior of children? to whom do you suppose are these representations of children directed?
–how would you characterize human relations in the village when the village is free of incursions of terrorists? does presentation of village life appear “realistic” or idealistic?
–why does film seem to marginalize the presence/agency of Rachida’s fiance/boyfriend? why do you suppose film needs/wants to establish his existence in first place?
–what do you make of the film’s closing shot, of Rachida turning her gaze out towards the viewer?
EGYPT
Viewing Notes: The Closed Doors (dir., Atef Hetata, 1999, 109m)
Cast:
Mahmoud Hemida Mansour
Sawsan Badr Fatma
Ahmed Azmi Mohammed
Manal Afifi Zeinab
Ahmed Fouad Selim Awande
Writer: Atef Hetata
Cinematography: Sami Bahzan
Music: Hisham Nazih
Setting: Cairo, 1990-91, around time of First Gulf War
Sites: School, rooftop apartments, mosque, employer’s apartments, Mohammed’s father’s office, streets
References: Gulf War & street demonstrations; Iran/Iraq War (1980-88); emigration to Iraq, Kuwait, etc.; institutional corruption, e.g., “extra lessons”; popular culture (TV, cinema, radio, “Maradona shoes”); treatment of women (divorce, polygamy); Islamic fundamentalism & political Islam; lifestyles of rich (adultery, drinking, exploitation).
What to notice:
–Film’s critical and representational range, its panoramic critique of Egyptian society (the rich, fundamentalist sheiks, the school & its teachers, husbands and fathers, Western consumerism), and obvious sympathy for the struggles of the poor and striving, particularly women.
–Stylistic sophistication: structure, visual framing, use of montage, occasionally clever dialogue, e.g., “Are you a Romeo or a fundamentalist?”
–Directness: unadorned representation of Arab street and living conditions, sexuality and sexual frustration, brutality of everyday life.
Questions for Writing & Discussion:
Take a single moment or scene or memorable set of images from the film and explain why and how it works, e.g., the scene at the mosque when Sheik Khalid is describing the pleasures of heaven to the boys, or the two moments when Hamada climbs all over Zeinab before rushing off in tears, or the final argument between his mother and Hamada.
Briefly explore how the film represents the collisions between Hamada’s impulse to express his sexual drives and desires and his efforts to repress and renounce them. Is this more than a film about the difficulties pious Arab men encounter in making the transit from adolescence to sexual maturity? How specific is it with respect to the relationship between Hamada and his mother, Fatma? To what extent does Fatma initially encourage her son’s over-close identification with her, and service as a substitute for her older son and husband? Why does Hamada’s chronic voyeurism so often fixate on his mother and his mother’s body?
In many ways, Fatma is, or emerges as, the film’s most sustained subject of audience sympathy and attention, which represents her in the many subject positions she assumes in the course of the film (scorned wife, loving mother, hardworking maid, independent woman, tough-minded individual). To what extent does this film seem committed to doing more with the construction of working-class women than making her the victim of fundamentalist-inspired violence?
By contrast, Hamada/Mohammed is almost entirely presented as grim, pent-up, uptight, humorless, selfish, and violent. He only lightens up when he’s hanging out with Awande, and otherwise only seems at peace with himself at the mosque or when he can still act like a child in relation to his mother. What are we to make of this? Does the film manage, in the end, to make us sympathetic to a character who is almost always repellent?
Towards the end of the film, Fatma tells Zeinab that her son has “sold me to a bunch of brutes” and that “these guys are criminals.” Do we perceive the two sheiks in the same way she does? If so, how does the director manage to convey that impression to us, given that they are almost always presented in a soft-spoken, tender and caring manner when they interact with Mohammed and the other boys?
Formal concerns: Try to reconstruct a sequence of the film that displays its formal qualities (montage, framing, mise-en-scene, camera angle, soundtrack) to particularly good effect, elaborating on how it achieves its aims and why you admire it. Feel free to find and play a clip of the scene in class to support your claims.
Viewing Notes: Horses of God (dir., Nabil Ayouch, 2012, 115m)
Morocco Political & Cultural History
Morocco has a population of over 33.8 million. Its political capital is Rabat, although the largest city is Casablanca; other major cities include Marrakesh, Tangier, Tetouan, & Fes. A historically prominent regional power, Morocco has a history of independence not shared by its neighbours. Its distinct culture is a blend of Arab, indigenous Berber, Sub-Saharan African, and European influences. Morocco’s predominant religion is Islam, while the official languages are Berber and Arabic. Moroccan Arabic, referred to as Darija, and French are also widely spoken.
From the 11th century onwards, a series of powerful Berber dynasties arose. Under the Almoravid dynasty and the Almohad dynasty, Morocco dominated the Maghreb, much of present-day Spain and Portugal, and the western Mediterranean region. In the 15th century, the Reconquista ended Muslim rule in central and southern Spain and Portugal and many Muslims and Jews fled to Morocco. In 1549, the region fell to successive Arab dynasties: first the Saadi dynasty (1549-1659), and then the Alaouite Dynasty, which has remained in power since the 17th century.
In 1904, France and Spain carved out zones of influence in Morocco. The 1912 Treaty of Fes made Morocco a protectorate of France, and triggered the 1912 Fes riots. Spain continued to operate its coastal protectorate, and assumed power over the northern and southern Saharan zones. Tens of thousands of colonists entered Morocco. Some bought up large amounts of the rich agricultural land, others organized the exploitation and modernization of mines and harbors. France’s exile of Sultan Mohammed V in 1953 to Madagascar sparked active opposition to both protectorates. France allowed Mohammed V to return in 1955, and the negotiations that led to Moroccan independence began the following year. In March, 1956 Morocco regained its independence from France. A month later Spain ceded most of its protectorate in Northern Morocco to the new state but kept its two coastal enclaves (Ceuta and Melilla) on the Mediterranean coast.
Upon the death of King Mohammed, Hassan II became King of Morocco in 1961. Morocco held its first general elections in 1963. However, Hassan declared a state of emergency and suspended parliament in 1965. In 1971, there was a failed attempt to depose the king and establish a republic. A truth commission set up in 2005 to investigate human rights abuses during his reign confirmed nearly 10,000 cases, ranging from death in detention to forced exile. Some 592 people were recorded killed during Hassan’s rule according to the truth commission. King Hassan II died in 1999 and was succeeded by his son, Mohammed VI: a cautious modernizer who has introduced some economic and social liberalization.
As reconstructed in Horses of God, a series of suicide bombings occurred on May 16, 2003 in Casablanca: the deadliest terrorist attacks in the country’s history in which 45 people were killed (33 victims and 12 suicide bombers). The suicide bombers came from the shanty towns of Sidi Moumen. In the deadliest attack, bombers wearing explosives knifed a guard at the Casa de España restaurant, and blew themselves up inside the building, killing 20 people, many of them Muslims dining and playing bingo.
The 5-star Hotel Farah was bombed next. Another bomber killed three passersby as he attempted to bomb a Jewish cemetery. Two other bombers attacked a Jewish community center, but killed no one because the building was closed and empty. Another bomber attacked a Jewish-owned Italian restaurant, and another blew himself up near the Belgian consulate, killing two police officers. Two bombers were arrested before they could carry out attacks. More than 100 people were injured; 97 of them were Muslims.
In 2011, the King won a landslide victory in a referendum on a reformed constitution he had proposed to placate the Arab Spring protests. However critics continue to accuse the government of failing to deliver on reforms.
See following for detailed account of rise of militant Islam in Morocco:
http://mondediplo.com/2004/11/04moroccoislamists
SELECT DIRECTOR FILMOGRAPHY: Nabil Ayouch (b. 1969, Paris)
2015 Much Loved (see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/star-of-controversial-morocco-sex-worker-film-severely-beaten-a6725746.html)
2012 Horses of God
2011 My Land (Documentary)
2007 Whatever Lola Wants
2000 Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets
1997 Mektoub
SELECT CAST:
Abdelhakim Rachi … Yacine
Abdelilah Rachid … Hamid
Hamza Souidek … Nabil
Ahmed El Idrissi Amrani Fouad
Badr Chakir … Khalil
Rabii Benjhail Tadlaoui Zaid
Mohammed Taleb … Abdu Zoubeir
Mohamed Mabrouk … Nouceir
Fatima El-Kraimy … Yemma (Yacine’s Mother)
Youness Chara … Said
Imane Benennia … Ghislaine
Abdallah Ouzzad … Ba’Moussa
Hanane Douch Tamou (Nabil’s Mother)
Viewing Notes: Bamako (dir., Sissako, Mali/France, 2006, 115m)
Notes on Mali:
One of the poorest countries in the world, Mali experienced rapid economic growth after the 1990s, coupled with a flourishing democracy and relative social stability. This all hung in the balance in early 2012, when the steady collapse of state control over the north of the country was followed by an inconclusive military coup and French military intervention against Islamist fighters who threatened to advance south. Although civilian rule was re-established in the summer of 2013, a fragile truce with Tuareg separatists broke down amid resumed fighting a year later. For several decades after independence from France in 1960, Mali suffered droughts, rebellions, a coup and 23 years of military dictatorship until democratic elections in 1992.
The core of ancient empires going back to the fourth century, Mali was conquered by the French in the middle of the 19th century. Although swathes of Mali are barren, the country is self-sufficient in food thanks to the fertile Niger river basin in the south and east. It is one of Africa’s major cotton producers, and has lobbied against subsidies to cotton farmers in richer countries, particularly the US. A chronic foreign trade deficit makes it nonetheless heavily dependent on foreign aid and remittances from Malians working abroad.
Director Filmography: Abderrahmane Sissako (b. October 13, 1961, Mauritania)
2014 Timbuktu
2006 Bamako
2002 Waiting for Happiness
1998 Rostov-Luanda (Documentary)
1998 Life on Earth
Waiting for Happiness Synopsis:
Abdallah stops in Nouadhibou on his way to Europe where his mother lives in order to say goodbye. […] He has passing acquaintances with other villagers, among them Khatra, a young orphan who tutors him in the tribal tongue. Maata, an electrician and Khatra’s adopted father and mentor; […] and a girl who is learning traditional songs from an older woman… Khatra and the girl represent the possibility that Nouadhibou is a place where the soul can be perfected. In contrast to Abdallah, who sees the world through the frames formed by windows, doors, a TV set and a book–connections to Europe rather than Africa–Khatra and the girl are creatures of the vast, Saharan landscape. Khatra looks for electrical hook-ups with Maata on the labyrinthine, sunlit rooftops of the village, and the girl sings under a colorful lean-to, next to the old woman who is her teacher. Her voice drifts through the window of Abdallah’s home, but he doesn’t understand the words. He remains unmoved by the songs, just as he remains insensible to Khatra’s pedagogy. Abdallah represents an Africa still unsettled in its relationship to colonial Europe. Khatra, on the other hand, illustrates the possibility that the traditions of Africa […] will survive the tenuous connections to the modern world that electricity and the light bulb represent. The girl holds an even greater promise. Africa’s songs, its precious oral culture, all that it has to teach the world, will survive in her, and will pass someday from her to another of Nouadhibou’s daughters.
Timbuktu Synopsis:
Not far from the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu, proud cattle herder Kidane lives peacefully in the dunes with his wife Satima, his daughter Toya, and Issan, their twelve-year-old shepherd. In town, the people suffer, powerless, from the regime of terror imposed by the Jihadists determined to control their faith. Music, laughter, cigarettes, even soccer have been banned. The women have become shadows but resist with dignity. Every day, the new improvised courts issue tragic and absurd sentences. Kidane and his family are being spared the chaos that prevails in Timbuktu. But their destiny changes abruptly.
Bamako: Partial Synopsis & Background Information
Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work and the couple is on the verge of breaking up… In the courtyard of the house they share with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF whom they blame for Africa’s woes… Amidst the pleas and the testimonies, life goes on in the courtyard. Chaka does not seem to be concerned by this novel Africa’s desire to fight for its rights…
A year before he began filming, Sissako hired the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, real lawyers who wrote their own dialogue, mainly in French (we’re often reminded that Mali is a former colony of France). Sissako hired the witnesses, who also wrote their own speeches, during or shortly before shooting, whenever he happened to find them. “Victims in Africa don’t need inventing,” he said in a recent interview in Sight & Sound. “Just go out on the street and they’re there.”
When the elderly farmer from the film’s beginning finally gets his turn, his angry, chanting lament in his native dialect lasts for three minutes. Sissako, who recently said that the man is an improviser—a griot– who usually sings in rich metaphors for at least an hour, explained his decision not to subtitle it: “It’s a scream from the heart that doesn’t need to be translated.”
Select Cast
Aïssa Maïga … Melé
Tiécoura Traoré … Chaka
Maimouna Hélène Diarra Saramba
Balla Habib Dembélé … Falaï (cameraman, videographer)
Madou Keita Witness 3 [Madou]
William Bourdon … Avocat partie civile
Mamadou Kanouté … Avocat de la défense
Gabriel Magma Konate Le procureur
Danny Glover … Cowboy
Elia Suleiman … Cowboy
Abderrahmane Sissako Cowboy
Zegue Bamba Griot, who speaks exclusively in Bambara
Language: French | Bambara | English | Hebrew
Release Date: 18 October 2006 (France)
Budget: €2,000,000 (estimated)
Viewing Notes:
–What’s the point/effect of setting the trial in the compound of a group of residents of Bamako? Of setting the trial in contrast/relation to the private dramas going on both inside and outside the houses (family breaking up, man dying) and of the cloth dying business being run by Saramba?
–What is the point of the private drama occurring between Mele and Chaka? What seems to be the root/ground of their disaffection? What kind of work besides singing does Mele do? What are we led make of Chaka’s final act? (Does the name Chaka ring any bells?)
–Explore and analyze the “Red Cloth” scene from its beginning to its end, and its function as a frame for the story of the immigrants trekking through the desert by Madou. What role is played here by Saramba and the imagery associated with her cloth-dying business?
–What’s the point/effect of staging the film within the film, of making it a Western set in Timbuktu, of having its actors played by well-known and famous international directors and actors, and of having it screened for an audience of receptive villagers? One critic contends that the film-within-the -film “turns the prosecution’s brief into a bloody allegory,” asking “if you saw gunmen killing women and children on the street, or executing schoolteachers because there were too many, [wouldn’t] you […] be appalled and enraged?”
–What is the film trying to teach viewers about such practices and institutions as “structural adjustment,” “privatization,” debt and forgiveness of debt, the IMF, World Court, G8, etc?
–Series of speeches, many very powerful—old man (the griot)speaking in Bambara clearly designed to have greatest effect: how can we know/guess at what’s the old man saying? How is meaning conveyed through the montage of silent responses? On whose behalf does he speak?
–What do you make of the film’s mixing of languages, dominated by French, but powerfully contested by untranslated Bambara? And why do you suppose Sissako left the Bambara untranslated at what seem to be the film’s most crucial moments
–How does Sissako present/represent closing speeches by the advocates? Why does he cross-cut these speeches with the funeral arrangements for Chaka?
–Who role throughout is played by the doorkeeper, and also by the walls of the compound itself? How differently are the worlds outside and inside the compound represented? Why, when, and for what purpose are these divides breached in the film?
IRAN
VIEWING NOTES: KANDAHAR (dir., Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001, 81m)
Selected Filmography
Scream of the Ants (2006) Gabbeh (1996)
Sex & Philosophy (2005) A Time of Love (1990)
Kandahar (2001) Marriage of the Blessed (1989)
The Apple (1998) The Cyclist (1987)
A Moment of Innocence (1996) Boycott (1985)
Awarded the Fellini Prize at the 2001 Cannes Festival, Iranian film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2001, when most Americans had little to no knowledge of the Taliban or of the theocratic hold they had taken of Afghanistan from their headquarters in the ancient city of Kandahar. Adapted from the true story of Afghani-Canadian journalist, Nilofer Pazira, whose family left Afghanistan in 1989, when she was 16, and who tried to re-enter Afghanistan in late 1990s to rescue a childhood friend, much of the film is set on the Iranian-Afghani frontier, a mile or so away from Taliban-controlled land.
In Kandahar, the “real” Pazira plays Nafas (“breath” or “soul”) who is trying to return to Afghanistan to prevent her sister (who has lost both legs to a landmine) from committing suicide at the next eclipse. Her journey is of less import than are the Afghan refugees, hustlers, Western relief workers, African-American “doctor”, and flocks of burka-clad women she meets along the way. Made to draw attention to the plight of Afghan refugees, Kandahar offers stunning visual and oral testimony to the veritable land-mine, criss-crossed by local and global interests, Afghanistan, in the wake of 9/11, became and remains.
Other characters: –Khak (“earth”, “soil”, “dust”), the boy expelled from a madrassa:
name reflects Afghan resistance to foreign intervention
–Hayat (“life”), the one-armed man, would-be prosthesis dealer
–Tabib Sahib (“Doctor Sir”), false-bearded African-American (played by Hassan Tante’i, an African-American, aka David Belfield who allegedly assassinated a man variously described as an anti-Khomeini dissident and former member of SAVAK in Maryland in 1980 and fled to Iran and then to Afghanistan)
Vocabulary: chador, chadris = head-to-toe veils of Afghanistan
burqa = face-mask
maktab, madrassa = religious school
siah-sar = “black-heads” = women (term points back to Iran where
women’s heads are covered with black veils)
QUESTIONS FOR WRITING & DISCUSSION:
What is this film’s pov? How does fact that most of it is spoken in English by a journalist who lives in Canada inflect the way we see and respond to the Afghani people she encounters? Is the film critical of Nafas and the first world baggage she brings to bear on her encounters with Afghani? How do we read the exclusivity of her focus on her sister as opposed to a broader concern with the plight of the Afghani people—here embodied by the three ages of the men (old man, boy, mature man) she chooses for her guides, and the “flocks” of women who are traveling to a wedding in Kandhar?
What—if anything—is Iranian about this film? Why do you suppose M chose just this strategy to tell a story that, in the end, is as much abt Afghani refugees as it is abt Nefas? Should this film have any special meaning for an Iranian audience, or does it seem specially designed for an international audience?
How does it fulfill the function of “cultural ambassadorship” Fischer identifies as one of the six functions of Iranian cinema? Think here esp. of the special function an Iranian filmmaker can supply in this setting, one that an American, say, could not. How does the film gesture to what’s “hidden” behind the surface of things?
Two predominant foci:
–the narrative as carried by the story of Nafas and her sister, and as presented in the form of embedded voiceover in the recordings she makes
–the visual orientation of the film, its repeated fastening on visual set-pieces: the prostheses dropped from the sky; the gallop of the crutch bearing Afghanis; the sweeping shots of the burka shrouded women in their colorful robes, etc. How does the one affect our response to the other (looking at world both through and beyond web of burka)?
Central scenes:
–the final advice offered by the teacher to the returning Afghani students
–Nafas’s negotiation with the old man and their abortive journey back to Afghanistan; his insistence that she cover herself so that he does not lose his honor
–Khak’s travails at the madrassa: how do we read the mullah’s dismissal of Khak for incompetence? What do we make of the function of the school and of the charitable allowances the mullah makes?
–Nafas’s negotiations with Khak (why after already getting the $50 does Khak insist on the $5 in return for the ring? Why later does he insist that she accept the ring for nothing in return?)
–Tabib Sahib’s “office” and treatment of Afghanis; Tabib Sahib’s interactions with Nafas (why after saying he will take her to Kandahar does he pawn her off on the suspect Hayat? What do we make of him, his history as a fighter for many sides, his current role as a healer, his seemingly inappropriate remarks about the love of a woman?)
–Hayat’s negotiations with the Red Cross officials, and the entire scene at the Red Cross outpost
–Nafas’s negotiations with Hayat, and their effort to join the wedding party
–the encounter with the Taliban, and the “selection” that ensues
–the seemingly inconclusive ending, and Nafas’s apparent lack of concern with what will happen to Hayat: where are the different groups going in the end? What does our own disorientation suggest with respect to present and future directions?
Fischer’s readings:
–what do we make of his readings of the import of the characters’ names?
–It’s clear enough that Khak aptly represents a certain tenacity and insistence that we associate with the earth or soil, but how do read Hayat’s association with “life”? Is something being said here abt his aggressiveness and insistence in his effort to survive? Does this make him a somewhat maturer version of Khak?
–How do we read Nafas’s association with her name? Does she “breathe into” film as a sense of spirit or soul, or is her orientation superfluous here, beside the point of the quest for mere survival that occupies the other chraracters?
–Along these lines, how do we respond to the officiousness of the Red Cross nurses? Are they merely doing the best they can do under strained circumstance?
Related matter:
–Any import in Nafas’s three “pretend” marriages? She is “married off” successively to the old man, Tabib Sahib, and Hayat, and ultimately divorced from them all as she submerges herself and her identity in the wedding party. She seeks both survival and success in feigned submission to her series of pretend husbands and by hiding herself in the company of other veiled women.
–Does Nafas’s sister’s planned suicide remain a concern either for Nafas or for us by the end of the film? What filmic purpose does the unstaged, still hypothetical suicide serve?
CRIMSON GOLD (dir., Jafar Panahi, 2004, Iran, 97m)
(title roughly translates into something like “Blood Money”)
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY: JAFAR PANAHI (b. 1960)
Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015)
Closed Curtain (2013)
This is Not a Film (2011)
Offside (2006)
Crimson Gold (2003)
The Circle (2000)
The Mirror (1997)
The White Balloon (1995)
In April, 2002, on the way to a New York Film Festival screening of Crimson Gold, Panahi was detained and handcuffed at JFK airport for 10 hours after refusing to be fingerprinted and photographed. A dissident in his home country, he knows a lot about the alienation he portrays in Crimson Gold. The Iranian authorities, in turn, banned the film, labeling him a tool of the Americans.
Panahi has since been sentenced to six years in prison plus a 20-year ban on all his artistic activities—including film making, writing scripts, traveling abroad and speaking with media. Panahi was convicted of “propaganda against the state” for having exercised his right to peaceful freedom of expression through his film-making and political activism. He was specifically accused of making an anti-government film without permission and inciting opposition protests after the disputed 2009 presidential election.
Panahi was detained in Evin Prison in Tehran for nearly three months following his arrest at his home on March 1, 2010. While in prison he carried out a hunger strike to protest his degrading treatment, including being forced to stand outside in the cold with no clothing. He was invited to be a judge at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2010 but was in detention during the entire festival. His absence was recognized by the presence of an empty chair meant for him in prominent view on the stage throughout the festival.
Panahi’s films are political in orientation and focus on situation of working class and of women, e.g., The Circle, which traces the tightening circle several women prison escapees find themselves in as they seek to elude re-capture in Tehran. The scope of Crimson Gold is even more narrowly focused on friendship of Hussein and Ali, two pizza delivery men and small time thieves, and on Hussein’s response to what might seem a small and predictable experience of humiliation at the hands of the owner of an upscale jewelry store. The film opens on what is chronologically its last scene, then flips back to origins of conflict that lead on to its already glimpsed culmination. Panahi provides little in the way of backstory, apart from making Hussein an unclearly disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, (1980-88) establishing his close bond with Ali, and indicating his engagement to marry Ali’s sister.
Central Scenes:
Three scenes take place in the jewelry store: one at beginning and end (which is essentially same scene); one in which Ali (Kamyar Sheisi) and Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin) make their first visit and are summarily rebuffed; and one in which they return and are again rebuffed. Three other crucial scenes involve pizza deliveries Hussein makes: 1) to a well-to-do gentleman who turns out to be his former commanding officer in the army; 2) to a party of seemingly upper middle-class young people, which is being staked out by the police and “guardians of the revolution”; and 3) to a wealthy young man who invites Hussein in to share his pizza and enjoy his palatial apartment. Though little is advanced on level of “plot” in these scenes, each of them offers marked insights into the social contradictions that beset post-revolutionary Iran while also enhancing our sense of Hussein’s social invisibility.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER FOR WRITING & VIEWING:
–What in particular makes Hussein so outraged at being rebuffed by jeweler? (This is clearly not the way everyone in his position would behave.)
–Why does the pragmatic, more savvy Ali defer to Hussein, and agree to take part in the botched robbery?
–What does Hussein hope to achieve in his last return to the jewelry store? Is he trying to prompt a belated show of respect from the owner? Does he go there to flat out kill him?
–Given how little insight the actor playing Hussein gives us into Hussein’s thoughts and motivations, what effect (if any) do we imagine that his three pizza deliveries had on his decision to intimidate/frighten/rob/kill the jeweler? The first scenes reference the very different lives Hussein and his former officer live; the second features both the privilege and entitlements of the upper-middle class and the unexamined authoritarian behavior of the police (who seem to be taking out a form of social revenge of their own here); while the third gives Hussein a sustained glimpse of just how vast the differences are between his life and those who live on the upper floors of Iranian society. So what?
–What do we make of Hussein’s characteristic silence throughout the film, particularly as that silence is contrasted with the constant jabbering of Ali and his sister?
How does Hussein’s silence “speak” for film? What does it say?
–Consider how this film “picturizes”–presents in the forms of images–contemporary Iranian society, and then consider how these images themselves contribute a form of cultural critique. Take special account of the different spaces within which dramatic “action” takes place, e.g., the jewelry store, the streets and highways of Tehran, the tea-house, the pizza delivery center, three different apartment houses, Hussein’s apartment, the interior of the rich boy’s triplex, the view of Tehran from the terrace, etc.
–How does Panahi’s preference for the long sustained shot play out and help position the point of view we as audience bring to bear on the film?
Viewing & Discussion Notes: Abbas Kiarstomi
IRAN NOTES
Iran = Aryan = Ancient Persia (Darius, Xerxes)
Language = Persian = Farsi
Majority population: Shiite Muslim, with strong Kurdish minority in Northwest (setting of film), and very small Christian Arab and Jewish elements
Conquered by Muslims; incorporated as province of Ottoman Empire; occupied by British and French in WW1 and WW2; Western-supported monarchy allied with USA during Cold War; one-man, one party repressive rule, torture of “dissidents” by secret police (Zavak) till 1979; Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini; 444-day takeover of American Embassy in Tehran by Iranian “students”; imposition of Islamic law & repression of “dissidents”; 8-year war with Iraq, enormous casualties on both sides; death of Ayatollah and gradual liberalization in late ‘90s followed by periodic backlashes. Iranian film profoundly conditioned by irregular bouts of repression and censorship, and low number of screens available for film exhibitions. Effect on style of film-making leads to emphasis on visuals over speech, “elliptical” structure and ambiguous themes, use of non-professional actors and loosely-rendered shooting scripts, disproportionate focus on children and use of child-actors, rural settings that focus on “folk cultures” as opposed to cosmopolitan strife.
ABBAS KIAROSTOMI: SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
2012 Like Someone in Love
2010 Certified Copy
2008 Shirin
2007 To Each His Own Cinema (segment “Where is my Romeo?”)
2003 Five Dedicated to Ozu (Documentary)
2002 Ten
2001 ABC Africa (Documentary)
1999 The Wind Will Carry Us
1997 Taste of Cherry
1995 Lumière and Company (Documentary)
1994 Through the Olive Trees
1992 Life, and Nothing More…
1990 Close-Up
1987 Where is the Friend’s Home?
AN UNFINISHED CINEMA by Abbas Kiarostomi
Originally, I thought that the lights went out in a movie theatre so that we could see the images on
the screen better. Then I looked a little closer at the audience settling comfortably into the seats
and saw that there was a much more important reason: the darkness allowed the members of the
audience to isolate themselves from others and to be alone. They were both with others and
distant from them.
When we reveal a film’s world to the members of an audience, they each learn to create their own
world through the wealth of their own experience.
As a filmmaker, I rely on this creative intervention for, otherwise, the film and the audience will die
together. Faultless stories that work perfectly have one major defect: they work too well to allow
the audience to intervene.
It is a fact that films without a story are not very popular with audiences, yet a story also requires
gaps, empty spaces like in a crossword puzzle, voids that it is up to the audience to fill in. Or, like
a private detective in a thriller to discover.
I believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and time to its audience. A half-created
cinema, an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience, so
resulting in hundreds of films. It belongs to the members of that audience and corresponds to their
own world.
The world of each work, of each film recounts a new truth. In the darkened theatre, we give
everyone the chance to dream and to express his dream freely. If art succeeds in changing things
and proposing new ideas, it can only do so via the free creativity of the people we are addressing –
each individual member of the audience.
Between the fabricated and ideal world of the artist and that of the person he addresses, there is a
solid and permanent bond. Art allows the individual to create his truth according to his own wishes
and criteria; it also allows him to reject other imposed truths. Art gives each artist and his audience
the opportunity to have a more precise view of the truth concealed behind the pain and passion
that ordinary people experience every day. A filmmaker’s commitment to attempting to change
daily life can only reach fruition through the complicity of the audience. The latter is active only if
the film creates a world full of contradictions and conflicts that the audience members are able to
perceive. The formula is simple: there is a world that we consider real but not completely just.
This world is not the fruit of our minds and it does not suit us all that well but, through cinematic
techniques, we create a world that is one hundred times more real and just than the one around us.
This does not mean that our world gives a false image of justice but, on the contrary, it better
highlights the contrasts that exist between our ideal world and the real world. In this world, we
speak of hope, sorrow and passion.
NOTES ON KIAROSTOMI
Most popular films are long on plot or storytelling and try to keep the action moving to maximize audience attention and engagement. Such films are escapist in more ways than one; they aggressively force the viewer to submit to what’s happening on screen and actively shape and direct the nature of audience response. They essentially dream our dreams for us, allow us to lose ourselves in the sights and sounds they put on display.
K’s cinema—which has much in common with European art cinema of the 60s and 70s—consciously refuses the high-speed rush and momentum of such films. K generally takes the most mundane aspects of existence and dwells on them in a slow, often meandering way, often using non-professional actors and improvised dialogue. Many of K’s films are virtually plotless; indeed, much of the time we can only guess what the story he’s trying to tell us is, or whether he’s trying to tell us any story at all. This kind of cinema throws us back on our own resources, and challenges us to pick out meaning and significance from whatever the camera chooses to show us or dwell on.
While we can simply turn ourselves off for the 90 minutes or so the film lasts, most viewers will at least try to participate in the act of making sense, just as we might try to make sense of, or solve, a puzzle if left alone for an extended period of time with nothing else to focus on. Since the “sense” that we try to make of such a film will often depend on what we, ourselves, bring to the subject, it may seem that K actually is encouraging us to bring our own subjective concerns and preoccupations to bear in building up, or assembling, our responsiveness to, or interpretation of, the film in question.
I don’t, however, entirely buy this argument. Rather, I think that K constantly signals the specific response to, or interpretation of, his characters and situations he expects the active or informed viewer to come to, and relies on the viewer to develop a way of “reading” those signals. He is, in this sense, doing in a much subtler and much less obvious way what commercial films do more overtly. Given how much he expects of his viewer, he also is taking exactly the kind of risk no commercial film-maker would ever take: which is the risk not only of failing to elicit the viewer’s attention, but of actively provoking the viewer’s confusion, bewilderment, and irritation.
K can take these risks, I suppose, because he assumes that the only people who will take the trouble to see his films are those who already generally know both what to expect and what not to expect. In a way, K is actually flattering his audience by assuming that they will possess the intelligence, patience, sensitivity, and good will which are the essential conditions for appreciating films like The Wind Will Carry Us.
WIND WILL CARRY US (1999) NOTES
Try to keep all this in mind when you see the film. If you find yourselves bored or bewildered and start asking yourselves such questions as–who are these guys in the truck? where are they going? for what reason?–try to rest content with the simplest answers the film makes available. They are men from the city (Tehran); their “leader” seems a well-educated man, possibly a “professional” of some sort; they are going to a village in the mountains where a place to stay has been made ready for them, though what they are to do there is a question we can only answer by paying attention to the questions the leader himself (Behzad, whom the villagers call “the engineer”) asks the villagers.
Clearly, they are waiting for something to happen (though who they are continues to remain a mystery since we only get full-length views of Behzad and never actually see his “colleagues”, though we do hear them speak). Try noticing things such as:
–How Behzad interacts with Farzad, the schoolboy, how these interactions shape our response to the two characters.
–How Behzad interacts with the other characters in the village, with the woman who runs the outdoor café, with the man who is digging a hole, with the pregnant woman in the next house, with the girl who milks the cow for him.
Then start considering such questions as:
–Is he gracious, friendly, grateful, irritable, condescending with these people? Does he listen to what people say to him? Is there any thing essentially comic, willfully ironic, in Behzad’s approach to people? in the nature of their interactions? How does Behzad interact with his cell-phone, with the people he speaks to back in Tehran, with his neighbors, with his truck, with the bone, with the tortoise, with the dung beetle?
–Do his moods, attitudes, behavior change in the course of the film? for “better” or for “worse”? What are we supposed to make of his argument with Farzad? his conversation with the schoolteacher? his response to the cave-in? his interactions with the traveling physician towards the end of the film?
–What kind of role is played throughout the film by the look, feel, daily life, culture, downright materiality of the Kurdish village? of the surrounding fields and hills and trees? How does the film’s camera-work deliver these images to us?
–What role does poetry play in the film? Does it strike you as odd that so many people quote it? How is the film like a poem? How is reading the film like reading a poem?
–Do Behzad and his colleagues get to see or find what they are waiting for? Do they get to see or find something different? In either case, what do they see or find and what difference does it make?
–When the film ends, does it seem “finished” or “unfinished”? What did you bring to the film to help “complete” it? What did the film bring to you?
CAST OF CHARACTERS:
Behzad (“engineer”)
Mrs. Malek (dying woman)
Farzad (boy)
Youssef (digger)
Zeinab (milkmaid)
Farzad’s aunt
Farzad’s Teacher
Doctor
WRITING ASSIGNMENT: 4-page paper on The Wind Will Carry Us due: October 24
Some Points of View:
–According to Hamid Dabashi, “Kiarostami’s cinema . . . is an aesthetics of the real, a countermetaphysics of the factual. It is there to filter the world and thus strip it of all its cultures, narrativities, authorities, and ideologies” (Close-Up, p. 54). On the face of it, this statement seems to accurately reflect K’s practice in The Wind Will Carry Us, a film that repeatedly tries to draw us into the textures and rhythms of daily life. However, if we take into account that everything we see on screen has been carefully selected, framed, shot, and edited, and that many of the voices we hear speaking are disembodied (that is, separated from their off-screen speakers), we may conclude that K’s cinema is more “arti-factual” than “factual”: a cinema of “artifice” which disguises its constructedness by hiding it behind the veil of “the real”. –How would you approach this question? Does it seem to you that Wind is a film structured more by accident, improvisation, serendipity (surely, the dung-beetle doesn’t arrive on cue) than it is by pre-conceived design, scripting, and framing? Or is it specifically designed to look accidental, improvisational, and serendipitous? If the latter is the case, so what?
–According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, “the particular ethics of The Wind Will Carry Us largely consist of K reflecting on his own practice as a ‘media person’ exploiting poor people. To broach this matter, we can note that Behzad may be the closest thing in K’s work to a critical self-portrait” (Abbas Kiarostami 35). Rosenbaum also claims that K “is critiquing the premise of his own filmmaking and implying that there’s no ethical difference between a TV director making a documentary about an old woman’s funeral and a celebrated filmmaker-artist like himself entering a village to make a feature” (AK 36). How does K “reflect on” or “critique” his own practice through the medium of Behzad? How does Behzad reflect on or critique his own practice in the course of the film? How does K encourage us to assess Behzad’s interactions with Yousef (the digger), Zeynab (the milkmaid), Farzad (the schoolboy), Farzad’s aunt (the pregnant woman), the tea-house lady, the teacher, the turtle, the leg-bone, the physician, and his cell-phone; his preoccupation with Mrs. Malek and her imminent demise; his attitude towards the look and feel of the mountains, the fields, and the village itself?
—Wind repeatedly frustrates our desire for narrative, for storytelling, for the clearly delineated outlines of a plot, moving through conflict to some form of resolution. Yet in order for the film to achieve anything more than visual significance, or to deliver anything more than a few isolated moments of dramatic satisfaction, it must not only sustain our attention but give our demand for narrative something to hold onto, some bits and pieces of visual and dramatic information that we can string together and construct meaning from. Although Kiarostomi claims to deliver a “half-created cinema” into our hands which relies on our “creative spirit” to attain “completion”, the creative spirit he has in mind must work with what K himself makes available, with the way he privileges this image over that one, shoots one character from on high, another from below, etc. Can’t we, in fact, piece together at least the contours of a narrative, or of a coherent series of images and insights, for The Wind Will Carry Us? What “story” about the village and its practices does the film try to tell? What “story” about the mysterious visitors from Tehran does it seem to convey? How are these two “stories” connected? How do they inflect one another? Can you detect an “arc” in the film’s development, a moment or series of moments that alter what comes before and shapes what comes after? Is the photo-snapping Behzad the same man at the end as he was at the beginning (when he forgot his camera, tried to use it, then forgot it again)? (Are we aware that another kind of camera which we do not see is always photographing him and, if so, so what?) What role do Farzad and the other villagers play in this story? Is the story as much about them as it is about Behzad?
–We have another alternative for “reading” this film, one that has much in common with the film’s own preoccupations with the reciting of poetry; that is, we can read the film as we do a poem–fastening on images, textures, stray words, repetitions, juxtapositions, the rolling of an apple, the look of a weathered face–without trying to transform it into a consistent plot or narrative. In this, we may also use the film’s title as our cue or point of departure (note that Behzad recites the poem from which the film’s title is drawn in the milking scene). What does it mean that “the wind will take us away” or “carry us”? How do the closing scenes of the film focusing on the physician help gloss the meanings of this phrase? What do the village and the surrounding fields contribute to the character of the film-as-poem?
VIEWING NOTES: A Separation (dir., Asghar Farhadi, 2011, 123m)
IRAN NOTES:
Iran = Aryan = Ancient empire of Persia (Darius, Xerxes)
Language = Persian = Farsi
Majority population: Shiite Muslim, with strong Kurdish minority in Northwest, and very small Christian Arab and Jewish elements
Conquered by Muslims in Middle Ages; later became province of Ottoman Empire; occupied by British and French in WW1 and WW2; freely elected government of socialist Mossadegh overthrown with planning and help of CIA in 1953: this would become source of great and continuing resentment.
Western-supported monarchy led by Reza Ali Khan, self-styled Shah of Iran, allied with USA and Britain during Cold War; one-man, one party repressive rule, torture of both religious (Shiite) and political (Communists, socialists) “dissidents” by secret police (Zavak) till 1979; Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979; 444-day takeover of American Embassy in Tehran by Iranian “students”; imposition of Islamic law & repression of “dissidents”; theocentric state.
1980-88: Iran-Iraq War: enormous casualties on both sides; bloodiest and most destructive military conflict since WW2; use of chemical weaponry; vast numbers of Iranian teenagers recruited to serve as “martyrs” to the cause.
Death of Ayatollah and gradual liberalization in late ‘90s followed by periodic backlashes, leading earlier in this century to the political dominance of extreme Islamist party led by Ahmehdinijad, and occasionally surges of moderate liberalization, as in recent election of Rahani
Iranian Cinema & film culture, pre- and post- 1979:
–Leading figures: Kiarostomi, Makhmalbaf, Marziyeh, Panahi, Qobadi, Farhadi
–Major films: Taste of Cherry, Wind Will Carry Us, The Circle (Panahi), Kandahar, Marooned in Iraq, Moment of Innocence.
–Most films not available for screening within Iran; those that are often adopt strategies that effectively mask or displace political agendas: focus on children, on peasant life and remote areas of country. All of Qobadi’s films, e.g., focus on hard lot of Kurds on borderlands of Iran and Iraq. Protocols of censorship are erratic and often contradictory; government takes pride in allowing export of cutting-edge films that common Iranians are not allowed to see.
–Films of Kiarsotomi are most sophisticated and cosmopolitan in orientation, and often focus on the kind of upper-class families and individuals we encounter in works like Persepolis; those of Panahi are most expressly political in orientation and focus on situation of working class and of women, e.g., The Circle, which traces the tightening circle several women prison escapees find themselves in as they seek to elude re-capture in Tehran.
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY: Asghar Farhadi (b. 1972)
2018 Everybody KNows
2016 The Salesman
2013 The Past
2011 A Separation: Golden Bear Berlin International Film Festival. Best Foreign Language Film: Boston Society of Film Critics, Chicago & Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, Golden Globes, César Award, Independent Spirit Award; Academy Award. First Iranian film ever to win an Oscar.
2009 About Elly: Silver Bear for Best Director, Berlin International Film Festival; Best Picture at Tribeca Film Festival. Iran’s official submission for the Foreign Language Film competition of Academy Awards in 2009.
2006 Fireworks Wednesday
2004 Dancing in the Dust
CAST
Payman Maadi … Nader
Leila Hatami … Simin
Sareh Bayat … Razieh
Shahab Hosseini … Hojjat
Sarina Farhadi … Termeh
Merila Zare’i … Miss Ghahraii
Ali-Asghar Shahbazi … Nader’s Father
Babak Karimi … Interrogator
Kimia Hosseini … Somayeh
Shirin Yazdanbakhsh … Simin’s Mother
Sahabanu Zolghadr … Azam
VIEWING & DISCUSSION NOTES:
–How does Farhadi try from the start to position his audience as judges or arbitrators of the impossible dilemmas that beset the film’s main characters? How, in turn, does he later authorize the government’s official interrogator to take on that role in our place? What are we led to think of the system of Iranian justice represented in this film?
–Like many modern societies, Iran’s is divided into many parts, two of which are represented in this film by a well-educated, secular-leaning middle-class Tehran family and a poor, religiously conservative working class family that can only afford to live on the outskirts of Tehran. In Tehran this divide has deep political and cultural consequences and contradictions; the faith of the working class is consistent with that of the country’s supreme leaders, but the educated middle-class remains far better off economically. How is this social or class divide staged or represented in this film? Whose interests (if any) does Farhadi set out to advance or defend?
–Simin’s resolve to divorce Nader rather than remain stuck in Iran may strike you as indefensible or inexplicable given its implications for her daughter, Termeh, and the fate of Nader’s housebound father—and, we might add, given how unorthodox such a move might look even to the most Western-oriented Iranian. How does the film seek to explain Simin’s motivations? What does Farhadi do to make her a sympathetic character?
–Children have been a prominent feature in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema; foregrounding their challenges and experiences became a popular way to address broader social problems in an indirect, hence, permissible way. What function do the two daughters from opposite sides of the track serve in this film? How differently is their behavior represented from that of their mothers and fathers?
ADDITIONAL NOTES:
Qisas (the law of retaliation/retribution) is a sharia class of crime involving personal injury. It is similar to a civil law tort. If a person has intentionally murdered or maimed another person, the victim (or victim’s family) is entitled to retribution (an “eye for an eye” in the case of personal injury or a life for a life in the case of murder). However, the victim (victim’s family) can forgive the perpetrator and have the punishment not carried out. If so, the perpetrator must pay blood money (diyya)to compensate for the injury/death.
If the death was intentional murder (qatl-e-amnd) or intentional injury (zarb-jahr amnd), qisas can be applied. If the death was unintentional (manslaughter)(qatl-e-na-amd) or unintentional injury (zarb-jahr na-amnd), qisas cannot apply, but the person can receive up to 3 years in prison in order to pay the money. If an unborn child was killed, while considered intentional murder, the maximum punishment is 1–3 years in prison.
Qisas is considered by Islamic scholars to be extremely fair and just. For example, in western countries, the family of the victim has no say in the punishment that the perpetrator receives, yet in Islamic law, a murderer could be executed or forgiven depending upon the wishes of the family. In intentional qisas cases, the sentence would sometimes be delayed for 5 years in order to increase the chances of a settlement, and allow the criminal to amass the blood money.
Diyyeh (blood money) In any case of personal injury, the victim’s family may accept diyyeh, or blood money to compensate for the death/injury. The official rate that diyyeh is a price equal to 100 camels (this precedent was set by Prophet Muhammad). However, the blood money must be paid in cash only, not by bartering or any other means. While the victim’s/victim’s families have a right to retribution (qesas) when the crime is committed intentionally, they are recommended by the Qu’ran and judges to forgive the defendant.
In practice, blood money is settled through negotiation between the two parties, and the final sum is usually more or less than the official “100 camels” amounts, unless both sides could not reach a settlement.
A woman receives 1/2 of the blood money a man does. However, in practice, since the blood money is settled through negotiation between the parties, normally women receive equal amounts as men, and in 2008, the law was changed allowing women equal amounts of diyyeh in cases involving insurance and life-insurance. An unborn child in the first period of pregnancy will receive 1/20 of regular diyyeh, and in the second period, 1/10 of regular diyyeh.
In an intentional case, the money must be paid at once, and the person must remain in prison until the money is paid. In unintentional cases, the blood money can be paid over a period of 1–3 years, it the person fails to generate the money, they will go to debtor’s prison until it is paid. The family of the murderer/injurerer is expected to help pay the blood money. In other cases, the government will subsidize it, or private charities/citizens will help pay.
In rape/sodomy rape cases, the rapist must pay “jirah”, which is similar to blood money, but equivalent to a woman’s dowry (mahr), usually in exchange for forgiveness. In addition, they may be forced to also pay diyyeh as well, for injuries inflicted during the rape.
ISRAEL
Viewing Notes: Kippur (dir., Amos Gitai, Israel-France,120m, 2000)
Select Filmography:
Rabin, The Last Day (2015)
Tsili (2014)
Ana Arabia (2013)
Carmel (2009)
Disengagement (2007)
Free Zone (2005)
Promised Land (2004)
Alila (“Plot”, 2003)
Kedma (2002)
Kippur (2000)
Kadosh (“Holy”,1999)
Yom Yom (“Day by Day:,1998)
Esther (1985)
Cast:
Liron Levo Weinraub
Tomer Russo Ruso
Uri Klauzner Klausner
Yoram Hatteb The Pilot
Guy Amir Gadassi
Juliano Mer The Captain
Ran Kauchinsky Shlomo
Kobi Livne Kobi
Liat Glick Dina
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From Fred Camper review, Chicago Reader (1-5-01): “Gitai plunges the viewer into the reality of modern warfare, in which the enemy is often invisible — we never see the Syrians in Kippur — and battle lines are often unclear. Americans learned this lesson in Vietnam, Soviets in Afghanistan; Israelis and Arabs, sadly, are still learning it today. But by moving from a relatively objective long shot to a subjective view of the trenches in a single take, Gitai also questions the whole notion of documentary truth. Gitai told interviewer Ray Privett in the fall 2000 issue of Cinemascope, “I do not make objective images. I don’t believe in them. As individuals we perceive the world according to our position within a network of images. We are surrounded by images that are all subjective. CNN news is subjective, ABC news is subjective…” But by moving in a single take from conventionally objective images to chaotic point-of-view shots, Gitai also gives his soldiers’ perceptions a vividness, a presence, that encourages the viewer to accept them as the truth about war rather than intellectually locating them within a “network” of other images.”
Camper on opening “sex painting” scene: “This scene is formally linked to the rest of the film […] It’s chaotic, its mix of colors reappears in mud-splattered images of Weinraub, and its blue and green reflect nature just as its red suggests blood. The mixing of blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, with green and red and white (“Arab national colors”) makes an implied argument for peace. But the real key to this scene can be found at its outset: that moment of white before the first splash of color appears, a metaphor for cinema’s irreducible zero point, the white screen. Celluloid subtracts colors from the projector’s white light — the ones allowed through create the image — while Gitai’s lovers replace the white with gradually added colors, creating an image through their choice of human activity, just as a filmmaker does.
The scene not only stands in for the film and for the war but makes this statement: images are arbitrary human constructions, the result of choices by humans who are not heroes, whose fates are as intertwined as the clutching bodies of the lovers. The Yom Kippur war too was the product of choices by peoples whose histories have been interwoven for centuries, but by giving us little information about the war’s causes, Gitai allows it to represent all conflicts. War is a human fabrication as arbitrary and absurd as a mannered piece of performance art — and it does not have to happen.”
See http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Gitai.html
Questions/Points of View to Consider:
–Gitai occasionally films this “small war”—which only lasted 3 weeks—as if it involved some of the same horror and suffering of trench warfare in WW1. In no way does he ever claim—or try to be—objective, choosing to use footage he made after heavy rainfall on impossibly muddy battlefields, whereas the weather during the 21 days of the actual war was warm and clear. Given the fact that this was hardly a commercial film, what seems to have prompted his decisions?
–Both the smaller and larger wars Israel has fought with neighboring Arabs have all taken place within driving distance of the homes of members of the JDF (Jewish Defense Force). To what effect does Gitai apply this fact in Kippur? How does physical proximity to the fields of battle appear to affect the JDF soldiers?
–Gitai (see interview) confirms that Kippur is an anti-war film but he’s a little more ambiguous about whether or not it can also be construed as “patriotic”. As you watch the film, try to detect what (if anything) is “not patriotic” about it if patriotism implies love of homeland and the devotion to one’s fellow citizens?
–Given the backstory Gitai gives Klausner, and the plaintive appeal for his mother he makes near the film’s end, would you conclude that Kippur is a more conventional war film that it may initially appear? What other aspects of the film render it conventional?
–How does Gitai film the interaction midway through the film between Ruso and Klausner in the men’s sleeping quarters? Note in particular the way the interaction is blocked, with Ruso first sitting on his own bed, then moving to Klausner’s, then moving back to his own. How representative is this sequence of other interactions between members of the rescue crew in the course of the film?
–What, finally, do you make of the sex/painting scenes that frame the film at beginning and end? Why did Gitai include them and position them as he does?
VIEWING NOTES: GETT: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014, 115m)
Select Director Filmography: Shlomi & Ronit Elkabetz
2014 Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
2008 7 Days
2004 To Take a Wife
Selected Cast:
Ronit Elkabetz … Viviane Amsalem
Simon Abkarian Elisha Amsalem
Carmel Ben Tovim Menashe Noy (lawyer for Viviane)
Sasson Gabai Rabbi Shimon (Elisha’s brother & lawyer)
Rami Danon Rabbi Danino
Roberto Pollack Rabbi Abraham
Eli Gornstein Rabbi Salmion
Context & Partial Synopsis:
In Israel, there is no civil marriage or divorce; only Orthodox rabbis can legalize these marital states. In order for a woman to divorce, she must be granted a gett from her husband, who needs no grounds for refusal. The primary interest of the presiding rabbinical courts is the preservation of the Jewish family, so unless there is evidence of abuse or inadequate support, the courts place no value on irreconcilable differences. A woman who lives apart from her husband without a gett is automatically shunted into a lower stratum of society for the rest of her life.
Three years prior to the start of the film, Viviane separated from Elisha, who refuses to grant her a gett. She has now brought her request to the rabbinical court, where her case will drag on for another five years while she’s whacked by a continual series of Catch-22s. Almost all of the film takes place within the walls of the courtroom, the plaintiff and the defendant along with each of their attorneys at tiny wooden tables, while the rabbinical jury of three towers over them from a high bench.
The Amsalems are Moroccan Jews who moved to Israel; Elisha is a fastidiously religious man, while Viviane, who was 15 when they married, has grown more secular over the years – one of the results, she claims, of living with her pedantic husband. Relatives and neighbors are called in as witnesses as the trial moves forward in dollops scheduled at intervals of several months or weeks. Yet even these testimonies give way to unforeseen twists and consequences.
The film is composed entirely of point-of-view shots. Although she’s in the room, Viviane is not even part of the image during the early minutes of the film. At first, she dresses modestly for the court appearances; midway through, as her hope dwindles, her attire grows more indelicate.
From Indiewire interview w/ Shlomo Elkabetz:
You use her silence so effectively, and when she explodes, it works.
When we came to shoot, we said, “How do we shoot a film where we have two lead characters and they’re not talking most of the film.” They have only three scenes where she talks, and Elisha has a scene-and-a-half. That’s it — they’re not talking — but these are the characters that carry the film. It’s not a film about two lawyers, but we have to shoot this silent film. We did that every time we shot a scene with the talking actress. It took us, like, half-a-day to shoot it, and then we took just two, three, four days to shoot the looks. We shoot around her. Who’s looking at whom? Who’s reacting to what? Who’s reacting to what smile, to what sound, and so on. That we developed on the shooting days.
A lot of daggers going back and forth between the two of them.
Of course. And, of course, we kind of took advantage of the setting, so we could take a lot of low angles — a lot of high angles, on the opposite. So we could deconstruct the room in many different ways.
From Eli Glasman, “Breaking the Chain:”
“Viviane’s trial is not just about her, but also a platform to explore the culture of arranged marriages within Orthodox Judaism. With each witness that is called, we are exposed to different attitudes towards the religion’s approach to matrimony. This section of the film is reminiscent of Helen Gottstein’s one-woman show Four Faces of Israel, in which the actress changes clothes and characters to outline everyday Israelis’ differing views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Gett’s witnesses serve a similar function. Every witness brought into the courtroom – whether they be the ‘spinster’, the submissive housewife or the unmarried, irreligious lawyer – speaks of their own lives and roles within the Jewish community.”
Also from Glasman: how do you respond to this?
“Yet the filmmakers seem a little too eager to depict Elisha as the bad guy – despite his passive aggression, there is never a moment in the film in which he is not the obvious villain. His wickedness is conveniently conveyed not only in his demeanour, but also in his twisted logic of love. Throughout Gett, he refuses to see himself in the wrong. He is complacent about the social advantages of being male in such a patriarchal society, and shows no sympathy for Viviane despite all his supposed love for her. While Elisha is middle-aged, the film frames him as having the defensiveness and inability for self-reflection of a teen-ager. Gett may have had a greater impact if it had humanised Elisha a little more. The way he is characterised could leave viewers with the impression that there is something inherently wrong with him, and that this system could actually work if the proceedings involved reasonable men. But this seems less aligned with the filmmakers’ goal of critiquing Israel’s rabbinical court system, which allows women like Viviane to be treated in such a fashion.”
From Meir’s opening prayer in Kadosh:
“Thank you for not making me a woman.”
VIEWING: Waltz with Bashir (dir., Ari Folman, Israel/France, 90m, 2008)
Filmography:
The Congress 2013
Waltz with Bashir 2008
Made in Israel 2001
Clara Hakedosha 1996
Cast:
Ron Ben Yishai Himself (voice)
Ronny Dayag Himself (voice)
Ari Folman Himself (voice)
Shmuel Frenkel Himself (voice)
Dror Harazi Himself (voice)
Yehezkel Lazarov Carmi Can’an (voice)
Mickey Leon Boaz Rein-Buskila (voice)
Ori Sivan Himself (voice)
Zahava Solmon Herself (voice)
Points of Reference:
1982 Lebanon War in which IDF (Israeli Defense Force) effectively stood by and “allowed” Lebanese Phalangists (right-wing Christian, “fascist” party) to kill 3,000 Palestinians in revenge for the assassination of the Phalangist leader, Bashir Gemayel.
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From interview with Folman by Andrew O’Hehir, Friday, December 26, 2006, salon.com
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/12/26/folman
“This is not a Richard Linklater-technique film. This is not rotoscope […] With rotoscope you have a video and you put the video into the computer. Then you go through a process where you draw over the video to get the film you want. Here’s what we did: We had a video that was done in a sound studio, that was cut and everything. Then we drew the video again, from scratch. The video was there as a reference, the sound was used. But it was drawn from scratch. I just thought that rotoscope animation would not qualify in an emotional way. The audience will not get emotionally attached to the characters if they’re rotoscoped. There’s too much technique there, you can see the video below. We wanted something different and more complicated.”
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For another, much briefer interview with Folman, go to:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/movies/26bash.html (NY Times registration may be required). Also available here is a review of Bashir by A.O. Scott, followed by about 18 reader comments, among which one of the most interesting is the following:
#1) A continuous haze of self indulgence. I do not argue with A.O. Scott that Waltz With Bashir was an artistic achievement in form and perhaps somewhat in content too. However, I suppose when one scratches the surface, which I expect my reviewers to do, one discovers that Waltz with Bashir continues the ‘innocent Israeli narrative’ in which youth is blamed for ignorance, and trauma is the site of Israeli self-reflection/indulgence. As a Jew who currently resides in Palestine working on another film about the reality as it exists from this side of the wall, it never fails to astonish me the self-centeredness and complete lack of responsibility Israelis have for their actions. In very American fashion, therapy becomes the bastion of ‘working through issues’ and we watch our main character mine his consciousness not so much for what he has done but rather for what happened (ie Sabra and Shatila) that he cannot quite remember. Convenient. Israel is a country whose citizens seems to be walking in a perpetual ‘haze’. As the film aptly represents the self-indulgent Israeli in a state of PTSD, it fails to address (and hence therefore understand) that the war in Lebanon was A. a war of aggression, an invasion by Israel that wreaked further havoc in a country already deeply weakened and fragile from years of civil war, and B. that the Sabra and Shatila massacres were not only the ‘indirect responsibility’ of Israel but in fact were quite directly their fault; Israel had been supporting the Phalangist militia with arms for years and the Israeli leaders (Ariel Sharon, then Defense Minister, and Rafi Eitan, Chief of Staff) allowed the Phalangists into the Palestinian refugee camp to do their dirty work. It is quite widely held that Sharon, Eitan, and the leaders were not only fully aware of what might happen but that they were part of the larger plan to rid themselves of the ‘problem’ of the Palestinian refugee camps and the political factions therein. Waltz with Bashir, despite its intention to deal with and expose the atrocities of Sabra and Shatila, once again provided us with the ‘innocent’ (navel-gazing) Israeli who seems not only oblivious to the realities of what his country was up to in 1982, but is the perfect reflection 25 years on of the contemporary Israeli: one who is not only oblivious to the daily atrocities imposed on Palestinians, but is also inactive, caught instead in their own ‘musings’ and ‘traumas’. – eflanders,
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from Debra Kaufman, “How They Did It: Waltz with Bashir”
http://www.studiodaily.com/2008/12/how-they-did-it-waltz-with-bashir/
Flash is a well-known tool but doesn’t usually come to mind as a way to animate an entire feature film. But that’s what director Ari Folman did, constrained by a tiny budget but certain that animation was the only way to tell his story. From the opening scene, in which a pack of wild, vicious dogs rampage through a city street, it’s quite clear that Waltz with Bashir isn’t a typical animated feature. First shot as a documentary with three DVCAMs, and then painstakingly transformed into animation, Waltz with Bashir also defies easy categorization as an animated feature.
Stylistically, a documentary is ordinarily quite different from animation. But filmmaker Ari Folman has a different point of view. “Who decides what is more true?” he says. “A digital image that you see on a screen that is made out of pixels and dots and lines, or a drawn one, both of them are speaking in the same voice? Who decides the video picture is more real than an artist who drew the images for four months? Folman admits he was “clueless” about the challenges that awaited him when he tackled an animated feature.
Though keyframe animation was an impossibly expensive route, Folman was determined to make the best of a toolset dictated by dollars and cents. “We had to take the low-budget issue as an advantage and to invent something that is different so when you look at it, you don’t say, oh I’ve seen this before,” he says. Most importantly, Folman is emphatic that the film was not rotoscoped. “I respect rotoscoping […] “But, for me, rotoscoping has a big problem in conveying emotions. You see the technique, you see the drawings, and that takes your focus. If this film had been rotoscoped, it would have been hard for the audience to get emotional with the characters.”
The first step was to videotape, on a sound stage, the interviews and even bare-bones representations of the war re-enactments. “We tried to dramatize those scenes in the studio as much as we could,” says Folman. “We’d sit in two chairs with a plastic grill in front and pretend we were in a car.” One thing Folman was firm about was recording crystal-clear sound, without distractions of a cinema verite style recording.
Once the movie was videotaped, it was first turned into a storyboard and, from there, an animatic. “We made the animatic very precise,” says Folman. “I wanted to minimize as much as possible any mistakes that could appear at the animation stage.” The animatic was screened multiple times, to see if the drama was working and to lock in the story.
The next step was to draw 3,500 keyframes at crucial points in the movie; art director and illustrator David Polonsky drew 75 percent of them. From one keyframe to the next, the animators […] moved the keyframe in classic cutout style. Autodesk Maya was used only for spectacular turning points in the film: one scene goes from snow in the forest, up into the sky and then down into the boat. “Most of them are the more fantastical shots,” says Folman. The design […] played a key role in developing and creating the film. In fact, Folman goes so far as to say “the design dictated a lot of the animation.” “I was obsessed that the characters would really have a realistic style,” he says. “That meant more detailed faces with contours and wrinkles, etc., which made it more complicated to animate them.
To achieve realism in the environments, says Folman, the team took photographs and then carefully added all the background details. To achieve realism for the faces and bodies, animators broke them into sections and sub-sections. The face was typically divided into 8 sections and each section into 15 sub-sections. This didn’t work well for the lower part of the body – slow movements weren’t realistic. “In many places, we did the lower part of the body with frame-by-frame classic animation,” he says.
The film’s dramatic conclusion takes place in what Folman calls “hard-core documentary” style. “It’s in a monochrome color design between orange and black – melancholy and depressing, and less detailed in the characters,” he says. All of the styles were tied in, stylistically, to the “super scene,” the vision of the three soldiers in the sea that repeats three times.
Viewing Notes:
–What does Folman’s choice of animation enable or make possible that a more conventional filmmaking approach does not?
–In terms of content, most other Israeli war films concentrate on the youth of the Israeli soldiers. Bashir comes at this subject differently insofar as we watch middle-aged men in the present (roughly 2008) recount their youthful career as soldiers in Lebanon in 1982. In this respect, whatever naivete or innocence they possessed as soldiers has been seasoned by experience, understanding, and regret. What service, would you suppose, does this film imaginably perform for an all-Israeli viewing audience that the others might not?
–How do we understand the several surprising moments in Bashir that seem to slip past the documentary conventions within which much of the film is working? What is the function of dream or nightmare or fantasy in the film? Is the “reality” of the film itself essentially dream-like? If so, so what?
–What do you make of the sudden drop into documentary footage at the very end of the film? How do you respond to this unexpected shift from the surreal to the real?
ISRAEL/WEST BANK
Viewing & Discussion Notes Divine Intervention
(dir., Elia Suleiman, 2002, 92m)
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY:
The Time That Remains (2009)
Divine Intervention (2002)
Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996)
Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990)
CAST:
Elia Suleiman E.S.
Manal Khader Woman
George Ibrahim Santa Claus
Amer Daher Auni
Jamel Daher Jamal
Lufuf Nuweiser Neighbor w/ American Van
Read Masarweh Abu Basil
Bassem Loulou Abu Amer
Salvia Nakkara Adia
Naamar Jarjoura Uncle
Rama Nashashibi Um Elias
NOTES:
From Xan Brooks, “When we started shooting, so did they,” Guardian, January 13, 2003. See http://www.film.guardian.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,873837,00.html
“When Elia Suleiman brought his film Divine Intervention to Ramallah he found the Israeli soldiers had got there first. The entrance to the cinema had been bombed, the cashtill rifled, the Dolby stereo stolen. Storming the adjacent ‘house of culture,’ the soldiers proceeded to gun down a row of costumed mannequins and shoot holes in a canvas that hung on the wall. ‘They executed a painting,’ Suleiman says, before dissolving into giggles. ‘I thought it was so funny. I mean, it’s depressing when you’re there. I was in Ramallah only yesterday and I was completely devastated. But we all have our own mechanism to lift us up again. Yesterday was a nightmare. Today I’m laughing.”
From Hamid Dabashi, “In Praise of Frivolity: On the Cinema of Elia Suleiman,” in Dabashi, ed., Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. London: Verso, 2006
“What we witness in Suleiman’s cinema is the precise critical moment when the depth of tragedy mutates into the height of comedy, comedy meets absurdity, and then absurdity remembers the dark dread at the heart of its own memory of the terror it must, and cannot but, remember. Keeping the memory of the cruel past alive, out-foxing the clumsy occupier (all occupiers are clumsy, for they are, ipso facto, not at home), and holding a fire of hope, a ray of purposeful intelligence, for the future of Palestine is what holds the cinema of Elia Suleiman together . . .” (135).
“I never really come to a film through the structure. I simply jot down notes and build a story through them. Then I compose tableaux. When I get a tableau that stands by itself, it becomes an image. Later, when you shoot, there are a lot of ever-present possibilities. I write a very precisely structured script, but then I leave that work alone and start the process again. I want to avoid archiving images. I always want to make the creative process continue and not simply shoot what I’ve written on the set. Also, something else happens through the montage [the act and art of editing]. In terms of narrative structure, it’s because I see them in poetic montage . . . Chronicle of a Disappearance was a document about the time that I shot it. For me, it was the silence before the storm. This one [Divine Intervention], which also follows some of the same individuals, shows all hell breaking loose.” (Elia Suleiman in Dabashi 135-6)
Dabashi refers to this “purposeful frivolity” as a form of “substitutional narrative, a manner of storytelling when all else has failed” (136). He also claims that “disjointed narrative amounts to the discursive dismantling” of the colonizing state, and “of the violence that brought about and sustains it” (136).
[Connect with next weekend readings. Note how much of his account resonates with Cleary’s discussion of the difficulty of confidently deploying the formats of the 19th century realist European novel to represent 20th century Palestinian experience: the experience of a scattered people, divided up into fragments, a “nation” (if ever a nation) only on the level of dreams, fantasy, utopian political projection. Yet also note how Suleiman’s decision to confront fragmentation on its own terms represents his pursuit of the kind of modernist alternative taken 40 years earlier by Kanafani. Though the mood and style of these two works could not be more different, both approach the challenge of storytelling by engaging in forms of spatial and temporal dislocation, and strategies of disorientation.]
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
–Though Dabashi is surely correct to note how “disjointed narrative” may amount “to the discursive dismantling” of the colonizing state, what more sustained effect can such dismantling claim? When Palestinian successes or triumphs operate only on the level of discourse or fantasy in this film (the apricot pit exploding the tank, the Woman defying the guards, Arafat reclaiming al-Aqsa mosque, ES facing down the Jewish settler by playing “I Put a Spell on You,” and the Woman playing Ninja warrior to comically rendered Israeli soldiers), what real success or triumph can be claimed?
–Why do E.S. and the Woman sit together above the checkpoint? Why do they choose this place to “make love” with their hands? If they are together already, why would they want/need to cross over, and from where to where? Jersualem to Ramallah? Or Ramallah to Jerusalem? If, as Suleiman contends in his interview with Jason Wood, love “leaks and seeps and goes through any kind of checkpoint” (Woods 219), couldn’t it also be said that the checkpoint “leaks and seeps and goes through any kind of” love?
–Why do you suppose Suleiman chose to parallel the checkpoint sequences with the stages of sickness and death of E.S.’s father? Are we supposed to try to connect the one series of images with the other? If so, how is the death of the father tied to the departure of the Woman?
–Why are E.S. and his mother staring at the pressure cooker at the end of the film? What are they waiting for?
–Dabashi and others are intent on claiming that Divine Intervention—through its fragmented style and content, and refusal to satisfy cinematic expectations—constitutes a form of defiance against the Israeli state. But what might it also be saying about the position and agency of Palestinian artist-intellectuals like Suleiman? Of Palestinians in general? Where, in the end, does the film take its characters?
======================================
DETAILED VIEWING NOTES :
Opening image: Santa Claus being chased by boys up barren hills
NAZARETH
Cursing man (father)
A Chronicle of Love & Pain
Here begins a series of unnarrated, largely silent fragments or tableaux, whose continuity is disrupted both spatially and temporally:
Man waiting for bus (“I am crazy b/c I love you.”)
Man climbing up roof/bottles
Father opening letters/heart attack
Car climbing up driveway watched by 2 old men
Man on roof throwing bottles at cops
Man throwing garbage into neighbor’s garden
Father smoking outside/other men soldering
Road digger measuring, adjusting/car gets stuck
Soccer boy loses ball—man on roof punctures it—another man beats up man on roof
Garden lady throws garbage back—“neighbors should respect each other”
Men beating snake to death
Can we assemble a narrative from these fragments? Are we encouraged to? Or would doing so be opposed to the design or drift of the imagery?
Father’s heart attack/ES eating apricot and throwing pit at tank: explosion: How do we read/respond to this?
Hospital: ES & father
Checkpoint closed: the Woman proudly, confidently, contemptuously walks through it to techno beat—slo mo—watchtower crashes down—fade. (When screened in Ramallah, audience applauded as soon as her foot stepped over the border [ES])
Al-Ram checkpoint (Ramallah)
ES & Woman touching hands—go different ways/Is there a “story” here?
Hospital—checkpoint—Woman & ES watching
Drive-by firebombing (who is victimized by whom?)
JERUSALEM
Surveillance van—tourist asks for directions to Holy Sepulcher—blindfolded Arab prisoner provides them since Israeli cop doesn’t know area
Post-Its (insight into organization of fragments): “father falls sick”
Checkpoint—3 suspects—soldiers wipe mud/shit off boots
Hospital corridors—everyone is smoking (b/c there’s no predictable tomorrow?)
Checkpoint—music/Arab music
Shooting at firebombed house
Directions—“lost again”—prisoner has escaped [what’s effect of making Israeli soldiers & police seem so clueless? Is it a way of rendering them less dangerous or threatening? Does it serve interest of providing Palestinian viewer w/ a vicarious triumph/sense of superiority?]
Post It: “I am crazy b/c I love you”
Checkpoint: Arafat balloon causes panic, settles at top of al-Aqsa mosque; set-piece scene: what’s achieved? What’s suggested?
Woman at ES’s apt, ES sleeping—she walks away
[Man showing off alarm system]
ES looking @ father at hospital
Headphones-ES looking @ city, ES alone @ checkpoint
Soldiers harassing, mocking working people—high angle sustained shot of traffic @ chkpoint [one of most interactive segments of film: Israeli soldiers very differently positioned here insofar as they seem decidedly nasty & threatening]
ES on highway-“Come Shoot if you’re ready” Ninja poster
Stare-down w/ man in yarmulka: “I Put a Spell on You” w/ Arabic beat/: “You better stop the things that you do” (Jarmusch Stranger than Paradise citation)
What seems like arm wrestling shifts to ES helping father out of bed (struggle, conflict, love, & solidarity conjoined)
Chkpoint [note empty passenger seat]—ambulances
Firing Range—Rock video—scene morphs into ninja film of Palestinian Woman
Final scenes: ES crying out of sorrow or b/c slicing onions—removing post-its: “Father dies”; traffic, vicious anecdote
Mother & ES watch pressure cooker—“Stop it. That’s enough now”
VIEWING NOTES: Five Broken Cameras
(dir., Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi, 2011, 94m)
Guy Davidi, was born In Jaffa to a Jewish family, and grew up in Holon South of Tel Aviv. When he was 10 years old his father died and the family moved to Kfar-Saba, north of Tel Aviv. In high school he studied cinema and started making short films. At 19 he refused doing his obligatory military service in the Israeli Army after being enrolled for 3 months. From 2000-2002 he taught cinema in a Tel Aviv high school. In 2000 he studied at Tel Aviv University Cinema School. From 2002-2003 he lived in Paris. After returning to Israel he started working as cameraman with documentary filmmakers. From 2003 he became engaged with the Israeli branch of Indymedia and filmed many video reports and short documentaries about Israeli social and political issues. Many of the documentaries were filmed in the Palestinian Occupied territories, dealing with the Israeli Occupation. In 2005 he studied directing actors in Amir Orian’s “The Room Theater”. From 2005 he has been teaching cinema and video to Israeli artists and activists in private workshops. In 2005 for the creation of his first long documentary he spent 3 months living in the West-Bank village of Bil’in. He currently lives in Tel-Aviv.
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY:
2016 High Hopes (Documentary short) (completed)
2013 Mixed Feelings (Documentary)
2011 Five Broken Cameras (Documentary)
2010 Women Defying Barriers (Documentary short)
2010 Keywords (Documentary short)
2010 Interrupted Streams (Documentary)
2009 A Gift from heaven (Documentary short)
2006 In Working Progress (Documentary short)
SELECT CAST
Emad Burnat Himself – Narrator
Soraya Burnat … Herself – Wife of Emad
Mohammed Burnat … Himself – Son of Emad
Yasin Burnat … Himself – Son of Emad
Taky-Adin Burnat … Himself – Son of Emad
Gibreel Burnat … Himself – Son of Emad
Muhammad Burnat … Himself – Father of Emad
Bassem Abu-Rahma … Himself – Protester (as Phil)
Ashraf Abu-Rahma … Himself – Protester (as Daba)
Intisar Burnat … Herself – Mother of Emad
Eyad Burnat … Himself – Brother of Emad
Riyad Burnat … Himself – Brother of Emad
Khaled Burnat … Himself – Brother of Emad
Jafar Burnat … Himself – Brother of Emad
Storyline
When his fourth son, Gibreel, is born, Emad, a Palestinian villager, gets his first camera. In his village, Bil’in, a separation barrier is being built and the villagers start to resist this decision. For more than five years, Emad films the struggle, which is led by two of his best friends, alongside filming how Gibreel grows. Very soon it affects his family and his own life. Daily arrests and night raids scare his family; his friends, brothers and himself are either shot or arrested. One camera after another is shot at or smashed. Each of the 5 cameras tells part of his story.
Interview with directors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPlBpyhvkMM
PALESTINE
Viewing Notes: Paradise Now (dir., Abu-Assad, 2005, 90m)
Filmography
The Idol (2015)
Omar (2013)
The Courier (2011)
Paradise Now (2005)
Rana’s Wedding (2002
Cast:
Lubna Azabel Suha Azzam
Kais Nashif Said
Ali Suliman Khaled
Mohammed Bustami Abu-Salim
Amer Hiehel Jamal
Hiam Abbas Said’s Mother
Viewing Notes:
–What seems to be the primary aim of film? To humanize suicide assassins? To demonize their aiders and abettors? To exploit thriller value of plot gone wrong?
–How does representation of Said and Khaled square with the portraits and background studies of suicide assassins in The Making of a Human Bomb? How similarly/differently motivated are Said and Khaled?
–What possibly motivated Abu-Assad to undercut the seriousness of the making of the martyr video? What relationship obtains between the martyr videos and a film like this one?
–Why does the director of the film leave its ending inconclusive? How does such an ending situate both character and viewer?
–Apart from the conventional filmic function supplied by a “love-interest”, why do you suppose Abu-Assad chose to complicate matters by adding Suha to his film’s dramatic mix? Does Suha take the film outside the realm of dramatic believability? Or has the film already gone too far in that direction by making Said and Khaled such recognizably “slacker” characters?
–What, by contrast, makes it possible to believe that a thoughtful young Palestinian man, haunted by his father’s being named a collaborator, might prefer to give his life to the Palestinian cause (to become a “human bomb”) than to pursue a romantic love relationship with the beautiful, articulate, compassionate Suha?
–What do you make of the following characterization of the film: “A muddled political thriller that goes off topic to sway in favor of becoming a Hollywood thriller through diverting plot twists rather than straightening out what it meant by its portrait of two Palestinian suicide bombers and what propelled them to take on such a psychopathic desperate mission”?
How does our comparatively casual introduction to Said and Khaled as just two regular guys play into our sudden recognition that they have already committed themselves to be suicide bombers?
Are we meant to recognize that yes, even such sympathetic, decidedly human beings can be committed to what must seem at once a murderous and irrational cause?
Does anything that follows compel us to change our minds abt the legitimacy/desirability of martyrdom? How abt the comments made by both Khaled and Said that death is preferable to living in the dead-end prison of Nablus and the Occupation?
How do the discussions of the subject between Said and Suha on the one hand, and Said and Khaled on the other, play out? Do we ever bow/yield to the superior logic of Said? Does he persuade us of the justifiability of the act? Or does he only persuade us of its justifiability for him as a young man who feels he must redeem the dishonor of his father?
How is Said characterized/portrayed throughout the film? Is he a readable/legible character or not? How does he look the last time we see him, seated on an Israeli bus surrounded by soldiers?
How are other extremists represented, particularly Jamal and Abu Harem?
How does Said’s mother seem to relate to Jamal?
Do we simply see Khalid and Said as unwitting pawns in their hands?
Do they seem as adept at this business as they pretend to be?
Why do they install the lock mechanism on the bombs the men carry?
What does this indicate about their past experiences with would-be suicide bombers, their trust in Said and Khaled?
Recall the scene in the store when Suha prices videos of both martyrs and collaborators: why do collaborator videos sell better than martyr videos? What’s likely included in them that are not in martyr videos?
===================================
MAKING OF HUMAN BOMB NOTES
Embeddedness of sacrifice in historical Palestinian site or city (as opposed to an Israeli settlement)—integral relationship of sacrifice in economy of suicide bombing [not at all evident in film]
Martyrdom gives legitimacy to dialogue with Israel by backing it with resistance
(138) too many, as opposed to too few, volunteers [do we count K & S among them?]
“Most of those who volunteer for martyrdom operations are not active members of the armed resistance but rather ordinary members of society who are not necessarily active in politics”—what do we make of this? Are they motivated by personal/psychological narratives? Are they suicidal to begin with? What does book say/suggest?
(138-9) many, not all, have had firsthand experience of violence at hands of Israeli state—no other special indicators—even Israeli specialists have failed to construct a profile: what does THIS indicate? Widespread willingness of young Ps to die for this cause/to kill Israelis?
(144) niyyaluh = envy
use of euphemism: “earned the best certificate” in a culture that prizes college graduates
(149) funerals as sites where new commitments are forged
(150) higher status of martyrdom certificate
(151) sacrificial performance—being alive in spite of death brings the martyr a form of living in death—in this context death is abt living, and to die is to live
NOTE how differently rendered Said and K’s proposed martyrdom is—it seems much more improvisational—something they need to be coerced into—none of this sociological context is apparent
DITTO: (152) “Most martyrdom mission carriers are described w/ a heightened sense of awareness, as thoughtful rather than as impulsive actors”
NOTE: “approval of violence rises with the level of education among Ps”
(153) characteristic excitement, even pride, in anticipation of moment [also decidedly missing in film where Said only becomes motivated the second time around: why?]
COMMON THEMES (184-6)
- transcendence of boundaries
- revival of Palestine
- unity of Palestine
- assertion of P’n rootedness
- assertion of P’n peoplehood
- assertion of P’n independence
- securing inner peace
- application of mimetic violence
VIEWING NOTES: Distant (dir., Ceylan, 2002, 110m)
FILMOGRAPHY: Nuri Bilge Ceylan (b. 1959)
2011 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
2008 Three Monkeys
2006 Climates
2002 Distant
1999 Clouds of May
1997 The Town
CAST
Muzaffer Özdemir Mahmut
Emin Toprak … Yusuf
Zuhal Gencer … Nazan
Nazan Kirilmis Lover
Feridun Koc … Janitor
Fatma Ceylan … Mother
Two “stars” are cousins of director. One of them, Emin Toprak was killed in an auto accident before he and Muzaffer Ozdemir were to receive joint best actor awards at 2003 Cannes Film Festival. “Mahmut’s” apartment really belongs to Ceylan, as does car he drives.
VIEWING NOTES
–Though this is arguably a class example of an art-house film in which “nothing happens”, Distant rewards viewers who take an active role in filling in the emotional and psychological details seemingly absent from the film itself. Mahmut, who has made a seemingly enviable life for himself despite his rural origins, is deeply into a period of life-crisis from which he may never recover. Thus, rather than play the generous host to his country-cousin, Yusuf, he neglects the clueless Yusuf, seldom finding a moment to supply him with the nurturing and protection he requires. Most of us who have hosted friends at particularly bad moments can no doubt identify with this situation. But there is a second level at work here which has everything to do with the city/country geographic and class divide that is peculiar to Turkey, and that has analogues in the kinds of experiences also represented in Crimson Gold and The Wind Will Carry Us.
–Pay close attention: the layout, furnishings, use made of Mahmut’s apartment; the look, feel, overall atmosphere of the parts of Istanbul Yusuf trudges through; the Europeanized character of Mahmut’s friends, ex-wife, lover & associates; the manner in which the camera works to isolate individuals who are already isolated and alienated; the humor and irony that creeps into the film at unexpected moments.
VIEWING NOTES: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (dir., Ceylan, 2011, 150m)
FILMOGRAPHY: Nuri Bilge Ceylan (b. 1959)
2014 Winter Sleep
2011 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
2008 Three Monkeys
2006 Climates
2002 Distant
1999 Clouds of May
1997 The Town
CAST
Muhammet Uzuner … Doctor Cemal
Yilmaz Erdogan … Commissar Naci
Taner Birsel … Prosecutor Nusret
Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan Driver Arab Ali
Firat Tanis … Suspect Kenan
Ercan Kesal … Mukhtar
Erol Erarslan … Murder Victim Yasar
Ugur Aslanoglu … Courthouse Driver Tevfik
Murat Kiliç … Police Officer Izzet
Safak Karali … Courthouse Clerk Abidin
Emre Sen … Sergeant Onder
Burhan Yildiz … Suspect Ramazan
Nihan Okutucu … Yasar’s wife Gülnaz
Cansu Demirci … Mukhtar’s Daughter Cemile
Kubilay Tunçer … Autopsy Technician
VIEWING NOTES;
–Note the difference in understanding that concentrating or not concentrating on the opening pre-credit shot-sequence can make. Pay close attention to these faces—you will see them again.
–Note some characteristic cinematographic & audio moves Ceylan makes in course of film, e.g., use of long shots over panoramic landscapes that disproportionately diminish size of human actors, disembodiment of voices that seemingly cease to be spoken aloud and operate as internal discourse rendered in a form of voiceover. (What does Ceylan himself have to say about these techniques in interview?)
–Note (for future reference) the influence on Ceylan of Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky (particularly Stalker), and Abbas Kiarstomi (particularly A Taste of Cherry & The Wind Will Carry Us.) In so doing, note the regional basis of such influence, especially with respect to Iranian/Persian aesthetic, and Russian literary precedents.
–This is a world in which official titles—doctor, prosecutor, police chief—divide society into those who speak and those who are spoken to, hence, one in which individuals who seek to breach these barriers tend to stand out. To what extent does the doctor’s early offer of a cigarette to the suspect anticipate his standing as a character who “crosses over” in ways that other professionals do not.
–What are we to make of the prosecutor’s transparent effort to transform the possible act of rejection that was his wife’s suicide into some kind of miraculous, prophesied (but unwilled) event that happened to another fictive individual? Why have him share so transparent a fiction with someone as clearly savvy as the doctor? What is he seeking in trying to “share” this event?
–Probably 120 of the film’s 150 minutes take place at night, and focus on a small cast of characters and cars moving through hauntingly beautiful landscapes in search of a freshly buried body. The effect is not a little archetypal, as if we are witnessing some kind of seminal (and chronically repeated) event in human existence/human history—figuratively speaking, a brother killing brother, and the work of interrogation, discovery, and punishment delegated by civil society to other human actors on the scene. Yet at the same time there seems to be something culturally specific in the way the characters interact with one another, in the way the lines of authority are drawn, in the humor and irony that enliven the dullness and repetitiveness of the proceedings, in the landscape itself, which, for lack of better terms, one is tempted to call “Turkish” or “Anatolian.” Lacking any real connection to what those terms signify apart from the behaviors and setting put on display, how would you fill in the gaps in our information?
–As many critics note, until the last movement of the film, all of the characters we encounter are men. The first female we notice is the beautiful young woman who appears seemingly out of nowhere carrying a tray of tea to the weary searchers and murderer after the body has been recovered. It is a conspicuously “amazing” moment in the film in which each man “snaps to” as if they have never seen anyone or anything so beautiful before. What effect (if any) does this “discovery” have on the behavior of any of the male characters in the rest of the film? How, in particular, might it effect the doctor’s later decision not to accurately record his autopsy findings?
–Another woman temporarily enters our viewing field in the last scenes of the film in the form of the widow of the murdered man (whom we are led to suspect may well be the lover of the murderer), who (along with her son) may also make an impact on the doctor’s decision. Why would her presence (or the earlier entry of the teenage girl) prompt the doctor to a decision that would lead to a more merciful judgment of a man who is guilty of burying his friend alive? What prompts the doctor to lie?
PRIMARY FILMS
Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966, dir., Pontecorvo)
Cairo Station (Egypt, 1962, dir., Chahine)
The Closed Doors (Egypt, 1999, dir., Hetata)
Crimson Gold (Iran, 2004, dir., Panahi)
Divine Intervention (Israel/Palestine, 2000, dir., Suleiman)
Kandahar (Iran, 2001, dir., Makhmalbaf)
Kippur (Israel, 2000, dir., Gitai)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Turkey, 2011, dir., Ceylan)
Paradise Now (Palestine, 2005, dir., Abu-Assad)
Rachida (Algeria, 1996; 2002, dir. Bachir-Choikh)
Viva Laldjerie (Algeria, 2004, dir., Mokneche)
Waltz with Bashir (Israel, 2008, dir., Folman)
The Wind Will Carry Us (Iran, 1999, dir., Kiarostami)
SUPPLEMENTARY FILMS
Ajami (Israel, 2010, dir., Copti & Shani)
Alila (Israel, 2003, dir., Gitai)
Bab El-Oued City (Algeria, 1994, dir., Allouache)
Beaufort (Israel, 2007, dir., Cedar)
Chronicle of a Disappearance (Israel/Palestine, 1996, dir., Suleiman)
The Circle (Iran, 2001, dir., Panahi)
Close-up (Iran, 1990, dir. Kiarostami)
The Color of Paradise (Iran, 1999, dir., Majidi)
The Day I Became Woman (Iran, 2002, dir., Meshkini)
Gabbeh (Iran, 1997, dir., Malhmalbaf)
Halfaouine (Tunisia, 1990, dir., Boughedir)
Jaffa (Israel, 2009, dir., Yedaya)
Kadosh (Israel, 2000, dir., Gitai)
Kedma (Israel, 2002, dir., Gitai)
Lebanon (Israel, 2009, dir., Maoz)
The Lemon Tree (Israel, 2008, dir., Riklis)
Marooned in Iraq (Iran, 2002, dir., Ghobadi)
A Moment of Innocence (Iran, 1996, dir., Makhmalbaf)
Rana’s Wedding (Palestine, 2003, dir., Abu-Assad)
A Separation (Iran, 2012, dir., Farhadi)
The Syrian Bride (Israel, 2005, dir., Riklis)
Taste of Cherry (Iran, 1999, dir., Kiarostomi)
Ten (Iran, 2002, dir., Kiarostomi)/VHS only
This Is Not a Film (Iran, 2011, dir., Panahi)
Three Monkeys (Turkey, 2008, dir., Ceylan)
Wedding in Galilee (Palestine, 1987, dir., Khleifi)
Where is the Friend’s House (Iran, 1989, dir., Kiarostomi)
Yom, Yom (Israel, 1998, dir., Gitai)
SECONDARY READING
Abufarha, Nasser. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian
Resistance. Duke UP, 2009, esp. chapters 4-6.
Armes, Roy. Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film. Indiana UP, 2005.
Benin, Joel & Joe Stork, eds. Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. UC Press,
1997.
Dabashi, Hamid. Dreams of a Nation: on Palestinian Cinema. Verso, 2006.
Fischer, Michael M.J. Mute Dreams, Blind Owls and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian
Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry. Duke UP, 2004.
Mottahedeh, Negar. Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. Duke
UP, 2008.
Shafik, Viola. Arab Cinema: History, Culture, Identity. AU in Cairo P, 2007.
Stein, Rebecca L. and Ted Swedenburg, eds. Palestine, Israel, and the politics of popular
culture. Duke UP, 2005.
Tapper, Richard. The New Iranian Cinema. Tauris, 2002.
Thomas Cartelli 