WAR-WOUNDS IN BAHMAN GHOBADI
Contemporary
Iranian cinema often focuses “on ordinary people caught in harsh circumstances
brought about by sociopolitical, cultural, or natural forces. The devastation
created by an earthquake, the wounds and traumas caused by war, the hardships
heaped on the poor – these are powerful subjects. And such films manage to
address them not with easy sloganeering or smooth sentimentality, but with both
penetrating insight and a strong feeling of compassion for those who suffer.”*1
The
above statement is a succinct preface to contemporary Iranian cinema. Though
there are movies like those of Asghar Farhadi, Tahmineh Milani, or Mania Akbari
that focus on the emotional traumas of urban elites and go beyond these class
distinctions, they too take part in the same cultural and political anxieties.
These movies also tend to focus on bold subject-matters and extend their
boundaries by exploring themes that are often considered taboo by far. Themes
of illicit affairs, incest or distinctly feminine life issues are boldly
explored in their movies – something that is not so easy in Iranian movies like
their western counterparts. This daring becomes all the more engaging, given
the nature of the censorship and restrictions rampant in the country.
Other
familiar methods of overcoming these restraints are easily discerned. Indeed,
great movie makers of the country have turned these constraints into virtues by
studied aesthetic manipulations, as it were. They have to make movies so very
cheaply which has resulted in a simplicity that belied their subtle realism.
Restrictions in overt depiction of sexuality have led directors to practice
skilfully indirect, sometimes allegorical storytelling, and also to search for
subjects that are beyond the formulaic or the genre-specific. The Iranian
specialty for films about children is perhaps the most important point in this
regard. This type of picture allows both for a form of oblique social
commentary and for the depiction of intimacy otherwise unthinkable. These
movies are not always movies for children, for the life experiences
explored in them are not purposely alienated from those of the adult
world. The Runner (1985) directed by Aamir Naderi was one of the
earliest to set this style, a style that would stick on and yield great
results. One of the earliest and most memorable films after the
Islamic Revolution and made at the height of the Iran- Iraq war (1980-1988), it tells the story of an
orphan, Amiro, as he tries to survive and adjust with his surroundings. The
Runner gained wide critical recognition on the international film festival
circuit and it brought wider attention to “post-revolutionary art-house” cinema
in Iran. Notable features in this vein included Where is the Friend's House
(1987), Children of Divorce (1990), The White Balloon (1995), The
Mirror (1997), The Children of Heaven (1997), The Apple
(1998), and The Color of Paradise (1999). All these movies show some
distinct traits summed up in the
wikipedia page of The Runner: “realism, child's eye
perspective of the world, innocence, gentleness, set in poor neighbourhoods,
exposing great disparities in wealth, resting much of the film on the shoulders
of one young actor, using children's lives as analogies for (or explicit
expositions of) the problems of the adult world.”*2
Bahman
Ghobadi is a Kurd, meaning that he has an identity at once distinct and
rootless. The nation of Kurdistan is apparently an entity to Kurds but they
live in a number of Middle Eastern States: part Iraq, part Iran, Turkey, Syria
and even some parts of Armenia. “By the age of seventeen, I had seen two wars,
one revolution and a lot of my close friends and relatives killed.”*3 He had revealed. These two facts; that he is
a Kurd and film maker of intense sensitivity at that and had seen/ been through
wars which shattered, uprooted and dismembered his people, determine his
creative oeuvre. From the very first of his major works A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) to
the 2012 Rhino Season, he has time and again went back to the plight of
his people in all possible manifestations.
A Time
for Drunken Horses is
about a group of orphaned Kurdish children who live on the poverty line in a
village near the Iran-Iraq border. They scramble aboard a truck to take them to
Iraq to work in the market, or as foot- soldiers in various smuggling scams.
They transport heavy tyres in the snow and terrible cold. For this backbreaking
work they are routinely cheated of their pay. The working conditions are so
appalling that the mules and horses have to be fed whiskey to get them to work.
They put up with their hardships with heartbreaking stoicism, focusing on the
immediate priorities like earning enough money to get a dying sibling operated
in a hospital beyond the borders as a last attempt to save his life. There
would be no limits to the extend they would suffer for it, no matter consenting
to a marriage that offers nothing but a chance for help for the purpose, or
crossing the barbed wire boarders with the sick sibling on one's back under
knee-deep snowing climate in the wildest of terrains. Even as political events
impinge on the children's lives in the form of an ambush and gunfire
off-camera, there is no stopping for the twelve years old Ali with his familial
mission. Here, the world of the children is not disconnected from that of the
adults. Rather, it crosses and collides with the latter in human terms,
that is, at times endearingly and at times antagonistically. The sickly child
on the verge of wasting with his all-too-powerful, piercing eyes is imbued with
a mystic aura as if he is more of a metaphor for their existence itself:
capable of seeing through and through but with absolutely no power to influence
or alter anything. In fact, it would be a recurring motif in Ghobadi elsewhere
too: characters imbued with power to seeing everything with no power to do
anything to positively alter the state of affairs, like the armless boy in Turtles
Can Fly.
Ghobadi
had once singled out two distinct weapons which he claimed to have helped his
people survive the traumas of war and displacement- namely, their sense of
humour and their exciting music. Several of his films from Marooned in Iraq
to No One Knows About Persian Cats have much to do with the latter. In his second major feature Marooned
in Iraq (2002), Ghobadi focuses on the adult world of search and
tribulations in a picaresque manner. During the war between Iran and Iraq, a
group of Iranian Kurd musicians consisting of an elderly father and two sons
set off on an almost impossible mission in search of Hanareh, a singer with a magic voice who
crossed the border and may now be in danger in the Iraqi Kurdistan. She was the
first wife of Mirza (Shahab Ebrahimi), the father and had deserted him decades
back. The time is right after the first
Persian Gulf War as Kurds are being hunted down, gassed, arrested, and
massacred by Saddam Hussein. They are in constant flight across a landscape of
bombed-out villages and mass graves, their society and lives falling to pieces around
them. There is a strong sense of black humour throughout the loudly voiced
dialogues in almost into the first two third of the movie and in the
characterizations, especially in the character of Audeh whose sole purpose in
life is to produce a male heir no matter he has to take an eighth or more
number of wives for the purpose. Yet as he discovers he can adopt two sons from
among the hundreds of war orphans, obviating the need for another wife, we get
a clearer vision of the war-ravaged state of the people and the human toll of
persecution involved. Half Moon (2006)
again places focus on music and musicians in Kurdistan. Mamo, an old and
legendary Kurdish musician living in Iran, plans to give one final concert in
Iraqi Kurdistan to celebrate Saddam Hussain's fall and the end of his brutal
repression of Kurdish music. After seven months of trying to get a permit and
rounding up his ten sons, he sets out for the long and troublesome journey in a
derelict bus, denying a recurring vision of his own death at half moon. Halfway
the party halts at a small village to pick up a female singer named Hesho, a
perilous move since public performance was forbidden for women, let alone in
the company of men. But Mamo is determined to carry out his doomed mission. The
same desperate quest to musical expression forms the core of No One Knows
About Persian Cats (2009), Ghobadi's next film. Two young song writers,
just out of prison decide to set up an underground musical band and try to find
talents to join them. But fed up with the indifferent and at times hostile
attitude of the authorities, and forbidden to play in Iran, they plan their
escape abroad with a fast-talking music promoter. Vowing to play one last show
before leaving Tehran, they set out on a dangerous mission through the City's
vibrant and diverse underground scene, home to an estimated 2,000 illegal
independent bands. The irony of making the film in largely clandestine way
resulting in the imprisonment of several involved paralleled the subject matter
itself. Ghobadi was to find himself in exile after the releasing of the movie. Rhino
Season is his first work produced outside Iran in this exile, and
marks a fairly significant change in his cinematic language.
Starring
Behrouz Vosoughi , Iran’s most popular pre-revolutionary actor ('Iran's Marlon
Brando' in Ghobadi's own words) who has since 1979 lived quietly and out of the
public eye in the US, Rhino Season moves between two
time registers—between the current day and the years immediately after
revolution. The veteran plays Sahel, a Kurdish-Iranian poet who emerges from a
prison in Iran after three decades. He travels to Istanbul, searching for Mina
(Monica Bellucci), driving obsessively around the city, till locating the house
in which she lives. Intercut with this action are flashbacks to 1979 that
follow their courtship and marriage. Mina’s father was a wealthy colonel who
was denounced by his own chauffeur, Akbar (Yilmaz Erdogan) who joined the
revolutionary forces during the revolution. Akbar had secretly loved Mina, and
so with his newfound power as a revolutionary figure, he has Sahel and Mina
imprisoned. Eventually, upon Mina’s release, he convinces her that Sahel is
dead and coerces her to marry him. It is Akbar's desire for Mina that grows
into a perverse and dangerous fixation that causes the imprisonment of Sahel,
and a horrific scene in the prison when he rapes Mina after her meeting with
Sahel for a conjugal visit in a cell. The uncertain question of the paternity
of Mina's daughter then has reflections for later events, when Sahel drinks
himself into a stupor and then beds her without either of them realizing the
possible relationship between them. In these sexual allegories Ghobadi
transgresses the restrictions of Iranian cinema to explore the traumas of the
revolution and their aftermaths as affecting not only the direct victims, but
also those from the next generation. Perhaps he was making the best use of his
new-found freedom-in-exile.
Turltes Can Fly (2004) is by far the most expressive of Ghobadi's statements of the war
wounds of his people from a myriad of dimensions. Set in Ghobadi's native
Kurdistan, close to the Turkey-Iran border,
and filmed immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussain, the film
explores the enigma of existence in times of war and the terror of genocidal
policies and thereby lays bare how sanctified myths of human values are
shattered in the wake of these horrors. Ghobadi has dedicated the film to
"all the innocent children in the world — the casualties of the policies
of dictators and fascists." The wild terrain reminiscent of Samira
Makhmalbaf's Blackbord (2000) is the central image of the movie. Set in
the refugee camp at the Tukish-Kurd
boarder immediately before America's second attack of Iraq, the bulk of
performers were real inmates of the camp. Kak Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), the
thirteen years old born-leader and antenna-service 'expert' in the rag-tag
camp, leads the band of orphaned children engaged in the precarious job of
collecting undetonated landmines and shells to sell back to Americans and
thereby finding a living. To a certain time they take the Americans for
redeemers; though the film goes on to shatter that myth. Satellite is the
mediator between the illiterate villagers and the news from outside world,
especially of when the American 'redeemers' would make their appearance. As the
invasion is impending, the atmosphere is charged with apprehensions. In this
grim atmosphere, Kak's flawed English and way-of-the mark translations provide
kind of black humour which Ghobadi found to be one of the two powerful weapons
with which Kurdish people survived their trauma, the other being their great
music. Satellite has fallen for Agrin (Avaz Latif), a refugee girl who has
terrible memories of a gang rape and its humiliation in the form of a baby boy
whose eye sight is ever failing. Naturally, she is beyond any romantic
involvements. Her armless brother (Hiresh Feysal Rehman) who has the power of clairvoyance
is afraid of leaving the child alone with her. At the end of the film, as
Satellite is bed-ridden with his feet shattered by a landmine blast while
attempting to rescue the child whom Agrin had left there, he has a vision that
his sister has drowned the baby in a pond with a rock tied to his body. He
rushes to the spot, but too late. In the meanwhile in a take on from the very
first shot of the film, Agrin jumps off the cliff to her death.
The heavy hammer-stroke effect the
film gives is the most eloquent cinematic expression about how children bear
the war wound most heart-breakingly. This is done in many ways in the film. The
utterly lovable Kak Satellite does everything he possibly can to help Agrin
survive her trauma but to no avail. His heart-rending screams at the end with
no pain killers to alleviate the pain of his shattered feet is one of the most
powerful reminders of that wound in the physical level. In fact, almost all the
characters share similar fate. Several of them are maimed or cripples. There is
always the danger of a landmine creating new casualties. On a psychological
level Agrin herself is the most eloquent testimony of war wound. In a sense the
film demolishes the poetic myth of sacred motherhood. The truth the film
highlights is that for a mother it is not always possible to love a child which
is her perennial mark of humiliation and disgrace. Yet that abandonment is no
life to her. Its death to her as well.
Beyond the familiar theme of the
meaninglessness of war, Ghobadi reminds us that for the victims the war is
never really over. It goes on in its cripples, its widows, its orphans and its
minefields-turned-barren lands. Here, Ghobadi is in good company of a corpus of
great Iranian film makers who softly deny the Hollywood myth that children's
area is exclusively made of superman adventure 3 -D, animation computer games,
specializing in unreal cartoon gimmicks of demolition forces. The horror that
Ali and Zahra (Children of Heaven- Majid Majidi) feel about how to cover
up the loss, by carelessness, of the latter’s pair of shoes from being detected
by their impoverished parents is far more real and thereby more affecting than
any unreal Mozilla terror. No animation character ever had to put up with the
helplessness of Kak Satellite suffering the agonies of shattered feet without a
single pain-killer. No cartoon princess, even under the spell of a curse, had
to endure the sheer helplessness of Agrin who had to kill her child and find
refuge in suicide. Children of jinxed communities are doomed to bear the entire
tragic burdens of the society. These movies underline the fact that children
are not always children; they are the replica of humanity, especially when it
comes to suffering the mishaps of a society forsaken by all benevolent gods.
Xxxxxxxxxx
Notes:
*1: Screen Writings: Partial Views of
a Total Art, Classic to Contemporary- By Bert Cardullo – Anthem Press: Pages: 31 , 32.
*2 :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runner_%281985_film%29
*3 Bahman Ghobadi: The Poetics of Politics by Felix Koch/
February 2007, Published by
mono.kultur
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