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Saturday, February 15, 2014

WAR-WOUNDS IN BAHMAN GHOBADI

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 latterIn 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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