Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Circle (Dayereh) Jafar Panahi (Iran 2000) Nargess Mamizadeh; Fereshteh Orafely; Maryiam Almooni

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle, 21 April 2011 Ticket price: £5.00

Life in a concentration camp

In retrospect the Circle’s (C) last shot, a long circular pan is an ominous anticipatory journey, a portent of Jafar Panahi’s (JP) own chosen destiny. In the police cell, the camera pans off the disdainful supercilious look of the whore whose arrest we have seen and with whom we have ridden in the paddy wagon. The camera moves across the walls of the room. At first it appears the cell is empty. But as the camera continues its course it reveals the presence in the cell of all the women who have been in the film. Their faces stare out at us. The face of those who have lost the power to direct their own lives; the face of those upon whom the force and logic of power exercised. Faces whom power despises and punishes. A face that JP recognised even then as his own, ten years before he was handed a 6 year sentence of imprisonment for making propaganda against the regime.

I think the extraordinary feature of the Circle is that JP takes complete ownership of his film in the sense that the film allows only for one unequivocal reading of its meaning. As an expressive medium the Circle is shot using long takes in which the camera typically accompanies the women: as they watch as they hide as they flee as they walk as they wait. As the women move through the film JP’s camera is always with them to the extent that they no longer appear as objects of the camera lens. Rather the women are themselves the lens through which we can see the political system that they sustain through their degradation as in the extraordinary penultimate long shot where in a medium close shot we sit with the arrested whore as she is driven to the cells in the police bus. We partake both in her humiliation and her contemptuous response.

The Circle is an uncompromising attack on a country whose present political system bases its actual legitimacy on a systematic suppression of women. A political system that functions by the containment of women within the prison of the male psyche. Claiming a spurious religious provenance, the State has set up a repressive apparatus to encode and enforce the inferior status of women. This comprises a legislative code covering all aspects of their rights and behaviour in the public and private realms with specialised agencies tasked with duties of enforcement.

This system using a major group of a society as a ritual degraded scapegoat has a parallel reference in the use made of the Jews by the Nazis. It is different of course in context and intensity. I’m not saying that there are industrialised death camps in Iran. The points of similarity are in structured legally based and policed segregation. The similarity to which I point is located in the creation of apparatus of subjugation for some social groups. Twisted and distorted power systems can stabilise through demonisation processes. In Iran women are not quite seen as demons; but in their sexuality their emotional volatility their uncleanliness, they are seen always as potentially demonic entities. Women are projected threats to the pureness of the Male: Jews projected threat to the purity of the Aryan. The system at a stroke creates a self fulfilling psychic sense of superiority for the ‘pure group’ which has at the same time a given a stake in the social mechanism of vicious violent repression. This is what we see in the Circle.

With the Circle JP does not pull his punches; he makes no concessions in this respect to the sensibilities of Mahout Ahmedinejad and his psychotic cronies because there is no point: any more than there was any point to pander to sensibilities of Hitler and his henchmen. JP sends a message without compromise: Circle is an indictment of a political system and the cowardly forces mainly male, that sustain it. The system is rotten and criminal. As in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes Iran operates, in particular by rewarding psychotic violent types of individuals with them secure and profitable employment as part of the apparatus whose purpose is the subjugation a particular social group. And in general Men are rewarded by giving them hegemony over women, giving them a sense of their right to an unalienable superiority.

Circle’s message is bleak and unforgiving of the ‘system’. But the Circle is no polemic because of the extraordinary way in which the film is shot and the complexity of the central metaphor, the circle, which is incorporated both in the narrative strips of action and in its style of the filmic composition. The circle is a female symbol and the narrative strips of action take the viewer from the long opening shot, with its wide parabolic pan, of the birth of a girl to the final cell shot already quoted. We go from the birth of a new being, a new soul within this system, that is immediately damned for being the wrong ’sex’, to death of spirit by crushing and pulping it through the repression apparatus. And yet, in the contemptuous demeanour of the whore as she rides in the bus there is a residual of hope.

The defining shots of the movie are all long, many of them huge circular 360 degree pans. These circular shots are in themselves composed as complete orbits of Iranian society, so that as we move through the circle we can see everything. The busy public agitation and movement of the men; the dead static shrouded nature of the women; the confidence of the male hunters the fear of the hunted women, the bride and the whore existing at different points of the same circle, the freedom of the men the imposition upon women to adhere to multiple legally sanctioned restrictions. We glimpse all of these fashioned into the slow interlocking circular shots, chains woven together that bind the women to the male social order.

Whilst not over stated sexuality lies at the core of the film. Repressive regimes that wish to operate like replicating machines are usually anxious to channel sexuality into approved forms. Sexuality as a strong individual subjective force resists. Such States usually operate dual standard morality based on appearances and disclosed or revealed infractions. Infraction is Ok as long as appearances can be maintained, (plausible deniability being the last line of defence) or if in the case of disclosed or revealed infraction, pleas for mitigation are sustainable. In Iran the woman as ‘ by her nature potential demon’ offers the male who ‘strays’ a solid stand-by excuse: he was corrupted by the insatiable sexual wantonness of womankind. At the same time women denied access to the employment market, or unmarriable perhaps because they are no longer virgins, are forced into marginal prostitution as a source of income. In seeking sex work, because of their marginalisation, they are caught in the double bind: the work towards which they are economically pushed has in this sexually repressed society many employment opportunities; at the same it makes them even more vulnerable to men, confirms their status as demons and legitimises the ideology of this society and its apparatus.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams W. Herzog (2010; Fr. USA) Camera: Peter Zeitlinger

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 31 March 2011; ticket price £8.50

Did Herzog forget something…?

At first as I watched The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it seemed to me a TV doc tricked out with 3D wow factor imagery to enable a pedestrian but worthy documentary to be screened theatrically and make some money. As it developed its theme it seemed to do no more than go through the regulation art archaeological genuflections, a routine sweep with music through the Chauvet cave complex with its ice age paintings. Destined to succeed as a cinema release because of its core subject matter, the paintings and because it came stamped with the Herzog imprimatur.

What is difficult to evaluate is the extent to which WH has structured into the Cave of Forgotten Dreams (CFG) a laminate structural parody which overlays WH’s sense of serious intention declared in the film by both his voice and the interviews he conducts with the scientists. To some extent most of his recent work seems to have an element of parody, taking standard filmic structures and then undermining them by use of expressive content that deconstructs the overt claims of the film to be about what it appears to be about. An overlaid parody is a type of fabrication, perpetrated first on the contributors and later on viewers (who may fail to get it). If WH has filmed CFD with a shadow parodic form overlaying its the primary structure, it looks like WH have given himself an intellectual fall back position. This is a stance acceptable where film is made under politically censorious conditions; but it’s a position which under other conditions may betray the lack the moral courage to say what it is that you have seen. Or of course WG may be on the level, and intended to make a film with one consistent level of meaning: the proto-reverential.

In heavily hushed tone, archly emphatic of wondrous nature of the Chauvet site, WH leads us on a tour of this complex. Intercut in the course of the tour, WG talks to scientists whose work is centred on the caves. In fact the caves are only open to the scientists: they alone have access to them, they alone have the key to open the massive steel door that leads inside the cave; they alone have access to the interior of the site which contains the beautiful paintings (and many other fragments and traces of ice age accretions). All who gain entry to this hallowed ground, including WH and his crew, are subject to strict rules governing all aspects of movement and behaviour, the which severely circumscribes the positioning of the cameras.

As the cave’s human and archaeological narrative is hypothetically unpacked by the scientists from the clues they have found, the possibility suggests itself that the cave was a place of Shamanistic ritual. The paintings are all found in the deepest and darkest recesses where no light would have penetrated, A sort of holy of holies, an inner sanctum which few were permitted to enter, where idle gaze was restricted: a place bound up with religious practices whose purpose and meaning is now lost.

And when we consider the present situation at Chauvet, not much has changed. What has happened is that the scientists have become the new priests, the new shamans and voodoo practitioners. As WG’s voice informs us only the scientists have access to this place; only the scientists may gaze upon the wonders of the cave, only the scientists may tread where no other foot may step. The scientists it is who explain and reveal to us the meaning of all this. With their monopolisation of access they alone caste the chicken bones and read significance into the patterns. Like the shamans and priests of old, they control the sources of the readings. Technology is technology: whether magical or scientific. And the success is to a large extent defined by the control of meaning. In CFD, WH’s scientists take on the de facto mantel of a religion. They have their technical apparatus and processes which reveal to them the hidden aspects of matter which legitimises the statements and assertions they make about the nature of what we are seeing, and by extension, our own nature. As we are taken through the CFD the overlaid lamination suggests that nothing structurally has changed here in 32,000 years except belief systems with scientists supplanting shamans. The ‘public’ is excluded by the series of rationales relating to the delicate state of the cave as previously they were perhaps excluded by a series of religious rationales related to profane violation of the mysteries of the sanctum. We are bound in an irony that ice age man and information age man operate parallel systems.

I think that in making CFD, WH is using the film to make the claim for himself to be an artist guide, a sort of light bearer into the cave of the collective human soul. Either that or he is playing the trickster spoof to the hilt. The film has a tone and style of conceited self importance. It is a feature of contemporary Western culture that religion, with its complex psychic technology and it’s interpretation of meaning for man has been superseded by the arts. Scientists may be the technical shamans, but in the West it’s the artist to whom we look to reveal meaning; whose function it is to tell us who we are or who directs our sensual and psychic engagement with the world. Art from being the servant of God, becomes the source in its own right of sustaining self belief, to the extent that some people will tell you that they ‘live’ for art or music etc in a manner in which they seem to believe these forms can be embraced without context or meaning.

In this sense the paintings in the Chauvet complex are presented in the film as a sort of Garden of Eden moment. Not in the sense of the Fall: in this story self awareness replaces sin as the defining moment; artistic activity is presented as being co-existent with a key development of human consciousness. There is perhaps the defining moment at the end of the film, when WH puts a ‘question’ to the wise old scientist: “Were these paintings the beginning of the human soul?” Of course it is a question that cannot have an answer. The scientist takes the bait and replies. His answer is little more than intellectual babble (I found it impossible to understand), but the emotional glow in his response tells it all. He believes in art: he is a believer. He looks for meaning and finds it.

The aura with which the film is shot, the hushed tone of enunciation, the music on the sound track all conspire to create a mood and tone of revelatory importance implied in the moment when ‘art’ was born. In particular the corny use made by WG of the sound of a ‘heart beat’ laid over the paintings was presumably intended to reinforce in the viewer the idea that the paintings were made at the cusp of life’s beginning, the birth of ‘art’ whose beat continues to pump the life blood of meaning through the social body for ‘liberal’ humankind in the 21st century.

There is a strange postscript which takes place in a large structure, containing a tropical environment that is heated by waste water from a nuclear power station. WH uses this short sequence to introduce strains of thought that are typically whimsical. WG films the crocodiles lazily basking in the warm waters, and using the shared time framework with the paintings, asks what the crocodiles might make of the cave? Then zooming in on the mutant albino crocodiles asks the rhetorical question: “Are we today’s crocodiles looking back in time when we see the paintings?” The stupidity of this po voiced question, asked raised the issue for me of WH’s purpose in making the film: one lamination or two? A straight documentary or a spoof? And who cares?

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk