You’re not Supposed to Be Here, Ma’am
You’re not Supposed to Be Here, Ma’am!
Offside!
“In a position in a game…on the opponent's part of the field where you are not allowed to be,” that is how Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the word ‘offside’. It is also the title of a 2006 Iranian movie. The storyline of the movie is simple: It’s about some girls who try, individually, to sneak into a stadium during an important game of soccer. They do not succeed, though, and are taken into custody. Why? Because women are not allowed in the stadium where men are playing, according to Islamic Republic laws. The movie is directed by the internationally acclaimed director, Jafar Panahi. Quite naturally, it was banned from screening in Iran, where it made sense most.
The storyline above doesn’t reveal anything of the depth of the social, as well as political, implications of the movie. Most of the movie is dedicated to a negotiation between one of the girls, or a couple of them, and the soldiers who are in charge of detaining them; whom one should be wary not to take as merely the pawns and tools of the state. The characters, the storyline, and the stylistic aesthetics of the movie persuade the viewer to delve deep into the definition of the public sphere in the Iranian civil life. Is it enough to go along with the state defined civil society? Is it adequate to persuade the state into introducing formal social liberties? Does ‘the private’ matter as much as ‘the public’? Which one of the scholarly definitions of the public sphere fits more appropriately with the one depicted in the movie? These and many other questions are among the issues that the movie touches upon in both its form and its content.
Women in the Public, and in Cinema
In an article on women and sexual love in Iranian cinema, Mir-Hosseini mentions three phases in the participation of women on screen in Iran.[1] In the first phase, which is also the oldest one, women were rarely willing to stand in front of the camera and play, since what happened to Sadiqeh Saminejad, the first Muslim Iranian actress to play a role in an Iranian talkie, was so devastating to her life that she decided to seclude from the cinema and society all at once. Mir-Hosseini speaks of the sexual harassment she received in the public whenever she stepped outside, while the male actor of the movie, Sepanta, rose to stardom. This is perhaps a very good illustration of how the society saw the limits of the presence of women in Iran, back then.
The advent of the Pahlavi dynasty and the infamous, forced de-veiling phenomenon, which was the translation of feminism for Reza Shah[2], had a direct role in the increase of the public presence of the women even in posts as high as a judge or a minister. But most of it went up in smoke in 1980, when Khomeini, ‘the Imam of the nation’ after the so-called Islamic revolution, declared forced veiling. During the Iran-Iraq war, lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the role of women in front of the camera was virtually limited to that of a chaste wife or mother.
There have been movies in the 1990s which tried to circumnavigate the stereotypes of women by emphasizing on the rights of women as mothers and wives, specifically the oppressed ones. Tahmineh Milani’s movies are full of these trials. There were other female directors who tried to emphasize the role of women in the society in a more profound way; e.g. by depicting women who are more resilient in the face of oppression than any female persona depicted thus far. Rakhshan Bani E’temad is quite a staggering figure in this trend. Mir-Hosseini’s example for the second of her tripartite phases mentioned above, is Bani E’temad’s Nargess. The movies of this trend were significant in the sense that they were reflecting the tensions troubling the minds of the officials who had already been witnessing the increase of the public presence of women in the post-war and the reform era.
The third phase which Mir-Hosseini titles “debating the taboo,” came along at the height of the reform era. The leash on the film makers’ liberties was loosen a little bit and some movies dared take up issues which had commonly been considered forbidden before. Showkaran (Hemlock; 2000) is the movie that Mir-Hosseini chooses as the archetypal example of this period. There were other movies which had a more vitriolic take on the plight women were suffering. One of the most acerbic critiques of the oppression of women, Nasle sookhteh (Burnt Generation; 1999) was a harbinger in holding both the patriarchal society and the state responsible. It was in this atmosphere that Offside was created.
The Stadium: A Public Sphere?
The movie Offside is about the oppression of women in general, and their efforts to take up a more prominent role in the public sphere, and the civil life of the country, in particular. Panahi uses the soccer stadium and the public celebration in the streets that follows the match as a symbol of the spheres that women in Iran are not supposed to step in. His heroines engage themselves with the very people who are so keen on implementing the patriarchal rules and male-dominated cultural taboos on women. These girls see it as their right to be able to take part in the social activities that involves national interests such as the rare event of publicly celebrating an international sport achievement.
Let us see how (and how come) Panahi considers the soccer stadium a public sphere. At approximately the beginning of the movie, there is a scene on a minibus where some football fans are riding. An apparently mild clash begins between two of the passengers. Later on we find out the whole thing had started because one of the passengers felt offended when he was asked why he was taking his ‘blind’ dad to the stadium. The blind man gives a peculiar answer to the curious guy. He says that he believes the stadium is not just for a soccer match. It’s a place to talk, shout, and reveal your true colors; where you can say whatever you want; you can even curse at anybody and everybody; it’s a place to feel excited among other people.
If one knows how politicized the atmosphere in the Iranian soccer stadiums is, no doubt they will agree with what the blind character of the movie says. It is a place where people chant highly politicized slogans, especially in provinces of Iran where people generally believe they have been neglected by the central government for so long. This happens on a regular basis in cities like Abadan and Tabriz. Even in Tehran, especially when the national soccer team is not playing in harmony, protestation shows itself in the form of chanting slogans in favor of the rival team. In another incident, when six of the players of the national team wore a ‘green wristband’ in an international match outside Iran (apparently in support of the Green movement), they got immensely popularized; for months they got cheered by the football fans in the stadiums regardless of the team they were playing for or against. Right when the Green movement was in its height, many of the matches were reported on the state TV without the live sound of the stadium whose amateur videos on the internet showed a great deal of chanting in favor of the movement. The soccer stadium in Iran is definitely more than a place for watching a game of soccer, as ‘the blind man in Offside’ says. It’s a public sphere in its own uncharacteristic manner.
This brings us to an age-old debate on the definitions of the public sphere and its features. Two somewhat competing approaches toward the public sphere that this paper is going to elaborate on are the Habemas’ conceptualization of public sphere and Gandhi’s Indian variants of it.
Habermas’ Public Sphere and its Critiques
Let us now review very briefly the tenets of the Habermasian conception of public sphere and its critiques. In a way public sphere is defined as “a modern institution and a set of values which brings private persons together in public to engage in the context of reasoned debate.”[3] It is "a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment."[4] Habermas’ notion of public sphere “designates a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk...in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs.”[5]
Though still looked upon as a determining theory, Habermas’ notion of the public sphere has come under some critique. Fraser, in her article, Rethinking the Public Sphere, attacks some of the assumptions which a masculinist and bourgeois conception of the public sphere - the way Habermas defines it - possesses. She asserts that this kind of public sphere actually excluded women and lower social classes. Fraser believes that the idea that “the institutional confinement of public life, to a single, overarching public sphere is a positive and desirable state of affairs”[6] has also proved inadequate. The other aspect of the Habermas’ definition of the public sphere which Fraser finds problematic is the boundary he draws between the private and the public, saying that there are no “naturally given, a priori” boundaries there. On the whole, Fraser believes that “Habermas stops short of developing a new post-bourgeois model of public sphere.”[7]
Gandhi and His Indian Variants of Public Sphere
Gandhi’s effort were directed at getting his message beyond the literary elites to a non-literate mass public. In his very first experiments in creating a public sphere, Gandhi tried out “organizational forms that could be used to attract new constituencies as politics – a very different function than the coffee house’s deliberative exchange among the politicized.”[8] Gandhi started a movement which only later got to be called Ashram. People who lived there learned to become trained resistance professionals who were so influential in some of India’s greatest social movements, such as the Delhi Satyagraha, and the legendary salt march.
In elaborating the characteristics of Gandhian ashram that makes it different from the Habermasian coffee house - both representative of a public sphere - the Rudolphs, in Coffee House and the Ashram, name these traits as the most significant differences: The ashram “sought to draw uneducated: urban and rural, working and farming people into the public sphere in the context of mass politics.” And “…Gandhi’s ashram deliberately challenged the differentiation between private and public that characterizes the modernist public sphere.” Also, “[Ashram was] dedicated to social and political change in a polity where illegal political action is the only action possible for a free person.”[9] The transgression of the borders between the public and the private, the writers believe, is what gives the Gandhian public sphere its revolutionary quality. Let us now see how these traits work into the Iranian public sphere and Panahi’s representation of it: the soccer stadium atmosphere.
Offside, A Transgressive Illegal Act!
Offside begins its story with a dad who is looking for his daughter. He believes she has gone to the stadium to watch the Iranian national team’s soccer match with Bahrain. It’s an important match and Iran’s team will go to the World Cup if it wins. Thousands of people – and by people in this situation, one means ‘men’ – are heading towards the stadium. The story doesn’t linger on the dad, though, and we come to know of a girl, cross-dressing as a boy, sitting among male football fans on a minibus. A boy finds out and tries to inform a friend of his, another boy on the same vehicle. The friend’s reaction comes as a shock, “I know. And guess what! She is not the only one. A lot of them sneak into the stadium all the time.” Right there, Panahi draws a line between the people who tacitly agree with the participation and presence of women in public events and those who don’t; and he doesn’t try to hide his suspicion and contempt for those who don’t. Later on in the movie, we even see some young people helping a detained girl run away.
Soon enough, the aforementioned girl gets caught by a soldier. Panahi shrewdly depicts the arrest of the girl as an unusual effort a soldier goes through when he gains no apparent benefit in doing so. Therefore, the pressure on women’s public presence is still, up to this point, from people, and not necessarily an iron fist of the state; especially evident when the very same soldier asks the detainee to lend him her cell phone to call a certain person who is obviously the soldier’s girlfriend. In this sense, the long negotiation between ordinary individuals and the soldiers which takes up most of the time of the film is emphasized as a necessary part of the public sphere. What it means is that, in order to be free, to be normally considered as an individual who wants to be a member of the public sphere, the girls have to negotiate their presence.
The illegality of the girls action – being present in a sphere which is considered forbidden for women –is consistently emphasized since the location where this girl, and the others like him, are kept becomes the main location of the film for almost two-thirds of the film. Panahi chooses a place within the stadium, close to a large gate where the soldiers can watch the soccer match, but the girls can’t, as a symbol of the absurdity of the situation. The place is not a prison; it’s a small restricted area with a rather short fence around it. The prisoners and the soldiers are in constant contact. All of them, and us as the viewers, can hear the cheers of the fans who are in a situation where they can watch the game. However, once again in a clever decision, Panahi abstains from screening the actual sight of the match. This makes the viewer of the movie more sympathetic towards the fate of the girls who, like the audience, are deprived form watching the match they were willing to risk their neck on watching.
As mentioned before, one of the characteristics of Gandhi’s ashram was to ‘deliberately challenge the differentiation between public and private’. This is a strong motif in the movie which is repeated over and over. The first instance of this is when one of the girls tries to smooth talk a young officer into being less aggressive. The officer, who we later find out is from an economically neglected rural area of Azerbaijan, is initially depicted as an agent of the state; a hegemonic tool who is doggedly inflexible to the point that he doesn’t let a girl go and use the bathroom, while she obviously needs it. He is blaming the girls for his own obligatory stay in Tehran while his mom is sick and needs him. Instead of asking the very structure of the state that is responsible for his plight, he decides to take out his rage at the detainees. Then comes the dialog: the girl, who is as adamant in defending her presence there as the officer is in reprehending her, manages to get to the soft side of the officer and ask him some pretty serious questions about the credibility of his ideas. She doesn’t give up even after hearing some tired clichés about the chastity of women. She keeps pushing until she persuades the young officer to think over his prejudices.
Panahi chooses civil disobedience, the way it was practiced in Gandhi’s movement, as the core strategy that the girls of his film capitalize on, not only against the state, but also their own families. For instance, one feature much favored by the ashram movement was to peacefully break the rules and regulations which they saw as unjust, simply because it was the only action they could take. The role of women was also significant: in Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement “[t]he uncommon appearance of women as political mobilizers…and outrage at ‘the insult offered to our womanhood’ caused their call to spread like fire.”[10] Like those women, the girls in Offside are already guilty as charged for their presence there, but they are far from accepting that guilt. They see it as their unquestionable right to be at the stadium; and even at times they make fun of their situation there and laugh about it. They see transgression of the rules as the only method of getting what they consider to be their neglected right.
Gray People, Black Officials!
It is probably worth mentioning that Offside uses a range of diverse features in order to highlight the universal quality of the specific situation it is depicting. The first and foremost is the lack of classic character building which is an indispensible part of a mainstream movie. The characters do not bear names. We do not know who they are, or what their personal stories are. Their political worldviews, except for the brief dialog between the girl and the young officer, is not revealed to us. All we know about the characters is the hunches we can make based on their rural accents and more importantly on their exchanging of their viewpoints on soccer and on the legitimacy of their own actions. Although the scenes in which one or two members of each group tries to defend him/herself are lengthy and numerous, rarely can we pick any personal information about the characters.
At the beginning of the movie one gets the feeling that it’s a standoff between the oppressed women and ‘the state’ with the police force as its apparatus. Before half of the movie is elapsed, we find out that the gravity of the problem that the movie is portraying goes well beyond a simple political message. The movie claims that there is a fraction of the male society which is still against the presence of women in some spaces of the public sphere. In all fairness, I should add, that at the end of the movie Panahi alludes to how very hopeful he is that keeping up the dialog with this fraction of the society, even in the problematic and impaired form of the public sphere, will bear fruit in changing them. However, Panahi has never been famous for making compromises. The only high rank officer of the movie is also the only character which is portrayed in solid black; a rude unorthodox alpha dog who shouts at everyone, and doesn’t care a fig about what happens to the other people. He is a person who sees it right to impose his own private ideas on the public. Panahi’s reaction to this is clear-cut and unambiguous: “Coercion, presumably including lawful coercion by states, vitiates the civil society.”[11] Panahi remains uncompromising in holding the state as the most responsible body for the plight of women.
Stylization of the Public Sphere
Jafar Panahi belongs to a generation of film makers who introduced the Iranian cinema to the world. The most significant attribute of this coterie is the unique language they devised in portraying their society under a repressive régime with a firm system of censorship. The language they came up with was unprecedented in the history of cinema.[12] In Offside, one can witness a mastery over the medium of cinema in the service of a socially amenable mind. Panahi takes his camera into a public sphere as the audience’s invisible eye. He uses the cinema vérité techniques to make us believe that the situation depicted in the movie is true and happening right then. He refrains from allocating preference or significance to any of the characters in order not to make it a personal story. He makes the viewer ponder on the social structures that makes the two otherwise congenial groups of people, the soldiers and the detainees, antipathetic. The movie makes you wonder whether there ever is any logical reason to exclude women from the public spaces and social life on the whole, for that matter.
And finally the way Panahi suggests out of this deadlock is through individual efforts to change the patriarchal minds of the fraction of the society that thinks what they consider as private is the outline of the standard legitimacy for the public. By taking an active role in challenging the unjust rules, and by physical presence in the spheres of the public life traditionally forbidden to women, they can change the social structures of the society they live in. And on this path the characterization of the public sphere of which Gandhi’s movement is the greatest manifestation seems to be the most plausible aim.
Panahi proves, via his cinematic genius, that any change in the social structure that we might wish for will come along through social activism. Change is possible and for Panahi, following Gandhi, it comes in the form of “a societal act engaging subjectivities as well as social structures.”[13]
P.S., As of the time of writing this paper, Jafar Panahi, has been sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment and 20 years of not making movies or leaving the country, based on the allegation that he was “planning for” making a movie against the Islamic Republic.
[1] Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. Negotiating the Forbidden: On Women and Sexual Love in Iranian Cinema. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 27, Number 3, 2007, pp. 673-679: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v027/27.3mir-hosseini.html
[2] Bahramitash, Roksana. The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, 223–237, Summer 2005.
[3] Gheytanchi, Elham. (2001) Civil Society in Iran : Politics of Motherhood and the Public Sphere. International Sociology, Vol. 16(4): 557-576
[4] Hauser, Gerard (1998), Vernacular Dialogue and the Rhetoricality of Public Opinion. Communication Monographs 65(2): 83–107
[5] Fraser, Nancy. (1992) Rethinking the Public Sphere. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 84
[6] Fraser, Nancy. (1992) Rethinking the Public Sphere. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p.89
[7] Ibid p. 85
[8] Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd. The Coffee House and the Ashram. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 391
[9] Ibid p. 399-400
[10] Satyagraha in South Africa p. 251 ff. Cited in Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd. The Coffee House and the Ashram. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 39
[11] Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd. The Coffee House and the Ashram. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 380
[13] Rudolph, Susanne and Rudolph, Lloyd. The Coffee House and the Ashram. Cited in Elliot, M. Carolyn. (2009) Civil Society and Democracy: A reader p. 404
Well-Put
Based on her work in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, Ellen Lust-Okar argues that, in some cases, political concessions are deliberate manoeuvres to preserve the regime. That is to say, ‘authoritarianism need not sustain itself primarily through repression’, but through the structuring of government–opposition relations in ways that give privileged opposition elites incentives to join with incumbent elites in excluding other groups by denying them the power to mobilize. In some countries, at certain points, opposition groups may fear each other; in others, or at other times, they may not.
Naomi Sakr, Arab Television Today p. 16-17
Where Philosophy Meets Poetry I
Everydayness as closure, as Verborgenheit, would be unbearable without the simulacrum of the world, without the alibi of participation in the world. It has to be fuelled by the images, the repeated signs of that transcendence. As we have seen, its tranquility needs the vertiginous spin of reality and history. Its tranquility requires perpetual consumed violence for its own exaltation. That is its particular obscenity. It is partial to events and violence, provided the violence is served up at room temperature. The caricature image of this has the TV viewer lounging in front of images of Vietnam War. The TV image, like a window turned outside-in, opens initially on to a room and, in that room, the cruel exteriority of the world becomes something intimate and warm – warm with a perverse warmth.
Jean Baudrillard: The Consumer Society (p.35)
If this is not pure poetry, then I don't know what it is.
Auf der anderen Seite
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foiled searching of mortality;
Matthew Arnold
Yeter, a Turkish prostitute in Germany, finds a way to escape her predicament and takes it. Ali, a Turkish émigré in Germany, finds a way to make a change in someone's life and takes it. Nejat, Ali's son, gets the feeling that he has a duty toward a perfect stranger and embraces it. Ayten, Yeter's daughter, tries very hard to find her way in life and is thwarted in every possible way. Charlotte, a German student of English and Spanish, falls in love with Ayten and finds a way to manifest her love and takes it. Susanne, Charlotte's mother, finds out, in a shocking revelation, that whatever she has tried her daughter not to be is exactly what she herself had been; so, instead of being angry with her daughter decides to follow her way.
II.
In Persian poetry, one can rarely find the word journey carry one meaning. It almost always has the dual meaning of physically taking a trip and mentally reaching a new place within one's psyche. It almost always means change. And change is what Fatih Akin reveals in his breathtaking movie, "Edge of Heaven." All the characters in this movie are shown traveling to another country. And also there are moments in which all the protagonists show metamorphosis. What's more, they often learn how to do this the hardest way possible. It seems like you have to lose your dearest beloved to be able to take the final leap of faith. And don't get me wrong here. I'm not talking about the religious aura which is attached to the word faith. It has nothing to do with that. It's the faith in humans. The leap occurs when the protagonists start to believe that there is something they can do to help out someone else, another human being, who is, by the way, a stranger. The characters are looking for the exactly same person to help, without knowing it; without being bestowed the opportunity to really help the one they crave to help. Susanne seems to be the only person who gets the chance to help someone, but again at a very high personal cost.
A gay man finds himself loving a girl, and two straight girls find themselves in love with each other. An old woman finds out she has been running away from her youth's interests in vain, and goes back to them. Even when the director doesn't have the time to show how one of the characters, Ali Aksu, has changed in character, he shows us his new face, with a mustache.
Change is a theme that happens to the movie itself, too. At the beginning of the movie Nejat goes into a supermarket and hears a piece of music and asks about it. The salesperson says something about the singer. In the middle of the movie, we see the exact scene again, with the exact dialog, but this time the singer is different; this time a woman is singing the song. At the end of the movie we hear the same song again, and this time it seems that someone else, an old man, is singing the same song. Nothing remains unchanged here.
III.
Faith Akin seems to be living in two worlds. Well, you might say, it doesn't take a genius to see that, since he is a Turk born and brought up in Germany. But what makes him different, in my opinion, is the fact that he is not a Turk who lives and works in Germany. Nor is he a German with a Turkish descent. He is 'both' at the same time. Like his characters, Nejat in "Edge of Heaven" and Cahit in "Head-On", he seems to be torn apart between these two beings. You might say he is more Turkish (he accepted his Cannes prize on behalf of Turkish Cinema), but just for the sake of example look at Charlotte and Susanne in this movie, and Cahit's therapist in "Head-On", and then you can obviously see how he feels about the German side of his being.
Akin has shown his responsibility as an "Engaged Artist" both in his life and in his cinema. He was once investigated by German police for wearing a T-shirt with a Swastika on it in place of the "S" in the word Bush to show that the Bush Administration is like the Third Reich. In a scene of Edge of Heaven two Turkish fundamentalists try to lead Yeter back to the path of Allah, but ironically the way they choose to do this is to threaten her. For yet another example of how Akin believes in humanity and not religion or any other kind of ideology, let's remember that Ayten finally repents from being a member of what seems to be a terrorist leftist group.
IV.
I have seen movies in which the director tells you, in advance, what is going to happen next. Or when the narrator confides in you a secret which the protagonist should know but doesn't (the most surprising revelation of this kind to me is still what happens in Hitchcock's "Vertigo"). But what the director does here is quite innovative. He divides the movie into three parts and at the beginning of the two first ones, he tells you which one of the main characters is going to die. Then he goes on and kills those characters in a way that is still shocking to the spectator who already knew it was going to happen. The trick is that he doesn't dramatize it. In both cases the one who dies is not even in front of the camera. We see the one who kills and not the one who dies. And both deaths are mere accidents.
There is also this obscure matter of non-linear narration. I've said before that in my opinion this matter is turning out to be a popular toy for most directors to play with. But Akin is definitely not playing with it. He repeats some scenes twice. One of the times seems to be anachronistic, and the other, right in its proper place in the plot of the movie. And each time he does it, he 'mentally' takes you back to the first time you saw that scene. This time everything is different, not that what you see is different, but that you, as the spectator, are a different person now; because in the second time, you know things which you didn't, and got feelings for the characters which you couldn't conceive of.
V.
For me Fatih Akin is already in the pantheon of the greatest directors. After watching "Head-On," I told a friend that his movie somehow reminded me of Fasbinder and he told me I was exaggerating. But after seeing Hanna Schygulla shining in the role of Susanne I got the feeling that I was right.
One thing is for sure, Akin is not comfortably numb. He sees the pain, feels it, and shows it in a graceful manner for us to understand. And I salute him for that. After all his first name means the conqueror, doesn't it?
Ibsen
These days I can hardly concentrate on anything except the humans and their primary rights to be on the earth: freedom. I can't read books, just looking for a well-established context in a well-shaped form anymore. The only fact I am concerned with is Humanity. I don't know how freedom tastes and smells, because I've never experienced it, but at least I have figured out how to fight for it since the beginning of presidential election aftermath in Iran. These days watching Head on and The Edge of Heaven by Fatih Akin, Vengo by Tony Gatlif, Listening to the extraterrestrial voice of Yasmin Levy and reading Llosa, Kundera and Ibsen presses my spirit: how they can give such a comprehensible, concrete and touchable feeling of humanity! Don't worry! We can feel them easily; not only because they are the prophets of their world, but especially because we are on the same track; because once in their world, we can identify ourselves with the tortured personages who are deprived of their liberty in a world where the respect for humanity has been stifled.
Sometimes we hear a lot of a writer, we see the tributes pouring around them all around the world, but we put off discovering their globe. Ibsen is one of these masters. I blame myself for figuring out his humanistic world so late. Such a great importance to the humanity's freedom! I'm not a specialist of New Novel but I've read so many of them, and at least I've worked on it as my M.A thesis. But honestly I understood nothing of it. Please tell me what the hell it means that art can stand on its own feet? Can't you feel that in our world nothing can be considered alone and there's an interaction between all the things? Don't you think that literature has a responsibility toward humanity? Of course my thoughts are due to the situation which we're living in Iran. But any way, I believe that not only literature but also other arts should help us see the reality of being human and being free. And I admire Ibsen for his sense of responsibility to reflect a cold world from where freedom has gone away. In Ibsen's plays nobody can make an acceptable decision when being in a prison and their primary rights restrained: Ellida in the Lady from the sea, Regina in Ghosts, and Dr.Stockmann in The enemy of people are looking for their lost freedom out of their family and the corrupt world made by the politicians. Who cares about your rights and liberty? Your family or your pretended-democratic government? Nobody except yourself. Having been aware of their power to get rid of all the yokes foisted on them, these characters start fighting for their beliefs and freedom, and find a way to get out of the limbo. This is the life which dawns on them.
Evil
The true source of Evil is the very neutral gaze that perceives Evil all around.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Constant Shit
One thing I like about Makhmalbaaf is that he never ceases to change. He always changes, like it is a duty placed on his shoulders by the gods above. I didn't like the movie Screm of the Ants by him. But this part, below, sounded nice and enchanted me. It's a dialog:
- This universe is full of shit.
- It is not only stable, full of shit. No, the shit is constantly raining on you. It is a process. Shit is happening, continuously. Shit is happening; something is shitting on you. It's not only shit is there, no, no. it's really moving. It's rolling, raining over you. And then in the different cultures, they have found different answers to that. For example, the Catholics are saying, "You deserve it." The Protestants are saying, "Let it happen to others." The Muslims are saying, "It's the will of Allah." And the Jews, they always say, "Why is this always happening to us?" Buddhists are saying, "Actually, it's not really shit." In Japan, the Zen Buddhists say, "Listen to the sound of shit, happening." But, you know, these are theoretical… these are only worked-out solutions by some people who try to console the people, who try to help the people survive with all that constant shit business. Come on! We're having some… something interesting, important to do. Come on!
Whatchamacallit
نمی دانم که آن بت را چه نام است
The first thing that used to come to my mind in such occasion like the one I am in now (some sort of confusion) is to seek out the reasons. But as far as I have experienced, 'this' is absolutely ridiculous and absurd, 'cuz the most recent life-experiences, especially the sad ones, are the farthest you can go back to and think of. And I mean only "SAD" ones because why would you think a happy experience could have caused a melancholy like the one you're going through?
Thus, from not long ago, I gave up delving into my past in a desperate attempt to psychologize myself. Now the only domineering idea I have is, "why the hell did I choose to think?" (Please don't make the fatal mistake of taking this as one of the articles which writers write when they get a writer's block or one in which an intellectual writes in a way that you think they are really saying something important when they are not). Because first of all I'm not a writer and definitely I don't have anything important to say and to top it all off, I never considered myself as an intellectual.
By 'thinking', I simply mean trying to understand "why?" or "why the hell…?" if you please. Just for the sake of making examples, "WHY should a nation try as hard as it can (for over a century) to be free or democratic, not as much as these terms mean in philosophical books, but just to be left alone in choosing the clothes they feel like wearing?" Don't worry; I don't plan to go all political on you. Like I said this was an example.
There are moments in which I think this must be a curse, an omen, something like a hereditary disease, this word "why?" (No, seriously! why doesn't it go away and leave you live your life and let you be?) With all due respect, I guess my foreign friends, who are reading this, may not sense what I'm talking about? They may even think I might have gone crazy or something. They might even say "How can thinking be bad or how may it cause you suffer?" Well the answer is as simple, and simpleton, as it gets. You have to live in a country like mine to understand 'How'; or a country like Kundera's or Llosa's, or Kieslowsky's or… well how many other examples do you need? I got plenty.
But this was not what I wanted to say. Well, you have been warned, haven't' you? And to add insult to injury I don't even know how to continue this, not that I don't have anything to say, but that it's 12 P.M. and I have 5 classes (of an hour and 45 minutes long) tomorrow. So I gotta go and sleep. I may continue this later, or may not, who knows? Meanwhile please drop me some comments on this and tell me what you think about "why".
Winston Spencer Churchill
Sir Chrchill once said, "Scarcely anything, material or established, which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure, or was taught to be sure, was impossible, has happened."
چرچیل گفته، "بسیار به ندرت چیزی، اعم از مادی یا مذهبی، که به من باوراندند ماندگار و ضروری است، بر جای مانده است. همه ی چیزهایی که مطمئن بودم، یا که آموختندم مطمئن باشم، که ناممکن است، به وقوع پیوسته اند."
Pimp
Pimp
I feel like a whore,
Who has been sold,
To the ugliest dick-head around,
By her pimp.
Oh, the gods above!
It feels painful.
It feels…
It…
.
Memory
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Milan Kundera, 'Testements Betrayed': (pp. 128-129)
"Try to reconstruct a dialog from your own life, the dialog of a quarrel or a dialog of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one, I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two, but the acousticovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost.
And not only is it lost but we do not even wonder at this loss. We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediately transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an episode we have experienced a few hours ago: the dialog contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the strongest memories, which affect the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are so dazzled by their potency that we don't realize how schematic and meager their content is.
When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment that it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.
We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we still see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and construct what has been forgotten. The present – the concreteness of the present – as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet; so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die without knowing what we have lived."
سعی کنید مکالمه ای در زندگی خودتان را بازسازی کنید، مشاجره یا مکالمه ای عاشقانه را. ارزشمندترین، مهمترین موقعیت ها کاملن از بین رفته اند. حس و حال انتزاعی آن باقی می ماند (من اینطور فکر می کردم، او آنطور، من پرخاش کردم، او دفاع)، شاید یک دو نکته ی کوچک، اما عینیت دیداری-شنیداری موقعیت ها در پیوستگی تامشان از دست رفته است.
و نه تنها از دست رفته، که حتی این فقدان مایه ی حیرت ما نیز نمی شود. ما به از دست رفتن عینیت زمان حال رضایت داده ایم. ما بی درنگ لحظه ی حال را به حالت انتزاعی آن بدل می کنیم. تنها کافیست گفتگویی در چند ساعت پیش را به یاد آوریم: آن مکالمه به شرحی مختصر تقلیل می یابد، و فضا نیز به چند ویژگی کلی. این در مورد قویترین خاطرات، مانند ضربه ی روحی، که تاثیر عمیقی بر ذهن می گذارند، نیز صدق می کند: چنان مجذوب توان آنها ]آن خاطرات[ می شویم که درک نمی کنیم محتوای آنها چه اندازه الگو وار و ساده است.
هنگامی که واقعیتی را مطالعه، مباحثه، یا موشکافی می کنیم، آن طور که در ذهنمان، در خاطره مان، حضور دارد تحلیلش می کنیم. ما واقعیت را تنها به صورت زمان ماضی در می یابیم. به صورت زمان حال، در لحظه ای که واقع می شود، به صورتی که هست، آنرا درنمی یابیم. لحظه ی حال مانند خاطره ی آن نیست. به یاد آوردن، نفی فراموش کردن نیست. به یاد آوردن شکلی از فراموش کردن است.
می توانیم سرسختانه دفتر خاطراتی داشته و همه ی حوادث را در آن یادداشت کنیم. کماکان، در بازخوانی تصادفی موارد، می توانیم دریابیم که حتی یک تصویر واقعی را هم برنمی انگیزند. و حتی بدتر: تخیل نیز نمی تواند به قوه ی خاطره یاری رسانده و چیزی را که فراموش شده است بازسازی کند. زمان حال – عینیت زمان حال – به عنوان پدیده ای برای تدقیق، به عنوان یک ساختار، برای ما سیاره ای ناشناخته است؛ بنابراین نه می توانیم در خاطره مان حفظش کنیم و نه با تخیلمان بازسازیش. ما می میریم بی آنکه بدانیم چه را زیسته ایم.
Luce Irigaray
Of course, it's impossible for each individual to create the whole of History. But I do think that any individual, a woman or a man, can and must recreate her or his personal and collective history. For this to be accomplished, everyone's body and opinions must be respected. Everyone should be able to be aware of her or his obligations, the judge of his or her own decisions. No one ought to believe. The psychic and psychological phenomenon generates dangerous artificial powers. Belief destroys identity and responsibility and goes against what experience teaches. It often further reinforces those historical gaps or oversights, whether these are exercised in the economy of discourses or in the systems of images that go with them. (April, 1987)
The issue, then, is one of whether our civilizations are still prepared to consider sex as pathological, a flaw, a residue of animality, or if they are finally mature enough to give it its human cultural status. (June, 1987)
From Je, Tu, Nous
All the Single People
I. A piece of news:
The Iranian government has passed a law which says that single people can't rent any houses or apartments.
Now I know you're probably bending over backwards to find a meaning of the word 'single' which accounts for the above-mentioned law. Need some help? The Concise Oxford Dictionary (2004) may give us some clues:
adj.
1. only one; not one of several
2. regarded as distinct from others in a group
3. designed or suitable for one person
4. not involved in a stable romantic sexual relationship
5. consisting of one part
6. archaic free from duplicity or deceit
n.
1. a single person or thing
2. a short record with one song on each side
3. US informal a one-dollar note
and some other baseball and cricket meanings which could be ruled out.
Other dictionaries give pretty much the same meanings, too. You might think among the adjectives numbers 4 and 6, and among the nouns number 1 can somehow manage to make sense here. But the truth is the Iranian government means 'unmarried' people. One of the top-rank Iranian police chiefs has recently said, loud and clear, that homes of the single people are places for corruption.
II. A perpetual question:
You have your different reactions, but this piece of news reminds me of a scene in Bergman's 'The Seventh Seal' where a girl is going to be burned at stake because she is thought to have been possessed by the Devil himself. I know! You can say that you have seen this a million times in different movies, but the difference, here, is that the girl in Bergman's movie seems to have accepted it. She is calm. She probably wouldn't even run for it even if she could.
I sometimes wonder if this is not the case with us. Is it really not?
Shiva, the God of Death
I.
There are lawyers in Tony Gilroy's movie 'Michael Clayton' who are called Janitors. It's easy to guess why. People (rich folks that is) mess around and janitors/lawyers clean up the mess. But one of the janitors has had enough of it.
I like the way the movie starts. Right from the beginning, the director tells us what we see is not all, for it doesn't match what we hear (Arthur's voice-over). There is more to what we are looking at. The voice-over is a bit shaky, but certain and we see a law firm swarmed with people who seem to know what they're doing.
Following this we see George Clooney driving in a car, angry but trying to control himself. He pulls over and goes up a hill to get a closer look at some horses. And as you are about to think this isolated part of heaven is tranquillizing to Clooney (and you), his car explodes in the far bottom left side of the background.
Well, see the rest of the story in the movie, if you already haven't.
II.
a. I'm not one of Clooney's fans but he is brilliant here. Playing the role of a man, on the verge of breakdown (any kind you think of, economical, nervous, friend-wise, familial, job-related, you name it) is not that easy. For the entire movie, we hear about the bits and pieces of his life. He is definitely not a hero. All the good things he does in the movie encompass helping one and only one friend, and his great care for the one and only son he has who doesn't even live with him. He seems to have been on the wrong track for so long that nothing can be done to save him, and nothing actually does.
b. I am a big fan of 'Tilda swinton'. She is, and always has been, brilliant (watch War Zone or The Garden and you'll see). She has nothing to do with all those lawyers/bitches who are in Hollywood movies, killing themselves to show how bad/bitchy they are. Just for the sake of comparison recall 'Gina Gershon' in The Insider (she was the Achilles' hill of that nice movie, in my opinion).
Karen Crowder is not one of the 'ladies who lunch'. She's got discipline. She knows what she wants. She makes decisions about people's murder faster than she decides on her clothes. In the world we live in, Karen is a goddess.
III.
I already told you how the movie starts. Right after the explosion, there's a flashback to days before. Gilroy is in no hurry to tell us the whole story. We are shown the corruption of the whole law system. Not one person seems to care. Everybody is in for deceit and back-stabbing. The only good guy here (Arthur played by 'Tom Wilkinson' between madness and purgation) transforms from "Shiva, the god of death" to a loving, caring and battling warrior of the oppressed, for a million reasons other than morality or bad conscience. He should be under medication but refuses, he falls in love with one of 'the oppressed', he has recently lost his wife to a disease, and her daughter doesn't even talk to him; besides all this, everyone wants to lock him out. Clooney, in a beautiful monolog tells him, "janitor to janitor", that nobody is there to help him. The part in which they decide to kill him is shocking. If memory serves well, the good guys of all movies, the ones I remember right now, are decided to be murdered in closed half-lit rooms. Here the decision is made in the street, where almost any casual observer can hear. And the murder scene itself is so cold and quiet that, for a second, frightens you. Is it really so simple?
IV.
The ending is also good. The janitor becomes a warrior (Shiva becomes Vishnu) but not for ever, not even for any moral cause; other than taking revenge for his friend's death.
When Clayton tells Karen Crowder he is gonna blow the whistle on her, she is wordless, defenseless, and Clayton starts walking towards the exit, with the camera traveling back, showing us both his tired and disgusted face in the foreground and at the same time her collapse/disintegration in the background. You may think Clayton is coming toward us (salvation, redemption, catharsis and all that jazz) but he gets on an escalator and goes down while we stay up and watch him 'going down'.
Nobody is safe here.
P.S. I have seen the trailer of Gilroy's lastest movie, 'Duplicity' or something. I guess Hollywood is on her way to make another 'Soderberg', my term for wasted genius.
2×5
Non-linear narration is becoming a kind of game for filmmakers to attract and amuse the movie fans who have seen it all; remember some of the late American movies in which the omniscient narrator tells you a lie, just to make you form false ideas and then jumps out of a corner to scare you and laugh at you by telling you that he - 'the omniscient' - has told you a 'lie'? One of the most ludicrous examples of this, in my opinion, is 'The Righteous Kill'.
But this is not the case with all directors. You may have different choices, but one of my choices is definitely the French director 'Francoise Ozon'. The way he starts his movie 'Cinq Fois Deux' and gets to proceed and drag us back into the depths of a pool of life experiences between the two protagonists, doesn't seem much of a game to me.
The film starts with the bitter scene of a divorce. The divorce lawyer is telling us all about the couple's properties which will be divided between them. One gets the feeling that he has come to see a real-life scene late enough to miss all the reasons why these two are getting divorced. From this moment on till after more than half of the movie is gone any spectator may form a million reasons in their mind (reasons more likely to have happened in their own life or fantasies) to justify the divorce. And Ozon is not very generous with clues, either. Then the director takes us back to see what went on between these two, step by step, backtracking in five stages of their life, hence five times two. To me it seems more like a psychoanalytic session than a mere try to attract attention with non-linear filmmaking.
For most of the movie you may consider Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) as somehow the victim here - like when she gives birth to a child while we see her husband Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) eating at a restaurant as if nothing is going on. But as the movie goes on -and the story goes back - we see a betrayal scene, right at the night of their marriage, which is something between sex and rape, which also reminds us of a scene between Marion and Gilles that starts like a break-up sex but soon turns into a rape, at the beginning of the film. Then you see it might not be as simple as you might have thought. There is more to a marriage than meets the eyes.
The ending of the movie is a bit of a shock. That great moment and sensation of getting to like someone, together with the feeling that you have been chosen over someone else in a love contest, a quiet seaside at dusk, the thrill that a new relationship is forming and you -as the viewer - get the chance to watch it. But the paradox is you know where it all is going to go, because you have been there, seen the end. What an ending!
Thank gods Saint Ozon is not tempted to work in Hollywood.