how to tell a film
by
Douglas Messerli
Jafar
Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (directors) این
فیلم نیست (This Is Not a Film)
/ 2011, USA 2012
Locked up in his comfortable Teheran
apartment on a day his family members have traveled to celebrate the Iranian
festival Chaharshanbe Suri, preceding New
Year’s eve, Panahi turns on his camera to record, in documentary style, a day
in his life, including his awakening and breakfast. Determined to find a way
around his ban, Panahi calls up his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, and asks his to
take up the camera, while he begins in read
and, through the
use of masking tape and imagination, to realize a movie that he was planning,
but can no longer make, about a young girl, much like him, who has been locked
up in her own home because she has determined to attend the university.
The parallels between the locked-away girl
and his personal condition are crucial, in that they convey the impossible
frustration and desolation of a society closing individuals away from their
destinies and creative endeavors. But almost as soon as he has begun to play
out the scenario of a young girl locked away in her small room with the view
only of a young boy who appears outside her window, but the director gives up,
realizing that, of course, you cannot “tell”
a movie. As evidence he gives the example from one of his earlier films,
showing a scene where an amateur actor suddenly behaves in a strange way that
the director might never have imagined possible. A shot form yet another movie
shows how a simple set design reveals much more about the character than he
might ever have imagined.
Although billed as a sort of documentary,
Panahi’s and Mirtahmasb’s film, pretending to be shot in a single day—the film
as actually shot over a period of 4 days for a cost of around $4,000—the work
incorporates a great many personal and political events which come together to
make a far larger statement than they seem to represent. Panahi’s daughter’s
pet lizard, Iggy, plays a large role and he roams the rather posh apartment,
crawling up bookcases filled with books, and clawing his way behind them,
casting a rather eerie presence which, clearly, is not unlike the Iranian
officials. He refuses to eat his usual diet of lettuce and seems only happy
when he is fed a few pieces of cheese, evidently a lizzard delicacy. As Panahi
complains at one moment, “your claws, Iggy, are hurting me, get off me, you’re
hurting me.” And the very presence of the
lizard fills anyone who is not a lizard lover with the sense of reptilian
danger.
If nothing else, we can only hope for the
future in the grace and comprehension of this young man, who, once they reach
the lobby, advises Panahi to remain behind so that he will be safe. It’s clear
the limits of reality are perceived by all.
In the end, Panahi has found a way to
“tell” his film visually, with amateur actors that do precisely what he has
advertised, behave in way that you might not expect. This Is Not a Film is a totally understated work that profoundly
makes its message clear through all the elements of cinema, while pretending,
nonetheless, not to use them. It is, quite clearly, a radical expression of
what it means to make movies in a society that cannot accept them, but yet
having an audience desperate for their messages. Panahi put his move on a flash
drive, which was sneaked out of Iran in a birthday cake. The movie was shown,
as a surprise entry, in the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and later appeared at
the New York Film Festival, demonstrating that the collapsed society cannot
truly censor an imaginative mind.
Los Angeles,
February 13, 2017
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