Chess of the Wind — Irene Bakola

شطرنج باد

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‘There are certain sores in life that, like a canker, gnaw at the soul in solitude and diminish it. Since generally it is the custom to attribute these incredible sufferings to the realm of rare and singular accidents and happenings, it is not possible to speak about them to others. If one does talk or write about them, people pretend to accept them with sarcastic remarks and dubious smiles. In reality, however, they follow prevalent beliefs and their own ideas about them. The reason is that these pains do not have a remedy.’

[ Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl ]

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To engage with Chess of the Wind is to engage with an ending. The moment of death submerged into an urn of acid, under a greenish glass dome. For 1920s Iran, it is the sunset of the Qajar dynasty; in 1976, the dying days of the Pahlavis. As the camera pans over 1976 Tehran a girl opens the locked gates of an old house. A virus until recently contained amongst the infected, is set free, ready to pollute the city into which it has been unleashed. This is how a story ends as a perpetual ending.

It is a scene reminiscent of another film, one yet to be released in 1976: Angelopoulos' Alexander the great. That story ends in the same manner, with a boy escaping into the city. The final shot of the smoggy Athenian skyline hums: this is the history Alexander carries; this is the illness of all things witnessed he has brought with him. The similarities of the two films are uncanny: both take place in the turn of the 20th century and meet the same end, both inoculate their dramatic stage with the death of the polis. Alexander the great observes an isolated Macedonian village as its citizens activate a cycle of political systems; communism, oligarchy, tyranny, anarchy.

‘The cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls, that they are walls with a single casing, walls that have the entire earth behind them,’ writes Bachelard. ‘The cellar then becomes buried madness, walled-in tragedy.’ This depth encloses a washroom to bathe one’s body but its stagnant waters are bound to death. The house is a recurring signifier in Iranian cinema—fossilising the dead and those soon to be buried. It is an national scenography that houses decades of solitude inside the nooks and corridors of one’s home. A decaying inner space whose dome keeps revealing itself infinite. Outside the occupied house its engraved hierarchies are not nullified. Its cosmos tonalises the chorus of washerwomen toiling away as time passes. From the cavernous bath hall, onto the staircase, the courtyard and the Tehrani skyline, no spatial negation is allowed. The anguished world resides in a perpetual cathode, like the house sinking at its centre.

Last Update: March 2025