In Search of

NATIONAL CINEMAS








Where is homeland?



Four excerpts from my undergraduate thesis.






What do I miss?
I ask myself sometimes— The sheer volume of works characterised by cultural flows has granted a sort of artistic—and by extent social—normalcy to the state of human displacement. There is a noticeable shift of interest from the cultural, national and environmental catastrophes that have forced people to immigrate, to the tragedies of adjustment in the western no-place. A study of the endemic demands and assemblages of national cinema will illuminate the ways in which diasporic narratives converse with the traumatic temporal/topographic absence of the nation.

The validity of the post/colonial condition must be questioned. The prefix ‘post’ suggests that we are now positioned in the ‘after’ of a concluded situation. And yet, the developed/underdeveloped dichotomy lingers as our compass in understanding the post/colonial world. Here, I borrow the term post/colonialism from historian and cultural critic, Hamid Dabashi, to represent the awareness one needs to maintain about ‘our actual condition and our potential emancipation’ (152), the metamorphic slash (‘/’) representing the necessary opposition to continued—not quite ‘post’—colonial forms and dynamics of globalisation.
I seek to exemplify how national identity itself, is complex and contradictory. Specifically, what I shall refer to as the ‘democratic national,’ contains within itself multitudes of conflicting assemblages, precisely because democracy is the only political system that is established on diversity and defined by the potential of its destruction. National consciousness does not exist as a crystallisation of semantics, but as a mode of addressing, negotiating and reconstructing itself. Within this undetermined flexible state and amongst the imminent threat of rupture, national identities emerge organically from the open processes of debate and discussion that invite all social subjects to participate. Rather than only ‘protecting the present sense of national identity’ (Miller 129), egalitarian accounts construct a responsive imaginary that lends itself to a potential re-vision and re-modification by their audience.

The dramatisation of a nation’s significant dilemmas and traumas provides intersubjective intimacy across participators and spectators. During a film, new social ideas and relations might be rehearsed onto the public sphere of the screen. Jill Dolan, in discussing performances that provide a stage for communal hope, argues that contemporary theatre still has the potential to become a plain of critical civic engagement, where audi­ences feel themselves allied with each other as a public (91). As Dolan states: ‘Perhaps, in fact, performance is an act of public dreaming’ (92).
And who is the friend?
And whom do I miss?

[ Esmail Kho’i ]



Works Cited

Dabashi, Hamid. ‘Dead Certainties: The Early Makhmalbaf’ in The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, ed. Richard Tapper. I.B.Tauris (2002): 117–153.

Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Miller, David. On Nationality. Clarendon Press, 1995.

Towards

resistance


Raj Kapoor’s Nehruvian hero, Nargis’s sacrificial mother, Shah Rukh Khan’s consumable hero are all manifestations of national fears and dreams conversing on the communal stage of Hindi cinema. Presumably because the disillusionment with ascribing the Indian nation to the mother figure reached its zenith in the 1970s with Gandhi’s 1971 rallying slogan ‘Indira Is India, India Is Indira,’ a new vessel was in need. Disrupting notions of marginality or integration, the ‘angry young man’ became the visceral embodiment of the democratic national and provided a popular mobilisation through Amitabh Bachchan’s renditions of the troubled figure. Films like Deewaar bridged the gap between what had not been cinematically articulated until that moment: the pre-liberation dreams of decolonisation and the palpable disenchantment with the state.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, that medal will be awarded now, which every police officer desires to wear on his chest.’ These are Deewaar’s first lines of dialogue; a story of two brothers and their radically different life paths.

दीवार

 Bachchan’s dispossessed rebel defied the systematic political corruption upheld by his alter ego; his brother birthed by the same mother/nation. Focused on the ruptures of the family, now rendered irrevocably split, Chopra’s film becomes the ground for a civil war between state and community. Eighteen years after Nargis’s ‘Radha’ became the cinematic paradigm of sacrificial matriarchy by killing her own son in order to restore the social order of her village (Mother India), Sumitra is called on stage to participate in the celebration of her son’s killing (Deewaar), calling into question just how benevolent and just an act of filicide can truly be. The sacrifice has not mended any of the nation’s wounds, only allowed for a facade of justice to cover up the schism. The Indian national has been evaluated and found wanting.

Towards

TIME



From the nineteenth century onward, the West has been regarded as a compass of temporality, especially when viewed as the interpreter of modernity. All countries could be evaluated on a scale in their various stages of ‘progress’, with the Western world recognised as the apex the rest aspired towards. The temporal totalisation of the globalised no-place is in line with the conception of cinema; a device capable of possessing time and releasing the results of its conquest into the a-temporal place of modernity. After all, ‘technological modernity’ was introduced on the post/colonial site through advanced weaponry; a more efficient way to exploit, torture, and exterminate the colonised.  The post/colonial screen is then doubly resistant: reclaiming the oppressors’ weaponry while deviating from their temporal understandings. This is why the brutalised nation of Palestine, has been one of the most powerful sites for national cinema. Colonialism is a totalitarian practice not content only to conquer and rule the colonised, it ‘turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.’ (Fanon 169).
Conjugated in a perpetual coil of defiance through transformation, Elia Suleiman chronicles the journey of displaced bodies and meandering souls as mimetic narrative gives way to an account of fragmented temporalities. The everyday assembles itself into a mesmerising resistance, one that simultaneously carries the burden of its past, and the hope of its present. Each sign of disintegration is pregnant with its opposite; despair coupled with humour, militarism paired with slapstick, trauma dealt with irony. Chronicle of a Disappearance roots itself into the death of time; the ultimate un-fillable present. In this cinema of no-narrative, whose whole has been lost, time is concretely present. And it is precisely through his rootedness to the cinematic moment that Suleiman is able to dramatise an ontological chasm whose colossal injustice cannot be expressed. The national temporal is only  visible in its present motions. There it stands alone as a pure symbol; anodyne and infinite. There is no assertion of time as absurdity meets terror in an endless loop of displacement and senselessness.


To  reclaim  time  within  and  despite  the  colonial
settlement  that  has  made  exiles  of  its  citizens

اختفاء
سجل


To  question,  dismantle  and  seek  anew
the  definitions  of  the  democratic  national  self


Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz. ‘On National Culture,’ in The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin Books (2001): 166–189.

Towards

PLACE



 In 1966 Peter Brook offered postmodern theatre The Empty Space—its scenographic manifesto. The key lines of his declaration are cited right at the beginning of the book: ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.’ (7). Forty-five years later, under house arrest, Jafar Panahi sits on his living room carpet in the middle of his apartment in Tehran. This Is Not a Film: yellow tape for walls, a cushion for a bed, a chair for a window, torn tape for the entrance, a carpet for a stage. The purest act of theatrics is engaged within the national context of confinement; spatial relationships being crafted through action and intervention.

A negative space on screen; to come face to face with the creator of the work is to realise the work remains unfinished. It is to exist in the purgatorium of an empty stage before one makes the decisions of its contents. Thus, a negative space is created; a hesitation between action and inaction. The spectator is invited to enter this perfectly void outline and negotiate between reality and fiction. The ‘parabolic realism‘ (Dabashi 36) of Panahi’s pre-house-arrest filmography mutates into a miasma of the present that tears the film from its own form. It is as if audience and creator witness the dilemma of each theatric moment not sure if it should document or fictionalise itself anew. The mirroring of the director’s presence then, conceptualises how the nation may transcend from the vacant stage of inaction, into the emancipatory theatron of action. When a man walks across his cell weaving freedom in the knots of his rug, his walk becomes dangerous; his walk becomes a revolution.

این فیلم نیست

Works Cited
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space: A Book about the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate. Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Dabashi, Hamid. Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker. I.B.Tauris, 2008.

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Last Update: September 2024