National Cinemas — Irene Bakola

In Search of National Cinemas

three excerpts

Disrupting notions of marginality, the Angry Young Man arrived on screen at a time when Hindi cinema was looking to replace the archetypes of the past. As an antidote to Raj Kapoor’s Nehruvian hero and Nargis’s sacrificial mother, Amitabh Bachchan’s renditions of the troubled figure carved out a space for popular mobilisation. Films like Deewaar bridged the gap between what had not yet been cinematically articulated: the pre-liberation dreams of decolonisation and the palpable disenchantment with Indira Gandhi’s 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 the two paths to which they are led. Bachchan’s dispossessed rebel defies the systemic 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 Resistance
दीवार

From the nineteenth century onwards, the West has been regarded as a compass of temporality, especially when viewed as the interpreter of modernity. 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.’¹.

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.

Towards Time
سجل اختفاء

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.’². 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 purgatory 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’³ 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.

Towards Place

این فیلم نیست

¹ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (2001, Penguin Books)
² Peter Brook, The Empty Space (1996, Simon and Schuster)
³ Hamid Dabashi, Makhmalbaf at Large (2008, I.B.Tauris)