by Mark Cousins
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The third film in the trilogy – Through the Olive Trees – depicts the fictionalized process of filming the second film and includes characters from the second, including the wife of a couple who were about to get married. Iran, 1994.
The third film was the excavation of the philosophical implications of moments from the second. Here was the last element in Kiarostami’s wholly distinctive approach to cinema: the examination of the relationship between the unpredictable flow of real life on one hand and the artworks which try to construct a shape out of it on the other. At other times and in other countries filmmakers like Ozu and Satyajit Ray had instinctively been minimalists, but neither more experimentally so than Kiarostami. As if to prove the point, in 2002 he directed Ten, a cinematic work more minimalist than any but the avant-garde films of Andy Warhol (see pages 281–82). Fixing two small video cameras to the dashboard of a car, one pointed at the passenger seat the other at the driver’s he filmed ten conversations between the young Tehrani at the wheel and the people – her son, her mother, local people and a prostitute – whom she picks up (329). In only one instance does the camera leave the interior of the car. While most of the people in the film are actors, the performances are among the most naturalistic ever to have appeared on a film screen. Ten pared cinema down way below even the level envisaged by Bresson. It was one of the first great films of the new millennium.
Twelve years earlier, in a move that is inconceivable in Western cinema, Kiarostami made a film about a small event in the life of one of the other major Iranian filmmakers of the time. Seventeen years younger than Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf was also born in Tehran. A teenager in the 1970s, he formed an underground Islamic militia, and was imprisoned for more than four years for stabbing a policeman.1 During the time of his incarceration he taught himself sociology and aesthetics. This led him to abandon his political extremism and to start making feature films. From 1982 onward he met with success and even fame, which is where Kiarostami’s project becomes relevant. At the end of the 1980s a man called Ali Sabzian pretended to be the celebrated director Makhmalbaf and convinced an elderly couple and their children that he would make a film about them. He was exposed and imprisoned but the story intrigued Kiarostami who convinced the family and Sabzian, after his release from prison, to re-enact the events. This process of re-entering reality rather than ventriloquizing it with professional actors and dramatic enhancement, was familiar from Kiarostami’s other films but was, if such a thing is imaginable, taken even further by Makhmalbaf. His fourteenth film, Noon va Goldoon/A Moment of Innocence (Iran–France–Switzerland, 1995) which was shown at an astonishing forty-six film festivals around the world, is the ultimate example of this.
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Eight years later and Kiarostami was still innovating. Ten was shot, almost in its entirety, with two locked-off video cameras, one photographing the driver of a car (Mania Akbari) and the other her passengers. Iran, 2002.
A few years earlier Makhmalbaf put an advertisement in a newspaper asking for non-professionals to come to a casting call. One who did so was the policeman he had stabbed nearly twenty years before. Why was he there? asked Makhmalbaf. Because he was out of work and the film world seemed more interesting, replied the ex-policeman. Seeing at once the rich ironies of this situation, Makhmalbaf did what no planned industrial film production could easily do. He scrapped the film he was casting and decided instead to make one about the stabbing incident. He proposed that the policeman, who of course had never made a film before, recreate the events on camera from his point of view, and that in parallel the director – who was also his stabber – would do so from his point of view. Immediately we have a scenario that is engaged with the relativity of truth. What made the resulting intercut film so rich and moving was, among other things, the role of a girl in the story. In the intervening years the policeman had thought often of a girl who had been talking to him in the moments immediately before his stabbing. In his version of events, she is a romantic figure; his theme is the loss of her possible love. In Makhmalbaf’s version it is revealed that she was in fact acting with the plotters, distracting the policeman and certainly not motivated by love. When the ex-policeman realizes this, he storms off, twenty years of dreams dashed. Makhmalbaf could not have known that something as rich as this might emerge out of the disparities of the two versions of the tale. He ends his film with the fictional girl asking the fictional policeman the time. She does so again; then again. Then he offers her flowers “for Africa” and bread “for the poor”. Then a freeze frame. The unpredictability of Iranian paradocumentary was again doing justice to the unpredictability of lived experience. A Moment of Innocence is one of the most original accounts of an aspect of a filmakers life in the whole of cinema, a comedy about the absurdity of the years before the 1979 Iranian revolution and as philosophically complex as Shohei Imamura’s somewhat similar A Man Vanishes.
Using his own self-education as a model, Makhmalbaf took time off from filmmaking to form Makhmalbaf Filmhouse, an immersive experience for teenagers who would be taught philosophy, film, aesthetics, poetics and sociology. One of the most distinguished graduates of this was his daughter, Samira, who made her award-winning debut feature Sib/The Apple (1998) at the age of eighteen. Again it was a paradocumentary and, like her father, she showed a feel for unforced symbolism and moral richness, which established her in the front rank of world filmmakers. Her third feature film Panj é Asr/At Five O’Clock in the Afternoon (2003) focuses on a young woman studying at an Islamic college in Afghanistan, immediately after the end of the Taliban regime. Although apparently pious, after class she secretly pulls back her burkha and puts on feminine shoes, walking about, thinking what it would be like to become president of her country. Moving around because of the crowds of refugees entering her home town, she and her father and sister come across a grand, bombed building (330) which, as she thinks aloud about the presidency, begins to look like her palace. Her shoes add regality as well as femininity but she takes them off often, liking the feel of the earth on her soles. Samira Makhmalbaf’s maxim – don’t preach, don’t judge – and her belief that in Western culture imagination is wedded to escapism rather than the transformation of reality – serves her splendidly.
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“Don’t preach, don’t judge” – the guiding principle of Samira Makhmalbaf, who acknowledges Farough Farrokhzad as an influence. Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon was a series of poetic observations about a young Afghan woman Noqreh (Agheleh Rezaie, left) who wants to become president of her country and who wears a pair of white shoes to express her femininity. Iran, 2003
REVIVAL IN AUSTRALASIA
No other film culture in the last section of this book quite meets the high standards of Iran, but Australasia had its best period since the mid-1970s. The most innovative figures in its revival were Jane Campion, Baz Luhrmann and Peter Jackson. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1954, Campion moved to Australia and studied in the same film school – AFTRS – as filmmakers of the previous generation such as Gillian Armstrong (see page 364). After several shorts and an award-winning feature, Sweetie (New Zealand, 1989), she delivered An Angel at my Table (New Zealand, 1990), based on the three-part autobiography of the same name by Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most distinguished novelist. Campion evokes Frame’s life – her impoverished childhood, her growing interest in language, her shyness, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, more than 200 electric shock treatments and battles with the mental health world – in a frontal, patient and highly coloured way. Actress Kerry Fox, who plays Frame for much of the film, stares at the camera in a way that is sometimes penetrating, sometimes on the verge of a panic attack (331). Campion and her cinematographer, Stuart Dryburgh, used-wide angle lenses to exaggerate spaces in the film, placing actresses in the bulging foreground of the image and having New Zealand’s magical landscapes in the background. One of the things that is moving about Campion’s films is that her lonely women are of
ten aware of how other people see them. As with Fox as Frame, they live so intensely and sometimes appear startled because of this double burden of simply being themselves but also being what the world wants them to be.
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The edgy stare of Kerry Fox as Janet Frame as well as Jane Campion and Stuart Dryburgh’s square-on framings made An Angel at My Table an unusually intense portrait of mental illness and creativity. New Zealand, 1990.
Campion followed An Angel at my Table with a lushly metaphorical film about the sexual repression of just such a woman in The Piano (Australia, 1993) and then, revisiting the theme of female masochism, the icy Portrait of a Lady (UK–USA, 1996). Like many directors, Campion pays particular attention to how her characters use words to express and conceal themselves.
Eight years younger than Campion, the New South Wales-born Baz Luhrmann was a flamboyant Vincente Minnelli to Campion’s analytical Ingmar Bergman. In the early 1980s, the Mad Max films brought exuberance to Australian filmmaking, but Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (Australia, 1992), William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (USA–Australia, 1996) and Moulin Rouge (USA–Australia, 2001) were the mirror image of Miller’s films. Each was a musical of sorts where everything would stop for extended, exalted dance routines. Where Miller confirmed the key elements of Australian masculinity, Luhrmann, like Campion, challenged the country’s gender stereotypes.
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Baz Luhrmann’s heightened mix of pop promos, Sergio Leone, Bollywood and Hollywood musicals made his hybrid films exhilarating and unpredictable. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. USA–Australia, 1996.
Strictly Ballroom was overrated camp but the schemas for Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge were fascinating. In the first, Luhrmann took Shakespeare’s play about teenage lovers from warring families and re-imagined it in the explosive contemporary US setting of a border between Hispanic and Anglo enclaves (332). It opens with a petrol station stand-off between rival gangs, filmed with Sergio Leone-type close-ups and gun play, and with the rapid editing techniques and speeded-up shots of MTV, a decade after the channel’s inception. In other sequences he uses the sensuous intercut tracking shots of Hong Kong directors such as Tsui Hark and John Woo.
Moulin Rouge augments the influence of Asian cinema. Similar to Romeo + Juliet in that it is a parable about idealized lovers tragically separated by death, it is a full-blown musical in the Bollywood tradition, where set and costume design maximize colour and glitter, where dancing suddenly becomes ensemble. One musical scene uses explicitly Indian costumes and choreography (333). As in his previous two films, in what Luhrmann started calling his “red curtain trilogy” about the nature of performance, the songs themselves are Anglo-American pop of the MTV era. At one point in Moulin Rouge the female characters sing, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?” from LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade”, while the men crash into the chorus of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Where Campion’s interest in grown-up women went against the tide of her cinematic times, Luhrmann’s themes were those of the multiplex: teenage love and rebellion. Yet his aesthetic recipe – elements of stage opera, Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (see page 214), Hong Kong action movies, Hindi musicals, pop videos, 1970s disco, gay costume and performance style – radicalized his themes, winningly insisting on a new cinema where the frontiers between Asia and the West, men and women, gay and straight, do not exist. Together with Pedro Almodóvar he was the most exhilarating Western director of the period.
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The influence of Bollywood musicals is clearly visible in this image from Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. The film was designed by Catherine Martin and shot by Donald McAlpine. USA–Australia, 2001.
Nine years younger than Luhrmann, the New Zealander Peter Jackson made his first feature Bad Taste (New Zealand, 1988) between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five. His Braindead (New Zealand, 1992) combined low-budget horror with comedy, but special effects remained his passion. He got to indulge this passion extravagantly in his trilogy of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, (USA–New Zealand co-productions made between 2001–03). Although they added nothing to the schemas of the movies, these sword-and-sorcery adventures became the most profitable films of the new millennium.
THE PAST AND THE FUTURE IN AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE 1990S TO PRESENT.
No American filmmaker dynamized the language of film as Luhrmann did, nor did any conceive their work as philosophically as Kiarostami or the Makhmalbafs. That the industry continued its reorganization begun in the 1980s is in part to blame for this. The corporatization of mainstream production increased in the 1990s; leisure goods were increasingly introduced into scenes in films in what became known as “product placement”; the cross-fertilization which the Time–Warner conglomerate achieved with Batman (see pages 432–33) were repeated across the industry, with Time–Warner leading the way once more when it in turn merged with internet giant America On Line (AOL); and the most powerful of the agencies that represented talent in the industry continued to package whole productions with their actors, directors and writers behaving, in effect, as studio bosses once had.
Despite the corporate dominance, the 1990s and since have seen a broadening of the art of American cinema. Traditional, quality genre films such as The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathon Demme, 1991), Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997) and The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) were a return to the solid narratives and adult psychological grounding of closed romantic realism of, for example, the 1940s. More significantly, films across the spectrum attempted to marry such nostalgia for pre-1980s humanism with some of the formalism of the video age. Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), the work of the Coen brothers, Reservoir Dogs (1992) by a precocious new talent, Quentin Tarantino, and the movies of Oliver Stone were each rec-ognizably of their age yet obsessed with cine-ma’s past. Together they represented movie postmodernism in early 1990s cinema, the last years in the run up to the digital revolution.
After making some of the best films of the mid-1970s, Martin Scorsese’s cinematic soul-searching took its toll. His New York, New York (1977) was an epic, disastrous, beautiful, schizophrenic musical that dragged him down so much that Raging Bull (1980) was about his recovery. Scorsese had been hospitalized, his private life was in a mess, and he was a cocaine addict. It was only in 1990, however, after efficient but less deeply felt films such as The Color of Money (1986) with eighties icon Tom Cruise, that Scorsese managed to capture the complexity of what was happening in the movie world. In that year he made a film that was as fast as Hollywood’s video-edited mega-entertainments, but that also looked back to the most primitive era in cinema.
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Joe Pesci’scharacter – although long dead in the story – shoots straight into the lens in GoodFellas. USA, 1990.
“You want it fast?”, he said about GoodFellas, “OK, I’ll give it to you fast, really fast.”2 The film was about the rags-to-riches-to-spiritual-ruin of a bunch of “wiseguys”, no-hopers from Brooklyn. It followed their lives and schemes from 1955 to the 1980s. The title referred to gangsters who never talked to the police. They deal in food, clothes, liquor, anything to get money and control, but unlike most of Scorsese’s characters who go through hell but see the light, for them there is no redemption.
GoodFellas had shorter scenes, and more of them, than any other Scorsese movie. The director had recently made a promotional video for Michael Jackson’s song “Bad” and brought some of the energy of this to the new film. Unlike many of the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced films of the period, however, the pace of GoodFellas did not feel imposed, as if it were simply the shallow patina of the times. Nicholas Pileggi, the writer of the book on which the film is based, says about the mafia characters portrayed, “I used to know a lot of them and one thing they all have is an unbelievably high metabolic rate. They are, almost every one of them, highly manic, highly energized … They were ‘spielkas’ – that’s Yiddish for
‘ants in the pants’.”
This was not only the era of high metabolic rate films, however. As if in response to the amnesia of the times, film history had become fashionable. Abel Gance’s Napoleon (France, 1927) had been masterfully restored in the 1970s. In 1986 David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia underwent a similar process. In 1996, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo did too, as did Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 2000. The search for new thrills sent the film world looking in the most unusual of places – the past. At the very end of GoodFellas, reformed gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is living in bland suburbia. As he finishes a voice-over, Scorsese and his long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker suddenly cut to his long-dead partner in crime Tommy (Joe Pesci), who points a gun straight at the camera and shoots. Boom. The end (334). This was a direct reference to Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), in which a gunman (George Barnes) is framed in head and shoulders, square on, and fires straight into camera (335); Pesci was shot in exactly the same way. Cinema was still about pure spectacle then; it still had the power to shock moviegoers, to jolt them in their seats. Mainstream American cinema of the 1980s wanted nothing more than to jolt people in the multiplexes. Martin Scorsese was wise enough to know this and reached back to the earliest period in the movies when this had been done.