Rahimieh, N

eScholarship - University of California

UC IrvineUC Irvine Previously Published WorksTitleCapturing Cultural Transformation on Film: Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of InnocencePermalinkhttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/06g5d671AuthorRahimieh, NPublication Date2001 Peer reviewedeScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital LibraryUniversity of CaliforniaCapturing C11/tuml Tmniformation on Film 197filmmakers. But there gradually appeared a change in Makhmalbaf's work and his views on the Islamic revolution. Few Iranians have for­gotten the controversial Makhmalbaf of the early days of the revolu­tion, but many more speak of his personal transformation from an unforgiving zealot to a self-reflective artist. In an issue of the maga­zine Kryan, dedicated to Religion, Tolerance, and Violence, Hushang Gulmakani speaks candidly of his personal experience of Makhmalbaf, the self-proclaimed watchdog of the cultural values of the revolution, and recalls the terror Makhmalbaf's presence at screenings used to evoke. But Gulmakani concludes: "Makhmalbaf, who used to judge everyone, albeit in his imagination, and believed that individuals could be divided into the two groups of innocent or worthy of punishment has now stopped judging and sentencing others" (p. 193). Gulmakani testifies to a softening in Makhmalbaf's views and cites him as a unique cultural figure of the past two decades. The sources of his uniqueness Gulmakani finds in the kinds of transformations we see represented in films likeA Momentoflnnocence. The vision conveyed by A Moment of Innocence draws on Makhmalbaf's personal experiences as a young revolutionary, but it goes beyond those experiences and invites Iranian viewers to engage with their personal and collective memory of the twenty-year-old revolution. Juxtaposing an idealistic young man impatient for change and unafraid to resort to violence with his older counterpart relying on creative means of bringing about change, A Moment of Innocence creates a space within which the social and political fabric of the revolution can be explored. My analysis will focus on the transformative possibilities opened up in A Moment of Innocence. I shall argue that Makhmalbaf's camera does not merely give us a glimpse of the past, but rather it takes us into the very process of remembering, or to borrow from Janice Haaken, "transformative remembering;' asking what the recreation of this moment in the life of a revolutionary and the revolution itself tells us about the Iranian social, political, and cultural scene. A secondary, but related, aspect of this question would be why cine­matic expression has proven to be the most appropriate means of articulating the twists and turns of this intense period in Iranian history. My aim in attempting to arrive at answers to these questions is not to produce definitive pronouncements on post-revolution Cap111ring Cul111ml Traniformation on Film 199in A Moment of Innocence. I depart slightly from Haaken's formulations in turning my focus away from the individual apparently at the center of the narrative, i.e. Makhmalbaf, to the fictional representa­tions of that individual for the purpose of activating a collective remembering that can lead to the type of transformation Haaken identifies: "The past is reactivated, and a new configuration arises out of previous recollections. While the elements of the story may be fact, fantasy, or (most likely) some combination of the two, what is key is the reorganization of the past from a newly acquired vantage point" ( p. 15). To explain the distinction I make between the "real" Makhmalbaf and the film's representations of him, I will first provide an overview of the plot of the film that makes every effort to appear an accurate reanimation of the process of making a film about the fateful encounter between the seventeen-year-old Makhmalbaf and the policeman guarding the bank. The director Makhmalbaf plays his own role as filmmaker, and we are led to believe that the man playing the policeman is in fact the person Makhmalbaf attacked and injured. This is how the story unrolls in the film. In the opening scenes, we see a man looking for Makhmalbaf's house. When he arrives there, the director's young daughter, returning from school, greets him. After questioning him, she agrees to pass on a message from the man, who turns out to be the policeman Makhmalbaf stabbed, to her father. During this exchange the viewers find out the connection between the former officer and the director. In the next sequence, we see Makhmalbaf interviewing a group of young men about their goals in life. Among them he seeks a suitable actor to play his younger self. The person who answers his question with "I want to save humanity" is the one he selects for the role. The director and the young actor have their picture taken together. The auditioning process is repeated, this time the former police­man stepping into the shoes of the director. To select a person who will play his role, unlike Makhmalbaf, he focuses on his perception of the similarities between his own features and that of the potential actor. The person he chooses does not meet with Makhmalbaf's approval. Makhmalbaf himself is not seen disagreeing with the policeman, but his assistant is appointed to carry the message back. The former policeman walks away, threatening to abandon the entire Capturing Cultuml Tmnsfonnation on Film 209present. As I mentioned earlier, it is implied that he has agreed to this re-enactment of the past at the behest of the former policeman. But the director is no less serious about an authentic recreation of the past. In the audition scene, we see the director is lighthearted and mocking in his questioning of the young men gathered in the studio. The young actor whom he ultimately chooses is very serious about his goal of saving humanity. In contrast, the director engages in deliberate literal-mindedness and asks whether he knows how many individuals compose humanity. W hen the young man produces the wrong answer, the director asks others for the right figure, humil­iating the young idealist. The director's ironic distance from the idealism of his own past persists through the scenes in which he tells the young actor about the story line. For instance when he is driving the young man to his house, the latter asks him to go faster because he is eager to return home to avoid worrying his sick mother. The director retorts: ''If you are such a mummy's boy, how do you want to save humanity?" He calls the young man's courage into question again when he presents him with a fake switchblade knife. The director mistakes the young man's disinclination to resort to violence as his fear of the knife. After the young man tries out the fake knife, the director says: "Did you see that the knife didn't hurt your hand?" But the young man persists by asking, "Yes, but can't one save humanity in other ways?" The director's response inaugurates his immersion in his own past: ''Yes, but that's the kind of talk used by seventeen-year­olds of today .... In the old days, twenty years ago:' Not coinciden­tally, at this very moment they arrive at the house of the young man's cousin. In their conversation the two youngsters ignore the director's valorization of the past by asserting their own reality. The youngsters choose for a slogan they would shout in case a crowd assembles in the course of the confrontation with the policeman: ''As long as there are trees, life must go on:' In the script the line is: "If I pull up a blade of grass, I know I will die;' from the poem Rushani, Man, Gu4 Ab (Light, I, Flower, Water) by Suhrab Sipihri (p. 335). This same line is chosen by Makhmalbaf as the epigraph of his script. The slogan chosen in the film also echoes a line from Sipihri's poem Dar Gulistanih (In the Garden): ''As long as there are poppies, life must 212 Nasrin Rahimieh which new configurations of meaning can be articulated. Here I draw on Victor Turner's concept of the liminal and its generative potential: "'Meaning' in culture tends to be generated at the interfaces between established cultural subsystems, though meanings are then institutionalized and consolidated at the centers of such systems. Liminality is a temporal interface whose properties invert those of the already consolidated order that constitutes any specific cultural 'cosmos"' (p. 41). The cultural "cosmos" inverted in the film is the one determined by inscriptions of the past, specifically the director and the former policeman's. The young actors chosen are reminded over and over again, through both directors, of the need to act according to the scripts they have been given. Yet, throughout the process of filming they transgress the script. Ultimately they subvert the most crucial moment, the scene of the confrontation between the young revolutionary and the policeman, replacing the violent conflict with gestures of peace. The bread and the flowerpot take the place of the knife and the gun in the last shot. Affected in this process is the vision of personal history. Recalling the past, the film suggests, is to enter into negotiation with see­mingly self-contained personal histories and to encounter hitherto unimagined admixtures. A Moment of Innocence also implies that "[t]here is no part of [a] personal record that is not at the same time the record of a community, a society, a nation, an age" (Hillman, p. 45). What we see especially in the ending of the film is a laying claim to these broader dimensions of individual histories. It privileges the young actors and shows them controlling the outcome, pointing out that the past must enter into dialogue with the present. The episode from Makhmalbaf's own revolutionary past can also be seen as a metaphor for the history of the Iranian revolution, impli­citly inviting viewers to engage in an examination and interrogation of that history. The camera and the medium employed by Makhmalbaf are not secondary to this message. Moving images have the potential to free Iran from the revolutionary images with which it has been saddled since the first days of the revolution and the hostage crisis. The images by which Iranian revolution represented itself to the world were underwritten by anger and violence. As Edward Said points out in his Covering Islam, the Iranian hostage takers believed 214 Narrin Rahimieh "involves the capacity to recognize new patterns or relationships in previously available information. Events that never were forgotten may assume emergent meaning and emotional vividness in light of the nascent awareness or newly found possibilities for framing and interpreting the past" (Haaken, pp. 14-15). Making an episode from his own youth the subject of a film about changed ideals and realities, Makhmalbaf offers his own life as an emblem of the transition from a generation consumed with revolution, war, destruction and vio­lence to a generation determined to open a new vista on the future. Like Makhmalbaf's revolutionary past, Iran's revolutionary history, the film suggests, might be best used in artistic recreations rather than obsessive and confining repetitions. Works Cited Dabashi, Hamid. (1999). Muhsin Makhmalbafs A Moment of Innocence. In: Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker (Eds), LijeandArt:The New Iranian Cinema, pp. 115-128. London: National Film T heatre. Fischer, M. J. and Mehdi Abedi. (1990). Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmoder­nity and Tradition. Madison: T he University of Wisconsin Press. Gulmakani, Hushang (1999). Az Khushunat va Talasub ta Mudara va Mihrvarzi: Y ik siliyi Dardnak-i Bidarkunandeh va Hushdardahandih. Kfyan 8.45, 188-195. Haaken, Janice. (1998). Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hillman, James (1983). Healing Fiction. Woodstock, Connecticut: Spring Publications. Makhmalbaf, Muhsin. (1996} Nun-uguldun. Tehran: Bahman. Nun-u guldun. Dir. Muhsin Makhmalbaf. Tehran. 1996. Said, Edward W. (1981). Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How Wil See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon. Sipihri, Suhrab. (1997). Hasht Kitab. Tehran: Tahhuri. Sutton-Smith, Brian. (1997). The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Turner, Victor. (1982). From Ritual to Theater: The H uman Seriousness of Play. New York: Per­forming Arts Journal Publication. 

Capturing Cultural Transformation on Film: Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

eScholarship - University of California