AND LIFE GOES ON . . .
It’s fascinating to consider the ideological factors that influence how film canons are formed, especially when it comes to films that depict unfamiliar cultures. Without thinking much about it, we tend to prefer American movies that suggest either that foreigners are just like us (the liberal approach, as in Samuel Fuller’s China Gate, in which Angie Dickinson is cast as a Eurasian) or that they’re devils from another planet (consider the xenophobic and racist depiction of Vietcong soldiers in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter). The possibility that they might be neither is often more than the media can handle, with the unfortunate consequence that movies are less likely to make it big when they depict foreigners as complex beings who are not carbon copies of ourselves–movies, in short, that are human in their approach but not necessarily idealistic or sentimental or bourgeois humanist. When it comes to foreign movies that depict their own cultures, the same rules apply but with even greater force.
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When I saw Kiarostami’s film a second time–at a retrospective of recent Iranian cinema at the Toronto Festival of Festivals last month–the festival program described it as a film dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake in northern Iraq. The earthquake in question–responsible for the deaths of over 50,000 people in 1990–actually took place in northern Iran. Though the difference of one letter could perhaps be excused as a simple typo, I think it points to a general misunderstanding–consider that during the recent gulf war Iranians in this country were widely confused with emigres from Iraq, despite the fact that the two countries speak different languages and spent the better part of the last decade at war with each other.
On the other hand, it’s far from mysterious that Makhmalbaf has not yet been accorded as much attention in the United States and Europe. Scorsese’s eclectic style succeeds commercially in the West largely because the ideological content of his movies is usually far from progressive. (When it has been progressive, as in The King of Comedy, audiences haven’t turned out as they have for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Cape Fear.) Makhmalbaf may use a similarly eclectic style to explore the contradictions and conflicts of Islamic fundamentalism, but his ideology, reactionary or progressive, has little to do with Western audiences.
We learn at the outset that the nameless middle-aged man (Farhad Kheradmand) is driving to the earthquake site with his son (Pooya Pievar) in an attempt to find two of the male children who acted in Where Is My Friend’s Home? five years earlier. It’s apparent that the man is a sort of stand-in for Kiarostami himself, who did spend a morning and afternoon with his son three days after the earthquake driving to villages hit by it. Then he returned five months later to re-create this experience with the real-life participants and two actors to play himself and his son, but set the action five days after the earthquake. And according to Kiarostami, for economic reasons he used his own car in the film.
The film’s exquisite sense of reality is of course a construction; it’s really nothing more than a profound sense of material presence, a way of placing us as spectators in the middle of an event being reimagined and observed at the same time. Kiarostami’s wonderful feeling for space and duration allows us to enjoy the unique textures of a place and event and gives us plenty of time to reflect on them. The fact that all of this happens to be taking place in Iran may well end up striking us Westerners as secondary; apart from the stark beauty of the terrain, we could just as well be in Miami after the hurricane struck.
