images of desire
by
Douglas Messerli
Abbas Kiarostami (screenwriter and director) شیرین Shirin / 2008
Abbas
Kiarostami’s 2008 film, Shirin, might be described as a film with a
film, or a cinematic work with film effects. Throughout this almost two-hour
movie, we see nothing but an audience of mostly women, head on, as they watch
and react to a film on the screen which we never get to see, but can hear.
The story, a kind of melodramatic version
of Tristan and Isolde concerns a 12th century Armenian princess and
later queen, Shirin, who falls in love with a Persian prince, Khosrow. He is
equally in love with her, but in order to save his kingdom he must ally with
the Romans, marrying a Roman woman. Each time the would-be lovers come close to
one another, something happens to keep them apart; finally Shirin even gives up
her kingdom to order to live in Persia, although her love can never be
consummated, and she and Khosrow die without ever knowing each other’s love.
This is what we might describe in the US,
as a “chick flick,” and we observe several of the dozens of women watching it
in tears or, at the very least, with their faces rapt in consternation and
attention. Almost all of them, except for the French actress Juliette Binoche,
are Iranian women, and Kiarostami presents us with several types, each of whose
reactions are somewhat different.
Strangely, even without being able to view
this film—or perhaps one should say because we are unable to view the
film—we must imagine it, perhaps, as in my case, as a splendiferous color
spectacle, laced with Persian miniatures. I can see only the most beautiful of dark-haired
males in Khosrow, since even a lovely queen has given up her kingdom for him.
However,
we might equally conjure it up, given that the only things we have to work with
are the dialogue, the music (an historical film score by Morteza Hananeh and
Hossein Dehlavi), and the visual clues from the faces of the audience members,
as rather realist, plain-faced warriors whose beauty lies only in each other’s
eyes, a dreary comedy in which the lovers are horribly misled.
In some respects, the central characters’
love for one another is not unlike our own relationship with the missing
images; we desire to se the missing film, but must do so only by using our own
imaginative desires and those we equally imagine from the faces of the film’s
viewers. In a sense we are watching the desires of our own desires, a kind of
wishful imaginative experience that has ultimately nothing to do with what
might be showing on any screen.
In this sense, this is an extremely queer
film or a very heterosexual one, depending simply on who is watching it, who is
imagining the desires on screen and off. Are the women excited more by the
heroine or the hero? With whom do they most identify? And what forms of beauty and
notions of love are they encountering upon the screen?
Actually, it may not be anything at all
since Kiarostami filmed these characters’ responses to the film (rumored to
have been shot in his own home) by simply asking them to gaze at a series of
dots above his camera. Even he had no idea, at first, what movie he might pretend
they were watching, and only at the last moment chose the famous 12th century
tale.
It reminds to some of what the
Iranian-born sculptor Siah Armajani once told me about his childhood filmgoing
experiences. A local theater owner would gather up pieces of US and British
cinema that had been cut from the films for purposes of censorship. He’d then
link those pieces together in a loop and, while showing the, create a personal
dense narrative for his mostly youthful audiences that decried the evils of the
West. “Never before or since,” Siah sighed, “has film been so immersive and
exciting. We had to imagine those narrative connections which the strange ‘forbidden’
images only hinted at.
If there was even a precise example of
the adage that film is the canvas of our own dreams, Shurin is its
exemplar. In this work the director has perhaps made one of the purist and
theoretical works of cinema ever, forcing us to become the creators of his own cinematic
work.
Los
Angeles, New Year’s Eve, 2016
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December 2106).
No comments:
Post a Comment