“Requiem for the American Dream” - Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott (2015)

Requiem for the American Dream (2015) is a documentary film offering a summary of Noam Chomsky’s current thoughts on what he sees as the dysfunctional American sociopolitical landscape.  Chomsky, of course, is a preeminent American intellectual, famous for both (a) his revolutionary contributions to the academic field of linguistics and (b) his lifelong avocation as political activist and social critic.  Indeed Chomsky’s linguistics work, already attracting attention in the late 1950s, completely recast the field in accordance with his ideas.  Although these ideas have since come under criticism [1], he is probably still the most famous figure in this field in the last century.  However, Chomsky’s fame for the wider American public rests on his relentless activities as a social critic from a leftist liberal perspective.  It is on this plane of Chomsky’s thinking that Requiem for the American Dream is focused.  This film, which was co-directed, co-produced, and co-scripted by Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott, represents a summary compilation of Chomsky’s overall views on these matters.  And since Chomsky is now ninety-years-old, this may well be, as the filmmakers suggest, Chomsky’s final long-form testimony on American social issues.  In further observance of the solemnity of these perhaps final thoughts, they have also been published by Chomsky and the same filmmakers in 2017 in book form, entitled Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power, and with much of the written text repeating verbatim Chomsky’s spoken words from the film [2,3].

When watching this film, it struck me that Chomsky and the filmmakers have been rather clever  in assembling a lot of disparate thoughts of Chomsky into a coherent structure.  The result is a relatively straightforward disquisition based on Chomsky’s “10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power”.  Chomsky’s basic idea is that the wealthy, self-interested elite in the United States have carefully conspired to undermine the basic, originally idealistic, principles of American society so that they can further concentrate wealth and power into the hands of the few.  Underlying this is the image of a malicious cycle of wealth bribing its way into more power, which leads to corrupt legislation that further enriches the wealthy. 

The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power that Chomsky lectures us on are as follows:

1.  Reduce Democracy
The basic goal of the wealthy elite here is to reduce democratic control over the economy and put it in the hands of a few “responsible” people.  Chomsky outlines examples of how this has been done over the years.

2.  Shape Ideology
There has always been concern among the elite about an “excess of democracy”.  So elitist leaders from both the Left and the Right have tried to influence our prevailing ideologies to correct this so-called flaw.  Chomsky specifically criticizes the Trilateral Commission as an organization with an elitist, anti-democratic agenda.

3.  Redesign the Economy

The movement to shift the economy from manufacturing (by off-shoring it) to financialization  has entailed a shift in perspective from long-term interests to short-term profits.  This Chomsky also sees as the outcome of a conspiracy.  In particular he cites economist and former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan’s, celebration of increasing job insecurity in the US.  Overall, redesign of the economy meant increasing deregulation and this led to more economic crashes.

4.  Shift the Burden
By reducing the progressive income tax, there was a dramatic increase in inequality.  This led to a shift in the burden of funding the government from the “plutonomy” to the “precariat “.

5.  Attack Solidarity
The goal here has been to attack social cohesion and instead extol self-interest [3].  Instruments along these lines have been both the increased  privatization of the public commons and the undermining of social security and public-funded education.

6.  Run the Regulators
There has been a huge increase in wealth-funded lobbying that has interfered with the proper public regulation of the economy [4].  Now it seems that with every economic bubble/crash, there is a bailout that redistributes wealth to the rich and increases inequality.  Big business has come to expect and count on crash bailouts from the government.

7.  Engineer Elections
Chomsky feels that the concentration of wealth inevitably leads to the concentration of political power.  He is particularly critical of the 2010 US Supreme Court decision “Citizens United”, which, by declaring that corporations have the same rights as individual citizens, gave them enormous power to influence and manipulate elections.

8.  Keep the Rabble in Line
In order to undermine social cohesion, the elites have long attacked organized labor.  Now only  7% of private-sector jobs are unionized.

9.  Manufacture Consent
There has long been a drive to get people to over-consume via false advertising.  The advertising media lie to the people in order to get them to waste their money.  Now these same techniques are being used to get an uninformed electorate to make irrational choices.  Given the economic decline of print media and the increased concentration of network media, the only people with the resources to run information media for the public are the wealthy elite, who are willing to run these media at a loss in order to achieve their political aims [5].  Again, the concentration of wealth leads to a decline in democratic openness.        

10.  Marginalize the Population
Of course, the goal of the elite is to keep major decision-making from the hands of the people.  One means to this end is to keep the public mired in unfocussed anger and outside of the main decision-making processes.

All along the way of this discourse,  Chomsky speaks in calm, measured terms.  It is clear that he has thought things over very carefully.  However, sometimes he makes, for me, surprising observations.  For example, he points out that Richard Nixon was the last “New Deal” American President [3]:

“In Nixon’s administration, you get the consumer safety legislation (CPSC), safety and health regulations in the workplace (OSHA) and the EPA — the Environmental Protection Agency. Business didn’t like it, of course — they didn’t like the higher taxes, didn’t like the regulation.”

Another interesting observation of Chomsky’s was his claim that freedom of speech is not in the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights.  However, First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights reads

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

And this, to me, contradicts Chomsky’s claim.  Nevertheless, Chomsky’s thoughts on freedom of speech are well developed [6], and he does positively celebrate the fact that, thanks to seminal Supreme Court decisions mostly in the 1960s, no other country’s citizens enjoy the freedom-of-speech protections that American citizens do.

But the overall vision that Chomsky puts forward is certainly bleak.  In particular he doesn’t offer a positive program or set of principles that we should all fight for.  In this connection, I would suggest that his advocacy could be fruitfully supplemented by consideration of the four core principles that I believe underlie successful rational humanist societies and which I call RMDL [7].  The four essential RMDL principles, which must operate in concert, are:

• Human Rights.  These include freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom to watch and listen, freedom from torture, etc.
   
• Open Markets.  There needs to be regulated markets that allow for the open exchange of goods and services across society.  This includes necessarily ensuring there is sufficient wealth equity across society so that there can be widespread, fair exchange.
   
• Democracy.  Some form of democracy involving universally inclusive enfranchisement needs to be in place.
   
• Rule of Law.  There needs to be a written set of laws that are made known to everyone and that can be changed or adjusted by the actions of a democratically-elected government.

With RMDL in mind, we all need to set about positively rectifying and saving the American Dream [8].
★★★½

Notes:

1. “Universal Grammar, Criticisms”, Wikipedia, (7 August 2018). 
2. “Requiem for the American Dream (book)”, Wikipedia, (9 October 2018).   
3. Mark Lilla, “Two Roads for the New French Right”, The New York Review of Books, (20 December 2018).  
4. Noam Chomsky, “In His New Book, Noam Chomsky Takes a Look at Income Inequality”, Moyers, (11 May 2017).  
5. Erik Wemple, “The Weekly Standard is gone”, The Washington Post, (14 December 2018).   
6. Noam Chomsky, “Crimes Again / Freedom of Speech”, Arts & Opinion, Vol. 10, No. 3, (2011).  
7. See my discussions of RMDL, which can be accessed by clicking on the tag  “RMDL” under the “LABELS” section of this site.   
8. David Swanson, “Noam Chomsky Wants You to Wake Up From the American Dream”, Alternet, (27 February 2016).   

"Protest" - Masoud Kimiai (2000)

Writer-director Masoud Kimiai has been an important Iranian filmmaker over a fifty-year career that spans both the pre- and post-revolutionary periods.  However, his most influential films – Gheisar (1969), Dash Akol (1971), and The Deer (Gavaznha, 1974) – came early on, before the 1979 revolution.  But despite the vast changes in the Iranian social climate that have occurred since then, he has generally maintained his usual  focus on two main themes:

• loyalty, honor, and revenge 
• the disastrous effects of drug addiction. 

Of his more recent (i.e. post-revolutionary) films, though, one of the more interesting has been Protest (Eteraz, 2000), because it presents a more subtle and ambiguous picture of the normally crowd-pleasing themes of revenge and honor.  In fact the film presents the narratives of two men who go through an existential examination of just who they are and how they identify with and relate to the traditional socioculturally-defined themes of dignity and honor. 

The film starts by telling how Amir Farmanzad (played by Dariush Arjmand) vengefully murdered the unfaithful wife of his younger brother Reza (Mohammad Reza Forutan) in order to preserve his family’s dignity and self-respect.  He willingly and pridefully confessed to the crime and was immediately sent to prison.  When he learned that the woman he killed was pregnant with the unborn child of her paramour, Ahmed, Amir, rather than feeling any remorse, felt that his victim was even more guilty and more worthy of being murdered.  In short, Amir is a quintessential example of a man for whom dignity and family honor are the highest values.  He is willing to give up his own life in his efforts to maintain these tribal values.

In fact Amir had sacrificed his own career opportunities in order to work and earn money that could support younger brother Reza’s education.  But Reza’s college education evidently exposes him to higher, more humanistic, values than those of his brother.

The scene shifts forward twelve years, when Amir is released from prison.  Before he departs, his fellow prisoners, in particular a powerful gangster named Mohsen Darbandi (Mehdi Fat'hi), celebrate Amir for his heroic act of honor killing.  Just before his release, Mohsen gives Amir a valuable ring and urges him to look after his woman, Majdi (Bita Farahi).

When Amir gets out of prison, he is met by his family and learns that they have been shielding him from some awful news.  His father has died; his mother has become blind; and his opium-addicted brother-in-law’s mismanagement has led to the family’s financial ruin.  When Reza has a chance to talk with Amir alone, he tells him that they all now live in a different world, where revenge and concern for selfish dignity are no longer the highest values.  Instead, the world (in Iran) has embraced the higher, more rational and universally benevolent, values.  They have the following exchange on this matter:

Reza: “The days of such [vengeful] reactions have passed.”

Amir: “So what about dignity?  [Things may have changed,] but is conscience not there
             any more?  Honor and dignity can’t be taken away.”

Reza:  “I was talking about today’s sense of reason, a progressive society."

Although Reza humbly acknowledges the sacrifice that Amir made, he tells him that what he did was wrong and even led to the ruination of their own family.  And even Ahmed, his dead wife’s lover, has lost his mind with grief.

Thus there are two ways of looking at the world that have been identified:

• The Tribal
  This focusses on dignity, honor, and loyalty.  Resentment is harbored, and revenge is the primary operation of justice.  Amir is associated with this view.
   
• The Rational Humanistic
  This focuses on human reason, human rights, and universal values promoting the common good.  Although Reza has been exposed to both moral regimes, he is now ready to embrace the one he has more recently learned – that of Rational Humanism.

Note that I have on several occasions commented on how mistaken is the notion that dignity can have objective validity and on the even more absurd idea that dignity can be so objectively identified that it should be recognized as a universal human right (see, for example, my reviews of The Last Command (1928) and Bicycle Thieves (1948)).  Dignity is a subjectively perceived posture, like pride, that is usually only internally assumed.  In this connection I have cited two references that shed further light on this topic [1,2].

Thus the Tribal moral regime, at the root of which is an obsession for dignity, is a false perspective founded in resentment.  Unfortunately, in the world today we are faced with a rising tide of what is referred to as “populism”, but which is really a return to tribalism under another name.  There is little in the way of policy that connects the various political figures who are currently regarded as populists, such as Bernie Sanders, Norendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Donald Trump.  What these  populist figures do have in common are calls for a restoration of lost dignity which has allegedly been damaged by shadowy elites.  Their popularity is fuelled by the  resentment invoked by their clarion calls for an authoritarian leader to suppress and punish these ill-defined elites who have attacked our dignity [3].  

To counter this rising support of authoritarian populism (which is another form of Tribalism) among the wider population, I have proposed a more compact and easy to remember formulation of the basics of sociopolitical Rational Humanism, using the acronym RMDL, in order to make it easier to conceptualize and discuss in wider forums [4]. RMDL stands for four basic pillars of sociopolitical Rational Humanism:

• Human Rights.  These include freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom to watch and listen, freedom from torture, etc.
   
• Open Markets.  There needs to be regulated markets that allow for the open exchange of goods and services across society.  This includes necessarily ensuring there is sufficient wealth equity across society so that there can be widespread, fair exchange.
   
• Democracy.  Some form of democracy involving universally inclusive enfranchisement needs to be in place.
     
• Rule of Law.  There needs to be a written set of laws that are made known to everyone and that can be changed by actions of the democratically-elected government.

In the context of the film Protest under discussion here, we could say that these two social themes of Tribalism and Rational Humanism offer a conceptual background for our two protagonists, Amir and Reza, as they separately struggle to come to grips with who they are.  The rest of the film now follows two parallel and largely separate narrative threads showing their contrasting worlds.

Amir’s world is the lower-class, crime-tinctured milieu of the urban jungle, which is a favourite setting for writer-director Kimiai.  Amir goes to look for a job by visiting Mohsen’s agent, Fathollah, who operates a cockfighting pit for unsavoury gamblers.  When Amir asks Fathollah for a job but only making “clean money”, Fathollah reminds him that no money is clean.  Corruption is a part of everything.  The dark world Amir inhabits is also hinted at by showing a shadowy figure who watches him ominously from the background during one of Fathollah’s cockfights.  This turns out to be the embittered Ahmed, the lover of Reza’s murdered wife.

Amir, himself, is shown to be tough, but he comes across as an essentially good-hearted and well-meaning person.  The crime he committed was an act of self-sacrifice for his family’s honor and not one motivated by greed.  When he visits Ms. Majdi, who turns out to be gangster Mohsen’s sister, he sees that she is a hard-working seamstress and finds himself motivated to protect her when she is bothered by a street tough. 

Meanwhile Reza is shown socializing at a restaurant with his former university classmates and discussing their favourite topic: Reformist Iranian politics.  Even among Reformists, though, there are disagreements and lively discussions.  They talk about the difficulties President Mohammad Khatami is having getting the Reformist agenda implemented, and a key issue discussed is whether the priority should be placed on opening up the economy or emphasizing freedom and human rights (i.e. whether RMDL dimension ‘R’ or ‘M’ should be prioritized).  This policy divide existed even within a single Reformist party, which is here loosely referred to as the “Kargozaran party”.  This was actually the Executive Construction Party, whose official news outlet was the Kargozaran newspaper.  The party’s two leaders, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Gholamhossein Karbaschi, differingly championed the M and R issues, respectively.

One of the friends at these discussions is Ladan, Reza’s new fiancé, who was recently attacked while peacefully distributing leaflets at a demonstration and now sports a black eye.  Reza also has another close friend, Ghasem, who shares Reza’s lower-class status and who suffers from opium addiction. Ghasem warns Reza that Ladan’s educated, higher-class family background means that she is not a good marriage match for him. 

All of these discussions make Reza stressfully wonder who he is and where he is going in life.  He has embraced new humanist values, but he feels himself unworthy of his brother Amir’s devoted (even though wrongful) sacrifice.  The only job he has been able to find after all of Amir’s sacrifices to fund his education is the humiliatingly low position of a pizza delivery boy. 

Further self-doubts presumably affect both Reza and Amir when they visit their younger brother Yousef, who suffered a brain injury when he was beaten while participating in a peaceful demonstration at his university.  Yousef is a sensitive and innocent young musician who harbors no resentment and now smiles at everything he sees. 

All of their separate encounters weigh on both Amir and Reza.  Amir, who had dreamed of marrying the seamstress Majdi, finally decides that the murder he committed has permanently polluted him and has made him unworthy of her.  He terminates his relationship with her and renounces further association with Mohsen’s gangster family.  Similarly, Reza, feeling that he and Ladan belong to two different worlds, terminates his relationship with his fiance, too.

The final fates of Amir and Reza offer a striking contrast.  After watching another cockfight and seeing Ahmed there, Amir steps outside and fatalistically invites the murderously intentioned man to finish him off.  The vengeful Ahmed goes ahead and fatally knifes Amir and then runs away in the night.

Reza’s ending is different.  At his work he is assigned to deliver a stack of pizzas to an upscale party and is shocked to discover when he gets there that the party is for Ladan’s wedding to a mutual friend of theirs.  Ladan and Reza momentarily exchange painful eye contact before Reza returns to his pizza café.  There he meets some of his old-college friends returning from Ladan’s party, who backhandedly console him by reminding him how filthy-rich Ladan’s family is and how she belongs to a different world from theirs. 

But then Ladan, still in her wedding dress, unexpectedly shows up at the café.  She has apparently had a last-minute change of heart.  She has renounced her Tribalistic arranged marriage and come to Reza to embrace the higher and universal feeling of boundless human love.

Kimiai’s other films often deal with honor and revenge in ordinary Iranian society, but Protest offers a more subtle treatment of these themes.  It gets the viewer inside the heads of its two main characters and presents these people grappling with changing social values. 

Admittedly, though, the film has some significant limitations.  The storyline is fragmented, and the film consists mostly of conversations shown in relentless back-and-forth closeups, which is a difficult cinematic rhythm to employ at length.  Another serious flaw is the treatment of the vengeful figure of Ahmed lurking in the shadows.  This is not well identified and signalled visually, and it represents a botched narrative opportunity for Kimiai.

Nevertheless, Protest probably deserves more appreciation than it has received.  It offers a thoughtful picture of Iranian society in disruption and of people trying to come to terms with it.
★★★  

Notes:

1. Steven Pinker, “The Stupidity of Dignity, Conservative Bioethics' Latest, Most Dangerous Ploy,” The New Republic, (28 May 2008).    
2. Samuel Moyn, “Dignity’s Due”, (2013), The Nation, (4 November 2013).    
3. George Weigel, “Democracy and Its Discontents”, National Affairs, number 35, (Spring 2018).   
4. For further reflections on RMDL, see my reviews of 
• Head Wind (2008)
• Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012)
• Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013)
• An Enemy of the People (Ganashatru, 1989)
• Michael Moore in Trumpland (2016)
• Taxi (2015)
• The King and I (1956)

“Rabindranath Tagore” - Satyajit Ray (1961)

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was one of the world’s remarkable cultural polymaths – he ranks right up at the top with the likes of Da Vinci and Al-Biruni.   In producing so many novels, essays, short stories, travelogues, dramas, poems, paintings, and more than two thousand songs, Tagore reshaped the entire landscape of Indian literature, music, and art. And enthusiasm for Tagore’s work was not just limited to his native Bengal: Tagore’s songs were used for the national anthems of India (Jana Gana Mana) and Bangladesh (Amar Shonar Bangla), and the Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work.

So to celebrate the centenary of Tagore’s birth, the Indian government, at the insistence of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, commissioned Satyajit Ray to make an hour-long documentary in English on the great poet [1].  Ray was a particularly apt choice.  Not only was Ray a consummate film artist, but his grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, was personally acquainted with Tagore and his illustrious family.  And Ray, himself, had been schooled at the special academy, Santiniketan, that Tagore had founded.  Ray would proceed to make several films that were based on Tagore’s stories, including one that he was working on contemporaneously with this documentary film – Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961), Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), and The Home and the World (Ghare Baire, 1984).

Making a documentary on Tagore may seem like a straightforward enterprise, but the remarkable subject’s range of expression presented challenges for Ray.  How could one capture in an hour-long film the full spectrum and magnificence of Tagore’s poetry, fiction, music, and art?  In particular, there was an issue with Tagore’s poetry.  Although he was justly famous in India, Tagore’s poetry was not known internationally until he traveled to England in 1912 and showed some of his own translations of his Gitanjali [2] collection of poems to English colleagues there.  These were enthusiastically received and came to the attention of famous poet William Butler Yeats, who praised Tagore’s poetry emphatically.  For a taste, here are some sample verses in English from Tagore’s Gitanjali [2]:

Thus it is that thy joy in me is so full. Thus it is that thou hast come down to me. O thou lord of all heavens, where would be thy love if I were not?
   
Thou hast taken me as thy partner of all this wealth. In my heart is the endless play of thy delight. In my life thy will is ever taking shape.
   

And for this, thou who art the King of kings hast decked thyself in beauty to captivate my heart. And for this thy love loses itself in the love of thy lover, and there art thou seen in the perfect union of two.    

. . .

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?

Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.

He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put of thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

In short order Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first non-European to be so honored.  However, a number of Indian critics have felt that the magic of Tagore’s Bengali verse has never been adequately captured in English.  For example, Amartya Sen remarked [3],

“Anyone who knows Tagore's poems in their original Bengali cannot feel satisfied with any of the translations (made with or without Yeats's help). Even the translations of his prose works suffer, to some extent, from distortion.”

Evidently Ray was of the same opinion, and he decided not to include any quotations or recitations of Tagore’s poetry in his documentary [4].  Ray also took the uncommon step of eschewing any interviews in his film   Ray did not want to just document Tagore’s achievements; instead he made the effort to evoke the inner spirit of his subject.   As he remarked [5],

“I put in as much work on it as on three feature films.  My approach to the biography was to stress Tagore as a human being and patriot.”

This involved staging some dramatized re-enactments from Tagore’s youth and surrounding circumstances.  But Ray avoided presenting any dramatized events showing the adult Tagore, because he knew that Tagore’s authentic visage was too familiar to many members of his intended audience.  So in the second half of the film he had to work with a lot of static photographic images and somehow make them more dynamic by employing subtle camera movements.  In the end,

“he came to the conclusion that the Tagore film would require more camera movement than any three of his feature films; that there would have to hundreds of opticals each worked out with mathematical exactitude.“ [6].

The result of all of Ray’s efforts was a moving and thoughtful evocation of an enlightened soul, the visual portrayal of which was graced by Ray’s own eloquent narration. 

The film opens with historical footage of the massive crowd that assembled in Calcutta for Tagore’s funeral in 1941.  Then it jumps back in time to cover the background of the wealthy and  prominent Tagore family, who were Bengali Brahmins and important social figures.  His grandfather Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846) and his father Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905) were both important cultural personages who participated in the 19th century Bengali Renaissance and were actively involved with the Brahmo Samaj (Brahmoism) movement, a progressive monotheistic Hindu reform movement.  Rabindranath Tagore was the youngest of Debendranath’s fourteen children, many of whom became prominent writers and musicians.  Indeed, one of his sisters, Swarnakumari Devi (1855–1932), became the first published Indian woman novelist.

Surrounded by older, highly intellectual, siblings, Rabindranath, known as “Rabi”, couldn’t tolerate formal classroom instruction, and was instead largely home-schooled within the Tagore household.   Soon, even as a teenager, Rabi was writing poetry and stage plays and was inspired to take up Brahmoism.   This section of the film showing Rabi’s upbringing and his rigorous absorption of Indian, Persian, and Western culture includes a number of dramatized depictions of Rabi’s family environment that is effectively suffused with moody Indian music on the soundtrack [7]. 

Tagore quickly established himself as a leading Bengali intellectual, but in addition to his prolific authorial output (he would publish more than two hundred books over his lifetime), we also see other sides and interests of the man.  In 1901 Tagore founded an ashram and progressive school based on Upanishad principles at a Tagore family-owned estate at Santiniketan.  Over the next thirty years he would spend much of his time and energy to nurturing this school, which Tagore wanted to offer as a creative alternative to the robotic pedantry that infects most schools the world over. Later, in 1921, Tagore established Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan. Among those who later received schooling at Santiniketan were Satyajit Ray, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, and later Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

Tagore was also actively interested in politics, too, and he became fervently involved in the opposition to British governor Lord Curzon’s “divide-and-rule” intention to partition Bengal into Hindu and Muslim sectors that would fuel internecine communalism. (The idea of fanning the flames of identity politics in order to create mayhem and weaken the broader social order is, of course, a complex and recurring issue.  For other films touching on this subject in the Indian context, see my reviews of Viceroy’s House (2017) as well as Ray's  adaptation of another Tagore story, The Home and the World (Ghare Baire, 1984).)

By 1912 Tagore was fifty-one and although famous in India, he was still relatively little known internationally.  The film now covers his trip to England and the publication of the English translation of some of his Gitanjali poems.  The resulting explosive popularity of this work led to Tagore receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 and a British knighthood in 1915. 

But Tagore still held true to his principles.  Europe was now engulfed in the self-destructive Great War, and Tagore in 1916 denounced the notion of nationalism as an underlying cause of this catastrophe.   Tagore was further disturbed by the cruel Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar massacre) undertaken by British troops firing on unarmed protestors, which led him to renounce his knighthood in 1919.

All the while, Tagore was continuing to express his spiritually influenced notions of rational humanism and  expand the range of his artistic output.  Remarkably, in his late sixties, he took up painting for the first time and demonstrated a marvelous flair for abstract surreal and expressionistic imagery.
 
In his latter years Tagore was also engaged in meeting up with and exchanging ideas with many famous intellectuals and cultural leaders from all over the world, including, of course, his longtime friend and, for the most part, ally, Mohandas Gandhi.  One such intellectual exchange was the interesting encounter that Tagore had with Alfred Einstein in 1930, which has been recounted by Amartya Sen [3]:

"The report of his conversation with Einstein, published in The New York Times in 1930, shows how insistent Tagore was on interpreting truth through observation and reflective concepts. To assert that something is true or untrue in the absence of anyone to observe or perceive its truth, or to form a conception of what it is, appeared to Tagore to be deeply questionable. When Einstein remarked, 'If there were no human beings any more, the Apollo Belvedere no longer would be beautiful?' Tagore simply replied, 'No.' Going further - and into much more interesting territory - Einstein said, 'I agree with regard to this conception of beauty, but not with regard to truth.' Tagore's response was: 'Why not? Truth is realized through men.'"

From my perspective, Tagore’s Interactionist view expressed here is much richer and more profound than Einstein’s apparent Objectivist view [8].

At the very end of his life, Tagore saw that Europe, from whose admired rational-humanist principles he had been inspired to incorporate into his own thinking, was once again engaged in a self-annihilating conflagration.  And again he could see how closed-minded self-identity politics and nationalism could ruin even the greatest of civilizations. So on the occasion of his 80th birthday and now severely ill, he turned his critical eye one more time to the external culture from which he had drawn so much inspiration and which he most admired, but in which he also saw fatal weaknesses – England.  This resulted in one of his last public statements, Crisis in Civilization [9], and Ray eloquently summarizes Tagore’s feelings on these matters in this film’s closing section. 

As mentioned, Satyajit Ray’s film here focuses on Tagore, the enlightened spirit, rather than on the specifics of Tagore’s many artistic creations.  To a certain extend Amartya Sen’s essay on Tagore [3] has a similar focus, but Ray’s film is more eloquent and directly engaging.  Overall, Ray does seem to capture and evoke the spirit of Tagore, and for this reason this is an outstanding documentary film.

Note that Tagore's enlightened spirit included a social humanistic perspective that was in accord with the four fundamental principles requisite of a beneficial society, which I have labeled with the acronym RMDL [10]. 

• R – Human Rights
• M – Free and equitable exchange of goods and services, i.e. open Markets
• D – Democratic governance
• L – Rule of Law

But in recent times there have arisen populist rulers (think of Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Duterte, et al.) who have gained support from significant sectors of society by evoking feelings of resentment, pride (masked as “dignity”), and suppression of alternative views [11,12].  These rulers have expressed contempt for RMDL and the principles it stands for.  What is needed now is widespread advocacy of the principles of RMDL in concise terms that people can understand and appreciate.  (“RMDL” is itself an attempt at such a concise expression.) Thus Rabindranath Tagore’s civilized and spiritually inspired messages are needed now more than ever. 

In particular, Tagore’s amalgamation of Western rational humanism and Eastern spirituality may well be what we need to save our increasingly interdependent but, on a human level, disconnected world. As he, himself, said in his Crisis in Civilization, perhaps a new dawn can arise from the East [8]:

“As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization strewn like a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises. “

Satyajit Ray’s Rabindranath Tagore is an eloquent introduction to a man who can help us bring about that new dawn.  Unfortunately, the visual condition of available copies of this film is atrocious, but it is still good enough for you to absorb its poetic and inspiring content.  I recommend that everyone have a look at this film and draw inspiration from this message from the East.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Marie Seton, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray, (1971), Indiana University Press, pp. 167-173.
2. Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, The Project Gutenberg EBook of Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore”, (1 January 1992).   
3. Amartya Sen, "Tagore and His India", The New York Review of Books (26 June 1997).   
4. Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, I. B. Tauris, (1989, 2004), p. 278.   
5. Marie Seton, op. cit., p. 169.
6. Ibid., p. 170.
7. Although Ray is not credited music composition for the film, his biographer Marie Seton said that he devised some of the film’s music (see ref. [1], p. 171).
8. For further discussion on Interactionism, see my essay and the following reviews:
• The Film Sufi, Existentialism in Film 1, The Film Sufi, (15 July 2008). 
• Avatar (2009)
• Lessons of Darkness (1992)
• Memento (2000)
• SiCKO (2007)
• The King and I (1956)
• Solaris (1972)
9. Rabindranath Tagore, Crisis in Civilization, Indian Society for Cultural Co-operation and Friendship, (14 April 1941).   
10. For further reflections on RMDL, see my reviews of 
• Head Wind (2008)
• Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012)
• Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013)
• An Enemy of the People (Ganashatru, 1989)
• Michael Moore in Trumpland (2016)
• Taxi (2015)
• The King and I (1956)
11. Roger Cohen, “Moral Emptiness: Donald Trump and the Erosion of American Greatness  Moral Emptiness Donald Trump and the Erosion of American Greatness”, Der Spiegel, (6 November 2017).  
12. Anne Applebaum, “100 years later, Bolshevism is back. And we should be worried.”, The Washington Post, (6 November 2017).  

“The King and I” - Walter Lang (1956)

Musical theater has a long and varied history, but for many people its surge in the US after WWII  seemed to suggest almost a new art form.  This was largely due to the unparalleled creative collaboration of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics), who produced a string of unforgettable musicals during this period.  These included the Broadway hit shows Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959).  Filmed versions of these shows, which reached much wider worldwide audiences, were released over an even shorter time span – Oklahoma! (1955), Carousel (1956), The King and I (1956), South Pacific (1958), and The Sound of Music (1965) – and they collectively had the effect of establishing a new, indelible genre.  Expectations were established back then that there would always be a new and wonderful musical film coming just around the corner. But Rodgers and Hammerstein were unique, and their “golden age” of musicals has never since been matched. 

Of that string of hit musical films, The King and I (1956), with its exotic setting and eccentric leading character, was a particularly memorable Rodgers & Hammerstein creation and remains a favorite to this day [1].  Directed by Walter Lang and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, the film  was nominated for 9 Oscars and won 5 of them, mostly associated with its lavish production values.  Perhaps the most significant contributor to that production, though, was the actor Yul Brynner, who played the role of the King of Siam.  With his shaved head (in those days a rarity) and emphatic gestures, Brynner stamped the entire production with his own unique stage personality.  Brynner had been the star of the original Broadway production, too, and throughout his career he replayed the role in revived versions of the musical play, so that by the end of his life, he had played the role on stage more than 4,600 times.

The story of The King and I is based on the autobiographically recounted experiences of an English schoolteacher, Anna Leonowens, who went to Bangkok, Siam (now Thailand), in 1862 to teach the children of the monarch, King Mongtuk.  The evolution of this account has had its own interesting path.  Leonowens’s memoirs were published in the 1870s – The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and Romance of the Harem (1872).  These later served as the basis for Margaret Landon’s semi-fictionalized novel, Anna and the King of Siam (1944). The novel was then made into a dramatic film directed by John Cromwell, Anna and the King of Siam (1946).  Hammerstein was influenced by both Landon’s novel and Cromwell’s film when the lyricist constructed the script for the musical play, The King and I (1951) [2].  Thus we have the following sequence of narrative development:

“reality” –> memoirs –> book –> dramatic film  –> stage musical –> musical film

However, all along the way, including even with Leonowens’s’ original memoirs, there were considerable liberties taken with respect to historical accuracy.  So by the time we get to the film, some significant deviations from the historically true account had crept into the story.  Indeed this may partly account for why both the stage musical and the film were banned from being shown in Thailand, where draconian lèse majesté laws prohibit any depictions of the royal family that might be construed as disrespectful [3].  Anyway, those issues of historical accuracy are not my concern here; the film’s narrative is a fascinating and entertaining tale, irrespective of its historical precision.

We should remember, as I mentioned in my review of Oklahoma!, that musical films are by their very nature expressionistic.  The songs and dances shown in such films reflect the emotive states of the characters, and so the expressionism here is not so much present in the physical environmental context (the usual case with expressionistic films), but rather in a musical context.  And since the films are expressionistic, we cannot really expect them to present an “objective” account of the events depicted.  But they still may offer and reflect some inner truth worth holding onto.

Note that with most Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, the emotive expressionism is not just restricted to romantic feelings; there are also significant social concerns covered, as well.  In the case of The King and I, there are three overlapping themes of interest.  Two of them can be related to King Mongkut’s passionate interest and measures in introducing and spreading Western “scientific” modernism across his tradition-bound kingdom.  Mongkut wanted to usher Siam into the modern world, and he contracted Anna Leonowens to come over from England and instruct his numerous children in Western ways.  But modernism included some Enlightenment-inspired humanistic notions about the social fabric which Mongkut was not prepared to accept.  Nevertheless, autocratic regimes have often exploited modernism’s fruits for their own exploitative ends, and the third social theme concerns a crucial counterweight that is complementary to the modernistic mind.  The three themes were

• Human Rights.  Along with modern scientific thinking came notions of basic human rights.  Siam was still saturated with slavery, and obeisance to the king was always mandatory.  These backward restrictions are still reflected today in the country’s lèse majesté prohibitions.
   
• Equality of Women.  The idea that women could be equal to men was shocking to the Siam of 1862.  This is a recurring theme in the film.
   
• Love.  Associated with Modernism is a reductive, “Objectivist” way of looking at the world that increasingly impoverishes and threatens our existence.  Love opens the door to another way of being, and this, too, is alluded to in the film.

The story of The King and I is set in the traditional theatrical arrangement of two acts separated by an intermission.  Like Oklahoma!, the first act has most of the songs in it and sets the overall mood, while the second act is shorter and contains a dramatic turn of events that leads to a crisis.

Act 1 – Anna Arrives and Begins as the King’s Governess

The film’s focalization focus, the widowed Englishwoman Anna Leonowens (played by Deborah Kerr), arrives in Bangkok and is introduced to King Mongkut (Yul Brynner).  She is to be the teacher of fifteen children of the King’s many wives – there are sixty-seven other children of the King’s less favored wives who are not included.  Right away there is conflict between Anna and Mongkut over whether the imperious king will live up to his promise to give Anna and her young son their own house.

Also introduced is Tuptim (Rita Moreno), a young woman who has been presented to Mongkut as a gift from the Prince of Burma.  It is immediately evident that Tuptim is in love with the man who has been ordered to deliver this gift, Lun Tha (Carlos Rivas).

The King tries to show off his “scientific” mind to Anna, but their relationship is mostly testy, primarily because of the King’s pompous and, what seems to us, adolescent behavior.  This included the King’s prideful demand that all his subjects’, including Anna’s, heads should be at an elevation below his. (The almost equal heights of Yul Brynner (5' 8“) and Deborah Kerr (5' 7“) make this an even more amusing issue.)

After one of their arguments, Anna finally decides to return to England.  However, the King’s senior wife, Lady Thiang (Terry Saunders), comes to Anna’s room and beseeches her in a beautiful song, “Something Wonderful”, to stay.  Anna relents and learns that the King is worried that British imperialists see him only as a “barbarian” in need of protective takeover.  Anna convinces the King to invite the British diplomats to a “Westernized” banquet to show how civilized he is.

Act 1 features a string of great songs – “I Whistle a Happy Tune” (Anna), “The March of the Siamese Children” (orchestral), “Hello, Young Lovers” (Anna), “A Puzzlement” (King Mongkut), “Getting to Know You” (Anna), “We Kiss in a Shadow” (Tuptim and Lun Tha), and “Something Wonderful” (Lady Thiang).  For the songs sung by Anna, Deborah Kerr’s voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon, who also sang the songs for Maria in West Side Story (1961).  The voices of Rita Moreno (Tuptim) and Carlos Rivas (Lun Tha) were also dubbed, by Leona Gordon and Reuben Fuentes, respectively.  However, Yul Brynner (King Mongtuk) and Terry Saunders (Lady Thiang) performed their own vocals.

Act 2 – The Banquet and its Aftermath 
In Act 2 the banquet is held, and with Anna’s coaching, King Mongkut impresses his foreign guests as an enlightened monarch.  The after dinner entertainment for the hosted guests is a balletic play composed by Tuptim that is based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). This 14-minute dance scene, unlike similar lengthy Act 2 dance scenes in Oklahoma! and Carousel, is brilliant.  Those dance numbers in Oklahoma! and Carousel are tedious interruptions that don’t integrate well with the rest of their films, whereas this piece in The King and I significantly contributes to the narrative.  Credit is due to Jerome Robbins’s choreography and the colorful staging of this entrancing piece.

Tuptim’s anti-slavery theatrical diatribe doesn’t go down well with King Mongtuk, since she is his slave and is demanding her freedom.  But the King is elated over his banquet success and doesn’t notice that Tuptim disappears after the balletic play comes to an end. 

In fact the King is so satisfied at this point that he speaks to Anna alone afterwards and gives her a precious ring that he takes off his own hand.  Then they talk about how men and women socialize in the West. He exuberantly sings a little rhetorical song to her about honeybees and blossoms that reflect his view of the naturally marked inequality between men and women – an attitude that is in striking contrast with Anna’s Western egalitarian views.  Then when Anna reminisces about what it was like to go to a dance by singing the song “Shall We Dance?”, the King enthusiastically takes Anna in his arms and waltzes around the room with her.

Their waltzing is interrupted by an announcement that Tuptim has been captured trying to flee the royal palace.  The King’s authoritarian instincts tell him to whip the poor girl, but when he looks at Anna’s horrified face, he feels a conflicting passion and cannot go through with it. He immediately becomes despondent and isolates himself from everybody.

The closing scenes are sad, as the King’s despondency evidently leads to his deteriorating health and imminent death [4].  Before he dies, Anna promises to him that she will stay in Bangkok and provide guidance for the King’s crown prince son and future king.

The great popularity of The King and I is of course largely attributable to the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein.  But just as important was the onscreen chemistry between Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner.  Kerr perfectly embodies the essence of Western feminine civility (seen through a 19th century British lens); while Brynner energizes the male side of the relationship with his infectious and rambunctious personality.  Most of the memorable dramatic scenes in the film, apart from the songs, involve their various encounters and efforts to bridge the enormous gap between them.

However, beyond the evolving and tentatively romantic relationship of those two, there are those three overlying (and, I will argue, overlapping) social issues that I mentioned earlier – Human Rights, Women’s Inequality, and Love.   These are not much explicitly articulated in the film, but they are worth our further consideration.

The first two of those social issues – Human Rights and Women’s Inequality – are clear cut.  Slavery was rife in Siam, and Tuptim’s designated punishment for trying to escape was torture by whipping.  Mongtuk’s many wives were essentially concubines and were brought up to believe they were inferior beings.  In fact when they first see Anna’s independent bearing and assertiveness, they address her as “Sir”, since she seemed to have the self-possession that only a man could have. 

So the implication seems to be that if King Mongtuk was truly wishing to modernize Siam, he should also introduce Western norms and laws in line with human rights and the inequality of women.  This he was reluctant to do, but by the end of the film he (and perhaps his crown prince son, too) seems to have begun to acquiesce on some of these matters.  I have argued elsewhere that for a modern country to be successful in the globalized world, it need to have a structure that provides  Human Rights, Open Markets, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (RMDL) [5].  In other words, what King Mongtuk needed to do was to align his country with the principles of RMDL,  which are derived from liberal ideas that arose from the Enlightenment (Age of Reason) and continued over the last several hundred years in Europe and North America.  Of course, the details concerning how to establish an efficient, fair, and just society are more complicated, but the advantages of the simple RMDL formulation is that it can be remembered and easily propagated to the populace by those who wish to make it the basis of their democratic government aspirations.  This is important, because even today there are many countries across the globe that claim to embrace “scientific thinking” but fall far short of truly implementing the RMDL principles.

However, the RMDL principles are still based on Western modernist ideas, and there are some cogent currents of thought that claim that Western modernist principles omit some important aspects of being and thereby limit us.  Martin Heidegger, for example, in his essay The Question Concerning Technology (1955/1977) [6] argued that modern technology, by relying on objective analysis and seeing everything in nature as “standing reserve”, limits our focus to a reductionist perspective of reality [7].  It’s not just that modern technology exploits and often misuses the natural world and the common pool resources within it.  The problem is, beyond those acknowledged problems, modern technology severely restricts the way we see the world, including how we see ourselves.  Thus this reductionist perspective, which can be called “Objectivism”, not only restricts our view, but also restricts our very being.  Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others have argued that we need an “Interactionist” perspective that embodies the full compass of experience [8].

Note that it is not that the Objectivist perspective is wrong and should be discarded.  Objectivist models have proven to be enormously useful approximations of reality.  But besides their utility, reductive Objectivist notions limit our perspective – they don’t encompass the full, rich nature of reality. We instinctively feel this when we contemplate the difference between “knowing what” (e.g. an Objectivist model of physics) and “knowing how” (e.g. the Interactionist skills of walking and being able to ride a bicycle) [9]. Such Interactionist engagements with the world involve what Merleau-Ponty called the “intentional arc” – our tight, fully-connected interactions involving our wholly embodied selves. 

What the Interactionists are saying is that the world of our being is much richer than our Objectivist models allow.  As an example of the impoverishment of total Objectivist thinking,  some reductivist philosophers, mindful of Objectivism’s failure to account for consciousness, have argued that consciousness doesn’t really exist and is merely an illusion.  This is what happens when your Objectivist blinders restrict your full experience of being.

Note also that the Interactionist perspective is not some new idea that has only recently been presented by Existentialist philosophers.  Its basic notions go back to the earliest stirrings of philosophy.  For example, ancient Yogic/Vedic teachings put forth the notion that consciousness (mind) has four components [10,11]:

• Manas – the sensory experiencing mind
• Chitta (Citta) – the storage of impressions and heartfelt wishes
• Ahankara – the self identity, the ego
• Buddhi – the knower that analyzes, judges, and discriminates

They suggest that (a) it is the Buddhi, with its Objectivist perspective, that has come to dominate our daily lives and that (b) we are not living our lives in awareness of and accord with the full spectrum of mindful being.

Returning now to that third social issue of The King and I, Love, it is that wider spectrum of being that love affords us.  By love, here, I am not referring to simple ego-thrilling romance or sexual attraction.  I am talking instead about the world-altering experience of feeling true, selfless love.  Interactionism includes love

When near the end of the film King Mongtuk, full of angry resentment, is about to whip poor Tuptim for trying to escape, he glances at Anna’s horrified face.  His vengeful Buddhi mind has been telling him that he must administer the punishment – these are the rules.  But now another feeling, from another quarter of his consciousness, has intervened.  This is his feeling of hitherto unacknowledged love for Anna.  At the end of the film, Anna confesses to her young son that she, too, felt a love for the King.

This is what we all need in order to help our increasingly interconnected and threatened world survive – a full implementation of RMDL principles and a readiness to respond to the call of love.  This was perhaps best expressed in my favorite song of the film, Lady Thiang’s heartfelt invocation of “Something Wonderful”.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Bosley Crowther, “Screen: 'The Kind and I'”, The New York Times, (29 June 1956).   
2. “The King and I”, Wikipedia, (24 March 2017).   
3. “Lèse majesté in Thailand”, Wikipedia, (25 March 2017).   
4. This is a historical fabrication, although the real King Mongkut did die of malaria in 1868.
5. See my reviews of Head Wind (2008),  Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), An Enemy of the People (Ganashatru, 1989), Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012), Michael Moore in Trumpland (2016), and Taxi (2015).
6. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, William Levitt (trans.), Harper, (1977), pp. 3-35.
7. Mark Blitz, “Understanding Heidegger on Technology“, The New Atlantis, (Number 41, Winter 2014). 
8. For further discussion of Interactionism see my reviews:
• The Film Sufi, “Existentialism in Film 1", The Film Sufi, (15 July 2008).   
• The Film Sufi, “"Lessons of Darkness" - Werner Herzog (1992)”, The Film Sufi, (30 May 2010).  
• The Film Sufi, ““Memento” - Christopher Nolan (2000)”, The Film Sufi, (4 January 2013).   
• The Film Sufi, ““SiCKO” - Michael Moore (2007)”, The Film Sufi, (2 October 2013).   
• The Film Sufi, ““Avatar” - James Cameron (2009)”, The Film Sufi, (16 May 2010).   
9. Martin K. Purvis & Maryam A. Purvis, “Institutional expertise in the Service-Dominant Logic: Knowing how and knowing what”, Journal of Marketing Management 28:13-14, 1626-1641, (23 November 2012).
10. Sadhguru, “Harnessing the True Power of the Mind”, (Yoga & Meditation, Science of Yoga), Isha, (15 May 2015). 
11. There are also Buddhist notions and other variants that offer different partitionings, but they have the similar idea that our very being can be reduced by not being aware of the full abundance of mindful interactive existence.

"Taxi" - Jafar Panahi (2015)

Famed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s difficult circumstances are mostly well known.  Following the notorious Iranian 2009 Presidential elections, when the government violently suppressed the progressive Green Movement’s protests concerning election rigging, Panahi, a Green supporter, was arrested and ultimately sentenced to six-years in prison, banned for 20 years from any filmmaking activities, and barred from leaving the country.  Although the six-year prison sentence is still hanging over his head and Panahi is closely watched by the government authorities, he has somehow managed to clandestinely (and clearly illegally) make and distribute three films in the succeeding years – This is Not a Film (In Film Nist, 2011), Closed Curtain (Pardé, 2013), and the film under review here: Taxi (Taxi Tehran, 2015).

All three of those films offer film narrative perspectives on personal confinement, but Taxi also sheds light on the larger social world we live in.  In the film, Panahi is a taxi driver on the streets of Tehran and gives rides to an assortment of clients that he picks up.  Everything in the film is seen from the perspective of cameras inside the taxi, both dashboard-mounted cameras and the mobile-phone cameras of some of the people inside. And all the shooting and editing of the film was accomplished in a scant fifteen days [1].  Despite these severe shooting restrictions, the film was smuggled outside of Iran and, remarkably, won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival [2].

Note that the shooting of a film entirely inside a taxi had been done before with Abbas Kiastomi’s 10 (Dah, 2002).  But Kiarostami’s film is a staged theatrical production, while Panahi’s Taxi is essentially a documentary film.  Indeed, Taxi has the look and feel of a cinéma vérité documentary, with a seemingly random stream of passengers getting rides in Panahi’s taxi and venting their petty concerns.  But there is more here than at first meets the eye. Iranian cinema has a history of mixing documentary realism with theatrically staged scenes, as can be seen in Kiarostami’s Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990), Panahi’s own The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997), and Madsen’s Sepideh - Reaching for the Stars (2013).  So the wall between objectivity and contrivance is sometimes obscure in this tradition in order to portray some desired intrinsic truth; and so, it seems, this is what happens in Taxi, too [3].  Panahi, as is his custom, avoids diatribes or disquisitions and lets his passengers do all the talking – he, himself, is primarily a listener and says very little.  But these passengers gradually, and in their own words, give us a picture of contemporary Iranian society and to some extent the degree to which the government is suppressing basic freedoms [4,5]. 

In order to fully appreciate Taxi, it helps to have an understanding of Tehran’s taxi culture.  With its huge population and limited public transportation, people in Tehran have for more than forty years relied heavily on hailing a “private taxi” (mashin-e-shakhsi) to get around.  A mashin-e-shakhsi is essentially a private car that is operated by its owner as a taxi cab. For years it has served as an open employment opportunity for men who are willing to put in the gruelling effort to make a go of it.  These cars do not have meters, and gradually over the years, a whole scheme of shared norms has arisen as to what fares to charge customers.  In general the fare prices are relatively inexpensive, and people do not argue much concerning what to pay anyway.  For efficiency and to keep fares low, taxis will often fill up their available seats with other passengers who may be travelling in the same general direction. 

In order to hail a mashin-e-shakhsi, one stands on the curb, and when a car slows down and stops for you, you need to call out your destination.  If the destination is roughly in the direction where the taxi is headed, the driver will likely tell you to get in, even if there are already passengers seated in the cab.  To be a smart taxi hailer, it is best to call out the name of a well-known building or intersection towards which taxis are likely to be headed.  If you have a long or complicated route to take, it may be necessary to take several such taxis, each of which is willing to take you part of the way towards your destination.  All of this may sound like modern ride-sharing schemes, but the Iranian version of it emerged long before the cell-phone-driven systems around today.

Inside these shared taxis, there is an interesting “social space” in which the passengers seem to feel some fleeting moments of confidentiality that are free from the restrictive conditions of the public space [6].  Iranians tend to be surprisingly friendly and open to strangers, anyway, and when they meet momentarily in these taxis, they often express their thoughts openly to each other.  This includes interactions between previously unacquainted men and women, which would be more restricted on the street. So there is almost a special mini-culture of open discussion in these shared taxis, and this is what Panahi has tapped into in this film.

The film opens with no titles or credits; Panahi wanted to protect his collaborators by keeping their names secret. Instead it starts with a shot of more than two minutes with no dialogue and a static frame, looking out the front window of the presumed taxi onto the busy Tehran street.  The first 73 seconds of this shot are static, and then the vehicle begins moving forward through the traffic.  This puts the viewer into a mood of watchful awareness as the taxi cruises along looking for customers.  As the film progresses, Panahi’s taxi has seven “fares” – a person or group of persons that get in the taxi and talk to Panahi.  Most of these fares are linked to particular Iranian social issues that Panahi shows us.  Although these fares sometimes overlap and are not all perfectly sequential, I will discuss them separately.

1.  The Man and the Woman

The first encounter is when the taxi picks up a man and then a woman who are headed in a similar direction.  Inside the cab they begin chatting and soon they are arguing over how thieves should be punished.  The man, who later suggests he is a hired mugger, thinks the regime should hang some criminals in accordance with Sharia law.  This, he says, would scare the population into lawful behavior.  The woman shows more compassion and says the government should address the root causes of extreme poverty that can lead to thievery.

➔ Social issue: the rule of law, wealth inequality.

2.  The DVD Seller

Panahi then picks up a diminutive DVD seller, Omid, who specializes in privately selling contraband videos. His short stature and enterprising attitude remind me of the similar media seller in Mohammad Rasoulof’s Head Wind (Baad-e-Daboor, 2008). Omid in this film sells popular international movies that have been prohibited by the government, and he can even get hold of some pirated movies before they have been released to the public.  As he reminds Panahi, whom he recognizes as a well-known director, they are both in the business of furthering Iranian culture.

➔ Social issue: human rights: freedom of expression

3.  The Accident Couple

Panahi has to stop to take a man who has been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident to the  hospital emergency room.  His wife, who had also been riding with him, accompanies him.  Thinking that he is dying, the injured man wants to have his last will and testament recorded on someone’s cell phone so that he can leave his possessions to his wife.  According to existing law, his brothers would get everything, and his wife would get almost nothing.  Only an explicit will could ensure that his wife would inherit the family possessions.

➔ Social issue: human rights and the rule of law

4.  Women with Goldfish

The next passengers are two middle-aged women with a goldfish bowl containing two goldfish.  They superstitiously believe that their lives depend on their releasing the fish into Ali’s Spring in South Tehran before noon of that day.  These women may have just been examples of the kind of eccentric riders taxi drivers may encounter, but I didn’t see much of a social issue associated with this fare.

5.  Hana

Panahi has to pick up his cheeky 11-year-old niece, Hana, at school and take her home.  Along the way she tells him about her school assignment to make a short movie with her cell phone camera.  Her teacher has ordered that the student films should be “distributable”, i.e. in accordance with the regime’s restrictions on movie making.  According to these rules, the students have been told to

• respect the Islamic headscarf
• allow no contact between men and women
• avoid sordid realism
• avoid violence
• avoid the use of a necktie for good guys
• avoid the use of Iranian names for good guys.  Instead they should use the sacred names of Islamic saints.
• avoid discussion of political and economic issues.

Of course Panahi is familiar with these rules, but he gets Hana to naively talk about them in this film.

➔ Social issue: human rights: freedom of expression

6.  Arash

Panahi meets with his former neighbor, Arash, who wants to share with Panahi some CCTV footage of Arash being mugged and robbed by thugs.  Although Arash wants to share the footage, he doesn’t want to have these particularly thieves (who were masked and hence unidentified) prosecuted.  This was because Arash recognized his assailants and fears that if they were to be prosecuted, they would be executed.

➔ Social issue: the rule of law, wealth inequality.

7.  The Flower Lady
Panahi’s final fare is referred to as the “Flower Lady”, because she is selling roses on the street.  But she is recognisable as an old friend of Panahi’s, the famous human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh.  Sotoudeh, who is shown here to be remarkably cheerful, is on her way to visit Ghoncheh Ghavami, a young woman who has been imprisoned for merely seeking entry to watch a men’s volleyball game.  As Sotoudeh reminds us, this is a situation that Panahi had treated in his earlier film, Offside (2006) [7].

Sotoudeh informs Panahi that Ms. Ghavami had begun a hunger strike after being held in solitary confinement for 100 days.  And as Sotoudeh reminds Panahi (and informs the viewer), they have both, themselves, resorted to hunger strikes to nonviolently protest their cruel treatment while they were unjustly held in prison.  The Center for Human Rights in Iran offers more background on Nasrin Sotoudeh [8]:

Sotoudeh was arrested in September 2010 and subsequently sentenced to 11 years in prison, later reduced on appeal to six years, and a ten-year ban on her legal practice, on charges of “acting against national security, collusion and propaganda against the regime, and membership in the Defenders of Human Rights Center.” Her prosecution followed her work defending victims of human rights violations in Iran, and she spent three years in prison, at times in solitary confinement, until her release in September 2013.

UPDATE(!): [9,10].

Sotoudeh and Panahi also refer to the lingering paranoia associated with possibly recognizing the voice of their “interrogator”.  This is a reference to the fact that when they were arrested, they were interrogated while blindfolded.  They never saw their interrogators, but the remembered voices have left a lasting stress on them.  As Sotoudeh remarks about their acquired fear of never ending surveillance and the extent to which this, itself, is a form of government instrumented terrorism:

“Sometimes they do it [leave clues of their presence] on purpose so we know they’re watching us.  Such obvious tactics. First they mount a political case. You’re an agent for Mossad, the CIA, MI5. They beef it up with a morality charge. They make your life hell. When you finally get released, the outside world becomes a bigger cell. They make your best friends your worst enemies.”

➔ Social issue: human rights and the rule of law

After dropping off Nasrin Sotoudeh, Panahi goes to Ali’s Spring to find the goldfish bowl lady who had left her purse in his car.  The closing shot of the film, which lasts 4:38, shows Panahi and Hana leaving the taxi to look for the lady, after which a presumed Basiji thug (a paramilitary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards) approaches the empty cab. He gains entry and wrecks the dashboard camera, but he can’t find the crucial flash drive with the recorded camera footage.  Panahi had apparently prudently taken the flash drive with him.

Note that the social issues associated with these fares all relate to the topic of RMDL which I have discussed elsewhere [11].  RMDL is an acronym standing for

• (Human) Rights. These include freedom of speech and the freedom to watch and listen (essentially freedom of assembly). These are fundamental forms of interaction that must be guaranteed and allowed to flourish. Those who are imprisoned merely for their conscientiously held beliefs become prisoners of conscience.
   
• Markets.  There needs to be regulated exchange markets that allow the open exchange of goods across society.  This includes the necessity of ensuring sufficient wealth equality across society so that there can be widespread, fair exchange of goods and services.
   
• Democracy.  Some form of democracy involving broadly inclusive enfranchisement needs to be in place.
   
• Rule of Law.  There needs to be a written set of laws that are made known to everyone and that can be changed by actions of the democratically-elected legislature. The laws provide regulation of the various interactions in the interests of the public good.

Iran has severe problems with all four of these RMDL categories, and hopefully the efforts of people like Jafar Panahi and Nasrin Sotoudeh will ultimately help to make things better.

It is difficult to discern how much of Taxi is staged, but the situations and issues depicted are real.  And they are ongoing.  Subsequent to the film’s release, Nasrin Sotoudeh was again summoned to appear before the Tehran Revolutionary Court in September 2016 to face unspecified charges [8]. 

When Hana had inquired of her schoolteacher what was meant to “avoid sordid realism”, she was told to show the real, but not the “real real”.  If reality is dark and unpleasant, then one shouldn’t show it.  What Panahi has managed to do in Taxi is to show the “real real” but not in a dark and unpleasant fashion.  He has shown the cordial and hospitable Iranian people trying to cope with their RMDL deficiencies in positive ways.

★★★½

Notes:

1. David Sexton, “Taxi Tehran, film review: enchanting film-making”, Evening Standard, (30 October 2015).  
2. Murtaza Ali Khan, “Banned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi's Taxi wins the Golden Bear at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival", A Potpourri of Vestiges, (15 February 2015).    
3. Jugu Abraham, “194. Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Farsi/Persian language film 'Taxi' (2015), based on his own original screenplay: Very interesting subject but intriguing cinematic docu-fiction.”, Movies that make you think, (19 June 2016).   
4. Jamsheed Akrami, "The Art of Defiance", Taxi DVD, Kino Lorber, (2015).  
5. A. O. Scott, “Review: In ‘Taxi,’ a Filmmaker Pushes Against Iranian Censorship From Behind the Wheel”, The New York Times, (1 October 2015).  
6. The interestingly severe contrast between the Iranian public space and private space, and the traditional hands-off attitude of the authorities with respect to the private space, has been described in Hooman Majd’s recent book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, Anchor, (2009).
7. There are other references to Panahi’s films in this work.   Omid makes a comment about Crimson Gold (2003) and Hana makes a reference to The Mirror (1997).
8. “Nasrin Sotoudeh: ‘Hardliners are trying to open a new case against me’”, Center for Human Rights in Iran, (22 August 2016).   
9. “Human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh jailed 'for 38 years' in Iran”, The Guardian, (11 March 2019).    
10. “Iranian Human Rights Lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh Says She Has Been Sentenced to 38 Years in Prison”, Center for Human Rights in Iran, (11 March 2019).    
11. See my reviews of Mohammad Rasoulof’s Head Wind (2008) and Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), Satyajit Ray’s An Enemy of the People (Ganashatru, 1989), Alison Klayman’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012), and Michael Moore’s Michael Moore in Trumpland (2016).