“Manuscripts Don’t Burn” - Mohammad Rasoulof (2013)

Mohammad Rasoulof’s searing drama Manuscripts Don’t Burn (Dast-neveshtehaa Nemisoozand, 2013) is not a political thriller, in the usual sense of that term, but is instead more of a sociopolitical nightmare – one that belongs in the same class as works by Orwell and Kafka.  Like the writings of those two authors, this film creates a haunting psychological tone and atmosphere that overhangs and dominates the proceedings depicted. Note however that in the case of Manuscripts Don’t Burn, it is not a matter of viewing some imagined dystopia, but instead a disturbing depiction of problems in present-day Iran.

In fact the current sociopolitical situation in Iran is an important backdrop to the recent films of both Mohammad Rasoulof and those of his friend and sometimes collaborator, Jafar Panahi.  Both Rasoulof and Panahi were arrested during the 2009 Iranian elections and given 6-year (later reduced to 1-year) prison sentences, 20-year bans from filmmaking, and prohibitions from speaking to the press and traveling abroad.  Nevertheless, they have so far defied the authorities and have managed to make films clandestinely.  In Rasoulof’s case he was able to spend some time outside Iran after the sentencing, and some of the indoor scenes of Manuscripts Don’t Burn were shot in Hamburg, Germany.  But since early 2014 he has had his passport confiscated by the Iranian authorities and cannot leave Iran [1].  His prison sentence is still threateningly on hold.

Basically, the Iranian government does not want Rasoulof to express his ideas publicly, and that is exactly what Manuscripts Don’t Burn is about: freedom of expression.  The story of the film follows the plight of some elderly intellectual writers whose works are always censored and who find themselves constantly under government surveillance.  One of these writers is suffering from some unspecified illness and would like to visit his daughter in France before he dies, but he cannot go, because he is under a travel ban (like Rasoulof).  So he has a plan to persuade the government to lift the ban.  He has prepared a manuscript describing in detail the government’s efforts in 1996 to kill 21 Iranian intellectuals traveling by bus to a conference in Armenia.  By a stroke of good fortune back then, the government’s treacherous scheme of having the bus driven over a mountain cliff failed, and the 21 writers survived but were warned to remain silent about the matter. The current manuscript’s writer was one of those survivors, and his secret (even to his fellow intellectual comrades) plan is to trade the manuscript to the government in return for an exit visa.

Actually, this 1996 attempt to murder 21 intellectuals by crashing their bus was indeed a real occurrence, and it is one of the documented events that were part of the notorious “Chain Murders” conducted by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence (VAJA) to secretly murder political dissidents and intellectuals [2]. Rasoulof’s rehashing of this infamous event and making it a key feature of his story must undoubtedly be embarrassing to the Iranian government – a number of the Chain Murder perpetrators have never been held to account and still hold key governmental positions. In fact the entire film seems almost an instance of Rasoulof throwing down the gauntlet towards his despotic antagonists and exposing the perfidious nature of the VAJA ministry.  Because of these threatening political ramifications, then, all the people who worked on the production of Manuscripts Don’t Burn retained their anonymity.  The only screen credits listed on the film are just those showing Rasoulof as the writer, director and producer.

The secretive making of a film like this inside such a surveillance state must have been extremely difficult, and yet the production values of the film are very high.  This is not a quick-and-dirty production off a mobile phone camera.  The acting, presumably mostly by unknown actors, is subtle and convincing.  And the camera work and editing are very professional and smoothly done.  Even the sound editing is well performed. There are some instances of dialogue continuing after an actor has closed his mouth, and I am not sure if this is for intended effect or it was a case of Rasoulof finding it too difficult to reshoot a scene to include some added dialogue.  In any case these are not significant detractions from the film’s overall polished presentation.

The film’s story is told from multiple perspectives and features six principal characters:

• The Intellectuals
• Kasra, the writer of the hidden and sought-after manuscript.  He was formerly imprisoned for ten years and is now seeking permission to leave Iran.
• Kian, a despairing poet
• Forouzandeh, a wheel-chair-bound, but feisty, novelist
•  The VAJA antagonists
• The Commissioner.  He is a former dissident intellectual and prison-mate of Kasra.  He has since become a turncoat and is now the vindictive head of an Intelligence Ministry bureau and seeks to confiscate Kasra’s manuscript.
• Khosrow, a low-level government hatchet-man
• Morteza, a low-level government hatchet-man  

The story moves back and forth between these two groups, employing time shifts and slow disclosure along the way to keep the viewer somewhat in the dark and maintain the atmosphere of paranoia.  In fact the opening sequence shows Khosrow and Morteza involved in some kind of caper that foreshadows the closing scene of the film and only becomes clear at the end.

As the leisurely narrative unwinds over the rest of the opening one-third of the film, we see only the two VAJA hitmen, Khosrow and Morteza, and the two intellectuals Kian and Forouzandeh, all of whom seem to be real, ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives. Khosrow, for example, is married and has a seriously ill child who needs urgent hospitalization, for which the worried Khosrow doesn’t have the money.  Thus the viewer is quite likely to sympathize with Khosrow’s anxiety and distractedness.  It is only gradually that we learn that Khosrow is not only paid to murder people but that one of his early assignments was to be the driver of that bus back in 1996 that was supposed to be driven off the cliff and kill the 21 intellectuals inside.  (Note that the real driver of that bus was apparently identified as a person named “Khosrow Barati” [2]).

In the second third of the film, Kasra and The Commissioner come to the fore.  Both of them are pursuing what they believe is their moral duty, and yet they are both compromised individuals. The Commissioner, in particular, is a recreation of the darkly cold-blooded O’Brien from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He is shown to be now obsessively devoted to his relentless battle against  “NATO culture”. Meanwhile Khosrow and Morteza are driving up north and conveying a hooded and bound prisoner in the trunk of their car. One of the examples of slow disclosure in the film concerns the identity of this prisoner: he is introduced in the 13th minute of the film, but his identity is not revealed until 80 minutes later in the story.

It takes some time for us to learn that there were two extra (hard) copies of Kasra’s damning manuscript made, and they were individually secreted with Kasra’s friends Kian and Forouzandeh.  Thus those two latter individuals become targets of the government.  (Why there were no electronic copies made is not explained, but perhaps that was a product of the intellectuals’ paranoia over government electronic surveillance.)

So in the final third of the story, the narrative threads converge, and we come to its excruciatingly grisly finale. There is an agonizingly slow four-minute-long shot showing Khosrow nonchalantly raiding his poisoned victim’s fridge and making a sandwich for himself while he waits for his helpless quarry to die. And the closing sequence, connecting as it does with the film’s opening sequence, brought to my mind Panahi’s narrative arc in The Cycle (2000).

Note that while Kasra and The Commissioner are the inscrutable instigators of the key narrative machinery, it is really Kian and Khosrow who are at the psychological focus of the story.  They are down at the operational level and suffering the consequences of others’ schemes. This is what makes Rasoulof’s film unique. The focus on Kian and Khosrow shows them struggling to find their way in a corrupted social matrix. 

An effective social matrix, as I have commented in connection with my reviews of Rasoulof’s Head Wind (2008) and Alison Klayman’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012), is one that attends responsibly to the four pillars essential to a successful society, which I call RMDL:

• (Human) Rights.  These include freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom to watch and listen, freedom from torture, etc. They all relate to fundamental forms of interaction that must be guaranteed and allowed to flourish.
• 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 equality across society so that there can be widespread, fair exchange.
• 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 government. Such laws provide for regulation of the various interactions in the interests of the public good.

Some social advocates think that only Democracy is needed; once that is established, their story goes, then everything else will fix itself.  This was the position of the US Neocons who promoted the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.  Others advocate only for free markets and that everything else is secondary.  This is the position of those supporting “Asian Values”, as represented by the views of past Singaporean President Lee Kuan Yew.  Still others, often coming from a religious background, insist only on the importance of a rigid notion of law and exclude consideration of R, M, and D. But in fact all four pillars of RMDL must be supported together in order to have a successful society, and the crucial one that is often neglected is R – human Rights.

Human rights have always been important, but their more explicit formulation that came to lie at the foundation of our modernist culture appeared in the 18th century during the rise of Rational Humanism (it is variously termed, but they are the principles behind the Enlightenment of the 18th century).  Rational Humanism asserted that human reason and human values, rather than so-called “revealed” texts, should be the foundation on which society is based.  This was an age when natural science was making tremendous strides concerning how we can understand the world and advance our welfare. Because of the verifiable success of natural science, many people nowadays think that Rational Humanism only relied on human reason. But Rational Humanism also relied on what we might say are heartfelt feelings [3].  That is, we need to consult the “god” within all of us rather than rely on the uncertain authority of ancient texts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a leading 18th century figure of Rational Humanism’s rise, called attention to this idea when he  asserted that his basis for moral action was not based on philosophical rules [4]:

"I do not derive these rules from the principles of the higher philosophy, I find them in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; conscience is the best casuist; and it is only when we haggle with conscience that we have recourse to the subtleties of argument."

Although out intuitive feelings can often lead us astray, there is now growing common agreement that certain heartfelt human rights – such as freedom of expression, assembly, movement, and privacy rights – are essential to all.  They are so essential, in fact, that I believe they must stand as one of the four pillars of RMDL.

There is nevertheless always a tension between heartfelt feelings (based on our consultation with the god inside us) and authoritative texts (whether from the exterior God or from external experts).  This tension exists inside most religions, too.  Thus within Sunni Islam there are two opposing tendencies: the Salafists, who are fundamentalists adhering to ancient texts, and the Sufis, who seek a mystical union with God.  The problem with fundamentalist adherence to ancient texts, though. is that they are still written by imperfect humans in a given context and are often outdated.  This means that they have to be interpreted by ecclesiastical “experts”, and this makes them subject to manipulation and exploitation. 

Thus during Manuscripts Don’t Burn Khosrow can be seen struggling internally with the moral rectitude of what he is doing.  He wonders if his son’s illness is the direct consequence of God’s punishment for his torturous murders.  Morteza blithely assures him, however, that the murders they are committing have been directly sanctioned by Sharia law.  This is how society’s foot soldiers can be manipulated into carrying out cruel actions and squashing human rights.  And this is how wars are justified, too. Indeed we can also see evidence of this kind of manipulation in the US today at the highest levels of government when torture has been permitted by manipulating the laws [5].  And nowadays torture can be justified, it seems, on utilitarian grounds alone according to the CIA [6].

So Khosrow, like everyone, has some humanity within him, but he does not have the strength to stand up to the text-based authoritarian social climate in which he lives. In fact human frailty is a key theme of Manuscripts Don’t Burn.  The intellectuals are not shown as heroic crusaders, either.  Instead they are despondent idealists who have all but given up any hopes of social justice.  And they are easily silenced and crushed by their unfeeling oppressors.  As mentioned, Khosrow and Morteza are also being manipulated by the system.  They freely exchange religious homilies, such as “Trust in God”, “God is Great”, and “God Willing”, and in so doing reflect their abandonment of any real moral self-reflection.  They are content to just have faith in God’s unknowable plans (as articulated, of course, by the scheming theocratic experts). This is how text-based justifications can be used to manipulate the infantry pawns to carry out unsavory acts.

And today in Western modernist societies there is arising another text-based movement, “Dataism”, which further threatens the Rational Humanism’s advocacy of heartfelt humanism [7]:

According to this view, the entire universe, including biological organisms, consists of particles governed by mechanistic rules of interaction; and with our always accelerating data-processing capabilities, we are now approaching the point where we can participate most effectively in this cosmic system by processing vast amounts of collected data. As Yuval Noah Harari has commented, “given enough biometric data and computing power, this all-encompassing system could understand humans much better than we understand ourselves”. [8]

Following Dataism to its logical conclusions would mean eventually abandoning our heartfelt considerations and relying on utilitarian-based computer correlations of “Big Data” to make all of our decisions, including those with moral implications.  Thus we now have modern scientists discovering from their data-mining how many animals are eaten by domestic cats (Felis catus) and concluding that they should all be annihilated (“euthanized”), because they are deemed to be an invasive species (not considering the much greater degree to which human beings are an invasive species) [9].  In this respect Kian, in Manuscripts Don’t Burn, was demoralized by how computer technology and “the Cloud” is distracting everyone, too, when he observed that today’s younger generation in Iran is mindlessly immersed in Facebook and Twitter postings and is unaware of how the data from these interactions can be used against them.  What we really need to do in the face of all these tendencies to subvert our humanity is at least to ensure freedom of expression and other human rights so that we can share our heartfelt views and arrive at consensuses concerning common issues.

Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn reveals how basic human rights can be so ruthlessly violated by a system in Iran that manipulates text-based religious accounts for its own exploitative continuance. The individuals shown in the film are not inherently evil, but instead reveal the banality and wider scope of evil. To guard against these difficulties, the preservation of human rights such as freedom of expression enables us generally to share our heartfelt views and arrive at an agreed-upon and mutually beneficial course of action. Restricting public expression and demanding fealty to prejudicially interpreted orthodox texts only sustains the exploiters. Rasoulof offers no solution as to how to ensure human rights, but he does reveal the extent of the problem facing us.  It is not just a matter of dealing with a few troublemakers; it is more a matter of correcting a system that denies freedom of expression and thereby enables the troublemakers to perpetuate their exclusive control.  His film, which has received many positive reviews [10,11], is not likely to be a box-office crowd-pleaser, and it has so far mostly only gained film festival exposure (of course like most all of Rasoulof’s films, it is banned in Iran).  Nevertheless, this is a penetrating and thought-provoking work that should be seen by everyone.
★★★★
   
Notes:

1. Sune Engel Rasmussen, “An Iranian Dissident Returns Home”, Aljazeera America, (3 July 2014). 
2. Muhammad Sahimi, “The Chain Murders: Killing Dissidents and Intellectuals, 1988-1998", TehranBureau, Frontline, PBS: Public Broadcasting System, (5 January 2011). 
3. See the comments in my review of “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). 
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or Education [1762], Barbara Foxley (trans.), New York: E.P. Dutton, (1921), Online Library of Liberty. 
5. Jed S. Rakoff, “‘Terror’ and Everybody’s Rights”, The New York Review of Books, (29 September 2016). 
6. Spencer Ackerman, “No Looking Back: the CIA Torture Report's Aftermath”, The Guardian, (11 September 2016). 
7. The Film Sufi, “‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ - Stanley Kubrick (1968)”, The Film Sufi, (30 August 2016). 
8. Yuval Noah Harari, "Big Data, Google and the End of Free Will”, Financial Times, (26 August 2016).    
9. Natalie Angier, “The Killer Cats Are Winning!”, The New York Review of Books, (29 September 2016). 
10. “Manuscripts Don’t Burn, Mohammad Rasoulof, Review”, The Vore, (n.d.).
11. Godfrey Cheshire, “Manuscripts Don’t Burn”, Rogerebert.com, (13 June 2014).     

“The White Meadows” - Mohammad Rasoulof (2009)

Unlike most Iranian films, which for practical reasons have focused on the circumstances of a few individual characters, Mohammad Rasoulof’s films, such as Iron Island (Jazireh Ahani, 2005) and Head Wind (Baad-e-Daboor, 2008), have often cast their gaze on the entire society. This is a dangerous cinematic enterprise, given the sociopolitical climate in today’s Iran, and Rasoulof has suffered severe consequences for exercising his right to artistic expression.  In December 2010 he, along with fellow Iranian film artist Jafar Panahi, was sentenced by the Iranian government on charges of “propagandizing against the regime” to 6-year prison term and a 20-year ban from making movies, giving interviews, or leaving the country [1].

In addition to Rasoulof’s support of the ill-fated Green Movement during the controversial 2009 Iranian presidential “election”, it is possible that the film he released that same year, The White Meadows (Keshtzar Haye Sepid), may have particularly angered the Iranian authorities.  Like his earlier film Iron Island, The White Meadows depicts in symbolic form a microcosmic society operating according to oppressive rules.  But while the oppression in Iron Island could be dismissed as arising from the depravities of a single agent, i.e. the captain, the oppression depicted in The White Meadows is indicative of a pervasive social disorder.  There is something endemically wrong with the entire social belief system as it is presented in The White Meadows.  Of course everything in the film is cast in allegory, and the film does not make overt critical references to the current Iranian system. Thus it could be viewed as a general philosophical lament against man’s susceptibility to rely on superstition to account for the dangerous world around him.  But most viewers of the film will narrow their focus and look for analogies in an Iranian context.

Certainly the most striking feature of the film is its open-ended mythic imagery. The succession of fantastic scenes offer no clear-cut answers as to what is going on, and the film’s ultimate obscurity counts as its poetic strength (but also as a narrative weakness).  The evocative imagery will persist in the viewer's memory, and it has all been masterfully crafted by veteran cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafouri. But this film’s narrative obscurity and consequential ambiguity leave a cloud of uncertainty over everyting.  In this connection I will discuss five specific questions I have about the story later on.

The story of The White Meadows is set in the desolate landscape of Lake Urmia in western Iran, which is a huge salt lake that is essentially an inland sea.  The area is subject to droughts, and exploitation of agricultural water from the lake’s basin that has raised salinity levels to the point where aquatic life has been severely diminished.  The poor native people in the area pray for rain that never comes, and they fall back on superstitious beliefs in hopes of appeasing local spirits that have presumably cursed the region with drought. 

At the beginning of the film, we see a lone figure, Rahmat, rowing to one of the sea’s islands in his dinghy.  His mysterious occupation, we soon learn, is to collect the tears from the local people and take them for some unknown future purpose.  These tears are believed to have some magical import, and some of the people believe that Rahmat can turn them into pearls.  For the rest of the film the focalization is entirely on Rahmat as he travels to five desolate, salt-covered islands collecting tears.  Each visit has a separate symbolic story to it, with unexplained elements that add to the mystery.

1.  First island
Rahmat’s first visit is to retrieve the dead body of a beautiful young woman.  A senior figure of the island tells Rahmat that the woman was too beautiful – other women were jealous of her, and the men were “humiliated” by her beauty.  This is certainly a problem in many parts of the world where men feel weakened by their attraction to women.  Their solution is to blame and punish the source of the attraction, and one suspects that this particular woman was murdered for this reason. For preservation, the woman’s body is kept covered in salt, and we only see her foot in a red sandal (more about the red sandal later).  Here, as in all the other island visits, Rahmat carefully collects into his little glass pitcher the tears that flow down the villagers’ cheeks as they reflect on their sorrows.

When Rahmat sets out to sea in his dinghy with the covered body onboard, he discovers that a teenage boy (the “Boy”, for our future reference) has disguised himself as the dead woman’s body (and is wearing the same red sandals) in an effort to escape the island.  Rahmat first throws the stowaway into the water, but eventually agrees to take him along with him, as long as the Boy pretends to be a deaf mute in front of other people.

2.  Second island
When they arrive at the second island, they see a blind man who has discovered a red sandal washed up at the shore.  He takes it to a village elder woman, who seems to place some importance on the sandal. Rahmat and the Boy then learn that the people are collecting their sorrowful prayers by whispering them into jars and then sealing them. They believe that a jinn, a local deity, fled to the bottom of a well some three hundred years ago and cursed the region.  A pitiable dwarf from the village is conscripted to carry all the prayer jars and be lowered down by a rope to the bottom of the well in order to offer them to the jinn and beseech her to return.  But he must accomplish his mission before the sun rises, or all the prayers will be voided.  In the event, he fearfully descends down the well, but when he doesn’t reappear before the first rays of the morning sun, the villagers cut his rope,  and we hear the dwarf splash to his death down in  the well.

3.  Third island
At the next island, Rahmat and the Boy discover that the most beautiful young girl of the village is to be sacrificed to the sea god in hopes of ending the drought. They prepare her for a “wedding” to the sea god, and they all swear oaths to the sea that the reluctant victim is a virgin and only loves the sea.  When the terrified girl in her bridal gown is taken out on a raft and set adrift in the sea, we learn indirectly that the Boy tried unsuccessfully to rescue her.  For his selfless troubles, the Boy is sentenced to be stoned.  But during the stoning when the presumably mute Boy is heard to cry out in pain, Rahmat intervenes and fools the villagers into believing that God has forgiven him.  However, the Boy is gravely wounded and barely conscious when they leave for the next island.

4.  Fourth island
With the injured Boy left on the dinghy, Rahmat is taken to observe a painter on the fourth island who is being punished for painting the sea  in the color red instead of blue.  The village elder orders him that unless he paints it blue, he will continue to be tortured (one example is to pour monkey’s urine into the painter’s eyes).  The painter says he cannot paint in colors other than what he says.  Eventually, the painter is given into the custody of Rahmat and ordered off the island.

5.  Fifth island
Rahmat, the Boy, and the painter arrive at the next island, which is inhabited by a wizened bearded man who appears to be half mad.  It turns out that he is operating a prison, and he is to take the Boy and the painter ashore as prisoners.  The Boy soon dies from his wounds, and his body is “buried” in a little lagoon, where it appears that many previous prisoners have been so disposed.  As Rahmat leaves this island, the mad prison warden is seen to be nonsensically ordering the painter to repeatedly climb up and down a sand dune and shout out the sea’s true color.

6.  Mainland
Rahmat now comes ashore to the mainland, which, unlike the desolate salt-covered islands, is a green space in autumnal splendor.  He stops at a villa, where a women wearing the same type of red sandals seen earlier brings him some water.  Then another woman brings out an old man in a wheelchair, and Rahmat uses his pitcher full of tears to wash the man’s feet.  Afterwards, Rahmat collects the tear-water in a bowl, pours it back into his pitcher, and then goes out to the seashore to empty its contents.

What you might take away from all this material will depend on your own perspective. The film could be seen as a generally pessimistic view of man’s continual surrender to simple superstitious beliefs.  But there is a special emphasis here on shared guilt.  On all the islands, the people feel they are guilty and seek remission of their sins via some superstitious ritual, often at the expense of the weak and defenseless.  Innocent women are punished on the first and third islands, the innocent dwarf is sacrificed on the second island, and free artistic expression is denied on the fourth island.  The people on these islands who carry out the atrocities are basically innocent, too, since they sincerely believe in the superstitions that drive them to cruel acts.  There is clearly something wrong with the system governing these local societies (as was the case in Iron Island, too), but any references to the Iranian government system seem to be obscure, at best.  The idea of the jinn hiding in the well for three hundred years may compare with some accounts of the Islamic Shiite belief that the long-awaited Mahdi was hidden in a well. In addition, some viewers have suggested that the washing of the old man’s feet at the end of the film connotes extreme and pointless obeisance to an ayatollah who is unmindful of the common needs. 

But apart from these general issues, I have five questions about the story that remain unanswered for me.

1. The Boy’s father.  The Boy had been hoping to find his long lost father, who apparently had become crazed by the region's salt-encrusted environment and had deserted his home when the Boy was an infant.  There is some possibility that the prison warden encountered on the fifth island is actually the Boy’s lost father and that the long absence prevents him from recognizing his son.  But if this is true, nothing is made of this connection.
2. The two girls. The girl seen wheeling the old man in the wheelchair at the end of the film looks very similar to the girl who was sacrificed to the sea god on the third island.  When Rahmat encounters both girls, he seems to exchange meaningful glances with them.  Is there a connection?  What is the importance of the girl in that final scene?
3. The red-colored sea.  The artist on the fourth island is punished for painting the sea in a red color.  At the end of the film when Rahmat comes to the villa, there is a painting on an interior wall that appears to be an island surrounded by a red-colored sea.  Is this merely to show the contrast between what the elite allow for themselves and the narrowly defined behaviour they force on the masses, or is there something more to this?  I have heard some people suggest that red is a disfavored color in Islamic societies, but I am unaware of red being formally sanctioned. 
4. The red sandals. 
   
   The same type of red sandals appear at several points in the story, and they are sometimes given suggestively meaningful closeups.  Could a red sandal worn by the Boy have slipped off when he was cast out of the boat and been washed ashore to be discovered by the blind man?  What is the connection between these various scenes and what is their importance? 
5. Rahmat’s complicity.  Rahmat seems to be aware of the absurdity of some of his rituals.  He also sometimes engages in compassionate acts, such as when he rescues the Boy or when he covertly urges the painter to say “blue” irrespective of what he sees.  But at other times, he seems to be a willing conspirator in an oppressive and pernicious system of community practice.  He is enigmatic, but is he really a consistent character that we can believe in?  To a certain extent he could be considered to be simply a dutiful functionary in a semi-dysfunctional system who is merely trying to do his best.  How are we to judge such willing participants in iniquity?  At one point he tells the Boy that the tears are valuable and not a single drop should be wasted: “tears should be treated with respect”.  And yet at the end of the film, he is seen disposing the “used” tear drops into the sea. Rahmat does not intend to harm, but Rasoulof’s critical eye may be ultimately directed at his character.

Skeptics might argue that Rasoulof has merely mindlessly thrown together these provocative symbols in the fashion of Alejandro Jodorowski.  But there is enough subtlety of expression here to suggest otherwise and that there is some method to the madness.  Overall, I would say that the visual presentation of The White Meadows is haunting and even gripping at times.  The viewer is plunged into an austere and evolving nightmare.  But the individual episodes do not appear to represent any narrative progression – they could have come in any order.  And at the end of the film, the final images do not provide a dramatic denouement, but are merely deflating.  Nevertheless, the film is memorable, and Rasoulof’s eery and disturbing portrayal of how blind superstition can be ultimately cruel and destructive is a testament to his own commitment to free expression.
★★★

Notes:

1. “Mohammad Rasoulof”, Wikipedia (2013), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Rasoulof, (accessed June 2, 2013).

“Iron Island” - Mohammad Rasoulof (2005)

Mohammad Rasoulof’s second feature film, Iron Island (Jazireh Ahani, 2005) was a bold and creative offering even for the Iranian film climate, where films often have a deeper philosophical perspective to them. In this case Rasoulof fashioned an allegorical fantasy, without the benefit of in-studio architectural fabrications or computer-generated imagery.  However, despite the film’s clearly allegorical suggestiveness, there have been different interpretations concerning the overall message of Iron Island.

Though only in his early thirties at this point, Rasoulof signaled with this film the coming of a potentially major film artist on the Iranian film scene.  His next film after Iron Island was the fascinating documentary, Head Wind (Baad-e-Daboor, 2008), which described the Iranian people’s widespread efforts, in the face of the autocratic government’s severe media censorship, to get information from the outside world via the use of officially prohibited satellite dishes. Regrettably, Rasoulof was arrested after the disturbances following the 2009 Iranian presidential election.  In 2010 he and major Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi were sentenced to six years in prison, plus a 20-year prohibition from leaving the country, talking to the press, or participating in filmmaking [1].  So Iron Island’s themes of autocracy and liberty take on  added poignancy in light of these subsequent events.

Most of the story of Iron Island takes place on an abandoned oil tanker off the Persian Gulf seaport of Bandar Abbas.  Captain Nemat operates the boat as something of a live-in work commune, managed solely by himself, for destitute locals who need a place to live.  The locals belong to the Sunni Arab minority that lives in this part of southwestern Iran, and many of them are severely impoverished.  Nemat takes them in and gives them various jobs to do in the collective.

In fact Captain Nemat manages everything on his ship.  He carries around a notebook in which he keeps account of all transactions.  There is no monetary currency exchanged; the residents work, and then their lodging charges are deducted from their wages in his notebook.  Everything works OK, as long as everyone operates according to his instructions.  The destitute residents of the ship buy into Nemat’s benevolent dictatorship, because he seems to be a reasonable man making decisions for the collective good.  So the ship represents a microcosm for an entire society managed by an autocratic elite.

When it comes to optimizing material benefits, Captain Nemat’s approach may seem plausible.  But sometimes there are other needs and desires that come into conflict.  In this respect other figures on the boat symbolize such alternate needs and generate the underlying tension of Iron Island.  The film narrative goes through approximately four stages as it proceeds to unwind these elements.

1.  Introduction

The opening section of the film introduces the viewer to the floating apartment building that the ship represents. People come and go to the ship by means of a motorboat that is part of Nemat’s equipment set. Early on Captain Nemat escorts a newly arrived family to their quarters on board and shows them around the premises.  This includes:

• an on-board bakery
• a burqa factory staffed by the women on the ship.  (The burqas in this community include a decorative face mask for women when they are in the company of men.)
• a classroom for the children (it has both boys and girls together)
• a mobile phone rental service
• men who dismantle various metalwork on the ship and sell it ashore for scrap.

Nemat manages the entire supply chain for all operations. When, for example, cooking oil or medicine is needed, he supplies it.

But we are also introduced to a conflict.  Ahmed and another boy get into a fight, because Ahmed had sent a message to the other boy’s sister.  Of course family “honor” is at stake for the other boy, who feels he must control his sister’s contacts for reasons of pride.  In fact the film’s pre-title sequence showed Ahmed at night using a lantern to secretly signal someone.  In the interests of maintaining order, Captain Nemat sternly warns Ahmed to stay from the girl (we’ll call her “The Girl”).  The notion of amorous love has no place in Nemat’s scheme.

2.  Extractive Materialism
The story then moves on to elaborate what was initially shown in outline.  Captain Nemat’s society operates according to extractive capitalism. They are slowly dismantling the ship, but they are not really producing much, except the burqas.  The ship’s schoolteacher, who symbolizes a society’s intellectual class, timidly points out a “truth”, to Nemat – that the ship is slowly sinking into the water and has sunk two meters over the couple of years.  Like current global climate change skeptics, though, Nemat dismisses this news as an event that is too far off into the future to worry about.  What matters to him is current profit and loss.

In fact we learn that Nemat, while publicly making his case that he operates for the common good, is a schemer and profiteer. 

• He has all the residents’ identity cards collected so that he can use them to acquire and then resell “green cards” on the black market.  This he can do, because as Ahmed points out to a skeptic, Captain Nemat “knows lots of people”.
• The father of The Girl, who serves as a sailor on another ship, stops by on one of his bi-weekly visits to express his concern about his daughter.  He is worried about his “honor” and asserts that he will kill her if she threatens his manly pride. But Captain Nemat calms him down and promises that he will arrange a lucrative marriage for The Girl – the side effects of which will mean extra bonus payments for both Nemat and the father. 
• The men on-board manage to drill into the tanker’s oil tanks and are then able to pump out some oil that remains there and partially fill some barrels. These barrels are then dumped off the side of the ship so that the ships’ boys can swim along side and shepherd the floating barrels to the shoreline, where they can be collected and sold. The filming of this sequence, incidently, is skillfully performed, but it must have been dangerous to carry out.

When the ship’s owner (Nemat’s business relationship with this person is not clear) notifies Nemat that his group intends to scrap the entire boat, Nemat protests that the residents cannot be turned out.  “What will happen to them?”, he protests.  But we know that he is looking out for his own interests, too.

In contrast to the extractive materialism that occupies Nemat’s every waking moment, there are other people on the ship looking at things differently. 

• An old man, Sadegh, stares every day at the Sun, looking for some unnamed deliverance.
• A young boy known as “Baby Fish” spends his time rescuing little fish that have gotten trapped inside the ship’s hold and throwing these fish back into the sea.  He is a lifesaver. 
• Ahmed pursues his clandestine romance with The Girl and secretly exchanges temporary gifts with her by lowering a rope into her quarters after dark.  In a touching scene, he tenderly gives her his red shirt to hold, and she gives him her burqa mask in return.

3.  Maintaining Order
Captain Nemat shows that he must exercise discipline in order to avoid chaos.  After a pregnant resident woman dies in labor, Nemat subsequently discovers that the ship’s boys were clandestinely watching TV at the time.  So he tosses their TV and satellite dish over the ship’s side. 

Later, when The Girl is married off to the rich suitor in accordance with Nemat’s deal-making, the disconsolate Ahmed steals the ship’s motorboat and heads off. But Nemat "knows lots of people" ashore, and Ahmed is quickly captured, bound, and delivered to Nemat.  Then, in front of the entire tanker community, Nemat cruelly subjects Ahmed to a water torture (presumably like waterboarding), which utterly breaks the boy down.

4.  The Promised Land
With the ship’s scuttling imminent, Nemat makes another deal.  He gets all the ship’s residents to grant him their “power of attorney” and arranges to acquire land on their behalf in the desert, where he proposes to build a new community.  He still has big plans.  But the film’s ending reminds us of the other narrative strands.  The longings of Sadegh, Baby Fish, Ahmed, and The Girl remain unfulfilled.

Iron Island’s presentation, cinematography, and mise-en-scene are remarkably well done.  Rasoulof has taken that oil tanker and made of it a true microcosm.  Veteran actor Ali Nassirian, in the role of Captain Nemat, is excellent, even though he was over seventy years old at the time of filming [2]. Rasoulof uses Nassirian’s unique countenance and posture, along with his iconic head scarf to maintain a striking visual motif of the leader throughout the story. All the other actors were nonprofessionals who were recruited from the local region. 

The enigmatic suggestiveness of Iron Island has led to multiple interpretations.  The idea of people on a ship’s journey led by a charismatic leader has appeared many times, from Noah’s Ark to Captain Ahab’s Pequod.  However, the ship is only a metaphor here, and we could be just as well be comparing Iron Island’s community with those led by Moses or Mohammad.  In fact Rasoulof’s originally conceived story did not even take place on a ship; he changed his story when he happened upon the oil tanker in the Persian Gulf and altered his script [3]. 

The question is what to make of the charismatic Captain Nemat?  Is he a benevolent figure?  Certainly Captain Nemat is not a draconian ruler. He seems to operate sincerely according to his worldview, which seeks to optimize material resources.  Even when he tortures Ahmed, he explains that this must be done in order to avoid social chaos. (Of course, using the bogeyman of disorder to justify authoritarian punishment is counseled in many quarters around the world, from Iran to Singapore to China.)  Sympathetic to Nemat's sincerity, a number of critics have seen the social contract under which Nemat operates in a positive light.  Accordingly, they feel that the “journey” of Nemat and his people is ongoing and still has a bright future at the end of the film, if the people will only just all cooperate under his leadership.

However, I do not go along with such an optimistic interpretation.  The extractive system of Nemat has a finite lifetime, just as does a nation’s economy that is entirely dependent on the extraction of resources under the ground.  At the end of the film, the people are out in the middle of the desert with nothing at all.  Nemat proclaims that they can build a city, but these people don’t have the knowledge or the means to do it.  They simply trust that their leader will tell them what to do. Whenever he is not present, they just sit idle in the desert. There is no sense of independent industriousness. The seemingly only independent figure among them, the teacher, makes his own blackboard chalk, but he is isolated from the rest and is not integrated into an interactive community.

Everyone on the ship is instructed to hand over whatever autonomy they have so that Captain Nemat can perform his optimizing operations.  When the ship’s schoolteacher timidly asks to examine for himself the document concerning the handing over his power-of-attorney to Nemat, he is brushed off by the Captain and told that he can read it at a later date.  Similarly the teacher was brushed off when he meekly protested the water-torturing of Ahmed.  The intellectual community, represented by the schoolteacher, is unable to have any effect. 

This is the general problem with autocratic, extractive leadership, and Rasoulof has done well to present the problem without demonizing the figure of Nemat.  Captain Nemat is sincere and pragmatic, but that can only take you so far. For a nation to prosper, it must go beyond extraction and offer the opportunity for creative production.  And such production arises when people have the opportunity to interact in their own newly discovered ways, not just by following orders.

Near the end of the film as the tanker is abandoned, Captain Nemat sees Baby Fish with a bucket of fish that the boy has found in one last rescue effort.  Nemat tosses the fish back into the ship’s hold and tells him to let the fish grow bigger, “then we’ll catch them and eat them.”  Baby Fish sees the fish as vital, alive, wonderful; Nemat sees them as food. In the final scenes, Ahmed and The Girl encounter each other, Sadegh is still looking to the sky, and Baby Fish runs off into the sea.  They do not have answers to the pragmatic demands of material existence, but they know there is something else beyond all that.

★★★

Notes:

1. Michael Sicinski, “When the Salt Attacks the Sea: The Films of Mohammad Rasoulof”, http://cinema-scope.com/features/features-when-the-salt-attacks-the-sea-the-films-of-mohammad-rasoulof/.
2. He has appeared in several films directed by Dariush Mehrjui, including Gaav (1969) and The Cycle (1978). More recently Nassirian appeared in the rabidly anti-Jewish Iranian-produced film, The Saturday Hunter (2011).
3. Chale Nafus, "IRON ISLAND (JAZIREH AHANI) Program Notes", Austin Film Society, http://www.austinfilm.org/page.aspx?pid=720

“Head Wind” - Mohammad Rasoulof (2008)

Social control of public information in Iran is the subject of the documentary film, Head Wind (Baad-e-Daboor, 2008), written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof.  It would seem that making any film in Iran must be a difficult undertaking, but making a film on this particular subject must have been fraught with extra concerns.  In this instance Rasoulof came up with an entertaining and relatively even-tempered work that  essentially captured the situation and general attitudes as they exist (at least in 2005-2007, anyway), but it probably didn’t satisfy the Iranian government authorities.

The availability of public information has exploded due to the globalization of mass media access, which has had massive social impacts everywhere, usually opening the doors of opportunity to large sectors of the population. But governments in authoritarian countries such as Iran often view these developments as existential threats.  They count on their governing elites to control the masses, and they know that restricting the population’s access to information is critical to their continued governance.  Up until recently it was relatively straightforward to burn books, shut down newspapers, and restrict broadcasts to achieve their ends, but what about those communication satellites flying overhead?  They can’t block those satellite signals, so people in range with receivers will be able to tune in and watch the broadcasts.  All the public needs to do this is to have access to a satellite dish.

So not surprisingly the Iranian government has banned the private ownership and usage of satellite dishes, but ordinary Iranian people still manage to get hold of them and use them, anyway.  These satellite dishes are crucial instruments of the public’s freedom to know, and how they go about doing this is the main topic of Head Wind. 
               
The documentary narrative of Head Wind goes through roughly five general topic areas that cover a broad spectrum of public electronic media access and usage in Iran.  The focus is on ordinary people – this is the general public that wants to see other things than what is delivered over the tightly regulated government media.

1.  Television to the Provinces
The first five minutes of the film examine the small village of Makhoonik in eastern Iran [1], where electricity was only introduced three years earlier than the time of filming.  The people there now have a television relay station that enables the local people for the first time to watch public (Iranian government controlled) television.  Since this is a small, rural town where tradition dominates, the village elders are suspicious of the corrupting influences of any kind of television – even the government sponsored material.  The kids love it, though, and it is interesting to see their excitement as they watch TV. 

2.  Satellite Dish Entrepreneurs
The big cities have already gone through this initial exposure to television that is covered in the first segment of this film.  What the more sophisticated urbanites want now is access to the richer and more diverse international media.  So this next section switches to the big city of Tehran, where despite the government prohibition, vast numbers of people have installed satellite dishes on their apartment building rooftops or in window frames.  The film focuses here on two individual private entrepreneurs who procure and install the dishes for their clients.  Advertising is done by word-of-mouth, but both of these dish installer have plenty of eager customers.  In fact from the estimates given, it seems that at least 70% of the people in Tehran have access to satellite TV. 

The electronics are imported via the black market, but the dishes themselves are made by local metalsmiths, who make the dishes as side operations to their ordinary business of making containers and fencing material.

3.  The People’s Views
Throughout the film there are people who face the camera and express their views concerning access to the satellite TV channels.  There are always two basic concerns acknowledged:

• immoral content that could “corrupt” the public and lead to a deterioration of public morality.
• political views and revelations that could lead to public dissatisfaction with the government.

The government, of course, says they are only concerned about public morality, but everyone knows that their primary worry is the second issue – people might learn a truth that the government doesn’t want them to know.

The film depicts a relatively broad spectrum of satellite users, including even an enterprising herdsman who powers his electronics with a petrol-powered electric generator.  Even some Basiji and Muslim mullahs express their views, which are, of course, scathing with respect to public media access.  The two that are interviewed both solemnly affirm that noone in their horizon uses satellites, which is probably something that they are trying to get themselves to believe, if not the film viewers. 

But in fact satellite dishes are everywhere, even in the pastoral villages.  One villager points out that the women of his village are not allowed to watch any of those films on satellite TV.  What about him?, he is asked.  “Very rarely,” he says, cautiously.

4.  The Police
Of course, since satellite dishes are illegal, there is always a danger of getting caught and punished.  The film shows how the police regularly go onto apartment rooftops and destroy satellite dishes that they find.  And the people just go out and buy new ones again in an endless game of cat and mouse.  In Iran, by the way, there is a rather strong cultural tradition, almost an unwritten law,  that while the government can be very strict about public morality on the street, it is not generally acceptable for the government to enter into and interfere with life in private dwellings [2].  So people who surreptitiously place satellite dishes (often homemade ones) in their windows can often get away with it.

5.  Other Media
The last part of the film goes beyond satellite dishes to cover other media, including, of course, the Internet.  A former journalist of a shutdown reformist newspaper talks about how he and others get around the Iranian Internet censors by using proxy servers.  This is another cat-and-mouse game, since the government can block a proxy server address when they discover it, but a new one will soon pop up and offer an alternate route around the authorities.

Besides the peoples' directly accessing the Web, there is the widespread exchange of DVDs containing movies that have been acquired by various means.  There are even underground professional dubbing studios that dub non-foreign-language films into Farsi [3] and perform subtle graphical edits that make the dubbed films suitable for general audiences in Iran. Again, all this is accomplished by means of enterprising Iranians, such as the cheerful diminutive DVD librarian shown here, who are in the private business of providing people with what they want.  As part of this underground media culture, there are also underground recording artists who make music that they could never perform in public and distribute their performances via electronic media.

One of the things I like about Head Wind is that, without preaching or harranguing, it lets the ordinary people point out the basic disconnect that lies at the heart of government media control. It all comes down to a basic misunderstanding of what information is all about. Conservative doctrines view any various dangerous (to them) influences as harmful substances.  Thus they want to control it like they control the use of alcohol – ban it, for the most part.  But information is not a substance; it is part of an interaction. The most successful societies set up norms and instruments of governance so that fruitful interaction is maximized among the constituents of society. Without widespread, fruitful interaction, the society cannot prosper. 

In this connection there are four areas of concern for successful interactive societies, which for brevity are labelled "RMDL".  The two most significant interaction types are communication interactions and the goods-exchange interactions.  To assure the safety and equity of those interactions, there need to be two public regulating mechanisms that assure the equitable and inclusive involvement of the entire society: democracy and the rule of law. Aggregating those four concepts, we can say that all successful interactive societies must provide institutional guarantees in the four RMDL areas:

• (Human) Rights.  These include freedom of speech and, as covered in Head Wind, the freedom to watch and listen. 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 [4,5,6,7].
• Markets.  There needs to be regulated exchange markets that allow the open and fair exchange of goods and services across society.
• Democracy.  Some form of democracy involving broadly inclusive enfranchisement needs to be in place [8].
• 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. The laws provide regulation of the various interactions in the interests of the public good [7].

Note that the key to successful societies is that the RMDL institutional mechanisms enhance interactions, which include, of course, communication interaction, the message of which is information.  But traditional thinking has often seen information as a substance, which is believed to have some sort of mysterious power, independent of the associated interaction. People following this outdated line of thinking believe that simply controlling and "owning" information will give them power.  But by doing so, they restrict the entire sphere of social interactivity in their communities and thereby diminish the beneficial social externalities that come from widespread interactions on the part of the public.

Actually, even from a moral/religious perspective, it is beneficial to view information as an accessory to interaction.  The great religious messengers throughout history have all urged their followers to engage in compassionate, loving interactions with their fellow beings – interactions which are not only mutually beneficial to those involved in the interaction but also elevate the society as a whole. This is in accordance with the “Golden Rule”, which is endorsed by all religions [9]. The practice of suppressing communicative interactions may lead to quietude, but this only amounts to pious isolation and is not inherently that which elevates one to a higher level of consciousness. Confinement does not lead to virtue. Achieving a higher level of enlightenment requires loving interactions with others, not withdrawal.

The RMDL formulation is important, because all four of the RMDL institutional principles must be in place in order to assure the success of a society. If any one of them is missing, the society will suffer breakdowns.  Nowadays there are some Asian nationalists who believe that they can get away with having just a subset of the four, such as only Market capitalism and Law, without Rights and Democracy.  But I believe that they cannot reach their ful potential by following such a path; they will need to have all of RMDL to succeed in the long run.

Getting back to the people of Head Wind, you can see it written on the faces of the ordinary Iranians in the film that (a) it is interactive engagement with others that  drives their interests and (b) that satellite TV is a means to enhanced interactions.  It is similarly the same kind of personally engaged communication that sparks the underground musicians.  The faces of many of these people are animated and full of enthusiasm as they stare into the camera.  It is evident that whenever they look at the TV or computer screen, they are looking for enhanced human engagement – it is interaction that they seek.  But the naysayers, those who see information as something to be thwarted, do not see information as part of and in terms interactions.  Instead, they view information as a dangerous substance that is potentially damaging to themselves and others. Accordingly, the information suppressors punish people not just for political opposition but even just for trying to make information more freely available. So such a coercive and punitive line of thinking led to both Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi being sentenced in 2010 to six years in prison, along with a 20-year prohibition from leaving the country, talking to the press, or participating in filmmaking [10].  The information suppressors currently hold power, but compared with the mass public, they are in the minority and are living in the past.

To be sure, the authentic way of thinking about information – that it is a component of interaction – is not obvious to everyone, whether in Iran or elsewhere. But this realization is intuited by young people, and it is implicit on the faces of the people shown in Head Wind, which is why the film stands as a valuable testament. It testifies to how an entire nation, with its rich cultural traditions that include Sufic wisdom, is working from the bottom up to find creative ways to exchange information in the face of obstruction.

★★★ 

Notes:

1. Makhoonik is near Sarbisheh in South Khorasan.
2. This is discussed in some detail in Hooman Majd’s , The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran,   (Doubleday, New York, 2008).  Of course this is presumably an ill-defined boundary, and if there is a noisy party, for example, the “moral police” can storm in, claiming it is a public nuisance.
3. Many Iranians prefer dubbed films to subtitled films.
4. Saeed Kamali Dehghan and Anita Hunt, “Iran's Prisoners of Conscience – an Interactive Guide”, The Guardian, (21 May 2013), http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/may/21/iran-prisoners-of-conscience-interactive.
5. Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Iran Cracks down on Activists in Runup to Election”, The Guardian”, (21 May 2013), http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/21/iran-election-crackdown-rights-activists.
6. Another human right is the right to personal privacy. So it follows that one must have the right to restrict “watching” of his or her personal affairs on the part of outsiders, such as the government.
7. Laura Secor, "War of Words", The New Yorker, (4 Janurary 2016). 
8. Laura Secor, "Election Monitored", The New Yorker, (7 May 2012).
9. Tenzin Gyatso (the Dalai Lama), Towards the True Kinship of Faiths, (2000), Hachette Book Group, USA.
10. Michael Sicinski, “When the Salt Attacks the Sea: The Films of Mohammad Rasoulof”, Cinema Scope, CS46 (2010), http://cinema-scope.com/features/features-when-the-salt-attacks-the-sea-the-films-of-mohammad-rasoulof/.