"This Is Not a Film" - Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (2011)

Ordinarily I ignore a film’s production backstory, since being mindful of those details undermines my immersion in the diegetic world, and hence the story the filmmaker wants to tell.  But with This Is Not a Film (In Film Nist, 2011) I make an emphatic exception.  In this case the production backstory is essential to the film’s subject – freedom of expression in the face of a despotic regime.

The background story concerns the distinguished Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s arrest and confinement by the Iranian authorities following the widely disputed 2009 Iranian presidential “election”.  Panahi, who had supported the defeated Green Movement candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was arrested shortly afterwards when he attended a cemetery gathering to mourn the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, who had been gunned down on the streets during post-election protests.   Although Panahi was later released from prison, he was banned from leaving the country and was rearrested in March 2010.  Then on 20 December 2010, Panahi was convicted on the charge of plotting to “commit crimes against the country’s national security” and was sentenced to six years in prison and banned for 20 years from “making or directing any movies, writing screenplays, giving any form of interview with Iranian or foreign media as well as leaving the country” [1].  The movie This Is Not a Film was made in March 2011 when Panahi was under house arrest awaiting the results of his legal appeal of this conviction. 

Actually it is amazing that Panahi managed to have a film made at all under these restrictive circumstances.  Here he is, a man arrested and confined in order to stifle his voice and forbidden to engage in any kind of film activity, shown on camera talking about his situation.  This work (not labelled a “film”, of course, but merely an “effort”) is the collaboration of Panahi and documentary filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb.  It was shot during the Nouruz (Iranian New Year) period with the events shown covering Chaharshanbe Souri, the Iranian equivalent of New Year’s Eve.  How they managed to smuggle the finished film out of the country must have been a story in itself, because it was apparently coded onto a flash drive that was concealed inside a birthday cake and was eventually screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

This Is Not a Film opens with Panahi shown attending to routine activities inside his apartment.  The focus seems to be on the uneventful tempo of isolated life in the apartment, while outside is heard the sound of explosions, to which Panahi pays no evident attention.  Given the relatively boring nature of Panahi’s activities, the viewer’s attention is naturally drawn to what may be happening outside.  If the noises are a manifestation of some civil disturbance, why is Panahi so unmindful of it?  It soon becomes evident that this day is Chaharshanbe Souri (“Fireworks Wednesday”), because it takes place on the Wednesday before Nouruz, the Iranian New Year’s day.  Chaharshanbe Souri is somewhat like July 4th in the US or like Guy Fawke’s Day in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand: people like to celebrate it with raucous noise and firecrackers.  Actually this day is of far more ancient vintage than its Western counterparts – it is perhaps 4,000 years old, and representative, as is Nouruz itself, of pure Persian culture.  On Chaharshanbe Souri in addition to setting fireworks, people like to make bonfires and leap over them, an act that has some symbolic significance.   It’s also a day that can be seen to represent a certain freedom from routine constraints, even rowdyism, as people engage in celebratory antics on the street.  Not surprisingly, the conservative religious authorities of Iranian society condemn the day and its activities as un-Islamic, but they have so far not been able to suppress its observance.
                           
Relatively early on in This Is Not a Film, Panahi does something that both he (see for example  The Mirror, 1997) and his sometimes collaborator Abbas Kiarostami have done before –  he breaks the “fourth wall” of the film’s “dramatic stage” and begins to talk straight into the camera about the filmmaking going on.  By doing this he actively engages the audience in his concern of how one goes about expressing one’s thoughts in film form.  At first in this film, the shots of Panahi had been photographed by a statically placed camera, but soon his collaborator on this occasion, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, arrives and begins filming Panahi himself.  The subsequent dialogue is then understood to be between Panahi and Mirtahmasb, but we viewers, as silent witnesses, are presumed to be part of the conversation, too.

Panahi now speaks of a film script that he had prepared and for which he had been attempting to get permission to film.  It is based on Chekov’s short story, “From the Diary of a Young Girl” [2]. With the possibility of that filming now closed off, however, Panahi here decides to discuss how that film would have looked in terms of layout and narrative structure.  The proposed script concerns a young woman from a conservative family who wishes to attend college.  Her father in the story forbids her to do that and has her locked up inside the house.  So the film script concerns a girl facing the same kind of suppression that Panahi now faces.  As he describes his plans for this story to Mirtahmasb, we get some interesting insights into various aspects of Panahi’s filmmaking approach.

One of the most interesting, to me, revelations, concerns Panahi’s modest remarks to the effect that he doesn’t know much about the technical details of cinematography.  Filmmakers around the world have varying degrees of expertise at this level, with some being expert camera operators and others leaving the camera work to professional technicians.  For example on this score, I also found it surprising to hear some time ago the accomplished Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi remark that the great Federico Fellini never ever looked through a camera lens.  Nevertheless, given the technical cinematic mastery of Panahi’s previous films and the fact that he has been a film editor in connection with some works directed by others, I would have expected him, in particular, to be highly knowledgeable about film cinematography.

Another interesting stylistic point is the way Panahi schematically maps out his proposed camera setup layout with masking tape on his livingroom rug.  Some filmmakers like to do this kind of thing – a sort of overhead-map style layout of where the camera positions should be – while others envision their films in terms of just what will be seen in the film frame.  These two perspectives, which we may refer to as the “architectural” and the “subjective”, are quite different.  The architectural camera map layout perspective is objectivist, a top-down approach that has an implicit view-from-the-sky attitude that keeps all aspects of the scene in consideration.  The film-frame perspective is local and subjective; it is the perspective of a single observer.  Of course both perspectives are useful in filmmaking, and Panahi does refer to the subjective perspective, too, on various occasions in the film; but it is still a question as to which perspective is preferred by the director. It is my understanding that Michelangelo Antonioni, a visual movement master of both the camera and his players, also preferred to think of the scene from the “architectural” perspective.

Also like Antonioni, Panahi says that he generally constructs his film in response to the environmental context of the story: the setting helps determine the narrative structure.  In fact he usually doesn’t map everything out beforehand, because he wants the film to be partially constructed at the time of the shooting – certain unexpected aspects of the visual narrative may emerge during the filmmaking process. He illustrates this filmmaking aspect by showing clips from two of his earlier works, The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) and Crimson Gold (Talaye Sorkh, 2003), which featured unexpected responses on the part of his unprofessional actors that were incorporated into and added to the narratives.  In fact such an emergent event apparently occurs in This Is Not a Film, too, towards the end, when a student moonlighting as a trash collector shows up at Panahi’s door and Panahi then goes on to converse with him in the elevator.  

Panahi’s desire to capture emergent events and incorporate them into his films reflects an emphasis on spontaneity and authenticity.  This underlies his remark that he has always shot his films outdoors because of the Iranian government’s restrictions on women’s dress in films.  Presumably he finds it artificial and unrealistic to show women invariably wearing the hejab in indoor scenes, so he restricts his action to the outdoors.  Like all Iranian filmmakers working inside the country, though, Panahi’s films do not make overt political statements, and there are no villains.  They simply show people trying to cope with the social circumstances in which they find themselves.

Returning to the events of This Is Not a Film, after Panahi discusses the outline of his proposed film for awhile, he loses interest in further discussions of it.  After all, he says, “if we could tell a film, why make a film”.  Compare this to Alfred Hitchcock, who famously remarked that the thrill of making a film was in its planning.  The actual shooting of the film, for Hitchcock, was merely a boring implementation of the film idea and not a creative activity.

The film events in This Is Not a Film finally move to Mirtahmasb making his departure for the evening to attend to his own family’s Nouruz celebration.  But just when  Mirtahmasb is leaving, the young trash collector unexpectedly shows up; and Panahi decides to accompany him as he makes his rounds collecting trash from the various floors in the apartment building.  The young man cautiously, but genuinely, talks about his life, his difficulties finding a job, and other aspects about his life in Tehran.  When the elevator gets to the bottom, where the trash is deposited in larger containers, Panahi’s camera looks out on the wide world that is beyond the apartment gates and is full of joyous fireworks.  On this view the film closes.

Given the constraints in which Panahi had to work, this film is a fascinating and a valuable testament.  I am not aware of Panahi ever having overtly expressed any hostility to the Iranian government, but he has been muzzled and imprisoned.  Iran now has serious issues concerning:

•  basic human rights, such as free expression
•  the rule of law
•  open democracy. 

Besides the film’s backstory, there have been further, ongoing events.  Iran’s Council of Public Culture has declared The Iranian House of Cinema, Iran’s largest professional organization for filmmakers, to be illegal [3].  Mojtaba Mirtahmasb was arrested in September 2011 as he was leaving the country.  In December 2011, Mirtahmasb was released, but in that same month Panahi’s legal appeal of his prison sentence was denied.
★★★★

Notes:

1. "Filmmaker Jafar Panahi Sentenced to Six Years in Prison", The Green Voice of Freedom,  20/12/2010, http://en.irangreenvoice.com/article/2010/dec/20/2581.
2. This is a one-page story, and you may be able to find a copy of it here.
3. Iran Daily Brief, December 29, 2011, http://www.irandailybrief.com/?p=5695

"About Elly" - Asghar Farhadi (2009)

When middle-class Iranians in Tehran have a holiday, they often like to escape their dry urban confines and trek up north to the Caspian seaside, where everything is cooler and greener. It’s also an opportunity for people to be a little more casual and relaxed in the open air. About Elly (Darbareye Elly, 2009) is a deceptively clever film about one such holiday visit, where events don’t go exactly as planned.  Over the course of the three-day weekend by the sea, the viewer is exposed to the fascinatingly complex social dynamics of people under stress.  In particular, this film has things to say about some of the nuances of Iranian culture under these circumstances (but, of course, much of what happens relates generally to how all of us interact with others).

The film was written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, whose subsequent production was the more famous and highly praised A Separation (2011), which won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Film.  Without diminishing the excellence of A Separation, however, I would say that About Elly is even better and is Farhadi’s best work so far.

The principal characters are a group of holiday travelers who are linked by old friendships formed years before at law school: 

• Amir and Sepideh are a married couple whose daughter, Moravid, is in kindergarten.
• Peyman and Shohreh are a second couple with a little boy and girl, Arash and Anita.
• Manouchehr and Naazy are a third couple.
• Ahmad, also an old friend in addition to being Naazy’s brother, has returned to visit Iran from Germany, where he recently went through a divorce.
• Elly is Moravid’s kindergarten teacher and has been invited along on the trip.

Sepideh is the vivacious social organizer and energizer of the group.  Without her, as she herself points out early on, the entire Caspian trip wouldn’t have happened.  One of her principal goals for the trip is to match up the now-available Ahmad with the pretty and modestly charming Elly, in the hopes that  romantic developments will ensue.  This match-making quickly becomes an open secret among the entourage, and whenever Elly is out of earshot, they all teasingly encourage Ahmad to make his move.

When they all arrive at the seaside villa, they are informed by the local caretaker that the villa they want is only available for one night and that there are probably no other nearby accommodations during this busy three-day holiday period.  It turns out that Sepideh had known beforehand that only one night was available, but she had not told the others about it, figuring that once they got up to the seaside they could find further accommodation for the other two days. She explains to them her reasoning: if she had told them all beforehand about the villa being available for only one night, she couldn’t have convinced them to set out on the trip in the first place.  In her mind, a little deception was needed to make things happen.  

Sepideh then pleads with the local caretaker woman in private that they really need a nice place, because Elly and Ahmad are on their honeymoon.  This little white lie moves the woman to make an extra effort to accommodate the group, and she arranges for an abandoned villa by the sea to be opened up to them.  But note that Sepideh’s little fibs are not just incidental to the story; indeed they constitute one of the major themes of About Elly – how do we convey the truth to others?  

In this connection I would offer the comment that whenever we are in any group, there is a shared understanding concerning issues of mutual concern.  We point to people and things in the world in front of us and discuss them, hoping that we understand each other, even though we know that we all have our own individual interpretations about these things.  Sometimes, in order to spur cooperative group activity in a certain direction, though, we may exaggerate or even innocently bend the literal truth about something.  This of course can be dangerous.  

The difficulty of conveying exactly what we mean is symbolized early on in the film when the holiday makers have fun playing the game of charades (pantomime game).  In that game the goal is to arrive at a shared meaning; but later on in the story words will be used to mislead – to try to generate separated, distinguished understandings of what has happened.

Anyway, returning to the film story, as the viewer watches the evolving socializing of the various people, he or she is likely to assume that the principal narrative line will be about the emerging relationship of Ahmad and Elly.  But on the second day of their outing (about thirty-five minutes into the film) the story takes a disruptive dramatic turn.  The three little children are playing by the beach, and Elly is asked to watch them while the other adults attend to their various activities and chores.  The viewer doesn’t see exactly what happens in this situation with Elly and the children, but it soon emerges that Arash has wandered out into the sea and is lost, and Elly is not around. There is now a desperate effort by find Arash in the sea and save him from drowning.  The panic-stricken group do just manage to rescue and revive the nearly-drowned Arash, but then the attention of the group turns to Elly.  Where is she?

The rest of the story is concerned with finding out where Elly is and what has happened to her. There are two conjectures. She may have drowned attempting to rescue Arash.  Or she may have abruptly left the group and gone back to Tehran without telling anyone. What makes the second conjecture plausible is that it is known by several group members that Elly had only wanted to stay one night at the seaside villa and then return to her infirm mother back home.  In addition, they wonder if the demure Elly had been offended by the boisterous teasing that had been the social undertone of the interactions on the trip.

Now the finger-pointing begins.  With Elly missing, a police investigation ensues to find out the truth of what happened to her.  What had begun in the film as an exercise in social bonding and harmonizing now dissolves into finding blame and searching for excuses to maintain individual innocence.  As they attempt to discover the truth about Elly, the group uncovers the many little lies that had been accumulating during their time together.  The lies were all understandable within their specific social contexts, but now they are exposed as violations of the truth.

Then the story takes another turn when a phone call to Elly’s home in Tehran uncovers the fact that Elly had a fiancé and that upon hearing news of Elly’s disappearance, the fiancé is now rushing to the Caspian area to investigate.  This discovery adds a further layer of guilt, because the group may now appear to have some moral taint in connection with having arranged an apparent romantic tryst between Ahmad and Elly.  Now the new issue becomes who among the group knew that Elly had a fiancé.  To protect themselves, it seems to some of them that further falsehoods may be necessary.

These three phases of the film thus reflect the shifting social dynamics among the group. 

1. In the first phase of the film, before Elly’s disappearance, the socializing was oriented around finding ways to bond and achieve social harmony.  This involves some minor falsehoods, but the goal was to achieve social unity.
2. The second phase covers the period after Elly’s disappearance and before the appearance of the fiancé.  Here the social dynamics are all involved with selfish concerns.  How can each of them establish his or her own innocence and separation from the group?
3. The third phase, after the arrival of the fiancé, sees the group members reluctantly working together again, this time to arrive at an agreed-upon story to tell the fiancé.

So the story moves from group-thinking –> selfish-thinking –> group thinking as it evolves through the three phases.  As the story progresses, all of the characters, including Elly and her fiancé, participate in deception in one form or another.  Most of these falsehoods, particularly those of Sepideh, were uttered in support of group harmony, not just for selfish reasons.  In fact the biggest liars in the story, Sepideh, Ahmad, Manouchehr, and Naazy, are the most selfless and compassionate.  They exude innocence.  The three characters most closely adhering to the literal truth, Amir, Shohreh, and Peyman, are in fact the most selfish people in the story.

This is what makes About Elly a fascinating tale.  We generally make knee-jerk affirmations about the importance of telling the truth and not lying.  But the story about truth is often more complicated in social situations.   When should one really utter the unvarnished truth?  That is a question that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Dialogues. Indeed the title, “About Elly”, is ironic, since the film is really “About Self” and how the selfish individual relates to a group.  The people in this story are mostly concerned with themselves and have little empathy for Elly [1].  

In About Elly, Farhadi has pulled off a tour de force that cinematically evokes aspects of Michelangelo Antonioni’s work, which also often involves complex ensemble acting performances. Indeed Farhadi remarked in a recent interview that earlier Italian filmmakers had a major influence on his development. Particularly comparable here is Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), which also begins with a group of people on a holiday that is disrupted with the early disappearance of what appeared to have been the major character. But while Antonioni’s focus in L’Avventura eventually centers on two remaining characters, Farhadi accomplished the more difficult feat of maintaining the narrative focus on the entire ensemble throughout About Elly.  It’s interesting that Farhadi manages to maintain the visual coherence of this collective interaction without using as much complicated moving-camera cinematography as was employed by Antonioni.  Unfortunately, Farhadi again resorts to shaky, hand-held camera framing in order to evoke emotional agitation.  To me this technique is distracting and ineffective.  On the other hand, I must admit that the in-the-water close-up cinematography used in the rescue of Arash scenes (how could this be done without agitated framing?) is convincing and very effective.

The acting performances in About Elly are uniformly superb.  Golshifteh Farhanai's performance in the role of Sepideh is particularly compelling, but all the principal characters have distinct personalities and associated social proclivities that are consistently and believably sustained throughout the film.  As the tension mounts during the various crises, each person responds in a way that drives the organic behaviour of the group forward.  This is what makes the ensemble performances work so well and achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Of course, there is a special Iranian flavor to what goes on in About Elly. As you would expect, there is the nuanced social backdrop concerning how men and women behave towards each other, particularly inside a traditional culture such as Iran’s that is also influenced by modernism. But there is also an even more specifically interesting Iranian cultural attitude that should be highlighted in this connection, and that concerns the cultural attitudes about literal truth.  In general, I would say that Iranians have a stronger-than-usual cultural inclination to avoid telling people what they don’t like to hear.  And this can often involve concealing the truth.  This tendency to prevaricate may be culturally reinforced by the Shia Islamic tradition of taqiyya, which sanctions hiding the truth in certain circumstances. The disposition to occasionally mislead is also probably supported by the famed Iranian tradition of social etiquette, known as taarof, which directs people to speak and act with the utmost courtesy.  One might argue about the proper boundaries and limits of such practices, but their sustained existence in Iranian cultural behaviour offers clear evidence that successful social interactions go beyond black-and-white utterances about what is true and what is good for the overall group or society.  In fact many times we don’t know exactly what is true, and mere adherence to a literal, but uncertain, truth about something may not lead to the most “positive” (an admittedly interpretation-dependent term) course of action.  Thus in the final verbal exchange that takes place in About Elly, Sepideh evidently lies one last time.  Was this final lie ultimately a selfish act?  You can reflect on what her reasons may have been for doing this and whether or not you agree with them.
★★★★

Notes:

1. The Farsi word in the title, ‘Dabareyeh’, means ‘concerning’ in English and has been translated as ‘about’ in the English version of the title.  But ‘about’ has additional connotations in English beyond ‘concerning’, including 'around' or 'nearby'.  This injects some extra suggestive meaning into the English form of the ironic title.
    

“The New World” - Terrence Malick (2005)

The New World (2005) is writer-director Terrence Malick’s account of the legendary encounter between explorer Captain John Smith and the American Indian (Native American) girl Pocahontas when the first permanent English settlement in America was established in 1607.   Americans are well familiar with the main outline of the oft-told story, one of the key elements of  American folklore – how Smith was captured by native Indians and about to be executed until Pocahontas pleaded with her chieftain father to spare Smith’s life.  Pocahontas was then befriended by the colonists and later traveled to England at the invitation of the King and Queen.  This seems like the material taken from a romantic fantasy, but is actually part of the historical record.  Nevertheless, over the many years since that time, romanticized elaborations and exaggerations of the original story have appeared, including a recent Disney animated feature film (1995).  But one would not expect such exaggerations from Malick.  On the basis his previous film, The Thin Red Line” (1998), which vividly showed the harrowing experiences of the World War II campaign on Guadalcanal Island, the viewing audience likely expected on this occasion to see an intensely realistic account of these events surrounding the Smith-Pocahontas story.  Indeed, Malick is famous for his painstaking attention to creating a convincing immersive atmosphere, and he seems to have spared no expense this time in his efforts to recreate the circumstances of that particular time and place.  However, strict historical accuracy is not always adhered to in this film, either – there is no clear historical evidence that Smith and Pocahontas had a romantic relationship, and the timing of Smith’s departure from Jamestown has been altered by Malick in order to fit his own narrative designs.  But one must always keep in mind that Malick’s focus is not so much on providing a thorough and objective historical account as it is on invoking the genuine psychological experiences of what it was like for the participants to live through those narrated events.  This was certainly the case in The New World, and it is what makes the film an exceptionally rewarding viewing experience.

Malick’s cinematic storytelling style is unique; his emphasis on the immediacy of consciousness and psychological experience gives the narration an entirely different tempo from that which is typically associated with an objective  historical account. The major events in what would be a conventional historical account of the Smith-Pocahontas story, such as the near-execution of Smith or the subsequent “kidnapping” (taking hostage) of Pocahontas by the settlers are only briefly and cursorily covered.  What is emphasized in Malick’s account, instead, is the psychological atmosphere that was invoked by such events and which dominates the feelings and perceptions of the participants in the aftermath.  The “new world” referred to in the title is not so much the newly discovered North American land mass as it is the new mental landscapes that emerged in the minds of both Smith and Pocahontas as a result of their respective encounters with the exotic other.

Since the film is more about love and what it means to an individual than it is about history and society, the narrative of interest from this perspective can be seen to progress through three stages:

• The idyll of Smith and Pocahontas
• Smith and Pocahontas Separate
• Pocahontas and John Rolfe

The Idyll of Smith and Pocahontas
At the beginning of the film, the English ships of the Jamestown Expedition land at the Virginia coast, with one of those onboard, Captain John Smith, already a prisoner and sentenced to death for attempted mutiny.  Upon arrival though, he is pardoned by the expedition’s Captain Newport and soon assigned to go upriver in search of trade with the local Indians, referred as “the naturals”.  Captain Smith is captured and again about to be executed, this time by order of Chief Powhatan, when he is saved at the last minute by the pleading of the chief’s teenage daughter (with whom Smith was not acquainted up to that point).  This girl we know, of course, to be the thirteen-year-old “Pocahontas”; although she is never called by this name in the film, and modern historians claim that Pocahontas was not her real name.  Smith, in voiceover, expresses his utter amazement at the innocence, compassion, and spontaneous vitality of the Indians that he encounters.  They seem to be graced by the “state of nature” and are unsullied by the greed and corruption common to his own experiences. 

While he is held by the Indians, Smith is given relative autonomy to interact with them, and although they do not share a common language, he is soon fascinated by Pocahontas, and he in turn becomes the object of her fascination.  Gradually and tentatively they interact and learn to converse.  This first, forty-plus minute section of the film showing their growing attachment is impressionistic and lyrical.  Each of the two is completely outside the conventions and expectations of the other, so their interactions are a continual process of discovery and delighted surprise.  Eventually Smith and Pocahontas are deliriously in love, but they are cautious about showing their feelings.

Smith and Pochontas Separate
On the condition that the English colonists return to where they came from in the spring, Smith is finally returned to the Jamestown settlement.  As soon as he arrives, he is struck by the stark contrast between the perceived purity of the Indian life and the squalor of the colony.  The colonists are mean-spirited, lazy, disorganized, and avaricious, constantly at odds with each other.  Perhaps influenced by stories of Spanish discoveries of gold in the New World, they spend much of their time looking for gold, rather than attending to needed chores.  Smith would prefer to return to Pocahontas, but he is pressed into command, since Captain Newport had returned to England for supplies.  During the winter the disarray among the colonists almost causes them to perish from starvation, but Pocahontas and a small party make a surprise visit to the colony and provide them with life-saving provisions. 

When spring comes and the colonists do not leave as Chief Powhatan ordered, the Indians attack the colonists, who defend themselves with the devastating lethality of their firearms.  Powhatan banishes Pocahontas from his local tribe for disloyalty, and the Jamestown colonists craftily arrange to acquire her as a hostage from her new Indian custodians as protection against future Powhatan attacks.  Back in Jamestown, she is reunited with Smith, but life in the colony is still in turmoil.  Smith is now distracted by the mundane (but compelling to him) concerns of survival and opportunity.  He loses track of his love for the teenage girl, which he dismisses in his mind as a fantasy that does not relate to the hard world that he lives in.  When a commission is proposed for him to lead another adventurous exploration, he leaves Jamestown and has Pocahontas informed that he drowned at sea.

Pocahontas and John Wolfe
Pocahontas is heartbroken and inconsolable over the loss of her love.  Although now living in the colony and wearing Western clothes, the depressed girl is virtually mute.  Another settler, John Rolfe, takes a fancy to her and patiently tries to befriend her and help her learn Western ways.  Pocahontas eventually marries Rolfe and gives birth to a son, but she and Rolfe both know that her heart still belongs to Smith.  Gradually Pocahontas warms to Rolfe and is resigned to the loss of Smith.   Later she visits England at the invitation of the Kind and Queen, and there she learns that Smith is still alive and that he had left her voluntarily.  They finally meet privately, but their encounter this time, as awkward as those first meetings, is this time a sad expression of closure rather than of possibilities.  Pocahontas embraces her new life with Rolfe, but a fuller closure arrives shortly: on the return trip to America, Pocahontas has a short illness and dies in Rolfe’s arms.

Malick’s film is ultimately an excursion into the subjectivity of new love.  The focalization of the first section is on both Smith and Pocahontas as they come together and discover a new world about the other and about themselves.  Then as they begin to separate in the second section of the film, the focalization is shifted more to Smith’s sense of isolation and strife.  This is mirrored in the armed conflict that breaks out between the two communities.  In the third section, the new focalizing element of John Rolfe enters the story.  He is captivated by Pocahontas, but he is a gentleman who is patiently willing to accept even a compromised life with her.   Ultimately Pocahontas learns to embrace life (understood in her voiceovers as the “Earth Mother”) in its larger dimensions, which enables her to extend her loving gaze to a wider compass. 

The other striking theme besides love  in The New World concerns the profound clash between Western culture and the state of nature, as exemplified by “the naturals”.  The Western instinct to possess, dominate, and exploit is accentuated here and contrasted with the Indians’ more organic engagement with the world about them.  This thematic element was reminiscent of an even more exaggerated presentation of this clash in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972).

The main characters in the film are well cast and delineated.  Colin Farrell, as Smith, has a physical, rough-and-ready physique, but here he is very much the cautious and inward-looking perceiver, almost to a point of self-obsession.  He hesitates, taking in all the strange things he encounters, before he takes action.  The viewer is given the feeling of a man trying to find his way in a “new world”.  But the irreversible action that he finally did take cost him dearly.  He acknowledge this when Pocahontas asks him during their final meeting whether he found his “Indies” (i.e. the riches of the Indies sought by the Crown and its explorers).  He responds quietly that he may have sailed right past them.  This notion of a paradise found and abandoned has been told many times and reminded me of Alejo Carpentier’s novel, Los Passos Perdidos (The Lost Steps). 

Q’Orianka Kilcher, as “Pocahontas”, was only fourteen at the time of the filming, and she gives a compelling performance as an exotic and not very shy native woman.  The intimate scenes between her and Farrell are sensitively handled.  Christian Bale, as Rolfe, offers a profound contrast to the inwardness of Smith.  Here we see a well-meaning man whose mental landscape is settled within the scope of conventional culture.  We see everything from all three points of view, and we can empathize with all of them.

Despite the meticulousness of Malick’s mise-en-scene, though there were elements that I found a bit disturbing.  Alterations in the timing of Smith’s departure from Jamestown are acceptable for narrative reasons, and they don’t really call into question the authenticity of the setting. But it seemed to me that Pocahontas’s skill in learning English was too rapidly acquired – especially the English as mumbled by Farrell here.  In addition Farrell’s many tattoos don’t belong in this setting.  Although there was tattooing in pre-Christian Europe, it was not part of 17th century European culture.  Tattooing became popular among European sailors after visiting the Americas and Polynesia in the 18th and 19th centuries, but in this film Smith already had his tattoos on arrival to America.

In addition Malick’s use of the prelude from Wagner’s Das Rheingold as background music on the soundtrack was probably inadvisable.  Werner Herzog had used the same music in a similar fashion for his Nosferatu the Vampyr” (1979).  While Herzog didn’t establish ownership to that usage, the presence of the same music here was distracting to me. 

But despite these small misgivings, one must give Malick his due in terms of what has been accomplished.  As is his wont, Malick has offered a viewing experience that is expressed not as a linear narrative but as an impressionistic collage of little moments, all of which are left to the viewer to assemble into something meaningful in her or his mind.  What is assembled is not so much an understanding but a feeling.  How Malick achieves this result is somewhat mysterious, but the film includes his usual subjective tracking shots, as well as many interspersed upward shots gazing at the sky through treetops.  All of these things give a feeling of one’s existential immersion in an environment that is only partially understood.  One has the feeling that there is always more than what you see right in front of you – something behind you or just out of sight that is unknown and mysterious.  To Pocahontas this the voice of the Earth Mother.  To others it is the mystery of love.
★★★★

“The Thin Red Line” - Terrence Malick (1998)

The Thin Red Line (1998), a film written and directed by Terrence Malick, is based on the James Jones’s World War II novel covering a pivotal US Army assault (the Battle of Mount Austen) against Japanese forces on Guadalcanal Island.  The title is taken from a Rudyard Kipling poem that celebrates the heroic “thin red line” of foot soldiers.  Although it is called one of the great anti-war films, The Thin Red Line seems to be less of a direct polemic specifically against war and more of a melancholy rumination about the inscrutable violence inherent in life itself.  Early on in the film, a rhetorical query is presented in voice-over:

“What is this war at the heart of nature?  Why does nature vie with itself?”

This seems to be an intrinsic aspect to many of the films by Malick, who is America’s cinematic philosopher-auteur.  Malick, who majored in philosophy and translated one of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical treatises into English, has only made five films in the last thirty-eight years [1].  But each one has a contemplative tone and mood that evokes profound questions and feelings about life and the universe.  Despite their philosophical overtones, however, each of Malick’s films has been a polished, big-budget production featuring some of the finest cinematic craftsmanship that Hollywood has to offer.  To a certain extent one might say that Malick has employed the most advanced movie-making techniques in his arsenal in order to present his philosophical perspective in a way that goes beyond verbal expression.  Perhaps for this reason many of the top dramatic talents in Hollywood have been willing to drop everything in order to have the chance to appear in one of Malick’s rare film productions.  The Thin Red Line was anticipated with particularly keen interest in the film community, because there had been a twenty-year hiatus between its production and that of his previous work, Days of Heaven (1978).  Actually Malick had been working on a film treatment of the novel since 1989, but it took some time for him to congeal his ideas and assemble the production team [2]. 

The James Jones novel covers the Guadalcanal military action from the perspective a number of soldiers who participated in the fighting, and Malick does the same.  Since I have not read the Jones novel, I will not attempt to distinguish the specific narrative contributions of Jones and Malick, and I will simply refer to the general narrative aspects of the film as presented.  In the film there are a considerable number of characters presented who have a significant presence, but there are nine of them that seemed particularly important to me:

• Lt. Colonel Gordon Tall (played by Nick Nolte)
• Pvt. Robert Witt (Jim Caviezel)
• Sgt. Edward Welsh (Sean Penn)
• Capt. Elilas Staros (Elias Koteas)
• Pvt. Jack Bell (Ben Chaplin)
• Corporal Geoffrey Fife (Adrien Brody)
• Sgt. William Keck (Woody Harrelson)
• Capt. Gaff (John Cusack)
• Pfc. Don Doll (Dash Mihok)

Of these characters, the first six of them are centers of focalization in the story and from time to time have their thoughts presented in voice-over on the soundtrack.  This is sometimes confusing, because the viewer is not always sure to which character the voice-over on the track should be attributed.

The overall plot features five narrative sections or “acts”.  Time is not evenly distributed across these acts, though – much of the film running time takes place in Act 2, with Acts 1, 3, 4, and 5 being comparatively brief.

1.  The Coming To Guadalcanal. 
The film begins not in a military setting, but with idyllic scenes of Melanesian natives on another island.  Pvt. Witt has gone AWOL from C Company to be with these natives and escape the drudgery of military life.  He is soon captured and arrested by Sgt. Welsh, who does him out of the brig but on condition that he be assigned to stretcher-bearer duty.  Witt seems to be the primary focalization figure and narrative voice of the film, the one asking, “what is this war at the heart of nature”.  But Witt’s perspective is enigmatic: although he initially goes AWOL, he later seeks to rejoin his company and take part in military action – why?  His desire to share the life-and-death experiences of war with his comrades seems to be part of his quest to discover what lies at the violent heart of nature.

Early on in this section, the viewer is presented with two opposing perspectives about life, respectively embodied by Pvt. Witt and Sgt. Welsh. 

• Witt is moved by what he sees to be the lyric harmony of the Melanesian natives that he had observed when had run away to the island.  He feels that he has seen some sort of “spark” – that there is some mystical, spiritual magic about life, and he wants to find the source of this magic.

• Welsh, on the other hand, is cynical and sees life as a never-ending struggle against exploitation from others.  Welsh’s view is the purely selfish perspective. 

These two contrasting perspectives also underlaid the philosophical tone of Malick’s later work, The Tree of Life, and were there expressed as the “way of nature” and the “way of grace”.  The “way of grace” was that of compassion, love, and surrender, and this corresponds to what Pvt. Witt seeks in the The Thin Red Line.  The “way of nature” was the animalistic fight for survival here espoused by Sgt. Welsh. 

At the end of this section, the ship transporting the nervous soldiers of Company C’s battalion arrives at Guadalcanal, and as the soldiers charge up the beach and into the forest thickets, they are relieved not to face enemy fire.  They march into the interior, where Company C will take up its assigned task.

2.  The Assault on the Hilltop Bunker.
The second act is the film’s longest and most dramatic segment.  (For some critics this is the only redeeming part of the film, and they feel the film should have ended with the close of this act.)  Company C has been ordered to take out a Japanese machine-gun bunker atop Hill 210.  Very quickly it becomes evident that this is virtually a suicidal mission, since the Japanese can gun down any soldier making a charge up the hill.  On top of this is the fact that the weary soldiers who have climbed up part of the hill to their current position are now exhausted  from a lack of drinking water. They are further traumatized when they see Sgt. Keck make a simple mistake with a hand grenade and blow himself up.  There is now another highly dramatic character clash between another two opposing perspectives – this time military perspectives, those of Lt. Col. Tall and Capt. Sartos.

• Lt. Col. Tall is an aging and  frustrated career officer who feels he desperately needs to command an heroic and dangerous assault in order to gain his sought-after promotion.  Heavy casualties are an expected part of this proposed scenario.

• Sartos is a humane and reasonable man who is unwilling to sacrifice the lives of his men in a pointless and suicidal charge.

This section of the film is packed with action, featuring harrowing firefighting scenes that capture the chaotic horror of imminent death.  The lasting imagery and main theme here is the intense fear and in-your-face carnage that overwhelms the participants.  Some of them break down completely, others go literally mad.   One of the soldiers, Pvt. Bell, only manages to maintain his sanity by continually focusing on his intense love for his wife back home.  One gets the feeling that maybe that perhaps these scenes get closer to what being in a war is really like.  Eventually Sartos is relieved of his command, the hilltop bunker is captured, and Company C, now headed by Capt. Gaff, is successful in taking the hill. 

3.  The aftermath of the battle.

After the successful hilltop assault, the soldiers rampage through the Japanese camp, killing indiscriminately.  Some of the soldiers take out their nerves by brutalizing the miserable, emaciated Japanese soldiers they find and treating them as if they were farm animals to be slaughtered.  When the dust settles, the soldiers are given a week-long leave to celebrate their victory.  Many of them quickly get drunk, and there are various exchanges between them that show how their war experiences have changed them.  Capt. Staros bids farewell to his men and returns home.  Pvt. Witt revisits the Melanesian village he had seen earlier, but instead of seeing the near-heavenly comradery of before, he sees only mean-spirited, venomous people at odds with each other.  Pvt. Bell receives a curt “Dear John” letter from his beloved wife informing him that she has fallen in love with another man and wants an immediate divorce.  C’est la vie.

4.  The River Detachment.
Abruptly, the scene now shifts to a short time later with Company C in action again.  This time they are wading down a shallow stream and are fearful that they are sitting ducks to an impending Japanese assault.  Pvt. Witt, Corporal Fife, and another soldier are sent out ahead on reconnaissance.  When they run into a large Japanese contingent, Witt sends Fife back to warn the others and sacrificially stays behind to hold off and delay the Japanese.  In a confusingly brief scene, Witt is eventually surrounded by the Japanese soldiers who shout something to him, perhaps demanding that he drop his weapon.  But Witt suicidally raises his rifle and is immediately riddled with bullets.

5.  Epilogue.The focalization now shifts back to Sgt. Welsh, as he cynically watches the newly arrived Capt. Bosch address his new troops with what Welsh takes to be the usual nonsense military rhetoric about brotherhood.  Later at the beach, the landing craft arrives to remove the troops, and the natural rhythm of life returns to the island.

There are two intriguing aspects to The Thin Red Line that distinguish it from other films and make it simultaneously both puzzling and memorable.  One of these aspects is the purely visual manner that Malick employs to create a sense of existential engulfment.  Although there are numerous camera closeups, the viewer always has the feeling that the soldiers are embedded, almost entombed, in a disturbing, alien environment.  The surrounding context is not suffocating; it is alive, even overwhelming.  When the soldiers in Act 2 are filmed in the tall grass, their natural environment seems both to isolate and expose them at the same time: they are vulnerable to attack from the outside, and yet they have difficulty getting their bearings concerning where they should go for safety.   This cinematic mood that Malick creates pervades the entire film and gives it an eery mood throughout.

A second puzzling yet compelling aspect of the film is its narrative.  Act 2 has the more or less conventional film narrative structure of a thrilling and bloody military mission.  But that’s just one segment of The Thin Red Line – there also Acts 1, 3, 4, and 5, which turn the viewer’s interest to things beyond that particular battle.  Taken together, these collected sections turn the film into an unresolved meditation about what is the driving force that animates nature.  This narrative complexity is compounded by the manner in which narrative voiceover is used in the film.  There are (at least) six characters featured in voiceover (Witt, Welsh, Tall, Sartos, Bell, and Fife) [3], and they represent conflicting  moods and perspectives to the film’s multivocal interior monologue.  At first it seems that Pvt. Witt represents the principal narrative voice, and so his position in the philosophical disputation with Sgt. Welsh appears to have a privileged status.  But with Witt’s death late in the piece, he disappears from the scene, and the final narrative voiceover in the film comes from Welsh.  Are we to conclude that Welsh’s pessimistic perspective came to dominate in the end and represents Malick’s conclusion?  Similarly in the Sartos-Tall dispute, the more humane Sartos is removed from the story, and only Tall’s ruthlessness remains at the end.  Again the voice of compassion is silenced.  Moreover, one of the most interesting and poignant voiceover themes is Pvt. Bell’s romantic dedication to his soulmate, which is an otherworldly obsession about the indestructibility of love that is as casually dismissed by fate in the end as was Witt’s quest for that vital spark of life. 
   

But as with all of Malick’s films, what lingers in the mind of the viewer at the end of The Thin Red Line is not the concluding tones of frustration and emptiness, which are almost always disappointing in his films, but the ineffable moods that are conjured up along the way.  These are fleetingly captured in brief, distracting images – sometimes of birds and wildlife, sometimes in momentary, quizzical expressions on faces.  They leave us with the same questions and aspirations that drove Pvt Witt to keep on looking.
★★★

Notes:

1. The Thin Red Line was the third of the five film’s Malick has made so far. The others are Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life (2011).
2.  Josh Young, “Days of Hell”, Entertainment Weekly, January 15, 1999, (http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,274092,00.html – see the continuing pages of this article).
3. Young’s article [2] says there are eight voiceover narrators.

Terrence Malick

About Terrence Malik:

• "Terrence Malick: the Return of Cinema's Invisible Man", by Jason Solomons, The Observer, 3 July 2011. 

Films of Terrence Malick:

• Badlands - Terrence Malick (1973) 
• The Thin Red Line - Terrence Malick (1998)
• The New World - Terrence Malick (2005)
• The Tree of Life – Terrence Malick (2011)