By Mubashir Karim
“. . . [A]ll societies have battled with that incorrigible disturber of the peace-the artist.” – James Baldwin
In his latest film No Bears (2022), Jafar Panahi is seen directing a movie over a phone call, while desperately searching for internet signal across the border – exasperatingly elucidating the technicalities to the actors, the assistant, and the crew. At one point in the movie, Panahi cedes his camera over to the immature Ghanbar, in whose house he is living as a guest. Thereafter, he captures a jittery sequence of the local custom of the ‘river ceremony’. Even when Panahi does pick up the camera in the film and shoots few photographs of the locals, he finds himself caught in the quagmire of local politics over a couple, who may, or may not have been clicked by him. Eventually out of frustration, he hands over the memory-card of the camera, including all the photos therein, to the local authorities for further investigation. This is Jafar Panahi at his best. Or is there any other way that so fiercely ‘captures’ the situation Panahi ‘the great auteur’ is caught in today’s Iran?
In one of the pivotal scenes of the film, Panahi the character is then brought to a swearing-in ceremony. He is willing to swear-in that he hasn’t captured the photograph they are looking for. However, he wants to perform the swearing-in in his own style. He pronounces to document and record his swearing-in and assures everyone that they will each get a copy of the video recording. The holy book is, thereafter, in the direction of the sheriff, replaced by a camera. In other words, the sanctimonious regime gets replaced by a mechanical apparatus, the holy authority by a paltry machine. To invoke Walter Benjamin here, the aura of the machine/camera inversely exiles the people of the village from their own environment, rather than Panahi, the actor. In other words, the machine paradoxically becomes an essential medium that restores the aura of the actor caught in the quagmire of History, local politics, in contrast to the aura of the holy book. At one point, a local tells Panahi that one can even lie in the ceremony after taking an oath. This can easily mean that the aura of the holy book does not sanction the revered practice of witnessing. It might perhaps be because of this that Panahi substitutes that camera for the book. Panahi the director, assigns then more veracity to the camera than to the people. The machine appears to be more truthful in a place like the one he is part of than the book in Panahi’s art.
The sheriff thereafter declares, “He wants to film his own witnessing” – a statement that captures the intricate problematics of Panahiesque cinema. The sheriff’s statement, specifically in this reference, finds more ground and meaning in the situation of the character in the film, if not in Iran. A ban has been imposed on Panahi since 2008 that prohibits him from making films for twenty years. In fact, it won’t be an exaggeration to label Panahi’s entire oeuvre of filmmaking “a filmic witnessing of the Real.” Right from This is not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013) and Taxi (2015), to Three Faces (2018), Panahi has been trying to film his own witnessing under such a regime that threatens to constrain, if not his political commitment, but at least his creative sensibility. It is pertinent to mention here that such an important statement is not declared by Panahi himself but the sheriff who is fighting the case on behalf of the villagers. Here, the trope of a censorial body deftly capable of understanding Art in contrast to the larger common public comes in handy.
Moreover, as Panahi records the witnessing among the audience in the film, he is interrupted in the middle of the statement by one of the persons of the accusing party. He accuses Panahi, once again, of defaming the local rituals and disrespecting their age-old traditions of which he understands nothing and is thereby in no position to comment upon. This, again, forms an important statement in respect to the Panahiesque Cinema, at least of the last two decades. A cinema wherein, while recording his own witnessing, interruptions in the form of authority, personal trauma, people at large or for that matter the traditions, customs and politics of post-revolutionary Iran, come into play. One can perhaps read or mis-read this in connection with what Walter Benjamin labels as “intervention” within the process of film production when he discusses the shift from the stage to the camera (110-111). In the film, for Panahi the actor, or in real life, for Panahi the director, the act of intervention proceeds again at the societal level. This group, in Panahi’s life, unlike Benjamin’s formulation, doesn’t include any specialists or experts. To unpack this further, they are not directors, producers, cinematographers, etc. but common people at large. Broadly speaking, it is in fact the regime itself, which constantly intervenes in Panahi’s Art, in his act of witnessing in front of the camera including No Bears. In fact, interventions form an essential segment of other Panahi films also. These deliberate interventions in his films need, therefore, to be read in the broader context of the politics of the land and as a radical comment on his singular style of the ‘politicization of art’. It is, perhaps, of interventions like these that Panahi, the director, ceases to be just a director recording the problematics of filming in Iran and turns into Panahi, the actor. For these interventions continue to occur to the director who cannot help but intervene against these non-specialists. Panahi the actor, acting in his own films, is then like a ghost figure returning from the dead/censored instructing Panahi how to do Art. The ‘meta’ nature of Panahiesque Cinema should then be read as an essentially inherent part of his oeuvre and not something imposed from some outside vantage point displaying the experimental fervor of Art specifically. In other words, it is only through the reproduction of the filmic images along with the reproducibility of his own self that Panahi can bring about some kind of redemption to Art, if at all it can. The Panahi in these films is actually not Panahi the director, exhibiting his problems within Iran, but Panahi the actor who can’t help but film his own self as “a spectacle of failure” that, despite everything, displays signs of resilience. Panahi the director and Panahi the actor is thus the fractured self of a society at odds with the imposed reality of Iran.
As already mentioned, Panahi is directing a film over phone, with actors working in Turkey, from some bordered land of Iran. This yet again needs to be read as an important site of the bordered/fractured nature of direction that has lately become an essential component of Jafar Panahi’s cinema. Even the characters in the movie that Panahi is directing within the movie are fraught with problems of crossing the borders wherein the male counterpart fakes his passport so that the woman character can crossover and live her life under someone else’s identity. Panahi’s own character breaks the fourth wall here and accuses him of lying regarding the fake passport so that the film ends on a happy note, thus showcasing that “some people might make it out of here.” Panahi again here is problematizing the situation of not only the borders of the land but also of the bordered nature of self itself.
The act of remaining committed to one’s land, insisting on not leaving, yet at the same time, engaging in critical exegesis of the place, where people seem bent upon defeating one is something seminal to Panahi’s identity. It is because of this, when Panahi in the film is guided by his assistant to cross the border into Turkey, Panahi returns back to the village disquietingly. From a director accused of disturbing the peace of the land by the authorities to a character accused by the villagers of disputing their rustic harmony through the medium of a camera and an in-between Self, relegated by his own characters of using them as pawns for mere ‘happy endings’ are few of the accusations that Panahi’s self is facing in real as well. No Bears, if not anything else, is yet again, a testament of a self, caught in the whirlwind of a society that is yet to come to terms with a mechanical mesh committed to truth-telling through images. In fact, the ‘No’ of the No Bears could itself be read as an essential trope that plays with the absence and the presence of things at hand. As becomes evident through the movie that the absence of the photo (as audience we don’t get to see it) turns into the presence of something looming large over the local politics – the presence of Panahi the director in a remote village. Needless to say, there are no bears, as one character puts it, just stories, superstitions, because “our fear empowers others.”
Bio:
Mubashir Karim resides in Srinagar, Kashmir and is currently working as an assistant professor in the Higher Education Department, Jammu & Kashmir.
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