<underfire> realism and global sense perception

Sat Nov 11 15:35:24 EST 2006

Negar,

The point about realism is interesting.  We screened Underexposure in  
NY in September as well and I was struck by two things -- one, that  
the audience could only accept the film as realist.  And the other  
was the annoyance from academics and activists strongly opposed to  
the U.S. invasion that the "real" story wasn't being told because  
this was a piece of fiction.  There were documentaries, they were  
quick to remind me, that told us something real about the devastation  
of Iraq.

It has always struck me as curious that when Coca Cola and Hollywood  
were doing such a good job of entering the eyes and mouths of the  
world that the U.S. would continue such an old formula of total war.

Radhika

Radhika Subramaniam
Director of Cultural Programs
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
125 Maiden Lane, 2nd floor
New York NY 10038
Tel. (212) 219-9401 ext. 124
Fax. (212) 219-2058
rsubramaniam at lmcc.net

On Nov 11, 2006, at 12:15 PM, negar mottahedeh wrote:

>
> I am encouraged  by Ananya's intervention to end the week's posts by
> reflecting on some contemporary feminist debates in Iran; debates  
> around
> the question of representation in cinema.  Listening to these  
> debates, I
> am, in particular struck by the persistent evocation of the notion of
> realism and, in thinking self-reflexively, by the global demand for  
> realism
> in representation. A recent Sunday Times Magazine article on the  
> election
> of the Iranian President Ahamadinejad focuses on his "image maker"  
> whose
> film about the modest then-mayor  portrays a simple man who eschews  
> the
> luxuries of his predecessors. "Asked if he thinks this was authentic,"
> Javad Shamghadri, the president's visual arts adviser replies,  
> "People can
> tell he is genuine. That's why they voted for him. The image  
> corresponds to
> his true self."    The image corresponds to his true  
> self. ...Shamghadri's
> film about the mayor attracts the voting masses because of its  
> realism, its
> realistic portrayal of a man who despite his humility is today the  
> Iranian
> "President of the Apocalypse".
>
> In watching the success of Iranian post-Revolution films in film  
> festivals
> around the globe, critics repeatedly argue that the films depict
> unrealistic representations of Iran and its "way of life." Central  
> to these
> critiques is the industry's problematic representation of women.   
> In the
> Iranian context and increasingly in the West, a particular mode of  
> critique
> introduced by Iranian feminists, articulates the shift from
> pre-Revolutionary cinematic depictions of women as "unchaste dolls"  
> to the
> "chaste dolls" of the post-Revolutionary period.  Shahla Lahiji's  
> work on
> the representation of women in Iranian films is at the forefront of  
> these
> critiques, suggesting that "the unchaste dolls" of the pre- 
> Revolutionary
> cinema were banished from the cabaret stage and are now chastened and
> confined within the interior walls of the kitchen and engaged in  
> domestic
> chores.  It seems to me that  while these critiques of stereotypical
> representations may be seen as progressive in the context of a  
> national
> industry that is charged by its government to propagate proper  
> standards
> for Islamic life through film, they become quite problematical as  
> they make
> the rounds of international film festivals. What is key in this  
> context is
> the critical appeal to realism once again.
>
> For if  we accept the global effects of Americanization  on our  
> senses of
> seeing and hearing (Westoxification in another register), if we  
> accept this
> as an historical given, if we , in other words, come to understand the
> convention of realism as an historical imprint of an imperial logic on
> cinemas globally,  can "realism" still stand as the measure of  
> feminist
> approaches to representational strategies in national films? In the  
> context
> of Hollywood's imperial domination of what constitutes value in film,
> namely narrative realism,  can a feminist critique of  say, Iranian  
> films,
> proceed by merely reading the film narrative for realistic  
> representations
> or by suggesting that stereotypical representations be undercut and
> replaced by more realistic ones?  In the global circulation of fictive
> female characters on screen at international film festivals, what  
> films
> offer up to knowledge is not, it seems to me, an access to the  
> knowledge of
> the real beyond representation, but "a negative return on an absolute
> investment" in representation as truth.  While a simplistic  
> articulation of
> this formula would have it that if there is a camera there, what  
> you see on
> screen cannot possibly be real, its corollary in a feminist  
> analytics of
> cinema must be the recognition that “realism” stands as a discursive
> alibi for “an authentic encounter with difference” be it with the
> female body on screen or the other’s nation in effigy.
>
> Given these reflections on realism, I wonder about the expectations we
> often carry when we watch fiction films by  filmmakers such as Oday
> Rasheed, the Iraqi filmmaker who made the first feature length  
> fiction film
> in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Oday Rasheed's  film is entitled
> UNDEREXPOSURE (2005).   The following synopsis of the film will  
> have to
> serve as an introduction to the issues I would like to raise  
> momentarily:
> "UNDEREXPOSURE, a title that refers not only to the outdated film  
> stock
> that was used to make the film, but also to the generation of  
> Iraqis that
> have been isolated from the world for decades, takes an unprecedented,
> uncensored look into the lives, hearts, and minds of those living  
> in Iraq
> during the tumultuous days after the fall of Saddam. Director Oday  
> Rasheed
> has created a vivid world set against a real backdrop of war and  
> upheaval.
> Friends, lovers, strangers and family members are woven together by  
> the
> complexities of their new reality. The past is only a moment behind  
> them,
> with the presence of death a constant companion into the  
> future...The first
> feature length film shot on location in Baghdad after the war,
> UNDEREXPOSURE  blends reality and fiction to create a lyrical and  
> textured
> work that captures the dizzying atmosphere of life during war and  
> fiercely
> illuminates a part of the world long left in the dark. "
>
> To me, what is striking about the film UNDEREXPOSURE is the long  
> sequences
> that are set indoors. Here, the characters return to their  
> preoccupation
> with the impossibility of existence, the impossibility of  
> filmmaking, the
> impossibility of love and of friendship. Having lived through the  
> encounter
> with the violence of Saddam's rule and present to the prohibiting
> conditions of occupation under American rule, the camera despite  
> its use of
> outdated 20 year old film stock, refuses to capture the outdoor  
> environment
> of war and occupation. It wraps itself lyrically around spaces and  
> images
> and colors. The soundtrack captures anecdotes and bits of  
> conversation.
> Together sight and sound reflect more on the interiority of the film's
> hopeless characters, than on that hope for a different, utopian,  
> future
> that shaped guerilla filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s in the colonial
> world-- in the Third Cinema movement, for example.
>
> When we screened UNDEREXPOSURE as part of a film series marking  
> the  five
> year anniversary of September 11, 2001 at Duke, the audience kept  
> raising
> the issue realism as if the authenticity of the filmmaker as Iraqi  
> would
> inform the realness of the representations of post-war Iraq as these
> appeared on screen.  Somehow I wonder if it isn't a feeling of the
> impossibility of contemporary Iraqi existence-- one informed by the
> injustices of the past, the violence of the present and the unsettled
> vision of the nation's collective future-- that leads to the film's
> rejection of "the real" as the standard for its filmmaking  
> practice. To
> reject the imperial mark of realism on the senses of sight and hearing
> through cinema is, it would seem,  the only possibility of  
> resistance for a
> film industry under American occupation today.
>
> The conditions of Iraqi cinema may not be unique in this regard. As  
> the
> Iranian auteur, Abbas Kiarostami suggests regarding the defining  
> codes of
> American cinema globally, the American film industry is an industry  
> whose
> power is even greater than America’s military might.  What we may not
> realize is that our global demand for realism (that demand for an
> "authentic encounter with difference") is implicated in this  
> assertion of
> power over the senses.
>
> Negar Mottahedeh
> Program in Literature
> Women's Studies
> Duke University
>
>
>
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