Authors

KAMRAN BARADARAN

and

MARZIYEH FARNAM

“Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour [Stillstellung] of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past.”

— Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1)

For years, Iranian cinema has been carving itself a niche on the global artistic scene.  From Abbas Kiarostami to Asghar Farhadi, Iranian cinematographers have not only won multiple film awards but have also been well-received by critics and their works have generated substantial scholarship. Nevertheless, it appears to us that the majority of interpretations of and accolades for Iranian cinema have either overlooked or failed to address its ontological nature. In other words, one crucial aspect of reading Iranian cinema that is frequently overlooked is how various interpretations and interacting with their implications can lead to a new perspective about this unique cinematic expanse and about today's world.

One of the recent works that has managed to maintain this approach to some extent in its reading is "There Used To Be A Future: On The Films Of Ahmad Bahrami" by Séamus Malekafzali, published on 8 July 2024. Malekafzali's unique perspective is our motivation to write this article which, however, should not be considered as a response or negation of his article. Rather, our effort is to provide further perspectives on the cinema of Ahmad Bahrami and Iranian cinema in general, the latter having been our preoccupation for a long time.

This article has a structure of fragmentary writing, and there is a reason for this: in our view, the only way to depict a shattered and devastated world appears to be through the use of a fragmented form. In other words, to deal with the viral world that has turned everything into wandering scraps, thinking must also become viral or fragmentary.

This article should therefore be considered a fragmental attempt to revive the first phase of an ambitious project about Iranian cinema, politics, and the concept of the future, which is under development. For now, we limit our work to addressing ideas that may have been left out in Malekafzali's article, and we point out the nature of the relationship between politics, future, ruins, and cinema.

“It is true: when two writers meet, they never talk about literature (fortunately); their first remarks are always about politics,” Maurice Blanchot apparently once said (2). Our encounter with Malekafzali through his interesting article follows a similar approach.  

The Psychological Structure of Apocalypse

"History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." 

— James Joyce, Ulysses (3)

Malekafzali’s article starts with a statement that is frequently heard in current times, an observation that has gained prevalence in today's tumultuous world: "The future is now something to be feared, in seemingly all its possible forms." (4) The significance of this view lies in its objective and uncanny resemblance to our everyday misery, that is, the widespread wars and conflicts, the ominous horizon of environmental disaster that is no longer far away, and the numerous catastrophes which have made the future scary and inauspicious. 

The author primarily examines the work of modern Iranian cinematographer Ahmad Bahrami, regarding him as the successor to the renowned Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Malekafzali’s focus is on The Wastetown, the second part of the so-called Bahrami’s trilogy: The Wasteland (2020), The Wastetown (2022), and The Wasteman (2024). He successfully finds an apt connection between the ontology of Bahrami’s cinema and our current desperate situation. Accordingly, Bahrami's painterly shots of denied horizons and scripts of bitter, simple truths serve one purpose: to illustrate how capitalism has hollowed out the world and left it to rot.

But let us take another look at Bahrami’s cinema and focus on The Wasteland, the first part of the aforementioned trilogy. The film is narrated in an unknown time and among brick kilns. A remote factory manufactures bricks in an ancient way. Many families with different ethnicities work in the factory. Forty-year-old Lotfollah, who has been born on-site, is the factory supervisor and acts as go-between for the workers and the boss. Boss has Lotfollah gather all the workers in front of his office. He wants to talk to them about the shutdown of the factory. From here, the director engages us in the life narratives of each of these families and moves in a circular manner between the present, the past and the future that never arrives.

The Wasteland follows a circular mechanism, a coil whose kernel is the boss's statement about the shutdown, and from this center of gravity the agonizing life of each worker is narrated as an absurd and endless cycle of angst. Therefore, The Wasteland participates in the logic of modernism, which tends towards an autonomization of ever smaller segments, validating the authenticity of a whole at the same time (in literature, Joyce's Ulysses and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano are perhaps the most obvious examples). Here, the broken fragments undergo their own distinct deterioration and turn into another brick in an abandoned structure that is about to succumb to putrefaction. And what better expression to describe the world we live in now? This fragmentation represents the politics that questions the normal distribution of positions of power, that is, the definition of positions that exercise power and positions on which power is exercised. Such a rupture presupposes the idea that there must be dispositions for resistance against the so-called prevailing order of the day. 

As William Viney argues in his Waste: A Philosophy of Things, discarding something as waste is not simply due to our feeling compelled to organize the environment into hygienic allotments of clean space, but due to how we “encounter the time of things; objects that arise from the time felt in and with matter. Waste is also matter for whom time has run out or has become precluded.” (5) One has to accept the fact that the present structures of the world are not only waste in terms of space, but also that the time for all the usual apparatuses of our lives is practically over. As Bahrami effectively demonstrates in The Wasteland, the primary cause of this wrecked community is capitalism, "this infernal machine that is capitalism." (6) The film's narrative configures its own space and its agenda is to force the viewer to rediscover the world, its subjects, and the specific operations taking place within it. By questioning the “normal course of things” and emphasizing the narrative importance of the survivors who do not belong anywhere, the film explicitly challenges the normal arrangement of things and affairs, that is, the opposition between the original material and the waste, between the victor and the vanquished.

As previously mentioned, Malekafzali notes that there are affinities between Bahrami’s worldview and the works of Béla Tarr, the renowned Hungarian filmmaker. As he observes, “The atmosphere that Tarr created with films like The Turin Horse, Damnation, and Sátántangó— already brutal and pessimistic—takes on an even more morbidly poignant form in Bahrami’s hands.” (7) However, in order to gain a more accurate knowledge of both the world of the Bahrami and our own circumstances, perhaps it would be best to go back a little and think with reference to Tarr’s debut film, Family Nest (1979). Family Nest depicts the challenges faced by a young couple in Hungary as they are forced to reside with the husband’s parents amid a pervasive housing crisis. The movie focuses on the everyday life of the family, highlighting their struggles with money and emotional conflicts between them as they navigate a bleak existence marked by poverty and disillusionment. The narrative unfolds through a series of intimate, often painfully realistic vignettes that capture the family's attempts to maintain their dignity and cohesion amidst mounting pressures. The movie effectively showcases how socio-economic factors affect family relationships and personal goals amid escalating tensions, depicting a raw portrayal of life within a marginalized community.

The fundamental essence of Family Nest, this depressing constellation of relentless toil and struggle, is the elastic period of disaster, a time in which neither can promises be fulfilled nor can even an absolute desolation bring about a more or less eschatological conclusion. In his essay Apocalypse without Kingdom, Günther Anders introduced the concept of ‘naked apocalypse’, the apocalypse that consists of mere downfall, which doesn’t represent the opening of a new, positive state of affairs (of the ‘kingdom’). Anders’s idea was that a nuclear catastrophe would be precisely such a naked apocalypse: no new kingdom will arise out of it, just the obliteration of ourselves and our world: 

The door in front of us bears the inscription: 'Nothing will have been'; and from within: 'Time was an episode'. Not, however, as our ancestors had hoped, an episode between two eternities; but one between two nothingnesses. (8)

It is exactly at this point that Tarr's masterpiece and the first part of the Bahrami’s trilogy intersect, namely the point that makes every catastrophe in the world homogeneous, if not equivalent, to another. The characters of The Wasteland, just like Family Nest, suffer from a kind of permanent paralysis, caught in an aporia from which there is no escape, nor can it have a positive or at least a promising outcome, despite the most heinous horrors.

Family Nest is not just a critique of bureaucratic policies in the field of housing during Soviet domination. The director's main errand comes at the end of the movie, when the final song is heard: 

When our house is ready...

You will be our first guest

If you come in the evening 

we will dine together... 

and you can sleep in our spare room.

We will watch over your dreams.

And while you sleep your dreams will come true...

A house that will never be built, and even if it does, it will be too late for its prospective occupants because the calamity has left its mark on their worn-out psyche. In a similar way, the climax of The Wasteland also lies in its final scene:  Lotfollah, who was born at the factory and has reached middle age without ever knowing another profession, builds a brick-making oven around himself. Only when he is fully immured and darkness dominates do we hear the gas turn on. Here, too, we are only dealing with a narrow margin in which there is neither opening nor liberation but merely a vulnerability that melts down the ice that floods the shores of our existence.

The Unbearable Lightness of Future

"We live no longer either in tragic meaning nor in what [...] was supposed to transport and elevate tragedy to divine salvation."

— Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes (9)

As far as the idea of ​​the future and its impact on contemporary Iranian cinema is concerned, some other crucial elements should be considered as well.

From an etymological point of view, the word "future" comes from Latin futūrus (about to be, about to exist). Today, of course, talking about things to exist is not so peculiar: from enthusiastically nihilistic views of the future to pseudo-leftist optimistic visions about the necessity of revolution and the embodiment of utopia, everyone likes to have a certain fantasy about what comes next. However, perhaps one should take another look at the idea of ​​the future and utopia. As Frank Ruda once aptly elaborated, “it is rational to assume that there is right now no future and that there never will be anything worthy of that name.” (10)

The relationship between capitalism and concepts like “future” and “utopia” is complex. The prevailing ideology conceptualizes the future as of paramount importance and promotes the pursuit of its improvement. Capitalist ideology pretends to confer significance upon the advancement of our future and presents remedies for its own subjugation through its own conceptualization of temporality. In other words, the capitalist dogma not only demands that we evolve into the hereafter, but it also mandates the pathways that it deems suitable for this purpose: regulated methods that are a part of the gilded cage of our present.

Let us look at another example from Iranian cinema to gain a better understanding of this predicament: Utopia (1983) by Sohrab Shahid-Saless. Utopia's story appears quite simple and uncomplicated at first glance: five women work in a brothel in West Germany run by Heinz (Manfred Zapatka), a misogynist and ruthless man. Heinz subjugates the women throughout the film and in various scenes, each time in an abusive and humiliating way. When it comes to envisioning a future free from Heinz and the degrading existence at the brothel, these five women, who have a diverse range of life experiences and backgrounds, each have their own unique visions. These variant dreams share a common objective nevertheless: to escape from the catastrophic situation they are in. The women ultimately rebel against Heinz and take his life. And here comes the brilliant moment of the film: in the last scene, the five women, freed from their oppressor, take over and run the brothel on their own, abandoning their past aspirations. 

Only at the end of the film does the audience realize why Shahid-Saless chose the title "Utopia" for such a bitter and hopeless piece of work. Since its inception, utopia is inherently destined for failure due to our inherent inability to fully comprehend a world that diverges significantly from our present reality.

Does Lotfollah's symbolic suicide in The Wasteland represent anything other than the absence of a future? Isn't the radical aspect of Bahrami's film akin to Shahid-Saless's Utopia, particularly in the final moment, where we realize that the hoped-for future will never come true?  As warned a long time ago, “the point is not of planning utopias; the point is about practicing them.” To put it another way, what we need is a closed-circuit between the past and the future in order to escape from our apocalyptic present.

Mapping Politics

"ladies and gentleman there is no cause for alarm we have a minor problem in the boiler room but everything is now under… sound effects of a nuclear blast."

— William S. Burroughs, Twilight’s Last Gleamings (11)

The Wasteland, among many other things, is a movie about topology, or rather, the topology of the future. In the movie, the fraudulent employer has dispersed his employees around the desolate regions of Iran in search of alternative employment.  However, it is evident that there are no employment opportunities available, nor is there a designated space awaiting them.  They are compelled to roam, with no alternative but to discover anything beyond the unseen horizon.  

Indeed, what we are dealing with here is an attempt to map a kind of human condition amidst the ruins and remains of what could have been the future. The workers wander off after the factory shuts down, and everyone ends up heading to the city (except Lotfollah, of course, who takes a completely different route). Throughout the film, the "city" is identified as the sole final destination that offers the potential to resolve the current catastrophic situation.

The utopian function of urban migration is nothing new to the survivors and the downtrodden all over the world; in this perspective, the city is an escape from the stagnant and terrible state of the outskirts because of the greater economic possibilities it offers. It seems that the only thing that keeps the ruined world of Bahrami's film afloat is the idea of returning to the embodiment of modernization, namely, the city. But let us approach this issue from a different angle.

The Cycle (Dayereh-ye Mina), directed by Dariush Mehrjoui, perfectly portrays the logic of urban migration and the problematic of antagonism: A young man named Ali living along with his family in the suburbs of Tehran, takes his sick father, Esmail, to a major hospital, but is unable to pay for Esmail's reception and spends a few days outside until he meets Doctor Sameri, a blood dealer who buys the blood of the poor and the addicts cheaply and then sells it to hospitals. Sameri convinces Ali to work for him and find blood sellers. Esmail's condition keeps getting worse until he dies as Ali continues progressing in his career, starting a new life. Here, we have an acute and precise interpretation of the city's landscape as the epicenter of conflict and the interface between power institutions. The Cycle starts exactly where The Wasteland ends: Here, the marginalized finally reach the city, seeking relief from their endless suffering through forced migration. However, they soon discover that this tumultuous maze holds no promise of paradise, and they have already lost the future, unless the root cause of these unequal conditions, i.e., rampant capitalism, ceases to exist. In other words, the trinity of The Wasteland-The Cycle-Utopia is connected by what Marx described in the following way: “It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality.” (12)

This is precisely what Abbas Kiarostami's filmography, which shares a concentration on marginal locations with Bahrami's work, fails to capture. In Taste of Cherry, the main character, Mr. Badii takes refuge in the countryside to find someone to carry out his mission of self-annihilation. The logic of escaping from the city to the suburbs serves as a form of mental catharsis in this context, as it involves leaving the accelerated atmosphere of modernity and seeking refuge in a pastoral world where everything is plain and pleasant. Taste of Cherry's appeal to the Western audience stems in part from Kiarostami's portrayal of an idealized picture of the East that the audience in fact fantasizes about: a place abundant with simplicity and enigma, and how wonderful it would be if "the modern individuals from the Western world" could also embrace this simplicity in their everyday existence. In general, Kiarostami investigates the transitional areas of Iran as a tourist, whereas Bahrami perceives these areas as they truly are: places of hopelessness and timidity, where only the privileged can escape with the help of wealth and influence, leaving others with no choice but to commit suicide or wander among the remnants of a shattered world.

In most instances, our world suffers from what Shaj Mohan calls an idyllic a priori. That is, it thinks from the idylls of some specific group of people and then sets up this idyll as the impossible teleology. M. K. Gandhi too conceived an Indian village idyll and contrasted it with “western civilization”. Gandhi’s idyll is the village of the privileged upper caste Indian under whom the racial hierarchies and exploitations of the majority lower caste people carry on, but without an ounce of resentment on part of the exploited (13). The usual approach to history is to think of history as either the realization of an originary power or destiny, or as the approach towards an ideal or a transcendent end. These images of idyll are always of someone or of some people under whom many had to suffer to sustain them. For example, the contemplative life of an upper caste man surrounded by nature in the subcontinent was made possible through the racist caste order.

Bahrami presents a world that demonstrates indifference and radical subtraction or withdrawal, thereby creating new forms of collective enunciation free from the dominance of idylls. His characters in The Wasteland wrap themselves with a blanket after a grueling workday, transforming into living corpses encased in a winding sheet, which once again proves the fact that there is an infinite amount of sleep under capitalism… but not for us! On the other hand, the cinema of someone like Kiarostami ultimately falls into the trap of presenting an alluring image of the Far East to the gaze of the civilized people of the West, a realm that must be represented as docile, tranquil, and devoid of conflict to achieve worldwide acceptance.

It seems that we are living in a situation much like that of Alexandros in Eternity and a Day (the masterpiece of Theo Angelopoulos); a middle-aged poet (Bruno Ganz) leaves his seaside apartment in Thessaloniki after learning he has a terminal illness and must enter a hospital the next day to undergo more tests. After meeting with a young Albanian squeegee kid, Alexandros remembers his love for a 19th-century Greek poet, Dionysios Solomos, whose unfinished poem he longs to complete. In the final scene, he enters his old home. He looks about, exits out the back door, and into the sunny past where his dead wife Anna and other friends are singing. They halt, invite him to join them and subsequently dance together. Eventually, the poet and his wife are the only ones remaining in motion. Alexandros informs Anna that he is not willing to enter the hospital as originally intended. Anna then gradually withdraws. Alexandros calls out and asks how long tomorrow will be, and he hears this answer: “Tomorrow will last eternity and a day.”

Isn't this scene the best portrait of our situation today? We are deaf and dumb, caught in the midst of past spirits, and have no words to describe this horrible situation. Isn't it time to realize that this "eternity and a day" is our final destiny and we must gather our strength and power and bring back the forgotten words and write the poetry for the future?

NOTES

1. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm  

2. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. G. Quasha, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1999, p. 453. 

3. James Joyce, Ulysses, New York, NY: Random House, 1961, p.34. 

4. Séamus Malekafzali, "There Used To Be A Future: On The Films Of Ahmad Bahrami", Protean Magazine, July 8, 2024, https://proteanmag.com/2024/07/08/there-used-to-be-a-future-on-the-films-of-ahmad-bahrami/ 

5. William Viney, Waste: A Philosophy of Things, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 1-2. 

6. Jameson, Fredric, “Capitalism, the infernal machine: An interview with Fredric Jameson”, rabble.ca, February 9, 2012, https://rabble.ca/books/capitalism-infernal-machine-interview-frederic-jameson/ 

7. Malekafzali, "There Used To Be A Future.”  

8. Anders, Günther, Le temps de la fin, Paris: L’Herne, 2007, p. 11.  

9. Nancy, Jean-Luc, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, Trans. Charlotte Mandell, NY: Fordham University Press, 2014, p. 8.  

10. Ruda, Frank, “From Catastrophic Messianism to Comic Fatalism: A Reply to my Critics”, Provocations: The Journal, (1), 2020, p. 61. 

11. See: https://allenginsberg.org/2015/11/william-burroughs-1989-part-2/    

12. Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (1843): https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm  

13. See Nancy, Jean-Luc and Shaj Mohan, “Our Mysterious Being”, Philosophical Salon, 2020, April 13: https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/our-mysterious-being