7 -13 December 2000
Issue No.511
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 7 -13 December 2000 Issue No.511 |
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Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
The film world is undergoing a revolution. Traditional centres for filmmaking are giving way to newer ones. Thus the US, England, France and Italy, traditional strongholds of the film industry, are being replaced by Iran, Japan, South Korea and China. This was quite evident in the recent round of the Cairo International Film Festival and at the festivals of Cannes, Venice and Locarno where filmmakers from the East have been raking awards. In response, UNESCO's The Courier devotes a dossier in its October issue to "The rage for Asian cinema."
In addition to articles about the film industry in South Korea, China, Japan and Iran, the dossier includes exposés of the industry in Argentina and Brazil. In a revealing article entitled "Breathless West, Brilliant East," Joan Dupont, a Paris-based film critic for The International Herald Tribune, argues that economic value dominates everything in the West, and cinema is no exception. "Made for profit," she writes, "moulded for television, most movies have become pure entertainment. The results are a big turn-off."
Dupont believes the dominance of economic values and the search for prosperity in the West have deprived the region's filmmakers of creative muscle. In contrast, she finds that Asia's political, economic and social upheavals have bred a cultural tension that is reflected in its flourishing, dynamic cinema. Dupont quotes Piers Handling, director of the Toronto Festival as saying, "The culture is changing enormously, and telling stories is a way of dealing with the changes. Look at post-1917 Russia, post-World War I Germany, post-World War II Italy, post-1959 Cuba, post-colonial France in the late 1960s -- all these started producing dynamic films." This energy, according to Handling, tends to be dispersed when things are going well.
Alternatively, the New York critic Dave Kehr believes that the vitality of Eastern cinema may have something to do with these countries' resistance to "post-modernist irony and self-reference." They take their stories and their genres seriously while "the West has lost belief in the old formulas without finding anything reliable to replace them."
After years of failing to recognise filmmakers from the East, ignoring anything that was not American or European, the West now seems only too ready to welcome them with open arms. Marco Muller, former director of the Locarno Film Festival, argues that "it's not just story telling, but a different film universe that has been shaping up in the past two decades. Western reality desperately needed an injection of something new and that has come from those who have been shut out by the industry."
The Courier also includes Mamad Haghighat's article "After the revolution: The cinema will carry us." In this article, Haghighat, an Iranian film critic and historian, and the author of A History of Iranian Cinema, explains how fanatical believers could not tolerate the iconographic portrayal of humans since to them God alone is the Creator and the Craftsman of living beings. This is nothing new. As soon as the first cinema opened in Tehran in 1904, fanatics burnt it down. In 1978, 400 people lost their lives at the Rex Cinema in Abadan. Mulahs believed the movie theatre to be a symbol of the godless West, a rival to the mosque, and thus a direct threat to their own power.
Haghighat explains the paradox of the coincidence of the revival of the film industry in Iran with the Islamic revolution. "During his exile in France, Ayatollah Khomeini had become aware of the image's role as an effective political propaganda tool." Back in Tehran, Khomeini saw a film which focused on the troubled lives of impoverished farmers in a remote village. This film inspired him to give a speech on the educational role of film and led to the state's efforts to create an "Islamic cinema."
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