Non-Cinema

Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude

William Brown

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501327278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

Non-Cinema: Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude provides an original film-philosophy through which to understand low budget digital filmmaking from around the globe. It draws upon a wide range of western and non-western philosophers, physicists, theorists of 'Third Cinema, ' and contemporary film theorists and film-philosophers in order to argue that the future of cinema lies at the margins, in the extreme, the overlooked and the under-funded – the sort that distributors, exhibitors and audiences would not consider to be cinema at all, hence "non-cinema." Analysing numerous films, William Brown argues that contemporary low-budget digital cinema is also through its digital form a political cinema that suggests that we are not detached observers of the world, but entangled participants therewith. Non-Cinema constructs this argument by looking at work by established filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Michael Winterbottom, as well as lesser known work from places as diverse as Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and Africa.

1

Digital Dreams in Afghanistan

‘This film … is not for you’, gruffed the storeowner of the Al Madinah greengrocers on Uxbridge Road in London when I bought Anjam/End (Basir Mujahid, Afghanistan, 2008) on DVD in 2012. Even though ‘not for me’, I soon after returned to the store to buy a second film, Ehsaas/Emotion (Farid Faiz, Australia/Germany/UK/Afghanistan, 2006). As low-budget action films from Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora, Anjam and Ehsaas were a revelation to me, greatly different to the cinema about and/or from Afghanistan that I had seen prior to these films, and with which I shall engage presently.

‘A country without an image’: Afghanistan as non-nation

Prior to Anjam and Ehsaas my knowledge of cinema from Afghanistan was limited to three basic categories: films, predominantly American, set there (e.g. The Kite Runner, Marc Forster, USA/China, 2007); documentaries, predominantly western, about aspects of Afghan life (e.g. Out of the Ashes, Tim Albone/Lucy Martens/Leslie Knott, UK, 2010, about the emergence of the Afghan national cricket team); and a few films made there. This latter group was confined to films made or produced by the prolific Makhmalbaf family, including Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran/France, 2001), Panj é asr/At Five in the Afternoon (Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran/France, 2003), Lezate divanegi/Joy of Madness (Hana Makhmalbaf, Afghanistan/Iran, 2003), Sag-haye velgard/Stray Dogs (Marzieh Meshkini, Iran/France/Afghanistan, 2004), Buda as sharm foru rikht/Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf, Iran/France, 2007), Asbe du-pa/Two-Legged Horse (Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran, 2008) and Osama (Siddiq Barmak, Afghanistan/Ireland/Japan, 2003).

Mark Graham has described the latter as ‘burqa films’, arguing that western viewers see in films like Kandahar and Osama that which reaffirms their understanding of Afghanistan as backward and barren. Of Kandahar in particular, he says that ‘instead of portraying Afghans in humanizing, domestic settings, the film situates itself in the bleak and public spaces of refugee camps, squalid villages, and barren deserts. To do otherwise would flout viewer expectations.’¹ This is problematic, since ‘for many Westerners, the Afghanistan of these movies is Afghanistan’.² More than simply being received as ‘authentic’, though, Graham also suggests that the films are designed for westerners, and thus are complicit in this reception. This can be seen by the way in which Kandahar is told predominantly through the eyes of characters from the West, especially Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), a Canadian journalist who has travelled to Afghanistan in order to prevent her sister from committing suicide. And it can also be seen in Osama by the way in which it opens with footage shot by a foreign journalist of the Taliban breaking up a demonstration being held by women – before showing us an oppressive, patriarchal Kabul that is a ‘dead zone of barren and unremitting rubble’, instead of ‘a once beautiful city of flowers, trees, gardens, thriving businesses, modern high-rises, and exuberant crowds’.³ This use of the outsider offering a way into Afghan culture demonstrates how the films construct what Kamran Rastegar, in relation to Osama, would term a ‘global audience’, and as a result both films to certain degrees ‘fall within Orientalist discourse’.⁴ That is, with the work of Edward W. Saïd in mind, the films do not properly represent Afghanistan, but instead offer to western audiences what they expect to see, namely veiled women who need rescuing.⁵ For Graham this is made clear by the fact that Makhmalbaf uses the Arabic term burqa to talk about the veil, as opposed to the Dari term chadari: Makhmalbaf cannot but convey his own (Iranian) views on Afghanistan, rather than understanding the country from ‘within’.⁶

It is not my aim here to seek out whether films like Kandahar and Osama objectively are ‘reliable’ or ‘true’ – even if a case can be made both for their unreliability, which, broadly speaking, is Graham’s argument, and for their reliability (various of the actresses involved in Osama have described, for example, how the events in the film are ‘true’ to their own life experiences).⁷ Rather, I wish to suggest that if these films at least in part perpetuate the western image of Afghanistan, and if these films constitute Afghan cinema, then these films also reveal an important link between cinema, the nation and the West, namely that the concept of the nation is a western invention in which the reality of what is otherwise (after Benedict Anderson) an ‘imagined community’ is constituted through images/cinema.⁸ If one does not have an image or a cinema, or if one is invisible, then one is not really a nation and one does not really exist.

Makhmalbaf seems implicitly to be aware of this when he says that ‘Afghans … are indeed invisible, just like their country is on the world stage. Afghanistan, he writes, is “a country without an image”’.⁹ In trying to provide an image/a cinema of and for that country, Makhmalbaf in some respects negates Afghanistan’s non-cinematic/invisible status, while also negating its status as a non-nation (a nation without an image is not a nation if having an image is precisely what constitutes a nation). Krista Geneviève Lynes says that when the opening handheld sequences shot by the foreign journalist in Osama are brought to an abrupt close by a member of the Taliban, this marks ‘a foreclosure of a bottom-up perspective of the reality of life under the Taliban’.¹⁰ Similarly, Kandahar opens with an eclipse, suggesting that the film consciously is about light, visibility and/or the absence of both. That is, both moments suggest that one cannot film Afghanistan because Afghanistan defies/denies cinema; it is non-cinematic. In effect, Afghanistan is veiled from view; to lift that veil would be to negate Afghanistan, since the veil itself is what constitutes Afghanistan’s (non-cinematic) reality.

If Afghanistan is not cinematic – and yet if Osama and Kandahar are films about Afghanistan – then we get a sense here of how Osama and Kandahar do not capture the nation but construct the nation by giving to it an image. It is not just that these films are made for western viewers or that they are films ‘for me’, unlike Anjam and Ehsaas. Rather, they show how the nation is a western construct and how the nation is an image, with image-making and cinema thus also reinforcing as well as being a key part of western ideology. Anjam and Ehsaas, meanwhile, are ‘not for me’. They were supposed to remain invisible. In this way, neither Anjam nor Ehsaas is cinema in the way that Kandahar and Osama are. They are not films made to render Afghanistan comprehensible to westerners by virtue of providing a cinematic image of/as the nation. Rather, they constitute a non-cinema that, I wish to argue, does something profound on a political level, and which is tied to the films’ digital and ‘impoverished’ aesthetics – in contrast to the visual beauty of Makhmalbaf and Barmak’s films.

‘Barmak estimates that the entire history of Afghan cinema in the twentieth century amounts to about forty films.’¹¹ This suggests both that Barmak sees Afghanistan as not having particularly strong historical ties to cinema (forty is a low number), and that Barmak has a relatively exclusive definition of cinema. For, there are numerous films like Anjam and Ehsaas, suggesting that Afghanistan in fact has produced many films – even if these circulate not in theatrical venues, but online and on DVD. In other words, Afghanistan might not have strong links with cinema (only forty films, including Osama), but Afghanistan does have strong links with non-cinema (numerous films like Anjam and Ehsaas).

Anjam and Ehsaas

Anjam tells the story of two brothers, Rostam (Basir Mujahid) and Jawad (Aryan Khan), whose war-injured father was killed in a seeming hit-and-run car accident when they were young. Brought up by their mother, Rostam now works for his uncle, Sikander, a criminal involved in the drugs and firearms trades. Rostam is a kick-ass dude who wears a leather jacket and packs several guns when he’s not impressing his cousin, Lina, whom he rescues at one point from a kidnapping attempt. Meanwhile Jawad is a martial arts specialist who’s maybe the best cop in Kabul, and who wants to go steady with Frishta, a girl whom he meets in a shopping mall.

Although both Rostam and Jawad still live at home with their mother (and try to keep their respective love lives secret from each other), Jawad knows nothing of Rostam’s criminal life until late on in the film, when Rostam is betrayed by his uncle for refusing to help a Pakistani criminal to send a suicide bomber into Kabul (the subtitles read: ‘those Pakis [sic], I can’t kill my people’). Framed by his uncle, Rostam is outed in the newspaper as a criminal, prompting Jawad and Rostam to fight in a hospital over the body of their mother, who has died at the shock of discovering Rostam’s criminality. Rostam sends a thug to attack Jawad, but Jawad defeats him in the mud of a Kabuli plain (the scene foreshadows a muddy courtyard battle in The Raid 2: Berandal, Gareth Evans, Indonesia/USA, 2014). However, Jawad comes to forgive Rostam when the latter explains that he had no choice but to become a criminal, because it was the only way that he could pay to support their fatherless family. Together, then, the brothers track down Sikander (via a fight in a snooker hall), who confesses in an out-of-the-way estate to having killed their father (Jawad: ‘If al [sic] uncles are like you, then no one can trust him’). A climactic battle ensues, with Rostam eventually blowing Sikander up with a bazooka as he flees in a car. The police arrive – but instead of evading arrest, Rostam chooses to stay. ‘You did what you wanted’, the brothers say to each other, and the film ends.

Ehsaas, meanwhile, opens with a man waking up in a jungle, before telling the story of Nazir (Fahim Faiz), a strong guy who works a dead-end job in a scrapyard in Melbourne, Australia. He lives at home with his put-upon mother (Suraya Bahrami) and his alcoholic father (Farid Faiz), in his spare time going to the gym, kickboxing, and generally hanging out with his buddies, Navid (Navid Faiz) and Akmal (Akmal Akbar). Nazir has a nemesis at the gym: John (D. Antonio Vaqueroz), who turns up at regular intervals and initiates group fights with Nazir and friends. These take place at the gym, at a beach-side café where Navid’s love interest Gheeti (Sutara Ariyan) works, and in a pool hall.

When Nazir’s mother is fired from her job at a car service, Nazir loses his cool and gets into a fight with the police. Realizing that he needs to get money for his family, he falls in with Tania (Daniella Malinowski), who introduces him to Cobra (Beghan Sahil – who also did the graphic design for the film), a yellow-eyed drug dealer who gets Nazir to do his dirty work (with Nazir taking over from John for a while as Cobra’s number one heavy). However, when Nazir’s mother refuses the money that Nazir makes by working for Cobra, Nazir has a crisis of conscience, and refuses to do any more criminal work. Cobra therefore tries to kill Nazir, s...