‘Shahid’ REVIEW: An émigré and her laide-lettres
‘Shahid’ REVIEW: An émigré and her laide-lettres
Baharak Abdolifard as Narges Kalhor in Shahid / Taken from Variety
Narges Shahid Kalhor was born in Tehran, the cradle of Iran, in 1984. The Islamic Republic was then in its yawning and burgeoning years, after the 1979 revolution facilitated the overthrow of the secular, Western-aligned monarchy. The ajumbled mutineers, the fasces of the revolution, were held together only by their common antipathy for the Shah: a loose coalition of liberal democrats; socialists and communists; and Islamists with theocratic flirtations. Despite the revolution’s relatively peaceful character, what followed was the mere subrogation of one reactionary potentate for another. The accedence of the Islamists, theocratic fancies now made tangible, precluded the arrival of any democratic spring in Iran. The former sans-culottes, democrats and socialists alike, who once paraded openly in the streets, now saw themselves stymied at each political junction. Iran’s dalliance with democracy had come to an abrogated end, just as Thermidor came to the many Mountains and Plains of the past, and has come to many since.
In October of 2009, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a right-wing Islamic figure hewn from the veins of the Ayatollah, had just been re-elected President of Iran some months prior; and Ms. Kalhor, in Germany for the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival, had decided to apply for asylum there. Her work, critical of the regime, had evidently boiled over with Iran’s nomenklatura, leading to her impending imprisonment upon her return. And indeed, a few faint philippics from Iran did soon follow: her father, Mehdi Kalhor, then served as a media advisor to President Ahmdinejad. He swiftly repudiated his daughter, excoriating Ms. Kalhor in Iranian state media as an unwitting propagandist. “I believe she has been tricked by the country’s enemies," he stated. He did not say whether she was an enemy of the state herself.
For the following weeks, Ms. Kalhor lived in a refugee camp in Bavaria, near Nuremberg. The camp was in a terribly sordid state: men, women, and children living in scum-ridden hostels, similarly shared bathrooms, food strictly rationed each day. In early November, after less than a month, Ms. Kalhor received a residence permit from the German government; a relatively short time in comparison to other asylum seekers, who are often forced to stay in these camps for several years before they are set free.
Fifteen years later, Ms. Kalhor has remained in Bavaria, and last February, her debut film Shahid premiered at the 74th Berlinale, in the ‘Forum’ section. An ambitious sprawl of a film, presented in grandiloquent docu-fictional form, Shahid features the fictionalized Narges Shahid Kalhor (Baharak Abdolifard) as she attempts to strike that particular nomen, the eponymic ‘Shahid,’ from her legal tria nomina. In both Farsi and Arabic, Shahid signifies a martyr for the Islamic faith, an especially strong euonym for Ms. Kalhor, who inherited the name from her great-grandfather, killed during the Persian Constitutional Revolution.
The peremptory fist of the old country has now been replaced by a prevaricative palm: one apparatchik invariably takes the place of another. The striking of the name, a theoretically simple process, is stymied at every step by the bureaucratic machine. The Bavarian commissariat, like most local commissariats, conforms to a kind of sterile chic: the building is a brusque, dour grey; carpeted granular grey; and the middle-aged, gimlet-eyed German woman (Carine Huber) behind the grey desk wears a modest grey.
In accordance with procedure, she directs Ms. Kalhor to a psychotherapist, Stefan Ribbentrop (Thomas Sprekelsen), whose approval (denoted by a signature) is deemed imperative for her request. Mr. Ribbentrop’s office is much friendlier, operating in the genteel, petty bourgeois tradition: white-walled (eggshelled), delicate potted plants, and a poplar table; he later offers Ms. Kalhor the visage of her Shahid in conspicuously commodified form — a mug whose countenance appears only when heated. Frau Kalhor is forced to explain herself to Frau Huber, then to Herr Ribbentrop, then to her great-grandfather (Nima Nazarinia), whose ghost appears sporadically like that of Hamlet’s father, and then to us, and she does so in a frayed, desultory state.
It is a squalid act of mitosis: the second self ripping its soul from its initial master. And yet this gangrenous act is left oddly truncated: at a doddering 84 minutes, Shahid ends in the anaphase, and so one is inevitably left with the image of a pithy siamese. Within this brief window, Ms. Kalhor bespatters her film with a myriad of images old and new, consciously oscillating between the high and the low. We are shown the regalia of old Imperial Persia, the tassels of old Imperial Russia, collaged and compiled in lurid frescos. This is the Iranian ‘Pardeh Khan,’ which translates, quite literally, to “reading off the curtain,” and here it is done so with aplomb by an unnamed, colorful raconteur (Saleh Rozati). The artwork itself appears to be A.I., and indeed Ms. Kalhor imbues her mural with an undulatory quality, impaired only by the visible saccadic twitch of her machine.
Kalhor and her ancestors, with her great-grandfather at her left (Nima Nazarinia) / Taken from Berlinale
Ms. Kalhor expurgates as much as she extols her ancestral history, all the while remaining committed to her nomenclatural amputation. Identity, here, is limited to the prosaic presentation of symbols and signs, of phraseology and grammatology; semi-obscured signifiers that one can see, but may never truly feel. Bureaucracy, then, is that unfeeling force which merely tapers over these things, thereby killing its locomotive spirit; and the rather odd gripe that Ms. Kalhor has with Mr. Weber is that he doesn’t taper over her fast enough.
There is an especially egregious, almost deflating signifier at the film’s close, one that rings incredibly hollow, full of false sprezzatura: Narges Shahid’s digressive, ultimately minor tract on the cognomen Kalhor. Ms. Kalhor suddenly remembers, quite conveniently, that Kalhor is a matronym, derived from her great-grandmother, in notable contrast to the traditional patronym. “This film wasn’t about my great-grandfather at all.” she says, nonplussed with her hands in her face. “It was really about my great-grandmother!” Here the tract ends, as prolegomena to nothing, save for some spare hand-wringing.
There is something here to be said (at least tangentially) of, say, the erosion of immigrant cultures as it thorns and thistles with its hosts; yet Ms. Kalhor finds herself frequently occluded by what are essentially parenthetical concerns. The first Shah of Safavid Iran, Ismail the First, raised himself to the status of Mahdi, the incarnation of God. In a similarly egotheistic manner, the latter struggle is regularly raised and exalted to the position of the former. The film’s curt matronymic tract is almost entirely eclipsed by another one of Ms. Kalhor’s concerns: her apparent guilt over her class privilege.
Over the course of the film, Ms. Kalhor respitelessly harangues herself over this fact, again and again. She laments her early exit from the refugee camp, released only because she was a “rich kid”; in another, rather voyeuristic scene, speaking through the actors who play herself and her great-grandfather, she criticizes filmmakers like herself, only able to work because they are “rich kids.” Again, when Ms. Kalhor enters a convenience store, and the owner recognizes her from the very same refugee camp, she shrivels inwardly: she is only able to look at him through herself. It is as though the film immediately moves to criticize itself before others can do so, but ironically the whole thing is sunk because of it. If the film doesn’t believe in itself, then why should we?
The film’s treatment of both its history and herstory is ungainly to an absurd degree: vague expressions of socio-political guilt and subsequent remorse that lumber towards impotent cogitations then immediately discarded. Ms. Kalhor isn’t quite sure of what she wants to say, only that she must say something, even anything, and so the various central theses that are introduced and discarded are done so at a dizzying pace. What results is a rather strange promulgation of muddled, clearly middling muff — something so solipsistic that it is, at points, almost embarrassing, yet remains so facile that it doesn’t cling onto you, the way truly bad art does, instead slipping away from you all too easily.
In 1728, writing under the shared nom-de-plume ‘Martinus Scriblerus,’ the English poet, Alexander Pope, published an essay entitled Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry. A seminal work in the field of poetic mediocrity, Pope satirizes Longinus’ Peri Hupsous (‘On the Sublime’) to advance a possible theory of failed profundity. In direct contrast to the hupsous, taken from the Greek word for heights, Pope puts forth its direct antonym, bathos from depth. Bathos, like that of its dizygotic Russian cousins poshlost and printsipialnost, necessarily implies failure: this term is not to be applied to the lowbrow scribbling of a proud philistine, but rather to dilettantes with Empyrean ambitions. It is not merely high or low, nor even its postmodernic intermingling, but instead the careless and haphazard crashing of the two.
Pope writes: “He ought therefore to render himself master of this happy and anti-natural way of thinking, to such a degree, as to be able, on the appearance of any object, to furnish his imagination with ideas infinitely below it. And his eyes should be like unto the wrong end of a perspective glass, by which all the objects of nature are lessened.
For example; when a true genius looks upon the sky, he immediately catches the idea of a piece of blue lute-string, or a child’s mantle.
“The skies, whose spreading volumes scarce have room,
Spun thin, and wove in nature's finest loom,
The new-born world in their soft lap embrac'd,
And all around their starry mantle cast.”
Standing on the outside, peering in, a poetaster may only crow like a puffed-up lark: sinking, suffusing, then subsuming the same bathetic brio that binds together such writers as Kazan, Chayefsky, and McKay. And, in point of fact, Ms. Kalhor does come to possess the hypersensitivity of Kazan, the hysteria of Chayefsky, and the hubris of McKay. Ms. Kalhor begins the film with her mythicized Iran, an image so specific that it is immutably hers, yet by the end she incoherently resorts to trite, demotic references to Martin Luther King and the Beatles, as though they somehow flow through her.
In this moment, the film’s self-deprecatory pretenses slip, and it begins to reach a histrionic high, a feverish pitch. By tying herself to these figures, specific to nobody in particular, and, indeed, seemingly the entire history of the modern West, Ms. Kalhor flattens her history and her own identity. How can a singular, theoretically unique individual come to colligate the totality of the known world? The answer is that you can’t, nobody can, and to presume so would only be Babelian.
Pope’s poem of oceanography and organology, taken actually from Richard Blackmore’s epic ‘Prince Arthur,’ comes to represent Shahid as a whole: the film’s bathos is its perversion of symbols and signs; of matronyms and eponyms and euonyms; of thorns as well as thistles; of the self and the world entire. Bathos is, for the mature artist, the realm of the ignorant and the hopeless; but, in Ms. Kalhor’s case, it refers only to an artist burgeoning yet still without proper form. In a kinder sense of the word, one always begins bathetically. “The taste of the bathos is implanted by nature itself in the soul of man;” writes Pope, “till perverted by custom or example, he is taught, or rather compelled to relish the sublime.”
Let us return now to Iran in 2009. After the re-election of Ahmadinejad, propelled by charges of electoral fraud, a mass of protests soon broke out across Iran, in what would come to be known as the Iranian Green Movement, or the Persian Spring. A loose coalition of Islamic reformists, the movement sought the removal of Ahmadinejad from power. In 2009, however, spring would not last for very long. The peaceful protests quickly degenerated into violence: skirmishes with police leading to violent suppression: to mass arrests; torture; and state-sponsored murder. Finding themselves quashed and quelled, the Green Movement sputtered out into irrelevancy by early 2010. In Ms. Kalhor’s film, too, we see German socialists and communists parading the icons of revolutionaries long since gone, like that of Rosa Luxemburg’s, put down in her own time. “I was, I am, I shall be!” she said, just before her execution in 1919. The actors break character, the crew sit slack-jawed, and Ms. Kalhor puts the camera down, much to her own detriment, facing the floor and away from the crowd, standing on a pulpit on her own. There is that there there, the spring that Ms. Kalhor evidently seeks, but she has just missed it by a slender reed.
“She drinks! She drinks! Behold the matchless dame!
To her 'tis water, but to us 'tis flame:
Thus fire is water, water fire by turns,
And the same stream at once both cools and burns.”
From Alexander Pope’s Peri Bathous, anonymous work.
‘Shahid’ recently received a limited Philippine release as part of QCinema International Film Festival’s “QCinema Selects” program, presented by Goethe Institute Philippines. It premiered at the 74th Berlinale, in the ‘Forum’ section.
