Nisimazine Tehran #5

Saturday 18 October 2008

Nisimazine Tehran 5

Photo by Pablo Garcia (ArtPau)

A Magazine Created By Nisi Masa, European Network Of Young CinemA

Richard Leacock Citizen Havel Peter Wintonick

Editorial

NISIMAZINE TEHRAN Saturday 18 October 2008 A magazine published by NISI MASA – network of young European cinema,

W

hen I was working in an empty hotel lobby somewhere this week, I suddenly felt like I was being stared at. I looked up and saw a little girl looking at me. She was wearing a frilly pink dress and glittery shoes.

She just looked, but not in an unfriendly way. This made me think of meeting Tehran during these weeks. I was expecting a woman dressed in a chador, very hard to approach, but instead I found a colourful and friendly city.

As Richard Leacock teaches us at his old age, you can always be surprised, or find out you had it all wrong. And this is what documentary is about in a way. To discover a different point of view, or a life that is not so un-similar to your own.

Since this is our fifth and final issue, I would like to take this opportunity to thank some very special contributors to Nisimazine Tehran: Kaveh, our always smiling companion, Jalil, Hossein, Tara, Ali, Farzaneh, Ladan and Niloofar. Also Massoud of course, Shirin, Leila and Mr Afarideh; and all the others at the DEFC for sharing their culture and giving us the opportunity to participate in it.

In about six weeks, another series of Nisimazines will be made about 4 000 km from here, at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA).

Another documentary adventure! Even sooner, just across the Iranian border, Nisimazine will take up residence in Kars to cover the 14th Festival on Wheels (7th-13th November). Please continue to read us via our website www.nisimasa. com (and check out our blog at www.nisitehran.blogspot.com), and see you hopefully next year!

in cooperation with the Cinéma Verité - Iran International Documentary Film Festival, and with the support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Iran.

EDITORIAL Editors-In-Chief Matthieu Darras, Jalil Akbari Sehat Editorial Secretaries Jude Lister, Kaveh Jalali Art Director Hossein Norouzi Contributors Maartje Alders Ali Ameri Pablo Garcia Mateo Lasse Lecklin Réka Szalkai Farzaneh Tariverdi Anna Weitz Rebecca Wilson Ladan Zarei Niloofar Zarei Cover photo: by Pablo Garcia (ArtPau) NISI MASA (European Office) 10 rue de l’Echiquier 75010, Paris, France +33 (0)6 32 61 70 26 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com

Maartje Alders

Picture of the Day

Photo by Lasse Lecklin

Film of the Day Citizen Havel Pavel Koutecký & Miroslav Janek (Czech Republic)

F

ilmed over ten years and subsequently edited during almost five years, Citizen Havel is one of the most challenging political biopics ever made in the documentary field. The fact that we are not dealing here with the head of a powerful nation, but simply the first President of a newly born country, the Czech Republic – that many would have difficulties to locate on the map of Europe, doesn’t make the film any less captivating. Quite the contrary. Through a humoristic, irreverent, and down-to-earth portrait of a man, this intelligent documentary by Pavel Koutecký (who happened to be a close friend of Václav Havel) succeeds in being - with simplicity and elegance - amazingly multi-layered.

In a way - and the film includes numerous illustrations of this state of things, the story of Havel’s presidency is one of complete misunderstanding between the king and his people. It’s quite ironic to note that the writer of one of the most significant political essays of the 20th century, The Power of the Powerless (1978) – which advocates for changes in society to come from grassroots individual actions, had to face the general and commonly accepted idea that only he could make a change for the country. As a consequence, his political action mostly resides in clumsily claiming that his charisma alone can’t help against the relative insignificance of Prague on the global agenda, and that Czechs should rather count on themselves.

The powerlessness of the powerful…

Citizen Havel not only shows the complex issues of a country’s specific historical context – the transition from a communist regime to a possible democracy, but also captures the spirit of the era. A moment in time, in the nineties, when the great hopes created by the Velvet Revolution had given way to the realization of the limits of freedom for a small nation. Implementing a true participative democracy is actually not only very difficult but far less rewarding, and more trivial than it may sound. Protocol often takes over from great thinking.

We are witnessing a sort of tragicomedy on governing.

The play has some Chekhovian accents; still it could easily have been written by the main protagonist himself.

Before entering the castle of his tiny kingdom, Václav Havel hadn’t exactly followed the traditional career plan designed by ambitious politicians. Playwright, former political dissident (one of the three spokesmen for Charter 77) and influential thinker, Havel came to power quite reluctantly, and primarily thanks to the iconic status he acquired during the events of 1989. In a way – and the documentary indirectly tackles the consequences of this, he was willingly designated for presidency by the true politicians, who thought they could easily manage with him. Eventually, after the split of Czechoslovakia in 1992, he firmly maintained his position as President of the Czech Republic until 2003. Amusingly, Havel’s longevity was not down to his skills in manoeuvring nor the depth of his political essays, but to a natural and irrational level of popularity among his fellow citizens. He became one of these rock stars who he used to admire so much himself, and still does - one episode features a concert of the ‘Rolling Stones’ in Prague in 1995, followed by lunch at the presidential castle with Mick Jagger & co.

After two hours of family routine, day-to-day politics and intense dramatic moments, the viewer feels emotionally attached to Havel, but also intellectually questioned. One cannot help ending up with mixed feelings on his governing, and more generally on the broad topic of democracy.

Was he ultimately a good President? And weren’t his high concerns about trying to teach a model of active citizenship going against the efficiency of the results? After all, was it really what the Czechs were expecting? And if even Havel failed to achieve what many of his generation envisioned and dreamt of, who would be capable of making it real? Almost twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, a strong sense of disillusionment fills the air.

Still, in times which have given birth to George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, Nicolas Sarkozy and others, and which are marked by a return of autocracy within the most advanced democracies, the struggle of men like Václav Havel is to be praised and followed.

Matthieu Darras

Reviews In Unfinished Streets

W

ith In Unfinished Streets, veteran Iranian documentary filmmaker Pirouz Kalantari draws on an intriguing subject matter: Tehran according to contemporary Iranian poets, from Nima Youshij, the father of modern Iranian poetry (‘She’r-e Nu’) to icons like Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farokhzad. His work manifests an arduous research on the subject, encompassing the ups and downs of the capital of Iran, subjected to political and social upheavals.

Two outstanding Iranian poets, Ahmad-Reza Ahmadi and Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou, as well as Ms. Granaz Mousavi, appear in the film reciting poems focusing on human conditions, ordeals, sufferings and pleasures in Tehran. In Unfinished Streets also features the works of the younger generation of Iranian poets.

This kind of film demands a meditative rhythm to let the viewer float into the poets’ fantasy world. To give an example, a film like The Mirror demonstrates a perfect harmony between images and poems. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film visual compositions enhance the significance of the words, for instance during a sequence-shot devoted to a few verses by the director’s father Arseny. But in some sequences of In Unfinished Streets the images are overshadowed by the poems and cannot have a proper symbiosis.

Oscar Niemeyer Fabiano Maciel (Brazil)

O

scar Niemeyer is one of the most important geniuses of the 20th century. Taking inspiration from Le Corbusier, and essentially building up the whole city of Brasilia, his style not only defined modern Brazilian architecture, but became a milestone from a global perspective.

The film is based on face-to-face conversations with the Brazilian architect, with an in medias res beginning and a ’spontaneous’ ending: “The interview is over, isn’t it?” asks Niemeyer, when they begin to talk about women as everyday pleasures for the 100 year-old architect.

Besides a wide range of the architect’s mostly public buildings in the biggest Brazilian cities, and also in France, Italy and Algeria, director Fabiano Maciel tries to show us the post-war intellectual and political atmosphere in Brazil, and Niemeyer’s relation to it.

We also get to know him as a fighter for social justice and about his role in the construction of Brasilia as a symbol of the workers’ movement in the fifties.

The film doesn’t mention Niemeyer’s friendship with Fidel Castro and other Soviet leaders, and it touches only superficially on his exile in Europe during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Hints from Niemeyer’s words and from the archive material explain a little about this, but it would be advisable to read a biography in

Design by Hossein Norouzi

Despite its nostalgic qualities, Kalantari’s piece suffers a major drawback - the familiar problem of the incongruity of form and content. The running time is too short to cover all issues raised in the film therefore the entire pace feels uneven. Perhaps it would have been better for the director to limit the subject to a specific period, or fewer characters. Images accompanied by poems are often unfolded so fast that they prevent the audience from fully comprehending the scenes.

By the way, shouldn’t a film participating in an international festival have subtitles, particularly when it features poetry as a key method of expression?

Ali Ameri

order to understand everything.

The film can teach us two main things about the Brazilian master.

One is the coexistence of different art genres in Niemeyer’s work (architecture together with literature and music) – with the help of interview footage with fellow contemporaries (musician Tom Jobim, poet Ferreira Gullar, etc.). We also get a comprehensive, piece-by-piece picture of his oeuvre, shown by the film’s two talented cinematographers.

Réka Szalkai

Interview Richard Leacock

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Richard Leacock isn’t sure whether he’s been to Iran before or not. “I’ve been everywhere and hotels look the same all over the world”, he says while crossing the cosmopolitan lobby of the Laleh Hotel in Tehran. What turns out to be more certain is that the 87 year old cinematographer, director, producer, and grand old man of Cinéma Vérité is attending for the first time a festival named after the genre that brought him his rebel position in the history of documentary film.

Y

But then you went on to study Physics at Harvard University?

Yes, I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker but Physics was the best I could have studied because I learnt about light and optics. After that I served as a combat photographer for the US army during the Second World War, which eventually led to a job as cameraman for Robert Flaherty (on Louisiana Story, 1948 - ed.).

You are often described as one of the inventors of the ‘Cinéma Vérité’ genre. What do you think about that label today?

The problem is that it’s based on a misconception. It started with the ‘Kino-Pravda’ practice of Dziga Vertov, and he was saying that it was the cinema-truth; a truth but not the truth, and this was misinterpreted. For me it’s not so much about the truth, what I always have been after is the feeling of being there.

Photo by Lasse Lecklin

ou grew up on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands. How come you turned towards filmmaking?

There wasn’t any school in the Canary Islands so when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in the UK. How can you tell your friends who live in a terrible island, all with running noses, what heaven is like? At eleven I saw a silent film about the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway, and thought: “I could do that!” So I wrote the script, went back home with an 8mm camera and shot Canary Bananas (1935). I was thirteen then.

or now I do it together with Valérie (Lalonde - ed.). And I edit in my head already when I am shooting, so I don’t shoot a lot. Also, we are very disciplined, Valerie and I. Every night we have to watch everything we have shot.

And we’re not allowed to press fast forward.

What do you do, practically, to obtain that goal?

I observe. It’s just me and my tiny camera. No tripod, no mic boom. I hate all these big things. I never ask anyone anything.

I never ask someone to do anything and I never ask for permission, I just shoot. And no headphones, because you look stupid!

From banana farming to a musical drama rehearsal in Siberia, how do you choose your topics?

I used to think there were good and bad topics. But then I started making films about people I hate. For example, I spent three months living with the Ku Klux Klan (for Ku Klux Klan – Invisible Empire, 1965 - ed.). So it’s not about the topic, it’s about the making of the film. When I met Valérie, the lady of my life, I wanted to make a film on Video 8 about nothing in particular. She understood what I meant and we made Les oeufs á la coque de Richard Leacock (1991).

Sounds like you are not really directing much.

I create visual tension with my camera. In film school they teach students to explain what’s going on by starting with long shots so that the viewers can orientate themselves in the image. I do the opposite, which I learnt from Robert Flaherty.

A close-up gives a lot of information but it also holds back things. That’s why I don’t like widescreen. You can’t make a portrait of beautiful women on widescreen; you always have to put something else in the picture that destroys it.

Looking back, what’s been most challenging in your way of making films?

I can’t answer that. Mostly I’ve had fun. But I’ve never made a film that made money. My dad was a communist and I never understood money. TV hates me and I hate them. Cinema is nonsense. I don’t know for whom I make films. Now we just make DVDs of our work and give them to our friends.

How important is the editing?

The directing is in the editing. I always edit my own films,

Anna Weitz

Into the Festival Interview: Frank Heidemann Frank Heidemann is professor at the LMU (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) University in Munich and an expert in visual anthropology. On the sidelines of the festival, he held a workshop titled “Contemporary Ethnographic Documentary Film” and gave a lecture on the subject.

W

hat is your view on Iranian documentary cinema?

Iranian documentary films are of good quality and blessed with variety. They have been screened and appreciated in many countries. While they were introduced to the world of documentary cinema, they maintained their unique poetic style. It’s just regrettable that Europeans have more access to Japanese and Indian films compared with Iranian ones. Organizing an impressive festival like Cinéma Vérité, which includes various sections, provides a ground for Europeans to become more acquainted with Iranian documentary cinema.

How do you evaluate the Iranian ethnographic documentary films you watched?

I observed a kind of skill and courage in them. In these films a harmony exists between cultural concepts and the images made by the filmmaker from his/her society.

Is it better for an ethnographic documentary to illustrate realities or adapt a poetic style of expression?

If we are to simply focus on reality, the result will be boring.

There are two ways for avoiding such dullness: first, creating a model of reality for describing reality and second, direct

description of reality to show the exact nature of it.

What’s the impact of ethnographic documentaries on anthropology and ethnography?

Documentary filmmakers, particularly those who make ethnographic documentary films, inspire sociology and anthropology theorists. Through the lens of his camera Jean Rouch was creating, not recording, a kind of reality. His achievement inspired a theorist called Fieldrock to suggest his self-reflection theory. It was realized that through interaction with people, we can form scientific theories on them. In Rouch’s films, anthropology is not simply a mirror put in front of people, but a marker for knowing reality. Through film and images, sciences and theories can be better perceived by the human subconscious.

Would you please tell us more about Jean Rouch’s style and his influence?

Jean Rouch is the epitome of visual anthropology. He focused on an issue which could not be illustrated as directly and transparently by other filmmakers. In his visual anthropology, he proved first that anthropology is a full-time work which may embrace a human’s whole life, as he himself spent fifty years on making ethnographic documentary films; second, that anthropology is a reciprocal science and relation; it can both influence and be influenced.

Elham Hesami - translated by Ali Ameri.

Point of View: National Jury Member Habib Ahmadzadeh

his principles: “We didn’t go for war, the war came to us. We have always been after peace. I have tried to show that humanity is more important than war. Actually the main point of war is humane behavior[…]

After the 20th century, the world turned to a virtual state. We have sent heroes and virtues to the virtual realm and buried them there. In reality, we aren’t faithful to them and it’s dangerous.”

Habib Ahmadzadeh is a writer best known for the internationally successful Chess with the Doomsday and Stories of the War Torn City. He has cooperated as a screenwriter and advisor for feature films (Refinery Tower, Glass Agency, Minoo Tower, Night Bus) and also directed a documentary, The Last Arrow of Arash.

On the documentaries of this year’s Cinéma Verité, he is extremely positive: “Iranian fiction cinema should bow down in front of documentary. The films participating in this festival illustrate more hope, while bitterness and complaining have been reduced. Filmmakers have looked at problems more plainly and tried to find solutions.”

As many other Iranians, Mr. Ahmadzadeh fought in the war. However, today he attends the Peace Association. He says of

Farzaneh Tariverdi Photo by Pablo Garcia (ArtPau)

Work in progress Portraits: Traces of Faces

Sonja Lindén portrays her father Krister in No Man is an Island using her advantages in terms of access and existing knowledge to create an intimate portrait without imposing any obvious information. Lindén lets the small details speak for themselves; press clips her dad has put on his walls, the songs he hums and the duties he carefully fulfils soon give the viewer a surprising feeling of having gotten close to this man living alone on an island. As the film proceeds, family relations elegantly unfold through the recordings of Krister’s phone conversations. The Iranian film Tinar by director Mehdi Moniri about a cowherd boy in Darmavand is similar in cinematographic style, but has the important difference of using the boy’s voice as narrator. This creates an impression of the subject himself telling his own story, which is effective, but not necessarily closer to ‘reality’ since a voiceover is often strictly scripted and edited.

A Road to Mecca: The journey of Mohammad Asad by Georg Misch uses the framework of a portrait to talk about something bigger. Ukrainian-born Jew Leopold Weiss, who after converting to Islam changed his name to Mohammad Asad, has left a trace of footsteps that the film follows. But the places he visited have changed.

Characters in the film speak mostly of the man as a concept, about his theology and influence on Islam and the places where he lived. Mohammad Asad himself is seen in pictures, his voice on tapes played on a forgotten recorder in a mountain of electrical devices. The man becomes the tool for visualizing the changing of time and an example for a portal to the other side of the fence that stands between East and West. In this film there is no friction with truthfulness, since the person portrayed is dead.

The critically-acclaimed The Putin System by French director Jean-Michel Carré is a different example of how to make a portrait without meeting the person. In this case the filmmaker had to rely on archive material and interviews with other key figures, since Putin was out of reach. The art is to compile and structure the infinite amount of existing material and wisely choose people who can help draw up the contours of the man to be portrayed. Nevertheless, had Carré been able to access

A Road to Mecca: The journey Mohammad Asad

In painting, a portrait is usually just a person in a frame.

In film, a portrait is, most often, 58 minutes or so of a person in a frame. Meeting someone in this way gives the impression of an actual conversation, but one in which the line is open just one way. Oscar Niemeyer by Fabiano Maciel is an example of this format, with most of the film spent looking at the talking architect and his work, mixed with archive footage and interviews with people who know him. But a portrait in film can also be something else.

Putin himself, it’s quite possible that he wouldn’t be any wiser. What is the chance of the former president of Russia giving away the slightest part of his self-insight?

A film portrait not showing during the festival, but interesting to mention nevertheless, is Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, about Zinedine Zidane. It is not saying anything at all: this is a man in a frame, but mostly just pieces of him, in combination with his sounds. It’s a portrait of his physicality, which actually defines him as a sportsman. This is sensing someone. The film celebrates Zidane’s craft and takes the viewer right into the sensation of action on the field.

Someone talking about their own life can be of questionable worth, since the perception one has of oneself always differs from what others may see or think. On the other hand, this very thing might result in the feeling of betrayal sometimes experienced by those portrayed.

Who ever feels like someone has presented them well?

Sometimes, getting a sense of the context and space around someone, or a view of traces left behind, can be just as if not more insightful than a verbal description on camera.

Anna Weitz and Maartje Alders

Photo by Lasse Lecklin

Peter Wintonick

Portrait

“

I’m a ninja filmmaker, seeking revenge on journalism and inspiring documentary makers”, says Peter Wintonick. “But I’m just thinking of ninjas now because of your headscarf.”

Wintonick’s mind seems to work like a small news network of his own, continuously tuned in to the world around him, making connections, and then spouting one-liners. He came up with the above when he talked about his route to documentary filmmaking.

Wintonick started making films when he was in high school, instead of writing essays, hoping the extra effort would earn him extra credit. Later, he abandoned his journalism course because he didn’t want to conform to the format of objective news stories and switched to the more inspiring architecture and existentialist philosophy, then film school. His time editing fiction films was up when he met a documentary filmmaker in a bar, decided that was what he wanted to do, and “took a vow of documentary poverty.”

His films screened at the festival are the apt Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment (1999), and the most successful Canadian documentary in history Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992). The last film he directed is Seeing is believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News, which explores how digital media can shape social movements. These last two films have made him the darling of activist filmmakers everywhere. He sees himself as activist too, and feels inspired by the anti-globalist movement. “But my main interest is the media.

And peace.”

Since, as he says: “there aren’t that many people making documentaries about documentary”, he’s become the embodiment of his subject – and talks about it with great ease. He has been doing this rather a lot, attending festivals all over the world, which he loves: “I’m today’s documentary diplomat; the international ambassador of documentary film.” But he’s not all talk, he gives workshops too, recently in Indonesia, China, and now in Tehran.

“I like to give young filmmakers tips on distribution, funding and ideas. There’s no shortage of those. All these beautiful mushrooms

of documentaries are coming up from Armenia to Iran, challenging the Anglo-Saxon discourse of documentary. I’m just as much inspired as inspiring.”

Being someone who “likes to work on six projects at the same time”, Wintonick has also been Executive Producer for a number of films, writes for POV, has been working at the Amsterdam documentary festival IDFA in an advisory capacity and for programming the debates, and has been involved in a project called DocAgora, a moving and virtual social network in which documentary filmmakers discuss new platforms and ways of financing.

Yet he still managed to make another film, which he just finished editing. He co-directed PilgrIMAGE with his 22-year old daughter Mira, whose name, explains Wintonick, means ‘to look.’ Mira seems more interested in hearing than in looking – she studied filmmaking but is now moving more into sound. “Mira says there are three halves to film: the images, the sound, and what you get when you combine the two”, says Wintonick, as always enthusiastic about the thoughts of the younger generation.

This new film is a dialogue between the two Wintonicks as they journey to places they feel are essential to their generation’s perception of the media. Peter takes Mira to Charlie Chaplin’s grave, the Paris basement of the Lumière brothers, and has her film him in Neurenberg à la Riefenstahl. Mira takes Peter to a blog theorist in Vienna and the particle generator in Geneva where the worldwide web was invented – reflecting how essential the internet and social networking are to the young.

Wintonick has a theory on filmmaking: “Think of a triangle. At its three points are the pedantic, didactic documentary; the poetic, wild documentary; and politics. The best ones combine all three.

You have to build a new tower of Babel in the middle of the triangle.” Sounds like the two Wintonicks have already laid the foundation.

Rebecca Wilson