Apple.
Wood, Robert Paul
If The Celebration relates to the New Wave in its rejection of
dominant conventions and its corresponding espousal of a new realism,
the `spontaneous' capturing with a constantly mobile hand-held
camera of actuality (albeit an actuality that is staged and acted), The
Hole relates to the New Wave's opposite extreme: the fascination
with stylization, with artifice, with the foregrounding of the medium,
manifested in very different ways in films by Godard and Demy, and in
the Chabrol of Les Bonnes Femmes. The Apple's relationship is
different again: one might argue that it bypasses the New Wave to return
to one of its major sources, the Italian neorealist movement, and
especially to the work of Rossellini (who was, with Bazin and Renoir,
one of the New Wave's triumvirate of father figures).
The Apple was directed by Samira Makhmalbaf, the seventeen-year-old
daughter of Mohsen Makhmalbaf who wrote the screenplay and edited the
film. But any temptation to see it as essentially her father's film
was called into question by his newest work The Silence, also shown in
the festival. Makhmalbaf's career strikes me as increasingly odd.
His early films (The Peddler, The Cyclist), although already showing an
attraction to symbolism and allegory, are essentially works of raw and
brutal social realism; Moment of Innocence, which stands as a kind of
marker in his career so far, separating the early films from the two
most recent, evokes Kiarostami in its self-reflexivity, though not at
all in its tone, a charming and funny jeu d'esprit quite unlike
both what precedes and what follows. The abrupt change comes with
Gabbeh, by far his most famous film in the West, celebrated both for its
extraordinary visual beauty and its (to western eyes) exotic and obscure
mythological narrative. I saw it, in fact, as his calling-card to the
West, a film not exactly insincere (it is very impressive in its way)
but calculated primarily as the kind of work that wins prizes at
European festivals. The Silence proves me wrong: it appears that, for
the time being, we must accept the predominance in Makhmalbaf's
work of the aesthetic over the political, an escape (in terms at least
of my own interests) into the obsession with beautiful images. The Apple
relates, superficially, to Moment of Innocence (in its use of
`real' people playing themselves), but to nothing else in
Makhmalbaf's work. Despite her father's active participation
in the production, Samira's film seems influenced more by
Kiarostami.
It is splendidly appropriate that Kiarostami was awarded the
Rossellini prize: his work strikes me as not only a continuation but a
creative extension of that of the greatest director of the neorealist
movement. The fundamental principles of neorealist strategy and style
are carried over into The Apple, very strictly: location shooting, the
use of non-professionals (which Ingrid Bergman essentially became when
she worked with Rossellini: one rarely gets the impression in Viaggio in
Italia that she is acting, and she herself commented that she `just
walked through' the film), the simplest possible technical
resources and shooting method, the camera a recording instrument that
never attracts attention to itself through `sriking' angles or
conspicuous movement yet is never disowned as a presence. Thematically,
the connection to Kiarostami is also clear: The Apple takes up his
characteristic preoccupation with children and their social situation.
Yeats's phrase `the ignominy of boyhood' springs to mind,
Samira Makhmalbaf extending it to the ignominy of girlhood -- though
Kiarostami, who wrote the screenplay for The White Balloon, also
anticipated her there. Where Is the Friend's Home? is surely one of
the finest films about the ignominy of childhood ever made, certainly
worthy to stand beside Germania, Anno Zero. The Apple, the cinematic
rendering of the `true life' story of two little girls kept locked
up by their father for the first twelve years of their lives, with the
girls playing themselves, could almost be considered a sequel, though a
very different one from Kiarostami's own (...And Life Goes On, aka
Life and Nothing More). Some western critics have jumped to the
conclusion that a preoccupation with childhood must be characteristic of
Iranian cinema generally. I know far too little of it to judge, but it
seems plausible that it is a concern of Iran's most progressive
filmmakers, and I shall dare speculate (very tentatively) on a possible
reason for this. We are frequently bombarded in the West with horror
stories about the position and treatment of women in Iran, and the
grotesque and horrific punishments meted out to any who transgress or
rebel. It seems arguable that, in such a context, it would be impossible
to produce films that protested against this or could be construed as
promoting dangerous notions of women's emancipation: Kiarostami,
after all, got into enough trouble for making a film that failed
unambiguously to denounce suicide. One can therefore read the
preoccupation with the horrors of childhood as a displacement, the
substitution of a concern to which it would be difficult for the
authorities to object for one that is still too explosive to project
publicly. Samira Makhmalbaf in her first film (which one hopes will be
the first of many) manages, by centring her work on female children, to
imply the taboo subject under cover of the acceptable one.
I found The Apple a quite magical experience. It deals, not with
the children's incarceration (except retrospectively), but with
their release (the film opens with the newspaper account of the
neighbours' belated report to the authorities), and their
intelligence, wonder and bewilderment (the bewilderment of appearing in
a film perhaps enabling them to reproduce the bewilderment of their
initial liberation) are transmitted to the spectator via the
director's obvious empathic mediation. This sense of intimacy with
the girls' experience is balanced throughout by the distancing of
the Rossellinian objective camera: we share, but we also watch. The
progress of the film is the process of the children's liberation,
initiated and intermittently guided by an intelligent social worker who
has the courage to allow them simply to go out and learn from their
environment and their peers, with a minimum of adult interference. The
dangers of this are not stressed but they are clearly presented: the
girls, totally ignorant of the outside world, cross streets, walk along
railway lines, relate to anyone they chance to encounter. The film is
committed to the inherent generosity and readiness to cooperate of
relatively unrepressed children, but the view of children is never
sentimentalized: the boy selling ice creams initially demands money (of
which the girls have no understanding), and takes back their ices when
they can't pay; the young girls they meet bicker occasionally,
their generous impulses qualified by the egoism necessary as a defence
against `the ignominy of childhood'. But perhaps the film's
final strength and intelligence can be seen in the treatment of the
parents. The process of liberation is not confined to the children; it
applies also to the father, and ultimately the mother.
The parents are never demonized. If the father has been, in effect,
almost unimaginably cruel, it was with the best intentions, the
intentions of his culture carried to an almost parodic extreme. He is
characterized by ignorance, simplicity and superstition, but the
ignorance and superstition are firmly related to what he himself has
been taught. Girls have been allowed to go to school in Iran only since
1979. His doctrine is summed up in the sentence he has internalized and
literalized from a book on the education of females (`A girl is a flower
and would fade in the sun'); his daughters mustn't play in the
street because they would be `dishonoured' if a boy touched them;
equally, they must be kept locked up indoors because boys might climb
the wall into the yard to retrieve a ball. All is done in the name of
parental care and concern. There is certainly no intention of cruelty,
and it is clear that, their incarceration aside, the girls have not been
physically abused: he loves them, in his clumsy, unintentionally abusive
way. His major grievance is that he has been slandered: the newspaper
reports have claimed that the girls were chained, and this was untrue
(we believe him). Hence, although deprived of any companionship but each
other's, and denied any possibility to learn and develop, in their
ignorance of any other life and actually unaware of their deprivation,
the children have retained their natural cheerfulness, goodness and
resilience, and display no obvious neurotic symptoms. This is what
enables them to confront the outside world with curiosity, delight and
wonder, and without fear.
The liberation of the children would seem to be a relatively simple
matter: though in need, obviously, of a great deal of help and support,
they are swiftly aware of all that they have missed. The liberation of
the parents is presented as far more tentative, and far more painful:
how does an elderly man confront the fact that he has been hideously
wrong all his life, that everything he has been taught is a grotesque
lie? I find his reluctant acceptance of his daughters' liberation,
and his subsequent cautious acceptance of an external world he has
always been taught to fear, very moving. And what of the blind mother,
who apparently has also never left the house, and who has internalized
thoroughly the joint oppression of the female and the disabled, her
natural resistance emerging only in the repeated obscenities with which
she regales her husband (`son of a bitch', `bastard',
according to the subtitles)? Will she ever taste the apple of the title,
that dangles before her veiled and unseeing eyes (we never see her face)
when she at last, left alone in the house, the gate at last unlocked,
wanders out into the street? It touches her, but she doesn't even
know what it is. As Florence Jacobowitz commented after a screening, at
the film's end the house is empty, all its prisoners released from
their captivity.
What, finally, is the status of this remarkable film? It seems to
present itself as a quasi-documentary, but `quasi' can cover a lot
of territory (so, of course, can `documentary', and always has).
Yet what one is finally left with is its expressive use of symbolism:
the apple, the watch, the mother's blindness. (The apple, of course
-- this being way outside Judaeo-Christian culture -- has nothing to do
with Eve or sin, it is simply a symbol of life, the natural goodness of
existence with which our contemporary civilization has so disastrously
lost contact. It is time we realized that, within western corporate
capitalism, we are as far removed from `the apple' as the veiled
blind woman whose face it repeatedly touches. We exist within a
social/political system from which all of us should be demanding
liberation). Were these elements miraculously present in the `true
story', or are they the inventions of either the screenwriter or
his daughter?
Ominously, the listing of The Apple in the film festival catalogue
makes no mention of a North American distributor. Of the fifteen films I
saw at press screenings, this was the only one that not a single member
of the audience walked out of, yet almost no one wrote about it in their
columns. Of course, I sympathize deeply with our journalist critics:
unlike myself, they have their careers to think of, and can only write
about films they know will `sell'. I find it interesting that the
critics of the Toronto Star, when they listed (at great length) the
films they admired in the festival, found it quite unnecessary to
mention any of the three films I have written about in this issue, nor
did anyone utter a word on behalf of Flowers of Shanghai. Either they or
I have no understanding of what is `important', and as Flowers of
Shanghai, The Hole and The Apple may never be released in North America,
readers may never have the chance to decide who is right.
Robin Wood is the author of Sexual Politics and Narrative Film:
Classical Hollywood and Beyond, published by Columbia University Press,
November 1998
