Kiarostami at risk of detention - Iranian human rights campaigner

Here's the full text of the interview I conducted via email with Hadi Ghaemi , the New York executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran for my story in The Australian on the continued detention of Iranian director Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Offside, Crimson Gold).

See the final paragraph for the alarming comment about fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (pictured above) also being at risk.

Why do you think the authorities moved against Panahi, given the strength of his international reputation?

HG: Mr Panahi, while internationally recognized, had also become a potent symbol of Iranians' support for the Green Movement after the disputed elections of last June, both internationally and domestically.

He directed the election-campaign movie for the opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, displayed green scarfs during his travels abroad when he won prestigious awards, and was not shy about his disapproval of the post election violence and crackdown.

In general, the Iranian government fears him most because of his ability to use art and film to demonstrate the deep discontent and protests within the Iranian society.

There is no doubt that whatever artistic project he was involved in, would explicitly or implicitly reflect the realities of the Iranian society during the past year and the government's violent crackdown.

The government is engaged in a cultural war against artists and film makers who would be the most potent ambassador's of Iran's current domestic ills in the international arena. His arrest follows a short detention past summer when he joined thousands at a memorial for the victims of violence in a Tehran cemetery as well as his recent travel ban to attend the Berlin film festival.

He was certainly becoming a thorn in the side of the government and his detention not only prevents him him from being a cultural and artistic ambassador globally, also sends a strong message to Iran's film and artistic community that no-one is immune from the ongoing harsh repression and that attempts at using art to display popular discontent will be met with brute force.

What reaction has there been to the arrest inside Iran - both among supporters of the opposition, and from members of the film community?
HG: There has been a strong reaction within Iran, both from the human rights community as well as the film and cultural community. In March, 45 most well-known Iranian film-makers in an open letter condemned his arrest and called for his release and many other voices have made similar protests. Over the Persian New Year celebrations on March 21, a delegation of women's rights activists defied the authorities and met with Panahi's family to express their solidarity and publicly advocated for him.

But the current government is displaying utmost arrogance in ignoring these protests which will undoubtedly increase the level of discontent and opposition to its rule and transform Panahi to even more of a cultural icon.

Most interestingly was Panahi's message to the outside world, through a brief visit to him in prison by his family, that he considers himself just another prisoner of conscience, like thousands of others and wants to keep the focus on them, not himself.

Such humility and degree of concern for other prisoners, while he has been in solitary confinement for over 100 days, will certainly make him a beloved principled and honored artist for many Iranians.

What do you think are the chances of his being released soon? There were rumours that he might have been released back in March, but nothing happened.
HG: We have hundreds of political prisoners in Iran today, with quite of few of them enjoying international fame. The prisons are simply too full to have capacity for so many people incarcerated and there has been a rolling door of some being released as new prisoners are picked up. This seems to becoming a pattern.

I am not sure how soon Panahi will be released. It depends on what his interrogators will consider as his "cooperation," which routinely means confessing to crimes not committed. Of course continued international attention to his case will also be critical in making his release possible.

Has there been sufficient pressure from the international film community and human rights organisations in your view? (I'm aware a week of screenings of his films being organised in various locations outside of Iran).

The human rights organizations are routinely advocating for political prisoners held in Iranian jails. But we really need a much larger swathe of the international community making protest, and in the case of Panahi, the film community should be doing much more in supporting him and shaming the Iranian government.

Every international film event, which usually gain substantial global media coverage, should be focused on his case and use his detention as a symbol of ongoing injustice in Iran and call for his release.

I have read that Abbas Kiarostami has come out publicly and criticised the regime in a recent newspaper letter. Does this put Kiarostami at risk? Or did it help to put more pressure on the authorities?
Kiarostami, in a public letter published in March, strongly condemned Panahi's arrest and called for his release. This will certainly put him at great risk. I believe the security and intelligence agencies are constantly engaged in calculating how high are the risks of detaining internationally well-know people, like Panahi and Kiarostami, and as such may be hesitant to fan the flames of international outrage.

At the same time their behavior is quite unpredictable and as such, Kiarostami's detention is not out of their reach, if they choose to 'punish' him for his outspokenness.

See the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran website.

For media inquiries:

In New York, Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director
ph.: +1 917-669-5996
email: hadighaemi@iranhumanrights.org

In Hamburg, Aaron Rhodes, Policy Advisor
ph.: +49 170-323-8314
email: aaronarhodes@iranhumanrights.org

In Washington DC, Rudi Bakhtiar, Communications Director
ph.: +1 202-573-2046
email: rudi@iranhumanrights.org

Abbas Kiarostami - the philosophical is political

Coincidentally following on from my story in The Australian at the weekend on Jafar Panahi's continued detention, there's a short but great piece by Richard Brody in The New Yorker on contemporary Iranian film.

Brody zooms in on the question of whether the filmmaking of fellow director Abbas Kiarostami has been selfishly apolitical in the face of a dictatorial regime, as suggested by Bahman Ghobadi in a recent withering exchange between the two directors.

Since the argument Kiarostami has put his neck on the line by penning a strongly worded letter of protest against Panahi's detention.

Anyway, here's a passage from Brody's piece that especially caught my attention: "Kiarostami’s films do not deal directly with such matters of practical politics as elections or censorship....

"...However, Kiarostami’s 'mythic and contemplative' films are philosophical, in the highest sense of the term: he is in search of human nature and its place in nature, in existence as such—and, in film after film, he suggests that the Islamic regime of Iran is in contradiction with what he discovers about human nature.

"His methods may not be 'radical and sensational,' but his political ideas are more decisive and radical than those of his peers in the Iranian film industry. In such films as “The Wind Will Carry Us,” “The Taste of Cherry,” and “Close-Up,” and the 2007 short film “Where Is My Romeo?” he investigates the human condition from the standpoint of someone living in and subject to the laws of Iran." Read more here.

In the meantime, anyone up for helping to organise screenings of Panahi films in Australia - as part of a movement of protest and consciousness-raising that's started happening in cities around the world - might like to contact me via email, facebook, twitter or the comments section below (I'll hold back from printing).

POSTSCRIPT 28.4.10:
The Tehran Times reports that The Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has just forbidden filmmakers to use foreign names for Iranian films, including films now in production.

German filmfest hits its stride

The Audi Festival of German Films is in full swing in Sydney and Melbourne. It opens tomorrow (Wed) in Brisbane and on May 7 for the first time in Adelaide. In Perth it finished yesterday.

As usual I'm contributing to the official festival blog throughout the event alongside festival advisor and critic Peter Krausz and (for the first time this year) writer, lecturer and animator Kate Matthews.

This year's program includes a retrospective of films by Fatih Akin (including the excellent documentary on the Istanbul music scene, Crossing the Bridge, which screened in the Sydney Film Festival in 2006) ; a collection of comedies on a culinary theme (including Akin's latest film, Soul Kitchen); and stories set in Berlin including the three-part teleseries, The Wolves of Berlin.

Among many other films the festival also offers the first chance to see Michael Haneke's chilling Cannes Palme d'Or winner, The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band - Eines deutsche Kindergeschichte) ahead of its Australian release.

Extract:
Two strong currents in contemporary German screen production satisfyingly come together in Kaspar Heidelbach’s feature Berlin ’36, which has had the first of its several festival screenings in Sydney. The first trend is a gravitation towards strong female roles, while the second is a continued fascination with often incredible real-life stories from the Nazi era.

"The latter tendency saw early expression in Max Faerberboeck’s 1999 lesbian WW2 story, Aimee & Jaguar (which festival patrons can see as part of this year’s “Berlin Based” program strand), and continues this year with several new titles, including this story set during the lead-up to the 1936 Olympics..."

Iran turns the screws on Jafar Panahi

The Weekend Australian yesterday published my piece on the outrageous arrest and continued detention of the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi (Offside, Crimson Gold, The Circle, The White Balloon). It's grim news, I'm afraid. See here for the full story.

Extract:

The filmmaker "was held in isolation in Tehran for a month before his wife was allowed to visit and found him 'very pale, thin and weak'. Confined to a small, shared cell without access to the jail yard, Panahi had been unable to exercise.

"Periodically he had been hauled out of his cell for lengthy interrogations, despite two episodes of severe chest spasms his doctor has explained as psychological while warning they could lead to a heart attack..."...

The New York-based executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Hadi Ghaemi, says the filmmaker has become a symbol of Iranians' support for the opposition Green Movement, wearing its colours at overseas festivals and speaking openly about his disapproval of the violent post-election crackdown..."

See the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran website.

For media inquiries:

In New York, Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director
ph.: +1 917-669-5996
email: hadighaemi@iranhumanrights.org

In Hamburg, Aaron Rhodes, Policy Advisor
ph.: +49 170-323-8314
email: aaronarhodes@iranhumanrights.org

In Washington DC, Rudi Bakhtiar, Communications Director
ph.: +1 202-573-2046
email: rudi@iranhumanrights.org

Image of Jafar Panahi at the Melbourne International Film Festival, 2006: c/o The Australian

Why aren't video games art? Because they're GAMES

(Postscript: this blog post was picked up by the ABC website and posted in their Drum/Unleashed section, where it has accrued more than 160 comments. Go here to scroll through).

When a video game achieves the status of art, then it will have stopped being a game.

Why? Because gaming and art are two mutually exclusive conceptual categories by definition. Gaming is by definition competitive. Art is by its very essence non-competitive; it has no winners or losers (despite the efforts of countless institutions to turn artists against one another with prizes).

If video gamers and game-makers want their passion to reach the status of art form, why don't they drop the gaming paradigm, which is the thing that's getting in the way (not the interactivity), to explore non-competitive forms of interactivity?

Gaming has never been considered art, so the onus is on vidgamers to demonstrate why this has suddenly changed after several 1000 years of games (from chess to water polo) and art co-existing happily as separate categories of human endeavour.

Of course video games (particularly the graphics they employ) have aesthetic properties. So do cars, tea-cups etc. I'm writing this by staring into an iMac that looks extremely elegant - it's beautifully designed. This is craft.

Post-Marcel Duchamp's urinal (pictured left), a car can have a claim to being art when an artist puts it in a gallery, changing the context in which it's consumed and giving it a frame. But of course outside a gallery it still has aesthetic properties. Even inside a gallery craft objects such as medieval pottery are often explicitly labelled as craft objects rather than as art. The craft/ art distinction tends to be ignored by the gamers in this debate.

I'm also intrigued by the vehemence with which many gamers (including many on Ebert's blog) insist their form is art. I've been reading popular and cult music writing for decades and literally can't recall a single time when anybody has given a toss whether their favoured music was considered art - though I accept there's an unspoken assumption since the performer or composer is usually referred to as 'the artist'.

The way gamers protest too much seems to give away a rather telling chip on the shoulder (possibly from years of teachers and parents nagging at them for 'wasting time'). Obviously not yourself. Or am I being unfair?

Can video games be considered art?

It's funny the way that expressing an opinion on some subjects online can blow up unexpectedly. One is the question of whether video games can be legitimately considered art, as I found this morning, having circulated the URL for a blogpost by US film critic Roger Ebert. (For those not on Twitter, this is called re-tweeting, a simple device via which the user can instantly pass on other people' messages and links - similar to the "share" function on Facebook.)

After originally circulating the Ebert link about 2 days ago to little apparent interest, out of the blue someone hit back at me, rather than the author of the blogpost, with a strongly-worded objection. Seconds later there I was foolishly answering.

Within minutes this had turned into about 10 people simultaneously flooding me with objections, to which I crazily tried to argue back, triggering yet more argument. There is, it seems, nothing like a video gamer who feels spurned. I have no interest in playing video games and have little knowledge of their latest incarnations but my objections are conceptual, so please hear me out.

I have nothing against video gaming and believe it almost certainly stimulates cognitive fucntioning. That's not the same as believing it's the same thing as art.

There's a simple reason for this: games and art have been parallel practices throughout human history and to the best of my knowledge never have the former been mistaken for the latter.

If this has suddenly changed with the development of video games, it is up to members of the gaming community to explain why this radical shift in conceptual reasoning has come about. The argument needs some sophistication and subtlety (John Birmingham exhibited both in a recent exploration of the topic in the Fairfax media. It didn't convince me but it was certainly a serious argument).

The backgammon board may be beautifully designed, aesthetically pleasing in its own way, and a soccer player may exhibit tremendous grace on the pitch. But that does not turn backgammon - the game - or a great session of soccer into an art form that can be discussed alongside the painting and sculpture of Picasso or the music of Miles Davis.

I was grateful when one of the debaters sent me a personal message and proceded to write a long and considered reply via email. Lee Zachariah has kindly given me permission to reprint his thoughtful comments, so here they are. My reply follows in the separate post below.

Lee Zachariah:
"Why do we always do this? Enter into a debate that requires thought, nuance and verbosity, and then both realise -- only after we're hip-deep -- that Twitter is not the place for such a debate? We shall never learn! And hooray for that.

"A few points I wanted to cover going in...

"I need to define how I am using the word art in this context.

"I am not using it as hyperbole or an adjective. As in, 'The way you shouted the name of the murderer at the same time the lightening struck, that was pure art!'. I believe you can call the way a football player catches a ball 'artistic', but only in a hyperbolic sense.

"Nor am I using it (in this instance) as a definition of what I like and what I don't like. I thought Transformers 2 was about the worst thing I'd ever been forced to sit through, and was an insult to every part of my being that enjoys good story and character and, well, coherent storytelling. But it is still art.

"I do not know exactly what a Lady Gaga is, and I seem to be the only person in the world who has avoided her music, but even if she does turn out to be a manufactured, poppy, irritating so-and-so, the fact that she creates music still makes her an artist. What she does is still art, regardless of how I feel about it.

"I am in no way a 'gamer'. I like Tetris. I occasionally (ie: once every few years) get sucked into a computer game that someone has managed to get me playing. But this is a very rare occurrence, and the world of video games is one I consider largely foreign to me. My claim that video games is art does not come from a place of self-justification, as I have no personal investment in them whatsoever. I entered the fray purely because a part of me really enjoys the occasional theoretical, academic debate.

"So, here's where I believe the crux of the argument lies: the act of playing the video game is not art. It is not art in the same way that the act of reading a book is not art, the act of watching a movie is not art, the act of listening to music... etc, etc.

"However, the creative, created element of the game -- ie: the story, the characters, the design, the music -- is art. It is a creative piece that stands on its own, regardless of how the user interacts with it. If the user does not touch the controls and their character stands there for an hour as the trees swish in the distance, that is art. Not great art, but as with the Transformers/Gaga definition above, art doesn't have to be good to be art.

"I have to disagree with your assertion that the definition of art hinges on what it says about the human condition. Not because I necessarily agree or disagree, but because it is unprovable. It is an entirely subjective viewpoint.

"I use the BBC series Snuff Box as an example here, purely because the DVD is sitting next to my computer: I can make an argument that Snuff Box does reveal a lot about the human condition, yet I can also see someone countering that argument by saying it's simply a lot of silly sketches with too much sex and swearing in them. Nobody can be proven right in that argument, because it is purely subjective. Art is open to interpretation, and the interpretation lies with the beholder.

"Comparing video games to chess, I will repeat my Twitter point purely for the sake of completeness, that the act of playing chess is, like the act of playing video games, not art. But the act of fashioning the pieces on a chess board is, indeed, art. When I argue that video games are art, I am speaking of their creation, not what happens to them once they are released into the world.

"You asked why video games are art if sports are not. Very good question, and one that I spent a bit of time thinking about. I noticed Daniel Knight responded to you by saying "Computer games are a work of fiction. Football is not." I do agree with that to an extent, but if I'm also counting, oh, say, Tetris as an example, the care with which some Tetris games are designed (the contours and colours of the shapes, the background, the now-iconic music), it can't really be considered fiction. But then neither can chess pieces.

"If we remove the interactive element from computer games, they remain art. In fact, my argument is that the interactive element has no bearing on its position as art. If we remove the interactive element from sport, however, nothing remains.

"You could argue that the creation of, say, the ball is as much art as the creation of chess pieces, but the regulations surrounding what a ball must be restricts the creativity of what a ball can be. In fact, it doesn't restrict is so much as it eliminates creativity altogether! There may be artistry in the design of the players' outfits, but that is a negligible element. The clothing is not essential. (Please ignore the mental images that this conjures up. It's a bit disquieting.)

"Essentially, the boil down the above waffling to a coherent, cohesive statement: if you remove the interactivity from sport, it ceases to exist. If you remove it from video games, they remain a creative piece, and must therefore be considered art."

(Lee Zachariah ends)

Bergman and extra-marital sex

My review of the DVD release of Ingmar Bergman's second film, It Rains on Our Love, first released in 1946, is up at SBS.

Extract:
"Apart from the bold treatment of premarital sex – unthinkable in the Hollywood films of the era, due to the Hays Code – the use of an omniscient narrator (Gösta Cederlund) on screen demonstrates that Bergman was thinking in self-referential terms a full 20 years ahead of his modernist touches in Persona. This character not only observes and comments upon the narrative within the same frame as the lead characters, acting as a kind of Greek chorus, but even steps into the drama to alter the course of events..."

Tarantino vs the Coens

Please note that due to technical issues the right-hand side of this clip is hidden on this blog. Go to this link to see full-screen.


From the title of this montage brilliantly assembled from the films of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, you might expect a kind of video-essay playing up the differnces between their styles - the first saturated with pop culture references, outrageous humour , the second rather more distanced and knowing.

Instead the clip, edited by Leandro Copperfield , tends to emphasises how much the most revered American directors of the last 25 years or so have in common. Namely an anti-realist aesthetic, a fascination with violence, and a facility for using irony and humour as a shield against emotional realism.

By that I mean not so much the naturalism or social realism of, say, a Ken Loach, as the kind of naked emotional honesty found in the work of John Cassavetes.

In other words, both Tarantino and the Coens like to present extreme situations in a way that makes them safe to enjoy. Cassavetes was more interested in confronting viewers , not with unexpected juxtapositions of violence and humour, but by pouring their emotions into a tumble-dryer.

Of the contemporary pair, though, I usually prefer Tarantino, whose sense of humour I usually glom onto without a second's hesitation, whereas the Coens' strikes me as too often sniggering and superior.

While Tarantino is a fiendishly talented but palpably non-intellectual, lower-class Los Angeleno, the Coens are inescapably middle-class.

Born in the mid-West they may have been, but nobody should be surprised to learn they live in New York and that Ethan studied at Ivy League university Princeton where he completed a thesis on Wittgensteinian philosophy, while Joel studied film at New York University. East Coast intellectual attitude drips off them - which is not the same as saying their films are intellectual.

An obvious exception is their most recent, A Serious Man, whose denial of traditional dramatic grammar I critiqued in a recent post. Fans including Scanners' Jim Emerson have defended the film by, among other things, drawing on the Schroedinger's Cat hypothesis - a famous paradox found in quantuum physics.

A commenter on this site meanwhile advised that "you just need to immerse yourself into some research on Jewish religion, history and culture. However, given your distaste for everything Jewish, you may not want to."

In other words it seems to be the fault of the movie's critics for finding dramatic flaws. Seems we walked into the cinema having failed to study theoretical physics and the history of Jewish culture and religion in sufficient depth.

That's not intellectualism, it's witheringly arrogant elitism. Somehow I dont think we'll ever find a Tarantino fan pursuing that line.

Sydney Film Festival unveils part of 2010 program

(Postscript April 16: :I've edited out much of this since it's now on the SFF website here )

Here's another film festival making a major program announcement without bothering to put up the information on its website.

The media release tells media to go the website at http://sff.org.au . So I did, only to find the following message:

"The 2010 Sydney Film Festival runs from 2 to 14 June. The program will be revealed Friday 7 May."

Very helpful. Why direct people to go to a website that contains considerably less information than the media release that's doing the re-directing?

Some promising selections here (especially the Polanski and Banksy titles). Re. the festival's decision to continue with the blandly generic program streams it introduced last year, I'll leave others to comment in detail. I heard nothing but complaints about this last year (including the phrase "dumbed-down"), but maybe someone out there likes the new approach. Let's hear your views please - good, bad, whatever.

Edited media statement starts here:
7 April 2010 SFF unleashes first taste of 2010 program
(The 57th Sydney Film Festival runs from Wednesday 2 June – Monday 14 June 2010. For more information www.sff.org.au)

Sydney Film Festival today announced a selection of films from the upcoming festival, which runs from Wednesday 2 to Monday 14 June 2010 (Queenʼs Birthday holiday).

Amongst the first films to confirm a place in the festival program are highly anticipated Australian Premieres of:

• Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer starring Ewan McGregor
• Exit Through the Gift Shop by art prankster Banksy
• Gérard Depardieu as a beer-bellied biker in Mammuth
• Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett in The Runaways

The 57th Sydney Film Festival runs from Wednesday 2 June – Monday 14 June 2010.

Warren Fahey: an Australian independent music pioneer

On Thursday The Australian published my profile of Warren Fahey, a pioneer of the independent music scene in Australia during the '70s and '80s through his Larrikin record label and distribution company and Folkways record shop, not to mention a folk balladeer and collector of songs making him an Australian equivalent to America's great song Alan Lomax and Britain's A.L. Lloyd.

Fahey was named this year's recipient of the Australia Council's Don Banks Award, which has previously gone only to classical composers such as Peter Sculthorpe and jazzers like Bernie McGann.

Extract:

"From his Folkways record shop in Sydney's Paddington, for years Fahey had been importing, distributing and selling music from across the world: Australian, especially indigenous, African, Latin, Asian and European, reggae, gospel, blues; anything the major labels and stores put in the too-hard basket. This was long before the phrase "world music" was dreamed up as a handy marketing tool by British record labels.

"The shop - in which this writer had a brief but pleasurable time serving behind the counter - was an endless source of delight, littered with potential discoveries. The effect flowed on to music lovers in other cities via Fahey's importing and distribution efforts, which also covered jazz and classical.

"Of its famously outre slogan, Real Music in a Sea of Shit, he remarks: "I never got one complaint in all that time, which I found astounding," though he recalls a nun once asking for her purchase to be slipped into a plain paper bag..."

Busby Berkeley goes all David Lynch

I love the creepy and genuinely surrealistic quality of this video installation, part of a continuous loop extracted from a Busby Berkeley dance sequence in 42nd Street, recently on display in the lobby of New Zealand's Christchurch Art Gallery.

When I filmed this a few weeks ago - apologies for the crap framing - I didn't make a note of the names of the installation and the artist, assuming they would be on the gallery's website. They're not, sadly - not that I can find. If anyone can identify them I'd be grateful.

(Before you ask, the gallery allows photography and does not appear to outlaw video filming, though if the copyright owner has any problems with this posting I'll remove it.)

42nd Street - Trailer | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com