Ashar Fahati was born in a middle-class family in Asfahan Province, Iran in 1972. As a young man, he was deeply fascinated by drama, so he studied drama in college and master degree. In 2003, he directed his feature-length debut "Dancing in the Dust" (Dancing in the Dust), about a poor Iranian man who was forced to divorce his beloved wife because her mother was a prostitute. The plot elements that are common in his films in the future—divorce, ambiguous women, and the protagonist’s dilemma—have their prototypes in this film; the second film "A Beautiful City" is about the Iranian death penalty. With love, in this bitter and tender film, carefully set layers of suspense attract the audience until the last second of the film; the third film "Fireworks Wednesday" (Fireworks Wednesday, 2006) is from the perspective of a housekeeping girl Witnessing a day of chaos in an Iranian family plagued by extramarital affairs, the film uses broken marriages and a city with fireworks to metaphor the turbulent Iranian society; "About Elly" (2009) is a group portrait of the Iranian middle class , The disappearance of a girl exposes the truth of the incident and the truth of human nature; "A Separation" again focuses on Iranian divorce: the accidental miscarriage of a helper brought a separated family to an end more quickly; he was in France in 2013 The film "The Past" (The Past) is a story of an Iranian man who went to France to go through the divorce proceedings with his wife; in 2016, "The Salesman" (The Salesman) tells the story of an Iranian male teacher whose wife was attacked in the bathroom in the middle of the night After that, look around for stories of the murderer's revenge.
Obviously, Ashar Fahati’s films are all about "ambiguous moral stories." He did not create "Orientalist" spectacles such as polygamy and stoning to cater to Western film festivals, but instead used a side-by-side approach. It touched on topics that are particularly sensitive in Iranian society and even the entire human society, such as murder, rape, prostitution, suicide, and adultery, testing the common moral bottom line and survival anxiety of mankind. Most importantly, he found the common interest of mankind-body, and the common language of narrative-suspense. It is this unspoken body narrative and the suspense setting of "inducing the enemy to go deeper" that allows us to discover the common moral dilemmas of people of different nationalities and different religions. Therefore, his film is called "new realist suspense film." .
The invisible body
American scholar Daniel Pendet mentioned in "Narrative Body · Constructive Body Narrative" that the so-called "body narrative" refers to the influence of the body on the storyline, character creation, setting and the body manifestation in the narrative. The "Body Narrative" of Ashar Fahati's film mainly embodies that "body" is an important element to construct suspense, establish spectacles, and trigger imagination, which is manifested in three aspects: covered body, ambiguous body and disappeared woman.
1. The covered body
In Iranian movies, the body, especially the body of a woman, is invisible. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iranian women were forced to wear headscarves and long clothes with only their hands and face exposed; in Iran, women over 8 years old who went out without a headscarf would be warned, fined or detained by the patrolling moral police. . The same is true in Iranian films. In addition to strict political and religious regulations, Iranian film censorship also has specific regulations on the clothing, words and deeds of actors and actresses: it is forbidden to appear in films such as "tight female clothing; except for faces and hands." Expose other female body parts; no physical contact between men and women is allowed..." etc. Therefore, in Iranian movies, the woman's body disappears in a turban and blue-gray long clothes. But Asha Fahati’s movie focused the lens on these Iranian women wrapped in headscarves and robes. In the telephoto lens, a woman in a black burqa walks on the streets of a busy modern city. It is the special scenery and "Islamic wonder" in his movie. At the beginning of "Fireworks Wednesday", it was a couple riding a motorcycle. This scene is not difficult to explain as "Iran on the road to modernization fell due to the fetters of tradition", and the black burqa lost by the girl at the end of the film became a symbol of discarding tradition, liberating the body, and awakening female consciousness. But the Ashar Fahati film focuses not only on the veiled body, but also on the mute inner world and silent social reality of Iranians.
In Iran, where politics and religion are united, the body is not entirely personal private property, but is also the subject of religious laws. The focus of moral review is about personal reputation and family dignity. This can be seen everywhere in Ashar Fahadi's movies. First of all, a woman’s body must not be exposed except for her hands and face. This is why the scene in the bathroom in the film "Salesman" will always be a mystery. It is naked. A strange man broke into this bathroom (he may also be naked) and saw this naked woman. This scene must be a taboo in Iranian women and Iranian movies with no naked hair. Secondly, It is not only impossible to shoot, but also impossible to say, so it can only be infinitely ambiguous as a mystery. Here the audience is forced to become policemen, judges, and novelists, linking stories based on clues left in the film: blood stains on the bathroom and stairs, socks on the floor, keys on the sofa and mobile phones, money on the cabinet, words from neighbors , Messages on the phone, and imagined countless possibilities. Women's tightly wrapped bodies are constantly challenged and ridiculed in his films.
The gender segregation in Iranian society is also reflected in the movie. In Iran, even couples and couples cannot have intimate behavior and physical contact in public, let alone between strangers, and it is the same in movies. In 1997, Kiarostami received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for kissing French actress Catherine Deneuve, and was banned in China)-because Iran prohibits men from kissing women other than their wives in public places. Coincidentally, Layla Khatami, the heroine of the film "A Farewell", was associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for kissing each other on the cheeks with Gilles Jacobs, the chairman of the festival at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Hizbullah Students, a national university student organization, filed a lawsuit with the Iranian Ministry of Justice, demanding that Khatami be punished with public whipping because she "kissed a strange man." Although the matter was not resolved afterwards, it can be seen that this rule is quite trivial. Therefore, there is almost no physical contact between adult men and women in Iranian movies, even couples and couples. In "A Farewell", the helper Reitz has to change underwear for Nader's old father. Through the frosted glass in the bathroom, only the fuzzy figure is seen through the lens. This fuzzy image reveals the warmth of human nature. So when Nader pushed Ritz out of the door later, she yelled not "Don't push me!" but: "Don't touch me!" It was reflected on the screen of the movie. Ashar Fahati's movies were heavily used. To shoot the camera from the front and back-use the camera to separate people from people, men from women.
In Ashar Fahadi’s movie, once the body of a man and a woman are in contact, there must be a serious conflict-often when a man beats a woman, when a husband beats his wife, in the movie "Beautiful City" , "About Yili" and "Fireworks Wednesday" all have such plots. This is why after the attack on his wife’s bathroom in "Salesman", he never called the police or told others. Instead, he wiped off the blood, covered the wound, and pretended that nothing happened-here is the most real thing in the crisis. National character-bandaged with bloody knives, in revenge, from a victim to a murderer.
2. Ambiguous body, disappearing woman
Wigenstein said: The human body is the best picture of the human soul. The limited positive expression of the body in Ashar Fahadi's movies has become the most poetic and beautiful part of the movie. At the beginning of "Fireworks Wednesday", the girl was sitting on the bus, and the camera was shot from the window of the car, and the hand that was flying out of the window was photographed. This hand and the hand in the mirror image of the glass window together constitute a flying hand. Bird, this scene strongly expresses the body’s desire to get rid of the shackles and gain freedom; in this film, there is also a scene of a housekeeping girl wearing thick clothes inside and a tight-fitting white wedding dress, enjoying her mirror image alone. It is an Islamic bride’s desire for beauty and her perception of her body; and in "About Yili", Yili suddenly disappeared at the 36th minute of the film. Before she disappeared, the film used 16 shots and 125 seconds. Come to film Yili flying a kite on the beach: She wears a red headscarf running and jumping-this is also a rare moment of indulgence for an Iranian woman in Iranian movies. The kite flying by the sea and her jumping youth are like this at a moment The beauty of her, and then she said that I am leaving, and disappeared.
"The Disappearing Woman" is another common character in Ashar Fahati movies. Some women play a very important role in the plot, but they either never appear in the movie. For example, the prostitute mother in "Dance in the Dust", the former tenant of the prostitute in "Salesman", and the "beautiful city" The girl killed, the wife who committed suicide in "The Past", or disappeared in the middle of the movie, such as the wife in "Dance in the Dust", Yili in "About Yili", and the woman in "Fireworks Wednesday" Neighbor. These women are often prostitutes, third parties, divorced persons, empathic persons, etc. They are women who live in the cracks between religion, morality, and law. They disappeared because of the ambiguous nature of her identity and behavior: they were pregnant women who went out to work without telling their husbands, divorced women who ran beauty salons in the community, and sex work with their children in the apartment, which belonged to Iran. Informal labor in the informal economy. After 1979, Iranian women were prohibited from going out to work. Since the normal economic activities in post-revolutionary Iran were often not guaranteed, a large number of informal economic activities and emerging industries were born. There are fitness clubs, beauty salons, and sex workers in the community. Most of them are single or divorced women in these industries. The ambiguity of their profession determines the ambiguity of their existence; although they are ambiguous and invisible, they play an important role in the narrative and have a direct impact on the fate of the characters in the play. Ambiguous call for rectification, absent to prove existence. Ambiguous bodies and disappearing women express the gender tension of Iranian society, the strength and absurdity of religion, and the powerlessness of the law.
This kind of ambiguity and disappearance is not so much an active choice as it is a compromise and dodge-Iranian film censorship prohibits the themes of violence, pornography, adultery, science fiction, disaster, horror, etc. in movies, so the blurring of the truth and the vacant ending become one. An active choice in desperation. When talking about this issue, director Ashar Fahati said: "We are also looking for new methods of filming. We will not go against the censorship system. Under its supervision, we will find another way to express our thoughts." Therefore, ambiguity is a strategy to avoid film censorship. The ambiguity between prostitution and rape, occurrence and non-occurrence, accident and intentional injury in the bathroom attack in "The Salesman" is undoubtedly a helpless and clever approach.
From concealment to disappearance, from ambiguous to never appearing, this is how the suffering of Iranian women's bodies is revealed. Covering and controlling the body is the denial of humanity, and the absence of the body is the absence of humanity. The invisible body is the invisible truth and the invisible pain. Iran is like a mysterious woman wearing a veil and a burqa. The body narrative of Ashar Fahati's film is like an X-ray machine, giving us a glimpse of the real Iran.
Endless suspense
Ashar Fahati likes to create suspense, which stems from an experience when he was young. Once he was late to watch a movie and only saw the second half of the movie. After that, for a long time, he had been thinking about what the first half of the movie was like. In the movies he shoots in the future, he always uses "suspense" to give the audience free imagination, in order to express respect for the audience's IQ and emotions. But the "suspense" in his film is not Hitchcock's "bomb under the table", nor is it different from the "white space" of Chinese painting, but a "missing puzzle"-a missing link in the plot chain. There are four main ways he creates suspense: omission; flexible perspective; multi-level suspense; character's dilemma.
1. Omission-deliberately concealing key plots and fragments-is the most commonly used method when setting up suspense in Ashar Fahati films.
Because his films strictly follow linear narratives, without flashbacks and flashbacks, this omitted part becomes an eternally missing piece of the story's territory. Everyone is trying to portray the "lost piece", but the truth of the matter is always a mystery. For example, in "A Farewell", the two key plots of how Reitz was hit by a car and how Reitz was pushed by Nader to fall outside the door were omitted; in "Salesman", the plot in which his wife was attacked in the bathroom was omitted; "About Yili" "The story of Yili’s drowning is omitted; in "The Past", the scene of how his wife committed suicide is omitted; these omitted parts have changed everyone's life like a spell forever, and the truth is often not in the end. Announced. The audience is forced to imagine the truth of the incident through the description of the characters and the clues like a detective, and this imagination continues long after the film ends. These concealed key plots seem to be the "causes" in the causal chain, but in fact, they are only effects. What is ignored in the dense plot chain of the film is the first link of the plot chain, which is the cause of the entire story. It is often the part that the director wants to say the most. For example, the reason for the whole story of "A Farewell" is that Nader and Westminster are going to divorce. Why the divorce is not because of a breakdown in relationship, but because Westminster wants to go abroad and Nader wants to stay; why does Westminster want to go abroad? Because she didn't want her daughter to live in such an environment, what kind of environment? When the judge asked Westminster, she did not answer, and the whole film seemed to be a complete answer. Another reason for the story: Why did the pregnant Reitz come out as a helper? Why would her shoemaker husband be in debt, go to jail again and again, and suffer from depression again? These are also the missing parts of the story puzzle. The first act of the film "Salesman" is a desolate scene of a crumbling apartment and neighbors fleeing together. The final frame of this long shot with complicated scheduling is an excavator working hot outside the window. Excavation has caused this building to collapse. But people ignore its existence, don't look for the cause, and no one wants to stop this huge machine. Just looking at the present, not thinking and looking for the real reason, it is this blindness that led to the collapse of Go'an Home. And this collapsing apartment undoubtedly symbolizes the shattering family and the collapsing Iranian society, a world that is crumbling and collapsing amidst the tears of morality, religion, and humanity. So, who is digging and destroying all of this? ——This is another suspense. Except for the beginning, all Ashar Fahati's films have an open ending. The film is over, and the suspense continues. So his films are like life itself: there is no beginning and no end. Or, this is what makes the protagonists miserable One point, as the dialogue in "About Yili" said: A painful end is better than never ending pain. The audience feels the pain and dilemma of each character in the play in this lingering blank space;
2. The second technique in the suspense setting of Ashar Fahadi's film is the flexibility and change of perspective. Usually a character brings the audience into the story. This character is often an outsider, who is out of the way and trapped in it. In "Beautiful City", it is a boy released from prison, in "Fireworks Wednesday" it is a housekeeping girl, and "A Farewell" "In "Reitz, the helper." With the development of the story, the perspective has become a freely transformable omniscience perspective. The audience knows more than the characters in the play, and the relationship between the audience and the characters in the play is also changing: onlooker-curiosity-identification-sympathy-worry-empathy -A dilemma. In this process, the audience’s perception of Iran has changed from a vague and cold impression to an emotional identity;
third, the suspense is dense and multi-layered: there are secondary suspense in the main suspense, and small in the big suspense. suspense. The interlocking suspense tightly entraps the audience in the narrative until the end of the film.
For example, in "A Farewell", the main suspense throughout the film is: Will Nader and Westminster divorce?
The film is divided into three paragraphs, and each paragraph has several suspenses: the
first paragraph, the helper (beginning-46 minutes 28 seconds), the suspense of this paragraph is: Will Westminster who returns to her parents come back? Is the pregnant Reitz qualified for the job? Why did Reitz tie the old man to the bed and leave? Did she steal money?
The second paragraph, the lawsuit (46 minutes 28 seconds-99 minutes 44 seconds), the suspense in this paragraph is: Why did Reitz miscarried? Did Nader know in advance that Reitz was pregnant? Will Nader be sentenced? Will Reitz be sentenced? Will Reitz's husband hurt Nader's family? Will Teme, who knows his father lied, tell the judge the truth?
The third paragraph, reconciliation (99 minutes 44 seconds-120 minutes 25 seconds), the suspense in this paragraph is: Does Reitz's husband agree to reconciliation? Did Nader agree to a settlement? When the two husbands agreed to a reconciliation, Reitz revealed another fact: She had a car accident one day before the accident, so she could not ask for money, but this matter cannot be told to her husband. Can the reconciliation be completed? Will Nader and Westminster divorce? Who did their daughter follow?
And in each paragraph, there are a lot of small suspenses. For example, the 21 minutes from Reitz to Nader’s helper at the beginning (14th to 35th 50th) is the calmest time in the film, but during this time In, the film is still full of small suspense, see the table below:
"A Parting"
Plot and Predicament
Suspense
15 minutes and 30 seconds, the
audience knows that Reitz is pregnant,
can she do the job?
17 minutes and 20 seconds, the
old man wets his pants, Ritz hesitated whether to bathe the old man and change his pants.
Reitz's job conflicts with religious laws, what should she do?
20 minutes 47 seconds
Reitz resigned to Nader, saying that work conflicts with her beliefs, and promised her husband will come the next day.
Can Nader find a new helper? Will her husband come?
For 30 minutes,
Reitz continued to help, because her husband was taken away by the creditor and the police the night before.
What happened to Reitz's husband?
Is she qualified for the job?
At 32 minutes, the
old man disappeared. Reitz went to the street to search and crossed the road in a thrilling manner. I omitted the plot of Reitz being hit by a car.
Can the old man find it?
How is Retzian?
34 points
Ritz stuns
her on the bus after work, is it okay?
35 minutes and 50 seconds
Reitz is a helper on the fourth day. Nader and his daughter return home, and find that Reitz is not at home? The old father fainted to the ground.
Where is Reitz?
How is the old man?
The main suspense in the section of "Helping Helper" is "whether pregnant Reitz can do her job". On average, there will be a new twist and suspense every 2 minutes in the film. This layer of suspense weaves a net, allowing the audience to deepen step by step and want to stop. Suspense creates a tacit understanding between the people and the audience in the play, a kind of identity, a kind of worry and care for the fate of the characters;
4. Constantly getting the characters into trouble and difficult choices: divorce or not, leave or stay, lie or tell the truth, follow the heart or religious creed, revenge or forgiveness. "Making audiences with strong moral anxiety through movies is an important means of suspense setting in film narratives. The opposition, contradiction and conflict between good and evil are close to the audience's moral bottom line, and the attention to fate and humanity are realized in the severe ethical test. ." But the focus of the conflict in Ashar Fahadi's film is not the opposition of good and evil, but the "opposition of good and good"-this is a more difficult choice. The suspense in the Ashar Fahati film brings not surprises, but sighs. At the end of the film, what the audience feels is not the satisfaction after the suspense is solved, but continuous thinking.
Here are some moral anxiety and moral dilemmas that belong only to Iranians: for example, the Iranian death penalty in "Beautiful City", the "night attack in the bathroom" that is difficult to distinguish between prostitution and rape in "Salesman", but more in the film Anxieties common to all mankind: life and death, forgiveness and revenge, crime and punishment, freedom and responsibility, lies and truth, love and family affection. In the predicament, we have seen the dilemma and dilemma of modern Iran.
Suspense is a kind of fear and anxiety about the uncertainty of life. Ashar Fahati’s movie story always takes place in a highly unstable scene space: a broken family, a rough coast, and a collapsing Apartments, courts with people coming and going, etc. His characters are in a dilemma and struggle in this uncertain environment, searching for meaning and truth in the gray area between life and death.
In the seven feature films of Ashar Fahati so far, the protagonists in each of them are characters in "divorced" or broken marriages. In Iran, the revolutionary nature of divorce lies in: first, if "marriage and family life are the benchmark of Islam and the core of community activities.... are one of the aspects that Muslims admire the Islamic society most...", then the divorce itself It is a kind of rebellion against religion; secondly, divorce is a symbol of women's struggle for independence and freedom.
Use the body to create suspense and call for freedom; use the suspense to retrieve the body and discover the truth. "Body" and "Suspense" in Ashar Fahati's films lead to eternal and universal values-freedom and truth. In the global environment where Islamic images were demonized and Muslim phobias spread after "September 11", Ashar Fahati’s films used body and suspense to tell human stories one after another, and transformed Muslims from “others”. "Transformed into a member of "us". As he said in his speech at the 2017 Academy Awards: "The'Muslim Ban' divides the world into two camps, "us" and "our enemy"... As filmmakers, our mission is to show humanity. The brilliance of the world breaks down racial prejudice and religious discrimination, and establishes a sympathy between "us" and "them"."
Published in "Contemporary Cinema", 2017 Issue 11
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