Dispatch 11.4.19
(L to R) Courtney Stephens, Maryam Tafakory, Joshua Gen Solondz, Leo Goldsmith, and Mathilde Walker-Billaud.
On Monday evening, November 4, 2019, Flaherty NYC hosted program three of a six- part series on the theme SURFACE KNOWLEDGE, curated by programmers Courtney Stephens and Mathilde Walker-Billaud. The screening took place at Anthology Film Archives and was co-presented with UnionDocs and Colgate University. Filmmakers Joshua Gen Solondz and Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence Maryam Tafakory were in person to discuss their screened work with writer, teacher, and curator, Leo Goldsmith. Monday night’s theme played on ideas of perception, projection, and the intersection of metaphysical with physical reality. It asks what happens when conscious awareness of these planes of cognition are restricted to a point of anonymity and distortion. All five films that were screen built upon each other in a way that became visually tense, inviting the audience into spaces that are simultaneously inaccessible: The solar system, ghost erotics, and ancient gymnasiums become places of subjective reflection by the filmmakers, who charged them with gravity and personal meaning.
Luna E Santur ( dir. Joshua Gen Solondz, 2016, USA)
The most visually insistent of the four films, Luna e Santur made by Joshua Gen Solondz, was described by Solondz as having been made for his mother, after she passed away, following an encounter with her spirit. Spasmodic images of ghosts in ritualistic, sexual play flash upon the screen with a strobing violence that almost hurts the eyes. Luna induces a hallucinatory kind of trance the longer one views it, the images lingering as afterimages and brief residues; as if one cannot look directly at the intimacy taking place, but must witness it in the moments of its absence. The filmmaker’s form is truly unmatched in the way that it tests the audience’s endurance and visual capacity for dissociation, and brings strange catharsis in this in-between space.
Solondz discussed Luna e Santur’s title in the enlightening post-screening discussion on his work, the film borrowed verbiage from Nazi occult circles who signified the rising of the sun as “the death of the old world and rise of the new one”. Like the rhythmic relationship between the sun and the moon, Solondz went on to explain that he was interested in merging two paralleled aspects of his own life at the time, one being sadness and grief and the other eroticism and romance. What is made from two opposing yet equally innate feelings, is a film that utilized sound and image to invoke a combative interaction of give and take. The two ghosts, whose identities are paired in anonymity, engage in a constant physical shift between dominant and submissive. The question of whether they are fighting, playing, or having sex is still unanswered. Looking back it’s quite possible all three are taking place depending on where you were seated in the audience or what kind of day you had. Josh’s emphasis on the blurred line between love and threat emphasizes the idea within the allegory of Plato’s cave that we can be ignorant to the nature of reality and interpret it as best suits us in our incessant journey to understand both it and ourselves.
Absent Wound (dir. Maryam Tafakory, 2018, Iran/UK)
In Maryam Tafakory’s film Absent Wound, there is a specific moment where femininity itself punctures the screen: a single drop of blood. Leading up to this moment, we watch as anonymous men dance in a kind of traditional athletic dance while other men surround and cheer them on. This ritualistic performance of Persian warrior training is understood as a secret handshake amongst those born fortunate enough to learn such practices, that is, men. In another room, elsewhere, water tapping, water running, and water splashing create an anxious atmosphere that has moments of rhythmic synchronism with the masculine ritual. Tafakory told the audience that the two locations she filmed in were both male-only facilities in Iran, one being an ancient public bathhouse still in use today and the other a place where the oldest form of athleticism in Iranian culture is still practiced. Tafakory said that naturally, being forbidden, she wanted to investigate both spaces and reject physically the gender based restrictions by capturing the spaces in a female lens. Tafakory’s use of text and its composition across the screen suggest a type of control she may otherwise not have had while filming. The poetic insertion of words and phrases allow the images to breathe without being insistent in their meaning. Tafakory uses her own whispering voice in a non-diegetic way to further this idea of the absence of women in these spaces while also emphasizing this scopophilic moment the audience partakes in by engaging/viewing acts of exclusivity within forbidden places.
I Have Sinned A Rapturous Sin (dir. Maryam Tafakory, 2018, Iran/UK)
In her other film, I Have Sinned A Rapturous Sin, Tafakory follows on these notions of womanhood and how it has been governed under Iranian patriarchal order. Tafakory pulls directly from Fundamentalist Islamic television segments, bombarding the screen with the rhetoric of conservative imams who convey precepts about how Iranian people should conduct themselves, think about and control their sexuality, and how their purpose is to serve a higher power and remain pure. Tafakory mentioned that the propagation of these kind of conservative ideas through public television represents only one microcosm of Iranian culture and is not representative of Tafakory’s homeland as a whole, although it does interest her. A Persian love poem, expressing feminine lust and longing, is imposed on the screen in the form of fragments of text. It’s direct and sexual rawness offers a contrast and opposition to the monologues spoken my extremists, who suggest eating lettuce without sauce will curb a women’s sexual desire. The spoken words of these men and the written words of the poem spar with one another onscreen, clashing approaches to sensuality. Like Luna e Santur, violent textures are created in I Have Sinned A Rapturous Sin that manifest itself through an unidentified man beating cotton against the ground, or the heavy whispers of a woman’s (Tafakory’s ) voice reading a poem aloud, urgently. While political, Tafakory pointed out that although she is speaking directly to her identity and ethnicity in both works, she does not feel that her films speak to any universal kind of Iranian experience; they were made from her own unique perspective. I Have Sinned A Rapturous Sin is self-aware in its efforts to represent the multidimensional cultural identity and expectations of women in an Islamic state, calling attention to the clergy’s prudish and oppressive control over feminine eros. In the space of Tafakory’s film, these admonitions and harmful ideologies are rendered ridiculous, unrealistic, and misrepresentative of contemporary Iranian culture, through the complex interiority of its maker.
written by Krystalle Macqueen & photos by Abby Lord
PROGRAMME
Joshua Gen Solondz LUNA E SANTOR 2016, 10 min, 16mm-to-35mm
Maryam Tafakory* ABSENT WOUND 2018, 10 min, digital
Maryam Tafakory* I HAVE SINNED A RAPTUROUS SIN 2018, 8 min, digital
Gunvor Nelson TAKE OFF 1972, 10 min, 16 mm
Pia Borg SILICA 2016, 23 min, digital
Total running time: 61 min.
*Maryam Tafakory is the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence. After her Flaherty NYC screening she will spend a week at Colgate University sharing her work with the university community through a series of screenings and class visits. We are all excited to host her on her first visit to NYC.
Join us, November 18, 7pm at Anthology Film Archives for the fourth program, SEDUCTIVE SURFACES. Yto Barrada, Zachary Epcar, Daniel Paul, and Sara Cwynar will all be in person to engage in a discussion moderated by Lucy Ives. This program of short films and a visual lecture focuses on the sensual and erotic elements of surfaces: color, shape, texture, flexibility, penetrability. The works explore the impulse of humans to interact with and be absorbed by their physical environments, as well as the advertising languages and industrial production that exploit this urge. The nights’ program will be co-presented with Organism for Poetic Research.