Not so long ago A Nos Amours screened
Moshen Maklmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (1996) at the ICA. The
presentation of this Iranian film by A Nos Amours, a pop-up cinema collective,
raised questions about the political potentials of pop-up as a new mode of
cinema spectatorship.
Maklmalbaf’s quasi-autobiographical
film, set in his home country, is an exploration of what it means to recreate a
moment in history, and what such a re-exploration can hope to achieve. The film
follows Moshen (playing himself) who is making a movie about an incident which
was pivotal for his 17 year old self; the stabbing of a policeman during a political
demonstration. Unexpectedly, the policeman himself returns, eager to take part
in the film too, albeit with his own emotional agenda. Both men chose a ‘young
me’ to act in the reconstruction and set about training the boys to embody
their past-selves.
In the first minutes of the film we are
presented with a question, posed by Moshen’s daughter, a small but self-assured
Iranian girl, who peeps from behind the large door of her father’s house to
address the ungainly ex-policeman. Innocently, she asks ‘why do you want to be
an actor?”
The answers explored as the film progresses
are all variations on one central idea, the idea that to stage a performance is
to rediscover what has passed, to relive, reimagine and, thereby, to rework or
alter reality. In the case of A Moment of
Innocence the reality reworked is one which is personal and emotional, but
also deeply political.
Not all cinema makes such overt gestures
into the ‘real’ socio-political world as A
Moment of Innocence. Film as an industry has become expert at escapism, at
creating a fiction we can lose ourselves in briefly, but then leave behind in
the cinema along with discarded pop-corn seeds and Coca-Cola cups. The cinema
has become a container for fantasy worlds which are safely circumscribed within
it and therefore unthreatening to the world
outside.
However, within the world of pop-up
film there seem to be attempts to do something quite different. By bringing
film out of its designated space and into alternative venues (including disused
properties and even the streets) pop-up film is offering a platform for films
to be understood as directly concerned with lived reality. Pop-up helps to
rediscover films as comments and contestations and, furthermore, as stimuli for
new ways of thinking culturally and socio-politically.
Out of the Egyptian revolution, for
example, grew a film collective called ‘Mosireen’ and their campaign ‘Kazeboon’.
Mosireen’s project is to collect and project footage from the revolution and to
screen this footage, along with grassroots and professional documentaries, in
the streets of Cairo. The films are usually projected onto the walls of the
city, drawing large audiences, and aim to show the realities of the revolution
including police and army brutality. In this way, the collective work to contest
the dominant media narrative and provide fuel for political debate and action. These
kinds of screenings do not offer films to be escaped into and then left behind;
they present films which are in, about and for the real world.
Clearly most pop-up cinema is not as
overtly political as the work of Mosireen, but perhaps it shares certain
similarities. It has a relationship with reality that can be similarly outward
facing, responsive and combative. It has the potential to ‘take film to the
streets’, to prompt a mode of cinema spectatorship which makes film
instrumental in examining and re-shaping the world. This is true not just of
confrontational political screenings, but also of the endeavours of collectives
like A Nos Amours, who use the agility and mobility of pop-up to keep old or
alternative films alive. The freshness of pop-up’s itinerant movements ensures
that such films are not dragged up as relics for museum display but as
specimens with on-going vitality and relevance. Such a model of cinema
spectatorship regenerates discussion of ideas which might otherwise have been
lost to cinematic history and thereby plays a critical role in instating and
sustaining cultural and political debates.
In A
Moment of Innocence the young actor picked to play the director, Moshen,
continually states his life aim as being ‘to save the world.’ The implied
question is whether film can help in this pursuit?
The answer given by Moshen seems to be yes. The ‘moment of innocence’ promised
by the title is arrived at right in the last frame, when the young actors, hired
to restage a moment of violence, find themselves incapable of repeating the acts
of their adult counterparts, even as charade. The suggestion is that the
elaborate reworking of this socio-political history has had a constructive
effect. The younger generation have in some sense surpassed the adults who are
directing them, moving beyond the mistakes of a historical political moment and
creating a moment of non-violent encounter. We see then, that the fiction
staged in A Moment of Innocence is not
just a fiction; it is a tool in the dissemination of the past and in the construction
of a new reality. This should serve to remind us that all film, if approached
from the right perspective, has this critical and transformative faculty, a
faculty which can be harnessed by the worldly endeavours of pop-up cinema.
Ella Harris
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