In film nist
Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (2011)
Jafar Panahi starts recording his life in his Tehran apartment then calls his friend, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who comes to the apartment and takes over the camera. The Iranian government regards Panahi’s cinema as politically subversive. He’s under house arrest and not permitted to make films – hence the title: this collaboration with Mirtahmasb is described on the credits as an ‘effort’. According to Wikipedia, This Is Not a Film was smuggled out of Iran on a memory stick hidden in a birthday cake and into Cannes, where it was first shown at the 2011 festival. How important it was to get it made, and made available, goes without saying. The circumstances of its creation are more than enough reason to see it. But the title is apt in more ways than one. This is not a film in the sense that you don’t assess its quality as you would a narrative film or even a fly on the wall documentary (its closest relative). It’s not a film in that it isn’t self-explanatory: you have to know its context and how it came to exist for it to mean much. You might decide to buy a ticket for This Is Not a Film because the title is intriguing. If you see the film at BFI (as I did) you’ll have the benefit of programme notes. Without these, you would likely find the piece baffling throughout its seventy-five minutes.
Panahi is a likeable man; so is the largely unseen Mojtaba Mirtahmasb; so too is the young university student collecting trash in the apartment block, who talks with Panahi in a lift going down the building that stops at each floor. But I got very little more from watching This Is Not a Film than I would have got from reading about it. The use of clips from Panahi’s other work to illustrate his outrageous situation or to comment on the process of filmmaking are unsurprising. You get a sense of his being bored as well as enfermé but you may feel bored too. Like many more conventional pieces of cinema, the most entertaining bits here are supplied by animals – a crazily barking dog called Micky and, especially, Igi, Panahi’s daughter’s pet iguana, which is much more responsive and affectionate than you expect. This Is Not a Film is a significant piece of cinema because it has been made. As Panahi says at one point, ‘It is important the camera stays on’.
23 May 2012
