Cinema matters, as a verb and as a noun. The matter of cinema, its form and its representational objects, continues to be wondrous, particularly when we move away from the province of US media into the world at large. Cinema matters, because even the most cursory look at filmmakers in the world, particularly in the Global South, shows the many arguments behind keeping the form alive in often adverse economic and political conditions The fact that cinema matters, its unique importance, has nevertheless ceased to be self-evident in the streaming era, as serial narrative and reality-based television became the crucial products in corporate platforms. As cinema-based platforms have struggle to settle into this new landscape, there has been talk of their demise, which, in my opinion, is a bit premature. We nevertheless live in a paradoxical media world in which we have the technological capacity to have every single film (or at least any film of importance) available to us on-demand, and a system of geolocation, rights management and corporate ownership that proactively undermines our right to media diversity.
The point of this post is not to discuss platforms, something I may do at a later time. Instead, I have been thinking about the matter of cinema and the way cinema matters after watching Jafar Panahi’s No Bears last weekend. The film is currently free for subscribers of the Criterion Channel and broadly available for rent and purchase in major platforms. The political situation behind the film emphasizes its importance. This piece by Richard Brody describes it well. Panahi was banned from making films by the Iranian regime in 2010, but has continued to work on the edges of the ban. He famously made This is not a Film, where he enacts the impossibility of making a proper film, and Taxi, where he drives a cab and talks to passengers while being filmed by the vehicle’s security camera. Both films can be streamed, although This is not a Film is increasingly unavailable, a victim of the gradual vanishment (and banishment) of media works in the streaming era.
Panahi is almost too easy of an example about the importance of cinema, given that he makes his film under great threat to himself, his family and his collaborators. In fact, when No Bears opened around the world, he was imprisoned in the heat of the protests taking place in Iran, and only recently released. But the beauty of his work, particularly the one done under the conditions of the regime’s ban, resides in the considerable creativity behind his approach to filmmaking, which in turn prevents the kind of flat, sappy narratives that plague many forms of politically dissident cinema.
When I taught a class on the Global South, students were really taken with This is not a Film, to the point that it overshadowed other more directly ideological works. I think that the fascination comes from the fact that Panahi not only renders visible the material conditions of making films in adverse circumstances, but also questions consistently the ethics of doing so. Is it worth being endangered in the name of cinema? Is it ethical to endanger others to work in this film? Are the messages that cinema carries truthful to the social experience that it purports to convey? I guess Panahi answers these questions with a “yes” insofar as he continues filming. But in the world of his films, through the fictionalized version of Panahi within them, the answer is never straightforward.
I will not analyze No Bears because the point of this post is to encourage people to watch it rather than delivering spoilers. Yet, I want to convey the fact that this is one of the films in which Panahi explores the matter of cinema in its more radical way. In the film, Panahi, playing himself, sits in a town in the border between Iran and Turkey. Because Panahi cannot leave Iran, he is directing a film in the Turkish side via videoconference, tracing the travails of a couple, who may be fictional or real, seeking to go into exile in the West. The conditions of pursuing this film are less than ideal, in no less part because internet access in the Iranian village is spotty. In the gaps of directing the film, he takes photographs of the town. A conflict arises with the local people as a result of a photograph that he may or may not have taken.
In this plot we see a rich array of reflections about the matter of cinema and the way cinema matters. The ethics of telling the story of the couple in the Turkish side, the right of the director to subject the people in both sides to his acts of representation, the very difficult political and technological circumstances of filmmaking in Iran and the tensions between the educated urban elite from Teheran and the religiously devout inhabitants of the rural town play out in rich, nuanced ways. It is truly a jewel and I hope you give it a chance. The power of watching a truly important film, one deeply aware of the ways in which cinema matters, has no comparison in a landscape of media populated by mediocre works that perform being relevant when they are not.
I am mindful I am writing this in the middle of the WGA strike. Although I believe that watching foreign cinema and giving your time and money to niche platforms like Criterion, MUBI and OVID is a way to not cross the picket line, one of my colleagues helped me understand that what should be avoided is unscripted TV, because that conveys to the platforms that people still value the work that WGA writers produce. So continue to watch scripted films and shows to support the striking writers and learn about their demands. I do shudder about the near future of franchise TV and cinema written in part by AI. And I look forward to the resistance. The writers will be even more essential in that future.
No Bears is to me a reminder that cinema matters. That the work of editing, screenwriting, shooting, directing, acting, etc, carries an insight into the world that no other medium does. That doing so in the concentrated space of a film achieves a power distinct, in my opinion superior, than the length of a serial. That no IA or corporate board room will ever produce something as meaningful as a work of art produced by people aware of the perpetual danger in which art exists. That moving away from the cultural imperialism of US media into the many ways in which people make cinema matter around the world is an oasis that previous few people choose to visit in their journey through the desert of the real. I do not think we should be engaged with high forms of culture all the time (I certainly continue to watch Hollywood with uneven enjoyment), but we should always make a point to engage with and through important cinema.