[Intro Music, "Procession of Nobles" by Rimsky-Korsakov]
Drumroll! [drumroll starts]
Guys, this is the most awesome thing
I've ever talked about on this show.
The director of this film is a stone-cold badass.
This movie is easily one of the greatest acts
of filmmaking I have ever witnessed.
This is a work of art that will inspire millions
for years to come.
[Dramatically] Behold!
[Clank of dishes]
[Noise of sitting]
[Clank of cutlery]
Genius!
Meet Iranian movie director
and Disney-villain themed sandwich, Jafar Panahi.
Mr. Panahi doesn't have a lot to do,
and he wants you to see how little he has to do.
He fixes his breakfast,
sits on the couch,
checks the news,
watches his own movies,
feeds his pet iguana.
This film is a revelation.
I never realized how much I want an iguana until I saw this film.
Loooove.
[Panahi speaks]
[Kyle] I use my claws to show my looove.
It's like a cat crossed with a dragon, it's just so...
Hmmph.
So, uh...
Why are we even talking about this?
That's probably what you're asking.
Why am I even talking about this?
It's the 21st century, and we're on the Internet.
It's not like there's a deficit of videos of people
speaking into their cameras
with their living rooms as backdrops.
(Including this video).
So why watch this one?
Because Jafar Panahi cannot leave.
[Panahi on the phone]
"This is Not a Film" is not a film,
because it's not allowed to BE a film.
["For What It's Worth, by Buffalo Springfield starts to play]
Panahi has been a director with a career stretching
nearly 20 years,
studying under some of Iran's greatest filmmakers.
He loves his country, but not so much that he hasn't been afraid to question it.
Daring, considering the Islamic Republic of Iran's
attitude to criticism.
In 2009, during the failed Green Revolution,
he started work on a movie
whose subject matter was the fraudulent reelection
of noted grandstanding &#%-head Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
and the riots that followed.
He basically intended to suggest that
the Iranian government might not be the most transparent regime in the world.
The Iranian government,
in a generous effort to prove him wrong,
arrested him for crimes against the state.
Again, he only INTENDED to make a movie.
He didn't actually make one.
For context, this is the same regime that arrested
this guy for doing a gig on "The Daily Show".
Iran's government is famously unkind to dissent,
even perceived dissent.
While in prison, the world of filmmaking
erupted in protest.
The Federation of European Film Directors,
The European Film Academy,
The Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema,
The Berlin Film Festival,
The Human Rights Watch,
and too many other organizations to list here,
called for his release.
A month after his arrest, a petition to release Panahi
was released by Hollywood, signed by a list of names
that could double as a Who's Who of the greatest
American directors working today.
And the outrage over his imprisonment
only grew from there.
[Barack Obama] Jafar Panahi, imprisoned and unable to make his films.
These choices do not demonstrate strength,
they show fear.
[Kyle] Eventually he was released from prison and placed
under a six-year house arrest in this special little
legal purgatory where he could be thrown back in jail at any moment.
Final result?
A six-year suspended prison sentence,
plus a twenty-year ban from making movies.
Twenty years.
Panahi will be 70 when he's legally allowed to direct a movie.
Or... at least that's what the ayatollahs want.
Sure he's under house arrest,
and sure, he can't use a camera,
or write a script,
or hire actors,
or even say the words "action" and "cut". [Panahi speaks to someone out of frame.]
[Kyle] But just because he can't hold a camera,
doesn't mean he can't hold a phone
which has a video feature.
And he's allowed to have cameras in his home
so long as he isn't operating them.
So there's nothing stopping him from asking his
son to set up a camera running in his dining room.
Or with asking his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb
to come over with an HD digital camera
and say... talk about movies for a while.
Talk about what it means to make a movie,
go over movies in the past,
maybe, just maybe discuss his legal situation
while a camera happens to be running.
But it's not a film.
[Sarcastically] It's certainly not a film.
And there's certainly nothing wrong with taking
the not-footage and not-editing it into a feature-length not-film,
or with storing this not-film on a USB flash drive,
or with hiding that flash drive in a birthday cake,
or with mailing that birthday cake to the Cannes Film Festival
and screening the not-film hiding in the cake.
And then giving that not-film the Cross D'Or.
And I'm sure no one in the Iranian government would
mind that this not-film currently has a 98% rating
on Rotten Tomatoes.
Or that anyone in the West, could, at the time of writing this script,
watch the whole not-film on Netflix Instant.
But again... it's not a film.
Bad-ASS!
[Defiantly] Yeah, I'm hanging out in my own living room
on camera! Fuck the Revolutionary Police!
The overall mood you get from This is Not a Film
isn't outrage, as you might expect.
It's not like he takes his precious airtime and uses it
to spit some bile at the regime.
No. The overall mood is frustration.
He's bouncing off the walls in here,
because he has so many ideas
and simply cannot implement them.
Here, he's blocking out a scene from a script
that he can no longer produce.
You might have already guessed that the title
"This is Not a Film", is an homage to
René Magritte's painting, "The Treachery of Images",
in which he famously declared that
a painting of a pipe was not, in fact, a pipe.
As such, "This Is Not a Film" isn't a film,
so much as it is a film about
what it means to make a film.
That's what Panahi spends most of his time doing:
musing about the art which he is no longer allowed to do.
It's a shame that his career was cut so short,
because Panahi is actually a very interesting filmmaker in his own right,
precisely because he's so introspective.
He's a very empathetic man,
concerned about the state of human rights in Iran,
particularly women's rights.
One of his most famous movies for Western audiences
is this one: "The Circle",
about several women finding themselves punished
by a pervasive Iranian patriarchy.
It won the Golden Line at the Venice Film Festival.
It is also banned in Iran.
But I want to talk about this one:
"The Mirror", which is not famous in the West
nor is it banned by Iran.
But I think it reveals a lot about Panahi's
filmmaking sensibilities.
"The Mirror" has a very simple premise.
A girl with her arm in a cast is released at the end
of a day of school.
Her mom doesn't show up,
so she has to figure out a way home on her own.
She tracks down a bus,
overhears some conversations,
gets lost, gets on another bus,
gets even more lost,
then halfway through the movie,
she gets on another bus,
and then my brain goes kablooie.
And the girl throws off the cast and storms out of the bus.
Panahi and his crew have no clue what to do,
until they realize that she's still miked.
So they turn the mike on, and follow her in secret
as she goes home after a long day of filming.
Think about that!
Imagine if, halfway through Terminator Salvation
the director said, "Guys!"
"Screw this cyborg shit, Christian Bale's chewing out the lighting guy! This is gold!"
But it's even better than that.
There are two stories in "The Mirror"
and they're both the same story.
A frustrated girl is trying to get home.
The break in the middle was staged, of course, but
after the breakdown and the rearrangement of the storyline,
you're suddenly more aware that there are cameras
following this child, that she has a mike on her.
Her fatigue feels more real,
her annoyance more palpable,
and you, the audience, are more attentive.
You're aware of the "eye" through which you're asked to view.
But, nothing has changed really.
You're watching the same person through the same camera.
Same picture, but the frame has changed.
Talk about treachery of images.
This is also not a film.
[Kyle] That suspicion of filmmaking's most basic tenet
is often on Panahi's mind.
But the really cool thing is that attitude
is pretty common in Iran. It's, um.....
I feel like I should talk about the Iranian New Wave.
I kinda want to talk about the Iranian New Wave.
Do I have time to talk about the Iranian New Wave?
Screw it. Iranian New Wave!
["I Ran", by A Flock of Seagulls starts playing] Now, I'm an American and here in America
the discussion of Iran tends to focus on our
infamously strained history with their government
and the regime toppling and the hostage taking
and the nuclear program, and the threats
to wipe certain allies off the map.
Uh, phrases like "Axis of Evil"
and "Great Satan" get thrown around a lot, but
to fans of world cinema, it's a different story.
In the late 80s and early 90s,
Iran's film community made the country into a hotspot
for innovative movie-making.
Now Iran, of course, is an Islamic republic,
and as I mentioned in the last episode,
hard-line Islam preaches Aniconism,
the belief that representational art
is inherently blasphemous.
That's something deeply rooted in Islamic art and culture.
Which makes it seem like I'm saying that there isn't
any Muslim cinema, which ... no, far from it.
The Muslim world has made great films going back to
the silent era, but generally in more secular countries.
Like this one, "Cairo Station", was made in Egypt.
But in the more religious countries?
Devout Saudi Arabia with a population of 30 million people
has a grand total of ONE movie theater.
At least it's an IMAX.
Iran is just as fundamentalist, but Saudi Arabia
is a Sunni nation. Shia Islam, the majority religion in Iran,
has historically been more forgiving of representational
art. At least certainly in Persia.
Look at these 17th century Persian paintings.
Depicting living beings, yes, but consider the context.
These were made at the same time that Caravaggio
Rembrandt, and Velasquez were experimenting with
rendering light and shadow,
while Persian artists eschewed such realism.
They were aware of their own artificiality.
But that's all cultural background noise, subconscious stuff.
The modern nation of Iran has a very real, very conscious, very strained relationship with cinema.
When the ayatollahs took power in 1979,
buildings across the country were burned,
about 180 of them movie theaters.
Iranian movies under the American-appointed Shah
looked like this:
very Western, very middle class, very...
un-Iranian.
So movies were seen by the new regime
in the same way that they saw the Shah:
as a Western tool of oppression.
And Iranian movies probably would've disappeared entirely
if there wasn't anything native grown to replace it.
Like the poetic style of this documentary,
"The House is Black", directed by Forough Farrokhzad.
The first great Iranian director was a woman.
How 'bout that?
But the most important pre-revolution movie
was this one, "The Cow".
It's a tragic love story between a man... and his cow.
Bad phrasing.
It's not like that thing with the pig.
Anyway, "The Cow" is important because
this story about rural Iranian life was
reportedly a favorite of Ayatollah Khomeini.
It depicted what he considered to be a true
representation of Iranian daily life within the confines of Islamic morality.
And because of that,
it arguably saved all of Iranian cinema
from being banned after the revolution.
Well, you know, as long as that cinema was acceptable
to the Ayatollah's morals and didn't say anything bad
about the State, or anything too feminist,
or pro-Western.
Or...... jail. [Jail door clanging shut]
So with that history, the distrust of image,
the native tradition of poeticism, the regime's censors
constantly breathing down their neck,
All that forced Iranian filmmakers to really think,
"What does it mean to make a movie?"
"Like, what does it mean to actually point
a camera at someone and say,
'This is the story of that person'."
It's that cinematic question that formed
the Iranian New Wave at the end of the 20th century.
Director Mohsen Makhbalsaf's "A Moment of Innocence"
is a work of autobiography.
The director stabbed a policeman as a young man,
and decades later, he made a movie about it.
Um, made a movie about him making a movie about it.
His daugher Samira Makhmalbaf's
"The Apple" didn't fall far from the tree.
(Terrible pun, I know).
After finding a family who had kept their children
locked up and separated from the outside world,
Samira dramatized this real event
by having the actual participants
play themselves.
Talk about based on a true story.
Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most famous director,
used the elder Makhmalbaf in "Close-up"
an older, similar docufiction about a man
impersonating Makhmalbaf and conning people into
being in one of his movies.
Kiarostami also did this insane thing where he
made a film
then made a documentary about trying to find
the lead actor from that film,
and then a film dramatizing the making of that documentary.
It's an entire national filmmaking tradition of
"What even is movies?"
And that's.... pretty cool.
And that's a very relevant question today.
What is movie-making in the 21st century?
A big mark of movie-making for most
of the existence of movies has been about expense.
Pro movie cameras have always, always run into the
five-figure range at least.
And high-quality but non-reusable film stock
can run just as expensive.
Filmmaking has always existed as something either
created by the monied, or overwhelmingly funded
by the monied. But that's just not true anymore.
Movies aren't just made by highly-trained
professionals with big, bulky cameras on expensive film.
You can actually reach into your pocket
and make a movie
on your phone.
We don't live in an era where cameras are these big,
bulky things worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Like this camera right here? It's, um.
Canon Rebel T4I?
Only set me back, like, um, 700 bucks.
And this cameraphone?
Worth even less.
[Panahi out of frame]
[Kyle] Actually, he can.
And he does.
So movie-making is literally cheaper today.
But does that... figuratively cheapen it?
Just in terms of supply and demand,
today the moving image is extremely cheap.
Look at YouTube's cross-country commune of vloggers,
for example.
Quickly shot.
Quickly edited.
Quickly distributed.
New cinema delivered weekly.
Sometimes even daily.
You know, the existence of that vlogging community
kinda makes the idea of banning filmmaking
even more absurd.
When everyone has a camera,
everyone is a filmmaker.
Oh, one sec.
Let me take a selfie.
[Phone's camera takes a picture]
This photo was taken by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei,
one of the most powerful selfies ever made.
He took it while Chinese authorities were in his house,
during his arrest.
He, like Panahi
is using the image as protest.
That's the wonderful thing about cameras:
how instantaneous they are.
There is a long, proud history of photographs documenting change,
showing injustice with a camera.
The first step in fighting persecution
is showing that it exists.
Pics or it didn't happen.
So here, Panahi is making damn sure
that you know that it's happening.
Everything he's doing right now,
the simple act of being filmed and letting us see him
be filmed, is an act of defiance.
And he's still being defiant.
He's actually made a second movie under house arrest!
Even more ambitious than this one.
It's hard to overstate the risk he's running by doing this.
Every shot he takes
might be his last.
He has a family, and a good home,
and that damn adorable iguana.
He has so much to lose by doing this.
But the fact that he's willing to run this risk,
makes it outright inspiring.
It might've been enough just to document his imprisonment, but
Panahi isn't trying to show.
He's trying to tell.
This isn't just a message in a bottle.
At the end,
it's a poem.
The last shot is a long unbroken take
done by Panahi himself,
shot on a professional-grade camera.
So this is the one instance where you know
for certain that he's breaking the law.
To add to the danger,
he talks with a guy taking out the trash,
and goes outside with the camera.
And when that take ends,
he discovers a terrifying sight,
one that shows how he must feel locked in his domestic cage.
[Yelling, and the noise of a fire]
He's trapped inside
while outside, Iran is burning.
That's storytelling.
That's poetry.
This is not a film,
["Morq-e sahar", comp. Morteza Neydavoud, perf. Mohammad-Reza Sharjarian starts playing]
but this is definitely filmmaking.
Keep those cameras rolling.
[Music continues, louder]