Argofuckyourself - Best Film at the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards

This is a review, and commentary on the reception, of Argo (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 February

This is a review, and commentary on the reception, of Argo (2012)

for those of you who were irritated by my last tweet, here, again, are my thoughts on Argo: bellacaledonia.org.uk/2012/11/15/mar…
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 11, 2013

After the awards last night, Mark Cousins has followed up that Tweet to-day with a host, giving names of Iranian films :

Post-Argo, gr8 films abt Iran: the Boot,Bag of Rice,A Moment of Innocence,The Apple, The Cow,Taste of Cherry,Close-up,20 Fingers,The Runner
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 25, 2013

...The Wind will Carry Us,Don,Crimson Gold,The White Balloon,The Circle,Koker Trilogy,The House is Black,Blackboards...
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 25, 2013

...a Separation,Divorce Iranian Style,Bashu,Gabbeh,the Jar,Nargess,Sara,A Simple Event,Two Women.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 25, 2013

great Iranian women directors: R Bani-Etemad, T Milani, M Akbari, S Makhmalbaf, F Forakhzad, N Karimi, P Derakhshandeh.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 25, 2013

All well and good from Cousins, though few are likely to have the time to explore this area in as much detail. But I want to go back to the criticism that he has levelled at Argo, and see how his very specific experience of the Iranian country and people have a bearing on what he has written.

As far as I recall, the three main ways in which Iranian people are portrayed are :

1. At the US embassy, which, I believe, included some original footage from the Carter years

2. The scenes leading to and at the bazaar

3. The laughable (and invented) attempts of the Revolutionary Guard to foil the escape


I simply do not know of what relevance to these portrayals 'In 2001, [...] I stayed for three weeks in Iran, mostly in villages and in the hills, but in the big cities as well. Though it is often in our news media, I found myself in a terra incognita. Where were the crowds punching the air?' or 'Several years later [...], I went back to Iran, and I went back again, for much longer, to make a series for Channel 4 on the history and poetics of Iranian film. On these trips I made friends in Iran, smoked the sheesha, walked the streets, spent hours in Tehran’s traffic, went to the Jewish cafes, saw how ardent and brave many of the young people were, saw how most didn’t identify with their current government, how Iran is not its government or Mullahs, saw how restless and urgent for reform the country is. Mostly, though, I felt the welcome of the people.'


The film is set in 1980, and it is historical fact that the US embassay was stormed and hostages taken and escaped. The fact that the people whom Cousins met, 21 years later, did not behave in that way cannot belie what did happen. The bazaar business was almost certainly invented, but it is still an invention about 1980 - is it a plausible one, given making a thriller about the escape plan, that people on the streets would behave as shown ?

As to the risk of being caught, in fact, no one knew that the six who had been hiding out, thanks to the Canadian ambassador, had ever been in Iran, and the film fictionalizes the reassembly of shredded photos of staff, so none of what is shown, with the possible exception of the scrutiny of the apparent Candian film group's credentials, happened at all. It is meant to make what happens exciting, but chasing the plane down the runway is clearly the stuff of fiction - as if a commercial pilot would not have stopped !

Does the film claim to depict the Iranian people, or some of them at the time of real events when feelings were running high, or is it, as Cousins says, a Great Escape ? He seems to be the one with the conflict :

The film gripped me and moved me and I hated it for this. Affleck is talented, liberal and a nice guy – I met him recently. And yet he has made a film which chronically under-imagines, or mis-imagines Iran. I looked into its whirring thriller machine to try to glimpse even moments of truth about Iran, its people, subjectivities, lives and street scenes, but saw none.


Affleck is 'a nice guy' - how could he have made a film like this ? Where I have greater issue with the menace of those on the look-out for people getting out and make a muck-up up of what the film shows as evidence of conspiracy, because, for all their cunning (with the patching together of the photos), they are disorganized and bumbling : as a stereotype, one would have every reason to find that offensive.

And Cousins does not seem to acknowledge that faking a Hollywood production to help some people get away is such a preposterous <i>true story</i> that it cries out for making into a film, not some other film set some other time to put Iran across in a less negative way than suits 1980, and, if it is set then, then it will have to be against the background of what happened then...

And, for good measure, you can find out how Kevin B. Lee demolished the film, with much emphasis on Iranian buffoonery and American superiority.


STOP PRESS

Iran to sue Hollywood for 'distorting image' of Islamic republic gu.com/p/3ecq2/tw
— The Guardian (@guardian) March 12, 2013

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Watching Steve

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 January

You know the scene. Steve McQueen. On his looted motor-bike. The border. Barbed-wire fence on high trestles.*

I forget what he went through to get there, who is in pursuit, whether this (accurate or not to the realities of war) is meant to be the border into Switzerland, and what he must have thought the plan was.

Maybe, heading for the border, he did not think that wire-cutters would be needed (and so did not procure them), and let’s assume that they were somehow not easily-made standard issue for what are normally called - although it makes no sense - escapees**. If so, then we have our given:

Steve’s bike isn’t really going to be as much help getting over the barbed wire as snipping the top couple of strands would be and a quick hop over. In fact, for all that he is 20 yards from the border, he might as well be 20 miles away, but that is all part of the so close, and yet so far motif of his part of the story, of seeing what he cannot, any more than Tantalus, reach***.

Is he then, as Camus might have said, heroic, but heroic in the way that Sisyphus, and so, looked at coldly, attempting the absurd in thinking that he can get the angle and terrain right to cross the barbed wire on the bike ? Does he represent someone who is so far from being able to achieve what is necessary to complete the escape for which he has struggled that he might as well not be there, when he is there without the means to mitigate the problem, and his predicament does not even resemble having no hammer, but only a milk-bottle, to put up a picture-hook, where thinking might find a solution ?

All this may always have been obvious in the lead-up to the scene, it may all be desperation, but what is the reason for it symbolizing heroism, unless we don’t – or don’t choose – to think those other thoughts ?


End-notes

* In The Great Escape (1963).

** They are clearly escapers (those who escape), and those whom they escape are escapees.

*** The film-makers, of course, put him in this impossible position, of not being able to cross to where he can see.


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