“BLACK
TAPE” PRESSROOM
FROM THE CATALOGUE OF EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
2003
ROSEBUD
Announcing itself from the beginning as a found artifact (it’s
subtitled ‘The videotape Fariborz Kamkari found in the
garbage’), this debut feature offers itself as a work
of unmediated realism. It’s a conceit, admittedly, but
a smart one, and director Kamkari is ingenious in his methods
of justifying the existence of a footage we’re being shown.
Shooting either in long, woozily inclusive takes, or as fragments
of scenes shot on the fly – with many of the most dramatic
moments occurring off-camera, so that their effects reverbarate
through the visible action – the result is a mosaic of
small moments that add up to a devastating portrait of Iranian
domestic life, and one which takes the meta-fictional grammar
of Iranian cinema to its logical conclusion.
Goli is a young Kurdish trophy-wife, married to the much older
Parviz. Her husband dotes upon her, albeit in a patriarchal
way; indeed, with his condescending tone, his insistence on
rules and propriety, he seems more like an indulgent father
than a spouse. But he also happens to be her former torturer,
prone in the early days of their relationship (when she was
still a child) to tying her to a chair and burning her with
cigarettes – a memory which surfaces occasionally in his
fantasies about bondage, and which further disfigures a relationship
already complicated by the difference in their ages and their
mutual cultural resentments.
It is to Kamkari’s credit that none of this is told to
us, specifically; rather, we piece it together through inference
and implication. But Goli’s disgust with her life, the
sickness at the core of her being, is unmistakable. When we
first encount her, at her 18th birthday party, she is in fine
form: insulting the guests and storming out, to be gently chided
by her uncomprehensive husband. He gives her the camcorder as
a present (“I want to brag and say Goli shot this film”,
he tells her), but at first she despises it; only later does
she recognise its value. Soon it becomes her salvation.
Before long, however, she encounters a criticism faced by most
filmmakers at one time or another: of using the camera as a
buffer against life’s harsher realities. (“You hold
this in front of your face and you see everything as nice”,
declares her former sweetheart bitterly). But this could hardly
be more wrong. Goli simply captures her life as it really is,
in all its stifling misery and horror and in this regard she
has the unsparing eye of a Frederick Wiseman or a Werner Herzog.
She is a captive, yes, but also a born filmmaker.
