“BLACK
TAPE” PRESSROOM
NYTimes.com Article
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Brutality Plays the Lead Role in a Home Movie
March 31, 2003
By A. O. SCOTT
The conceit of "Black Tape," a new film from Iran, is
summed up in its subtitle, "The Videotape Fariborz Kamkari
Found in the Garbage." The idea is that the story we are
witnessing - a sad, lurid tale of marital and political brutality
- has been captured, both intentionally and inadvertently, on
a home-grade video camera. We first see two women peering into
the lens as they bargain over the camera in a Tehran shop. Then,
after the camera takes intervals of electronic sleep, we are introduced
to the household of Parviz (Parviz Moasesi), a retired military
officer, and Goli (Shilan Rahmani), his much younger wife, who
is an Iranian Kurd. Their violent fights and sadomasochistic sex
play, displayed with a rawness and candor unusual in Iranian movies,
amount to more than a sordid domestic drama. Lurking in the background,
and never quite spelled out, are atrocities that Parviz, whose
wife sarcastically calls him Colonel, committed against her people
- indeed against members of her own family. There are allusions
to torture, rape and kidnapping, as Goli desperately tries to
save her younger sister from being sold into prostitution.
The film can be hard going. Mr. Kamkari, following the pretense
of being the movie's scavenger rather than its author, has fastidiously
tried to limit himself to the camera angles and movements that
amateurs would use (especially when they have forgotten to turn
the machine off).
There are thus plenty of vertiginous pans and seasick bounces
and lurches. There are also some haunting images, especially at
the end, when the camera, hidden in a half-zippered bag, catches
horrifying glimpses of Goli's desperate attempt to escape from
her hellish life.
"Black Tape," with its rough texture and frantic, unpolished
rhythm, looks like an attempt to push the methods of the Danish
Dogma 95 group to their logical extreme: to make a movie that
comes by its emotional impact by being as uncinematic as possible.
The camera, snapping on at moments of intimate cruelty, seems
remorseless in its violation of the characters' privacy and its
need to
implicate viewers. Mr. Kamkari effectively creates a mood of queasy
prurience, but his approach, while undoubtedly ingenious, is also
somewhat evasive.
Without the impressively sustained fiction that it is a found
documentary, the film might well have collapsed into melodramatic
overstatement. The story, told and acted more conventionally,
might well have buckled under its crude and heavy themes. Instead,
an artifice designed to heighten the feelings of honesty and immediacy
amounts to an elaborate and finally alienating sleight of hand.
Mr. Kamkari's film is being shown with "Asylum," a documentary
short directed by Sandy McLeod about a Ghanian woman fleeing genital
mutilation and an arranged marriage. The two films present an
interesting formal contrast because "Black Tape" uses
documentary techniques to tell a fictional story, and "Asylum"
supplements talking-head testimony with dreamy, suggestive montages
and metaphorical images. BLACK TAPE The Videotape Fariborz Kamkari
Found in the GarbageWritten (in Farsi and Kurdish, with English
subtitles) and directed by Fariborz Kamkari; director of photography,
Tiraj Aslani; edited by Amin Aslani; produced by ayed Ahmad Samsam
Shariat. Running time: 83 minutes.
This film is not rated. Shown with a 20-minute short, Sandy McLeod's
"Asylum," tonight at 9 at MoMA Gramercy, 127 East 23rd
Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, in Manhattan, and
tomorrow night at 6 at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center as part
of the 32nd New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society
of Lincoln Center and the department of film and media of the
Museum of Modern Art.
WITH: Shilan Rahmani (Goli), Parviz Moasesi (Parviz), Farzin Saboni
(Sohrab) and Shokan Ghafari (Shokan).
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
