During the span of a film, sitting in the dark, silent room of a movie theater, one may suddenly begin to occupy an entirely different space: the space proposed by the film itself. In this way, one may find oneself inside a projection, beginning to question what they see, beginning to wonder “Am I seeing this right?”
This question is not, in fact, about correctness, but about resemblance and reverie. A woman wakes and begins the quiet movements of her morning ritual. Nothing spectacular occurs. Yet through the experience of the film, a sensation arises: a gap, a pause, an opening — an interstice in which one is granted the time to ask, in the very act of seeing, what it is one is seeing. The sensation is dreamlike, though not quite a dream; its quality may stem from the curious feeling of an intimate detachment.
We might describe this gap in different ways, each one of us. What this gap enables, what it does to us, what we see in it, what we wonder once we have found ourselves within this third space of the cinema. Something appears in this reverie, something of ourselves, yet veiled in mystery. But the chance that such wondering may even be possible amidst the duration of a specific image and sound, amid the observation of a character or the unfolding of a narrative, suggests that in being told a story, one is also being given the chance to ruminate upon their own.
Through this folding and unfolding, the films in this program propose various tensions: between on and off, between time as leisure and time directed toward a specific aim, between what is visible and what remains unseen. The characters appear in relation to the landscapes or spaces they inhabit or construct, in hours that are neither fully occupied nor entirely free. These films seem to seek an openness, both within the frame and beyond it. Here, cinema becomes a medium through which time can be inscribed: read, sensed, and reimagined.
Curated by Elisa Juri
In collaboration with EQZE — Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola
Made in 1977, Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil anticipates the formal asceticism of the films that would follow Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. It also offers a feminist corrective to the male-dominated concerns of that post-revolutionary cinema. 18-year-old Rooy-Bekheir is like a stone, obstinate and unmoveable. Throughout the film she mostly sits: at the courtyard hearth, opposite elders on a rolled-out rug, or alone at a riverbank. Though she is already more than old enough to be married off, she refuses all suitors, as well as any explanation why. Meanwhile, the village men debate whether to relinquish their land to an agricultural business. Nabili too resists filmmaking convention, having shot The Sealed Soil in secret while working on a miniseries for National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT). Her fixed camerawork recalls the films of Chantal Akerman, especially in how it creates a gaze at once intimate and distant. Though we see Rooy- Bekheir in private moments, her hair visible in a way that would soon become impossible in Iranian cinema, she never appears in close-up. The most revealing scene of her body and her desire is filmed, quite literally, with her back to the camera. (Genevieve Yue — Viennale)
Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with the support of the Golden Globe Foundation, Century Art Foundation, Farhang Foundation and Mark Amin.
