As far as tragedy is concerned, it may be that the demand for an immediate and complete understanding of history only asserts itself when private desires become public damage; the “event,” as it is written, begins when the first bombs go off. But every attack, every fire, every crash, eruption, and act of destruction is a flower, germinated by contingency or nurtured in the soil of someone’s internal will. In the exacting headlines and fugitiveness of the mundane, these before-moments tend to slip through the rubble — for Shahram Mokri, the Möbius stripper of contemporary Iranian cinema, these moments are the silver-screen-worthy stuff of myth.
Maybe an example to clarify what I mean: Mokri’s most recent film, 2020’s Careless Crime, draws inspiration from a 1978 fire at the Cinema Rex in the Iranian city of Abadan, in which upwards of 470 people were killed during a screening of Masoud Kimiai’s The Deer (1974). Much ink sizzled on newspaper presses in the fire’s aftermath, flinging accusations at the state secret police, left-wing militants, Islamic fundamentalists, and the vague but terror-inducing “fanatics.” But what didn’t, or more likely couldn’t, make it to the headlines were those aforementioned before-moments: what strategies did the perpetrators (to this day unidentified) discuss over lunch? How many times did they try to execute their scheme before it worked? What did they argue about on the way to the theater? What were they thinking? One can only imagine the details of these lost corners of the Rex fire’s history; Mokri makes this imagination his craft.
At a Q&A session after a screening of Careless Crime at the Brooklyn Academy of Music — part of a recent retrospective on Mokri’s work — the filmmaker described absence as a sort of mother of invention; where historical particularities are unknown and therefore unchartable, their invented representation must necessarily defy conventions of linear storytelling. Thus justifies Mokri’s most striking stylistic signature: repetition and the melding of timelines. In Careless Crime, three narratives interweave: a day with the four Rex arsonists, contemporary preparations for the screening of a film also called Careless Crime, and scenes from that film that depict the investigation of an unexploded missile in the dusty Iranian highlands. But once the four arsonists from the ‘70s step into the cinema of 2020, it becomes clear that the film has spun off its temporal axis, blending past and present beyond their montage to create a decades-spanning narrative about the psychology of public terror.
The best analogy I can find for this sort of temporality is making puff pastry. The dough, once wet and dry ingredients are fully incorporated, is rolled out, folded in threes like a letter, rolled out again, rotated, rolled, and folded — a process called lamination. The layers increase exponentially (hence the extreme flakiness of a lovingly-made croissant), each layer originating from a different section of the first dough sheet in a buttery mise-en-abyme. Mokri makes pastry of his timelines, allowing them to stack over one another and occasionally piercing a needle through them to let the contents bleed throughout. History, he affirms — especially in its darkest spots — does not simply repeat itself, it folds.
Repetition, of course, is one of history’s central cliché, and one that Mokri serves himself of with gleeful abandon. His characters often repeat their lines whole sequences after they are first uttered, or else repeat the lines of others. Often, the camera gets stuck in a time loop, rotating around a single-take tableau in which figures repeat words and motions ad infinitum, allowing the spectator to witness them from different angles. Take one such example from Careless Crime (the film-within-the-film): a woman offers a soldier/police officer some tea, heads back over to the table where her friend sits slicing watermelon, who then brings a piece to another officer, who then moves across a sheet-and-projector outdoor film screen (showing, what else, The Deer) to chat with another officer, who chastises the first officer, who walks over to a rock where a woman offers him tea. With each revolution — the unbrokenness of the take essential in establishing a theoretical diegetic linearity challenged by its subjects’ circularity — the camera peeks into different moments of the dance, unveiling new information while suggesting that a complete picture can never be achieved. So it is with events like the Rex fire, crimes that dissimulate their true and thorough natures in the effacing nature of historiography.
A similar effect appears in Mokri’s 2013 film Fish & Cat, in which the crime witnessed is the supposedly true story of a backwoods restaurant serving human flesh to kite-flying campers in the ‘90s. Mokri seems fixated on this notion of crime, blending the headline-grabbing pathos of tragedy with a perhaps more sinister and anxiogenic public imagination. Every witness to the crimes, be they present on-looker or distant news-reader, invents to some extent the interstitial details from preparation to perpetration. The whole history, therefore, acquires a perspectival multiplicity, something Mokri captures by repeating his sequences from constantly shifting viewpoints. In one instance, Kambiz (Faraz Modiri) chats awkwardly with his crush Mina (Neda Jebraeili). When she leaves, he begins setting up a tent when he is approached by Parviz (Abed Abest), who asks him for his name and serial number of the kite he brought along for the campsite’s records. Later in the film, the camera follows Parviz after a tense interaction with former flame Ladan (Samaneh Vafaiezadeh) to Kambiz’s tent, where he asks him for his name and serial number of the kite he brought along for the campsite’s records. All of this in one take, implying a continuity of time, characterizing this recurrence not only as a shift in perspective but a recharacterization of time through the eyes of another. As the minutes of an event unfold (and fold back again), a sort of collective memory is developed in the reflections and reconsiderations of the ways different people witness the same thing. A conversation is not one interaction between two people, but two: one through A’s eyes, one through B’s. In this way, every crime Mokri examines contains in itself its very own, multifarious infinite.
There’s an almost libidinal force in this desire to extrapolate the circumstances of wrong-doing, to plunge crime into infinite and continually divisible moments of the sinister, a union of voyeurism and imagination that Mokri expresses with his framing. A frequent motif of Careless Crime is a camera that appears to lag, failing to keep up with its subjects’ movements and often cutting them off with the borders of the frame or behind objects in the foreground. In the Q&A, Mokri explained this phenomenon again through historiography: when an event carries so much mythical weight, our understanding of it lags behind, is incomplete. In Invasion (2017), this partiality appears in the camera’s insistence on capturing the film’s protagonist Ali (returning Abed Abest) from behind, obscuring the emotions of his face as well as any action he may be responding to. Like the lag of Careless Crime expressing a retrospective “behind-ness,” Invasion positions the viewer as an under-privileged but insistent onlooker, aware of a subject that refuses to open itself to them.
Refusal, dissimulation, extrapolation: Shahram Mokri’s cinema of lamination presents these unavoidable elements of the writing of history as fertile ground for an often terrifying imagination. But perhaps more important is the way he recognizes and offers a creative treatment of the continuities between past and present. Do the Rex arsonists actually step out of time to set ablaze a student-run theater in 2020 Iran? Perhaps, if one wants to take the route of the fantastical. But in a more metaphorical interpretation, the notion of the sins of history bleeding into the circumstances of the now permeates our very understanding of cause-and-effect in the grand social narrative — or at least should, lest we condemn ourselves to repeating our mistakes. Simultaneity becomes both a historical necessity and a wicked inevitability: sucked into that temporal black hole of contingency and psychology, time is ripped to shreds, or better yet, crushed into delicious glittering shards like a pain au chocolat in the devouring.
