A Clock without Hands

Sahand Abidi

“…Night? What does night mean? Night is a state of time. I am drowned in time. It is reasonable

for night to be just night. Night is. The problem is not with night, the problem is the absence of

the light, and it is in sitting and saying that one should wait, wait for the dawn…" (Quoted from

“Tide and Fog” 1966)

Whenever night dominates in Ebrahim Golestan’s stories, it brings along thoughts and

fear: Starting with his very first story in 1947 to the endless horizon of the universal night in his

brilliant tale, “Tide and Fog” to … to his feature film, The Brick and the Mirror (produced by

The Golestan Film Workshop: March 1963 – July 1964). In the very first few minutes of the

film, the meaning of night is revealed: Golestan’s own voice is broadcast from Hashem’s radio

saying that: “It was night in its absolute darkness, but there was no-one in the darkness who

could tell who the prey was, and who the predator.” In that darkness, there is always a beating

pulse of an impending peril. Night is harsh and enduring eternal, and the city is pregnant with

people’s hopes, wishes, and fears. And the narrator's story is explained by the night's image of

this very city. The film’s first half (the first six chapters) unfolds in this city, from the infant of

the veiled woman left in the cab, and hearing the typical city dwellers' reasons, the movie arrives

at the trinity of Hashem, Taji and the infant in the solitude of the house (still a progressive,

dynamic, graceful, and sincere sequence in comparison to any period of Iranian cinema). The

second half (also six chapters) starts with a day spent in all those institutions (nurseries and

courts) that should be accountable for Hashem's responsibility. It moves on to the shocking

orphanage sequence, when the meaning of becoming an orphan is multiplied and when Taji has

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achieved an agonizing awareness, when Hashem is morally defeated. And once again the night

dominates the world of the movie, while a veiled woman gets into another cab.

The night in The Brick and the Mirror, like the nights in other works of Golestan, is not

subject to a mortal fate. It is as if the human beings themselves have accepted the meaning of the

night as they see it, and instead of bringing the light, they are just talking while waiting for

morning. Of course, in the world of this movie, Taji is of course an exception: Relying on her

woman’s intuition and a solid sense of responsibility, she is the only person who accepts the

baby (beset by impotence and sterility, everyone else is either waiting for a savior, or has wiped

the chalkboard clean off the original question and, uttering nothing but justifying their passivity).

She is the only person (with another crucial exception in the film) who addresses the infant

herself, twice, and talk to it directly in the film’s central scene: “…Do you even know what evil

is? Do you even know what fear is? Good for you, speak your mind…” and “…Scream to your

heart’s content. Scream before you grow up to become a coward!”

Different chapters in The Brick and the Mirror, other than developing (or diverting) the

central plot, also expand the film’s implicit meanings, and simultaneously, set forth a panoramic

perspective of the multiplicity of all voices in society. In the sequence with the old woman in the

ruins, we encounter the film’s theological theme (as well as the theme of social poverty and

desperation): “It is ruined here, no one comes here.”

In the ten-minute-sequence at the police station, we confront the logic of political power

with the historical situation of the environment: The male obstetrician, badly beaten by the

family of a pregnant woman who had given birth to a deformed stillborn baby, his tools and

belongings stolen, is the only person who protests in this environment. The pregnant woman’s

kin have taken revenge on someone who’s not responsible for the death of the baby, a child “who

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had no possibility of staying alive. A being with no head, just a small ball, size of a walnut, feet

the size and shape of pickling cucumbers, a belly with this size…”. A pitiful and deformed

monster. The doctor’s protest concerns the loss of confidence in his society and wasting one’s

life while waiting. An exhausted police captain, with his right arm fracture, tries to calm the

doctor: “In any case, I am charged with keeping peace and order here,” and the doctor snaps

back: “Exactly so! This puts the fate of this neighborhood in your hands.” The captain responds

with a sneer: “Ultimately, I myself am one of this neighborhood’s folks…” and “…It is what it

is.” The captain follows these statements with a utopic reverie, imagining of a day that police

officers and physicians are no longer needed. He reasons: “How could you and I remain as what

we are (a police officer and a physician), if we wish no criminals and sick people left?”

In the opening shot of this sequence, as we enter the captain’s office, a poster of the Shah

(Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) on the wall becomes particularly conspicuous. It is captioned by the

following text: “28th of Mordad, the Glorious Outcome of the National Resurrection” (an

allusion to the monarchic regime’s favorite piece of propaganda about August 19, 1953 military-

monarchist coup d’état against the popular and beloved prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh).

The room is boldly and sarcastically filled with an irrational number of images and slogans of

this kind (accentuated by a wall clock whose pendulum is moving at a regular pace, but has no

hands). The officer is an embodiment of the logic of power (the image of the Shah for instance,

as Golestan himself implicity states so in a conversation discussing directions given to the actor

in the scene). He tries to justify the social conditions in a seemingly intimate conversation (Look

at the year of the film’s production in relation to the historical events: The memory of coup ten years

earlier in the panic-stricken world of these characters; after the so-called Shah’s “White Revolution” in

1963, which was a series of social reforms; and Ayatollah Khomeini’s uprising against the Shah’s regime

on June 5, 1963, resulting in the Ayatollah’s exile in that year. He come back fifteen years later during the

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Iranian Revolution as the leader of the new social order. Consider two pictures of Khomeini bookending

the shot in which Hashem and Taji pass through Copper Bazaar in the ironsmith’s shop. According to

Golestan, “The sequence has been shot a mere five days after the June 5 event”, and…); And the other

lower-ranked officer in the station also has dreams of his own: He thinks it is better for the

doctor to arm himself, because “what the gun is capable of doing what no medication could do.”

At one end of the office, the senior officer daydreams of the force of the historical moment and

the ultimate peace, and at the other end, the lower-ranked officer dreams of bullets flying. And

the doctor is the only character whose point of view overlaps in a moment completely with that

of the film. He gazes upon the city's night through the office window, and just for a moment, we

escape the claustrophobic confines of the police station and see the city in a way comparable to

the film’s opening scenes: A terrifying and thought-provoking jungle. Feeling desperate, the

doctor abandons his case and decides to leave the police station. Here is that one exception I

mentioned earlier. He picks up his jacket from the back of Hashem’s chair, and after some

internal struggle, he abruptly asks the baby: “I don’t know…Do you know? …Nah, you don’t

know either…”. He is the only person, other than Taji, who talks to the baby, even if out of

desperation and a sense of surrender to outside compulsions (in contrast to Taji’s emotional

outpouring).

In the commercial and popular cinema of the 1960's (also known as Film-Farsi), there is

a recurring theme of losing one’s father; orphan-hood is quite common. Moreover, in these films,

the protagonists, mostly imbued by traditional/maternal believes, reject the modernity in their

environment (presented as a modern woman or a rich father). Eventually a dreamlike atmosphere

of understanding prevails through others recognizing their righteousness and "sincerity" or else,

through awakening of those who are "too" modern. Having said that, a description of the

relationship between Golestan’s film and Iran’s commercial cinema becomes a rather

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complicated question: Instead of isolating itself from its social surroundings and philosophizing

abstractions, The Brick and The Mirror uses familiar tropes of commercial Iranian films to de-

familiarize the spectators. An exemplary scene takes place in the cafe, where the musical

entertainment (the typical low-brow song and dance performance on stage, in a genre used to

local musical pieces) pushed to the background, and as a result, the scene for the indigenous

audiences, habituated to the conventional cinematic representations of the cinema of their era,

becomes strange and unfamiliar. Realism for Golestan means deep immersion in one’s

surroundings: There is no movie from that period of Iranian Cinema to have made a living record

of the space and architecture as authentically. Strolling around Tehran’s streets at night and

spending time at the courts and the bazaar the next day, is a victory to show ordinary people, if

they had the tools to describe their everyday surroundings. In other words, people, in addition to

their role in the narrative trajectory and their cinematic characterizations, are best portrayed, best

re-presented “in” their real environment (for example, look at the sequence that comes after the

police station scene, in which Hashem and Taji stroll the city streets on their way home). This is

the first time in Iranian cinema that milieu is “rigorously defined.” Even more significantly, the

film goes beyond literary descriptions; it is actually “present” on the scene (an obvious instance

is that beautiful single-shot of Taji with the mosque as the background; later on, a corpse that

passes in-between Hashem and Taji in the tight alley is another instance). I mentioned the term

“defamiliarization,” and it is interesting that defamiliarization happens only by intensifying the

realistic texture of the film that gives a shock to audience unfamiliar with realistic representation.

This move by Golestan toward representations of “the real” and also the buildup of a

realistic texture in order to deepen the allegorical dimension of the work (rooted partly in his

documentary work, starting in the 1950s through the end of the 1960s, and partly, in his literary

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experiences), is crystallized in the shift between “orphan-hood” and “childhood” terms. No

longer is our relationship to the film world one of identifying and empathizing with the orphan

and pitying the infant (and by extension ourselves), but rather a shift toward identifying with

people who, despite all pressures, are in a position to have opinions and also have the power to

make decisions about foundlings. The film’s critical strategy is quite concise: We listen to the

sounds of the environment along with Hashem; we are frightened by everything including people

on the street, the neighbors, the cop, the tough guy, the intellectual, and so on. We spent the

entirety of that beautiful, eternal night with the trinity of man, woman, and the foundling (with

the torchlight of kindness which just lasted a whole night) in that house. And then the next

morning, we do the exact opposite.

We may or may not endure the only moral warning in the film as it is pronounced by Taji. “The

Child” with that Messianic potential in constructing the trinity with Hashem and Taji, is the great

causal center of the film with numerous signs, with multitude of meanings, and quite a few open

possibilities. There is also the unemployed and migrant son of the old woman, the unborn child

of the homeless woman (who is waiting for her lover), the young lottery ticket-seller in the café

whose tickets are scattered all over the place, the headless stillborn creature described by the

obstetrician, all the wasted embryos in the nursery, an infertile woman who prays and begs for a

child; and the foundling that provokes Hashem’s anxiety and becomes the subject of ridicule and

entertainment for the people in cafe. That infant’s presence also makes petition-writer to

discourages Hashem to have her. The presence of the child means Hashem and Taji togetherness

and its absence, their falling apart. One is tempted to find a meaning for the allegory of the infant

in the fashion of old-fashioned scholars: Messianic presence, the possibility of redemption, a

social sign (such as modernity, rebirth, or a lost opportunity). It can even be said that the infant is

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an embodiment of a will that transcends individuality and connotes an epiphanic revelation for

the woman, but not for the man, or…

However, there is also that orphanage sequence, a baring of the “The Real”, unveiled and

without rationalization (with the help of its musical timing structure, the piece has an intensely

objective buildup). It is an unobstructed view of reality, an encounter with little and wretched

people that we have all been and still are. All those abandoned children, waiting, squatting on

toilet bowl, homely and beautiful, needy and in agony, That they inject into our veins through a

hypodermic needle. With Taji, we witness countless cast-off children, and countless stories

whose origins and causes we would never know. With a paralyzed Hashem as our surrogate, we

listen to the hypocritical speech of that petition-writer on television (reciting one of the

prominent classical Iranian poet, Sa'adi's most altruistic poem); we listen to the voice now

dominating the society.

The Brick and the Mirror is the Iranian cinema’s first attempt to create a “poetic

language” for Iranian cinema, i.e. a poetic cinema that according to Pasolini: “…is primarily

founded on a particular style. That style is used as a source of inspiration, an inspiration, which

in most cases and in the most profound sense of the word, is poetic” (Pasolini’s essay, “The

Cinema of Poetry” was first published in Pesaro “New Cinema” Festival (June 1965), and later re-

published in Cahier du Cinema. Pasolini is addressing films that were screened in Pesaro Film Festival,

and The Brick and The Mirror was among them). The film is a different interpretation of the

function of time and is an astonishing experience in establishing and maintaining a consistent

rhythm (both in individual scenes and the overall form of the film). It is a complicated

combination of continuity and fluidity of space and narrative (generated from lessons learned in

classical narrative cinema). Simultaneously, while being the film indeed a progressive audio-

visual experiment (coming from the avant-garde and modernist cinema). it is an elegantly well-

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thought film with a spontaneous ambiance; it has a self-possessed tone, but it is also feverishly

compassionate and with a humorous element. Finally, it represents a new style and approach in

working with actors. It is an experiment in exploration of the expressive possibilities of the

medium itself. At the same time, it is a precise and rigorous interpretation of its social milieu,

that does not suffice to tackle the issue but underscores the personal and ethical responsibilities.

The importance of formalism and style in narrative cinema was brought up seriously with

Golestan’s film in Iranian Cinema. Each element of that film was a prescriptive path for the

future of this cinema. Iranian filmmakers of the late 1960s and early 70s (also known as New

Wave Cinema) are indebted to The Brick and the Mirror: We have seen the fluid geometry of the

camera and its circuitous movement along the vertical and horizontal axes, precise framing, on

one hand, and the condensation of the off-frame people in the form of allegorical images as

devices that may expand and extend a simple plot in Bahram Beyzai’s cinema. Moreover, in the

street cinema of Masoud Kimiai, we have witnessed the spontaneous ambiance of solitary

deprived characters strolling the streets. Similarly, the same working method with actors in

Nasser Taghvai’s early films. There is even the innovative blend of documentary and everyday

images with an ethical fable in Kiarostami’s cinema (the orphanage scene in The Brick and the

Mirror and terrifying documentary effects of Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black,

produced by Golestan, had enduring effects on subsequent realist cinema of Iran). Golestan’s

elegant cinematic language in its capacity to communicate complicated dramatic messages is

brilliant and expressive, whether in this film or in conversations between his prose fiction's

characters. It is a contentious and passionate language (the melodic tone of dialogues in

conjunction with the composed poetic rhythms in the structure of everyday language is an

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experiment comparable to the lyrical use of language in Alain Resnais/Marguerite Duras’

Hiroshima Mon Amour to its rhyming iambic pentameter language in Sally Potter’s Yes).

The Brick and The Mirror, whether as a film standing on its own merits, or as an

influential (direct or indirect) film on the subsequent cinema of Iran, is a singular work by an

exceptional filmmaker/author in Iranian cinema and modern art.

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