2010-03-17 10:18:10

THE WHITE RIBBON: Anatomy Of A World Suicide

Filed under: Featured, Movies, The White Ribbon
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

In a Michael Haneke film, when two kids have knives and one has a whistle, it’s probably best to avert your eyes. Something bad is about to happen to the kid with the whistle.

And so it is in Haneke’s masterful The White Ribbon, though what happens to the kid with the whistle is nothing compared to what happens to everyone else in town. This is a story about a small German village on the eve of World War I, and Haneke has turned his eyes once again from the particulars of individual creepiness, as he did in Cache, to the larger canvas of historical repercussion.

The village teacher, who serves as our narrator, tells us from the start that what we are about to see presages the calamity of World War I, which killed millions of young European men, left millions of women widowed and children fatherless, finished off three empires and unleashed the forces of Fascism, National Socialism and Communism that would shape the world for the rest of the century.

Haneke is telling us our own story, in other words, however unfamiliar the details might appear. That’s always been one of his gifts.

Despite the flat narration, the movie never signals that we are watching the equivalent of a historical treatise. On the contrary, the Doom Of Europe feels nauseatingly intimate in the unspooling of a series of small, cruel events in a place where everyone once felt at ease. Some of the children are forced to wear white ribbons to remind them of their innocence, hence the movie’s title, but as viewers we know the ribbons will be futile. The children can’t possibly be innocent. The grown-ups have seen to it.

The storytelling is stark and near perfection. First, the doctor falls off his horse. Then a woman falls through the floor at the old mill and dies. A farmer destroys a field of cabbage. A child goes missing. One by one, as these events transpire, the anxiety in the village–and the audience–amounts. Haneke melds the one and the another, and before long a truly horrible feature of the story becomes clear.

We are as trapped in the cycle of decimation as the people onscreen. We are in the dark, too, and as news of the war finally arrives, releasing the village from its own demons into the wider concourse, we feel of the horrific relief of knowing that the worst of all possible outcomes has just resolved the plot. Annihilation is the deus ex machina.

Haneke has always been superb at torment. In the original Funny Games, he gave tennis whites a twist of Mengele. In The Piano Teacher, the tired old subject of sado-masochism became vivid again, because the protagonist, played with deep iciness by Isabelle Huppert, seemed to live and die on the edge of a knife, which she eventually plunges into her own flesh.

These were frosty, immaculate works of art, but they had the tick-tock of Hitchcockian machines. With Time Of The Wolf, quite suddenly, something changed in the atmosphere of the Haneke experience. That movie, so tense as it depicted a version of the end of civilization, actually offered hope, and with the advent of hope, bizarrely, a new realism seeped into the work. On the back of realism came history.

In Cache, the director used his gifts to unearth an unmentionable past, specifically the atrocities committed by the French during the Algerian War. The plot moved to the rhythm of pickaxes at an archeological dig.

The White Ribbon amplifies this tendency. Instead of finding ourselves in a comfortable French present, wafted back on coffee steam and nightmare to secrets that we’d rather not face, we’re placed at the epicenter of crime and forced to work our way out. The chill comes when we realize that the maze leads us right back to ourselves.

This village is damned, Haneke’s movie insinuates, but only if you say so.

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2010-03-15 10:35:14

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Haleh Esfandiari Talks About Her Incarceration, Her Interrogators, Her Guards And The Rest Of Her Ordeal Withinin Iran’s Infamous Evin Prison

Filed under: Ahmadinejad, Asia, Featured, Haleh Esfandiari, The Purple Interview, politics
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

In the early hours of December 30, 2006, on the road to Tehran airport, a dark green Peugeot sedan pulled up beside Haleh Esfandiari’s taxi. What followed looked initially like a robbery.

“Three men, large knives strapped to their hips, jumped out of the car,” writes Esfandiari in her harrowing memoir of interrogation and solitary confinement My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran. “They all seemed to be wearing identical, olive drab outfits. One, a tall burly man with a crude Persian accent, ordered Modarress [her driver] to switch off the motor, open the trunk and hand him the car keys.”

The “robbers” took her passport as well, along with it her right to leave the country. Right away, Esfandiari, a scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Center For Scholars in Washington D.C., knew that something was wrong, but the truth turned out to be far worse than she’d imagined. Within weeks, she learned that she was under investigation by Iranian Intelligence for conspiring to bring down the government.

The investigation, a blatant attempt to force a confession from an innocent woman, quickly became a farce, but it was no joke. In May, without being shown any evidence of her involvement in conspiracy, Esfandiari was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in Evin Prison, the country’s most notorious political prison. She stayed there for 110 days, conducting a stand-off with interrogators who repeatedly tried to wheedle and bully a confession out of her. These men, who identified themselves as J’afari and Hajj Agha, ruled her life, but they failed to break her.

Meanwhile, Esfandiari’s incarceration made headlines around the world. A concerted effort by her family, American and European government officials, journalists and human rights lawyers resulted in her liberation, but not before she’d witnessed firsthand the inner workings of Iranian political repression. Her story, as told in My Prison, My Home, is a brief literary tour of hell, opening a window on the fate of countless dissident prisoners around the world, shining a lot on the means by which the the unseen middle management of state repression exercise their power.

Her account makes for a gripping read, horrifying and enlightening at once, and we’re grateful for participation in this week’s Purple Interview.

Q:After your release, you write, you got rid of most of the clothes you wore in prison and tried to do everything you could to distance yourself from the place. Yet you presumably forced yourself back into Evin to write this book. How difficult was that effort?

A:Writing the book was never easy. I had to relive my eight months of country arrest, of which I spent 105 days in solitary confinement. I had to relive the pain caused to my mother with whom I was staying. I had to relive the fear—the fear first of arrest, then the fear of trial and a long prison term. In prison, there were the long hours of interrogation, the loneliness and the uncertainty and, always, the fear of torture. It all came back to me as I was writing. I still wake up sometimes not knowing where I am, thinking I am back in Evin Prison.

Q:The book works at so many different levels. It could be seen both as an intimate profile of the Iranian police state and a manual of how to survive it. At other times, you can seem like an anthropologist doing field work on the lifestyles and mindsets of interrogators. You mentioned that you started to write books in your mind while you were in solitary confinement. Is this one of them?

A:No. In prison, I focused my entire attention on dealing with my interrogators, on escaping the trap they were setting for me. I disciplined myself not to think about the conditions of my incarceration. But I also needed moments during the day to escape my immediate surroundings. That is why I wrote a children’s story in my mind for my two grand daughters. I also composed in my mind a biography of my paternal grandmother, a woman who taught me Persian poetry and appreciation for Islamic and Persian culture. I wanted to relive my childhood which was happy and serene.

Q:It’s been three years since your arrest, roughly two since your release. Do you still personally grapple with the memory of your confinement? How do you cope?

A:The scars of such an experience never really heal. For months after my release and return home, I had nightmares. I kept imagining that Iran’s intelligence agents were still following me. But writing the book was a kind of catharsis. It helped me give words to, make sense of, and shape my experience. I have given talks about my book in many different parts of the U. S. I still often become emotional when I remember saying goodbye to my mother and knowing that I might never see her again. But I feel fortunate to be able to share my story with others, and the interest and concern people everywhere have shown has been uplifting and comforting.

Q:We just passed the 31st Anniversary of the Iranian revolution. Three million people took to the streets. Arrests continue. On the one hand, the demonstrations haven’t stopped. On the other, they don’t seem to be making much visible progress in terms of moving the government from its repressive stance. Given your particular insider experience, can you give us any insight into what might actually be happening inside the country now?

A:The regime is experiencing a deep legitimacy crisis. Police brutality, trials and imprisonment have not silenced the protest movement. The scale of the protests is now perhaps smaller than the protests that immediately following the elections; but this is hardly surprising given the intensity of the crackdown. The children of the revolution , the younger generation who came of age under the Islamic Republic, are confronting one another. On one side are those who want a more open society, accountability, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a freely-elected president and parliament, punishment for those who committed atrocities on the streets and in prison cells following the June elections, and normal relations with the outside world. On the other side stand the extremists, centered on the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary Basijis, the judiciary and the security agencies. They have made common cause with the hardliners in the regime, think in terms of a repressive state apparatus, and wish to snuff out dissent. They feel threatened by the opposition parties of the Green Movement. The regime may succeed in silencing dissent in the short run, but they will have to rule by force, with the instruments of a police state. They will enjoy neither legitimacy nor credibility.

Q:Can you talk about your own personal experience of the upheaval of the last few months? Reading the book, I couldn’t help wondering if your relationship to these events must be quite intense, knowing what you know about the internal workings of the system, knowing better than most what fate a lot of the arrested dissidents are likely to face?

A:I never expected that the regime will charge its own people—leading figures in the reformist movement, senior members of the former Khatami government, all men with impeccable revolutionary credentials—with attempting to foment a velvet revolution. I believed that the era of accusing people of planning a velvet revolution in Iran, a charge leveled against outsiders in the past, was over. I thought it had been discredited during my arrest and interrogation and those of the Iranian-American urban planner, Kian Tajbakhsh, and the Iranian-Canadian philosopher, Ramin Jahanbegloo. Nobody in their right mind could believe that three academics were trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic.

But I was wrong. It turns out the regime is obsessed with the idea that it might be overthrown by a popular, peaceful movement such as those that overthrew Communist regimes in countries like Georgia and the Ukraine. The paranoia I detected in the agents of the Intelligence Ministry during my own ordeal in 2007 persists and is even stronger today. Besides, the post-election unrest not only caused the hardliners to panic; they also snatched at the opportunity to rid themselves once-and-for-all of the reformists and moderates in their midst. Hundreds were arrested and subjected to show trials. Some were executed and tortured to death. Kian Tajbakhsh was rearrested in July last year, tried and sentenced to five years. The hardliners tried to snuff out the Green Movement at the very moment of its birth.

Q:A moment of intense hope, perhaps?

A:Both yes and no. The pictures we saw of hundreds of thousands of Iranians on the streets, shouting “Where is my vote,” was exciting and inspiring. But the crackdown has been intense, severe. You cannot expect people to keep coming out on the streets and risk beatings, knifings, imprisonment and even death without stronger leadership and clearer guidance. The opposition leaders are beginning to find their voice; but they are not yet leading effectively.

I did not think that, if elected, Mousavi would bring about major changes. In keeping with his election promises, he would have freed up the press and political parties a bit, stopped the harassment of the young, granted more rights to women and focused on the economy. He did not intend fundamentally to change the system. But I also did not think that the regime would be so alarmed by this prospect of moderate change that it would manipulate the elections. Perhaps they sensed in the enthusiasm for Mousavi the beginning of a momentum they could not stop. The severity of the crackdown has changed the calculus. The opposition leaders have broadened their demands; the people expect more fundamental change; and the government dare not retreat one step lest it unleashes an avalanche of demands and ends up losing control.

Q:One of the most intriguing aspects of your book is your description of the “relationship” that develops between you and your interrogators, particularly with Ja’fari. Can you give a brief description of him for people haven’t read the book?

A:Ja’fari was my unwelcome companion—my interrogator, the presence I could not shake off—for eight months. He was a man in his early thirties, spoke a broken English, and was inseparable from his laptop. During interrogations, which could last eight and nine hours a day, he was persistent and harsh, and he was adept at twisting the truth. Threatening and intimidating, he seemed to enjoy his job. He began the interrogation when I was not yet imprisoned in Evin and continued after I was incarcerated. In Evin Prison he was joined by his superior, Hajj Agha. When I was released he accompanied me to the airport and made sure I left the country. I thought of him as a member of a new breed in the Islamic Republic, who dedicated their lives to make other people suffer. Habitually rude and relishing his work, he nevertheless appeared to me at times to be listless, indifferent, even bored.

Q:For me, your account of this man seemed to conjure up an entire class of largely overlooked professional—the middle management of dictatorship. On the other, you make very clear that he and his colleague Hajj Agha were individuals who brought their own unique personalities to interrogation. At times, it’s possible to glimpse the humanity of these men, however deeply buried in the norms of the police state, and that makes for a deeply ambiguous reading experience. Can you talk about your attempts to render them accurately in the book?

A:Once I was in Evin Prison, Ja,fari was joined by his superior, Hajj Agha, who took the lead in the interrogation. Hajj Agha had a softer, more intelligent approach than Ja’fari, and this made him the more dangerous interrogator. Naturally, after weeks and months under questioning, you get to know your interrogators—their methods, their quirks, the forms of intimidation or persuasion they use. They sometimes said a word or two about their families. They talked on cell phones, and I caught snatches of their conversations.

I was aware, from my reading, of the so-called “Stockholm syndrome,” the idea that a special relationship, even trust develops between a prisoner and his or her interrogator. I made sure nothing like that happened to me. My interrogators were my jailers; they had signed the orders that put me in solitary confinement; they were fabricating charges against me; they were putting me through hell. I never allowed myself to forget these facts. Besides, I told myself, no one had forced them to work as Intelligence Ministry agents and interrogators. (They both had second jobs as university professors—or so they told me; they could have done other things with their lives). They had chosen bullying, and worse, as a profession. I tolerated them. I learned enough about them, I hope, to make them real to the readers of my book; but I felt no sympathy for them; I couldn’t, as it were, break bread with them.

Q:After your release, you received a gift from your interrogators, whom Ja’fari refers to as “the boys”. The gift is a book of poetry by Hafez, a gift that you describe as “bizarre”, and that seems an understatement. It’s the most mysterious moment in the book to me. Looking back, do you have any more insight into the sentiment expressed there?

A:The gesture was very Iranian; but it was a distortion of Iranian tradition. As I write in my book, the ‘gift’ was the Ministry of Intelligence’s way of saying, after all they had done to me, “no hard feelings. Let’s be friends.” These men seemed oblivious to the havoc they wreak on lives, the damage they do to people. They imagined that they can make everything all right by a goodbye present. But I cannot forget what they did to me. In me, this attempt to make amends only generated a sense of revulsion. I chose to treat it as a my goodbye: goodbye to Evin Prison, goodbye to my Intelligence Ministry interrogators, goodbye to my jailers.

Q:You write very movingly about another category of professional at Evin Prison, the female jailers with whom you at time seemed to have an almost motherly relationship and who in turn appear protective of you. That struck me as the most complicated human connection in the book, and I wondered as I read how you approached your depiction of them. Were you ever worried that you might somehow compromise them by writing with so much sympathy?

From the moment I was put in solitary confinement I decided to treat the women guards of ward 209 politely. I told myself that they were employees doing their job, and I wanted to ensure that our interaction remained correct but civil. It helped that I have the ability to talk to everyone as an equal. I treated them with respect and as human beings; and they reciprocated. They knew the interrogations were harsh; perhaps they too understood that I could not be guilty of the dreadful things I was being charged with. They broke no rules; but they tried to ease the conditions of prison life for me. When I look back, I am bemused by the thought that I once could count women prison guards as my companions.

Q:You write that when you were first in solitary confinement, you read the Koran that had been left in your jail cell. What was it like reading that particular book under those circumstances? Did you find consolation there or was it an alienating experience, given that your jailers presumably derived their ultimate authority from the Koran?

A:I had some familiarity with the text. Over the years, I had of course read passages in the Koran, especially the passages relevant to women. My grandmother was religious, and she used to recite verses from the Koran to me as a child..

In prison the only book that I initially was given was the Koran. I decided to study it from an academic perspective for insight into the mindset of the people who work in the name of Islam. I wanted to understand why they do not practice what they preach. I was searching for the sources of injustices committed in the name of Islam. Understanding the text is often difficult, and this was an intellectual challenge which I welcomed in the loneliness of my cell. One of the older women guards, who had studied at a religious seminary, helped me with the interpretation of difficult passages or brought me books on Koranic exegesis. I did not really find an answer to my question. There were always prayer rugs and prayer stones in the interrogation rooms; and they caused me to wonder how an interrogator could pray with a prisoner, then turn around and subject him to harsh interrogation, perhaps mistreat him, or set him up for a false confession, trial and a prison term. I remain puzzled at this conjunction of prayer and prison, religion and repression.

Q:Your story reminds us that untold numbers of political prisoners remain in Evin Prison and places like it. In your account, the sense of isolation and abandonment is overwhelming. In closing, can you offer any advice to readers on how they might help out, even in small ways?

A:What saved me and kept me sane during those 105 days in solitary confinement was my inner discipline. I decided not to think about my family. I decided not to give in to depression. I kept repeating to myself that I might end up spending the rest of my life in Evin under terrible conditions; and I therefore had to plan a routine for my long days. Aside from the lengthy interrogations, I adopted a strict routine of exercise and reading. I took my meals and showers, insofar as I could, at the same time every day. I fully used any time I was allowed on an enclosed rooftop terrace to rapidly pace up and down. I carefully rationed reading books once they were made available to me.
In prison you hang on to the smallest gesture of kindness, the barest sign of life outside the prison walls. I had moments like this when I was allowed to speak briefly to my mother on the telephone , or permitted to spend more than the regulation one hour on the outside terrace the prisoners were allowed to use, or when I was allowed to receive English books from my fellow prisoner, Kian Tajbakhsh who had access to his home library. One day I saw a butterfly on the terrace. Another day, a female guard brought me a tiny rose from the prison garden. I treasured these moments, took comfort from them.
At the same time, I never allowed myself to succumb to despair; and even though there were times when I broke down and cried, I did so only in the privacy of my cell or under the shower. I knew the Intelligence Ministry wanted to break me down; and I was determined not to permit me them to do this to me. I held on to a blind (and, as it turned out, justified) trust in my husband. I knew that he would not leave a single stone unturned to get me out.

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2010-03-13 11:32:07

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Tim Burton Feeds Us Candy Mushrooms Of Love, And We Start To See Bandersnatches

Filed under: Alice In Wonderland, Featured, Movies
Posted by: John

JOHN MARKS

We live in an age of design revolution, but it’s easy to take for granted, because most of us don’t spend a lot of time contemplating our teapots. If you rustle up a Target catalogue from 1990, though, you’ll see the difference. Our teapots and much else have been transformed.

To see what I mean, check out Tim Burton’s deliriously gluttonous design fantasia Alice In Wonderland, and experience the change through the medium of 19th century English fantasy. As in the original Lewis Carroll works Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, published in 1865, and Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There, published in 1871, the point in the Burton film is not plot. It is picaresque, a sequence of encounters with impossible, menacing, outrageous characters, through which Alice becomes a little more herself.

The Cheshire Cat has never looked more sinuously insinuating. The minions of the Red Queen suggest Las Vegas blackjack cards turned into viral infection. The bolts of cloth flung by the Mad Hatter in self-defense seem destined for next year’s runways. The potions of the White Queen might be the latest and coolest in Brooklyn kitchen chic.

Still, it’s not our world that Burton conjures to life. It’s Alice’s.

By filming the second of the two books, Burton made a wise choice. Rather than making a movie about the little girl experiencing a strange world for the first time, we meet the woman, in a beguilingly stoic performance by Mia Wasikowska, rediscovering and bidding farewell to the lost mythology and magic of her childhood and in the process gaining a future.

The plot certainly radiates a strong female empowerment vibe, but there is so much going on at the level of sensual detail that one doesn’t have to be interested at all in the story to be charmed from the first frame of Alice In Wonderland. It’s sort of a miracle of a movie.

The whole thing could easily have tumbled down the rabbit hole of pictorial excess, following the plummeting trails of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Planet Of The Apes, but it turns out to be one of the director’s best. The sweetness in the imagery reminded me more of his early masterpiece Edward Scissorhands than anything he’s done in years.

Alice not as good as Edward, because it does at times eddy into pools of aesthetic inertia, but the moments of self-indulgence are rare. From the opening image of the little Alice walking with big, dark eyes through the halls of her father’s mansion and her kinetic fall down the aforementioned rabbit hole to the first, smoky encounter with Cheshire Cat, the flashing imp eyes of Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter and the “bulbous” head of the Red Queen, we’re carried along on waves of emotion and wonder that are embodied in the smallest detail.

This is the unrecoverable and impossible world of childhood, Burton seems to say, these images, these faces, castles and landscapes. They come to us as adults in no other form. In the end, when Alice sallies forth to find her destiny in the real world, we feel the presence of a grand sentiment, but the look on the woman’s face, its combination of anticipation and melancholy, tells us that what will be gained can never replace what’s been lost, an entire continent of infinite desire, danger and dream.

No teapot in the world can match that design.

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