The Silence (1998)
Makhmalbaf's imaginative exploration of the visual and auditory in Tajikistan
Country: Tajikistan
Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Time: 1 hour and 16 minutes
What It Evokes: Sonic and visual textures, imaginative ethnography, environmental sensitivities
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
Film remains both a visual and auditory media. Indeed, even “silent” films never avoided sound. Yet, the sonic often emerges the handmaiden of sight, augmenting emotional responses or heightening predominantly visual experiences. To make a film equally about sound and sight requires a reminder of their divorce—the disparate ways in which each conditions lived experience and inflects audience comprehension. In his exploration of Tajikistan’s visual and auditory richness, Mohsen Makhmalbaf limits his central character’s sight—Khorshid, our protagonist, is blind and thus particularly sensitive to sound—and, in so doing, establishes a fundamental cleavage between our experience of the film (as visual and auditory) and the central character’s exclusively sonic sensitivities. In an early scene, rows of women in colorful attire arrayed in a line sell pomegranates and bread, each naming their price. Khorshid, a young boy, stops in front of one of the women, rubbing his hand across the bread on offer. “Her bread is dry, but her voice is the prettiest,” he tells his mother, translating his tactile experience to the audience through sonic representation. The Silence remains a film about these sensations and their capture. It has a schematic plot: A young boy’s hyper awareness of sound leads him to follow a musician on his way to work, delaying his arrival. His boss fires him. His mother must pay rent and so alongside his friend, Nadareh (pictured above), he attempts to find the musician and some means to solve their impending eviction. But more importantly, its structure offers a vehicle for Makhmalbaf to capture the visual and auditory richness of Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, drawing upon the region’s musical traditions and Sufi mysticism in the process. Makhmalbaf himself hails from Iran—for Iranian film buffs, Kiarostami’s Close-Up depicted the real life story of a Tehrani man impersonating Makhmalbaf—though his films have been shot and set around Central Asia. (Tajik, though utilizing Cyrillic instead of the Perso-Arabic script, is a dialect of Farsi.)
In spite of its male central character, Tajikistan (and this film) emerges a female-centric world. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, a violent civil war engulfed the fledgling country between 1992-1997, disproportionately affecting the male population. Since the conflict’s cessation, Tajikistan has experienced some of the world’s highest rates of outbound migration—predominantly male—and remains one of the most remittance dependent countries on earth, with most migrants heading towards job opportunities in Russia. Indeed, Khorshid’s father left for Russia and never returned, while the musician he attempts to track down towards the film’s end functions as a sort of father figure. The female-centricity of life (though not to be exaggerated, men do exist) provides us with the film’s sonic complement: the visual richness of Tajik dress, its textured complexity, its vibrant and vivid and alluring patterns and colors. (As one anthropologist has noted, “Often eye-catching and highly personalized, self-consciously “national” clothing or libosi milli adorn the bodies of a majority of Tajik women across age, social class, and ethno-geographical groupings in Tajikistan.”) Throughout the film, a poetic and imaginative visual ethnography emerges. The film’s rhythmic quality, its continual intensification of the sonic and visual as experiences both distinct and merged offer an immersive glimpse into a culture and country rarely considered. It remains one well worth visiting over the course of a film.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Mohsen Makhmalbaf —Kandahar (2001)
Abbas Kiarostami — Close-Up (1990)