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Gabbeh
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Gabbeh begins with a very distinctive sound heard underneath the opening credits. It seems to the ear to be some kind of labour – perhaps a noise produced by the action of a tool. It is rhythmic and repetitive, but arrives with a very particular phrasing: three beats followed by two beats. Three then two: a hypnotic, incantatory rhythm, but also arresting in its oddness. Though musical, it is also not-musical – just some rough sound arising in the everyday grind. The second time I saw Gabbeh – among the most sublime films I have encountered – I realised that the entire soundscape, and many of the images as well, are built on this rhythmic figure of three-then-two beats. It serves as the basis, the ground-tone, of a rich, musical score. At one moment, when that music comes flooding in, one of the central characters, Gabbeh (Shaghayeh Djoda), suddenly starts clapping the three-two rhythm. Later, there is a scene where a goat gives birth, and then, in snippets, the early phases of how a goat mother tends to its newborn; basically, she tries to nudge it to its feet. As the mother does so, she pounds the earth with her own foot, possibly to clear some ground, and as she does so the film cuts to women who are in the process of making a Persian gabbeh rug. As they work the fabric with their implements, the women make that already familiar sound, three-and-two, but it is now in perfect rhythm with the goat stamping its foot. So, the film passes back and forth for a few shots between the goats and the women, between the stamping and the rug-making. But the sounds of each activity are cut free from the action, swapped and intermingled. Poetically, the goat makes music, and the artisans are giving birth to a new rug. Gabbeh is directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of Iran’s best-known directors of the 1980s and ‘90s alongside the rather more sedate Abbas Kiarostami. Makhmalbaf is an eclectic figure. He has been described as the Iranian Scorsese (whatever that is meant to mean!), and has made many kinds of films, from the lyrically plaintive to the psychodramatically cruel. In his incredible Salaam Cinema (1995), he auditioned, like some dark ringmaster, dozens of aspiring actors from the streets for parts in an imaginary film project. It is hard to believe that the person who made Salaam Cinema also made Gabbeh – but that’s reassuring, too. We all contain multitudes! This is a profound, uplifting, magical movie. Its emotional affect is almost eerie. There are very precise instants – a cut from one image to another, the turn and look that someone gives, the beginning of a particular sound – at which I can no longer contain myself: they are like triggers to some primal part of the self, psyche, soul. It’s a truly soulful work – and I don’t say that about very many films. There’s a story here, a simple, folk, peasant story. It is a story that springs forth, literally, from a gabbeh carpet – and we see, in exquisite detail, how such objects are made, and how the people who make them live. The film starts with a nomadic couple, an old man and woman (Hossein and Rogheih Moharami), tending to their carpet in a stream. A young woman who calls herself Gabbeh steps out of the rug, comes alive to tell the story of the figures that are woven into it: the figures of herself and her lover, a guy who sits astride a white horse. We learn that, for a long time, he was her ardent suitor: ardent but discreet, because he just sits far away on the horizon at all times, howling like a wolf. That howl is another of the key sounds of the film – a haunting, funny, musical sound that fills the universe. Gabbeh wants to go with the man, but her stern father keeps putting obstacles in the way or, rather, he keeps moving back the deadline: when her uncle arrives she can marry; then she must wait for her uncle to marry; and then she must wait until her mother gives birth; and so on. Gabbeh is among the most voluptuously sad women in cinema; she is the veritable Weeping Woman. That is the key story. But the film is, in fact, full of many stories – a weave or skein of stories. All of them interact with, affect and influence each other in the most remarkable ways. Gabbeh appears from a carpet and tells her story of the past; but her story is not a flashback. It seems to be going on all around her eternally, to her left and to her right, cued by her look, and also by the sounds surrounding her: the babbling of a stream, the cry of a bird, the harsh sound of an approaching rider. And then there is the effect of this story on the people to whom she is telling it – the elderly couple. As Gabbeh tells her story of young love, the old man is moved to pieces. He falls in love with her, and begs her to run away with him. He is one of the two wonderful old men in this story made instantly childlike by love. He loves, and he cries when he feels he has been rejected: he beats the carpet as it hung out on a tree, and he wails – in fact, everything this old man says or shouts out in the film is delivered musically, in a kind of never-ending undulating sing-song that is delightful and hilarious to hear. As this old man hears Gabbeh’s story, he becomes the young man, the ardent suitor – he is possessed by that spirit. The old woman, however, does not take this soap opera of possession at all well. “You never gave me children”, he hisses at her at one point, and she runs away, vowing never to return – because he is breaking her old heart with such talk. But then she quickly returns with a baby goat, and he thrusts it in his arms, saying, “You wanted a child - here's a child”. And he instantly loves this makeshift child of theirs; he cradles it, saying solicitously, “Has it been fed yet?” This incredible flux of emotions and attachments, this constant movement between youth and old age, is one of the many things that make Gabbeh great. I have not seen a movie since Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996) that covers, in such a lyrical and flowing way, such a diversity and range of human experiences – from the cradle to the grave. There is another twist with this old couple. Right from the start, there is a mild element of mystery that attaches itself to them: who are they, really? They are carpet makers, but they do not seem part of the wider group or community of similar workers; there is something special and strange about them. The fact that the old woman and young Gabbeh dress alike is the first clue. We come to suspect, more and more, that the old woman is in fact Gabbeh, many years on, and the old man was in fact the dashing fellow on a horse. Here is one of the most touching moments in the film: when the old man calls out to the young Gabbeh, her back turned as she is about to disappear into the figure in the carpet once again, he pleads with her never to leave him – then she swings around, and she is, in fact, that grand, sad, luminous, old woman. Makhmalbaf’s film is less a story than a weave of elements. That makes it not so much a narrative as a poem. Every second movie these days is lazily described as poetic if it contais a single overtly symbolic image in it such as a bird standing for freedom, or the landscape seen from above somewhat resembling a human body. But Gabbeh is a truly poetic work at every moment, and at every level. There is not one detail in it, one image, sound, gesture or detail, which is not echoed, expanded or transformed by some other detail. It exploits the openness of poetic metaphor in cinema: if there are two things put in a metaphoric relationship – for example, the threads of a rug being pulled and manipulated, and then the reeds in a field being swept and blown by the wind – it cannot really be decided whether the rug is a metaphor for a green field, or vice versa. There is never any origin for these ceaseless epiphanies, and that is what makes the film so unique, what makes its inner universe so infinite. The three-and-two beat figure: did it begin as a natural sound which then inspired music, or was it a musical idea then worked into the natural sounds? Or did Makhmalbaf just happen to find the magical correspondence between these two things in editing? We will likely never know. This idea of no origin, no point of beginning to anything, is a large part of Gabbeh’s magic. I struggle to talk about it using the classic table of opposites – birth and death, past and present, nature and culture – because these binary oppositions are blurred, dissolved into each other … and is full of images of liquidity and dissolution, from the water that passes over the rug as it’s washed in a stream, to the steam that mysteriously rises up at one point over everyone and everything, no matter where they are. There is one binary opposition that Makhmalbaf makes particularly juicy work of demolishing. Gabbeh is the type of film that some may be tempted to describe as primitive – as a work of folk art or naive cinema. In fact, it is an extremely sophisticated piece of filmmaking, prodigious in its inventions involving the combinations of images and sounds, its ways of conjuring figures and stories. Makhmalbaf renews, through this invention, the spirit of one of the medium’s most divine creators, the Georgian director Sergei Parajanov, (The Colour of Pomegranates [1970] and Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors [1964]). Parajanov, too, was described as a primitive, because his films told folk tales using exquisitely coloured still-life compositions or tableaux vivants. Some small minds suspected at the time that Parajanov did not know how to make a normal film, so he made his own intensely eccentric pieces instead. Until it dawned on some people that Parajanov was way ahead of the experimental curve – with Jean-Luc Godard himself declaring that everyone must be made to walk 25 miles to see these masterpieces. And then the verdict was revised – still with some condescension – to read that Parajanov was a primitive who eventually managed to “breathe the air of the moderns”. Good grief! Makhmalbaf's film detonates this kind of nonsense in a second. We could never say whether he has discovered folk art through modern art, or vice versa. Primitive and modern become indivisible at the nitty-gritty level of the most basic language of cinema, representation and fiction. This entire film unfolds in a magical space. There is a magnificent classroom lesson concerning colour: the teacher points beyond the filmic frame, saying “Look at the blue of the sky”. There is a shot of a perfect blue sky, and his finger pointing, then his hand making as if to scoop up this hyper-real fragment of the world. Then the man is back in front of the blackboard, and he draws his hand back into frame, and it is covered in that pristine blue. He does this process in rapid succession for the green of the field, the yellow of the sun and so on, and even at another moment of the film, for the sheer blackness of death – death which is the absence of colour. I do not know whether this kind of scene is primitive or modern, but it is more moving and touching than any mere description can convey. There is another scene where this same teacher-figure finds the bride he has always searched for, singing like a canary by a spring. He must improvise a poem to win her. And part of his poem is this incantation: “I am weary, you are energy. I am weary, you are energy”. He gets the girl – and so he should, too. Not least because his poem embodies in a superb flash all the generative, transforming, exchanging processes going on at the heart, the soul of this film. I can vouch for this: if you are weary, Gabbeh is a film that will give you back a vital energy.
© Adrian Martin May 1997 |
