Uprooted Tree

 

The image of an uprooted ancient tree always comes to mind when I think about the themes in my documentary on Iranian Jewish emigration as a result of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Over the years, I've searched online for images and videos of uprooted trees native to Iran, but haven’t come across anything suitable. The other day when I was walking with my friend Betsy on a path in the Lower Galilee, she pointed out an uprooted olive tree. I decided to go back and film it. One technical difficulty I had was focusing in the bright sunlight. Here are 5 short clips. I may weave brief segments from them into the film.

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Documentary Visualization

As a visualization strategy for my Iran Documentary--in an attempt to move away from a traditional documentary format--I organized photographs, newspapers and other items on a clothesline and filmed it. This will likely serve as a thread going through the film to give it a unique style.

Iranian Doc Semester Summary: Influences and Process

June 1, 2014

                                          

My work is focused on my documentary about Jewish women’s experiences emigrating from Iran as a result of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Video artist Dana Levy suggested I shift from writing out the story to constructing it using interview material. This involved sifting through hours of interview footage that I’ve collected to date, conducting and filming additional interviews, and thinking through, researching and filming visuals to effectively tell the story. This will ultimately be expanded into a feature length documentary. Starting small, I built a 5-minute segment, which Dana called the spine of my film. Constructing this simplified segment helped me understand the cutting process, but this was no easy task as it involved recutting several times to evoke tension and emotion. My interest in investigating the experiences of these Iranian Jewish women stems from my curiosity and unanswered questions about my Turkish paternal grandmother’s experience living in and emigrating from Smyrna in 1920, moving to Paris for one year, and finally settling in Montreal.

Women’s voices tell this story, which includes themes of domesticity, displacement, and cultural preservation. Through my readings, film screenings, and work with Dana this semester, I have begun to appreciate visual art that involves thoughtful conceptualization and presents multi-layered ideas in intelligent ways. In their catalogue Global Feminisms, Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin present broad, inclusive re-definitions of “feminism” and examples of feminist work with themes of domesticity, displacement, and political activism that resonate for my work and personal life. For example, Polish artist Elzbieta Jablonska, featured in the catalogue, bases her work on the rituals of everyday life like preparing a family meal, the nurturing experiences of motherhood, and her acceptance of the expectation that women should uphold traditional domestic ways. One layer of my film will be about women today who perpetuate culture and tradition through the preparation of food and other domestic arts. Another will show how women often wear more than one hat as both professionals and nurturing mothers or caretakers.

            The exhibition and catalogue She Who Tells a Story also stimulated my thought processes. Juxtapositions by several artists in their mise-en-scenes catalyzed my thinking about how to better deliver my messages and use this tool in my filmmaking. For example, in her Qajar series (1998), Iranian Shadi Ghadirian poses veiled women against a painted backdrop from the Qajar era (1786-1925) with a modern object, like a boom box or Pepsi can, which were either forbidden or restricted in 1998. These juxtapositions suggest the tensions between tradition and modernity, restriction and freedom, and public and private in Iranian society-- all of which are themes in my documentary. Further, Shirin Neshat’s dual format—video art and narrative film—in her work Women Without Men (2009), can be applied to my work. Following her lead, I may choose to also do a video installation that would focus on several of the characters. Rather than have all the information unfold as in a documentary format, viewers would have to make their own connections and draw their own conclusions by moving in and out of the installation space.

I’ve also been wrestling with what it means to craft truth in documentary storytelling and the ethical and moral implications of accurately or inaccurately depicting truth. In their book Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning, Louse Spence and Vinicius Navarro discuss Ruth Ozeki’s 1995 film Halving the Bones, where she resorted to falsifications and fabrications to tell her story about three generations of women in her family. I question whether I should I fill in the major gaps in my grandmother’s story by creatively imagining what she went through. What are the implications of fabricating in art and filmmaking? The Canadian documentary filmmaker Allan King once said about what’s “really real” in his films: “What the hell does that mean? Either the film means something to you, or it doesn’t.”

Crafting Truth also stimulated my thinking on how to creatively present the information and visuals in my documentary work. For example, Chantal Akerman’s film News from Home (1976) includes shots of locations in New York City to depict overarching themes of displacement and being away from home. In Nobody’s Business (1996), documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner uses symbolic displacement by showing the image of a house falling off its foundation when his father discusses his divorce from his mother.

Through research and video experimentation, I am building on interview material and visuals, which I began collecting in 2008 as a novice student filmmaker, to tell a creative and engaging story about Iranian Jewish women’s resilience, endurance, and strength in the face of great challenges and adversity.

Four Minute Cuts

I’m narrowing the subject matter of my documentary on Iranian emigration as a result of the Islamic Revolution. It will now be focused on the women’s experiences, and will include many different women’s voices telling the story of before, during and after the Revolution. I’ve been challenged to tell a good story by sifting through my interview footage. My task for the month of April was to lay down interview clips on a timeline to start shaping the storyline. The visuals will come later. To simplify this task, I broke down the material into many different themes.

This task helped reacquaint me with my footage, but by the end of the month, I felt overwhelmed by all the material! So when I met with Dana in May, we spent the time editing and used several useful clips from the first iteration of my documentary that I did in 2008 for my final project at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. Since our meeting, I’ve cut a sequence with a story arc from 10 minutes down to 7 minutes and finally down to 4 minutes. According to Dana this will be the spine of my film. Dana has given me suggestions along the way of how to better shape the story. Here some examples:

·      If one person mentions something it’s enough--it doesn't need to be repeated. 

·      Think about this as trying to tell a story with as little words as possible.

·      Let characters begin and end their sentences and breathe a bit before cutting to the next shot. It makes it look more natural and less like you’re forcing them to construct your story.

·      Let the tension build up, starting with the good life in Iran. It’s important to emphasize the good life so that the change will seem drastic. 

·      It’s better not to jump back and forth between characters when talking about the same time period. 

Here are a few production stills of the characters I’m including:

Before the Revolution, Movie Review

At a time when Israel experiences a persistent threat from Iran’s nuclear capabilities and its subversive presence in the bordering countries of Syria and Lebanon, Director Dan Shadur, in his documentary Before the Revolution, tells the story about Israel's economic and political presence in Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This ex-patriot community enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle and close relations with the Shah’s regime, built on weapon sales in exchange for oil and construction contracts, among other things. Through the film’s unique angle, the viewer not only learns about the utopian-like lifestyle of Israeli families living in Iran in the ‘60s and 70s, but the ever increasing discontent among the Iranian people which led to the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic Revolution.

Dan Shadur tells the story through the use of a rich collection of home movies, archival footage and interviews, with diplomats, Mossad agents, businessmen and their families. The Islamic Revolution encroaches on them unexpectedly turning their paradise into horror and shattering their dreams of continued wealth and opulent lifestyle. The director is personally invested in this story because his family was a part of this experience and he uses excerpts from family letters and his home movies in the film.

I took Sharona and Cyrus, two individuals in my Iran documentary, to the film. For them it was a nostalgic experience; they liked seeing the sights of Teheran, like the Shahyad Monument, close to where their aunt lived, and hearing David Menashri, a professor at Tel Aviv University, discuss Persian poetry that explains how Persians are different from Arabs. Shadur’s film did not weave in the experience of Iranian Jews at the time, and I wondered if there was any intersection between the two communities. I was disappointed that the National Center for Jewish Film did not reach out to the Iranian Jewish community in the Greater Boston area; we realized that Sharona and Cyrus were the only representatives in the audience.

I hope to have the opportunity to see the film again, so I can learn from and gain a deeper understanding of the filmmaking apparatuses Dan Shadur used to tell this story. He used 4 by 3 home movies and archival footage and seamlessly blended these with the 16 by 9 interview footage. At times he did use jump cuts in the interviews, but this didn’t affect the flow or quality of the film. Many of his interviews were artfully done with a shallow depth of field. The story arc was well-conceived and led to a dramatic crescendo as the discontent in Iran increased and Israelis found themselves in a vulnerable and unsafe situation. The film stirred a balance of emotions in the viewers: a few of the anecdotes were humorous and generated laughter while others were riveting and had the audience on the edge of their seats.

While this film does approach the history of the period from a unique perspective, this is a worthwhile film for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Having a little fun with video

As I develop the story for my Iran documentary, I can't help but think visually about film clips that might be useful. I shot this footage last month when I was baking hamantashen--triangular-shaped, filled cookies, eaten during the Jewish holiday of Purim. The holiday commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman's plot to annihilate them, and the story is recorded in the Book of Esther.  In Yiddish, these cookies are called "hamantashen," meaning "Haman's pockets," and in Hebrew, they're called "oznei Haman," meaning "Haman's ears."

Making hamantashen and the story of Purim are important for my documentary in a few ways. One of the memories I have of my Turkish grandmother, a character in my film, is going over to her house as a teenager to learn how to make hamantashen. (Years later, when I started making them for my family, my father instructed me on how to pinch the dough so the hamantashen would hold their shape.) The Book of Esther takes place in Persia and the tombs of Mordecai and Esther, important characters in the story, are in Hamadan, Iran. Many Iranian Jews have made pilgrimages there over the years. The characters in my film are heroines like Esther in that they overcame hardship in order to perpetuate their culture, religion and peoplehood.

As incoming students to LUCAD during the June 2013 residency, Judith Barry described an ideal studio space that includes a "play" area, where we should have fun with our medium.  I had a lot of fun with this exercise as I was editing and listening to the song I included. A word about the music: I went to an elementary school founded by Yiddishists and one of the songs I remember learning was the one featured in this clip,  called "Hop Meine Hamantashen," a humorous ballad about a woman named Yachne Dvoshe and her attempt to make hamantashen. This particular version is sung by Abby Rosenblatt. Here are the translated lyrics:

Yachne-Dvoshe's in a dither
Packing for the market-place,
She is off to buy flour
For to bake the Purim cakes

Chorus:
Ho, my hamantashen
Ho, my white delight,
Ho, my hamantashen

Didn't come out quite right.
It's raining and it's snowing,
And the roofs are dripping,
Yachne's bringing corn meal home
In a bag that's ripping.

She bought no honey, no poppy seed,
And quite forgot the yeast,
But Yachne's making hamantashen
They're in the oven at least.

Yachne's carrying her Purim gift
To her mother-in-law,
Two or three hamantashen
Half-burned and half-raw.

Meeting with Dana Levy, 3-25-14

I had another productive meeting with Dana. My Iran documentary is taking shape. The film will be about women who emigrate from Middle Eastern Countries to the West, and how the traditions and skills they bring with them are an important part of culture and history. My next assignment is to streamline the Mizrahi family’s story, put it on a timeline using interview material, and intersperse it with sparse voiceover about my grandmother’s story. Dana explained that visually I should think in terms of texture. We looked at digitized photographs that I have of Iran in the 70s, and she showed me how textures from two different photographs can blend together using dissolves. Textures and smells are an important part of this film. Dana also recommended I see the documentary film Before the Revolution, a new film by Dan Shadur and Barak Heymann, about Israelis living in Teheran in the 60’s and 70’s who enjoyed a special relationship with the Shah until their world collapsed with the onset of the Revolution. Fortunately, it’s playing at the MFA in May. And one more thing--I’m building a pulley clothesline.  To be continued . . .