Speak, Memory: Recreating History in A Moment of Innocence

Note: Blame D. A. Hollingsworth for making me post this boring college essay that I half-assed this morning 

As a young man Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (along with a few friends) attacked a policeman to try and get his gun. The attempt ended in disaster. After stabbing the policeman Makhmalbaf and his friends were unable to wrest away his gun. In the ensuing chaos Makhmalbaf was shot and detained. He served a five-year sentence in prison for the crime and was eventually freed when the 1979 Iranian revolution brought the Islamic regime to power. Years later Makhmalbaf was reacquainted with the policeman involved and decided to make a movie about the incident. The result is 1996’s A Moment of Innocence, a movie that tries to recreate this moment of personal history but quickly devolves into a playful examination of memory, identity, change and representation. The film follows Makhmalbaf, the policeman and the actors chosen to represent their younger selves as they attempt to get at the slippery “truth” of that day. The effort culminates in the final scene[1] where all the agents are finally brought together in the re-enactment.

The significance of this scene is two-fold. First, it is important simply because it is the ending. As Peter Brooks puts it: “[speaking on Sartre in Les Mots] He began to live his life retrospectively, in terms of the death that alone would confer meaning and necessity on existence… All narration is obituary in that life acquires definable meaning only at, and through, death… the end is recognition which retrospectively illuminates beginning and middle…”[2] Or, to put it in more simple narrative terms that directly relates to movies: “THE ENDING IS THE CONCEIT.”[3] In this way the ending allows us to hone and reconsider the events leading up to it and influences our reading and understanding of the film.

The second reason for the scene’s significance is that the scene, as filmed, is what the film has, ostensibly, been trying to do. It is the final result of an attempt to capture the incident on film. And, in keeping with the film’s flirtation with reflexive questions of truth and how “truth” can be depicted in cinema, the retelling isn’t straightforward. Instead the scene emerges as a sudden moment of spontaneity where parts that are supposed to fit easily into a re-enactment of history suddenly break away from the confines of the “truth” to create something new and unusual – a moment of innocence, as the film’s English title suggests. Of course, in this age of skeptical media consumption, we assume that what is captured on film is the intentional result of the movie’s writers and directors and not a “real” incident that transpired. After all, without the consent of the filmmakers that scene would not be exist in the form that it does. The movie is genuinely aware of the artificiality of this supposed re-enactment and actively plays into the reading of the scene as fictional. In the film this is reflected by a shift in the movie’s tone in the final scene to one that seems equally inspired by the French New Wave and (surprisingly) Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns.

The French New Wave is a rather simple and easy touchstone for any work of art cinema, regardless of national boundaries. Some of this is the fault of historical circumstance. The French New Wave was the most notable cinematic movement in the West to use film techniques that could be replicated on lower budgets with cheap equipment. French New Wave movies often used handheld camerawork, location shooting, playful formal trickery and a way of filmmaking that emphasized cinema’s ability to create texts similar to essays. Many of these elements are also common to much of Iranian art cinema and are, likewise, present throughout most of A Moment of Innocence. What is, perhaps, different about the Iranian cinema’s use of these ideas is the ways in which these ideas have often been adapted to foreground questions of truth and authenticity. While Brechtian film techniques – stylistic choices that would make us aware of the artificial construction of the movie’s sound and image – are common to many French New Wave films they are largely absent from many Iranian art films. The reason for this seems to be the ambiguity between truth and fiction that seems such an important thematic concern for many directors of the Iranian new wave such as Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up, Ten, Certified Copy, Shirin), Jafar Panahi (Taxi, This is Not a Film, The White Balloon) and Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple). The use of Brechtian elements in these films would call attention to the artifice of the productions, detracting from their power as texts of ambiguous “truth”. In the final scene of A Moment of Innocence, however, Makhmalbaf embraces this technique in both overt and subtle ways. Of the subtler cues the most obvious is the score. For most of the film scenes have largely played out in silence, lending the proceedings a slight air of realism. After all, three decades of Steven Spielberg and John Williams’s domination of the international box office has taught audiences to be wary of the manipulative tendency of film music. The final scene, however, is all ominous chanting and percussion with the dramatic bleat of horns underscoring the close-up of the bread hiding the knife[4][5] and the occasional flute shriek to heighten the tension. On the more overt side of the equation is the freeze-frame that ends the film which cannot help but remind us of the most infamous freeze-frame in history – the final shot of The 400 Blows, one of the quintessential films of the French New Wave.

But the final scene’s cinematic reference (another hallmark of the French New Wave) is as much Clint Eastwood as Truffaut. The scene plays out a bit like the climax of a Western - A long, stretch of (mostly) empty road where the three characters meet for their final showdown, with one of them nervously caressing his gun. The specific influence, however, seems to be the infamous Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. From Ennio Morricone’s music comes the score’s chanting opening (the vocals of Morricone’s L'estasi dell'Oro) , the nervous percussion (Il Triello , by the same composer) and the romantic theme that plays over the credits. The music also seems to share a mite of its DNA Sato Masaru’s score for Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the film that was re-made into A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood’s first Leone Western. The visual cues from Leone are also evident in the shot selection – close-ups and inserts – that lead up to the show down. The editing cross-cuts between close-ups of the actors’ faces, the gun and the bread hiding the knife in much the same way as the finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. 

Why would Makhmalbaf and company choose a Spaghetti Western as their reference point? It has to do with the genre’s particular relation to ideas of truth. Even by the standards of the Western (a dubiously historic genre if there ever was one) the Spaghetti Westerns are decidedly non-realistic. Leone, arguably the most important of the Spaghetti Western filmmakers, made films on broad, giant canvases that emphasize the size and scope of their images. His close-ups are extreme, focusing on such tiny details as a drop of sweat falling across the forehead set against the vast flat background of the desert. They are mythical. Giant (and obvious) fictions. The movies don’t just reject reality, they embrace their artificiality to heighten their drama. When the style of those movies is applied to something as small, personal and “realistic” as A Moment of Innocence the artificial nature of the re-enactment’s construction is brought into even sharper contrast. This allows the final moment of the “draw”, when one boy holds out a flower and the other a piece of bread, to read as a decidedly authentic gesture. In that moment the young actor playing the policeman rejects the historical truth and the desires of the man he portrays to create a new ending to the incident, one that he feels to be “right”.

So let us return once more to the question of the ending as the conceit. As the movie’s last word on the topic the ending carries a particularly heavy burden in the act of interpretation. Thus the “moment of innocence” in which the actor playing the young policeman rejects the “truth” to create a different fiction allows us a wealth of interpretive possibilities. One possible reading is that the ending directly confronts the subjectivity nature of history. Throughout the film the policeman has taught his younger counterpart how to “be” himself. For the purpose of authenticity he tells the boy a story about why the day was important to him. On the day that he was stabbed the policeman had hoped to profess his love to the girl who would ask him for the time every day. He had tried to present her with a flower as a symbol of his love several times, but had been too nervous to do so. To the policeman the day’s story is one where he loses an opportunity at love when Makhmalbaf attacks him and he never sees the girl again. To emphasize this aspect in the film the policeman buys a flower and makes the young actor practice chickening out of giving the girl the flower. Later on, when the policeman realizes that the girl had been a friend of Makhmalbaf’s who was a part of the attack, he storms off and asks the young actor to “shoot” the girl in the film when she asks for the time. He seems to believe that erasing his humiliation of the event with a reflection of his anger at the betrayal would allow him to achieve some form of peace or justice. However, the young actor – the chosen vessel of his revenge – also has a perspective on the events and he struggles with this and his loyalty to the policeman in that final scene. Eventually he decides that instead of following the historical re-creation or the policeman’s revisionist slant that he would change the story by doing what the policeman could never do – offer the girl the flower. In this way, through the perspective of the policeman the movie expresses the depth of subjectivity present in most attempts to depict history. The desire of the young actor to change history, in a way that rejects the real occurrence and the policeman’s revisionist take thus emphasizes the difficulty of arriving at historical “truth” through recreation and asks the question whether that “truth” is worth preserving and reproducing.

In an interview for Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present and Future says “…it is impossible to arrive at description, since description can only apply to what which is dead – when the subject is living and ever changing, how can we define its limits? ”. The ending of A Moment of Innocence seems like an explication on this point. In attempting to describe the incident through mere re-enactment the Makhmalbaf of the movie proves incredibly naïve. Because the incident involved people who remember it through their limited perspective and the re-enactment involves actors who interpret the incident through their experiences the historical cannot be adequately “described”. In this way the incident remains a living, changing entity that proves impossible to pin down and though the movie tries it never quite gets there. Then again, that’s all on purpose.