What follows the bedroom scene, in This Is Not a Film, reiterates Panahi’s desperate attempt to denounce and reject cinema’s inherent manipulative processes, like a dog incessantly chasing its own tail. After leaving his bedroom with the camera, we see him making tea (an act that recurs in
Closed Curtain), feeding Igi (his daughter’s pet lizard) and talking to his
lawyer on the phone, again on speaker mode, as if he continued to be by himself in front of a camera rolling on its own. Then he suddenly stops, looks at the camera and announces that the time has come to ‘remove his cast’. This sudden break of the fourth wall reveals that Mirtahmasb is already there and in fact operating the camera, and that tea was actually being made to welcome him. As for ‘removing the cast’, the reference is to the character in the aforementioned early Panahi film, The Mirror, in which nine-year-old star Mina suddenly decides (or appears to decide) to abandon the shoot. She throws away the cast from around her arm, which was part of her character, changes into her normal clothes, leaves the bus in which they were shooting and sets out to find her way back home by herself on foot. The film then cuts to the extract of The Mirror where this happens, which is shown on Panahi’s TV set. As the camera turns back on him, Panahi confesses to his feeling that he had been pretending and lying in his own staging in his home, turning the self-denying effect of The Mirror into a specular mise-en-abyme.
As noted by Chéroux and Frodon (2016: 13), this kind of set up brings both the documentary and the fiction genres ‘into a crisis through an interrogation of the truths and lies of representation’, and they go on to describe this self-reflexive procedure as a genre pervading Iranian film history from its early days. But once again here Kiarostami is Panahi’s closest predecessor, with his foundational film, Close-Up, about a jobless man, Ali Sabzian, who tries to pass as the famous filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. This mockumentary, based on a real-life story and utilising the actual characters involved in it, is essentially about filmmakers as pretenders. Facts are enacted and reenacted with the semblance of happening there and then, but with plenty of real consequences to the lives of all involved; for example, Sabzian is actually acquitted in his trial, which was nonetheless staged for the sake of the camera in the real courtroom and including a real judge. Even Sabzian’s riveting encounter with the real Makhmalbaf was the object of a trick, for example, when both go on a motorbike ride and a sound loss occurs, ostensibly due to a malfunctioning mike, but in fact resulting from deliberate suppression in postproduction. This precedent,
coupled with Panahi’s history as Kiarostami’s assistant, suggests that a similar occurrence observed in The Mirror might also have been obtained in postproduction, namely when the crew following Mina, as she tries to find her way back home in Tehran, occasionally loses the signal of the mike attached to her clothes.
In a perspicacious study of Panahi’s first feature-length films The White
Balloon (Badkonade sefid, 1995) and The Mirror, James Kenward (2018), citing
Currie (1995) and Walton (2008), elaborates on how the metaphor of the mirror lies at the heart of debates on cinematic realism and transparency, which attribute to photography the power to present, as well as represent, reality. In the case of Panahi, the ‘mirror’ is posited as life imitating film, in that Mina, after giving up acting, does exactly what would be expected of her in the fictional section of the film, namely finding her way back home through a chaotic Tehran by herself, after her mother fails to pick her up at school. Kenward (2018) subscribes to the view that Mina’s sudden break with representation, in The Mirror, is entirely staged, drawing on Cardullo, who quotes Panahi as saying that he had been ‘toying with this idea all along, but did not commit to it until the first little girl he had cast actually did refuse to continue in her role and had to be replaced with Mina Mohammad-Khani’ (Cardullo 2003: 70). Although Cardullo fails to mention the name of this other little girl and the source of Panahi’s statement, I am equally inclined to believe in a considerable amount of staging in this celebrated and much discussed ‘spontaneous’ break of the fourth wall in
The Mirror, not least because it is captured, yet again, by the expedient of
a second, and apparently ‘unmanned’, camera that registers Mina’s sudden decision to leave the film. As Kenward (2018) has pointed out, the image produced by this second camera is more grainy and unstable, but this camera is also more mobile and adequate to follow the character around in her romp. However, no information is provided on who is behind this second camera and why it happens to be there and rolling. Granted, it is usual practice to have parallel crews in charge of making-ofs, alongside the main film crew, but the lack of information suggests that manipulation is being covered up. Nonetheless, the trick of the second camera didactically lays out to the spectator the self-denying mechanisms through which a film comes into being.
In short, we are dealing here with ‘a desire to put an end to art for its alienated and inauthentic character’, as Badiou has defined the avant-gardes’ ‘inaesthetics’, combined with the romantic conviction ‘that art must be re- born immediately […] as its own immediately legible truth’. Badiou criticises this schema as ‘saturated’ for its exhausted goal of debunking classicism.
However, in the case of Panahi’s non-cinema project, a truth procedure is verifiable not through the debunking of previous styles, but through the life- saving need for non-films to draw attention to the filmmaker’s endangered condition, which is undoubtedly real. Panahi’s conversation with his lawyer on the phone, in the film, reveals that a national and international exposure of his situation might help him to obtain a reduction of his penalties, a fact that explains the film’s very raison d’être and dependence on the real world and the viewers’ own humanity for its completion. Indeed, it is probably thanks to that exposure, achieved through the smuggling of the film out of Iran to the Cannes film festival (in a memory stick hidden in a cake, as the legend goes) that his jail sentence has not yet been carried out, given the outcry it would certainly unleash in Iran and abroad.
Context thus proves to be as important as text in non-cinema experiments such as this. This Is Not a Film requires the viewer to know the circumstances in which the film was made for its completion, thus extending its politics before and beyond the screen. This includes all his previous oeuvre as inseparable from the filmmaker’s life, hence the way Panahi presents Mina’s rebellion as comparable to the spontaneous acting of the non-professional lead in another of his films, Crimson Gold (Talayeh sorkh, 2003), and to the pillars encircling a female character at a bus station, reproducing the prison she has just escaped from in his The Circle (Dayereh, 2000), both of which are briefly shown on his TV set. Asserting auteurism as a continuous indexical trace cutting across his entire oeuvre, Panahi testifies to the impossibility of keeping the unpredictable contingent away from the camera frame even at its most manipulative moments.