Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Part I The Life and Work of Sohrab Shahid Saless
- Part II Creative Exiles
- Part III The Stateless Moving Image
- Interview by Behrang Samsami (Journalist) with Bert Schmidt (Shahid Saless’s Cinematographer)
- Sohrab Shahid Saless’s Filmography
- A Film about Shahid Saless
- Index
3 - The Bl ind Owls of Modernity: Of Protocols, Mirrors and Grimaces in Sohrab Shahid Saless’s Films
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Part I The Life and Work of Sohrab Shahid Saless
- Part II Creative Exiles
- Part III The Stateless Moving Image
- Interview by Behrang Samsami (Journalist) with Bert Schmidt (Shahid Saless’s Cinematographer)
- Sohrab Shahid Saless’s Filmography
- A Film about Shahid Saless
- Index
Summary
Of what use are all the revolutions if people are
not capable of revolutionising themselves?
The Last Summer of Grabbe (1980)
HASHTI (ANTEROOM)
Let me begin by quoting a passage from Siegfried Kracauer's posthumously published book fragment, History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), a text in which he tackles the problem of subjectivity and the restriction to a single perspective in historical interpretation. For the author, the tiniest facts of history can be made accessible only through what he calls a ‘micro history’ of ‘close-ups’ (Kracauer 1995, 105), an approach he undoubtedly favours over the distortions of macro histories and their panoramic views, which oversee the details following a synthesising, subsumptive logic.
As I see it, the vast knowledge we possess should challenge us not to indulge inadequate syntheses but to concentrate on close-ups and from them casually to range over the whole […] This allegedly smallest historical unit itself is an inexhaustible macrocosm. (Kracauer 1995, 137).
This is not tantamount to an immersion in details until complete (self-) extinction. Rather, for Kracauer, this breaking down of macro entities into their smallest elements through close-ups entails a ‘minimum distance that must be upheld between the researcher and his material’ (Kracauer 1995, 86). The observer has to re-introduce the macrocosm into the microcosm:
‘This allegedly smallest historical unit itself is an inexhaustible macrocosm’ (Kracauer 1995, 116). But how is it possible for the stalker of close-ups to keep this minimal distance? According to Kracauer, he should penetrate the façade and materials of history with the eyes of an exile who resides in a ‘no-man's land’: that is, as a silent, emotionally detached observer, similar in this respect to the photographer who is excluded from the field of vision.
I am thinking of the exile who as an adult person has been forced to leave his country or has left it of his own free will […] his identity is bound to be in a state of flux; and the odds are that he will never fully belong to the community to which he now in a way belongs. (Nor will its members readily think of him as one of theirs.) In fact, he has ceased to ‘belong’. Where then does he live?
- Type
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- Information
- ReFocus: The Films of Sohrab Shahid-SalessExile, Displacement and the Stateless Moving Image, pp. 43 - 63Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020