Sohrab Shahid Saless - Tabiate bijan (1974)

Persa/Persian | Subs: Castellano .srt .English Hardsubs

  90 min | Xivx 512x336 | 891 kb/s | 92 kb/s Mp3 | 25 fps 640 MB

El encargado de la estación de ferrocarril de una zona remota que vive en una habitación individual junto con su esposa tejedora de alfombras es obligado a jubilarse, y cuando se entera de ello, es prácticamente su sentencia de muerte,ya que incluso empleados a tiempo completo, él y su esposa apenas pueden sobrevivir...

An aging rail worker, living a mononously quiet life with his wife, is asked to retire. The second of the two austere-looking, deliberately paced films Shaheed Saless made in Iran proved to be one of the turning points of Iranian cinema in the 70s.Winner of numerous prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in 1974, including the Silver Bear for Best Director, STILL LIFE examines the lot in life of an old man who guards a railroad crossing and his wife, who brings in a meager income weaving carpets. After 30 years in the same job, the man is forced into retirement by the arrival of the new guard. Finally, he is forced to a bleak epiphany of society's indifference to his fate.

Sohrab Shahid Saless' Still Life (1974) is, barring Kiarostami's Homework (1989), the greatest Iranian film that I've seen. To see that even during the pre-revolution era, when the escapist cinema of Hollywood and its imitations were much more popular, such uncompromising and quality films were being made is both surprising and hope-instilling. Typically European in its form but uniquely Iranian in its content, Still Life is the kind of movie that contemporary contemplative cinema takes off from. Produced by a newly formed group called Kanun-e Sinemagaran-e Pishro (Centre for Avant-Garde Filmmakers), that also produced some of Mehrjui's early features, the film was one of the many films that were discontented with the existing way of governance. Although never overtly political, Still Life not only manages to critique deeply the disparity that existed between villages and cities of the country during the Shah's regime, but also remains one of the best works from the country till date.

What is singular about Still Life is the way it handles cinematic time. Saless, while letting us witness individual scenes unfold in real time – be it entire dinner sessions or railway transitions – without hindrance, shuffles the order of these scenes in a way that disregards chronology. In one scene in the film we see the couple's son return home and in the next one, he is missing. And then he's back in the subsequent one. Soon one notices that most of the scenes could have taken place in any arbitrary order in real time and each of those orders is essentially irrelevant, given the idea of the film. What's the use of chronology when time repeats itself by going in cycles? In Jeanne Dielman (1976), Chantal Akerman used each day of the protagonist life's to illustrate its microscopic deviation from the previous. She seemed to be essentially constructing a spiral out of Jeanne's life – a structure that made her life seem to go in circles but which, in actuality, ends only in annihilation. Saless, on the other hand, treats time as some form of stray deadlock that could only be resolved by an alien intervention. Within this loop, all time is one and each day is virtually indistinguishable from the other.

Even with all its serious themes, Still Life isn't entirely humourless. There is a constant undercurrent of dark comedy throughout the film (In a masterstroke of black humour, Saless has Sardari regularly tune the alarm clock!), but, like all the other elements of the film, it remains extremely subtle and never thrusts itself upon us. Instead, Saless builds one stretch of time upon another, elevating the film from the territory of mere narrative cinema to the realm of the philosophical, the experiential and the contemplative. In the shattering last scene of the film, we see Sardari, who is now forced to accept the reality that he can no longer work at the railway crossing, vacating his quarters. After he loads the cart with his possessions, he decides to check the house one last time for any object he may have forgotten. As he stands in the middle of the now-empty house, gazing at the room of whose inanimate furniture he had become a part of through the years, Sardari notices the final remnant of his life at this place – a piece of mirror hanging on the wall. He reaches out to collect it and, in the process, looks at himself for the first time in the film. Mohammad Sardari has indeed become old. (IMDB)

Tabiate bijan, "Naturaleza muerta", es una reflexión profunda y desgarrada del sentido de la vida del ser humano, y concretamente de Mohamad y su mujer. Él está encargado de una remota estación de ferrocarriles y vive con su mujer en una pequeña casa con una sola habitación. Esto ha sido así por alrededor de 33 años. La naturaleza muerta (o Bodegón) es una obra de arte que retrata objetos inanimados, sean de origen animal, vegetal, o artificiales, y he ahí la columna de la película, el director nos posiciona al matrimonio de ancianos al mismo nivel de los objetos inanimados, con lo cual claramente refiere a que ellos ya han dejado de vivir, de obrar como seres humanos y no son muy distintos a una silla, una mesa o un jarrón con agua. La construcción del escenario principal, la casa del matrimonio, está perfectamente diseñada y proporcionada como un tipico cuadro de tipo Bodegón, y sobre aquel lienzo discurre la "vida" de los personajes.

Tabiate bijan es además una película muy moderna, en aquellos años Sohrab Shahid Saless pertenecía a un grupo de vanguardia artística y aplicó varios postulados experimentales a la película. A destacar la filmación de escenas en tiempo real, como la llegada de los trenes, cuando el viejo lía cigarros o toma té, entre otras. El montaje tiene escenas que pueden llegar a parecer que existen incoherencias de guión, pero en realidad él está rompiendo un asunto de fondo, el concepto de tiempo en el filme, de ahí que una escena puede haber ocurrido otras veces en diferente sentido, incluso un diálogo repetido es acallado por el sonido de un reloj que marca el tiempo. Además la inexpresión de los personajes, la repetición de la rutina hasta el absurdo, el microcosmos asfixiante, la hacen una evidente precursora de El caballo de Turín, y con más de treinta años de antelación.

La dejo recomendada, es una película muy lenta, pero de una belleza y valor inconmensurables, millones de gracias a eurídice, y que disfruten de la película.

Subtítulos en castellano cortesía de eurídice

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