Theater is more important than all political conflicts

Charso Press: According to the public relations of Iran Artists House, at the beginning of the meeting, Saeed Aqiqi said: The first thing that helps to understand and accept this model of film is to know contemporary history. In this model of film, there are two central traditions: the first is the opera tradition, which has a very, very important tradition in Germany and Italy. Opera is a combination of music and theater. The second is the theater tradition, which relies on almost all moments of the film. All the close-ups, people talking in front of the mirror and in solitude originate from here. The nature of the film belongs to the tradition of the show, which can be said to be completely unrelated to what we see in American cinema today. Orson Welles with “Citizen Kane” in America is one of those who brought this tradition to its peak and a sequence from the movie “Mephisto” is a reference to that sequence in the election conference hall in “Citizen Kane”. Its next reference is the story of a man whose goal in his youth was to defend workers and toilers, and more or less as he gets older, he becomes an arm of power; This is exactly what happens here, in the closed fascist society, while in Welles’ film it happens in the liberal society. It’s almost like the beginning of the path Hofogen takes in this movie. What is important in this film is that the film starts from the deconstructive tradition of Brecht’s theater and ends with non-contemporary and classical theaters such as Shakespeare and goes back. The more atypical you are in a closed society, the easier it is to deal with power, which is a very important point in this film. This movie is explaining that people start justifying the path they take in the direction of the photo based on their characteristics and traits. Hofogen explains all this rhetorically that the theater is more important than all political conflicts, while Mephisto is clearly the right hand of the devil. Like all closed societies, everyone in their youth, their motto is deconstruction, disrupting the existing order and creating a new plan, while based on the model they follow, we see generations who do not accept Ingmar Bergman in their youth and in middle age they have to find They are struggling to make a copy of the works of Bahman Mofid and Morteza Aghili. It is a very clear trend in our society that you can find that is the result of advertising. Also, this move towards power is not accidental at all. That people want to call something art and climb that ladder, how much this individual goal of theirs justifies all kinds of contradictions and nonsense sentences.

Aqiqi continued: One of my favorite scenes in the work is when he is explaining Hamlet, which means that no one has ever talked about Hamlet more nonsense than this. He says that Hamlet is dangerous for Germany, but at the same time, it is also anti-bourgeoisie. The gist of those sentences is that we want to perform Hamlet because we were told to perform it. The path he goes through is the same, and gradually, from a local theater in Hamburg, he becomes the director of the Proust Theater in Berlin and has become a part of this circle of Nazism.

He added: One of the important topics in this film is “the relationship between art and power”, which is also the subject of our discussion today. As the time of the film goes forward, the theater is going back, and in this way, it is explaining how much art can reinforce the retrogressive aspects of the society. In fact, the experience of people who are nostalgic for a reactionary period in every way, like the Nazis, have this idea of ​​cleaning everything and say that we don’t need the filth of the French and Italians, but we need a national art.

Aqighi stated: There is a sentence in the movie that one of the ways to suppress is to entertain. There is absolutely this point in closed societies. In these cases, Hamlet should be taught. Why doesn’t he choose Faust? For this, he chooses Mephisto because he is a deceiving element, and with this deceiving element, he first deceives himself, and when he succeeds in deceiving himself, there will be no stopping him. A stronger example of this is in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Continuum”, where these can also be found. There is a brilliant point in the lighting of “Mephisto” that everywhere the character goes, there is an unnatural spot light on him, and this light comes to a climax in the final scene when he says the dialogue: “I’m just an actor.” While practically in a society, there is no such thing as “I’m just…” and practically you have to do other things.

Saeed Aqiqi explained the “opera form” and related it to this work and said: “In the cinema, we have a term called “opera form” which is taken from the opera, in which they sing a piece in a few minutes, then the narration continues. . In the cinema, we have an American version that relies on the story, and the time of the scenes in it is a minimum of two minutes and a maximum of seven minutes for the key scene. In the “opera form” whose treasure is “Giuseppe Verdi” and has an impact on Italian films, there are large pieces, for example, one piece lasts thirty minutes. Therefore, films made with opera films have a running time of more than two hours, such as “Mephisto”. In Luciano Visconti’s films, there are scenes that last about 20 minutes, or the party scene in “Cheetah” where Burt Lancaster is an hour long. Francis Ford Coppola brought the same pattern in the movie “The Godfather”, which is the same wedding scene and is almost 22 minutes long, and introduces all the characters like “opera form”.

He added: It seems to the audience that there was no action in the first scene and only people were introduced, which is exactly the operatic formula. Francis Ford Coppola’s act as one of the best American directors revived the “operatic form” in America in a way that revived the gangster genre that was dying. He introduced a form of story-telling based on that Italian tradition that was widely used later. In some films, such as “Mephisto”, the operatic tradition goes back to the composition of the play in addition to the opera itself.

One of the audience said: Has art always been regressive when mixed with politics and power? This character has a key sentence that he says from his childhood memories: “When I was singing, I felt that my soprano voice was a special voice and everyone praised it. There, it was the most important moment of my life when I was disappointed.”

In his closing remarks, Saeed Aqiqi said with a reference to Farzad Motman’s “Shabhay Roshan” movie: 20 years have passed since the release of Farzad Motman’s “Shabhay Roshan” movie, for which I was the writer. What I want to say about the relationship between art and power is that it’s not just a movie for me because part of what I’ve been through for the last 20 years is to maintain my credibility by not working. After a while you come to the conclusion that you can’t do what you like and what you think is right. Many times people reach such a situation in life. The important thing is, what effect do you have on the lives of others during the course of your activity? When I meet some directors, they say that I don’t look at my films and I just make them. Therefore, I am very happy that I have not been an artist for the last 20 years because it all comes down to people’s choices. The dramatic values ​​of a character show themselves when there is a background to it, which, in my opinion, the character has, such as the memory he is telling. It is similar in Bertolucci’s “The Chaser” and the child’s encounter with that bodyguard. The second point is that this character says at the beginning of the movie in the cafe: “This director is old. We are the future.” Therefore, he is trying to reach his place at any cost.

He continued: When the audience sees Istvan Sabo’s films for the first time, they feel that some things are not fully explained. It stems from modernity, which really leaves some issues ambiguous. For example, the speech of the embassy or the execution does not show the main character. It shows the killing of the first one and the death of the second one. It also goes as far as the third kill. These triangles happen constantly in this movie. These geometrically ordered structures help you slowly get it in life because when the effect is more subtle and complex, you have to look at it a few times to find out. Such works will look much better the next time you watch them. This movie is one of the best examples for teaching character arc.

The implementation of this program was carried out by Saman Bayat.