42 The Nation. October 7, 2013 four symphonies in him. A part of him had he told Goodman, “is just one little stupid 1958. He’d been listening to the Juilliard always felt that jazz had been a detour, and an language hanging out there as a sign of unfair String Quartet’s recording of Bartok, marvel- imposed one at that. Although he had done employment. Jazz means ‘nigger.’” ing at how they could “transform in a second more than anyone other than Ellington and “My identity is mixed together with a listener’s soul and make it throb with love Monk to set jazz on an equal footing with Beethoven, Bach and Brahms,” he told Sue; and beauty—just by following the scratches European art music, jazz was the music that it pained him somewhat to be described as of a pen on a scroll.” It reminded him of his he’d been forced to play when the doors to a jazz musician. In Beneath the Underdog, he “original goal,” he said, but “a thing called the concert hall were shut: even the word reprinted a touching letter he wrote from ‘jazz’” took him far off his path, and he didn’t reminded him of that original exclusion. Jazz, Bellevue mental hospital to Nat Hentoff in know if he’d ever get back. n FABIEN DANY/WWW.FABIENDANY.COM FABIEN Mohsen Makhmalbaf during the Vesoul International Asian Cinema Festival, 2009 Salaam Cinema by ADINA HOFFMAN n Jerusalem these days, reality seems day I invite all of you to Iran!” The whistling for a democratic Iran, and political exile to be breaking through reality. It’s the lifts to tea-kettle pitch as the crowd rises to from his homeland has come to Jewish West cultural equivalent of a sonic boom: “I its feet and he bows, palms pressed together, Jerusalem—that is, Israel. A guest of the thir- love you!” A hailstorm of applause show- Namaste-style, then prostrates himself— tieth Jerusalem International Film Festival, ers the slight man in black, who has just possibly he’s joking, but maybe he’s not—and which in July screened his newest movie, The Ibounded down the theater aisle and leapt promptly springs back up to the microphone, Gardener, as well as a selection of his earlier onto the stage like a game show host or a declaring in his lilting, Persian-tinted Eng- work, Makhmalbaf was also in town to accept mega-church preacher. “Let’s have a hope lish, “I don’t know what to say after seeing a special award from the festival, “In the Spirit for peace between Israel and Iran!” The clap- your reaction, but I love you, I love you, I of Freedom.” He may be the first director ping grows still louder. “I have a dream one love you!” from the Islamic Republic to have visited the The great Iranian film director Mohsen Jewish state; he is certainly the first to have Adina Hoffman’s books include My Happiness Makhmalbaf has come to Jerusalem. The made a movie in this country. (Ostensibly a Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s former Islamic militant and death-row pris- documentary meditation on Bahaism, The Life in the Palestinian Century. oner under the shah, current secular activist Gardener was shot in Israel with a few digital October 7, 2013 The Nation. 43 cameras by Makhmalbaf and his son May- entertainment compound featuring chic res- has, in addition, cut East Jerusalem off from sam.) There is no doubt that he is the first to taurants, an airy gallery, and a pretty, land- the West Bank, rendering this once-thriving stand before a large crowd of Israelis and grin scaped foot and bike path that runs, High urban hub of Palestinian life little more than beatifically as he professes his love for each Line–style, along the old tracks. Mahaneh a demoralized and demoralizing backwater. and every one of them. Yehudah, the outdoor market, is booming. This is no doubt one of the main reasons It’s hard to believe that he has come, but Alongside the well-established vegetable and why so many Palestinians have decided this the unreality of his arrival seems somehow spice stands, funky bars and trendy cafés have summer to go west to eat ice cream and shop fitting, since most of Makhmalbaf’s movies popped up; the place is teeming with locals in pop-music-blasting Jewish shoe stores. are playfully serious (or seriously playful) and tourists, old ladies dragging shopping It’s a chance to pass through the looking meditations on actuality and illusion. Earlier carts and young hipsters taking drags from glass that this city often is and spend just a in the day, he said that in being here, he was their hand-rolled cigarettes. few day-tripping hours on the cleaner, more happy to have “land[ed] on [the] moon,” and Palestinians, too, mingle easily in this mix, prosperous side of town. from my seat in a packed auditorium at the in large part because of the municipal light Systematically neglected by the munici- Jerusalem Cinematheque, surrounded by a rail, which has been running for two years pality and battered by the larger political and mostly Jewish audience, it feels as though now. For almost a decade, the construction of economic situation, East Jerusalem is home we’ve all just taken a collective leap onto the rail line and its protracted delays threat- to 39 percent of the city’s total population, a mysterious but alluring extraterrestrial ened to destroy already depressed downtown though its people receive only a small fraction landscape—a tranquil, reflected image of the West Jerusalem by rendering it a dusty, nearly of the city’s resources. West Jerusalem has tense Middle East we actually live in. Lest we impassible building site. Now, winding like forty-two post offices, East Jerusalem, nine; forget: the day after the festival ended, Prime some great electric eel down Jaffa Road, the the West boasts seventy-seven municipal pre- Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on rail line cuts a sleek, silvery figure that, in the schools, the East has ten; eighteen welfare CBS’s Face the Nation, looking like the Grim gritty context of Jerusalem, appears almost offices function in West Jerusalem, while the Reaper in a businessman’s blue tie and warn- fantastical. The gentle tolling of the train’s bell whole of the East counts three. Since 1967, ing that he “won’t wait until it’s too late” to adds to that enchanted feel—as does the ut- a third of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem take military action against Iran because “all terly mixed population riding the train itself. has been expropriated. According to Israel’s the problems that we have…will be dwarfed Twelve years ago, at the height of the National Insurance Institute, the poverty rate by this messianic, apocalyptic, extreme re- second intifada, when suicide bombers were among the city’s Palestinians is 79.5 percent. gime that would have atomic bombs.” blowing themselves up with scary regular- Of East Jerusalem’s children, 85 percent live For all the grandstanding of Makhmalbaf’s ity in the middle of downtown and the very below the poverty line. (The percentage of Jerusalem charm offensive, he does have a way presence of a Palestinian on an Israeli bus poor Jewish Jerusalemites is 29.5 percent.) of cutting through the notorious “difficulty” was enough to make most of the Jewish The numbers are at once shameful, slightly of Middle Eastern diplomacy, to say nothing riders squirm, it would have been next to numbing and somehow too banal to register of the hatemongering and saber-rattling that impossible to imagine the scene on the light with most of the world at large, though this attend it. “I love you!” he insists in the sim- rail this summer: ultra-Orthodox women is the way a viable Palestinian Jerusalem ends: plest, most unwavering terms. “I love you!” in wigs and Muslim women with their hi- not with a bang but a bureaucratic whimper. Or is such simplicity itself—in this jabs, miniskirted Jewish teenagers and young Not one to be swayed by such sad sta- pathologically gnarled context—the most Palestinian men in jeans not only sitting tistics, Israel’s public security minister must slyly sophisticated sort of complication? and standing calmly side by side, but often have felt it his duty to protect the people of Like his movies, his presence here sends one packed together without panic as the train Israel from the existential threat posed by a wandering down a fascinating, disarming glides its way from stop to stop. They rarely children’s puppet festival that was scheduled hall of mirrors. exchange a word, but there they are, shoul- to open at the Palestinian national theater in der to shoulder, in the air-conditioned slither East Jerusalem on June 22. Claiming without hese are strange days in Jerusalem. toward de facto “unification” of the city. proof that the festival was being sponsored On the eve of the month of Rama- Each station is announced in Hebrew, Arabic by the Palestinian Authority, in violation of dan and at the height of summer and English, which in any other town might the Oslo Accords, the minister banned it vacation—as, nearby, Egypt seethes seem an ordinary nod to the linguistic needs and ordered the theater shuttered for eight and Syria smolders—the city is both of the various people using the train. But in days and its director summoned for question- moreT bustling and more bewildering than traumatized, sectarian Jerusalem, the co- ing by the Shin Bet. Protests by Palestinian ever, and Makhmalbaf’s unlikely appearance existence of these languages, as of the riders and international organizations did no good, only underscores the confusing nature of themselves, is startling for its sheer normalcy. and a solidarity campaign by various Israeli this Middle Eastern cultural moment. If things seem better in the old-new city of puppeteers—including no less than Elmo In the upscale Jewish neighborhoods on Jerusalem, it’s in part because they’re worse. from the local version of Sesame Street— the western side of town, things are look- Israel technically annexed East Jerusalem proved useless. The theater remained closed, ing surprisingly swank. Petunias have been after the 1967 war, but it has taken some four and the impoverished kids of East Jerusalem planted en masse in the municipal parks. and a half decades to create the infrastructural were left to entertain themselves in the heat. A hundred new street cleaners have been facts on the ground that make the occupation Back in West Jerusalem, hawkish high- enlisted by city hall to sweep up after the such a concrete and humdrum state of affairs. tech entrepreneur Mayor Nir Barkat hordes crowding the pedestrian malls. The The light rail is just one example, erasing as decided that what the people of his city Ottoman-era train station—derelict for it does the border between the Jewish and really needed this summer was a $4.5 million decades—has been tastefully refurbished Arab sides of town. In the last ten years or Formula One race car exhibition. Blocking and has just opened its doors as an elegant so, the notorious wall or “separation barrier” off traffic on the city’s main thoroughfares 44 The Nation. October 7, 2013

nearly a decade at the job. Here was a director—and writer, pro- ducer, editor, performer and sometimes cameraman—working with the most minimal of technical means, and often with nonactors and half-improvised dialogue, in the fresh- est and most surprising fashion. His movies seemed to strip the cinema back to its vital es- sence: no pyrotechnic special effects, no out- sized crew, no corn-starchy, plot-thickening additives or amped-up soundtracks. Instead, they spilled with a remarkably sophisticated sense of dramatic freedom, social conscious- ness, visual depth, humor, moral resonance and human possibility. His films have some- thing of the spare, true-to-life quality and political urgency of those by the Italian Neo- realists, but the cultural wellsprings that flow into Makhmalbaf’s movies are completely different, blending as they do elements of Sufi poetry, Persian and Arabic storytelling tech-

MAKHMALBAF.COM niques, and the symmetries and vibrancies of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Gardener (2012) Persian miniature painting. for several days, the mayor, a self-declared Sheikh Jarrah, where families are literally They’re defined as well by their constantly “motor sports fan and racer,” arranged for a being thrown out into the street. That’s amore. self-questioning nature. Makhmalbaf’s mov- flashy parade of Ferraris, Audis and Grand The mayor is a busy man. In late May, he ies seem to anticipate their own critique, or Prix motorcycles to vroom past the old city squeezed in a trip to Los Angeles, where he to suggest various theses and antitheses to walls in the rather mind-bogglingly named attended a reception hosted in his honor by which viewers are welcome to bring their Peace Road Show. It is, declared the mayor the evangelical birther Pat Boone, who long own syntheses. As a critic, I found this highly in his American-sounding English, “great ago did his bit for Israel by writing and singing refreshing, as though he’d started a conversa- branding, great marketing,” and “great for the lyrics to the theme for the movie Exodus. tion and expected the audience to continue promoting peace and co-existence.” (“This land is mine, God gave this land to me / it: his films are essentially dialogic, even So- And about that peace and co-existence: This brave, this golden land to me.”) While in cratic. Salaam Cinema, for instance, is a wise, Barkat also found time this summer to bestow LA, Barkat met with Hollywood producers, to wry examination of the power dynamics at honorary Jerusalem citizenship on billionaire whom he offered special tax breaks and sub- work in a casting call for one of Makhmalbaf’s casino tycoon and ideological sugar daddy sidies to shoot their movies in the Holy City, own films—and, by unspoken extension, in a Sheldon Adelson and his Israeli-born wife. where a special department has already been repressive society at large. Perhaps his best Adelson took the occasion of the Jerusalem established to handle film permits and logisti- movie, A Moment of Innocence, features an- ceremony held in his honor to dismiss the Pal- cal matters. It’s “not only good business. It’s other character named Makhmalbaf, played estinians as “southern Syrians” and to claim good Zionism,” he enthused to The Hollywood by Makhmalbaf, who decides to make a film that Yasir Arafat “came along with a pitcher Reporter. “It’s the right thing to do.” about a seminal event in his youth. It takes up of Kool-Aid and gave it to everybody to drink Which brings us back to Mohsen memory, the movies and the subject of regret and sold them the idea of Palestinians.” At this Makhmalbaf. better, and more poignantly, than almost any festive gathering, complete with the reading other film I know. It’s also a masterpiece of of a fancy parchment scroll and the crooning first heard his name when I was work- scale—a tiny picture that somehow opens up of “That’s Amore” by singers wearing Paul ing as a film critic for a daily newspaper onto whole galaxies of feeling. Revere–style tricorne hats, Barkat declared in Jerusalem during the 1990s. It was in For someone sitting in Jerusalem and the Adelsons “Zionist heroes of the city.” At 1997, at an earlier Jerusalem Film Festi- watching his movies, there was an almost the same time, native-born Palestinians from val, that I encountered his movies, and I electric jolt of recognition, something the neighborhood of Silwan are not consid- Iwas immediately captivated. Reckoning with like déjà vu: Tehran could be Jerusalem. ered citizens at all, honorary or otherwise. Makhmalbaf’s work was compelling then, Israel and Iran may be each other’s sworn They are, instead, “permanent residents,” and the pleasure it affords persists to this day. enemies, but their back alleys look like many of them threatened with eviction by the In fact, thinking back across all the thousands our back alleys. And it wasn’t just that municipality, which is working closely with of hours of sitting in the dark and at my desk the stony passageways were physically Jewish settler groups and various govern- that being a film critic entailed, I can say that similar to the ones I walk through every ment agencies to demolish their homes and seeing his movies—and, to a lesser though day, but that Makhmalbaf had an uncanny put in their place a pseudo-biblical park and still important degree, those of his country- ability to observe and convey his psychic tourist attraction called the King’s Garden. man Abbas Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf’s surroundings—and in doing so, reveal to us The city has also recently approved plans to gifted oldest daughter, Samira—did more to our own. He has said that he used to view construct apartments for Jewish settlers in the rearrange in a lasting way my sense of what the camera as a weapon, while now he sees heart of another Palestinian neighborhood, film could do than any others I took in during it as a mirror “to show people themselves.” October 7, 2013 The Nation. 45

he first thing that shocked me” are banned—though they circulate widely in friend wrinkles her nose and pronounces the about Israel, says Makhmalbaf, pirated form and on the Internet. film “a marshmallow.” On the one hand, I now dressed in a white shirt and All of which may explain why the prospect know what she means. It’s not just the treacly looking slightly subdued the of shooting a movie in Israel and then attend- tone of the Makhmalbafs’ various interlocu- morning after the first Jerusalem ing its gala opening in Jerusalem seems not tors that makes a somewhat cranky Jewish “screeningT of The Gardener, is that “it was like to have fazed him. Though the penalty in viewer shift in her seat. The film’s particular Iran. I felt I was in Iran.” And “especially in Iran for visiting the so-called Zionist entity brand of petal-strewn prettiness—its satu­ Haifa, many alleys and streets—the same as is a five-year prison term, a man with a death rated palette and occasionally precious cam- Iran.” Even in Jerusalem, he says, the markets sentence hanging over his head may feel such era angles, reminiscent of Makhmalbaf’s more were just like those in his hometown. It is a threat a kind of furlough. His visit to Israel deliberately “decorative” movies, Gabbeh, extremely odd to be sitting just upstairs from did elicit various predictable denunciations: Kandahar and The Silence—does at times sug- the theater where, some sixteen years ago, the director of Iran’s cinematic organizations gest the sugary filling of a cinematic s’more. I first saw one of his movies, and hearing condemned his “embrace of the usurpers of On the other hand, this is the restless, Makhmalbaf say the exact same thing—or Jerusalem and…criminal Zionism,” and a relentless Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and my the mirror image of the exact same thing—I’d group of Iranian writers, artists and scholars own sense is that The Gardener isn’t a pious thought back then: Jerusalem could be Tehran. criticized him harshly for not boycotting prescription so much as the next chapter His new movie is designed, as he puts it, the festival and its Israeli sponsors: “We are in the director’s ongoing exchange with his to shed “light on religion’s power”—though, deeply dismayed at Mr. Makhmalbaf’s dis­ audience about the nature of reality and as always, his approach is tantalizingly am- regard for the global movement for Palestin- illusion, truth and consequences. His “char- biguous: religion’s power to do good? Its ian human rights and the implicit support acters” may offer up various high-minded power to harm? Set in the peculiarly pristine for Israel’s apartheid policies.” In response, devotional maxims, but that doesn’t mean he Bahai gardens that cascade like a bright green Makhmalbaf told the Persian service of the himself subscribes to them wholesale. His cataract down the terraced northern face BBC that “boycotting and writing statements son’s onscreen persona repeatedly articulates of Mount Carmel in Haifa, the movie also does not solve anything. Why don’t the intel- his impatience with such righteous rhetoric, features several scenes that take place at the lectuals try to solve the problems by traveling and after my conversation with Makhmalbaf relic-cluttered holy sites of Jerusalem’s Old and having dialogue? Why is there no effort (who gently points out that he was the author City. It’s hard not to see the two towns as to remove religious hatred?” of his son’s lines in the script), it seems clear somehow representing the opposing points In this charged context, the choice to that he is more skeptical than not about the of view that make up the movie’s dialectical make Bahaism the “star” of The Gardener nature of organized religion and aware of the structure and are outlined in an early scene is pointed. It’s also clever, since the subject possibly cataclysmic dangers of too fervent by Makhmalbaf’s pop-star-handsome son of the fate and faith of this relatively minor faith, especially in this part of the world. Maysam, who explains in voiceover that the religious group allows him to sidle up to big- In the end neither “for” nor “against,” the film will alternate between “two angles”: the ger questions that haunt the Middle East in movie offers an unusually subtle fusion of the younger man’s camera will be directed at general—without addressing them head-on. two purportedly oppositional points of view. religion’s negative aspects, while the elder Established in Iran around 170 years ago, If anything, Makhmalbaf’s own religion Makhmalbaf will, well, accentuate the posi- Bahaism has been under siege there since its seems to have more to do with filmmaking tive. The movie unfolds as a conversation be- inception: its founder was sent into exile and itself, which, he says in The Gardener, is the tween these apparently dueling perspectives. suffered various persecutions as he wandered. extension of his eye, a kind of meditation. While that may sound reductive, even Even today, the religion’s Iranian adherents “I want,” he says in an early scene, “to learn simple-minded, remember who’s in charge are severely oppressed—harassed, jailed and to see better.” Though when I ask him if the here. Makhmalbaf began his life as an ex- sometimes executed. movies are his religion, he corrects me: “Mo- tremely devout Muslim and, after attempting Although Makhmalbaf says that he set rality,” he says, “is my religion.” By which he to steal a gun from one of the shah’s police- out to make a movie about the human rights means, he says, human dignity: “We’ve lost men, spent five years in prison, during which abuses suffered by the Bahai in Iran, in the end that, everywhere.” time he was tortured and just escaped the his film evolved into a far more philosophical “So for you, the camera is a way to get firing squad. After the 1979 revolution and affair—an attempt to understand not just this closer to that morality?” his release, he became a hugely popular film- particular religion but the impulse toward “Absolutely.” Makhmalbaf then launches maker and self-declared agnostic as well as an religion in general. As presented in The Gar- into a wistful disquisition on the need for mu- outspoken supporter of a secular, democratic dener, Bahaism is the ultimate peace-loving tual respect and the loss of that throughout Iran. He left the country when Mahmoud potpourri, blending turn-the-other-cheek the world—in the politicians’ offices, in the Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005 but Christian acceptance of one’s enemies with clerics’ chambers, in Israel, in Iran. “Where,” remains an underground culture hero back a Buddhist desire for self-knowledge, a Sufi the director wonders, “are we going?” home, and he is still considered enough of sense of the unity of all creation, and a Hindu Where are we going, indeed? It’s a ques- a threat to the regime that the Supreme belief in a kind of karma, together with total tion I continue to ask as I wander out into Leader has, he says, sent teams of secret Gandhi-esque devotion to the spirit of non- the strong July light and hear the tram bell police, armed with bombs and grenades, to violence. “Sometimes people are mean to us,” chime sweetly. Lavish race cars and locked- try to harm or intimidate the filmmaker, who a beaming, American-born blond Bahai ex- up puppets, petunia-filled parks and expro- has been forced to flee with his family from plains to a group of small children in the film. priated land, Sheldon Adelson and Mohsen Afghanistan to Tajikistan to Paris and now to “But we,” she adds, surrounded by immaculate Makhmalbaf—Jerusalem has something for London. He is at present persona absolutely banks of flowers, “just show them kindness.” everyone this summer. I, too, would like non grata in Iran, where his films and writing As the lights come up in the theater, a to see better. n