Blackboards (Takhté Siah)
Blackboards (Takhté siah) Dir: Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran/Italy/Japan, 2000 A review by Brian Gibson, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Recent Iranian films have each boasted a singular, breathtaking image: in Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), a bone floating down a river in the climactic scene crystallizes the life-and-death dichotomy of the film; in Rakhshan Bani Etemad's Under The Skin of the City (2001), a son's future is blown away with the loss of drugs that drift into the wind like snowflakes; in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar (2001), the sky is punctured by artificial limbs parachuting down to expectant amputees hopping towards them. Blackboards, Samira Makhmalbaf's Cannes Special Jury Prize-winning film, begins with a handheld camera shot of a mountain road. Then, around the corner of a cliff face, a group of men appears, trudging up the path, their heads and legs peeking out above and below large ebony rectangles. Looking like large black birds, their wings outstretched, they trudge towards the lens. The rectangles are large blackboards strapped to these itinerant teachers' backs, and even as they look for pupils in remote Iranian Kurdistan, they discuss why they became teachers and left shepherding, or exchange coffee and tea. Then the camera captures the austerely beautiful image of the men standing at a cliff edge, looking out at the valley below, the wind billowing through the pants of these crucified pedagogues. Suddenly they run, stopping to huddle beneath their boards by the roadside as a helicopter passes overhead. Far above, a flock of black birds circle and soar over mountain precipices.
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