The flashing jewel: 'A Moment of Innocence' (1996)
A filmmaker's reconciliation with a past crime reveals a number of multiplicities.
A Moment of Innocence (Nūn va Goldūn) (1996), dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran
The Color of Pomegranates (1969) planted in me a desire for illuminated, puppet show images: Parajanov caught lace passing in front of a regal face in white makeup, a shepherd posing among tombstones and choir boys, and the stamp of a monastery behind a golden procession. I could rearrange the figures in these images, like dressing-doll cutouts, and light a steam engine that would set them off hissing and rotating like the World’s Fair at the Crystal Palace, where top hats threw open hands to the air and offered crowds the wonders of the gyroclock, or the pneumopede. Their inventors trotted these machines along while in the monastery behind them, burlap sack sages painted, again in gold leaf, blue, and red. So I found these images in Orthodox icons as well. They were the Central Asian Rublev set to motion: they whirled, bent flimsy joints, and thrilled me.
I thought I found one of these images online one day, from a film called A Moment of Innocence. In it, a girl (Maryam Mohamadamini) in a black chador looks at a papery white flower in a clay pot and a piece of flatbread. What did this do to me? Some kind of abstraction teased the image; it looked at me from behind a hidden facet, laughing on one side and praying on the other. It patterned and chipped pieces of paint off my walls. It astonished me because I felt it astonishing itself with Mohamadamini’s eyes, which bring the bread to bubble and make the flower unfurl. It is an image of windowsill playthings, suggesting a world on the other side, my side, that would likewise bubble and unfurl if I could see it with Mohamadamini’s gentle wonder.
On my side: Makhmalbaf, seventeen years old, stabs a police officer in protest of the Pahlavi government, which sentences him to death for the act. On Mohamadamini’s side: Makhmalbaf (who didn’t die), thirty-nine, reconciles with the police officer by making a film of the attack. Two teenage actors play the assailant and his victim.
“The young you is coming,” Mr. Zinal, the cameraman, says to the officer. Together they walk to the tailor’s to get a uniform made for the younger, Officer Jr. Father and son plod along a retaining wall of big, round stones, fluffing up a few inches of unusual snow, and Jr. crams his hands in his pockets, tightens up his shoulders around his ears, and marches on with his eyes to the ground and his brow tucked closely to his nose. “Of course, didn’t you hear Mr. Zinal say, ‘Go and direct the young you?’” Sr. swishes in just a leather jacket, talking with one hand (“Of course, when I was a policeman I didn’t have any models to behave…”) and landing soft looks at his protégé under a dogs-paw unibrow. Just a leather jacket! In casting, he told us he was from Oroumieh, where the people in our town say it is so cold you can hardly go outside. When we asked if it was true, Sr. shrugged and frowned.
That frown stalked our rehearsals for days; one would turn around and see it there, full of disappointment, and quickly turn away, only to see it reappear in a ghost image on the eye or on Mr. Zinal’s face. In that way everyone started to look disappointed. Trying to teach him the basic posture of one of the Shah’s loyal policemen, Sr. frowned at Jr.’s sloppy salute. Harder snap, clicked heels, at attention! Erect and eager, this is one of the Shah’s generals you’re addressing! Sr. clicks again, hand to hat brim, a whip turned switch. “And don’t get caught out! If the general’s daughter walks past, don’t start trembling.” Jr. lowers his hand, mouth half open, and slinks his shoulders in a silent whine.
We tried more gestures in the marketplace alley, this time with distractions: Mohamadamini walks by, asks the officer for the time, and continues on her way. You see, Jr., when I was a young cop, she would come by every day and ask me something new: what time it was, if I could give her directions, that sort of thing. I loved her, yes, I’m sure of it: I brought her a flower, but trembled so much when I tried to give it to her that I could only look at my watch, flower in hand like a limp lizard, and tell her the time. No, not like that! Too confident! When will this boy ever learn? Let’s try again.
Sr. walks by, stops in front of Jr., and asks, “Excuse me, what time is it?” The officer checks his watch, flower in hand. “Two minutes to twelve.” She responds, “Merci,” and goes on her way.
I saw a poster for the film where Mohamadamini looked decidedly sleepier. I didn’t like this one: it lost wonder and replaced it with determination. It looked like someone punched her and half knocked her out. But it showed me a new tension: this was the image that made me want to watch the film in the first place, so which would I actually see? The first one, with Mohamadamini’s bright and thoughtful eyes? Or the sleepy, forceful second? So I jumped at her every appearance, as well as those of the white flower and the flatbread. The film’s very first shot sees a flatbread collapse next to the flower like a chain-mail fire curtain. It sent me into a small fit. When Mohamadamini approaches the officer and asks him for the time, he trembles with his flowerpot. Would this be it? Later, Mohamadamini follows the militant student to buy several flatbreads, which he hides his knife between. Would this be it?
The militant and his accomplice arrive at the officer’s post and a showdown begins: the officer unclips his gun holster and the student flips his pocket knife. “Excuse me, what time is it?” I have to make a choice and I have to make it quickly: The gun or the flower? The knife or the bread? The officer or the student? She looks at me, then at the gun, and her eyebrow twitches. I think she is starting to understand that I might actually kill him in front of her. When we bought the bread, when I coached her on what to say through my uncle’s car window, when she returned the book with sentences like “While there are trees, there is life” underlined, didn’t I know that she wanted to change the world? Didn’t she know he might die, for real? When we bought the bread I watched him cry and scream that he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t kill the boy, and for that matter I couldn’t either, for all his youth and small gifts and desire to make the world a better place. “Excuse me, can you tell me the time?” I watched them so closely that for a second I forgot what we were even here for. To take revenge—wait, no, to act! The past folded over the present, leaving me with a flaming treasure in my hands.
I gasped! This was it! The jewel unfurled in front of me like a butterfly mask and I could see it all in one flash: the officer, the boy, the militant, the filmmaker, the weapon, the gift, the girl, the actor, the seer, the frame! Again I can’t find the words for how I feel and I have to fall back on lists, begging that they will make for themselves—and for you—the kind of connections and disconnections that nearly burst my heart.
But what I do know is that that image, the one that pulled me to A Moment of Innocence, wasn’t just like the ones I had already seen, it was them. It was a part of them, showing the whole, which was still just a part. I had seen it and I hadn’t, another wink from behind turning crystal. These rhyming images born from the same moment—a showdown of murder and teenage love—suddenly, with the film’s last freeze frame, opened mouths to one another and breathed.
The last image isn’t the “right” one, or even just the “one that’s here right now”: it makes all the others, as the others make it. They are all here! And I finally saw them after waiting so desperately for their arrival: over years in solid cut-outs (the wondrous, the sleepy) and in an instant of multiplicity. Now “the girl with the bread at the end of A Moment of Innocence” refers not to an image, but a constellation held in a single point, and I wonder what infinite more variations bubble within me and imprint themselves onto this fluid whole. Now every image contains the life of its sisters, throwing smirks from behind corners and dancing for an audience just one rotation away.
That night I saw the moon on screen and the moon out my window. I also saw: the moon over my mom’s house when she leaves early for work, the moon cut with clouds in Un Chien Andalou, the moon over Count Orlok’s thundering castle, the moon of green cheese from a computer game I played as a kid, the moon as an angel’s egg, as a lantern, as a lightning bug, as a wish, as a—
See other films from: 1990s | Iran
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
Ohh, Angel's Egg!!
you know i love a good angels egg!!