These vagabond shoes, are longing to stray
Right through the very heart of it—New York, New York.
—From Frank Sinatra’s lyric “New York, New York”
In New York, Amir Naderi and I live on the two opposite sides of Manhattan. He lives near the Lower East Side, I live on the Upper West Side—he in the East Village, to be more exact, I on Columbia campus. For us to see each other, we have to change two subway lines. When I go down to see him (in the Summer of 2003, when I was helping him out with a script, almost every day, otherwise once a week when he is not shooting and less so when he is), I take the 1/9 train from 116th street down to Time Square and then change to N/Q/R/W down to Union Square, and then I walk for a few blocks south to 10th street and then East toward 1st, just before Avenue A, where he lives. When he comes up to see me he follows the same route in reverse. When the big blackout of August 14, 2003 (just the day before his birthday) hit New York, I was at Amir’s working with him on the script of what later became “Sound Barrier” (2005). On that day I had to borrow a transistor radio from him to follow the news of the blackout and walk all the way from 10th street and Avenue A to 116th and Broadway. It took me about five hours. He kept me company and walked with me for about fifty blocks—talking all the while about his encounters with Bernardo Bertolucci and his love of Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema. I can never have a stationary notion of Naderi. I can only imagine him mobile—walking, talking, laughing, eating, drinking tea, feeding his plants. In all these years, I have never seen him resting, sitting still, napping, keeping quiet, or sleeping. In his apartment he has no bed. “Great men,” I once read somewhere, “have small beds.” Naderi has no bed.
Though constantly mobile, Naderi scarcely leaves New York. It seems like New York has always been his final destination. One of the oldest friends of Naderi in New York is the distinguished Iranian artist Nikzad (“Nicky”) Nodjoumi. Nikzad lives in Brooklyn and has his own gentle manner of negotiating his way to opening nights of art exhibitions, SoHo and Chelsea galleries and such that invariably finds most of us together: Some graying, grown, grumpy, and bewildered (just like last night) at the spectacular achievements of our younger siblings—Ramin Bahrani, Kouross Esmaeli, and Laleh Khoramian are the latest additions to our midst. “Grumpy ol’ lions,” one of these younger siblings once affectionately called us. In the midst of the Metropolis, right here in the heart of Gotham City, Naderi has assumed a stable, iconic, impermeable significance—for us as permanent and stable as the Statue of Liberty: Naderi too is not going anywhere (though at times he does talk about “going West”). Others come to him, young and older Iranian artists, just like pilgrims paying their respect to a shrine. “Is it possible to see Naderi,” is the first question Iranian artists ask when they come to visit New York. More than talking to or learning from him, these pilgrims are mostly eager to touch him, kiss and hug him and shake his hand. There is something visibly tactile about the evident pieties of these visitors. We Shi’is, I often think, are incurable. Naderi has become the first Shi’i shrine in New York—but he still does not know it.
Like all other icons, Naderi is not quite conscious of his iconic demeanor. But his physical attachment to New York and his reluctance to travel speak otherwise. Naderi travels rarely—for he intensely dislikes going anywhere outside the United States, almost with the same intensity that he absolutely adores living in what he calls “Emrika.” This seafarers’ adulation for “America” he attributes to his birth and breeding in the southern coastal town of Abadan in Iran, where he was born on August 15, 1946. Since his first journey to the United States in 1976, he has decided that 4th of July, the American Independence Day, is his “American Birthday.” The symbolism is so thick that he once made a film (which was never released) called “Made in Iran, Made in America.” Naderi was in a way “made in America,” even though he was born and raised hundreds of thousands of miles away. “There was a world,” he once told me, “beautiful and shining in my mind, all made of movies; and then another world, ugly and boring outside, made of the real world. I always preferred to close my eyes and live in that beautiful world—of film, fiction, and fantasy.” The shot in his “Runner” (1984), where Amiru is sitting by the waterfront with his back turned to the crowd, facing the shimmering water and the anchored ships in the sunset, eating his watermelon, with a beautiful Louis Armstrong score in the background, is, Naderi once told me, a visual record of that indelible memory. New York for Naderi is the ultimate destination of those ships. He has landed on this island the way persecuted Protestant pilgrims dared the tumultuous seas of yore to seek their freedom and test their fortunes in the permanently New World. Among all the American authors, Naderi prefers Ernest Hemingway and Herman Melville—“The Old Man and the Sea” (1958) and “Moby Dick” (1851) in particular. It is only from his landed assurances in America that he can dream of the seas—for he has done a lifetime of the other way around, of coming to America.
What Naderi means by “America,” however, is really just New York. He occasionally travels to spend time with his relations in Virginia or friends in upstate New York. “I hate trees, meadows, ponds, woods, jungles, rivers, mountains and such,” he says on these occasions with a vengeance. All he remembers from these occasional trips is the color green. “He hates the color green,” says Michael Simmonds, his longtime friend and ingenious cinematographer. But Naderi has a green thumb, plants small plants in oddly shaped bottles, and speaks to and of them in anthropomorphic terms. “You see this one,” he once told me referring to a tiny-sized plant inside a bottle. “She always likes to turn towards the window and screw up my arrangement.” By “arrangement” he meant a “seating arrangement” he had put together of a group of short and tall plants as if they were sitting for a family portrait. Simmonds’ reading of these plants is that Naderi wants to know where the greens are and have them under his control. But I believe Naderi dislikes color period—not just green. Once I had a tiny streak of red in a T-shirt I was wearing. He gave me a long lecture against the color red.
Naderi has an equal aversion to Europe. “I cannot stand these old brick pavements, fancy shops, old castles, dilapidated fortresses and such—what the hell are they for anyway.” His preference? Modern architecture, spectacular skyscrapers, “steel, iron, copper, brass, concrete blocks—I thrive at their magnificent sights” he says with his sharp and brutal intelligence sparkling through his beady eyes. Barren desert is the only landscape of his choice. John Ford’s Monument Valley is definitive to Naderi’s notion of “America.” On one of my birthdays, he gave me one of his most prized possessions—a copy of a very old magazine on the cover of which is a picture of the Monument Valley. He had found it off the street in SoHo. He is proverbial for finding exquisite objects in outlandish places off the streets of Manhattan. I am convinced he knows (and has walked through) the five boroughs of New York more and better than five mayors of New York put together. His visual perception of New York is full-bodied, visceral, physical—brick, bone, steel and concrete.
Walking with Naderi in New York is a bodily exercise and a mental gymnastics at one and the same time. First of all, you have to walk to his left. He cannot stand anyone walking to his right. I never figured out why. Does he prefer the right profile of people, or is he phobic of his own right visual angle—or maybe something entirely different. I have no clue. He walks through the streets and back alleys of New York with his attention, it seems, fully devoted to the conversation at hand, and yet with an extra set of antennas up and about gathering noise, sounds, pictures, and shots from every which way around him. In his physical bearings, Naderi is short, stalky, rectangular—with an astonishingly gentle and delicate set of hands that are entirely oxymoronic in their attachments to this body. Naderi’s hands look like they belong to someone else. They are amazingly (and surprisingly) feminine, soft, gentle, and delicate—if I did not know better I would have suggested that they are manicured. But they are not. That’s the way they just are. If you look at Amir’s hands, spot-lighted and with the rest of his body hidden in darkness, you will not guess in a million years that they belong to that heavy, weighted, timbered, and bouncing body. But people scarcely notice Naderi’s hands. They are usually hidden from the naked eyes of people casually glancing at him, and invariably drawn to the most prominent feature of Amir’s bodily presence, which is his head—bold, balding, cheeky and wide, and above all disproportionately bigger than the rest of his body and marked by two beady and always piercing (though in a bewildered kind of a way) eyes. There is an agitation about Naderi that seems to reside somewhere in the center of his head as he talks and argues, balanced in his brain, nurtured in his mind, and sustained in his unrelenting intelligence. The stark contrast between his imposing head and his gentle hands, between his agitated intelligence and his scrupulous craftsmanship, finds its way into his cinema—at once exceedingly alert on its cutting edges and yet surprisingly gentle in its poetic disposition. The same combination that is most evident in his cinema is also paramount in his cooking. Naderi is a great cook—what is more important, he talks about his cooking almost in the same language that talks about his cinema—boastful and confident.
I have walked with Amir Naderi, on innumerable occasions, from his home in the East Village down toward the Williamsburg Bridge, and then further down toward the Lower East Side, bypassing Little Italy, which he does not like at all (“fake and bogus” he calls it), marching resolutely toward Chinatown, which he absolutely adores. In Chinatown, in a triangular urban landscape between (1) one end of the Manhattan Bridge, (2) the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, and (3) the Eastern-most side of Canal Street, Naderi is the happiest man alive, most jovial and talkative, agile and gesticulating—completely at home. Among a million restaurants that abound in Chinatown, he singularly prefers this little dilapidated Vietnamese restaurant on Baxter Street, where he always orders a huge seafood soup with a mountain of rice (he is classical vegetarian). Half a block from this Vietnamese restaurant, at the mouth of the block, there is an apartment building on the roof of which he shot the central, dramatic, sequence of his “ABC, Manhattan” (1997). Of another million pastry shops that exist in Chinatown he prefers yet another rundown place further down on Baxter Street, where he has two Chinese pastries with two cups of hot tea. Just across from the window where we sit and have our tea and pastry, there is the opening of a small foyer entering an apartment building. Next to it there is a public phone, at the foot of which he has sat down and written the script of his “Marathon” (2002). When I was working with him on a script that a version of it later became “Sound Barrier” (2005) we used to take my laptop and his freshly brewed tea and sit in front of a laundromat right in front of his apartment. There is a fire hydrant right next to that laundromat. On the top of the fire hydrant there is room for exactly one cup of tea. “That’s my table,” Amir used to say, as he placed his cup of tea there, took his chocolate bar out of his pocket, and sat down to work.
The map of New York is nailed in Naderi’s mind and carved in his soul with his specific habits and aging routines, locations he likes and routes he regularly traverses, places in which he has literally sat down and written his scripts, and the shades of light he prefers to see on specific buildings at specific times of the day—his scripts having been written from these very lived experiences of peoples and sentiments, shapes and colors, looks and gazes, sounds and noises, cries and whispers of New York.
It is as if Naderi was always meant to come to New York. Born and raised in the southern city of Abadan in Iran, Naderi had made a successful career as a pioneering filmmaker in his homeland. By the time he was thirty years old, he had established himself as a major filmmaker with a distinct visual vocabulary of his own, widely influenced by the best in world cinema and deeply rooted in his own poverty-stricken background. The colonial history of the oil-soaked southern Iranian provinces has given them a rare character at once provincial and yet exposed to the colonially mitigated introduction of a highly sophisticated oil industry and a bourgeois culture meant for European expats who run it and yet vicariously present for the rest of the native society as well. The look of Abadan, as a result, is far more cosmopolitan and industrial than even the capital city Tehran. The industrial parts around New York City, say the shipyards scattered around Hudson River, look far more like Abadan than they do Tehran—a sprawling city at the foot of Damavand Mountain. The move of Naderi from the coastal town of Abadan in southern Iran to the capital city of Tehran when he was still a teenager was no less traumatic and exhilarating than his journey from Iran to the United States. To understand Naderi’s cinema in New York, it is imperative to picture him always on the move—not just from Iran to the United States, but from Abadan to Tehran, from Tehran to Paris and London, and ultimately set upon a course that seems could have come to no other destination but New York.
Naderi made much of his cinematic career in the Tehran of 1970s, at once booming with an oil-based economy that brought a bonanza wealth to the Pahlavi court and yet shaken to its foundation by antigovernment guerrilla movements launched by both secular and Islamist militants. Between 1971 and 1976, Naderi made six major feature films in Iran, beginning with Khodahafez Rafiq/“Goodbye Friend” (1971) and ending the first phase of his career with Marsiyeh/“Requiem” (1976). His first attempt to come and settle in the United States occurred in 1977, when he traveled to New York and made a film called Sakht-e Iran, Sakht-e Emrika/“Made in Iran, made in America” (1977), a film that he wrote and directed but never released. Unsatisfied with what at the time he considered a shallow and artificial exposure to New York, Naderi returned to his native Iran and remained there (with the exception of short sojourn in Paris) between 1980 and 1986. At this second, post-revolutionary, stage of his career in Iran, Naderi made four films—two documentaries Josteju I/“Search I” (1981) and Josteju II/“Search II” (1982), his legendary Davandeh/“Runner” (1985) and one of his most globally celebrated masterpieces Ab, Bad, Khak/“Water, Wind, Dust” (1988). The third phase of his cinematic career began in 1986, when he permanently moved to New York, where so far he has made four feature films: “Manhattan by Numbers” (1992), “ABC Manhattan” (1997), “Marathon” (2003), and “Sound Barrier” (2005). Naderi has an allergic reaction to nostalgia, cares very little about the two Iranian phases of his cinematic career, and wishes (artistic procreativity always in his mind) only to think of himself and thus be considered as an “American filmmaker.” This deliberately cultivated sense of denial is definitive to both Naderi’s character and to his cinema. Any mention of going back to Iran (even for a visit) has an almost violent reaction from him. “Never,” he says, “go back to the country from which you come, or to the woman you once loved.” This resistance to and defiance against nostalgia is constitutional to Naderi’s cinema—always marching forward, as if he is running away from something—what exactly he cannot quite tell. He attends the complete retrospectives of his films reluctantly—not because he is ashamed of what he has achieved in Iran (“‘Tangsir’ still works, I tell you,” he whispered into my ears when we saw one of his absolute masterpieces in September 2001 when Richard Peña had curated a major retrospective of his work in New York)—but because his mind is always on his next project and because he thinks dwelling on his past achievements is the certain sign of decay and decline. He wishes for his New York films to have absolutely no visual resemblance to his Iranian films. He detests with a vengeance those artists, filmmakers, or literati that come to the United States or Europe and make a career out of their nostalgic reminiscences about their Iranian past—“and this kind of bordello house charlatanism in particular,” he once abruptly stopped as we were passing by the window of a Barns and Nobles bookstore in the Village displaying Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and said, “I intensely despise.” His mind speeds around a globe that seems figuratively revolving in his mind. “My next film will be set on the moon,” he told me recently, “the earth no longer satisfies me.”
The New York state of mind is migratory and mobile, and there is a migratory and restless soul searching through Naderi’s depiction of New York—from his very first to his most recent film. His first feature film in New York, “Manhattan by Numbers” (1992), is shot almost entirely in exterior takes, showing an unemployed journalist, George Murphy (John Wojda), navigating the streets of Manhattan, from its Northern tip in Washington Heights to its Southern climes in the Financial District, in search of money to pay his back rent, only to give Naderi an occasion to have his camera wrestle with the sculpted bull aggressively announcing the spirit of American capitalism. If “Manhattan by Numbers” maps out the exterior of the Cosmopolis, at once brutal and beautiful, “ABC … Manhattan” (1997) turns Naderi’s camera into the reflection of that architecture in the interior of the humanity it inhabits, the minds and souls of its inhabitants, three young women in particular—Colleen (Lucy Knight), who is a single mother struggling to make ends meet as a photographer and who finally loses her daughter to her former husband; Kacey (Erin Norris), who has already lost her girlfriend, boyfriend and her dog; and finally Kate (Sara Paul), who in her solitary musician soul has for long kept a deeply troubling secret. Shot mostly in interiors takes, medium and close-up shots, “ABC … Manhattan” gives Naderi’s camera an occasion to become psychoanalytical in its probing of the reflection of the architectonic exterior of New York in the hidden soul of its inhabitants. In his third feature film in New York, “Marathon” (2003), Naderi opts to move underground, literally, and take a long and lasting look at the subterranean soul of the city, the labyrinth of its subway system, and the sinuous spirits that move the body of a people. Shot almost entirely in the New York subway system, with the exception of its final sequence that carries the noisy soul of that subway into the interior of an apartment, “Marathon” is the story of Gretchen (Sara Paul) determined to break her own record of solving 72 crossword puzzles in a 24-hour round, while addicted to the sound of noise, most evident when echoed in the serpentine sinuses of the underground world. Solitary obsession, dogged singularity, and the physical embodiment of a phantasmagoric machinery that is New York, Gretchen is how Naderi sees his adopted city: introverted, self-absorbed, indifferent to the fate of the universe it projects. Finally, “Sound Barrier” (2005) moves Naderi’s camera into a navigation between two singular sets—the interior of a storage room and the exterior of a bridge traffic to map out the soul of a deaf and mute 11-year-old boy, Jesse (Charlie Wilson), in search of the suspected secret and possible cure of his ailment. By the conclusion of his fourth New York film, Naderi has drafted the exterior of the Cosmopolis he now calls home, searched through its traces inside the soul of its inhabitants, plunged deep into the subterranean spirits that sustain its exterior awe, and narrowed in on a solitary soul, deaf and mute in the language of its inhabitants, and yet observant of its ways in manners unheard of and unseen before. These four films are the autobiography of a city (as they are the autobiography of their maker) as seen and heard by one of its millions of immigrant and emigrated souls.
Like his own physical presence in New York, Amir Naderi’s New York films are overwhelmingly physical, embodied, corporeal in their aesthetics, evidentiary in their visual narratives. Naderi has a reputation for being primarily a photographer and then a filmmaker. Though it is true that he is a gifted photographer of uncommon perception, his cinema is not photographic, it is irreducibly visual. He is incurably anti-narrative. He cannot make a narrative film if his life depended on it. He sees the world; he does not understand it—and that is the central drama of his cinema. For that physical and evidentiary visuality to be for real and work, Naderi has systematically cultivated an almost allergic reaction to politics. He deliberately suspends all political notions of his whereabouts. He lives in New York—and what political implications that might have (exile, immigration, colonialism, imperialism, etc.) are entirely irrelevant to him. At the height of the US war in Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, etc., his most political utterance (if he were ever to say anything) would be something like “so the situation is really dangerous, right?”—and this would not be an affectation and asked only if it affected his traveling plans to a film festival (he still travels with an Iranian passport). Sometimes I genuinely believe that he neither knows nor cares to know who the president of the United States is.
The full-bodied presence of Naderi in his adopted city is equally evident in his photography. In March 2003, I organized a major photography exhibition for Naderi at La Maison Francaise of Columbia University, where we exhibited some fifty of his black and white photographs of New York. This exhibition was in anticipation of the world premiere of his third New York film, “Marathon” (2002) in May 2003 in the course of Tribeca Film Festival. These were mostly pictures of various street walls that Naderi had photographed over a period of ten years between 1992 and 2002. The idea of these photographs would usually begin by a torn flyer, a ripped poster, or a washed out announcement, sometimes pasted on top of each other and then left and abandoned to ruin on street walls near where Naderi lives. Naderi would first “work” on these traces of life in the streets of New York, “curate” them as it were, “treat” them with fire, smoke, water, etc., and then let them “pickle” for a while in an open and naked exposure to natural and urban elements—rain, wind, dust, snow, smoke, occasional hail, accidental paint, systematic pollution, etc., and then at an opportune moment, when his visceral guts and aesthetic eyes came together and concurred, he would frame them precisely the way he wanted and take a picture of them. The result is a spectacular, at times uncanny, visual evidence of the traces of rambunctious urbanity that a Cosmopolis at once generates, ignores or hides, and yet reveals to the perceptive eyes of a very few of its residents.
Throughout this decade (1992–2002), and as he was making his New York films, Naderi was also deeply involved in photographing his beloved city and exhibiting the growing body of his work in the United States, Europe, and Asia—with major exhibitions in Washington DC, Houston, Rome, Bologna, Milano, Bergamo, and Tokyo. These pictures reflect Naderi’s vision of the unforgiving layers of urban memories that erase each other more by repetition of overlays rather than by amnesia. The city does not forget, it just remembers too much—and in that embodied confusion of memories, Naderi’s vision of New York dwells. He considers these pictures a form of visual documentation of his thoughts and feelings as he has made his New York feature films—and they are in effect the variedly conjugated visual lexicography of his perception of New York, reflecting the same sensibilities that define his New York films. Naderi himself believes that his photography is in fact an extension of his cinematic vision and helps him sustain his imaginative space within which he then dreams and interprets his vision of New York. These photographs are in fact the pictorial record of extending the iconic universe of his cinema to the spell cast on his imaginative soul. In between his films, these photographs in effect “tie him over,” as we say, until such time that he can again stand behind a camera and shout “Action!” and then, as he habitually and abruptly ends all his phone conversations with a “Cut!”
Naderi’s political detachment from his whereabouts and his material rootedness in New York—evident in both his films and photography—are interrelated. His connection to New York is corporeal—buildings and streets have a living resonance with him. He was furious after 9/11. “What had these innocent buildings done?” He spoke of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in endearingly anthropomorphic terms. “What had these beautiful, innocent, creatures done? Why take it on them?” On the day of 9/11, he went to the rooftop of his apartment building and took magnificent, mournful, pictures, of the WTC. These pictures are the visions of a homage, a panegyric poem, an elegy for two fallen friends—whom (not which) he had shot so hauntingly in his first feature film in New York, “Manhattan by Numbers.”
Naderi detests politics with a vengeance (and is entirely oblivious to the fact that there is already a politics to his being apolitical, especially when he protests too much)—but his cultivated distance from politics is materially connected to the architectonic weight of his New York. When I appear on national television commenting on current affairs, he calls me and says he saw me on television and liked the color combination of my shirt and tie. When he finds out, usually from Nikzad Nodjoumi, that I have been attacked in New York press for having said or done one thing or another to anger powerful and nasty people of the city, he has one of three reactions. First, he does not call me for days; second, he calls me and comes up to my place with a rare and precious Ford or Kurosawa to have dinner and watch a movie with me (never ever uttering a word about the terror that has been unleashed against me); or third, he goes on a rampage against politics. For a man who made “Tangsir” (1973), “Harmonica” (1974), and “Requiem” (1978), three of the most political and anti-Shah films of the 1970s and definitive to the political consciousness that gradually led to the 1979 revolution in Iran, Naderi has a pathological reaction to political activism. “Well, I learned it from you,” I would tell him on these occasions. “I am a child of your generation of filmmakers.” “Did I not make ‘Tangsir’,” he would respond by asking rhetorically on these occasions. “Yes, you did,” I concur. “Well,” he concludes triumphantly, “I tell you fuck politics. Stick to your work.” Anything I do other than watching Ford, Kurosawa, and Lane (on whose cinemas he knows I am working on a book) he disapproves. When I helped put together a Palestinian film festival in New York he utterly disapproved. On the opening night of the festival, however, he called to wish me luck. When the political fallouts of the festival began to hit me hard (every single day a nasty article against me and my colleagues in New York tabloids), there was an “I told you so” written all over his cups of tea he offered me in consolation. When he was a member of the jury in Chicago and saw a film by Elia Suleiman, he called me at 2:00 o’clock in the morning to tell me what a great filmmaker Elia Suleiman is—and said nothing of our Palestinian film festival. When I invited Hany Abu Assad for dinner to meet him—for Hany is a great fan of his cinema—he was his usual public persona, charming, affectionate, talkative, boastful. For Naderi, Elia Suleiman and Hany Abu Assad are filmmakers, not Palestinian filmmakers. Once in a café in Damascus (it was in July 2004), I had a chat with Osama Muhammad, one of the most gifted Syrian filmmakers I know. He told me how once in India he was member of a jury and Niki Karimi, an Iranian actress and now filmmaker, asked him the proverbial question—do you like Kiarostami better or Makhmalbaf. “None of them,” Osama had responded. “Amir Naderi is the real master of your cinema—that’s the filmmaker I look up to.” When I told this story to Amir in New York, he blushed.
“Suppose,” he tells me when he wants to make a point of his aversion to politics, “suppose all your political ideals of justice and fairness, democracy and equanimity are materialized tomorrow. What then? What will you do with yourself if you get up one morning and there is no political cause that you advocate and everything you hope for has materialized—eternal justice for all mankind, food on everyone’s table, all clothed and sheltered. What will you do with yourself then? If you think the world is unbearable now, wait until you don’t have any political cause to espouse—then you see the real terror of this world.” He pauses then for a split second and adds, “I am the filmmaker of that morning after, when the world does no longer have a political cause to distract it from its real misery. Who cares to read Maxim Gorky today—but Chekhov, he is for ever.”
One of Naderi’s most perceptive American commentators is the film critic David Ng. Ng clearly grasps and admirably articulates the environmental fascination of Naderi with the cosmopolitan New York that he inhabits—and that for him represents technological postmodernity at the height of its paradoxical achievements. “Naderi’s poetry,” Ng notices, “is of a much harsher nature … [than D.A. Pennebaker’s ‘Daybreak Express’ (1953), with which he compares Naderi’s ‘Marathon’]. A Stygian voyage shot in caustic b&w, ‘Marathon’ inhabits its grimy environs so convincingly that the director may well have used an unwashed subway car window as his lens.”1 Ng has also noted the creative mutation of Naderi’s own person into the persona of his principal characters—but he misreads their (and with them Naderi’s own) location. “For Naderi,” Ng observes of Gretchen in “Marathon,” “she’s clearly an alter ego: a maniacally driven perpetual-motion machine stranded in an alien land.”2 That “alien land” is not New York qua New York, the United States, or particularly that hugely empty abstraction called “the West.” That “alien land” is the world at large (for which New York stands in Naderi’s cinema)—the technological world, the world abstracted to instrumental reason, to machine, to manufacturing, production, distribution, marketing, consumption—to men, women, and children mutated into things, things into objects, objects into in/animate simulacra of reality.
The nebulous disposition of that world is what Naderi’s cinema now inhabits, and New York is the cosmopolitan epicenter of the technological postmodernity that animates it. Naderi is fixated with being contemporary with his time—and that is the reason why he so succinctly detests nostalgia. But the intensity of his allergic reaction to nostalgia means that he is haunted by it. Between the goblin of a nostalgia that haunts him and his first and second names, and an obsessive fixation with being the creature of his time and place, Naderi maps out the creative contour of his art. New York is the absolute best place for that kind of creative disposition, for New York is miasmatic. It has no time to impress its inhabitants, let alone its casual visitors, of the depth of its character. Paris and London, Tehran and Cairo, as indeed all other major cities, have already a firm and formed opinion of themselves—opinions that they nervously impose on their inhabitants and show off to their visitors. The glory of New York is that it has no time for such shallow and fragile egos of its less gifted relatives. It embraces its inhabitants and welcomes its visitors into its vast, generous, cruel, and careless bosom, finds out what and who they are and then molds them and itself in the mirror image of each other.
Ng comes closest to what Naderi is up to in New York when he notices the non-verbality of Naderi’s obsessions:
For someone obsessed with words, she [Gretchen in “Marathon”] exists in an almost pre-verbal state, her only meaningful contact with other people being the messages her mother leaves on her answering machine. Her tunnel-vision existence mercifully explodes in the movie’s final scene: an entire city muted by snowfall—a startling cinematic negative of our lightless, noise-polluted civilization.3
That civilization for Naderi has now assumed iconic significance for the world at large. In “Marathon,” Naderi reduces that civilization to its innermost layers and labyrinths of abstractions, not just to mere words, but beyond that deep into the frightful fury of meaningless letters of the alphabet—long before they could mean anything, mere signs with no significance attached to them, symbols devoid of any mythic universe outside their own self-referential hubris. The most frightful scene in “Marathon” is the bathtub shot of letters, words, and pages of the dictionary floating in an abstracted eternity in Gretchen’s apartment. The same reduction of glorious words into meaningless letters, of confident signifiers into anxiety-ridden signs, is echoed in Naderi’s obsession with noise—music reduced to the elemental noisiness of its absolutist abstractions. There is something apocalyptic in Naderi’s vision of our present, pushing it forward to its logical conclusions into its (perhaps inevitable) future.
From this angle we can see how and why Naderi abandons the politics of the present for the metaphysics of the presence. The politics of the present, the systematic mendacity of our being politically positioned in the world (one way or even another), he seems to see as a camouflage fictively covering the metaphysics of our presence, our ability to see and suggest ourselves in our being-toward-the world, as Heidegger would say, or better yet, our Being-toward-death. But Naderi is far more an elegist than a coroner in this autopsy, for his careful construction of an apolitical take on reality is categorically coterminous in his cinema with an almost metaphysical dwelling in the physical facticity of life—a physicality that he visually sublates to a poetic take on shapes, shades, volumes, and sounds (teasing out of their mater-of-factness an overriding significance otherwise hidden under the guise of their too much familiarity—and thus the confusion of those who believe that Naderi is primarily a photographer, for they cannot see the centrality of abstracted objects and shapes in the general thrust of his cosmovision).
Central to that physical hold on reality is an existential solitude, operative at the heart of all Naderi’s films. Naderi’s cinema is a cinema of solitude—and that is the only feature of his vision that has remained consistently definitive to his cinema (from Iran to the United States), and I daresay will remain so, even if he were to go to the moon (as he plans to do, figuratively speaking, in his next film) and articulate his vision in the rugged aridity of its solitary distance from everything. At the center of “Manhattan by Numbers” (1993) is George Murphy (John Wojda), at the center of “ABC Manhattan” (1997) are three solitary and unrelated souls—Kacey (Erin Norris), Colleen (Lucy Knight), and Kate (Sara Paul); at the center of “Marathon” (2003) is Gretchen (Sara Paul), and at the center of “Sound Barrier” (2005) is Jesse (Charlie Wilson)—all of them solitary, driven, obsessed, self-referential, desperate, yet calm and quiet in their exteriors. We never see any one of Naderi’s characters in the company of any parents (Naderi himself was orphaned at a very young age), siblings, family, or friends. It really does not matter what these characters are looking for—George Murphy is looking for some money to pay his rent, Colleen is desperate to keep her daughter, Kacey is chasing after her lost dog, Kate is seeking to break up with her brother/lover, Gretchen is after breaking her own record in solving crossword puzzles, Jesse is looking for the voice of her mother to find out why he is deaf and dumb. All of these characters are lonely, lonesome, with no organic connection to anything or anybody. It is not sufficient to say that these solitary characters are reflections of Naderi’s own solitude, not just as an immigrant living in New York, but in fact as a stranger even or perhaps particularly in his own homeland, in Iran. In his innermost being as an artist, Naderi in fact does not have any homeland—does not feel particularly connected to anything or anybody. The solitude we witness in Naderi’s cinema is existential, cosmic, universal—something in that solitude speaks to humanity at large: disconnected, anomic, free-floating in the realm of worldly connections, material belongings—and thus integral to a metaphysical mutation to things, in/animate objects that he depicts and pictures. “I am a rock,” he might as well sing with his fellow New Yorkers, Simon and Garfunkel:
I am an island.
I’ve built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate ….
I am an island.
David Ng has admirably detected this existential angst at the heart of Naderi’s cinema:
His U.S.-set films, including “Manhattan by Numbers,” “A, B, C … Manhattan” and his most recent, “Marathon,” merge the anti-narrative style he pioneered in Iran with the ultramodern setting of his adopted home, New York. The results are a poetic but often jarring deconstruction of the familiar, in which mundane objects and events become almost abstract.4
That abstraction is purposeful, definitive to Naderi’s vision of the world, the way, in fact, he de-familiarizes the familiar by way of showing its inner angst, barely holding itself, and with itself the illusion of a worldly permanence, together.
To see the fragility of that elusive permanence, the way Naderi exposes it, it is crucial not just to read those who admire his cinema but also to consider those who find it unbearable and even troubling. It is important to know why, for example, Ronnie Scheib of Variety considers “Sound Barrier” “a black-and-white excursion into obsession, [which] may be the most extended mise en scene of pure frustration in cinema history,”5 and why Jared Rapfogel of Senses of Cinema believes, even more strongly, that “Sound Barrier” is “almost unbearable to sit through,” or describes it as “manic and feverish rather than calm and contemplative.”6 To be sure, film critics like Rapfogel are not entirely oblivious to Naderi’s cinematic virtuosity. Rapfogel in fact believes:
The boldness of the film’s structure is admirable, and I found myself fascinated by the first scene, with its hypnotic repetition, its almost sculptural representation of obsessiveness [sic] for the first 15 minutes or so, anyway. Its power has something to do with the fact that, at this point, we don’t really know who this child is or what exactly he’s looking for, leaving us only with this remarkable, animal immediacy, this pure spectacle of feverish physical activity.7
The problem for critics like Rapfogel (quite typical of others who have similar issues with Naderi’s cinema but have not put it so succinctly) begins precisely with this inscrutable obsession of such characters as Jesse. Describing the storage room scene of “Sound Barrier,” Rapfogel objects:
As the scene goes on and on (and on), as it ceases to be a scene, per se, and becomes the core of the film itself, it begins to test the patience even of those among us who love say, [James Benning’s] 13 Lakes, or an ostensibly narrative but radically uneventful film like Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).8
The conclusion of this line of argument is of course long foregone and pretty much predetermined, for
when Sound Barrier squanders the interest inspired by its structural purity, it’s in trouble, having little else to fall back on. Its derivative, melodramatic plot (the revelation of a childhood trauma miraculously curing deafness), its student-film-like direction and editing, and its crushingly obvious experiments with sound and silence (which basically consist of cutting back and forth between subjective shots accompanied by a low rumble and objective shots with ambient sound), fail to compel. And in the last half hour, with Jesse’s prolonged freak-out occasioning a much more cacophonous passage of sound-silence counterpoint, Sound Barrier becomes truly excruciating—it left me longing to be deaf.9
The problem that Naderi has with these critics is of course the problem that the good Captain of Road Prison 36 had with Luke, in Stuart Rosenberg’s “Cool Hand Luke” (1967): “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” The barely visible storylines in Naderi’s films are just there to suggest the mere simulacrum of a non-event. Definitive to Naderi’s cinema is precisely the instance of obsessive discovery—the maniacal moment when Jesse completely forgets not just himself but the whole universe around him and has absolutely no consciousness of anything but the focal point of his discovery—which at this point happens to be a tape that may contain the voice of her mother in which she may have revealed what happened that he lost his ability to hear. In other words, what Rapfogel cannot wait to get over with is precisely the moment of the film—there is nothing before or after it. That is it. The narrative drama in Naderi’s cinema, whatever they might be (whether a young woman trying to beat her own record in solving crossword puzzles in “Marathon” or a young boy looking for water in the middle of desert in “Water, Wind, Dust”), is entirely tangential, almost irrelevant, to the obsessive moment of discovery itself—and that discovery dwells in a moment, and has no claim to a duration, for the entire “Sound Barrier,” as indeed the entire “Marathon,” is really just a split second, the blink of an eye. Time stands still in such obsessive moments, the second handle does not move. There is an eternity in the moment of obsessive discovery that Naderi wishes to unpack.
There is a scene in “Marathon” (that unfortunately did not make it to Naderi’s final cut, but I have seen it among his rushes) when Gretchen stands in Time Square staring at a clock waiting for the strike of the hour so she can start her 24-hour marathon. The entire film, and the rest of Gretchen’s story, dwells really just in that very second when she is waiting to start. The rest of her day and the rest of her evening, night and midnight, until the hour strikes again and she has run out of time, and whatever number of crossword puzzles she has solved is the final number (72 and 1/2), stands absolutely constant. Naderi once said to me that people only see the final result of an artist’s creation, when Van Gogh, for example, has painted the sunflower and gone home to sleep. “People just look at that sunflower,” Naderi said, “and have no clue how it came about. My ambition is to enter the moment of obsessive creation, the madness that is hidden under the serene surface of the work.” Unless one is with Naderi in that equally obsessive urge to capture the moment of (almost epileptic seizure of) creation, of course his storylines appear almost ridiculous, non-existent, and even blasé. The point of his entire cinema is lost if one abandons the spontaneity of the moment of creation for the consumer-oriented, quick-fix, put-it-in-my-hand, final result of where we are headed and for what purpose. There is a fundamental discrepancy between Naderi’s fixation with the authenticity of the work of art and the triumphant reign of the culture industry, as Adorno called it,10 an industry that needs and exacts fast, furious, and dispensable results—works of art, McDonald’s hamburgers, and Starbuck’s coffee cups make no difference. (I have always thought that the “Emrika” that Naderi has actively imagined and sustained in his mind since childhood is really a figment of his own imagination, and the projected epicenter of the globalized monstrosity of capital has no relation to it—for today from Dubai to Tel Aviv to Disney Europe, to New Jersey shopping malls we have an entirely different map for “Emrika”.) A Hollywood scriptwriter once said that if he did not threaten to blow up the entire universe in the first thirty seconds of a script he has already lost the attention span of his American audience. That is the patience and poise that critics like Rapfogel bring to Naderi’s cinema. This is neither Rapfogel nor Naderi’s fault—this is just the mismatch discrepancy of a kind of artistic creativity caught in the snares of a long since vacated world. What Walter Benjamin called the vanishing aura of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is particularly meaningful in the light of the disease (now the condito sine qua non) that Adorno diagnosed as the culture industry—against both of which artists like Naderi have waged an entirely lost, and always uphill, battle.11
Notice Rapfogel’s almost accurate description of the crucial scene of Jesse in the storage room:
The central character is Jesse, an 11 year-old deaf-mute child who discovers that there may be a tape recording of his dead mother’s voice in a locker in a Queens storage facility. In a brief and elliptical series of scenes, we witness Jesse’s discovery of this knowledge and his securing of the key to the locker. The great bulk of the following 90-plus minutes consists of two scenes: for something like 45 minutes, we sit by as Jesse enters the storage locker, finds boxes and boxes full of labeled cassette tapes, and systematically searches through these boxes, growing increasingly desperate, violent and destructive, ripping open the containers, hurling the cassettes aside, and generally laying waste to the room until, finally (FINALLY!), he finds what he’s looking for.12
The frustration that you see in the parenthetical capital letters with the added exclamation mark (FINALLY!) is precisely where Rapfogel loses not just his patience but also the entire point of the film. That scene is not preparatory for something else. That scene IS the final and definitive scene. That scene is not going anywhere, and is desperately trying to draw attention to itself—but the culture industry, fast-food consumer culture, has of course no patience or poise to pause and see, note, notice, or above all care—for creativity in that culture is defined mechanical (and now electronic) productivity, by the very speed that consumes it at the moment of its creativity, as fast as a newspaper column written and read punctiliously to the deadline of a meaningless tomorrow—a piece of news in the newspaper today, soaking wet in the loiter box of a cat tomorrow. “The fact that we know so little about Jesse,” Rapfogel believes, “becomes less a matter of mystery and more of a liability. The little we learn about him by observing his behaviour—that he is desperate and hysterical—can’t justify 45 minutes of endless repetition.”13 What repetition? There are literally thousands of cuts in “Sound Barrier”—and not a single one of them is like another. “Sound Barrier,” Rapfogel finally concludes, “may have been awful, but it was at least memorably awful.”14 In that memorial remembrance, even when one has spectacularly failed to understand a work of art, is precisely where an artist leaves the traces of his time and leaves.
Failure of Naderi to convey what he is up to in his cinema and convince such film critics as Rapfogel, symptomatic of a more pervasive reaction to his New York films, casts Naderi in the exact opposite side offered by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, whose cinema is shot and projected from a diametrically opposite angle on the selfsame “America” that over a lifetime has fascinated and preoccupied Naderi. Beginning with his “Dancer in the Dark” (2000), and now two-thirds into his projected “USA trilogy,” two of which—“Dogville” (2004) and “Manderlay” (2005)—have already enthralled, bedeviled, embarrassed, angered, and disturbed his American audiences, Lars von Trier has an entirely different take from Naderi on “America.” Without ever as much as setting foot in the United States (for Lars von Trier is reportedly quite phobic and does not travel), the brutally wise and unmercifully perceptive Dane has hit hard at not just the political disposition but the very a/moral underpinning of the very idea of this thing called “America.” While American filmcrit crowd is busy trying to figure out whether or not Lars von Trier is “anti-American” (self-delusional verbosity has rarely been so confounded), Lars von Trier is busy ripping the very fabric of “America” to pieces. While Andrew Delbanco, the distinguished American literary critic, is busy linking Melville’s American myth of Ahab and his search for the white whale to President Bush’s presumably dogged pursuit of Osama bin Laden (an entirely delusional misconception for Bush needs and in fact manufactured Ben Laden),15 half-way around the globe, Ahab of a different sea comes to Delbanco’s doorstep and tells him of the horror under his own nose. How poor is Delbanco’s America in teaching the world anything; how rich is von Trier’s world in teaching America everything.
Naderi’s cinema is the exact antidote of von Trier’s—if only Rapfogel had a little bit of more patience with it. From the belly of the beast, he is desperately, and perhaps purely for the salvation of his own soul (for having devoted a lifetime believing in it), he is trying to find a redeeming light in this dark terror called “America.” “To me,” Naderi once told me, “‘Moby Dick’ is everything—that dogged, obsessive, consuming search.” He then paused for a second and said, “But I don’t have the heart of that ending in the future of Ahab. I need a dram of hope.” Jesse’s smile at the end of “Sound Barrier,” the snowfall over New York at the end of “Marathon,” and the few dollars that an accidental acquaintance finally gives to George Murphy in Manhattan by Numbers are all just these sparkles of that grace, fragile rays of hope, that Naderi, perhaps the last hopeful immigrant to this godforsaken land, can offer it.
Perhaps Naderi’s New York is the salvation of von Trier’s America—and yet they may be both too late.
Naderi’s cinema is a poetic of visual reflection—suspended of all imported meanings, saturated by the imaginal universe of their own making, and this is at once the most exhilarating and the most frustrating aspect of his cinema. It is exhilarating for with Naderi you never know where he is taking you, for he does not quite know where he is going himself. It is frustrating (particularly for major film festival directors and film critics who consistently have difficulty with his lexiconic asceticism) for he is a visual physicist and not a narrative engineer. Naderi’s visual reflections are anti-metaphysical in the sense that they are not predicated on any particular set of epistemic suppositions. In defiance of any received and meaningful epistemic, Naderi’s cinema (as that of any other great filmmaker) in effect has created, crafted, and coined its own visual vocabulary—over the course of a long and illustrious career. The specific nature of that vocabulary in the case of Naderi is his fixation with the post-industrial technological machinery. If the cosmopolis is the setting of Naderi’s cinema—from Bushehr to Tehran to New York—the very epitome of technological postmodernity is the soul of his cinema. In this sense, no other Iranian filmmaker comes even close to Naderi in being consistently an urban filmmaker, a filmmaker of the technological mammoth he at once fears and adores.
In Naderi’s cinema, the physical evidence of technological machinery—cars, airplanes, helicopters, trains, bridges, motorcycles, ships, bicycles, industrial refuse, oil refineries, city slums, gas reservoirs, traffic jams, skyscrapers, subway systems, etc.—is no longer predicated on a science that he neither posits nor wishes to question. In his cinema, this machinery has assumed a reality sui generis, irreducible to whatever advances in various sciences may have occasioned them. The iconic manifestations of technological postmodernity in Naderi’s New York cinema are the elemental forces of his visual reflections, his poetics of dwelling on that factual phenomenon rather than a politics of questioning or criticizing it.
Given the radical contemporaneity of Naderi’s cinematic reflection on technological postmodernity, his cinema is not reducible or assimilable to any national or regional aesthetics—his aesthetics is neither Iranian nor American, neither Eastern nor Western. In fact his cinema radically resists national or regional aestheticization. This resistance, in turn, prevents his cinema from becoming integrated into any metaphysics of significant meaning—as it insists on remaining visually irreducible, reflectively poetic, and as such definitive to the technological postmodernity it inhabits.
Naderi’s cinema equally resists cultural classification—not just in his New York films, but even the films that he made in his native country. In other words, even his Iranian films are not Iranian in any enduring, meaningful, or markedly cultural sense. This aspect of his cinema may be traced back to the marginal coloniality from which he as a filmmaker hails, or may be equally articulated in terms of the world cinema to which he was habitually exposed as a youngster. Abadan, Naderi’s birthplace, is a peculiarly syncretic location. Like the rest of Khuzestan province, Abadan is located on the crosscurrents of four cultures—African, Arab, Indian, and Iranian. People like Naderi, as the rest of us who come from that region, are located on the borderline of two colonial peripheries—both European-based colonialism and the Tehran-based racism. While the British colonial officers in Southern Iran considered us native Iranians in their racially profiling us, the Tehranis looked at us as “Arabs,” an equally condescending and racist category in their eyes. To this day, the principal figures in Iranian cinema—Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beiza’i, Daryush Mehrjui, Bahman Farmanara, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, etc.—are either born and bred Tehranis or else have completely assimilated and identify with a Tehran-based condescending attitude toward what they dismissively call “Shahrastani”—or “provincial” with a strong negative connotation. In the crosscurrents of two racist/colonial gazes, the dual marginality assumes an entirely new meaning. We in the south feel neither completely Iranian (the way from Pahlavi monarchy to Islamic mullarchy to the leading Iranian public intellectuals and literati think of themselves as “Iranian”), nor indeed do we completely see ourselves as Arab, African, or Indian. We belong to all of these colonially manufactured cultural traits and yet to none of them exclusively—and thus our very factual evidence dismantles them all. “Culture,” as result, for filmmakers like Naderi (or novelists like Ahmad Mahmoud and Sadeq Chubak) is an entirely fluid if not futile category. Thus not just culture but in fact its inevitable mutation into the politics of cultural identity is an entirely useless and pedantic proposition in our neck of the woods.
The suspension of cultural identity in Naderi’s cinema in turn leads to its deferral of all received and regurgitated god-terms—of “Tradition versus Modernity,” “Islam versus the West,” etc. All such god-terms, unexamined metanarratives of colonial modernity, are absolutely and entirely useless and irrelevant in the making of Naderi’s cinema. This is at once the blessing and the curse of his cinematic cosmovision—blessing for it is a space of emancipation from all such inherited traps, curse for it systematically prevents his cinema to be globally celebrated, as it richly deserves, because it defies the logic of national cinema, now seemingly forever cast in the guise of the cinema that most caters to the political atrocities of the season—Iran was yesterday, Afghanistan is today, Iraq has now followed, and Iran may indeed come back again, or perhaps Korea. Cannes as a result follows Bush in his designation of what he calls “the Axis of Evil”—for the French (and by extension Europeans) to feel superior to Americans (their perennial complex) and thus whitewash their own colonial atrocities.
In its creatively dwelling on technological postmodernity as the sight of its own peculiar (anti) metaphysics, Naderi’s cinema thrives in those counter-metaphysics, the bodily resurrection of the visual testament of a civilizational state that at once frightens and exhilarates him. Inside that machine he is the happiest discoverer of the terror that technological postmodernity has perpetrated upon man—and thus Stanly Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) remains one of his absolute iconic references. New York is thus both the Alpha and the Omega of Naderi’s cinema—its commencement and its conclusion, its point of origin and its visceral return. It is not just the Cosmopolis of the final world dis/order, but also the Gotham of no return.
*I wrote this essay in December 2005 for a major retrospective that Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Torino, Italy, had organized on Amir Naderi. I am grateful to Stefano Boni, the programming director of the museum for having invited me to write this essay. The Italian translation of the essay was published as the text of the catalogue for that retrospective. This is the first time its original English is being published.
1David Ng, “Noises Off: Seeking Solace in the Ambient Sounds of the City,” Village Voice (23 March 2004): https://www.villagevoice.com/2004/03/23/noises-off-seeking-solace-in-the- ambient-sounds-of-the-city/
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4See David Ng, “An artistic orphan in the big city,” in Salon.Com (11 June, 2003), at http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/int/2003/06/11/naderi/index_np.html.
5See Ronnie Scheib’s review of “Sound Barrier” in Variety (May 4, 2005).
6See Jared Rapfogel, “Lakes in Lower Manhattan: The 4th Annual Tribeca Film Festival, April 19–May 1, 2005” in Senses of Cinema (June 2005) at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/festivals/05/36/tribeca2005.html.
7Ibid.
8Ibid.
9Ibid.
10See Theodore Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 2001).
11See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in his Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969): 217–52.
12Ibid.
13Ibid.
14Ibid.
15See Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Knopf, 2005).