When fathers gasping the life out…
…or Sumgait residents of Matlab Muhktarov
Spring drizzle
On the tiny shore
The small shells are just moistened.
(Buson)
The fine line between real and unreal in haiku (hokku) evokes the most intimate feelings I can imagine for myself. While reading any haiku, I return to my own paradise – nostalgia. Any moment left in the past becomes my paradise.
***
According to Barbara Cassin’s cordial speech (French philologist and philosopher—ed.) nostalgia introduced into medical literature in the seventeenth century as a word to describe the emotional state of soldiers fighting distant from their home country. (Reference: B.Cassin “Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?”)
When they heard the melodies or laments belonging to the Alps, the soldiers would be unable to cope with their homesickness and either flee or die. Thus, they were barred to hear such melodies, and defiance of prohibition resulted in death. The word “Nostalgia” was coined as a name for the homesickness suffered by those soldiers.
Cassin, in her writings, associates the origin of the word with Odysseus’s journey of exile and emphasizes that the reason to return to Ithaca, her own home, was a deep nostalgia for there
After a decade of the Trojan War and twenty years from leaving home and living in exile (punished by Poseidon, he runs adrift across the oceans for years), Odysseus returns to Ithaca and finds that his home has changed; everything is no longer the same.
In a sense, nostalgia can be described as the feeling directed toward the past and what once happened – “homeland”
Actually, the feeling we name as “homeland” is a dream of our subjective reality including our family, friends, belongings, and so on.
The documentary film “12/35” made by Matlab Mukhtarov deals with nostalgia. The film’s opening sequence is a return to the author’s childhood, to a moment they referred to as “the paradise of his childhood”, in their understanding. This paradise is nothing more but a car driving by an old Soviet building an old Soviet building and the music playing inside.
However, the film director underscores that this reminiscence belongs to him. The director, guided by this personal reminiscence, He is overcome with nostalgia for the building he live. As memories deepen, both the protagonists and the director discover a shared point of convergence.
Film clearly portrays the transformations in the city’s architecture. Contract between the past and the present are presented to the audience using various camera angles and off-screen shots (the concept of off-screen events—happenings outside the visible frame).
Here, Odysseus stands us. Like Odysseus, when the director comes back his homeland after a long time, he sees his homeland “occupied”. But, in contrast to the protagonist, the director’s attempts to take back the homeland are passive. He is in search of reason. He searches for reasons. Consequently, the camera zooms in on the specific building—12/35.
The other protagonists in the film emerge from this moment on. The protagonists of Matlab Mukhtarov’s films, in some way, are possible to resemble those of Wong Kar-Wai’s films ad well. The substantial difference between them is that the protagonists and antagonist of Wong Kar-Wai are dandies who observe social interactions from a distance
They avoid from intervening in the recent socio-politic relations. The events happened in the director’s films develop around them, beyond their influence but impacting on them. However the protogonists in Matlab Mukhtarov’s films come from a variety of social classes or backgrounds. It is possible to title the film as “The Earlier Ones and the Later Ones” or “Fathers and Sons”. However, similiar to Wong Kar-Wai’s protogonists, the events in the film “12/35” take place independently of their intervention but in a way that directly affects them. The opening sequence of the film starts with a quest for the deceased father. The failure of the entire generation is presented in the background of the father. As the storyline in the film unfolds, the “sons” reveal that this failure is the outcome of social changes rather than individual causes. For this reason, the “12/35” might also be referred to as a quest or road film. After watching the film “12/35”, I realized that this is the off-screen shot film.
In other words, the film displays the real urban characters we are not shown by the media.
Therefore, it could be said that the film “12/35” has created and introduced new characters for Azerbaijani cinema. Their inherent dialectical contradictions and characters originating from the “ghettos” of Sumgait city serve as alternative protagonists in the current film industry. As the opening scene, the final scene is related with imaginations.
The director’s thoughts, heard over video footage of the deceased, brought to my mind a special line from Ulus Baker’s book “Brain Screen” (Turkish sociologist and philosopher). After investigating the creative potentials of thought and imagination, in a sense, image of thought, montage – thinking, Baker emphasizes in this book that everything, including our memory, is an image.
Similarly, in the film’s final scenes, the director expertly depicts nostalgia, imaginations, and images of death in the figures of the four deceased using a camera panning shot. The director, through this panoramic camera movement, displays the magnificence of cinema – how film revives these people for a few seconds, and transmits the feeling to the view.
To sum up my view, although the characters in “12/35” bear resemblance to Wong Kar-Wai’s protagonists in the obscure lit streets of Hong Kong’s street, they are, as we wholeheartedly call, Sumgait residents of Matlab Mukhtarov.
Alamdar Faig