crimson gold
talaye sorkh (crimson gold, 2003), directed by jafar panahi and written by abbas kiarostami .
i' m glad i saw crimson gold. watching it is like getting a peek behind the curtain .
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we’d love your help. let us know what’s wrong with this preview of the crimson gold by voronica whitney - robinson .
award - winning' crimson gold' banned in iran crimson gold, a film by jafar panahi, won awards at the cannes film festival this year. but its critical view of class divisions in contemporary iranian society has left it banned in iran. npr' s bob mondello offers a review .
crimson peak is filming today in kingston! still time to go check it out downtown .
fig 3: crimson gold: the plot starts at the end of the story: failing in his desperate attempts in robbing a jewelry store, hossein decides to conclude his misery by pulling the trigger .
crimson peak is filming today in kingston! still time to go check it out downtown. : kingstonontario
sing is due out on december 21 while gold is due to hit the screen on january 27 .
she wanted out. she wanted a new life. she wanted a trophy worthy of a master thief. she wanted to find the source of the treasured crimson gold. she wanted to face an undead emperor on his home ground and live to tell the tale. careful what you wish for .
the crimson gold
is the third title in this ongoing forgotten realms series focusing specifically on the shadowed lif
fig 4: crimson gold: numbed by the pills he regularly takes, and detached from any determinate relation with the lives of the others despite his daily interactions, hossein leads an ambiguous, invisible life .
accordingly, crimson gold disturbs this economy in order to achieve something different: it tends to show hossein in his most ordinary moments of life, and, more importantly, it does so by avoiding any explicit ascription of meaning to these moments. bearing in mind my previous discussion of the precariousness of life, crimson gold aims to recognize the liveable life of hossein in his most silent and least dramatic moments. or, it may even sound better to say that hossein’s life, the life of a lonely and marginal character, is nothing but a sum of these insignificant moments; and, interestingly, crimson gold does not strive to get hossein’s life recognized through imposing dramatic meanings and significations that are more or less ‘external’ to the life he is leading. what seems important to crimson gold is to locate and acknowledge the liveable life where it seems impossible to find .
and on thursday matthew mcconaughey revealed to ellen degeneres how much fun he had piling on some 40 pounds for his new film, gold, in which he plays prospector kenny wells who finds gold in the indonesia jungle .
crimson gold, a film by jafar panahi, won awards at the cannes film festival this year. but its critical view of class divisions in contemporary iranian society has left it banned in iran. npr' s bob mondello offers a review .
himitsu sentai gorenger volume 10 features episodes 55 - 60: ep. 55: the colored daishogun! tuthankamen' s curse, ep. 56: blue summer vacation! a demon' s killing beach, ep. 57: the black encircling net! five - faced peggy, ep. 58: crimson ambition! his excellency the führer' s gold castle, ep. 59: the crimson south! the mysterious big gold plan, and ep. 60: blue inland sea! the floating secret fortress island. [ 1 ]
the peruvian incas are confused by the spanish colonists’ obsession with gold and wonder if they eat gold to survive. the spaniards laugh at this ridiculous thought. but yes, they jokingly concede, “we live on gold. ” through this misunderstanding, the incas come to know the spanish conquistadors as the eponymous gold eaters in ronald wright’s historical fiction novel, “the gold eaters. ” wright paints a vivid picture of peru in the early 16th century as spanish explorers and colonizers began to arrive, providing convincing perspectives from both the spanish and the incas’ side. despite having an accomplished tone of historical realism, however, the novel is somewhat lacking in plot depth and character maturity .
some people loved guillermo del toro’s gothic confection crimson peak. some people found it disappointing. but the overall consensus seems to be that crimson peak not only wasn’t scary, but didn’t have a twisty enough storyline. but maybe everybody missed the huge twist at the end of the film ?
she wanted out. she wanted a new life. she wanted a trophy worthy of a master thief. she wanted to find the source of the treasured crimson gold. she wanted to face an undead emperor on his home ground and live to tell the tale. careful what you wish for .
the crimson gold
is the third title in this ongoing forgotten realms series focusing specifically on the shadowed life of the iconic character class of the rogue. each novel in the series is a stand - alone adventure, allowing readers an easy entry point into the forgotten realms world .
the namesake of this book, the crimson gold, feels ultimately unimportant to the primary plot. the d & d references feel heavy - handed. the lead protagonist is almost comically sure of herself, while the most powerful wizards of thay, ancient wizards, are incapable of thwarting their problem .
the gorenger discover a gold - stealing plot associated with a gift for the black cross furher, while daigorou wishes to prove himself to the team .
since making crimson gold, emadeddin has returned to his day job. he has yet to see the finished movie .
none of my colleagues has seen the film ,
panahi says .
they have forbidden all screenings in iran. not just public screenings but private ones too. nobody has seen the film .
crimson gold has significant resonances with close - up in terms of its reflexivity towards the realist tradition of social films; however, at the same time it is representative of a considerably different reflexive approach nonetheless. in what follows, i will map the significant ways in which crimson gold tries to bring the realist conventions and norms that are characteristic of social films to the surface in order to show their limitations in a playful way. of course, as we shall see, bringing the conventions to the surface means that the film itself is very much situated within the tradition; but at the same time, its playfulness and reflexive approach prevents it from being simply reducible to it .
crimson gold is more cyclical, socially conscious cinema from the world of panahi and kiarostami. this parable begins at the end when a lonely pizza deliveryman, hussein (hussein emadeddin), shoots himself in the head after a botched jewel heist. the narrative quickly rewinds and panahi observes the simple but devastating events that would slowly squash the man’s human spirit. the genius of kiarostami’s deceptively simple screenplay is how it quietly evokes america’s post - 9 / 11 immigration policy in the repeated embarrassments of the film’s lead. but because crimson gold is also about the oppression of one iranian man by his own people, it’s impossible to write off the film as some knee - jerk anti - american provocation .
afar panahi' s new film, crimson gold, climaxes in a jewel heist gone horribly wrong. clamouring at a shop window, the witnesses watch as the jeweller is shot down in cold blood. a moment later, the robber (and ostensibly the hero of the picture) turns the gun on himself. the crowd screams and scatters. from up the street comes the wail of sirens .
if the authorities disliked panahi' s previous picture (the circle), they positively detest crimson gold. the film is banned in iran and its maker is breaking the law every time he screens it elsewhere. on returning home from the moscow film festival, he was seized at the airport and interrogated for several hours. there was a moment when he wondered if he would ever be allowed to leave .
of course, it may be argued that, despite its reluctance to appropriate its main character, crimson gold effectively reduces hossein to a mere victim (a ‘victim of society / injustice / class differences’). in fact, crimson gold exploits hossein in order to provide the conditions for portraying the dark sides of community: while delivering pizzas, hossein encounters all sorts of people, all of which are the perpetrators or victim of some kind of a social injustice. hossein himself is a victim indeed, and his victimhood is even exacerbated since his job exposes him to the difficult task of witnessing other forms of social injustice that he himself may not be a part of. so in this sense the narrative does provide some motivations for hossein’s suicidal rebellion: after all, he is rebelling against the established order that is relegating him and many others to a state of victimhood .
in crimson gold, the overall structure of the plot is familiar: the film starts with a climactic situation in which a man, whom we later understand is called hossein, is robbing a jewellery store; and when his plan goes wrong he commits murder and then kills himself. the plot then flashes back in time, focusing on the characters involved in this initial climactic situation. in this respect, the whole plot could be initially understood as a struggle to describe what has happened prior to the final incident and what has caused the conflict. also, all of the scenes are structured in a classical manner and the montage is quite clearly following the norms of continuity editing. so, unlike close - up, the film is not preoccupied with making visible the different techniques and devices it exploits; on the contrary, like the classical mode, the style is not obtrusive, not attracting attention to itself while only serving the plot. like many other social films, crimson gold is a realist feature film narrating the life story of an individual who lives on the margins of society. so crimson gold is aimed at achieving the benevolent objectives associated with social films, and in doing so it does intend to convey some messages to its addressees. these characteristics unanimously eventuate in a pleasurable result: the story is more or less familiar, and the way that the story unfolds seems conventional and thus easily graspable. but is crimson gold really a mere reproduction of the dominant cinematic forms that we, as spectators, are familiar with? the experience of watching this film and a close analysis of it suggest that the film is building on the familiar forms; more importantly, however, these familiar conventions and expectations are playfully literalized and relocated at the surface of the text .
every scene in crimson gold evokes oppression within iran and, much more cunningly, the nasty “you are either with us or against us” mentality the united states adopted after 9 / 11. just as hussein’s constant waiting is meant to humorously parallel panahi’s own detainment at jfk, a conversation at the film’s crucial jewelry store more largely references our country’s isolationist mentality (the store advises hussein to buy iranian gold, not the imported italian kind). panahi and kiarostami understand the effects of 9 / 11 on our country’s policies, but when does safeguarding one’s country come at the expense of another’s humiliation? like one character in the film says: “show some mercy, please. ”
in close - up, hossain sabzian (playing himself) is a poor jobless man who very much loves cinema to the extent that he gets in trouble with the law for impersonating director mohsen makhmalbaf; while in crimson gold, hussein (hossain emadeddin) is a poor pizza delivery worker and a former fighter in the iran - iraq war who is still affected by the injuries of war. both of these characters are among the marginal individuals of iranian society, not only due to their poor conditions of living, but also due to their inability in narrating their own life story and thus in getting their invisible marginal status recognized socially. in this sense, both close - up and crimson gold can be considered as social films that are exclusively dedicated to bearing witness to the unheard life stories of those who suffer, but those whose sufferings are exacerbated due to their limited capacity to make their cry heard .
in a similar manner, crimson gold puts at its centre a marginal character; but, unlike the conventional instances, it does not take him for granted and it denies the spectator such transparency. by doing so, crimson gold highlights a very important consideration that is significantly neglected by the conventional features of the social films tradition: the obsessive defamiliarization in the early stages of crimson gold is indeed in accordance with the ethico - political aims of social films; since defamiliarization inevitably necessitates the existence of such a narrative. that is, narrating and representing someone who is not always already familiar – someone whose alterity is concealed and thus ungraspable for the moment – proves its own necessity and ethico - political significance. furthermore, this necessity gains even more significance if we consider it through its intersection with the lack of narrative privilege: hossein is not only unfamiliar but he is also unable to get his unfamiliarity recognized due to his lack of access to the necessary means of self - narration. he is simply a working class man, with no academic or technical skill. he is always numbed by the pills he takes because of the war injuries and accordingly he is even unable to do his simple pizza delivery work without any error. so obviously hossein is not able to use some sort of medium in order to narrate himself and thus the ‘social film’ undertakes this narration on behalf of him .
the cw seems pretty pleased with their efforts, of course. “i hope the fans who treasure the character are as excited as we are by what costume designer colleen atwood has achieved with this latest version of the flash’s iconic suit, ” said executive producer david nutter said in their press release. it definitely looks a lot less like the crimson chin from the front like this, so good job there, cw. or bad job, depending on how much you love the crimson chin .
in revealing this denouement i' m merely taking my lead from the film itself. the heist scene (the crowd, the shots, the sirens) actually plays out during the opening three minutes. everything else is flashback, rewinding to show the drip - drip of humiliations that turn a listless pizza delivery man into a killer with nothing to lose. this makes crimson gold a most unusual breed of crime thriller: back - to - front and curiously weighted .
take any human being and you find that his situation is a direct result of his family, his education, his economic position ,
explains panahi, an iranian .
so this thriller is not about the crime itself. it' s about the background story .
or to put it another way: the villain of crimson gold is not so much the gunman as the big, cold, uncaring city he lives in. and the fact that this city also happens to be tehran has inevitably caused problems .
after the early scenes, the narrative undertakes a simultaneous familiarization and defamiliarization of hossein’s character. with its focus on hossein in his everyday life and interactions before his attempt to rob a jewellery store, crimson gold follows the aforementioned conventional order – depicting the events that lead to the final climatic situation; but it is my contention that, once again, such following is accompanied by a great deal of playfulness. for instance, in many cases there is no strictly meaningful link between the scenes and each scene does not inevitably necessitate the one that follows. this unconventional approach disrupts the totality of the narrative in a significant way: each scene more or less plays a part in the whole film, but at the same time each part is not justified by – and thus is not reducible to – the totality of the narrative. the spectator, educated by the instrumentality of the realist social films, desires the complete picture in the least possible time with the most possible details; but crimson gold systematically disrupts such desires .
jafar panahi' s'' crimson gold,'' which will be shown at the 41st new york film festival tonight and tomorrow, begins with the armed robbery of a tehran jewelry store, an event captured in one motionless shot as if by a security camera, albeit one that has been set up for artistic effect rather than efficient surveillance. gunshots are exceedingly rare in iranian movies, and the two that are fired in the opening moments reverberate with particular force, even though the crime they aggravate looks banal and amateurish .
like many iranian directors, he began making films about children. the popularity of children as subjects stems in part from the existence of state funding for such films. they also serve to steer filmmakers clear of censorship problems that complicate the filming of any domestic or intimate scenes involving adult women. however, after his first two feature films, panahi decided to tackle these complications head on by making the circle, a devastating look at the strictures against women in contemporary iran. this new tone of social critique continued in the unsettling crimson gold .
at first, i though the main character was going to be a dwarf. this was an exciting concept for me, as i had never read a book with dwarf as the main focus of a story. then he gets killed in the first chapter. tazi is introduced and i really liked her. then she becomes a slave. another dwarf is soon introduced and they sort of team up. this was not what i had expected, but i like the unexpected. the crimson gold is an interesting tale about a young female fighter that gets tangled up in another
in this sense, crimson gold provides the condition for what we might call ‘bestowing recognition to the unknowable other’; a sort of recognition in which the self must abandon his / her familiar – but nevertheless ‘unethical’ – desires for knowing and grasping the other in a total manner. (60) crimson gold is denying the spectator his / her conventional expectations for identification with the character, foregrounding a different sense of identification through which he very much remains at a decisive distance: hossein’s liveable life and grievable death is acknowledged through providing him with some kind of a story; but such a story does not deprive him of his irreplaceable alterity. hossein’s story is very much his, and the film is clearly reluctant in clarifying many ambiguous aspects of his life. it is in this sense that the film works as the ‘listening eye’: hossein, as the embodiment of alterity, significantly remains exterior to the grasp of the narrative – as well as the grasp of the spectator – since the camera is obsessed with the surfaces and thus resists any determinate psychological – or even crude sociological – explanations. his story unfolds in front of our eyes, but his story is always already his and it more or less remains that way .
at first, i though the main character was going to be a dwarf. this was an exciting concept for me, as i had never read a book with dwarf as the main focus of a story. then he gets killed in the first chapter. tazi is introduced and i really liked her. then she becomes a slave. another dwarf is soon introduced and they sort of team up. this was not what i had expected, but i like the unexpected. the crimson gold is an interesting tale about a young female fighter that gets tangled up in another person' s war. she has no choice but to be the pawn of the evil wizard. she must not only use her wits to escape the situation, but to also save her new friend. this story moves along at a good pace, but did not have enough action to suit me. when the story focused on ythazz, i always felt a little lost and looked forward to it returning to tazi. still, it is a good story that does not require you reading the first two books in the series. overall, the the crimson gold by voronica whitney - robinson is a nice addition to the forgotten realms world of books. i rated this book a 7 out of 10 .
after he leaves the high - rise apartment, hussein returns to the store. we already know much of what will happen now, because
crimson gold
opens with a version of the same scene it closed with. but i will not discuss the opening (and closing) because they proceed with a kind of implacable logic. what seems impulsive and reckless at the beginning of the film takes on a certain logic after we have spent some time in hussein' s company. in his case, still waters run deep and cold. he has been still and implacable for the entire film, but now we understand he was not frozen, but waiting .
i would' ve given it 2 stars if it wasn' t d & d. as a d & d book, it' s bad. this isn' t the first book the author has written for d & d so it' s not just ignorance. and the editor must be blind as well. the crimson gold? it' s a sad excuse for a title. the metal in question can be replaced with whatever you wish and it wouldn' t change a thing, given how minor and unimportant it was to the plot. thazienne the protagonist? this series is about rogues. but our heroine is a rogue, warrior, military
“if you want to arrest a thief, you’ll have to arrest the world, ” says an armchair philosopher in the film as hussein’s friend ali (kamyar sheissi) goes through the contents of a woman’s purse he’s just stolen. tipsy from this conversation about guesswork, entitlement, and cause and effect, ali envisions a world where he can spare himself considerable embarrassment by knowing the contents of a woman’s purse before pinching it. crimson gold is a film largely concerned with the surface of things, and the message of this mystical scene is abundantly clear: just as ali cannot separate the purse from the woman, the united states cannot separate terrorism from the middle eastern man .
it may be said that crimson gold is withholding explanatory devices in order to elicit responses from the spectator such that he / she might be provoked to actively provide answers for him / herself (a sort of democratization of spectatorship). but this is not the case with crimson gold. on the contrary, the answers are there, and the blanks and gaps can be filled quite easily, in case we are satisfied with general explanations that effectively translate hossein’s particularity and concreteness into abstract terms. however, the interesting point is that such readymade filling, despite its accessibility, is not desirable or even satisfying here. there is something in play that goes beyond the mere act of filling the blanks: what we encounter here is a sort of questioning the very act of ‘filling’ since filling is decentred as if some kind of a story is not necessarily dependent upon such an act of filling the blanks. so, in a sense, the film is providing the answers like many other social films that are aimed at maximizing communicativeness; but the point is that, unlike these conventional features, crimson gold is delegitimizing the centrality of answers so that the film gains its affects at a quite different level. the point is not only that such answers seem quite unsatisfying, but also that the act of providing answers – filling the blanks, as if there is a puzzle to be solved – loses its edge throughout the film such that the affections of the film are not theoretically grasped even if we strive to provide ‘better’ answers. despite the fact that, at the surface, the story unfolds in a smoothly linear order, the film effectively denies us the pleasures of such linearity since there is no easy passage from a to b through which we gain a better grasp of hossein, and by which we may imagine a future c and d that could bring us to a much more comprehensive knowledge of him and his life story. the linearity is preserved at the surface, but it is nevertheless trapped in a constant process of being interrupted and negated .
crimson gold and close - up are not aimed at treating their central characters in typical ways and, more interestingly, they are not exploiting the familiar narrative devices in order to get them recognized through a familiar channel. crimson gold and close - up are aimed at narrating the invisible while resisting the current (altericidal) frameworks of visibility. recognizing the other through the current frameworks that we are used to is indeed reinforcing the presupposed universality of these established frameworks while concealing their undeniably violent particularity and exclusions. so, there would be no ethics, since ethics is understood here as a form of self - interrogation, as a form of stepping back by which the other may find an alternative space for being recognized in his / her alterity and not in his / her reducibility to sameness. what is at stake is putting into question our frameworks for thinking about the human through our encounter with the alterity of the other. but if the other is supposed to fit into these frameworks – if he / she is brought into a light to the extent that there would be no room left for acknowledging the ambiguity of that which is unrepresentable and that which always remains ambiguously unrepresentable despite our best efforts through our ‘best’ forms – then the other is always already in our grasp –always already phrased– and thus there is no possibility for any meaningful critique – and thus no meaningful alternative future – anymore .
the success of
crimson gold
depends to an intriguing degree on the performance of its leading actor, a large, phlegmatic man who embodies the rule that an object at rest will stay at rest until some other force sets it into motion. the character, named hussein and played by hussein emadeddin, is a pizza deliveryman in tehran, iran, heavy - set, tall, undemonstrative. he sits where he sits as if planted there, and when he rides his scooter around the city streets, he doesn' t lean and dart like most scooter drivers, but seems at one with his machine in implacable motion. when he smokes, he is like an automaton programmed to move the cigarette toward and away from his lips .
crimson gold, one of the best films of the year, is absolutely stunning from start to finish. it' s gritty and captures the essence of the social struggles in iran while consistently delivering messages on the struggles we all face in life regarding love and relationships. it' s a humanistic film that is extremely subtle, which turned off several viewers (as does taxi driver, one of my all - time favorites). jafar panahi' s slow pacing doesn' t allow the film to go into incoherent territory, but again, some viewers may be turned off by this. the pacing is really what allows the messages to set in and provoke the viewers thoughts. it' s worth every second of your time, don' t miss this gem. 9 / 10
mr. kiarostami, the lion of contemporary iranian art cinema, and mr. panahi, who has established himself with'' the white balloon'' and'' the circle'' as one of iran' s leading urban filmmakers, set out to explain what drove the robber, a pizza deliveryman and a veteran of the iran - iraq war, to his desperate, self - destructive act of violence. the answer is not altogether surprising, and at times'' crimson gold'' exhibits a finger - pointing didacticism as it exposes the cruelties and inequities of a society sharply polarized by class and corrupted by selfishness, snobbery and cynicism. but the occasional obviousness of the film' s themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods, and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, hussein .
panahi is keen to stress that he' s not a political person, merely a man interested in social issues. he admits, however, that the two have a tendency to blur. where the circle was interpreted as a passionate condemnation of women' s status in iran, crimson gold spotlights what appears to be a crisis of masculinity in the country' s underclass. full of rage and self - loathing, hossain emadeddin' s overweight pizza man can be read as the symbol of a wider malaise. his rides across tehran carry him from penthouse to pavement, from the miserable teenage soldiers staking out a decadent party to the lonesome playboy adrift in his parents' apartment. during his time off, he tries to buy an expensive pair of earrings for his fiancee. appraising his shabby suit, the jeweller suggests he pick up something cheaper from the local bazaar .
at least one might assume that the shoot went smoothly. not so, however. on the contrary, the making of crimson gold sounds like a nightmare. watching the film, i was struck by emadeddin' s charged, minimalist performance in the leading role, blithely filing him as some veteran mainstay of iranian movies. instead, it turns out that emadeddin is a real - life pizza - delivery man, and a paranoid schizophrenic to boot .
we knew he was a schizophrenic in advance, so we knew he would be difficult to work with ,
panahi says .
but i had no idea that it was going to be that difficult. on several occasions i was tempted to stop shooting and simply abandon the entire project .
more than once he found himself half - wishing that emadeddin would fall off his moped and solve everyone' s problems .
in the final scene, hossein finds a very rare occasion for exploring the lifestyle of a very rich man when he is unusually invited by that man to join him in eating pizza: hossein explores the house; he drinks from the expensive bottles of wine; he dives in the private swimming pool and so on. but he is still so expressionless and we are not allowed to clearly know what he is thinking. he rebels after this scene and obviously his rebellion is motivated by this rare encounter with the luxurious living conditions of the rich people of his community. but his recurrent and memorable expressionless face prevents us from reducing him to any a priori and readymade framework. in this sense, crimson gold simultaneously exploits and moves beyond the conventional narratives, since it foregrounds certain expectations, but it does not provide answers in a determinate manner. not only is hossein not comprehensively familiarized, but his familiarization is endlessly deferred .
when lucille finally sees a ghost, it’s like a piece of the past she can’t simply dismiss (as she does her dead mother). it’s the ultimate ironic punishment, and a brilliant comeuppance. but it’s also a powerful moment, because it’s a sudden change in the way things have worked in the movie up to now. crimson peak doesn’t have a big secret or a clever reveal at its heart—instead, it has something darker and maybe even more fascinating .
the big innovation in crimson peak, other than its insane visuals, is how it uses the supernatural. the movie is full of ghosts, but they’re entirely benevolent—or at least, they’re entirely on edith’s side. edith, from childhood, has had the power to see ghosts, including her own dead mother, and when she gets to allerdale hall, she’s able to see all of the ghosts in the house, including thomas and lucille’s mother, but also all of their victims .
the basic plot of crimson peak is, indeed, very simple. edith cushing (mia wasikowska) marries thomas sharpe (tom hiddleston) and goes to live in his decaying family mansion in bleakest blighty, a place where even the ground bleeds. but soon edith realizes she’s made a mistake. thomas and his sister lucille (jessica chastain) have murdered all of thomas’ previous wives, and she’s next. the plot is basically edith surviving, along with thomas having a slight change of heart .
on the contrary, my argument is that ‘alternative and progressive social films’ are those which, unlike the conventional realist features, considerably take into account the difficulties and risks in establishing a cinema based on alterity. progressive social films, including close - up and crimson gold, are not solely concerned with what the characters and events are supposed to represent (the so - called content); but, more importantly, are focused on ‘how the image is framed and shot, and which generic conventions it engages, distorts or challenges’. in this respect, by focusing on the ‘mediations which intervene between representation and reality’ (62), these films make explicit ‘how the history of meaning - making in images carries internalized norms and exclusions that can be challenged by dissident representations’. (63) progressive social films, inspired by the ethics of alterity, are not simply in favour of ‘affirmative’ struggles; but, more importantly, they critically interrogate their own tradition through denaturalizing and thus revealing its altericidal visions .
he has a friend named ali (kamyar sheissi). we meet ali for the first time in a tea house, where he produces a purse he has just found. its contents are disappointing - - a broken gold ring. another man overhears their conversation, assumes they stole the purse and delivers a little lecture on the morality of theft. he believes the rewards should suit the crime; you should not put your targets through a great deal of suffering just to relieve them of pocket change .
when he leaves the apartment, he goes directly to a jewelry store that he and ali had visited twice before. the first time, they wanted to get a price on the gold ring, and were treated rudely and with suspicion by the store owner and guard. returning, wearing ties and with ali' s sister along, they said they were shopping for a wedding ring - - but were treated rudely again; it is a high - end store and they look like low - end people .
in this linear narrative, seen as the film’s limitation by a critic, next enters omid, a seller of illegal dvds. omid was in the backseat when the first scene unfolded. he recognises panahi and his memory proves to be sharper than the filmmaker’s. omid is no ordinary dvd seller. not only does he remember the dvds he gave panahi’s son, a film buff, but also caught panahi’s apparently clandestine act of filming taxi in public. this he does by relating a line spoken by a pickpocket from the café scene in panahi’s crimson gold. omid does not sound like a man who simply sells dvds for a living. it is obvious he has an insatiable passion for cinema. and like all good film buffs in the world, his cinematic memory is quick to catch a scene with the slightest reference from an earlier film. omid is a man who takes real risks to keep the culture of alternative cinema afloat in tehran. no wonder a critic likens him to “a genuine hero of samizdat distribution” .
all of which spells good news for panahi. but the fact remains that the director is a pariah in his homeland. he is being celebrated at festivals around the globe - crimson gold won the un certain regard award at cannes earlier this year - and getting arrested when he flies back to tehran. he is making iranian films about iranian life that iranians themselves are forbidden to see. panahi admits that this is frustrating .
before anything else i want my film to show in iran. but the good thing is that if the film is successful outside iran, it will eventually be saved. it gets smuggled in on video or satellite tv and once that happens my compatriots can see it. and anyway, history has shown that, even if a film has been stopped or forbidden or buried, it never really dies .
with that, he sits back, lights a cigarette and gives a smile that would shame the sphinx .
the system can' t last for ever ,
he says .
i can wait .
in this respect, i will map the embodiment of the listening eye in and against the conventional tradition of social films through my case - studies, asking how these distinctive instances foreground a non - instrumental approach to cinema in which the film’s encounter with the other is not reducible to an altericidal relation comprised of a manipulating subject and its manipulated object; but in which the underrepresented other is represented in a way that the dynamics of subordination - dominance is disturbed and the realist tradition of social films is problematized. in particular, i will show how close - up foregrounds a unique cinematic hospitality towards the other by contesting the narrative and stylistic features of realist fiction films and by introducing a different conception – i will argue, a more sophisticated conception – of realism based on a reflexive approach to pro - filmic reality. furthermore, i will map how crimson gold plays with realism by bringing its conventions and characteristics to the surface in a reflexive manner and thus providing the conditions for excesses to the extent that effectively overflow the realist economy of social films. (47 )
finally, in order to articulate my argument in a concrete manner, i will undertake close analysis of close - up (6) and crimson gold (7), two of the major self - reflexive social films that rework the realist aesthetic that is characteristic of the tradition in order to take critical positions against the oppressive aspects of this cinema, while arguing that these cinematic narratives resonate with the idea of the ‘listening eye’. according to emmanuel levinas, the ‘listening eye’ is ‘concerned about and listens to the other’s story which always has to remain, to some extent, theirs’ (8); a sort of bestowing recognition on the unknowable other that disrupts the reduction of him / her to something simply representable and communicable that is always already subordinated to the representational powers of the self. the listening eye listens, since it is concerned less with ‘seeing’ than ‘listening’ (9) and since it listens to some kind of a story without rendering that story intelligible through the readymade frameworks of intelligibility. the listening eye breaks with the subject - object tradition through ‘a suspension of judgment and morality’ (10); but as we shall see, this break is not made possible unless the ‘eye’ accepts its embedding in this tradition and thus interrogates its habitualised altericidal visions .
this argument against the pathological aspects of crimson gold seems cogent; however, it effectively neglects the overall approach of the narrative to hossein’s character. as mentioned before, the film is focused on hossein in his very ordinary moments of life, but these moments do not reveal much about him. many of the scenes show hossein on his motorcycle going from one place to another. due to their recurrences, these extensive shots and scenes become a major stylistic aspect of the film and eventually provide the conditions for the possibility of a unique cinematic excess (58): not only do we see hossein in his most ordinary moments, but we also see him while he is simply there, without any justification or any significant meaning and narrative function. he is always ambiguous and his reactions are far beyond clear. he often rejects his fiancé, but at the same time he is worried about her well - being. he is humiliated by those who treat him as a peasant, but his reactions are not determinate. he is often numbed and silent (59), and there is no significant physical or facial expression through which his interior feelings and thoughts might be conveyed. but nevertheless he is onscreen, conducting a life that may be strangely opaque but is a life on its own terms nonetheless .
as tasha robinson wrote in io9 last week, the theme of crimson peak, as with other guillermo del toro films, is escaping from the past. in the case of thomas and lucille, they’re trapped with this terrible old house that’s the literal embodiment of history and its claims on them. their schemes to keep marrying and killing young women are a desperate attempt to move forward in spite of all the dead weight they’re tied to, so that thomas can build his amazing new machine. edith survives because she has a greater sensitivity to the past (in spite of coming from america, the land of newness) than thomas and lucille do .
unfortunately the characters are seldom very relatable, and as a result the reading experience feels very distant and unemotional. tika, for example, is repeatedly mentioned in waman’s thoughts and memories, but very little is actually revealed about her personality. despite the fact that waman sees her as one of his main motivations to return home, she remains very one - dimensional. pizarro is more developed as a character, but whether he should be sympathized with or seen as despicable is not considered in a way that invokes a deeper layer of meaning. while sometimes a lack of obvious protagonists and antagonists can make a novel thought - provoking, it makes “gold eaters” difficult to fully engage with .
wright devotes a great portion of the novel to creating a colorful setting of peru during the early 1500s, but he does so at the expense of his plot. the novel tells a somewhat cliche adventure and homecoming story through the eyes of waman, a young provincial from the incan empire who runs away from home shortly after coming of age. he is soon violently captured by spaniards and is forced to become francisco pizarro’s interpreter. the novel mainly follows waman’s journeys with the spaniards, as they attempt to colonize the incan empire and search the land for gold. waman is exposed to a new culture and language and must choose to defend his own while trying to find his way home. the story meanwhile follows waman’s family and some of the other spanish colonizers settling in the land. the plot is more or less straightforward and predictable. its concept provides many opportunities for depth and surprise, but wright’s adherence to historical fact seems to handicap his fictional license .
jafar panahi' s film about a psychotic pizza delivery man won praise worldwide - and got him arrested. he talks to xan brooks
on completing the film, panahi was obliged to have it vetted by a body with the wonderfully orwellian title of the ministry of guidance. predictably, they hated it .
maybe they expect me to do advertisements or pro - government films ,
he shrugs .
they think that anyone who is independent or not following their views is a spy of the west. paid by the west. spreading western propaganda .
but here' s the dilemma. in a sense, panahi is paid by the west. his films are buttressed by french and italian production money. it' s the only way he can make movies free from government interference, and it places him in a catch - 22 situation .
i always start a film in my own country with my own money ,
he says .
and halfway through i sell the production rights to foreign companies. this enables me to finish the film. it' s the only option i have .
the ministry finally agreed to release it if he agreed to a number of cuts. these ranged from overhauling an entire 17 - minute scene to the removal of a derogatory reference to a brand of cigarettes. panahi refused, hence the ban .
half of his problems were made by him on purpose. it was deliberate destructiveness. other times it was unconscious and came out of his own instability. hossein was very paranoid. he thought everyone was plotting against him. so he would smash up the set, get on his bike and just go home. and i would have to go to his house and reason with him. he would tell me that everyone on set was a neo - nazi. he thought that some of the crew were le pen supporters who had flown in from france on a mission to murder him .
how did panahi manage to coax a performance out of him ?
oh i don' t know. i would give him the approximation of what i wanted. then he would do half of what i wanted and the rest what he wanted. he didn' t always listen .
one might say that panahi' s love of the movies was born out of crime, or at least of bending the rules to his advantage. he studied at the tehran college of cinema and tv in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. wangling a post in the university' s film archive, he gained access to the pictures that were banned under the ayatollah' s regime. panahi would run the projector himself and sit up all night watching alfred hitchcock movies. when i ask which hitchcocks he especially liked, he struggles to provide the titles :
they change the names in iran. i don' t know the exact translations .
when pressed, he refers to a film called spirit, which could be spellbound, and another called the crazy man, which surely has to be psycho (although the title rather gives the game away) .
when i made my first short i wanted nothing more than to imitate hitchcock. but the film i made was so cold and artificial that it had no soul to it at all. so i knew i had to go another way.
crimson gold ( persian : طلای سرخ tala-ye sorkh ) is a 2003 iranian film directed by jafar panahi , and written by abbas kiarostami . the film was never distributed in iranian theatres , because it was considered too " dark " . therefore , it was not possible that crimson gold be considered as the iranian entry for best foreign language film for the 2003 oscars as it was not released in iran . 
crimson gold (persian: طلای سرخ tala-ye sorkh) is a 2003 iranian film directed by jafar panahi, and written by abbas kiarostami. the film was never distributed in iranian theatres, because it was considered too " dark ". therefore, it was not possible that crimson gold be considered as the iranian entry for best foreign language film for the 2003 oscars as it was not released in iran.
crimson gold (persian: طلای سرخ tala-ye sorkh) is a 2003 iranian film directed by jafar panahi, and written by abbas kiarostami. the film was never distributed in iranian theatres, because it was considered too " dark ". therefore, it was not possible that crimson gold be considered as the iranian entry for best foreign language film for the 2003 oscars as it was not released in iran.