In Persian mystical poetry, meanings are multi-leveled and multivalent. The surface meaning is just that: a starting point, the ground level that leads the diligent reader to higher and higher levels of understanding. Or, to use another metaphor of motion (one very appropriate to Close-Up), the reader proceeds from the zahir (the outward) to the batin (the internal), a process that repeats continuously, one revealed batin becoming the next zahir, as one goes deeper and deeper toward the poem’s innermost core of meaning. “Mysticism has a multitude of techniques to penetrate into the internal and hidden universe that leads to true knowledge of the divine and of all things,” writes historian Oleg Grabar, who significantly sees the same processes at work in Persian visual art, especially painting:
[T]he images must be interpreted as forms more or less cleverly conceived and executed that are, in themselves, nothing more than facades, agreeable and attractive ones perhaps but with a deeper meaning that escapes the uninitiated. 3
Grabar’s linkage of Persian poetry and painting (both tied to an underlying mysticism) brings to mind a tale recounted by the 12th-century poet Nizami in his long poem about Alexander the Great. In it, Alexander is in the court of the emperor of China, and when an argument breaks out over whether Greece or China has better painters, a contest is
arranged: A Greek painter and a Chinese painter are set to work separated by a curtain, with another curtain separating them from their audience. When the work is completed, the latter curtain is removed and people are astonished: the two painters appear to have painted exactly the same painting!
The apparent mystery is solved by the revelation that, while the Greek artist actually did paint a painting, his Chinese counterpart simply polished his part of the wall to a high reflectivity, so that his “painting” was really a mirror image of the Greek’s. Bürgel suggests that “Nizami here ascribes creativity to Hellenism and receptivity to the Orient (or Islam?). However, the judgment at the end of the story is in favor of neither of the two parties. One is good at painting, the other at polishing. Both are guided by a sense of vision (or insight).” 4
If this tale and its conclusion seem to have an eerie corollary in Close-Up’s account of “real” artist Mohsen Makhmalbaf being mirrored by his illicit doppelganger Hossein Sabzian, so does Bürgel’s conclusion anticipate the “poetic” form of Kiarostami’s film: “Symmetry thus results from a situation of confrontation and mirroring. In other words, the motif of the mirror so often met with in mystical thought and Islamic poetry is, if interpreted in terms of structure, directly linked with symmetry and situations of confrontation.” 5
9
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36