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I don�t have a grand, over-arching theme for this post, but I just watched Pen-ek Ratanaruang�s 2001 film Monrak Transistor and was once again charmed by one of the small pleasures of certain Thai art films, namely: the delayed title sequence. Thai New Waves masters Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul both love to get you well into the movie before they tell you what it�s called. In Monrak Transistor (sometimes rendered as Mon-rak Transistor), we�ve already met our heroes and had a musical sequence and a fight scene, and then at about the eleven-minute mark, the title �Monrak Transistor� comes up on screen. There�s a similar delay in Apichatpong�s 2008 film, Sydromes and a Century, where we get not just the title but also some of the major credits. In a rural hospital, some characters are having a conversation at a large window, and then the title shows up in the landscape outside, and then we watch the credits for a bit.
Pen-ek and Apichatpong have done even more dramatic title delays. It�s only about thirty minutes into Pen-ek�s Last Life in the Universe (2003) that we get the title, and Apitchatpong�s Blissfully Yours (2002) goes about forty-five minutes before the titles, which neatly divide the film in two, separating the village scenes of the first half from the forest scenes of the second half.
Now, aside from the fun of it (and fuck you, I think it�s fun how they play with the titles), what do these unexpected title sequences accomplish? I think they serve primarily as a distancing technique. When you�re well into the action and suddenly �Blissfully Yours, starring so-and-so� comes up on screen, it�s a reminder that you�re watching a movie, and so cinematic rules apply (I believe I did a previous post in which I discussed how all films, no matter how �realistic� or �naturalistic,� are inherently unrealistic because reality typically isn�t filmed and framed and edited). Now, when we mention distancing, we probably think of Brecht, who used the distancing effects of his theater to call attention to its artificiality and prevent the reader/viewer from getting too emotionally invested. There was an important didactic message to be conveyed, after all, and God forbid you should get so caught up in Mother Courage�s character that you forget about the economic forces determining her plight. The distancing effects in Thai movies, by contrast, seem like more a wink of complicity. They say, �Look, we have created an alternative cinematic world, cut off from the so-called �real world,� come join us.� And it�s a pleasure to join them.
So that�s the Thais, now on to an unrelated element of Iranian cinema: the tendency for Iranian movies to take place mostly or entirely out-of-doors. My attention was first called to this by Abbas Kiarostami, who explains in an interview that indoor scenes would fuck up the �realism� of the movie, because if an Iranian woman were really in the privacy of her own home, she would probably take off her hijab. But you�re not allowed to show a woman�s uncovered head on screen in Iran. So what�s a filmmaker to do? Have the women keep their scarves on indoors? This would ring false with the audience, who would know that women generally don�t do that. So the solution�or Kiarostami�s solution, anyway�is to set his films outside, where the women are expected to wear hijab. Now, I don�t know if other Iranian filmmakers have this exact same reason in mind when making their films, but it comes up a lot. I recently saw Mohammad Rasoulof�s The White Meadows (2009) and the action was almost entirely outside (in these beautiful salt islands along the Iranian coast; the Iranian landscape is lovely, so it�s not like the films suffer visually from the penchant for outdoor action). If the films do take place indoors, they typically make sure that the women have unrelated males present, and so they keep their hijab on. This can be seen in Ashgar Farhadi�s A Separation (2011), which is by far the most �indoors-y� Iranian movie I�ve ever seen. This is also the case in Kiarostami�s own largely indoors movie, Close-Up(1990), which deals with an interloper impersonating Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his attempts to insinuate himself into the lives of a family of cinephiles. And speaking of Makhmalbaf, his Gabbeh (1996) takes seems to follow Kiarostami�s strategy, as it takes place entirely outdoors, at least as far as I recall.
I should put out the disclaimer for both the Iranian and the Thai films I�m discussing that the vast majority of movies from these countries are unavailable in the United States. Furthermore, the Iranian and Thai movies that I�ve seen tend to be �art movies,� so perhaps the mainstream cinema in these countries doesn�t possess these quirks. I do think the Iranian hijab conundrum probably makes it more of an issue for Iranian filmmakers, whereas the Thai title sequence quirk is more likely to be a technique limited to Thai �art film� or �new wave� filmmakers who utilize it for aesthetic purposes. I will conclude this post with the trailer for Monrak Transistor, which has just become available to stream on Netflix.
