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Under the Skin of the City

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's 'Under the Skin of the City' animates an essential question of political filmmaking: how to balance fidelity to social reality with the often more compelling and convincing dictates of dramatic fiction. In the opening scene of the film Tuba, a late-middle-aged woman, stares with bewilderment into the lens of a documentary crew's camera and is unable to answer their questions about an upcoming election. She and her fellow gray-haired, shawl-covered factory workers are too involved in the problems of their everyday lives to be concerned. She says that she hopes the politicians will address these issues. Her coworkers' voices join hers, creating a cacophony that seems to chase the image away as the screen fades to black. We continue to hear their voices while the opening titles roll. When the image returns, it is in the midst of a fictional world, or at least a world where the camera does not acknowledge its own presence.

The film chronicles the lives of Tuba (Golab Adineh) and her family, each of whom rather schematically represents a different economic and political position in Iranian society. Tuba's husband Mahmoud (Mohsen Ghazi Moradi) is a dissolute, ineffectual, politically jaded man. Injured in a student protest years ago, he is disabled and unable to work, leaving his financial and parental obligations to his wife. Abbas (Mohammad Reza Foroutan), the eldest son, does odd jobs and deliveries that allow him to move between Tehran's legitimate and underground business worlds. On the periphery of both, he dreams of getting a visa so that he can go to Japan for a while and earn some real money that will lift himself and his family out of their poverty. Abbas's brother Ali (Ebraheem Sheibani) is a student who has become involved in an anti-government student group. He no longer attends class regularly, devoting all of his time to debate and secret meetings. An elder daughter Hamideh (Homeira Riazi) has been married off to a brutal husband, whose family, allows him to regularly abuse her. The youngest, Mahboubeh (Baran Kowsari), is a schoolgirl, who talks about pop music with her best friend and next-door neighbor, Masoumeh (Mahraveh Sharifi-Nia).

The plot turns on Abbas's desire to leave Iran. He and his father have schemed behind Tuba's back to sell their house, the family's only valuable asset, in order to get the money for a fake passport and visa. Tuba is violently opposed to this plan, but Abbas is convinced that he can buy her four houses if he gets the chance to work abroad. As Abbas travels through the city running errands for his employer and making plans to get the visa, he encounters opposing opinions about his trip. A young friend who had worked in Japan for a few months before being deported as an illegal alien speaks of the country as a promised land. He practices his Japanese by wooing a poster of a Japanese flight attendant, much to Abbas' amusement and fascination. An older man who runs an architecture firm chastises Abbas, complaining about the brain drain caused by low Iranian wages, and asking Abbas if he has no feeling for his country. The impact of the Iranian government on the flight of intellectuals and professionals is notably missing from the scene and the discussion. Abbas stubbornly sticks to his plan and leads the family into ruin. When the people who promised Abbas a visa disappear with his money, the house is lost. Abbas makes a last desperate, futile attempt to earn the money back, and the film ends in tragedy.

The majority of screen time is spent on Abbas's exploits, but Tuba is at the core of the film. Although she is the force that holds the family together, and the main wage earner, she cannot stop her husband and son from selling the house. For all her hard work in sustaining the family, she has no legal or social standing inside or outside of it. Through her study of Tuba and her two daughters Mahboubeh and Hamideh, writer-director Bani-Etemad reveals their powerlessness and the compromised position of women in Iran. After a particularly cruel beating, Hamideh returns home, but is told immediately that she must go back to her husband, even though everyone in the family acknowledges that she is being mistreated. Masoumeh runs away after her drug-addicted brother beats her for going to a concert with Mahboubeh. After searching in vain for her friend for several weeks, Mahboubeh finally discovers that Masoumeh has become a prostitute who works in a park along with many other young runaways. We learn of this transformation through an accumulation of subtle details - a little too much eye shadow and cracked purple nail polish.

More interesting than the larger melodramatic situations in 'Under the Skin of the City' are Bani-Etemad's close observations that reveal how life can be bearable under a repressive government and in seemingly intolerable circumstances. Before Hamideh is returned to her husband, Tuba has a conversation with her daughter's mother-in-law. The two older women discuss the situation as they hang their laundry in a windy backyard. Avoiding direct confrontation, or accusations, Tuba cajoles and prods the other woman into saying that she will try to keep her son's behavior in check. Tuba's position forces her to work behind the scenes and through networks of other women. Early in the film, on payday, Abbas decides to take the family out for pizza. Seeing an Iranian family at a fast-food Pizza Hut-like restaurant is surprising to Western eyes, which are veiled by assumptions about Iranian isolation. Through Abbas's connections they get four pies for the price of three, but Tuba is still embarrassed by the extravagance of eating at this 'fancy restaurant.' The next day in the factory lunchroom, she shares the leftovers with her fellow workers, out of generosity, but also to keep her support network intact.

Through Abbas's dreams of wealth and his pursuit of a woman he can afford to marry only if he is able to work abroad, the film makes palpable its characters' longings and unfulfilled hopes, hampered by poverty and social and religious conventions. Ali's energetic political activity contrasts with his father's apathy and defeat, while Tuba's practicality stands out against Mahboubeh's passionate outrage. These juxtapositions and the sense of broken dreams paint a picture of a country where it is difficult to have faith in rhetoric and principles, and where optimism and despair exist side by side.

At the end of the film, when everything has fallen apart, Tuba addresses another film crew and pointedly asks about the purpose of making films when people are suffering and the films make no difference in their lives. Bani-Etemad seems divided on the question. An established filmmaker, having made documentary and fiction features, her film is passionately engaged with the politics of Iran, but it also betrays an uncertainty as to how such issues should be addressed on film. The self-reflexive opening and closing sequences of the film directly reference the mixed style of many recent Iranian films. But Tuba's annoyance and despair in these scenes betrays Bani-Etemad's ambivalent feelings towards this style and the movie craze in Iran - and perhaps about the political efficacy of cinema itself.

[This review was written by Rahul Hamid and was originally published in Cineaste (Fall 2003), pp. 50-51. 'Under the Skin of the City' was produced by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Jahangir Kowsari and was directed by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, who also wrote the screenplay along with Farid Mestafavi. The film features cinematography by Hassein Jafarian, editing by Mastafa Kherghehpoush, production design by Omid Mohit, sound recording by Asghar Shahverdi, and sound design by Mohammad Reza Delpak. The second video clip above features Bani-Etemad speaking about her 2002 documentary 'Our Times.']

Musical Instruments, Culture and Classification

An important aspect of Western music research over the last century has been the creation of classification systems for musical instruments. These systems have been useful for the purposes of cataloguing, especially for information retrieval systems and museum archives. They have also been seen as a means for gaining a conceptual handle on the great variety of musical instruments the world over. However, and just as importantly, instrument classification systems independent of Western scholarship have existed in most of the world's cultures for as long as there have been instruments to classify. By examining systems of classification and their justification, we can therefore learn something about the cultures that produce those systems.

While many academics have written articles and books proposing various systems of classification and/or criticizing systems proposed by others, and some documentation is available for specific non-Western systems as well, few scholars have produced comparative studies of instrument classification systems in general. Cross-cultural analysis of musical instrument classification is possible with all the major classical cultures: Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Greek and European, as well as Tibetan and Javanese. Thanks to long literary traditions in those cultures, one can get some sense of how these systems have developed over time, as well as an awareness of the cultural assumptions underlying each system. Many systems of classification have been proposed by modern Western academics, including Hornbostel and Sachs, Hood, Lysloff and Matson, or Elschek and Stockmann, but there are also systems from orality-based cultures, including Mandailing and Minangkabau (Sumatra), T'boli (Philippines), Dan and Kpelle (Ivory Coast and Liberia), 'Are'are (Solomon Islands), and other indigenous peoples. In some of the smaller societies, musical instrument classification systems are not conceived or taught in an explicit fashion, and so scholars need to learn to explore concepts of instruments as found within each culture, which in turn may imply a presumed underlying classification.

Cultural studies of classification, whether they deal with botany, social structures, cosmology, or musical instruments, are always fascinating as well as controversial. The question of how people choose to divide up and organize their world - which features they choose to treat as meaningful distinctions, and the implied relationships and non-relationships that lie behind those choices - provide a unique perspective on the human mind, and on social and material culture. Musical instrument classification systems both reflect and influence how people think about, compose and hear music. Concepts and classifications of instruments and ensembles are part of the webs of cultural knowledge. The process of classification is not just a one-dimensional activity resulting in the production of a tightly-structured, systematic data set. Rather, it is frequently a multi-level, and at times creative way of thinking and organizing knowledge about instruments and ensembles in ways that are consistent with socially influenced or structured ideas or belief systems in a particular time and place.

Classification systems for musical instruments take a wide variety of forms, and use a wide variety of criteria for making distinctions. Many systems use the physical features of how an instrument makes its sound. Thus, instruments with strings are distinguished from those with membranes, and so forth; and progressively more detailed differentiations can be made along these lines. Some cultures classify instruments based on the materials out which they are made, such as the Chinese system, which classifies instruments as being made of wood, stone, metal or other materials. Another common way to classify instruments is by playing technique: e.g., struck instruments are distinguished from blown instruments. Many systems categorize instruments based upon their musical function in important ensembles within the culture. Tunings available on the instruments may come into play as well. Equally important - and this is just as true in text-based cultures as in oral cultures - instruments may have cosmological or spiritual connections, social and hierarchical positions, or cultural/historical associations, all of which can function as part of their categorization.

An interesting area of inquiry is the matter of how Western academic systems have developed over the last century. A number of thought-provoking issues have been at play. As some scholars have pointed out, recent Western systems are not based on 'natural classifications' - they did not arise organically in a process of cultural development in conjunction with a body of instruments. Instead, they were imposed upon the existing data in an after-the-fact intellectual process, usually the work of an individual. By the late 19th century, museum collections in the colonial metropoles of Europe and America were filling with instruments from around the world. The new awareness of different cultures stretched traditional Western classifications to the breaking point, and researchers, museum curators, and musicologists began to see a need to create a more comprehensive system. They called for a universal system, free of predisposition to any particular culture, which would be open and expandable to accommodate any conceivable sort of instrument that might be found, perhaps not realizing that the need to hegemonize is itself a cultural outlook. To meet that grand expectation, a system would need to possess two qualities: 1) It would have to be logical, meaning that for each progressive step of subdivision a single criterion of differentiation must be found that can be applied consistently and unambiguously; and 2) it would have to be logically exhaustive, meaning that there must be no holes that could leave unforeseen types with no place in the system. Over the years since these issues first arose, it has proven remarkably difficult to meet these prescriptions. The ensuing efforts to remove presumed cultural biases from the suggested classifications have been an ongoing exercise in sociological thought. And the struggle to achieve logical consistency and exhaustiveness has been a fascinating intellectual exercise of a different sort - a meditation, in many ways, on the very nature of musical instruments, calling for extensive detailed knowledge of the subject, complemented by great insight, but also humbling in its expansiveness.

Comparative analysis of how different cultures classify musical instruments can assist critical thinking about the predominant inherited system in European-derived cultures, the primary division of instruments into winds, strings and percussion, with further subdivisions following. Some have expressed disdain for this system for its obvious lack of logic, since the criteria of distinction are inconsistent and not mutually exclusive. But at the same time, it does accurately represent a division of musical functions within the Western musical system itself, and also reflects how most people in Western civilization naturally hear symphonic music and to varying degrees other music as well. It reflects a certain hierarchical thought, too, in which sustaining winds and strings are elevated to the most important positions, while the undifferentiated sounds of percussion instruments are sent to the back of the orchestra. In all these ways, the Western classification system is true to its purpose, true to the body of music and cultural associations that it serves, and in that sense it is meaningful and appropriate, although in a limited way. However, the Western system is less useful when discussing non-Western music. In the end, perhaps abandoning efforts to create a universal and hegemonic Western-based system would open the field to varieties of explorations on how each culture categorizes and classifies its own instruments.

[This essay was used by J. Progler with his students in a course on World Music at Zayed University in Dubai during 2003 through 2006. Progler has taught ethnomusicology (among other subjects) in Dubai, New York and Japan. Some of his writings on music are available online, including an article on music ownership in the digital age, a research paper on perceptions and performances of jazz swing (PDF), a piece on 'musical stupidity' (PDF), and an essay on teaching and learning the kora in West Africa. He also led a live dialog on the art of sound in the world of Islam for IslamOnline, and his 2008 book Encountering Islam includes a chapter on ethnomusicology and the representation of Muslim music. Some of these are archived here.]

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C4HD on Freesat HD receivers...

Channel 4 HD has been available for a few weeks now.

On Sky HD boxes you will have noticed no real changes.

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The 3D Truth in Old Masters

Thanks AIC class great input! What a creative idea behind....

The 3D Truth in Old Masters

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new york city. from James Ogle on Vimeo.