University of Cape Town – FAM3005F
Lesley Marx
23 April 2016
‘Playing The Orchestra’:
Hearing the People Sing in Francois Verster’s The Dream of Shahrazad
“This is the next century/ Where the universal’s free/ You can find it anywhere/ Yes, the future’s been sold/ Every night we’re gone”
-Lyrics to ‘The Universal’ by Blur
“Arabian Nights/ Like Arabian Days/ More often than not/ Are hotter than hot/ In a lot of good ways”
– Lyrics to ‘Arabian Nights’ from Disney’s Aladdin
“Everything proliferates. The Nights is a maze, a web, a network, a river with infinite tributaries, a series of boxes within boxes, a bottomless pool. It turns endlessly on itself, a story about storytelling. And yet we feel it has to do with our essential nature, and not just a need for idle entertainment.”
– A.S. Byatt in her Introduction The Modern Library’s The Arabian Nights: Tales From A Thousand And One Nights(2001: xiv)
Francois Verster’s The Dream of Shahrazad (2014) is a prescient palimpsest of fantasies and a wide-ranging parable concerning cinema itself. The film, like Walt Whitman and The Arabian Nights, contains – or attempts to contain – multitudes. And not just a grand number of people and stories but also influences, intertexts and entirely separate mediums. Whilst watching it we encounter a Turkish Youth Orchestra, a Lebanese satirist, an Egyptian theatre troupe and cartoonist, a Shahrazadian narrator of The Arabian Nights and countless ordinary people either drifting through their daily lives or participating in spectacles of mass protest which, in their articulate grandeur, far surpass any purely aesthetic experience. Verster seems to see his occupation as a documentarian as merely a means to encompass every other position of artistic leadership[1], and then to see every form of artistic expression as either a rehearsal or a regaling of political revolution. Yet he is also just a passive collector, or archivist, of interestingly interconnected stories. Shahrazad’s ‘Dream’ is thus manifold: a collective consciousness composed of all the individual fantasies of all the film’s characters and extras; an international concert featuring the music, songs and tales of a new Arabian generation; the ancient infinity of the 1001 Nights themselves dissolving and re-emerging throughout history; and the enframed dream that is cinematic reality, presenting the magic combination of sound, word and image in increasingly unpredictable ways to every rising audience. This essay will attempt to deconstruct and reconnect all these strands of formal intrigue so as to further illuminate the film’s innate and brilliant schizophrenia. In its way, The Dream of Shahrazadsuggests not just a new potential for political and creative self-consciousness in the Middle East but also a surprisingly new direction for the documentary form: as the intersubjective symphonic record of unique moments in the history of the world.
Just judging from the many similarities between Shahrazadand his earlier film A Lion’s Trail (2001), it seems clear that Verster views the soundtracks to his documentaries as being inextricable from the skeletons of their plots. These are both naturalistic films ostensibly about the political undertones of the lives of various performers, but instead of submitting to formal delineations of his cherry-picked stories, Verster ‘follows the music’, so to speak. In A Lion’s Trailthis entails retracing the steps of Rian Malan’s famous investigation into the South African roots of the blockbuster song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’, following its metamorphoses and baton-passes from Solomon Linda’s original ‘Mbube’ to Pete Seeger’s ‘Wimoweh’ to the final bastardized & Disneyfied version we know today. The narrative is interspersed with contemporary interviews with Malan and Linda’s daughters, but in essence the song is the story and we drift amidst its 70-year history as if examining a family tree. Shahrazad is simultaneously far more tautly structured and more broadly concerned. The 19th-Century Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Suite (famous for both its Orientalist bent and ‘Cinematic’ power) is played in its entirety over the course of the film by a student orchestra performing in an antique church in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace in late 2010. The suite’s four movements correspond exactly with the film’s four ‘Books’, the titles of each of which function as interpretations of the continued relevance of the Arabian Nights (‘Once Upon A Time’,‘Stories of Change’ etc.). Thus, with the symphony as the film’s backbone instead of its supplement, the rest of the story is freed to connect its characters and incidents with as abstract and instinctual a logic as Rimsky-Korsakov used in collecting his chords.[2]As a documentary, the film is then equal-parts Dziga Vertov and Frederick Wiseman. We alternate between two modes of exploration: affective montage and institutional interviews. We meet characters only identified by their nationalities and professional roles[3]who talk about what they think their job means in the greater scheme of things, and then we see their reactions to enormous events shown as sequences of close-edited collective drama. Two of these sequences parallel each other perfectly, perhaps even satirically: The twin crescendos which bring in the finales of the 2ndand 4thmovements are identically set to the falls of Egyptian presidents Mubarak in 2011 and Morsi in 2013 respectively. The music swells and Verster constantly switches between three types of footage: the tense concert film of the Youth Orchestra’s performance; the wild, concatenated video recorded by the news media and the protestors themselves; and the phantasmal silhouette animation of Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed(1926), in which a horde of winged beasts are loosed and anarchy seems to reign. This technique would be spectacular enough just for the audacity of its match-cuts, but the contrast between the showcased mediums is its own politico-cinematic statement. The fantastic reality of the primary footage is transcended by the soaring abstraction of the orchestra’s controlled expression and then projected into a mad dreamscape by the intoning of a fabricated Arabian Night from the deep history of Cinema. These three fragments are completely dissimilar yet nonetheless connected by the total energy of their shared collaboration with chaos. But the ease with which this sequence is repeated at the end of the film makes the essential point, if it were not already explicitly stated, that momentary freedom is no guarantee of lasting political change. Instead, the rest of the film is spent listening to the characters’ ruminations on the creative possibilities, for themselves and their countries, opened up by such moments of popular explosion.[4]As in Terrence Malick’s cinema, voiceover is used as a means of supporting an anti-linear narrative of philosophical drift. We hear many characters speak before we properly ‘meet’ them, and even when we think we know who they are they are soon re-absorbed into the film’s flow, only to pop up again later. In this way, Verster appears to attempt to replicate the collective consciousness of the Arab Spring through the technique of overlapping his stories like leit-motifs in a symphony or characters in the Arabian Nights themselves. Thus, Verster is perhaps his own best Shahrazad.
There is perhaps no way in which the Arabian Nights could be retold in a strictly linear fashion. Verster’s ‘drifting’ method is indeed only in keeping with the fact that the number 1001, with its perfect suggestion of continuation, has traditionally been seen in Arabic culture as a symbol for infinity. The story of Shahrazad – the frame-narrative, the story of the stories – is itself a tale about the end of endings, and so, by using it to bookend his film, Verster displays his naturalistic antipathy to the very idea of totalized conclusion. In it, the sultan Shahriyar takes his revenge for his first wife’s infidelity – her breaking of the promise of death being the marriage’s only possible ending – by one-by-one marrying and taking the virginities & lives of the young women of his caliphate, asserting his absolute masculine dominion over the futures of his people. The sensible families clear out if they can but “disquiet starts in the hearts of those left behind” and Shahrazad, with a cunning plan up her sleeve, volunteers herself to become Shahriyar’s final conquest. And so, as we know, she infinitely delays her execution by seducing the sultan every night with new, fantastic stories she never finishes, like foreplay without climax or life without death, until he relents and they marry, or until she kills him and takes the throne or – in Naguib Mahfouz’s version – Shahriyar exiles himself and wanders outside his kingdom forever like Oedipus[5]. The point Verster makes by telling Shahrazad’s story in this way (as well as editing the film itself in a Shahrazadian manner) is that documentaries too – and especially one about politics and aesthetics in the Middle East – should admit to the impossibility of finding closure in reality. This conclusion is rooted in the fact that – according to his Director’s Statement – the film had been in development since 2006 and was shot haphazardly between 2010 and 2013, showing that the need to incorporate the unpredictable vicissitudes of those years in Egyptian and Turkish history delayed the film’s own finishing almost indefinitely. However, what did end during the production process were Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year dictatorship and the sense that the people of Egypt, like Shahriyar’s subjects, had no political power to speak of. This opening-up of a closed-off reality can be seen as an archetype of the triumph of ‘feminine’ storytelling, of the Dream of Shahrazad itself.[6]Thus when the people come together as a mass, when they take down tyrants and constitute themselves as a free society, “Shahrazad … walk[s] amongst her people again” (in Hani’s words) and “communication”, “fraternity”, “pleasure” and “imagination” are once again possible. It is only under these conditions of inclusive collectivity that ‘eternal’ stories regain their relevance to the world. If the future is re-opened then different stories can finally be chosen as models for emulation or disavowal. Throughout the film correlations are drawn – or we are ourselves implored to draw correlations – between Shahrazad’s stories (including her own) and the characters we meet, the leaders we see fall and the dreams that drive the people of Egypt and Turkey. Early on in Book One, when we have only glimpsed the approaching protests through occasional flashes of muted video intercut with footage of everyday bourgeois life in Cairo and Istanbul, the narrator mentions in passing the story of Sindbad the Sailor and his two choices of survival: either passive submission to life’s domination or active struggle to amend its conditions. It is almost as if just the mention of this potential for an alternative world catalyses the film’s action, leading eventually to the later twin popular explosions of 2011 and 2013. Likewise, in the relatively long sequence in which the tale of Sultan Haroun Al-Rashid is elliptically related and set to images from Douglas Fairbanks’s early-Hollywood swashbucklerThe Thief of Baghdad(1924), the story, its previous adaptation, and the contemporary reality it pertains to are intermingled in such a manner that no strict links are made between fiction and reality but the viewer is nonetheless made to recognize the truth of the tale by just the suggestion of its applicability to the present. So a sultan who discovers counterfeit versions of himself and his authoritarian government working on an island in his city’s river in the night realizes the truth of his own incompetence: this fake kingdom “in which all are equal” and which holds midnight tribunals to perform the justice omitted in the daytime, would not exist if his own reign were more consequential, if his own ‘real’ kingdom was a free society. In this case it is the fiction of the counterfeit government that bears more truth than the real one for the mere fact of its existence. Verster layers this point brilliantly by implying that likewise it is the story of Haroun Al-Rashid that conveys more truth than any particular real-life story of a failed government and that The Thief of Baghdad, in its now-historic and hackneyed Orientalism, best illustrates the truth of long-held Western stereotypes about the Middle East, exacerbated by the submission of both the people and their governments to false expectations and assumptions about their culture.[7] The sincere and hopeful efforts of all the film’s characters – including Verster himself – to create a piece or form of art – a fakery – to capture the reality of their unique socio-political situation are thus seen to be validated, or at least valiant, in their fidelity to the implicit power of Fiction. It is the ‘unreal’ infinities of literature, drama, music and cinema which together point – in their shared will to throw off the threat of masculine closure – to the real possibility of a feminine social totality, a paradise on earth, a Dream come true.
Cinema, however, takes precedence over every other art in this pursuit because it, uniquely, can tell Shahrazad’s story as such, as the story of the story of stories. Every other art has to express a version of the framing narrative as the form of its own content.[8]The Dream of Shahrazadstructures itself as a partial retelling of the Arabian Nights, but it also concerns itself more closely with the present paradigm in which various retellings and re-interpretations of Shahrazad’s stories are deemed newly necessary. Thus the film finds itself anchored in the ordinary, material world but faces the constant threat that its invocations of Art and Revolution will pull its story up into the ideal – but alien – sphere of Music and Fiction. It avoids this by seldom seeking to escape its particular context or its particular interpreters and by showing the process by which they attempt to create moments of universal expression within the necessarily limited reality they know. So after we are introduced to the Turkish Youth Orchestra tuning up their instruments and beginning the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opus, we rewind two weeks to the beginning of their rehearsal process, we get to know their charismatic conductor Cem Mansur, we watch them nap away their lectures while they’re being implored to ‘use their music to empower the voiceless’, and later we see footage from far-right demonstrations on the streets of Istanbul and then from the mass popular protests at Gezi Park in 2013. In between, of course, we see and hear the sparkling results of their labours, but without our having been shown the world in which their work has materialized we would only be able to guess at the socio-political realities underlying their abstracted performance. The same process of contextualization is used to show the changes in the work of the Cairo theatre troupe – whose director openly sets out to develop “a different kind of theatre drawn from the [Tahrir Square] protest movement” – and in the life of Ghida, the Lebanese actress/activist, to whom we are introduced via her own reminiscences of the shock and awe that came with growing up in Beirut in an era of destruction. Her later success as a satirical commentator seems explicitly presaged by the political consciousness imbued in her by her upbringing. But the clearest example in the film of this method[9]is evident in the story of the Alexandrian actress Arfa. We meet her first as an unconnected character regaling the source of her instinct for storytelling: her father’s abuse failing to silence her need for communication in childhood. She slips out of the film for an hour or so before returning to collaborate with the Cairo troupe in the creation of a representative dramatic monologue based on the grief of a mother whose young son, Ahmed, had been murdered by the police in a crackdown on a peaceful protest. We hear the mother tell her story to Arfa and the troupe director, and she tells it so well that both of them lament that the mother herself can’t perform the monologue. We follow the mother in her grieving process and we see some of Arfa’s rehearsal work, but the next time we see the both of them together is at a theatre festival where Arfa’s tear-jerking performance draws wide acclaim and inspires Ahmed’s mother to tell her “she really is the mother of the martyr.” The inversion apparent in this scene is especially touching and effective. As powerful as Ahmed’s mother’s testimony is, Arfa’s aestheticized and polished ‘public’ version of it is what ensures the transfer of experience into expression. The reality of the authoritarian state apparatus is best communicated not by personal testimony but by a performance of truth that, in its ‘impartial’ professionalism, comes closer than anything to an unfettered treatment of righteous anger and grief. This ease of transferable identity – a kind of superpower of sympathy – is everywhere in the film and does perhaps constitute the core of Verster’s philosophy of cinema. To some extent we can identify with everyone we meet onscreen, and they, for the most part, can all identify with each other, but we nonetheless remain ourselves – fighting our own struggles, telling our own stories – but never letting our individualities get in the way of the potential for political solidarity or creative collaboration. Thus Rimsky-Korsakov could simultaneously have the ‘two identities’ of Russian composer and Arabian storyteller, Arfa could become Ahmed’s mother for the span of a monologue, President Morsi could appear a fallen Ali Baba, millions of young Egyptians and Turks could stand as one, and every storyteller – which is to say everyone – can become Shahrazad for the moments in which it seems their tales might continue forever. But only through cinema can we watch all of this occur together.
In the final, but never the conclusive, instance, The Dream of Shahrazad can be seen as a plea for humane sublimity on the part of both political and aesthetic activists. Verster may be as wary of happy endings as Shahrazad herself, but in cutting off the film with the twin sentiments “the only unforgiveable sin is despair” and “listen, for the end may never come” he does at least indicate his belief in the need for passivity and cynicism to be continually negated. As a record of so many different attempts at meaningful communication, both the film and the Arabian Nights are hopeful texts, confident in their endeavours to combine the infinite expressive power of music and storytelling with the meaningful details of real lives. Verster attempts to play every possible creative role in his harnessing of the film’s manifold elements, but the one opportunity he perhaps suggests for the writer of a meta-text about his meta-meta-text is that of applying his vision of inclusive totality – in politics, in filmmaking – to a South African, or any other particular, context. Every milieu is unique, but every milieu is a multitude, and so can be encountered and investigated and expressed, from without and within, by those artists with an eye for internal struggles and a feeling for people in general and friends in particular. Thus what the Nights and Cinema seem to deeply share is an appreciative humanism and a careful belief in meaningful entertainment.
Reference List
Byatt, A.S. 2001. Introduction to The Arabian Nights: Tales From A Thousand And One Nights. Translated by Sir Richard F. Burton. New York: The Modern Library.
Verster, Francois. 2014. ‘Director’s Statement’. Available: https://dreamofshahrazad.com/directors-statement/ [2016, April 24]
Verster, Francois. 2014. The Dream of Shahrazad. Undercurrent Film & Television/ Fireworx Media.
[1]“I have for some time been thinking of documentary as a space in which almost all other systems of thought or expression can be brought together – a kind of “ontological meta-montage”, something like a Gesamtskunstwerk, or perhaps akin to Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.” – https://dreamofshahrazad.com/directors-statement/
[2]It’s intriguing to me that a film which only visits three countries in the Middle East and encounters only a small representative patch of artists from each of them (compared to the sheer vastness of life included in The Arabian Nights) should nonetheless still feel so accurate in its implicit claim of articulating the popular undercurrents of the Arab Spring, and the years preceding and following it.
[3]I despaired of discovering the never-mentioned names of many of the characters – including the Turkish conductor (Cem Mansur) and the Egyptian director (Hassan el Geretly) – until I realized their partial anonymity within the film is entirely purposeful and I could just find their names on the film’s official website anyway.
[4]“Tahrir [Square] was a torrent of pure water going into a thirsty land.” – Hani, the Egyptian Cartoonist.
“Ordinary people express themselves much better than we do. … We can’t seem to express our society, even after Mubarak has stepped down. … So it makes me wonder, why are we doing this?” – A nameless member of the Cairo theatre troupe.
[5]The great Argentinean fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, who himself saw libraries as one of many avatars of infinity, once playfully recalled that he had found and read a version of the Nights in which Shahrazad eventually arrives at telling her own story to Shahriyar, thus implying that she would then regale all the stories she had already told him in the process of regaling her own, leading to an unending mise-en-abyme of Arabian Nights within Arabian Nights.
[6]It should be noted that part of the particular importance of the Arabian Nights to Islamic culture is that the Koran, unlike the Bible, is a book of holy advice straight from the mouth of God and not a collection of infinitely adaptable stories. There may be equivalent ‘national’ story anthologies – in the way that the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer are England’s representative books and Boccaccio’s Decameron and Dante’s Divine Comedy are Italy’s – but they don’t fill in for the absence of a trove of religious parables in the way that The Arabian Nights does. Considering Shahrazad’s unavoidable proto-feminism, Islam’s stereotyped reputation as a misogynistic creed appears particularly ironic.
[7]“The return of Shahrazad symbolizes the return of all the eternal values of our society, reminding people how wonderful their culture once was.” – Hani, the Egyptian cartoonist
[8]i.e. The Youth Orchestra’s performance of the Scheherazade suite is a channeling of Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic interpretation of the story of Shahrazad but it can’t be ‘about’ the Arabian Nights in the way that a documentary can be about both the tales themselves and the fact of their existence and adaptability. This extends to fiction cinema too, in the sense in which Jean-Luc Godard claimed that ‘Every film is a documentary of its own making’. Fellini’s Satyricon(1969), for example, is both an adaptation of the stories of the Satyricon and is, in an uncanny way, about the purpose, or purposelessness, of the Satyricon itself.
[9]A technique of investigation I am tempted to deem quasi-Marxist in its anti-ideological obsession with the details and contradictions of the all-round production process of, in this case, creativity itself.
Categories: Essays/Prose