The award for Best screenplay in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival (Aug 30-Sept 9) went to the Iranian director Alireza Khatami for Oblivion Verses (Los versos del Olvido). It is Khatami’s first feature film. it is a film where the spectator assembles the story with no traditional plot or storyline and no embellishment of characters with only 20% dialogue. The silence is important, which Khatami explains using Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. he silence is important, which Khatami explains using Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. "Silence suspends the chatter of inauthentic life " - and there is none of this in Khatami's film. The Iranian director said he did not want to make a predictable film with a beginning, middle and end and spend years making such a film. For him the writing process begins with an image and evolves from that in a process he calls “realizing”. He resists the notion of auteur as director and believes that film is a collaborative process of cast and crew.
At a a press conference about Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour in 1959, filmmakerJean Luc Godard spoke about intrusive camera techniques such as “tracking shots”, close-ups and shallow depth of field” in the representation of political events. Khatami uses the political backdrop of the film with distance. The country in “Oblivion Verses” is unknown as is the nature of political actions and resistance, which serve as a metaphor for the current political climate of the unknown country. Another Iranian director who does this is Jafar Panahi who is not allowed to leave his country after years of house arrest.
Oblivion Verses, according to Khatami, is an art film about a man “who resists forgetting”. The film opens as a grave is being dug – we do not see the digger but we hear his shovel and see dirt spew into the air. The digger tells a story of the man he is burying to the morgue caretaker (Juan Margallo). He explains that the story of the dead is what gives them dignity as humans. Without a story, the living are not honored.
The caretaker remembers everything but names and can recall the number of days he has worked or the number of days visitors come to look for their missing relatives. He continues to care for the morgue which is closing. It is a place which also houses archives in a labyrinth or corridors and he use a spool of string attached to a shelf so he can find his way back.
Each shot and every scene of the film is calculated precisely for an evocative mise en scène – such as the movement of characters, figures - a rolling golden apples, and small black tire. But it is not movement in the sense of constant action, which Khatami equates with “capitalism”. Even in early silent films, “actualities”, spectators were enamored by movement.
In Oblivion Verses, the placement of characters in the cemetery, graveyard and morgue in cluttered, dirty and well used environments evoke the passage of time and years of existence. The lighting is also exceptional including shots of the moon on the sand near the beach outside of town its circuitous shine radiating, a scene that includes a large pink hand buried nearby. Sounds of dogs emanate throughout the film and there are frequent appearances of cats.
This visual parable could be set in Chile, one of the co-production countries, evoking memories of the young protestors who were murdered by the military police after Allende was disposed during Pinochet’s junta, and plastered into walls or hidden in unknown places. The caretaker may not recall names but he does remember one man who covered the blood stains of the executed with plaster in exchange for a lighter prison sentence.
There are 12 cold chambers in the morgue with two bodies that as yet identified. One is a young woman and it is claimed that she was in a car accident. The caretaker cannot rest until her story is told, and her body is buried. Without the story, she cannot be interned and he works in the archives and at night in his modest dwelling to find out who she is. The pieces of the puzzle are revealed step by step as the caretaker visits the annals of the archives with folders of newspaper clippings of political prisoners who disappear. He finds one folder with pictures of a young man. These archived images serve as memories of the living including the young man who shows up at the morgue one day to help the caretaker. These discoveries enfold as news on a tiny radio reveals that seven whales are beached on the shore in an apparent suicide, an event that finds its way into the imagery of this beautiful film.
Moira Sullivan
FIPRESCI, Alliance of Women Journalists.
Filmfestivals.com
Photos:©La Biennale di Venezia
Moira Sullivan 
