SOUTH ASIAN FILM EDUCATION SOCIETY (SAFES)
Film screening for members
Sunday, August 23, 2009
2.00 pm to 5.00 pm.
Praxis Centre Screening Room (Suite 3120)
SFU Harbour Centre: 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Matir Moina (The Clay Bird)
Winner CANNES 2002 (International Critics’ Prize) Directed by Tareque MasudProduced by Catherine Masud 94 mins.Bangla with English subtitles
Discussion following SAFES screening of MATIR MOYNA
August 23, 2008
It’s a good film but the central character of Kazi is historically disorienting because it shows him as fanatically Islamic and supportive of the Pakistan army. Bengalis were all opposed to the Pakistan army. The position of Kazi was more typical of Biharis and West Pakistanis in East Bengal.
There were a number of Bengalis who collaborated with the Pakistan army.
Beg to disagree. Bengalis did not support the army. Support for the army came from Islamist organizations.
The film is good but easy on the army. It just tells at the end that the army is coming, killing people and burning houses and leaves it at that. We hear no more about it.
It is confusing because it takes on too many issues but does not pull them together into a coherent picture.
The film is cinematically powerful. It is also complex in the way it presents the development of character and situation, showing three distinct stages in the character of Kazi: first he is fanatically orthodox, then he is repentant and throws away his homeopathic medicine, and finally he is proved wrong and devastated.
Yes, but the film is even more complex than that and beautiful, poetic and layered. Kazi goes through five stages: we learn that he was Western educated and wore Western clothes, that he gave these up and burnt his clothes when he converted to orthodox beliefs and practices, we see the thinness of his conversion in the extreme practices he adopts and imposes, imprisoning his family, we see his repentance in regard to his medical practice, and we finally see him as defeated, paralyzed and left behind. The film is nuanced: Kazi is not a representative of Islam but of the thinness of conversion, which the pious boatman makes clear.
The centre of the film is not Kazi but his antithesis, the boy Rokon, who is isolated as different but has the courage to tell the master in the madrassa that another boy’s writing is not good because he is left-handed but forced to use his right hand. It is by contact with him that Anu gets the strength to leave the madrassa and return home. Rokon is the holy madman, the Sufi who is the subject of the great song-dialogue on Sufism toward the end.
But Rokon raises questions that remain unanswered: where does the sweet he offers Anu come from? Who is the special friend? Anu just leaves him and goes away. We don’t know what happens, what the answers are.
Perhaps the special friend is Nature.
Is Rokon part of a political allegory?
Rokon is an artist; he represents imagination; he is always outside and has no home. He is the Other of the entire order. He is called “mad” (and subjected to exorcism); he is shamanic, a healer.
We begin with a strong suspicion that the special friend is a pedophile as pedophilia is common in madrassas but that does not seem to be the case.
Rokon is certainly a central character and it also quite clear that there are unanswered and unanswerable questions about him. But instead of seeing this as a failure that is part of the apparent incoherence of the film, we should recognize it as a deliberate aspect of the film: at the centre of the film is something that is unresolvable, unanswerable. (This produces an openness of meaning: we seek an answer, come up with various possibilities, but can’t be sure. This contrasts with the certainty of religious dogmatism in which the answers are already given. In this regard Rokon could be seen as producing in the viewer a state of mind antithetical to dogmatic certainty.) (Rokon does say to Anu that the special friend can never be seen—though he gives visible sweets. Also, “Friend”, as we know, is the term for “God” in Sufism. The invisible special friend gives Rokon sweets, which he secretly shares with Anu. On the other hand Kazi throws out the door the sweets that uncle gives Anu through the window of his house.)
As a sociologist I am concerned with the way religion is represented and I am uncomfortable with the way Islam is represented in the film. It is almost entirely negative. Also I am troubled by the representation of society because people seem to passively accept what is happening and are left without any direction in the end. The film ends on hopelessness.
The film involves a number of dialogues on religion, mainly conducted through the songs, of which the dialogue on Sufism is the clearest and most powerful. There is also the discourse on the relative merits of a religion imposed by the authority of the sword and the Sufi appeal through the heart. The boatman too offers an alternative to the religion of the Kazi.
In the Eid episode a man sings a song about Abraham’s sacrifice while the village people sit around. The song is sung in the form of a traditional Hindu song about various Hindu legends and religious stories yet the content is Islamic/Hebrew/Christian. This shows the openness and syncretism of the Bengali folk culture: the folk cultural form can carry different religious content so that there is no strict opposition of religions. This fluidity is also shown in the uncle Mukul’s taking his nephew, Anu, to the Hindu river festival. Significantly, the song of Abraham’s sacrifice ends not with the Patriarchal God/Allah/Yahweh’s intervention but with the cry of the mother that is taken up by the whole of nature. So that the song transforms the Patriarchal foundational story to a story of a mother’s love and grief. This is a very Bengali transformation. The film, too, shows a movement from the father to the mother: at the end, the much oppressed woman, Kazi’s wife, “Anur Amma” is empowered to snatch her son from Kazi and walk away.
The central and binding symbol of the film is the bird, as reflected in its title. There’s a great song in it about the soul as a bird in the cage of the body and the bird’s desire to fly while the cage prevents its flight. The desire for freedom and the social-religious forces that prohibit and inhibit it are repeated in various forms through the film. The clay bird that Anu buys for his sister becomes an embodiment of this theme. It is a beautiful product of folk culture and a wonderful gift that is/has to be hidden away from the father, and is destroyed when the house is destroyed by the army.
Summary prepared by Chin
Note of clarification of historical question by Taj Hashmi (from Hawaii):
As you know fact is always stranger than fiction; tens of thousands of bengali muslims collaborated with Pakistani occupation army, and thousands voluntarily fought for them as Razakars or volunteers. many of them killed thousands of fellow bengalis in 1971.And on a separate note, thousands of bengalis literally celebrated (publicly) the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family in 1975. All the top cabinet ministers of Mujib (barring four) took oath as ministers within hours of the killing of mujib (even before his burial). Mujib's Speaker of the Parliament, the late Abdul malik Ukil led a parliamentary delegation to London in September 1975 and told journalists at Heathrow Airport on their asking about his reaction to the killing of Mujib: "The country has been relieved of the Pharoahs". Next day it came out in a Bengali daily in Dhaka (I still remember the caption): "Desh Ferauner haat hoite mukti paiachhey". Taj
Additional comments by Patricia:
Thanks for a great discussion afterward. I thought people were particularly eloquent. I agreed with Tom that the film is complex thematically, but I found it a little disorienting. For instance, it seemed to me that the story was built around "Amu's mother" but she wasn't recognized as the protagonist until the end. Also, as we discussed, was the issue of the other boy and questions that were raised but not answered. Since he was set up as a metaphysical character who embodied the values of bakthi/sufism, I was troubled by the way Amu left him behind in agony, saying he had no place to go. Was his mysterious benefactor perhaps the true spirit of God, and the sweets were spiritual rather than earthly? I don't remember anyone eating them, and perhaps Amu was packing them to take with him when he left the school. (His father had earlier thrown away the sweets he got at the Hindu boat races, which I took to be prasad.)
Anyway, I quite liked the film but I could never quite relax into trusting that it was completely coherent and intentional.
Addition by Nila:
I guess the comment I made had to do with the ostracized boy - Rokon? Anyway, I felt that his character represented everything that traditional (specifically fundamentalist) religions would fear or disapprove of. Fear, because he was a non-conformist. He questioned, he was an artist, creative, had his own opinions, he played by himself, and was comfortable doing so. Did not need the approval of others.
Comments added by Randeep:
“The Clay Bird” lets the viewer witness something of the trauma that must have been caused by the 1971 Pakistani civil war and the creation of Bangladesh. Masud handles a pivotal historical moment skillfully, juxtaposing quieter scenes such as the conversation on the boat about how thousand were turned into refugees against the sounds of gunfire and the cries of an old woman.
Masud also succeeds in looking at the contested meaning of Islam and what it means to be Muslim in South Asia. The “Muslim” is as rich, and varied as any other. Masud shows oftentimes in combination the “Muslim” as a Bengali, a villager, a cleric, a mother, a crusader for freedom, a Socialist, a child, an enigma. It showed the Islam of the Sufi, the Qazi in the wonderful folk songs performed before the village and the debates about Islam and Jihad at the Madrasah, between two teachers who are culling clay together as a substitute for toilet paper or water.
The cinematography was visually gorgeous, contrasting the quiet beauty of reeds floating along a river to the terror of villagers fleeing into the jungles. Rather than a single protagonist, Masud gives the viewer a story of well-drawn, and brilliantly executed performances. In looking at 1971, and the question of Islam today, Masud has given us one of the more humanistic and nuanced portrayals of both in recent times.
Addition by Tom:
The film appealed to me as it obviously appealed to people in New York because its aesthetics are European: it uses the European convention of story telling in following a central narrative instead of breaking it up with a certain given number of songs and dances.
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