Politics: December 2010 Archives

David Bordwell sums up the terrible news from the totalitarian state of Iran about the outrageous sentence given to director Jafar Panahi ("The White Balloon," "The Circle," "Offside," etc.) after he was accused of conspiring to make an "anti-regime" film:

From Tehran comes the shocking news that Jafar Panahi, one of the finest of Iranian filmmakers, has been sentenced to six years in prison. The sentence also bans him from filmmaking for twenty years, forbids him to leave the country, and forbids him from giving interviews to the press, foreign or domestic. Panahi's collaborator Muhammad Rasoulof was also sentenced to six years in jail. [...]

The charges may be simply a pretext for silencing a prominent figure critical of current Iranian society. Panahi's films do not circulate legally there, and he is widely believed to be in sympathy with liberal forces. The government has sought to eradicate the most visible of these factions, the Green Party. Even Islamic clerics have been swept up in the crackdown. A parallel case to Panahi's is the attack on Mohammad Taqi Khalaji, a dissident cleric. Last January he was arrested and his computer and papers were seized. He too was incarcerated in Evin prison before being released on bail. Yet he was not formally charged with anything. His personal papers, including his passport, were not returned to him.

You can get some grim satisfaction for knowing that movies still matter in some parts of the world. Films have the power to shock bureaucrats and threaten authoritarian regimes. Instead of being simply "assets" or "content" to be extruded across platforms and shoved through release windows, cinema is in some places taken seriously as political critique.

"Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer" is a kind of whodunnit. Spitzer makes formidable enemies in his rise to power as New York Attorney General, stepping in to police Wall Street when the feds refused, and we meet a number of furious financial barons (some convicted, some not) who say they would have done anything in their power to bring down the bullying, egomaniacal Spitzer. In the end, though, Spitzer admits he has no one to blame for his downfall but himself. He patronized a fancy call girl service when he was governor, and resigned when he got caught.

The sad thing is that while Spitzer was a paranoid john, many of his Wall Street enemies were pimps and dealers and capital criminals. Spitzer's crime is puny compared with the ones his opponents have gotten away with -- crimes that have ruined so many lives and nearly destroyed the economy, while still making a mint for themselves.