The Brick and the Mirror · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man turns around in his cab and there is a baby on the back seat. The fare who was sitting there has walked off into the dark of a half-built street. That is the entire mechanism of Ebrahim Golestan's film, and what's worth watching for is how little it turns.

In most movies this is a starting gun. A man is handed a problem, he solves it or it destroys him, and the world at the end isn't the world at the start. Deleuze had a name for that arrangement: the movement-image. It isn't a genre, it's a wiring diagram. Someone perceives a situation, feels something about it, acts, and the situation gives. Hashem tries the wiring all night. He takes the child to a café, to a police station, to an orphanage. At every stop the problem is received, inspected, debated at length, and handed back to him.

Deleuze's term for what fails there is the crisis of the action-image: the point in film history when characters can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. The police station is the cleanest demonstration you will find anywhere. It is staffed, lit and operating, and nobody in it has the authority to take a baby. You could object that this is just a film about bureaucracy and that Deleuze is decoration. Here is what the lens actually buys. It tells you the slowness is the content and not a shortfall of money or craft; it tells you the long café scene is doing the same structural work that a chase does in another kind of picture; and it puts a 1965 film made in Tehran, by a documentary outfit with no model to copy, in the same conversation as the European films that were dismantling plot at exactly that moment.

The debt runs straight to Bicycle Thieves. De Sica supplied the engine: an ordinary man dragging one unsolvable small problem through a real city's offices and streets, with a child beside him as the silent witness by whom the adult's failure gets measured. Golestan inverts it. Antonio chases something he lost and needs. Hashem is trying to lose something he found and doesn't want. Bazin's account of neorealism was that it let more reality onto the screen. Deleuze's counter-account is the more useful one here: what neorealism invented was a new kind of image, one in which seeing outruns doing. He called these pure optical and sound situations. A character can only look and listen, because nothing is available to be done. The whole film is a voyage-balade, Deleuze's word for the trip that transforms nothing — a night drive through a city that ends with the driver holding exactly what he started with.

The café is the set piece. People theorise, joke, moralise and evade around the subject of the baby, and Golestan refuses to cut any of it down to its plot function. Antonioni's term, which Deleuze adopted: temps mort, dead time, stretches where the everyday is simply held and nothing advances. It is also a dispersive situation, a room full of loosely linked people none of whom is the one who will act. What circulates in place of action is opinion: positions, received phrases, jokes about a child nobody will take. Deleuze's name for a film that knows this is what its people are trading in is a consciousness of clichés. The editing rhythm enacts a society that generates commentary instead of action. That sentence is the film's design, not its flaw.

Now look at where bodies are put. The crew shoot through door frames, down corridors, behind grilles and scaffolding, and they keep the back of the frame alive with other petitioners and other children so that no private crisis stays private. The recurring image is a figure standing in an aperture, visible, not yet committed to entering. Deleuze would call that a gest: not a gesture that expresses a feeling, but a posture that exposes a relation. A whole society's relation to responsibility, held in one body that has stopped in a doorway. This is Golestan's specific invention — the assembly scene as anti-action, one man in a threshold facing a room that will hear him and grant nothing, repeated until the repetition becomes the plot. The night city around those doorways is Deleuze's any-space-whatever in its disconnected form: construction and rubble filmed with the same attention as faces, space that has stopped being a setting for anything to happen in. The grammar comes from La Notte, where glass and stairwells quarantine each figure and a couple's talk drifts instead of escalating; the nerve to withhold the payoff comes from L'Avventura, which taught cinema that the search object need never be recovered.

And the dark. Fast stock, available light, blacks left black. Figures come out of the darkness and dissolve back into it. That dark is not the next room. It is the absolute out-of-field, something past the frame you can't put on a map, and it is precisely where the woman went and where the answer stays.

At the orphanage the answer arrives anyway, institutional and final, wanted by no one. Ranks of cots. A protagonist facing an assembly one more time, except this assembly is infants. Whoever stands there has become Deleuze's seer — demoted from agent to witness, and the looking is the last thing the film has to give.

The politics follow from the form. Deleuze says modern political cinema begins where "the people are missing": where a film cannot show a collective capable of acting, and films the shape of the absence instead. Tehran here is mid-transformation, half-built, its institutions receiving and not acting, its public rooms producing talk. Nobody laments this. It is simply photographed.

That it exists at all is the documentary shop's doing. Golestan's oil-commissioned A Fire taught the feature patience with process over event, roaring ambient sound in place of score, figures staged small against an indifferent background. The House Is Black, made in the same unit with Farrokhzad directing, fixed the house method: available-light observation, sound rebuilt after the fact from ambience rather than captured live, cuts that jump across time without polite establishing coverage. Released in 1966, three years before the Iranian New Wave gets its conventional start date with The Cow and Qeysar, this film had already refused everything film-farsi ran on — the songs, the fights, the stars — and built a feature out of duration, architecture and noise. It flopped. Its reputation survived in scholarship and memory until a restoration in the 2010s put it back in front of audiences who had only read about it.

The title is usually traced to a line in the Persian poetic tradition: what the young see in a mirror, the old see in a brick. Foresight, in other words. The film turns it bitter, because nobody here sees far enough. Watch it again and count the doorways, and how often somebody stands in one without crossing. The film isn't asking why they fail to act. It's asking what kind of city, and what kind of night, makes standing there feel like a decision.