Ballad of Tara · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Everything in the dead man's house finds a taker. Pots, cloth, tools: the neighbours carry off a life in armloads and are glad of it. Then the sword comes out. It goes from hand to hand and comes back to her. Nobody wants it.

That is a piece of stage business, and it is also the film's whole argument, which is why Ballad of Tara rewards a way of watching that Gilles Deleuze worked out in his two cinema books. Deleuze's claim, briefly: most films use time to measure movement, and a few put time on screen directly, as something you sit inside rather than something that carries you from A to B. Beyzai's film is the second kind, and it gets there by a route almost nobody else took.

Start with the refusal. Deleuze borrows a term from Brecht for this: the gest. A gest is a posture or a bit of handling that makes a social relation visible in the body, with nobody stating it. Not a symbol you decode; a gesture you watch. The village never debates its relation to the warrior past. It simply declines to hold the thing, hand after hand, and the declining is the thought. Beyzai stages judgement rather than writing it as dialogue. That is how the film can be about inheritance without one speech about inheritance.

Then the man arrives. He comes from a defeated army, out of the deep past, and Tara can see him when almost nobody else can. The obvious frame is ghost story, and ghost stories ask: is he real? That question goes nowhere here, because the film never treats his reality as in doubt. Deleuze offers a better one. In Cinema 2 he describes sheets of past — the past not as a stored memory you retrieve on cue, but as whole regions that go on existing at their own depth, which a present can be pulled into. A flashback tells you when. A sheet of past does not; it coexists. Beyzai's warrior is a memory of nothing. He is a layer of Iranian time still standing upright, with a claim to make.

Watch how he gets in. He is simply present in a shot where he was not. No dissolve, no glow, no ripple. Deleuze calls a cut that joins two things which do not connect an irrational cut: a join across a gap, where the gap is the meaning. Beyzai's editing is percussive by habit, willing to break spatial continuity to land a beat. Here that habit becomes metaphysics. The seam between 1979 and a defeated army is a splice.

This is also where the film speaks to film theory. André Bazin argued that cinema's power lies in the camera's dumb fidelity: the image carries the being of the thing that stood before the lens, which is why we extend it a credit no painting gets. Beyzai takes that credit and spends it on a revenant. Because there is no optical trick, the photographic contract holds. The warrior was photographed on that beach, in that light, in those clothes. The medium's honesty becomes the machinery of haunting. He inherits the method directly from Prince Ehtejab (1974), where ancestors materialise inside continuous domestic space with no dissolve at all, and from The Cow (1969), which taught the New Wave that a realist surface can tip into myth with no marker of the shift.

The landscape carries the same load. Beyzai frames the sea flat and horizonless, so a figure walking into it appears to walk into an idea rather than into water. Deleuze's any-space-whatever names a space that has stopped being the setting for an action and become a pure affective field. His stratigraphic image names a landscape read as layers, an emptied ground with a buried past speaking through it. The paddies, the forest edge and the shoreline are this film's archive. The past does not enter from off-screen left. It comes ashore.

Now Tara herself, because Susan Taslimi is why the film is an event and not a thesis. Deleuze has a category for what she does: a cinema of the body, where an everyday body carries duration and meaning arrives as attitude, stride, labour, weight. Taslimi works, laughs, refuses, negotiates, and holds her ground against a living suitor and a dead one. At no point is she something the plot happens to. Iranian cinema would shortly be forbidden to photograph a woman this way, which is among the reasons the film was never released. The concept and the ban point at the same fact: this film thinks through a woman's body in motion.

All of it is held together by theatre. Beyzai wrote the standard study of Iranian performance before he made features, and the film is built from ta'ziyeh, naqqali and ru-howzi rather than decorated with them. Villagers move as a mass, form rings and lines, answer back in choral bursts, and hold the middle ground behind Tara, watching. Actors face the lens and present objects to it. Deleuze's lectosign describes precisely this: an image that has lost its automatic action-logic and asks to be read, like a storyteller's painted curtain. His speech act in the strong sense — a legending, testifying voice rather than conversation — describes the post-synced dialogue that sits slightly forward of the image, declaimed instead of overheard. The line arrives already a tale. And note the invention buried in this: because the chorus stays inside the shot, in depth, Beyzai almost never needs a reaction cutaway to tell you what the community thinks. He wrote and cut his own films, so the rhythm was set at the level of the script's metre, not found later at the bench.

Which brings the film to its politics. Deleuze says modern political cinema begins when the people are missing: no constituted community for the filmmaker to speak to or for, so cinema has to invent one through fabulation, catching people in the act of telling themselves into existence. Beyzai's warrior comes from a clan that lost. His people are gone; that is his condition. The village he petitions is unsure it wants to be his descendant. And the film, finished at the hinge of the revolution, was released to no people at all.

The lineage runs both ways, and the second way is the wound. Ballad of Tara takes the chorus-in-depth from The Cow, the ru-howzi semicircle of onlookers who talk back from Beyzai's own Downpour (1972), the stranger from outside history and the ritual combat blocked as ceremony from his own The Stranger and the Fog (1974), the frontal tableau with a ritual object held out to camera from Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (1969), and from Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) the rule that one saturated hue per figure against a drained landscape can do the work of psychology. Deleuze would call that last one an affective colour-image: a colour that absorbs a scene's feeling instead of describing an object. Tara's reds and greens against the returned man's earth tones aren't costume; they are how the film tells the living from the dead. Where The Stranger and the Fog ended in withdrawal, a boat going into fog, this film answers it: the stranger asks for the sword back, and goes. Forward, the line runs through Beyzai and Taslimi themselves, through Death of Yazdgerd, Bashu, Maybe Some Other Time, and through the Beyzai heroine who carries continuity while the men carry weapons and grievances. The rest of the inheritance was refused, hand to hand, exactly like the sword.

What it did to the art: it showed that the fantastic can be produced entirely by cutting and blocking, with the camera telling no lies, and that a national past can appear on screen as a person with a request instead of a costume drama or a flashback. Watch it again for the crowd. Notice how often the villagers are the ones deciding what is real, and how little Beyzai has to cut to let them do it.