Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Turtles Can Fly
2004 · Bahman Ghobadi · Turtles Can Fly on Sightlines
A boy climbs onto a roof in a camp on the Turkish-Iraqi border and turns a dish by hand until the static on a television becomes a war. The war is not in the television. It is a few weeks up the road, and the elders crowding the room have come to watch it get closer. The boy is called Satellite, and the name is his own doing. Downhill from the aerial, on the slopes under the camp, his crew of children is on its knees in the dirt, pulling unexploded mines out of the ground with their fingers and carrying them down to sell. One war is arriving by signal. The last one is already in the soil, and the children are harvesting it.
Hold those two images side by side and you have the film. You also have the reason Deleuze is worth borrowing here.
Deleuze's basic division in his cinema books is between images where someone perceives a situation and acts to change it — the ordinary engine of almost every film ever made — and images where no available action touches what is perceived, so the character can only look, wait, and take it in. He called that second kind a pure optical situation. The circuit from eye to hand is cut. And he dated its birth to a child: Rossellini turning a small boy loose in the rubble of Berlin in Germany Year Zero, seeing a ruined world he has no power over at all. Ghobadi's descent from that film is direct and acknowledged, and so is the rest of his line — Kiarostami's rural child shot in long takes on real terrain, Naderi's scavenging boy, his own Kurdish borderland pictures where non-professionals haul loads across ground that wants to kill them.
Bazin defended neorealism on the grounds that some realities should not be cut into pieces, because editing that explains a fact has already replaced it. Ghobadi takes that contract somewhere Bazin never had to consider. He cast children from the camps who carry the actual injuries of the mines the film is about. The wound in the shot is not makeup. It is not a performance of a landmine; it is a landmine's result, walking through a fiction. That single decision is why the comedy never feels cheap and the grief never feels staged.
And this is where the film gets strange, because it is not a film of paralysis. Satellite never stops moving. He installs, brokers, bosses, organises, runs a small economy and a smaller government. Deleuze had a name for action that discloses its world a piece at a time instead of transforming it: the small form, where the act reveals a situation rather than resolving one. Every deal Satellite makes shows you a little more of what he lives inside. A mine has a price. An aerial has a price. The news costs money. He acts constantly, at speed, with real ingenuity, and nothing he does can alter one thing about what is coming. That is Ghobadi's formal invention, and it is a genuine one: he keeps the whole motor of a boy's-adventure movie and installs it in a world where action has already lost. The gallows comedy is not decoration. It is the argument.
Then there is Agrin, who hardly speaks. She is the film's seer — Deleuze's voyant, the one who has seen something that cannot be converted into anything at all. What Satellite spends in motion she carries in stillness, and the film's gravest weight is hers. What was done to her in the last war has no outlet in this one, and the slope she is on runs one direction only. Two children, two regimes of the image, one camp. The film does not let the cheerful one win.
Deleuze has a third idea that fits the hills exactly. Beneath a realistic setting, certain films expose what he called an originary world: not a place but a reserve of raw violence that hands out fragments and imposes a downward slope. The camp is the ordinary milieu — tents, bartering, playground politics. The minefield beneath it is the originary world. It releases its part-objects one at a time, the children have built a market around them, and it takes payment in hands and eyes. The mine is a fetish in Deleuze's precise sense: a fragment charged with more force than any whole object on screen.
Which brings us to the bodies. Deleuze's late cinema of the body turns on the gest, a posture that carries a social relation in it without anyone stating it. A child with no arms hauling scrap is not a symbol of war. It is war's bookkeeping, in a body, doing chores. Kandahar had already put actual mine victims on screen and framed prosthetics as narrative objects rather than pity props; Ghobadi takes that method to the one place it had not gone, where the maimed children are the workforce and the mine is the job.
Deleuze's last move is political, and this film needs it most. Classical political cinema addressed a people assumed to exist. Modern political cinema, he argued, starts from the opposite condition: the people are missing. So the work becomes fabulation, catching people in the act of making themselves up, telling the stories a collective might later be built from. The Kurds are the case the concept was waiting for, a nation spread across borders none of which recognise it. Ghobadi, Kurdish, filming Kurdish non-actors in a Kurdish camp, made the first feature shot in Iraq after Saddam fell and did as much as anyone alive to will a stateless cinema into existence. His camera neither observes these children from outside nor pretends to be them; it thinks alongside them, which is what Deleuze meant by free indirect discourse. And the fabulation is sitting right there in a nickname. A boy in a refugee camp names himself after a machine he half understands, the name sticks, the name becomes a trade, the trade becomes authority. That is how peoples get started.
What did the film do to the art? It proved the neorealist child still had work left sixty years on, and that the work was now being done by the filmed rather than about them. And it made the arriving image its real subject — not the invasion, but a village's relationship to a screen showing an invasion on its way. In 2003 that was a new and very cold idea.
Watch it again for the aerials. Ghobadi keeps cutting between two ways of receiving a war, one through the air and one through the ground, and neither is a way of stopping it. The open question is whether looking is a form of action or the thing left over when action is gone. Satellite is certain it is action. He is wrong in a way that is impossible not to love.
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns) — Satellite rigs antennas so the elders can watch the approaching American invasion on television; the camp can only receive the image of an event no one in it can affect.
- the seer (voyant) — Agrin, wordless and haunted, carries the film's gravest weight by enduring and watching rather than acting.
- action-image, small form (ASA') — Satellite's constant brokering — antennas installed, mines harvested and priced for resale — where each transaction discloses a little more of the camp's war economy without changing anything.
- originary world — The camp's ordinary milieu of tents, barter and playground politics sits on hills 'seeded with metal' that dispense violence in fragments.
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — The film's irreversible downward movement through Agrin's self-destruction and the mine economy's steady tax on children's bodies.
- fetish (part-object) — The unexploded landmine, dug out by hand and traded as the camp's principal commodity — a fragment carrying more force than any whole object on screen.
- the gest — Children bearing the actual injuries of the mines the film depicts, working as the mine-clearing labour force; prosthetics handled as narrative objects rather than pity props, after Kandahar.
- out-of-field-absolute — The 2003 invasion is never in the frame — it exists only as broadcast signal on the elders' television and as buried metal underfoot.
- the people are missing — A stateless Kurdish cinema Ghobadi did much to will into existence, made in the camps of a nation no border recognises, and the first feature shot in Iraq after Saddam's fall.
- fabulation (legending) — A camp boy renaming himself 'Satellite' after the machine he installs, the nickname becoming a trade and then local authority; non-professional children from the camps performing near-versions of themselves.
- free indirect discourse (political) — Ghobadi, a Kurdish-Iranian director who acted in Blackboards and cast real border children in A Time for Drunken Horses, fusing his vision with the children's rather than observing them from outside.