The story of George - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Joanna Mendelssohn
THE FOREIGN CULTURE THAT MOST readily threatens to corrupt the rigid Pashtun mindset of studied hypocrisy and fierce militarism is not Western decadence. Rather, it is the joyous bubbly musical spectacular of India's Bollywood. In villages that are out of the reach of television, the DVD is king, as cheap monitors and DVD players are smuggled over the Chinese border. Market stalls sell pirated copies of Indian and Western movies, and images of curvaceous ladies dance across the screen singing of their love for tall handsome men. The Taliban rejects these films as decadent. It destroys what it cannot control. The first target for any bombing campaign is the local video store.
I sometimes think of George as working in the ancient tradition of the Holy Fool, the apparent idiot innocent who by his acts exposes the evils of the world. That is the only logical explanation for why he constructed the filming of Miscreants the way he did. He was in Peshawar, staying at the SS Club, trying to work out how to tell the story of the rise of the Taliban and the struggle for power in Pakistan, when he was approached by local actors and DVD distributors, people wanting to ensure the survival of a local film industry, despite the Taliban. It was a particularly fraught time. Radical pro-Taliban students in Islamabad's Red Mosque had set themselves in opposition to the militarist Pakistani government. In July 2007, at the end of a siege that lasted over eight days, 154 people were killed. George had seen the Pakistani army storm the mosque, and filmed the blindfolded prisoners as they were led from the building. The aftermath unleashed Taliban counter-strikes across the country.
Only a determined fantasist could see this assorted crew of burlesque performers and opportunists as representatives of the best of local culture. But George has more than an element of fantasy to the way he envisages his films, and so he saw the chance to make his art out of their desire to make and sell highly profitable films.
So this was the deal. George would finance the production of two Pashtun language films – one a comedy with dwarfs (representing George W. Bush and Pervez Musharraf) fighting in a chook house, and the other a melodrama about a Sufi warrior. In return, he had the access to make the film he wanted to make about artistic freedoms and the way fundamentalism is destroying both popular culture and ancient traditions. All wealth is comparative. By Australian standards, George is not rich. Friends have often marvelled how he and his wife Gabrielle Dalton have a long and intimate relationship with impending financial doom, somehow always called off at the last minute. But in Peshawar A$7000 will fully fund two films starring local actors, including two dwarfs (essential ingredients for comedy) and three appropriately plump actresses.
The video shop owner who will be distributing the DVDs, a cheerful pornographer, is very definite about what his customers want, indicating with gestures to describe ‘a big fat lady, with big boobs, and this much fat. Men get very excited. They want to see the breasts, her stomachs, her something.'
It is clear that the men making this film are more interested in the actresses' physical attributes than their devotion to method, even though two of the three take their craft seriously. The third is a local prostitute, who wants to use the film as a way of promoting her illicit profile. It is the actresses who are taking most of the risks in revealing their faces and their clothed bodies to the camera and the male gaze. In this kingdom of men, women are punished severely for sins of the flesh. One of the actresses is persuaded to take part in such a risky venture when George, master of the tall tale, tells her that ‘you're the most beautiful girl in the industry and we want you to be in the film'. He brings in the cause of art to support the production of the second risqué melodrama. He tells her that the revival of the Pashtun film industry could spring from this film, which is as important to her country as Cubism was to Paris. ‘This could be Picasso's world in 1912 in Paris,' he says, likening her to Picasso's model and muse.
The film in which she stars is George's reimagining of Islamic myth to create the figure of a Sufi warrior, a noble mystic fighter who defeats anti-Islamic evil. This could be awkward, as Sufism is one of the many peaceful paths to God. In order to ensure that his venture is theologically appropriate, George took the actor with him to meet his friend, the ancient Sufi scholar who welcomed the venture but told the actor to dress as a Sufi pilgrim and visit an ancient sacred shrine. Here is where fiction and reality blend as the villagers followed the actor as a true pilgrim, and tried to honour him as such.
George relishes the larger than life adventure and danger of some of this filmmaking, but the pornographer distributor has a more realistic assessment of the motivation of both those buying the films and those who condemn them. ‘They, they're vulgar,' he lisps happily. This judgement is endorsed by the senior Taliban figure, also interviewed by George. ‘Dramas are not real and drama is not reality,' he intones. ‘Islam stands for practical life.'
The Taliban's terrible practicality stands as the counterpoint to the light-hearted frivolity of the films. Such a single-minded approach enables it to bomb the video stores and replace them with stalls selling its own Taliwood work – films of fighting and executions, showing children blooded for battle by cutting the throats of selected criminals. Practicality leads the Taliban to purify the land of Islamic traditions it does not share. Sufi communities are bombed, Shia mosques are destroyed. This is the Islamic equivalent of Oliver Cromwell's equally single-minded troops smashing the ‘idolatrous' English churches in the sixteenth century – and its consequences may be equally long lasting.
In the face of this fanaticism, George has his camera, and his questions. In the bombed-out shell of a Shia mosque where walls are freshly covered in the blood of victims, a grieving relative speaks of the way miscreant fanatics have betrayed the religion that he holds dear in killing all his family.
Even though George does not single-handedly save the Pashtun film industry with his melodramas, and it is unlikely that art will ever change the world in the way that he wants it to, Miscreants will create what George calls ‘a Taliwood story' for the rest of us. And in doing so we might begin to understand some of the forces that are shaping our world. ♦