گفتگوی نادیا مفتونی با پروفسور راب ماس + متن انگلیسی

به گزارش خبرنگار ردنا (ادیان نیوز)، انچه در ادامه می آید مشروح گفتگوی نادیا مفتونی، از پژوهشگران پیشکسوت دانشگاه بین المللی ییل و نویسنده کتاب اقتصاد فرهنگ و رسانه فاضله با پروفسور راب ماس با مدیر دپارتمان هنر، فیلم و مطالعات بصری دانشگاه هاروارد است.

درباره چه موضوعاتی با پروفسور راب ماس مدیر دپارتمان هنر و فیلم دانشگاه هاروارد گفتگو کردید.

مفتونی: گفتگوی من و پروفسور راب ماس گفتگوی مفصلی بود و موضوعات متعددی مطرح شد. اگر بخواهم به مهمترین آنها اشاره کنم باید از این مساله سنتی خودمان یاد کنم که فلسفه را مادر علوم می دانیم. در حدودا سیصد سال اخیر رشته های دانشگاهی مختلفی توسط فیلسوفان ایجاد شده که تا قرن بیست و یکم ادامه یافته است. پروفسور راب ماس تجربه شخصی در این خصوص دارد. وی گفت ما مدیون فلسفه هستیم و یک فیلسوف به نام استنلی کاول دپارتمان مطالعات هنر، فیلم و مطالعات بصری را در هاروارد تاسیس کرده است. البته خوب است در اینجا از نیکولاس رشر هم یاد کنم که به عنوان یک فیلسوف، رهبری و مدیریت مرکز فلسفه علم دانشگاه پتسبرگ را بر عهده دارد.

به نظرم از ارتباط میان فلسفه و هنر هم بحث کردید.

مفتونی: بله؛ مشخصا از نقش فیلم در بیان مسائل فلسفی صحبت کردیم. انبوهی از کتابها و مقالات درباره یک مساله فلسفی نوشته می شود که همه محترم هستند و جایگاه خودشان را دارند. اما در عین حال گاهی یک اثر هنری می تواند مفهومی عمیق و فلسفی را به مخاطب انتقال دهد. برخی فیلم های مستند راب ماس مصداق این هستند. درباره آثار هنری بنده هم اعم از فیلم ها و نقاشی ها صحبت شد که سخن گفتن از آنها مجال مستقلی را طلب می کند.

آیا مشغله دانشگاهی مزاحم زندگی هنری شما نشده است؟

مفتونی: اتفاقا درباره ارتباط زندگی هنری یک هنرمند با فعالیت دانشگاهی وی هم صحبت کردیم. این هم دغدغه مهمی برای هر دو نفرمان بود. چون هم راب ماس هم بنده در عین حال که دانشگاهی هستیم هنرمند هم هستیم. درباره اینکه آیا زندگی آکادمیک مزاحم زندگی هنری بوده یا مفید و موثر در آن بوده به تفصیل تبادل نظر کردیم و نقاط قوت و ضعفی در این ارتباط مطرح شد. راب ماس گفت نهایتا با این مساله کنار آمده و من هم تصورم این است که زندگی آکادمیک برای فعالیت های هنری من منفی نیست و این دو تاثیرات مثبتی بر هم داشته اند.

آیا درباره فیلم های ایرانی هم صحبت کردید؟

مفتونی: له؛ یک مساله جالب که مطرح شد جایگاه سینمای ایران در هاروارد و دپارتمان هنر و فیلم بود. راب ماس گفت در دپارتمان ما همه طرفدار سینمای ایران هستیم و هنگامی که فیلمی جدید از ایران مطرح می شود بهانه ای برای گردهمایی و جشن پیدا می کنیم. وی خصوصا از مرحوم کیارستمی یاد کرد و گفت آن مرحوم را در همین اواخر عمرش برای کرسی تدریس خیلی ویژه ای انتخاب کرده بودند که متاسفانه اجل مهلت نداد.

خانم دکتر، درباره فلسفه اسلامی همدلی یا حرف مشترکی وجود داشت؟

مفتونی: خیلی زیاد! مثلا آنچه به عنوان یک تز فلسفی برگرفته از فیلسوفان مسلمان برای راب ماس بسیار جذابیت داشت، دیدگاه فارابی درباره ارتباط فلسفه و هنر بود. فارابی هنرمندان را در صدر جامعه فاضله قرار داده و هنر را بهترین بلکه تنها راه انتقال و ترویج مفاهیم معقول و فلسفی و حکمی و سعادت نطقی در سطح جامعه می داند. این اهمیت به هنر از سوی یک فیلسوف مسلمان، وی را به یاد افلاطون و نظر منفی افلاطون درباره هنر انداخت. بنده با هر یک از محققان برجسته معاصر که گفتگو داشته ام، گوهری از اندیشمندان مسلمان برای آنها وجود داشته است و معرفی شده است.

ضمن تشکر از خانم دکتر مفتونی، گزیده ای از گفتگوی ایشان و راب ماس به انگلیسی از نظر می گذرد.

Robb: I came into the academy as a filmmaker, and my filmmaking was my scholarship. And I think that the fact that it was appreciated as such is what makes it everything else possible. And then the question is, what is the relationship of filmmaking to academia or artmaking to academia, they’re often thought of as separate things. But I think there’s at least in the United States in many liberal arts institutions, and partly driven by student interests, partly by the changes in the way in the world, even the way we started this conversation, thinking about how people see movies and how all that is, there’s a shift.

There is a way in which artmaking and filmmaking are different ways of knowing the world. And if academia and scholarship is about knowing the world through our disciplines, then why shouldn’t art of filmmaking be part of that thinking, part of that interrogation of the world, that you see the world if you’re a filmmaker, or an artist, you see the world in a certain way that is a rigorous, historical, theoretical, as well as expressive. It’s the expressive piece that in a way distinguishes much scholarship. I mean, lots of scholarship is also expressive. But expressivity is like an integral part of artmaking and filmmaking.

And I think that the way of the world is that people making things that making things embodied in the author as an artist as a filmmaker is a way of knowing the world not unlike any other ways of knowing the world. And if the academy thinks that, then people like me, perhaps like you as well, that your film work would be a valued piece, not an extracurricular piece. It has to be at the same level, it has to be thought of at the same level and that things like tenure, promotion can be part of it.

I mean I’m a filmmaker. But a lot of the people I teach are also scholars, I mean, young scholars, graduate students who are studying something, but also making things and that making things in at the same time that you’re doing your scholarship makes toward this powerful, in my view scholar practitioner, which I think is the future.

And I think it’s the future of liberal arts that without that piece, that liberal arts education will be cut off from our ability to attract students, our ability to know what the world is like, as we become ever more connected in these different kinds of ways and artmaking and filmmaking is central to our way of understanding what the world is like.

So, in a way the shift, I think needs to be in the academy. And then, in that shift people like us can make the work that we think is also important; and that we’re training people in that way, those people in our Ph.D. program, say in Art, Film, and Visual Studies, it’s called Film and Visual Studies in the graduate program in our department, many filmmakers, many artists are coming through the academy in this twin way, and that their scholarship and their filmmaking or artmaking is a part of what makes them employable once they graduate.

And we’re seeing many, many examples of universities all around our country and in the world, where such people have an advantage, not a disadvantage.

I would say 20 years ago, if you wanted to do both, it was a disadvantage. But I think now, there’s a growing understanding that that’s the future and in a way the present, which of course is the topic of my films.

But I also think it’s—I just think it’s something to think about and to argue for. And I think that it’s the future of liberal arts education.

Host: The term “scholar practitioner” reminded me of one of the terms coined by Nadia, which is Philartist. She has worked on the idea that the philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age like Farabi, like Avicenna, they were at the same time that they were writing their essays, they were writing stories, and they were storytellers. So, they were sort of Philartists; at the same time scholars and practitioners. So, it’s good to know that and perhaps when we move to Nadia, we would be glad to hear about that.

Robb: That’s wonderful. By the way, I’d love hearing that. And I’m curious to know more.

Host: I’d like to begin with The Same River Twice which is my favorite. Because of its personal literature. And some notes I wrote as I was watching the film. I like to mention, one of them was agony of remembering. The other note I wrote was “filmmaker’s guilt: reminding… causing pain and troubling others.” Does the film do that by reminding the people a golden time in their lifetime?

Robb: I think that making films about people, nonfiction films about people, is excruciatingly complicated—partly for the reasons we’re saying, partly for the reasons, I mean, in a film like The Same River Twice, it’s like about 80-minute long. Well, there’s the old footage in this about 30 minutes. So you have about an hour of these five characters, like 12 minutes of a character.

And I’m saying that their entire lives—Alright, OK, I think that intense reduction of somebody’s life to 12 minutes and to make the claim that those 12 minutes can express something serious about anybody’s life, is monstrous.

I mean it’s really just unbelievable, let alone the kinds of exposures like showing people naked when they’re young and putting that in front of other people, let alone being there for very personal things and that I’m seeing those personal things because we’re friends and they’re letting me see it because I’m their friend.

This is a complicated thing and ethical thing. But it’s also the nature of filmmaking and art. And I think for me the ethics of that are … it’s funny. And what just to say the answer of the question as asked, that one of the things that I think for me works for The Same River Twice is that the characters inhabit their current lives pretty fully. They’re not really living in the past. They’re really living in the present. They’re kind of shocked and amused by seeing themselves in the past.

I mean, when Danny at the beginning the woman who’s the Robert’s instructor is like looking at an image of herself and she kind of laughs. And I asked why are she laughing and she goes my breast, I recognized it, you know, from 20-years ago. and there is something so sweet about that and so telling and so direct.

But it does a couple of things, one of them, it makes it possible to look at people’s naked bodies. Because a person in the film has acknowledged that they are naked. It’s not just the thought you have. It’s a thought that the people in the film have and they are sort of saying it’s OK, even a slightly embarrassing. But a slightly embarrassing is not in ethical violations; it’s just a slightly embarrassing. And that seemed OK and that’s at the front of the film precisely to allow people to watch and not feel, you know, uncomfortable.

Are we sure we have the permission of everybody? Is it really OK? These are real questions and that has to be dispensed with quickly. And I think Danny’s like just her—she’s abashed. She thinks it’s funny. She’s laughing. She’s a little red-faced, but that’s all. You know, that seems to me and that’s like a real response in.

So, the ethical pieces, there is things in the film that I don’t like; many things that I filmed but are not in the film. Because I thought they went too far. If the mechanism for the film is our friendship, I mean, this is the film was drenched in our friendships.

I don’t have a voice-over. I don’t appear in the film as a character. But the ways in which they respond to me shooting, the ways in which the cameras embodied, that their friendliness towards the filmmaking process, and their authenticity, I think, gives a kind of permission to film. But I’m aware that permission is contingent. it doesn’t have endless permission. It doesn’t mean I can film everything or put everything in the movie. And I don’t. There’s things I don’t include that scene to take that permission too far. So that there’s a relationship that our relationships is in a way that the medium of the movie. It’s the medium in which the story is being told. It is through our people, and having known them for so long which is different than meeting people for the first time in a movie and getting their permission.

There’s something like a lifetime of experience. I mean, I’ve known, I knew Danny, you know, when I was 12 years old. I knew Jeff since I was 10 years old, Barry since I was 15 years old, and the newcomers to my life I’ve known for 45 years. So there’s something about that knowing that allows such a story to be told in a way that I hope is ethically responsible and intimate both.

Host: I remembered Katie’s words, when she said she feels stronger and perhaps better now. I mean some of the characters seem to be happy with their present lives, seem to be more happy. It seems they have made up their minds about their lives in better way than they had in their youth.

Robb: Yes, I think being young is incredibly beautiful and also can be incredibly difficult. It’s like, it’s easy if to make it sort of hazy and wonderful. And that’s a kind of nostalgia that I think if that was in the film, would kind of kill the film; that you know, not being in your life now, only looking back—it’s not to say that how beautiful are they. I mean it’s just extraordinary. And it’s not just them. It’s just being young. I mean it’s like and in a way if they weren’t naked, if they were just on a river trip, a camping trip, they would just seem ordinary. There’s something about their bodies before time has taken them into their middle age and then in my new film beyond middle-age, that just kind of shouts being young, it shouts youth, it shouts a kind of authenticity of being young in a way that you can’t claim.

If you just talk about being young, it’s one thing. But if you see it, it’s like it creates a kind of mythic in my view, a kind of mythical, potentially mythical quality that on that river trip it’s before they’ve taken a bite of the apple of their middle age, of their adulthood—not even their middle age, adulthood—that they had yet to make the decisions that will define them as adults.

And in a way that’s what being in the garden was, it was like a lack of knowing, you know, a kind of innocence about what the world was. And there’s something about what that looks like, what the garden looks like in a certain kind of way, and then juxtaposing that against, you know, the complexities of the way things turned out then no longer young. They’re middle aged, you know, they have all the problems at health and family and relationships and all of that; their place in the world and all of those questions. They’re not living with those questions. And that’s in a way the topic of the film was; what are those questions? what are they living with?

And if it wasn’t juxtaposed against this sort of gaudy representation of being young, I don’t think there would be any real poignancy to those choices. Because those choices are simply ordinary. But the frame of time passing allows us to know them as having been once young and transitioned into this new life and then going back and forth in time suggests that they’re embedded in time in a way that characters … in non-fiction, you’re always filming in the present in non-fiction film, or you have archival material. In this case, the archival material is something not quite from the archives. It’s like from their lives and my life with them and in a way it takes it out of the archival and it’s not distant; it’s personal. So, seeing them then and now suggests that they live in time and that their middle-aged choices, you know, weren’t secure; they were contingent. They just happen the way that they happen to their life choices and the film films them embedded.

And then the other thing about that is that it was filmed over four years which is because they’re had to be velocity in the present. And the present had to have an ongoing, it was an ongoing present that generated its own past. So, every time you cut back to a character you were further down the road with them. And that takes time in non-fiction for things to happen.

You know, Barry is running for office. He loses; he gets cancer. But he turns 50. those markers are shot over four years. And while it collapses and it doesn’t seem like so much time has passed. In my view, I needed that time in the present to create it a present that movie’s moving forward rather than just being embedded in the present, which documentaries are often embedded in the now; often in really good ways. That’s really good. But then here the frame of the film is time itself passing by going back to when they’re in their 20s and as they’re heading towards 50.

Also, I’m slow. I mean it just take me a while to make it. And this is related to being, you know, having a fulltime job in the academy. It slows me down. Because I have a fulltime job. I’m working all the time; not all the time. I have summers; I have sabbaticals. If I’ve got momentum on a film, I can organize my time to keep a project going; I can keep making a movie and teach.

Host: A personal question popped up into my mind, which is … any regrets about Academia slowing you down?

Robb: So, I would say, and it’s a personal answer. I don’t know how it’s … how much it can be generalized. But for myself, I would say for the first, I don’t know, dozen years of my teaching, I thought of my teaching and my filmmaking as deeply related but parallel, and I moved traffic, I moved back and forth between them.

And it was hard, I mean there was a way in which one always was taking, you know, one always was in some way taking time away from the other—even as each gave to the other. But I, you know, I had a complicated relationship between that. And at some point, somewhere, you know, after that, so in the last 15 or 20 years, my filmmaking, my teaching my engagement with the world of film, which has increased more and more over time, where I’m asked to look at films or speak or whatever it is, my connection to the, you know, all of that began to seem like one thing that this was my practice; my practice included filmmaking, teaching, being in the world of filmmaking. I’ve been in the world of academia. The speed of all of that was a function of all those things that I did. And I stopped being the least bit regretful. It was just what I did. It was my work. It’s my practice. That’s how I organize it. And it seemed unnecessary to think of them as competing. Why not think of them as allied? And I now think that, I feel that, I don’t feel that tension.

You know, I just … it all means I have to live long enough to get my filmmaking done; you know, to have as many, you know, enough films and enough ideas out there to continue. So, I have to have the luck of longevity to make all of that work in the long run. But even in the short run, it’s a decision I made a long time ago. But I’m happy to live with. It wasn’t always true Mahmoud, you know, so I appreciate the question. But for me, this is where I’ve ended up.

Host: You nicely summed up the dilemma of a lifetime; great! I’m taking your permission to move on to Nadia, and I will give an introduction to her. Professor Nadia Maftouni has a distinguished background in philosophy and philosophers of the Islamic era, their movement from Greek philosophy towards Neoplatonism and beyond. She specializes in philosophy of art. She is also an artist and besides being a painter and having held many international exhibitions.

She has been engaged with documentary filmmaking too, even in the technical aspects like photography and editing. She is a professor at University of Tehran and a senior research scholar at Yale Law School. Her works on medieval philosophy, Islamic philosophy, their relation to modern-day art and media has been published in numerous scholarly books and academic journals. So, Professor Maftouni are you here at the moment? I’m sure you were here.

Maftouni: I’ll mention a notion of Philosophy of Art here in a few seconds. Since your work The Same River Twice is of a philosophical theme, its second episode which I actually impressed by makes the first episode highly philosophical. You know, you might find a cornucopia of philosophical books and papers about the meaning of life, for example. But one can find it all in a single documentary like The Same River Twice. In this respect Farabi, the great philosopher of 9th and 10th century, has some ideas which are nothing short of remarkable today. Focusing on the arts of his own time like paintings, statues, crafts, poetry and music, Farabi says that art is the best language for philosophers and philosophical truth. And without art, Farabi believes, philosophical ideas and philosophers cannot make their ways to people’s mind and people’s emotions. The gist of it is that among the different powers of mind, imagination is solely capable of portray the sensible as well as intelligible beings. It can even depict the intelligible truth of utter perfection such as First Cause, abstract beings, Active Intellect … and so on. Actually, for them, for philosophers, final happiness is the state in which a human being successfully perceives the intelligible and achieves the nearest possible status to the Active Intellect. However, people usually don’t follow the intelligible, it is not feasible to speak of or bring into action particular details of nonsensible beings such as ten intellects or Active Intellect or First Cause. You can only imagine them. People might imagine them through analogy, parallelism, or allegory. Majority of people are not used to reasoning about the intelligible. In most people, the soul is attracted to the imagination and the imagination controls the mind, Farabi argues.

In effect, the proper method for educating the public is transferring images and resemblances of intelligible truth and intelligible happiness into their imagination via arts and art works. Probably, since you are Chair of AFVS, the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard, these critical topics, probably matter to you and again many thanks.

Robb: Just to say thank you also. And that was lovely to hear and I’ll pick more but those things. And I agree that art has access to human experience in complex ways that are hard to reduce; yet completely present. And also, if those works are designed to do what you just said I think they won’t work. I mean they don’t make sense if they’re like an argument and an orderly argument that leads to something.

They have to be somehow synthetic and holistic about what they are. And then what they are can begin to approach those questions.

It’s a kind of indirectness that has much more direct power in the people. it’s, you know, one of the complex things is people, students often think that, like … they have a complicated feeling about work at the end. And they think that making work leads to that. So, how do you make something that produces that experience? And then it becomes too direct to line and too literal somehow. And then it really is this complicated thing of making sense of the work you’re doing in the deepest way you can within the medium that you’re doing with no sense of what it’s adding up to at that level; at level you’re talking about. But once you do that, if you can possibly succeed at that, then I think it can translate in the ways that you’re describing, in a way that I think is quite beautifully said.

And one of the complexities of including it in the academy because it, you know, there’s a slight mismatch between those two things, between you know, scholarly argument and an artistic work can get to very similar things; but they can’t by doing it the same way; they have to do it in their own way. They have to believe in their own way for that to be the case.

 So, I appreciate your thoughts about that and also connecting it to Iranian philosophy and history. He was a philosopher in Harvard for many years. And our department was created partly through him. Because he believed that film could be what you just described. And he was like a fantastic supporter and also somebody, you know, he started playing saxophone. I mean this was as a young man he was saxophone player came to philosophy kind of late. And showing him your work, you know, if you were lucky enough to kind of ask him to come to see your work and progress on the editing table and sitting with him and showing him my work and just the things he would say so fantastic and so inspiring. He loved film and he loved thinking about film in the same way of that he loved thinking about Walden Pond or romantic comedies from the 40s. He just had such an active imagination in mind and I think philosophy can be that. It’s like it’s another way in which philosophy can keep hold of the present and make that alive for people in a way that I think you just described. I appreciate it. And let me thank you for the invitation and for organizing all this and doing this work, it doesn’t just happen, I know doesn’t just happen and I appreciate all that as well as the invitation.