Afghanistan in the Cinema

1. Getting in Touch with Our Inner Savage: The Horsemen

1 Getting in Touch with Our Inner Savage The Horsemen Before the 1970s, Afghanistan did not exist in the cinematic dreamworld of the West. Afghans featured briefly in lowbrow “Rule Britannia” films like King of the Khyber Rifles (1953) and Carry On . . . Up the Khyber (1968), but Afghanistan itself did not become the subject of a Western feature film until John Frankenheimer’s The Horsemen (1971). Scripted by Academy Award winner Dalton Trumbo, The Horsemen was the first (and only) twentiethcentury American feature film ever to be shot in Afghanistan itself, with the cooperation of Afghan Films, the national production company. At the time that Frankenheimer was making his picture, President Richard Nixon was abandoning Afghanistan to increased Soviet patronage, paving the way for an The Vanishing Afghan: Uraz (Omar Sharif) prepares to ride into the sunset. i-x_1-198_Grah.indd 11 1/25/10 2:27:08 PM 12 imperialist nostalgia eventual coup that led to the Russian invasion of 1979. The film thus stands as a poignant relic of an Afghanistan at the twilight of its innocence—before the seizure of power by Daoud Khan, before Nur Muhammad Taraki, before the Soviets, before the horror. Based on a novel by French author Joseph Kessel, The Horsemen tells the story of the proud and ambitious Uraz, who seeks to eclipse his father Tursen’s legendary prowess in buzkashi, the Afghan national pastime. In this game that one commentator has called a “cross between dirty polo and open rioting,” riders struggle to transport the buz, a headless goat or calf carcass stuffed with sand (and weighing close to a hundred pounds), around a post a mile away and return to the game’s starting point and goal, the “circle of justice.”1 When Uraz the young chapandaz (master player of buzkashi) fails to win the championship game in Kabul, he embarks on a perilous journey back to his home. Along the way, his servant Mukhi and Zereh, a beautiful and independent Kuchi nomad woman, scheme to kill him and steal his prize horse, Jahil. The redoubtable Uraz holds them off, even after a village doctor amputates his fractured and infected leg. Devastated with the thought that he might never ride again, the chapandaz hides the secret even from his own father until the climax, when he and Jahil are reunited in a masterful display of horsemanship. In evoking this rough and rugged story, The Horsemen clearly aspires to a documentary way of seeing. The issue of authenticity was a crucial one for the director: “Was this an accurate picture of what life is like in Afghanistan? Yes! Life is like this in Afghanistan, exactly the way I depicted it. I spent a lot of time there, I saw a lot there, but this was a story that I loved reading. I identified completely with that character.”2 On location in Kabul, Frankenheimer made a point to highlight the ethnographic, filming an array of barbers, dyers, bakers of naan, blacksmiths, and snake charmers. Evocative juxtapositions abound: automobile traffic interspersed with donkeys, Mercedes sedans with women in purple chadaris.3 There are mosques and minarets and a muezzin calling to the heights where the camera floats, observing both the pristine Kabul River and the traffic coursing beside it. Frankenheimer sees Afghanistan with an almost childlike wonder and depth of feeling, conscious of having gone where no one had gone before, at least in the American cinema. Despite his claim of having “been there” sufficiently long to portray the “real” Afghanistan with exactitude, Frankenheimer, like every other traveler, has packed some ideological baggage to take with him on his excursion into the unknown. Thus he transitions easily from talking about Afghanistan as a place to enjoying it as “a story.” As Steven H. Clark has written, “[T]he appeal to the testimony of the eyewitness itself may be deconstructed into an illusion i-x_1-198_Grah.indd 12 1/25/10 2:27:08 PM The Horsemen 13 of an experiential present embedded in a commentary that necessarily exceeds and transgresses those criteria of authenticity. Seeing presupposes believing.”4 But what exactly is it that Frankenheimer sees (and believes)? Nothing less than a cinematic vision of an almost prehistoric, uncorrupted world—what the director himself called “the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen.”5 That almost preternatural beauty is the focus of a series of majestic establishing shots at the beginning...