In her 2016 book The Lonely City, Olivia Laing writes about Henry Darger’s reputation as a hoarder. The Intuit Art Museum in Chicago includes a replica of the boardinghouse room where Darger lived for 40 years, in which “everything was coated with a fine black powder, maybe charcoal dust or grime”, and scraps of art supplies and household materials choking every surface.
Laing saw evidence of the difficult and sometimes overwhelming “loyalty” which hoarders develop to disposable objects, but also saw in the clutter an artist’s sense of urgency, and of expansive plans developed in constrictive circumstances: “It didn’t feel like the room of a mad person. It felt like the room of […] someone who must be wholly self-reliant, who knows they won’t be getting anything from anyone else, but must instead gather it for themself from among the discards, the leavings of the city.”
The new film I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies begins with junk, much of it coated with dirt and dust and grime; handlers wearing black plastic gloves and surgical masks carry it into a living room in loads of black garbage backs, and begin slicing the packages open, removing electric plugs, disused lamps and obsolete household goods. You might expect them to be packing this stuff up and carting it away from the house, not bringing it inside, taking it all out and handling it, in search of photo albums and other treasures.
The film, a documentary, concerns two self-described “artist[s], archivist[s], collector[s]”, Nasser Bakshi and Roghayeh Najdi, who are likewise obsessive in their accumulating, and likewise self-reliant by necessity, gathering history from the leavings of the Iranian state.
Laing also notes that “hoarder” is a designation usually applied to those subsisting on low incomes in small spaces, which does not appear to apply to the prosperous-seeming Bakshi, who can afford to employ those black-clad handlers at his Nasser Bakhshi Museum Archive, in Tabriz, and often dresses like a dandy, in a cravat and matching pocket square. He is certainly eccentric, and we sense that his practice is compulsive as much as conceptual. Two of his former employees (who are, like many other members of the Museum Archive staff, beautiful young women), tell the director Mani Haghighi that Bakshi forbade them boyfriends and digital watches, while his production manager drives all over Iran collecting soil samples from GPS coordinates specified by Bakshi, who then catalogues and stores the dirt. Najdi reveals that Bakshi even salvages her slashed and abandoned canvases.
Bakshi, well known to the antique-shop owners and rag-and-bone men of Tabriz, says that a blank wall is his idea of torture, but, less subjectively, he also describes collecting and preserving as “a form of resistance”, a way to maintain marginal materials and narratives from outside of the official history. The photo album from the opening search, for instance: the work of a prison guard and amateur photography buff, it contains portraits, in the form of mug shots, of women and girls who were forced into prostitution during the time of the Shah, and otherwise live on only in the alcohol-hazed memories of the men who exploited them. Both Bakhshi and Najdi’s work as portrait painters takes inspiration from archival materials, though Bakhshi’s collection of ephemera is his true opus.
Haghighi is “one of the world’s most interesting and most woefully underrated filmmakers”, in the estimation of The New Yorker’s Richard Brody. In an appreciation published earlier this year, Brody tracked Haghighi’s swerves between fiction and documentary over his career and within a single film, finding in his play with form and genre an “ongoing effort to explore long-sealed mysteries and reveal hidden byways of history”.
The filmmaking in I Deserve a Lover is certainly liberated, and liberatory. Haghighi primarily uses his subjects as jumping-off points for his explorations of history and memory, and instead of conventional exposition, the film contains montages such as one in which young Iranians, posed against a white backdrop, explain the meanings of their tattoos: Japanese calligraphy, a rocketship from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a mushroom, a tiny red dot. It’s a humorous and humane sequence, but also makes a serious point about the secrets and subtexts that are hidden under clothes or encoded on skin, cathartically surfaced for the camera. One young woman’s forearm tattoo is a rebus signifying the dissident slogan “Women, Life, Freedom”.
The unpredictability of the film is itself a form of subversive doublespeak, a political statement made in a roundabout way. Haghighi clearly sees in Bakshi an analogue for his own work as an artist under authoritarianism, and a smuggler of truth. The director frequently interrupts the film to explain that footage is missing, having been seized by censors; what remains has necessarily been compromised by suppression and disruption from sources both domestic and foreign (Haghighi was also interrupted by American and Israeli bombings). The film we are watching, he suggests, is a compendium of precious scraps.
Watch a clip from I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies:
- I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies, 30 September, 1 and 2 October, New York Film Festival