Takhté Siah or Blackboards is a late neorealist film with snippets of doc. and post-modernist features. Samira Makhmalbaf gives us a face-to-face reality, driving the spectator towards the paths of refugees and poverty at the same time she explores metaphorical and surreal scenarios as a way to describe the social reality of the Kurdish people. It was, indeed, an aesthetic purpose quite obsolete for its time. For a late neorealist attempt, it didn’t derive much from L’albergo degli zoccoli (eng.:The Tree of Wooden Clogs) directed by Ermanno Olmi in 1978, also considered late for the movement, which surprises me because Takhté Siah was released in 2000. However, this cinema must have been needed for the time it was released, because of its protesting and social awareness qualities.
Samira doesn’t want to drive the spectator away from the action itself. There was little time to rest your eyes over those border’s hills. She gave herself entirely to the refugees and the picture was dilated to them exclusively. No time for reflection. I believe that most of those intervenients were non-actors, which thrived and erupted neorealistic vibes from the 40s. A very crude and raw cinema purposely made for the people and to give them a voice, using them as a way to evoke reality itself speaking to itself and educate the masses. Nevertheless, in the middle of that whole intense scenario, there was space for exposition and comprehensiveness: the very first shot with all those blackboards dispersing in a different path, the mules avoiding the teachers, a wife that doesn’t have the headspace for teachings and love at a very critical episode of here life – all metaphors that caricature the film’s subject.
The sound was as true as the images were to reality. There were clear signs of doc. microphoning techniques, and, again, there was no time to do second perfect takes. The boom operator was currently trying to accompany the acting voices, even tho he/she missed a few times, but that was part of the process and was indeed rationalised and intentional – naysayers say it was a low-budget film (when in reality it was an international co-production). Improvisation was part of the creative and acting process. To interrupt it would be a crime against the whole purpose of the film. Apart from that, I consider that there was little editing, and it must have been very difficult for the sound editor. I believe this was the type of production where the director is annoying every single department and trying to impose their own aesthetic and ideas like a show-runner.