Caveh Zahedi has been making films for over the past 30 years, blending documentary and fiction filmmaking in the construction of an intimate portrait of his life. Zahedi is both the director and the star of each of his films. He begins with a subject or event of his interest which then blends with personal life events and with the making of the film. His first feature film, A Little Stiff (1991), premiered at Sundance Film Festival. Since then Zahedi has endeavored in such projects as The Sheik and I, which got him banned from Sharjah, and a podcast series 365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both Die, a daily podcast series in which Zahedi told one story about his life each day in 2021.
This THURSDAY, JUNE 16th, Zahedi will be staging a performance of his play, Ulysses and I, inspired by James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, for its centenary at The New School Theatre (66 E 12th Street) at 7:00PM.
This interview was conducted with Mr. Zahedi on May 30th, 2021. This is the first publication of the interview.
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Transcript (edited for clarity and length):
Connor Keep: Do you have a first memory?
CZ: I don’t know if I have a first memory, but I remember walking and hearing what sounded like a gunshot and then thinking, “I wonder if that’s a gun?” And then I remember, thinking, “I wonder if that’s a gun that someone just shot and I wonder if a bird fell down, right in front of me?” And then I remember a bird falling down right in front of me. And thinking, “Oh, that's weird.”
CK: Do you feel like that’s momentous at all or completely fleeting?
CZ: Well, I think as I've gotten older, I increasingly believe that the mind has a lot to do with reality. And that there's this kind of relationship between thoughts, and manifestations of thoughts. I think as kids we’re more in that space of magic. Some would call it magical thinking. We’re closer to a space where you can create your reality without unconscious intrusion. I think of it as an early instance of that phenomenon or of that belief system.
CK: Do you think that what you're trying to get back to is some sort of childlike understanding of the world in your work?
CZ: Yeah. I mean I wouldn’t call it childlike, I would say the sense of maybe being closer to the metaphysical sources of being. A lot of my ideas come from drug experiences. I think when you're on hallucinogens, your perception of the world feels much more fluid and dialectical. And it does seem like there is a back and forth that one can access on psychedelics, more than I do normally. And it does feel like something that I recognize from childhood or something. Like that same sense of power. I know a lot of people say that it's just like a child wanting to feel powerful because they feel powerless as a child. But I've had enough mystical experiences in my life, and especially in childhood that I rediscovered with psychedelics, that make me think that our model of reality, the secular model, the scientific model, the one all of us are taught, seems to me deeply problematic.
CK: I was just reading Rimbaud’s, A Season In Hell, and it reminds me of the confrontational aspects of your work. How does your confrontational nature as a being, align with what you would call any semblance of a political attitude that you have?
CZ: I come out of a political background. Mallarme famously said his poems were in lieu of throwing bombs. His poems were like bombs. He wrote during the anarchist period, when anarchists just threw bombs. Rimbaud is a huge influence, of course. And I just really, really, really relate to that extreme refusal of all social codes, and a complete rejection of society as such. It feels very important.
Politically, I think there was this moment when I understood this very simple idea that a lot of people understand, but don’t take very seriously, which is that the personal is political. I met Allen Ginsberg when I was in college. I remember trying to get him to help us to do some kind of political benefit or something. And he was really nice and he said to me, “I used to try to do political things that were about hunger, or things that were happening elsewhere.” But, as he got older he realized it’s important to do what's in your backyard; to clean up your backyard. These were things that were relevant to his life, and that he knew something about. I think that made me rethink politics quite a bit.
One thing I experienced in political circles of activism in college was that a lot of the political people were terrible people. They were judgmental, they were narrow, they were strident, they were just toxic. A certain brand of Marxism especially. It seemed clear to me that you can't get to this utopian place, passing through this very toxic energy. We weren't changing anything, but we were creating negative vibes in our own midst.
The way people talk to each other is as important, or if not more important than what they actually accomplish. Not that I'm ‘Mr. Talk Nicely,’ but at some level, just an awareness that there is a politics to interpersonal dynamics, and that etiquette is a political question. How we treat each other, what people call microaggressions, is the basis for which the other things come. I’m against PCness and against the term ‘microaggressions’ the way it's currently used, but the idea of a microaggression is an interesting one. The aggression starts with a microaggression and the microaggressions cumulatively lead to more naked aggressions. I think it's true. I forget how this conversation started?
CK: I was asking how your work connects with your politics? The personal being the political.
CZ: I think examining honestly, and looking under a microscope, how I interact with other people is valuable. I think that's where politics is. It’s like, “how are you talking to your wife? How are you talking to your kids or talking to your film crew?” All these things are political. I don't have any answers. It's not like I have a theory of how it should be and try to model that theory.
I think a lot of moralism and ethics are based on this pre-existing notion of the good, and then you try to do that, and you fail, because it's just a pre-existing notion that doesn't converge with reality. My approach is more of radical unknowing. I don't know what's good. I have no idea what's good. I know that there are theories about what's good, and I have theories too, but essentially, I am ignorant and blind, as we all are. One of the few things that I really bring to the table, philosophically, is a more radical awareness of or of an honest acceptance of that, more than most people seem to have; they just pay lip service to it.
I don't have the final say or the monopoly on [what’s right]. It's a question, and my films are just a question mark. Here is a way of being-in-the-world that poses certain questions, ethical questions. And the viewer has to decide.
One of the reasons people get angry with my films, and my films inspire a lot of anger, is because it doesn't provide a comforting endpoint or morality like most films do, that they can just sort of slot themselves into an existing moral stance. It actually challenges morality and their stance, and forces them to have to grapple with it. It poses questions like, “Do I like this guy? Is what this guy is doing wrong? Is this part okay or is this part not okay? Where is the line? Where do you draw the line of where to be honest or not to be honest?”
These are all open ended questions. It forces an engagement and a lot of people find it disturbing because they don't want to have their notions of what's good or who they are, or if they are in fact good, questioned. I'm constantly posing the question and that's my way of being political or being confrontational or aggressive. It’s not comforting. It's only comforting if you already have a problem with the way things are. Then it's a comforting voice of agreement or of disagreement with what is. Then you’re like, “I'm not the only one,” so you feel less lonely, if you have that. But if you don't have that, or if you're actually working in opposite directions, then it's the opposite of comforting. It's disturbing.
CK: Your ethical philosophy makes me think of what Mao wrote about with the internal contradiction within the contradiction, the essence of the two things coming into contact creates the contradiction rather than an autonomous existence. I think that can even be seen down to the level of the succession of your films in the way that they’ve painted a portrait of a life. Each work exists with reference to the other. Why has it been important to link them all?
CZ: Wallace Stevens says, “There will never be an end to this droning of the serf.” You think about the waves, think about the eternality of waves on the shore. The way they just keep doing the thing. There is no last word. There is no completion. There is no perfect loop. There is no closure in anything. It does seem to me that life is an open system.
It seems to be that life starts with birth and death, but I don't think it does. Even if it did, there's still the generations after we're all dead, and before we were born. Hegel talks about the dialectic of history and how everything is moving towards God's self consciousness and that life is this way for God to know his or herself. That makes a lot of sense to me.
I'm also interested in process art. The idea that the process is more important than the product or that the product is a lie. That the process is the thing. That seems true to me. I think my work is process art. It’s in that tradition. I straddle many traditions, but one of them is process art. One of them is performance art, and one of them is conceptual art. I'm less interested in the master work that is complete and totalizing than I am in the dialectic of how something evolves over time.
So, it doesn’t even matter if the films get worse. I'm sure they will. They go up, they go down, they go back up again, but you can't know. I think that going down is also part of the life cycle. We do go down physically, mentally. We go down. We go up and then we go down. And then other people pick up the baton and they do the same thing.
CK: We go up and we go down, but there is something about that expression of a moment in time frozen on the screen that is pure and non-hierarchical. How do you gauge what is better or worse in your work? Do you only find it better or worse in terms of some feeling of salvation, or is it an outside force that makes you feel better or worse?
CZ: I don’t know. One changes over time. What one likes or what one values changes over time. You're pretty young, but I’m sure you've had this experience too; where you think a movie is great and then you watch it again and it’s not that good. You see your own perceptions change, and they change not because the movie changed because it obviously didn’t, but because you changed, the contents changed, the way you were thinking about it changed. A lot of artists and there are reasons, historical-material reasons, why this happens, but they don't change much.
Take Martin Scorsese, who I think is a great filmmaker. All of his films are really good and I really liked his last one quite a bit, but you could argue that there is something unchanging there that maybe would benefit from a little change. He's doing what he can do. Also, there are social forces that push him to repeat himself and do another gangster movie. It's like, really is that all you want to do? *laughing*
CK: If he doesn’t make another gangster movie, he's not going to get the budget that he might want.
CZ: Right. I think I was trying to say that; “How do I know if something's good or not?” I mean, I don't know. All I have is my own sense of excitement about it right now, the history of what I've done, and how excited I was by that to compare it to. I think in a lot of ways, it does get harder the older you get to make good work because you have this burden that you carry, which is your past work. It’s like a critic saying either, “Not good enough, not good enough. Is it as good as this last thing you did? I don't think so.” That pushes you to be conservative. You don't want to lose whatever acclaim you had; as small as it might have been.
CK: In a way you are a sort of modernist. You're always trying to do something new. In a place where new things aren't welcomed.
CZ: I think I am in the modernist tradition, at least in myself. I think it's true that it's not really of the times. So in that sense, I'm like a throwback, not in sync with the times.
CK: Do you see an end point to making work for yourself?
CZ: I think death is the end point. I don't know why I would stop. I guess if I was blind and paralyzed, I guess then maybe I couldn't do it. But Matisse’s late work when he was dying, he was in bed. He couldn’t really move. He had very limited mobility. He kept a really long stick and would have people put a thing on the ceiling and he would just paint onto the ceiling with his really long stick. He went to the very end. He couldn’t stop and that seems to me like the right attitude.
CK: Can your life not be separated from art?
CZ: I certainly try to make it that way.
CK: It's interesting that the podcast that you've been working on includes death in the title. “365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both Die.” Is death presently on your mind?
CZ: The older you get the more clear it is. *laughing*
There are philosophical systems that believe that death is an option. It's optional and that you could not die if you were spiritually evolved enough. So who knows? But, it’s not looking good.