Moo

The focus of Hamid Dabashi’s article Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema hinges upon the idea of the uncanny. In the words of Freud, the uncanny, or Umheimlich, is an “unknown and unfamiliar and yet reveled and uncovered.” (Dabashi, 115) He adapts this concept to Cow and describes “Saedi’s… literary perception of the uncanny, in which the fact and phenomenon of birth and death become interchangeable.” (128) It’s this interchange of opposites that really intrigued me about the essay. So I began to apply this theory to Mehrjui’s film adaptation. Dabashi’s main parallel is between birth and death. The death of Hassan’s cow can be interpreted as a reincarnation of human to animal, much like the theories of Eastern philosophy and religion. I distinctly remember that in the scene when the cow dies there is a jump cut from the face of the cow to a stark white screen, all in silence. This whiteness reminds me of the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ associated with death. A white screen is a device often used in film, signifying both the loss of consciousness in death and the birth of consciousness when a baby is born, for example. Other applications of the uncanny I noticed within the film include parallels between noise and silence, sanity and insanity, and reality and imagination. The silence of the death of the cow seems to scream at the viewer as the rest of the film is filled with sounds of bells, singing and crying. Hassan seems insane when he starts living in the cow pen and eats hay, but compared to the lengths at which the villagers go to cover up the cow’s death and their odd custom of tying up people to the tiny tree in the village square and beating and chasing them, he might be seen as sane. Lastly, this village may seem like an ordinary village, however its existence seems surreal when you identify the discrepancies. It’s in the middle of nowhere, completely isolated with no interactions with other people besides the ‘Bolouris’ whom you only see in darkness so their existence is questionable. It may as well be a dream.