Margins of the funeral ceremony of Reza Davodenjad


“This year, last year, thousands and thousands of years . . .” We see a group of men, the archaeological excavation team of Marlik, with their small picks and brushes, unearthing the remains of a human skeleton. Suddenly, to the cue of a developing atonal music, a wipe cut radically changes the setting. The new scene is opened by a traveling camera moving through a dark space, passing by rows of objects suspended in the air. This twofold engagement with “archaeology” and the “museum display,” this fascination with excavation, with bringing old objects into the present time, shaped in the formative years of the New Wave, was to come back in its later years again and again.