From a linguistic point of view

Lucinda 2022-03-14 08:01:02

Talk about cinema only from a linguistic point of view. Musk, who went to Mars, recently said that the greatest invention of mankind (not even an aircraft or a car) - is language. It is hard to disagree: a society cannot be called a society if it loses its language, and if history loses its language, humanity loses its history.

The film obviously has little to do with language. As long as the director wants to pay more attention to language, he will not limit "Persian" to learning words. The truth is that even if you memorize 2840 words backwards, you won't necessarily be able to say a complete sentence, if you don't understand grammar. What's more, Persian, as a branch of the Indo-European language family, has occasional and stylistic changes. Not to mention writing poetry, which is at best a collection of words.

Of course, what the film wants to talk about is not about learning language, but about "referential meaning". When a thing has a name, and we can use language to refer to it, it ceases to be meaningless. Just like the little prince's rose, among thousands of roses, only it is meaningful. It is "the little prince's rose", not any other rose that cannot be named. Otherwise, try to recall the roses in the large rose garden. Besides the little prince's one, which one can you think of?

That's why "good-hearted" officers think that the dying civilians are worthless "nameless people" who don't deserve "Reza" to die for them. "Reza" is a person with a name, a person with meaning in life. In addition to the officer in the whole movie, another person who called the male protagonist by "Reza" finally gave his life for him.

The importance of "referential meaning" is more reflected in this film at the end, which is also the climax. When the male protagonist slowly announced the names of the 2,840 killed civilians, the audience realized the unbearable shock from the long or short names. When victims are no longer anonymized or represented in numbers, the real weight of history emerges.

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Extended Reading

Persian Lessons quotes

  • Klaus Koch: [Koch took Gilles back after he was put to move to another camp] You would risk your life for those nameless people.

    Gilles: Those aren't nameless. Just because you don't know their names. At least they aren't murderers.

    Klaus Koch: I'm not a murderer.

    Gilles: No. You just make sure that the murderers eat well.

  • Klaus Koch: As long as you work for me nothing will happen to you. I bet 20 cans of meat that nothing will happen to you.

    Gilles: Too bad I won't be able to eat them since I'll be dead.