Noorilhuda's Blog - Posts Tagged "durational-art"
Sarmad Khoosat, endurance art and the death penalty:
https://www.dawn.com/notimetosleep/
The anti-death penalty live drama ‘No Time To Sleep,’ spearheaded by INGO Justice Project Pakistan and heavily promoted by Dawn Group went live a night ago via YouTube and Dawn’s special site link. It shows the supposed-to-be last moments of a convicted death row inmate who is awaiting execution in the next 24 hours. A lot happens along the way. The point is to highlight the futility of man-made punishments, the loopholes in the justice system and the (lack of) humanity accorded to a prisoner by jail staff as he awaits death by hanging in solitary confinement.
The production design has the top-shot of a (make-believe) solitary jail cell, the titular character played by Sarmad Khoosat and a supporting structure of cast comrpising of the prison guard on duty, the superintendant and other jail staff, his family (father, brother, daughters) and his legal team.
It is extremely brave of Khoosat to attempt a ‘method’ acting project (bird’s eye view; fish out of water; David Blaine stunt in NY, etc.). The starkness of the image of a prisoner spending time in a cell, knowing it may be his last day (his execution has been postponed/ deferred plenty of times before), left in solitary with no one to talk to other than an occasional grumble with the guard, with every burp, snitch, and toilet problem on display for viewers around the world without any cut, edit or break. I have no idea how many hours it took to flesh out every detail of his act, the script or blocks, but it is all there, handled minutely.
This is a first for Pakistan and Pakistani creative medium (whether social media, TV / Film, or theatre) because it is a naked performance, literally so by the end when the prisoner takes his last bath 15 minutes from the hanging, and stands frozen with his back to the bars, silently staring at the wall, trying to grip pieces of it, while the jail staff comes forward to take him away, clothing him and then carrying him, his limbs all weak and hope all gone - only to be told that his execution has been stayed. A card on screen tells us, the viewers, that the prisoner lived another month till his execution was re-scheduled and he was again placed in solitary for three days and then promptly hanged.
It is a good idea. It is supposed to stir your consciousness, your conceptions about crime and punishment and the cruelty meted out to a man who will not be alive tomorrow: e.g. you find out that the prisoner killed two men out of self-defense (thereby raising questions of culpability, the capacity of his legal team to make a good case, strength of evidence against him and the attitude of the deceased's families for accepting / rejecting money / diyat / khoon maaf under Hudood Ordinance); you find out that in solitary awaiting death, as per jail rules, he is on a tea and biscuit ‘diet’, and his last meal is equally non-fussy - and he is kept hungry from breakfast till midnight when he is supposed to be hanged - with not even a cup of tea in sight; you find out that in the decades he spent on death row (appeal over appeal over appeal) he taught fellow prisoners and helped them get diplomas, complete schooling, etc. thereby raising the argument that the state is not killing the man it punished ala Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn’s 1995 film Dead Man Waling; you find out that his lawyers, and NGO, have been talking to the judge and family of the deceased for delay/ stay and compromise, that he latches on to hope against hope; you find out the inane, absurd things that occupy your mind and body. even when it’s the last day you’ll be alive; you find out the mental torture given to this man in the name of carrying out his sentence as per law and justice.
It doesn’t work. While Khoosat is extremely brave - and gifted - to put on a show - the performance (or the way it’s written) doesn’t say much. He is a good actor as evidenced in the brilliantly superlative film ‘Manto (that he also directed) and the TV drama ‘Istikhara‘ (even if the subject matter and story were regressive, and I thought he was much too bright and sensible to accept such a part or play), but he is no Faisal Qureshi. He isn’t charismatic enough to stand out on screen and isn’t ordinary enough to look like a common man. He comes across as way too much refined and educated to look lower-economic middle-class (which the rest of his role-family is), his voice is such that dialogues end up feminized and don’t carry punch, he is not good at emoting or histrionics that this role requires, he is also an actor who does well in tight shots (none exist here) as opposed to wide-shots (a camera hanging far away). It’s hard to take him seriously even though he is the one dying. He bares everything but his soul.
Also, seeing a man spend the last night / day on earth within the confines of a jail cell, and how he spends it, may look cool on paper or as a script or as a performance project or as a challenge to an ambitious producer / director / cameraman / content designer but the reality of it is that most of it is banal and voyeuristic and repetitive and makes chump-change out of the very human predicament of what to do or how to treat a man on death row. The ‘Big Brother’ style of television and countdown timer is popcorn fare. The non-execution is anti-climactic. The viewers are seeing it for the first time, but the prisoner is not doing things for the first time. So the novelty is lost when you see Khoosat sneeze for the nth time. You don't get the sense that this guy has been through this routine a dozen times (without getting hanged). You don't see the frustration or the mental agony till the last scene. The co-stars are stunted, wooden and don’t add any value. Irfan Khoosat, Khoosat’s real-life father and a great actor (‘Andhera Ujala') hams it out of the park. The sound volume is low, it’s hard to hear the conversations, the best sound quality is the one from the tap water flowing in the red balti.
I was more curious to see the actions / conversations in MCR (production’s control room) and the workings of the cameramen than Sarmad Khoosat trying to kill time. It would have been great if more information was given on how he prepared for the role, the rehearsals and the entire production design at Bari Studios, Lahore.
The viewers on midnight (10th Oct.) were 200-300, and it trickled to 1300 in the last half hour before midnight (11th Oct.), most probably because of the nude scene and the awaited execution. The viewers were 1800 or so when the transmission ended. The comments from viewers on YouTube were lethargic and pointless, even sensational in nature. Yes, I watched the whole of it, minus the 4 hours at night when I had to sleep.
Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Khan, the man on whose life (and trials and death) this drama is based, killed two men. He said he and his brother were being robbed and it was self-defense. His brother got a bullet wound on the arm. Many delays / stays in execution occurred until he was hanged. Between 1991 to 2014 (including seventeen years on death row), Ali not only got his degrees and diplomas but also reportedly educated hundreds of prisoners. Khan’s case went all the way to SC where technically the trial court’s misadventures and high court’s stubbornness is usually overthrown. It wasn’t, in his case. So should the benefit of doubt be given to him or the murdered? Is a prisoner like him an asset to society or not? Would we be even discussing him if he had been hanged a few years after the murders? Would we have even have cause to alarm ourselves if the death-row convict had not spent as many years in prison as a life sentence convict does? And then denied a conversion of sentence after decades in captivity? I think the writers / JPP want viewers to connect with this notion of doubt: they seem to be asking if it is enough to hang a man when a cloud of doubt exists? Is it okay to put such a man to death or allow him to do more in life imprisonment? The other side of the coin is why should this person be believed and allowed to have a life when he snatched the promising futures of two boys? An argument can be made for leniency out of compassion but it is arrogant of anti-death penalty crusaders to expect families of victims to deny themselves what they consider their right.
This notion of assumed innocence in a heinous crime is important for the anti-death penalty advocates: viewers would not react to a man paying for his deed through death by hanging, if they thought he was innocent. The 24-hour marathon is an attempt to desensitize the public (put a human face on the moral dilemma) and it is a good attempt in that regard - more of such stuff needs to be aired for people to start talking, thinking, feeling, understanding, questioning and conversing (on their charpoys with guns and axes in tow as well as over cups of cappuccino in F-6 and bodyguard in Honda Civic Ivtec Prosmetic). It’s the only way civilizations progress. And the chosen platform - social media - promotes across-the-board interaction. And if a society still thinks it’s okay to have death penalty so be it.
I hope Khoosat and JPP and Dawn are not sued for this crazy, brave, underwhelming live TV drama (you know, the usual charges of indecency / obscenity / ‘contrary to pakistani culture’ crap).
This drama is another one in the direction of what ‘Udaari’ accomplished: a channel’s creative forces researched and developed a TV drama with the help of an NGO working in the field for female uplift and justice. Here too, it’s a collaboration between research (by JPP and others) and visual treatment of the gained material by an independent crew (Olomopolo Media and Highlight Arts).
The best and most effective death row inmate going-to-the-gallows scene that I’ve ever seen, is the one enacted by Talat Hussain and his last visitors: his TV-family played by Ghazala Kaifi (wife), Huma Nawab and Komal Rizvi (daughters) in the 90s drama ‘Hawaein’, written by Farzana Nadeem. Hussain plays the worker (right or left-hand man) of a feudal who is accused of a murder (actually committed by the feudal, played by Nawaz Baloch) - in political enmity, six people got killed, Hussain absconded, his name was placed in FIR, police searched for him, he was arrested and put on trial, he accepted the blame (one of his daughters is also married to the feudal’s son - a marriage exploited by the feudal later on - but that’s just the usual dope in any melodrama). So the handyman / target killer never tells the police the truth because that’s what a loyal worker of a feudal does (ahem), his family knows he didn’t do it, he is about to be hanged for a crime he didn’t commit. This is the last meeting. Waterfalls. And then he is led off and hanged.
God Forbid anyone has to go through something like this, where you feel innocent but the world has you condemned but here, in ‘No Time To Sleep,’ you don’t feel sorry for the death row prisoner, rather I tried to look for ways to ‘better’ the experience for the dying man: okay so he should have a full stomach, a fan, more cigarettes, all the water in the world.
It's a bit too woke for me. Art may push the boundaries via social experiments, but justice has no second acts.
----------------------------------------
For those interested in seeing the now-recorded performance:
https://www.dawn.com/notimetosleep/
https://twitter.com/z_prisoner
On durational / endurance performance arts:
https://junkee.com/origin-stories-a-b...
On Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Khan, the convicted murderer on whose life Prisoner Z is based: https://www.facebook.com/JusticeProje...
https://www.bbc.com/urdu/pakistan/201...
https://www.propergaanda.com/prisoner...
Sarmad Khoosat's views on the drama:
https://www.dawn.com/news/1436978
Rehearsals for the drama:
https://www.dawn.com/news/1438876/cur...
Justice Project Pakistan:
https://www.jpp.org.pk/
https://www.jpp.org.pk/no-time-to-sleep/
Olomopolo Media: https://www.facebook.com/olomopolo
Highlight Arts: http://highlightarts.org/projects/no-...
Dramas / Films on Criminal Justice System:
Pakistani TV drama: 'Hawaein' (90s)
Ayeshah Alam Khan's directorial telefilm and fictional retelling of a real-life honor killing (90s)
Paradise Lost: Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)
The Act of Killing (2012, documentary)
The Thin Blue Line (70s documentary)
Shawshank Redemption (90s)
Book:
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
------------------------------------------
(Edit 17/10/18: Ironically, the production was held a few days before convicted child murderer Imran Ali was hanged, for rape and murder of a 6 year old Zainab Amin Ansari of Kasur in January this year, under ATC / SC judgments. I wonder whether the producers thought about the timing of the telecast - after all, not much sympathy can be expected for a child killer on death row. But 57 of his own relatives came to say goodbye to him! The fact that not much is known / researched about how or why such crimes occur and responsibility of parents of victim / survivor and that of the criminal's, is another thing for another day. But humane treatment of death row prisoners is necessary).
-------------------------------------------
(Edit: 12/12/18: Werner Herzog's 'Into The Abyss' is a dud. It's like a Jackson Pollock painting - all over the place, no balance between the two convicted criminals' backstory and family interviews, and that of the victims' families, and no forensics of triple homicide - in fact he spends more time on the injuries the two arrested got, during the shoot-out with the police before their arrest, than how the victims' died. The 19-year old on death row for ten years - Michael Perry, executed seven days after the interview - is not asked the right questions. His family isn't interviewed / didn't agree to be interviewed (we are never told). Too much time is given to Justin Burkett and his family. Both convicted come across as uneducated, clueless and selfish (and about to crack a laugh). But their answers offer no explanation for the senseless, stupid, cruel way they acted. No such convenience is in store for the victims. I only saw the face of the dead mother Sandra Stotler as a photograph somewhere at the end when her daughter holds it up to the camera! Nuts.
The only interesting tidbit - and I had to google it - is that Perry was charged and convicted of just one murder, and got the death penalty, while Burkett was charged and convicted of all 3, but got a life sentence.)
-------------------------------------------
The anti-death penalty live drama ‘No Time To Sleep,’ spearheaded by INGO Justice Project Pakistan and heavily promoted by Dawn Group went live a night ago via YouTube and Dawn’s special site link. It shows the supposed-to-be last moments of a convicted death row inmate who is awaiting execution in the next 24 hours. A lot happens along the way. The point is to highlight the futility of man-made punishments, the loopholes in the justice system and the (lack of) humanity accorded to a prisoner by jail staff as he awaits death by hanging in solitary confinement.
The production design has the top-shot of a (make-believe) solitary jail cell, the titular character played by Sarmad Khoosat and a supporting structure of cast comrpising of the prison guard on duty, the superintendant and other jail staff, his family (father, brother, daughters) and his legal team.
It is extremely brave of Khoosat to attempt a ‘method’ acting project (bird’s eye view; fish out of water; David Blaine stunt in NY, etc.). The starkness of the image of a prisoner spending time in a cell, knowing it may be his last day (his execution has been postponed/ deferred plenty of times before), left in solitary with no one to talk to other than an occasional grumble with the guard, with every burp, snitch, and toilet problem on display for viewers around the world without any cut, edit or break. I have no idea how many hours it took to flesh out every detail of his act, the script or blocks, but it is all there, handled minutely.
This is a first for Pakistan and Pakistani creative medium (whether social media, TV / Film, or theatre) because it is a naked performance, literally so by the end when the prisoner takes his last bath 15 minutes from the hanging, and stands frozen with his back to the bars, silently staring at the wall, trying to grip pieces of it, while the jail staff comes forward to take him away, clothing him and then carrying him, his limbs all weak and hope all gone - only to be told that his execution has been stayed. A card on screen tells us, the viewers, that the prisoner lived another month till his execution was re-scheduled and he was again placed in solitary for three days and then promptly hanged.
It is a good idea. It is supposed to stir your consciousness, your conceptions about crime and punishment and the cruelty meted out to a man who will not be alive tomorrow: e.g. you find out that the prisoner killed two men out of self-defense (thereby raising questions of culpability, the capacity of his legal team to make a good case, strength of evidence against him and the attitude of the deceased's families for accepting / rejecting money / diyat / khoon maaf under Hudood Ordinance); you find out that in solitary awaiting death, as per jail rules, he is on a tea and biscuit ‘diet’, and his last meal is equally non-fussy - and he is kept hungry from breakfast till midnight when he is supposed to be hanged - with not even a cup of tea in sight; you find out that in the decades he spent on death row (appeal over appeal over appeal) he taught fellow prisoners and helped them get diplomas, complete schooling, etc. thereby raising the argument that the state is not killing the man it punished ala Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn’s 1995 film Dead Man Waling; you find out that his lawyers, and NGO, have been talking to the judge and family of the deceased for delay/ stay and compromise, that he latches on to hope against hope; you find out the inane, absurd things that occupy your mind and body. even when it’s the last day you’ll be alive; you find out the mental torture given to this man in the name of carrying out his sentence as per law and justice.
It doesn’t work. While Khoosat is extremely brave - and gifted - to put on a show - the performance (or the way it’s written) doesn’t say much. He is a good actor as evidenced in the brilliantly superlative film ‘Manto (that he also directed) and the TV drama ‘Istikhara‘ (even if the subject matter and story were regressive, and I thought he was much too bright and sensible to accept such a part or play), but he is no Faisal Qureshi. He isn’t charismatic enough to stand out on screen and isn’t ordinary enough to look like a common man. He comes across as way too much refined and educated to look lower-economic middle-class (which the rest of his role-family is), his voice is such that dialogues end up feminized and don’t carry punch, he is not good at emoting or histrionics that this role requires, he is also an actor who does well in tight shots (none exist here) as opposed to wide-shots (a camera hanging far away). It’s hard to take him seriously even though he is the one dying. He bares everything but his soul.
Also, seeing a man spend the last night / day on earth within the confines of a jail cell, and how he spends it, may look cool on paper or as a script or as a performance project or as a challenge to an ambitious producer / director / cameraman / content designer but the reality of it is that most of it is banal and voyeuristic and repetitive and makes chump-change out of the very human predicament of what to do or how to treat a man on death row. The ‘Big Brother’ style of television and countdown timer is popcorn fare. The non-execution is anti-climactic. The viewers are seeing it for the first time, but the prisoner is not doing things for the first time. So the novelty is lost when you see Khoosat sneeze for the nth time. You don't get the sense that this guy has been through this routine a dozen times (without getting hanged). You don't see the frustration or the mental agony till the last scene. The co-stars are stunted, wooden and don’t add any value. Irfan Khoosat, Khoosat’s real-life father and a great actor (‘Andhera Ujala') hams it out of the park. The sound volume is low, it’s hard to hear the conversations, the best sound quality is the one from the tap water flowing in the red balti.
I was more curious to see the actions / conversations in MCR (production’s control room) and the workings of the cameramen than Sarmad Khoosat trying to kill time. It would have been great if more information was given on how he prepared for the role, the rehearsals and the entire production design at Bari Studios, Lahore.
The viewers on midnight (10th Oct.) were 200-300, and it trickled to 1300 in the last half hour before midnight (11th Oct.), most probably because of the nude scene and the awaited execution. The viewers were 1800 or so when the transmission ended. The comments from viewers on YouTube were lethargic and pointless, even sensational in nature. Yes, I watched the whole of it, minus the 4 hours at night when I had to sleep.
Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Khan, the man on whose life (and trials and death) this drama is based, killed two men. He said he and his brother were being robbed and it was self-defense. His brother got a bullet wound on the arm. Many delays / stays in execution occurred until he was hanged. Between 1991 to 2014 (including seventeen years on death row), Ali not only got his degrees and diplomas but also reportedly educated hundreds of prisoners. Khan’s case went all the way to SC where technically the trial court’s misadventures and high court’s stubbornness is usually overthrown. It wasn’t, in his case. So should the benefit of doubt be given to him or the murdered? Is a prisoner like him an asset to society or not? Would we be even discussing him if he had been hanged a few years after the murders? Would we have even have cause to alarm ourselves if the death-row convict had not spent as many years in prison as a life sentence convict does? And then denied a conversion of sentence after decades in captivity? I think the writers / JPP want viewers to connect with this notion of doubt: they seem to be asking if it is enough to hang a man when a cloud of doubt exists? Is it okay to put such a man to death or allow him to do more in life imprisonment? The other side of the coin is why should this person be believed and allowed to have a life when he snatched the promising futures of two boys? An argument can be made for leniency out of compassion but it is arrogant of anti-death penalty crusaders to expect families of victims to deny themselves what they consider their right.
This notion of assumed innocence in a heinous crime is important for the anti-death penalty advocates: viewers would not react to a man paying for his deed through death by hanging, if they thought he was innocent. The 24-hour marathon is an attempt to desensitize the public (put a human face on the moral dilemma) and it is a good attempt in that regard - more of such stuff needs to be aired for people to start talking, thinking, feeling, understanding, questioning and conversing (on their charpoys with guns and axes in tow as well as over cups of cappuccino in F-6 and bodyguard in Honda Civic Ivtec Prosmetic). It’s the only way civilizations progress. And the chosen platform - social media - promotes across-the-board interaction. And if a society still thinks it’s okay to have death penalty so be it.
I hope Khoosat and JPP and Dawn are not sued for this crazy, brave, underwhelming live TV drama (you know, the usual charges of indecency / obscenity / ‘contrary to pakistani culture’ crap).
This drama is another one in the direction of what ‘Udaari’ accomplished: a channel’s creative forces researched and developed a TV drama with the help of an NGO working in the field for female uplift and justice. Here too, it’s a collaboration between research (by JPP and others) and visual treatment of the gained material by an independent crew (Olomopolo Media and Highlight Arts).
The best and most effective death row inmate going-to-the-gallows scene that I’ve ever seen, is the one enacted by Talat Hussain and his last visitors: his TV-family played by Ghazala Kaifi (wife), Huma Nawab and Komal Rizvi (daughters) in the 90s drama ‘Hawaein’, written by Farzana Nadeem. Hussain plays the worker (right or left-hand man) of a feudal who is accused of a murder (actually committed by the feudal, played by Nawaz Baloch) - in political enmity, six people got killed, Hussain absconded, his name was placed in FIR, police searched for him, he was arrested and put on trial, he accepted the blame (one of his daughters is also married to the feudal’s son - a marriage exploited by the feudal later on - but that’s just the usual dope in any melodrama). So the handyman / target killer never tells the police the truth because that’s what a loyal worker of a feudal does (ahem), his family knows he didn’t do it, he is about to be hanged for a crime he didn’t commit. This is the last meeting. Waterfalls. And then he is led off and hanged.
God Forbid anyone has to go through something like this, where you feel innocent but the world has you condemned but here, in ‘No Time To Sleep,’ you don’t feel sorry for the death row prisoner, rather I tried to look for ways to ‘better’ the experience for the dying man: okay so he should have a full stomach, a fan, more cigarettes, all the water in the world.
It's a bit too woke for me. Art may push the boundaries via social experiments, but justice has no second acts.
----------------------------------------
For those interested in seeing the now-recorded performance:
https://www.dawn.com/notimetosleep/
https://twitter.com/z_prisoner
On durational / endurance performance arts:
https://junkee.com/origin-stories-a-b...
On Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Khan, the convicted murderer on whose life Prisoner Z is based: https://www.facebook.com/JusticeProje...
https://www.bbc.com/urdu/pakistan/201...
https://www.propergaanda.com/prisoner...
Sarmad Khoosat's views on the drama:
https://www.dawn.com/news/1436978
Rehearsals for the drama:
https://www.dawn.com/news/1438876/cur...
Justice Project Pakistan:
https://www.jpp.org.pk/
https://www.jpp.org.pk/no-time-to-sleep/
Olomopolo Media: https://www.facebook.com/olomopolo
Highlight Arts: http://highlightarts.org/projects/no-...
Dramas / Films on Criminal Justice System:
Pakistani TV drama: 'Hawaein' (90s)
Ayeshah Alam Khan's directorial telefilm and fictional retelling of a real-life honor killing (90s)
Paradise Lost: Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)
The Act of Killing (2012, documentary)
The Thin Blue Line (70s documentary)
Shawshank Redemption (90s)
Book:
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
------------------------------------------
(Edit 17/10/18: Ironically, the production was held a few days before convicted child murderer Imran Ali was hanged, for rape and murder of a 6 year old Zainab Amin Ansari of Kasur in January this year, under ATC / SC judgments. I wonder whether the producers thought about the timing of the telecast - after all, not much sympathy can be expected for a child killer on death row. But 57 of his own relatives came to say goodbye to him! The fact that not much is known / researched about how or why such crimes occur and responsibility of parents of victim / survivor and that of the criminal's, is another thing for another day. But humane treatment of death row prisoners is necessary).
-------------------------------------------
(Edit: 12/12/18: Werner Herzog's 'Into The Abyss' is a dud. It's like a Jackson Pollock painting - all over the place, no balance between the two convicted criminals' backstory and family interviews, and that of the victims' families, and no forensics of triple homicide - in fact he spends more time on the injuries the two arrested got, during the shoot-out with the police before their arrest, than how the victims' died. The 19-year old on death row for ten years - Michael Perry, executed seven days after the interview - is not asked the right questions. His family isn't interviewed / didn't agree to be interviewed (we are never told). Too much time is given to Justin Burkett and his family. Both convicted come across as uneducated, clueless and selfish (and about to crack a laugh). But their answers offer no explanation for the senseless, stupid, cruel way they acted. No such convenience is in store for the victims. I only saw the face of the dead mother Sandra Stotler as a photograph somewhere at the end when her daughter holds it up to the camera! Nuts.
The only interesting tidbit - and I had to google it - is that Perry was charged and convicted of just one murder, and got the death penalty, while Burkett was charged and convicted of all 3, but got a life sentence.)
-------------------------------------------
