Splitting

by: Ami Nisa , February 6, 2024

When deciding on a focus for my audio-visual essay, I initially envisioned making a conventional explanatory video. I intended to examine two rape-revenge films released in Pakistan in the 1990s in which the female avenger takes on the appearance of a cat. These films were Billi/Cat (1998), directed by Syed Noor and Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay/The Cat-Beast (1997), directed by Shehnaz Begum (typically credited as Shehnaz/ Shahnaz, also known as Shehnaz Khan, Shahnaz Begum/ Khan). I was particularly keen to explore the work of Shehnaz who is arguably the first female horror filmmaker in Pakistan. I wanted to compare the historical erasure of Shehnaz to the adulation of male filmmaker Noor, who was awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Excellence) by the State of Pakistan for his cultural contribution to the country.

Shehnaz began her career as a Pashto-language actor in the 1970s. She quickly rose to the status of bombshell, starring in the cult-classic rape-revenge film Haseena Atim Bum/ Haseena Atom Bomb (1990). She began directing in the 1990s and released a total of three films. Alongside frequent collaborator Imran Khan, she directed her first horror film Goorkund (1995), in which the gruesome act of necrophilia is used to explore the intersection where state violence and sexual violence meet. Following Goorkund, Shehnazwas the solo director for Zakhmi Zara (1996) and the aforementioned Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay – with the narrative of rape-revenge defining both of these films.

I anticipated that I would be bringing some well-deserved attention to a forgotten legend that has found little success (both inside and outside of Pakistan) due to a combination of factors, including the low-brow reputation of Pashto-language cinema (comparative to the dominant status of Urdu-language cinema), the low cultural status of the horror film, and the prevalence of sexual repression and misogyny in the region. Yet, as I began to research the colonial history of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) region where Shehnaz made most of her films, I became uneasy with my initial intentions. KP is located at Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, with its status as a Pakistani territory contested both by the state of Afghanistan and by many Pashtun people of the region (Zargar, 2019). The Pashtun are an ethnic group, often stereotyped as violent (Yousaf 2019) and as sexually deviant due to cultural connotations of homosexuality (Manchanda 2015) and associations with the production and exhibition of pornography (Crilly 2014; Ebrahim 2012; Mahmood 2012).

KP was the focus of the West’s ‘War on Terror’in the early 2000s, causing the decimation of the Pashto-language cinema industry. With the West’s explicit use of a feminist rhetoric to justify invasion of Afghanistan (Viner 2002), I could not help feeling that my work in ‘discovering’ this forgotten figure for a western gaze was inextricable from my position as a British (albeit Pakistani diaspora) citizen. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak’s states that ‘[i]mperialism’s (or globalization’s) image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind’ (1999: 291). Through this framework, the positive work of identifying this ‘forgotten’ Pakistani female legend carries with it an implicit imperialistic ideology where the West uncovers what the East takes for granted.

Laura Mulvey suggests that experimental cinema is the only medium that allows women to accurately represent their subjectivity (Houde 2020: 61), as the aesthetic regimes of conventional cinema typically consider women as visual objects (Mulvey 2009: 130). Instead of my planned explanatory video essay, I then created an experimental work attempting to consolidate my thoughts about the film and the implications of colonial power, the state, and sexual violence. A key guiding force for this film has been Trinh T. Minh-ha’s essay ‘Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference’ (1988); notably, the idea that drawing attention to the filmmakers’ subjectivity within a film works to examine the presumed objective filmmaking afforded to the dominant classes.

My video essay is further inspired by Peggy Ahwesh’s experimental short The Color of Love (1994). In it, Ahwesh uses the decay of celluloid film as a textural image, harking back to experimental cinema’s historical preoccupation with the materiality of film. Early experimental filmmakers often ‘physically ‘attacked the film’ by scratching it, baking it, dyeing it, using outdated stock—both when economically necessary and by deliberate design—to create a tactile viewing experience that would repeatedly remind the audience throughout the projection that they were witnessing a plastic construct, … in which the syntactical properties of the cinematic medium were always an aesthetic consideration’ (Winston-Dixon and Foster 2002: 2). I used the glitches encoded into the digital version of Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay (remnants of its transfer from celluloid film to VHS to digital) as an aesthetic marker of the film’s historical experience. In this way, Splitting is as much about the meaning of the material text as an object, and the meaning of the female subject, as it is about Shehnaz, its author.