Seattle is in the process of developing a cinematic language of its
own. And it is the brave ambition of this new language to be distinct
from the one that has been developed by outsiders, by those who look at
our city in the way a person looks at a goldfish in a bowl. This kind
of look, that of the outsider, can be seen in the new movie Battle
in Seattle. Stuart Townsend, the film’s director, pictures Seattle
in broad, blockish, and general (or generally laughable) terms. We
laugh at the depiction of Gary Locke (Seattle as a part/port of the Far
East), of a political banner dropped from a construction crane (Seattle
as a hub of radical activism), and of the Space Needle (the first and
final meaning of Seattle). Countering this general view of our city is
a growing local cluster of views, scenes, and scenarios. The primary
locus of this counterdepiction has been independent films (the cinema
of Lynn Shelton, for example). But there is another locus that deserves
our attention, and that is the recent body of hiphop videos produced by
Zia Mohajerjasbi.
The brother of Sabzi (the beat-maker for Blue Scholars and Common
Market), Zia, who is 22, made his first video a year ago for Gabriel
Teodros’s Mass Line masterpiece “No Label.” In that video, he
established the two themes that primarily generate the meaning of the
city he shares with us: the Jose Rizal Bridge off 12th Avenue South (it
is the link between the south and the center of financial and civic
power, downtown), and the globalization of the city’s population.
Seattle, from his view, is about an interaction (center/periphery) and
an emergence (the new voices of the global youth).
“I consciously avoid every popular image that’s been seen of Seattle
on a national scale,” says Zia over lunch at Cafe Presse, the most
European scene on Capitol Hill. “A shot might be nice, but I will not
use it because I don’t want to see the Space Needle and I don’t want to
see Pioneer Square.” What one wants to see and not see, that is the
meaning-motor of Seattle’s new cinema. And all local directors have
this agreement: What must be seen is what is not seen on a “national
scale.” For Zia, the tools for articulating this concern are found in
architecture and narratology (the study of literature). “Though I have
been making films since I was a boy, I started out thinking about film
by studying architecture. The comparisons that I drew were very
important. You have to consider all of the same things. You consider
lighting, angles, blocking. How you move through space is the same as
how the camera moves through space. Where are the actors standing?
Where is the light coming from? These are very similar considerations,
just in a different format.”
“But what’s funny,” he continues, “is when I tried my hand at
architecture for a year and half, I was preoccupied with this problem:
You can’t have two serious professions that are doing basically the
same thing. And so I changed my major to English. This was an important
move for me because studying literature is a way of studying the whole
social fabric.” In his videos, the theme of
interaction
corresponds with his background in architecture, and the theme of
emergence corresponds with narration. In Blue Scholars’ Back
Home, Joe Metro, and Loyalty, as well as the
Physics’ Ready for We, we see the point at which urban
topology meets the polyvocality of Seattle’s multitudes. (Zia
collaborated with Marty Martin on two videos, Joe Metro and
Ready for We.)
“I never shot a hiphop video with the mentality that it’s a hiphop
video. I shot my video like a film. And I guess the aesthetic, my film
aesthetic, is all about how I feel when I walk around Seattle… And so
my videos are about a fusion of the music, what the rapper is saying,
and my film values.”
Though still working in the hiphop-video format (Zia was recently
hired to direct
Toronto-based Somali rapper K’naan), he has also
completed a short film, Manoj (screening as part of STIFF),
that stars the once-local comedian Hari K. Kondabolu. The themes
activated in Zia’s music videos are activated in this wonderfully
photographed short film. We see our city in a way that it’s not seen on
a national scale. 
