One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
An unnamed young girl wearing a heavy shalwar kameez and mehndi looks down apathetically on her wedding day. The camera captures her blank face reflected in a mirror. The framing abstracts the figure from her society, culture, and time, defamiliarizing traditional Pakistani wedding customs. Mixing the political with the mystical—a common thread in Jamil Dehlavi's oeuvre—the director's feature debut The Blood of Hussain (1980) uses the beloved Islamic tale of the killing of Imam Hussain by the hands of a despot as a framework to explore the tyrannical infiltration of the oppressive, national army into the local spaces of Pakistan. Though the film deserves praise for its prophetic illustration of the military takeover—it eerily wrapped production a month before the real-life 1977 coup d'état—its exploration of the highly gendered and problematic local spaces is not to be overlooked. Throughout the film, female characters are primarily housewives or sex workers, echoing dominant perceptions of women at the time. Though such characters are marginalized to make room for the dominating plot of the titular landlord Hussain, Dehlavi doesn't waste a frame to establish their presence. Between the pictured shot and the last scene when Hussain asks the bride's father for her hand in marriage, Dehlavi refuses to show any correspondence between the future spouses, emphasizing the alienating patriarchal wedding customs. The shot begins with Hussain modestly gazing down at the reflector, with the bearded, soon-to-be martyred hero inspired by Imam Hussain representing otherworldly mysticism. Still in the mirror, the camera pans to the stone-faced young woman, who stares hopelessly, embodying a political critique. In this movement between faces, the mystical and the political clash, demonstrating an essential dialectic central to the film and a country on the verge of collapse from the forces of religious extremism, local conservatism, and military cronyism. The camera then traces up to the girl herself, eradicating any gaps between the image and the object, bringing forth the convergence of the grounded and the unreal, the reality and the story, the political and the mystical. In this confrontation of dualities, the dwelling of human suffering comes through, illuminating the screen with profound sorrow and unshakable honesty.