Thursday 17 September 2015
Ayatollah Khomeini (Culture/History)
Interest in mysticism (e.g. in the writings of Ibn Arabi)... making him somewhat less conservative than the majority of the ulema.
Relevant quotes:
"Cinema is one of the manifestations of culture and it must be put to the service of man and his education" [a pragmatist view towards cinema, wishing to islamicise it rather than ban it]
Censorship (Domestic Reception/Industry)
Post-revolution the arts in Iran were subject to control and guidance by the newly formed Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
Pre-revolution Iranian cinema in the 1970s was struggling to appeal to domestic audiences, in large part due to the invasion of Hollywood and Indian cinemas. For this reason, the post-revolution ban on much (all? details?) foreign imports was a boon to the growth of Iranian cinema under the Islamic Republic.
Pre-revolution Iranian cinema in the 1970s was struggling to appeal to domestic audiences, in large part due to the invasion of Hollywood and Indian cinemas. For this reason, the post-revolution ban on much (all? details?) foreign imports was a boon to the growth of Iranian cinema under the Islamic Republic.
Wednesday 10 June 2015
Sohrab Shahid Saless (Director)
Born 1944.
Sohrab Shahid Sales (1944-98) was born and raised in Iran and studied cinema in Europe. He had made a number of shorts and documentaries by the time he made A Simple Incident (1973) and radically redefined Iranian cinema with a translucent realism that was utterly unprecedented. A year later, Shahid Sales made Still Life, consolidating his position as a leading visionary of his generation. His next film, In der Fremde (Far from Home, 1975), was one of the first films to address the issue of Gastarbe-iter, or the "guest worker," in Germany. Shahid Sales continued to make his films in Germany, funded mainly by German television, and effectively lost his connection with Iranian cinema. Between 1976 and 1992, he made a total of nine films for TV in Germany. Toward the end of his life and before his premature death in Chicago, Shahid Sales moved to the United States where his health rapidly deteriorated—despite the admirable efforts of his friends to save his life. Mehrnaz Saeed Vafa made a fine documentary about his last days in Chicago, and Ali Dehbashi has edited an excellent volume of essays and other material on Shahid Sales' significance as a filmmaker.
"A Simple Incident premiered at the second Tehran International Film Festival, and caught the Iranian cinema scene off guard. No one could believe that such a simple incision of reality could carve through the fat layers of Iranian commercial cinema—pretty much dominating the mass consumption of Iranian films at the time. There were of course those who thought A Simple Incident slow and boring, its pace intolerable. But you will look in vain, even among those who liked and aggressively supported A Simple Incident, for a clue as to why they liked the film—although such standard cliches as "a true cinema" and "an honest cinema" as usual filled in the air.
A Simple Incident is a film of no incident. It is a succession of slighdy, ever so gently, mobile still lifes. There is more motion in Cezanne's paintings than in Shahid Sales' films. The character Mohammad in A Simple Incident is the son of an ailing mother and a forlorn father who makes a meager living by illegal fishing in the Caspian Sea. Mohammad's life is divided between watching his mother die, his father wither away, and his schooling that is entirely irrelevant to the rest of his life. But the film is not tragic; it is lethargic. Its sluggish pace is deliberately languid— with long takes that neither generate nor expect the slightest suggestion of life. There is a weariness about A Simple Incident, an apathetic indolence, that is neither real nor fictive—it is translucently indulgent. It allows for the spontaneity of the real to become see-through, unmitigated, unexplained, inexplicable, standing at the threshold of every and all explanations."
Sohrab Shahid Sales (1944-98) was born and raised in Iran and studied cinema in Europe. He had made a number of shorts and documentaries by the time he made A Simple Incident (1973) and radically redefined Iranian cinema with a translucent realism that was utterly unprecedented. A year later, Shahid Sales made Still Life, consolidating his position as a leading visionary of his generation. His next film, In der Fremde (Far from Home, 1975), was one of the first films to address the issue of Gastarbe-iter, or the "guest worker," in Germany. Shahid Sales continued to make his films in Germany, funded mainly by German television, and effectively lost his connection with Iranian cinema. Between 1976 and 1992, he made a total of nine films for TV in Germany. Toward the end of his life and before his premature death in Chicago, Shahid Sales moved to the United States where his health rapidly deteriorated—despite the admirable efforts of his friends to save his life. Mehrnaz Saeed Vafa made a fine documentary about his last days in Chicago, and Ali Dehbashi has edited an excellent volume of essays and other material on Shahid Sales' significance as a filmmaker.
"A Simple Incident premiered at the second Tehran International Film Festival, and caught the Iranian cinema scene off guard. No one could believe that such a simple incision of reality could carve through the fat layers of Iranian commercial cinema—pretty much dominating the mass consumption of Iranian films at the time. There were of course those who thought A Simple Incident slow and boring, its pace intolerable. But you will look in vain, even among those who liked and aggressively supported A Simple Incident, for a clue as to why they liked the film—although such standard cliches as "a true cinema" and "an honest cinema" as usual filled in the air.
A Simple Incident is a film of no incident. It is a succession of slighdy, ever so gently, mobile still lifes. There is more motion in Cezanne's paintings than in Shahid Sales' films. The character Mohammad in A Simple Incident is the son of an ailing mother and a forlorn father who makes a meager living by illegal fishing in the Caspian Sea. Mohammad's life is divided between watching his mother die, his father wither away, and his schooling that is entirely irrelevant to the rest of his life. But the film is not tragic; it is lethargic. Its sluggish pace is deliberately languid— with long takes that neither generate nor expect the slightest suggestion of life. There is a weariness about A Simple Incident, an apathetic indolence, that is neither real nor fictive—it is translucently indulgent. It allows for the spontaneity of the real to become see-through, unmitigated, unexplained, inexplicable, standing at the threshold of every and all explanations."
Tuesday 9 June 2015
Still Life (Film)
1974. Dir: Sohrab Shahid Saless.
The last film Saless directed in Iran before emigrating to Germany in 1975.
The Film:
"The story of Shahid Sales' Still Life is, of course, no story at all—and that is how it borrows the spontaneity of modern Persian poetry and makes a permanent loan of it to Iranian cinema. An aged and anonymous railroad attendant and his equally old and sedate wife live in a remote and nameless spot in the middle of nowhere. The old man's daily chore is to go to a particular spot at a railroad junction and switch the direction of the tracks for an oncoming train, about which neither we nor the man know anything. People enter and exit the couple's life, very much like the train that punctuates their otherwise memory-less life. The mind-numbing routine is ultimately interrupted—ruptured—by a visit paid to the old man by an inspector from the central office, informing him that he has reached the age of retirement. As his successor comes to take charge, the old man goes to the city to ask to be allowed to continue to do his job. Denied, he returns home and collects his wife and belongings and they quit the premises.
If we were to locate Shahid Sales' translucent realism in this film somewhere other than its own immediate visual vocabulary, we would follow it to Kafka, and to Chekhov, and of course to the prophetic visionary of the translucent, Yasujiro Ozu. The anonymity of the bureaucracy that both gives and takes away the old man's solitary source of distraction is Kafka par excellence. The patient endurance of the microcosm of a stolid life that reveals the macrocosmic universe it hides is directly from Chekhov. Just as the stationary camera that has no rhyme or reason to move anywhere beyond the placid matter-of-factness of the old couple's numbing life is solidly Ozu. But the soul of Shahid Sales' vision rightfully belongs to the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri.
I also believe that Shahid Sales conceived of Still Life very much aware of and in conversation with Paul Cezanne, whose "Still Life with Compotier" (1879-82), with its deliberate outlines and contemplative shadows, is palpably evident in Shahid Sales' framing and mise en scene. Keep in mind that the term tabiat-e bi-jan is a Persian neologism for "still life." Sepehri, the principal poetic influence on Shahid Sales, was also a major painter whose aesthetic was formed while he studied in Paris. So what I am suggesting is that both through Sepehri and directly, Shahid Sales was very much conscious of the still life in general and that of Cezanne in particular." [Dabashi]
The last film Saless directed in Iran before emigrating to Germany in 1975.
The Film:
"The story of Shahid Sales' Still Life is, of course, no story at all—and that is how it borrows the spontaneity of modern Persian poetry and makes a permanent loan of it to Iranian cinema. An aged and anonymous railroad attendant and his equally old and sedate wife live in a remote and nameless spot in the middle of nowhere. The old man's daily chore is to go to a particular spot at a railroad junction and switch the direction of the tracks for an oncoming train, about which neither we nor the man know anything. People enter and exit the couple's life, very much like the train that punctuates their otherwise memory-less life. The mind-numbing routine is ultimately interrupted—ruptured—by a visit paid to the old man by an inspector from the central office, informing him that he has reached the age of retirement. As his successor comes to take charge, the old man goes to the city to ask to be allowed to continue to do his job. Denied, he returns home and collects his wife and belongings and they quit the premises.
If we were to locate Shahid Sales' translucent realism in this film somewhere other than its own immediate visual vocabulary, we would follow it to Kafka, and to Chekhov, and of course to the prophetic visionary of the translucent, Yasujiro Ozu. The anonymity of the bureaucracy that both gives and takes away the old man's solitary source of distraction is Kafka par excellence. The patient endurance of the microcosm of a stolid life that reveals the macrocosmic universe it hides is directly from Chekhov. Just as the stationary camera that has no rhyme or reason to move anywhere beyond the placid matter-of-factness of the old couple's numbing life is solidly Ozu. But the soul of Shahid Sales' vision rightfully belongs to the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri.
I also believe that Shahid Sales conceived of Still Life very much aware of and in conversation with Paul Cezanne, whose "Still Life with Compotier" (1879-82), with its deliberate outlines and contemplative shadows, is palpably evident in Shahid Sales' framing and mise en scene. Keep in mind that the term tabiat-e bi-jan is a Persian neologism for "still life." Sepehri, the principal poetic influence on Shahid Sales, was also a major painter whose aesthetic was formed while he studied in Paris. So what I am suggesting is that both through Sepehri and directly, Shahid Sales was very much conscious of the still life in general and that of Cezanne in particular." [Dabashi]
Saturday 6 June 2015
The Apple (Film)
Seeb. 1998. Dir: Samira Makhmalbaf.
"The Apple can be read as a feminist allegory about women seizing opportunities, disguising its wider socio-political implications through the figure of childhood for the censors' benefit." [Chaudhuri, CWC.]
"The Apple can be read as a feminist allegory about women seizing opportunities, disguising its wider socio-political implications through the figure of childhood for the censors' benefit." [Chaudhuri, CWC.]
Friday 5 June 2015
Kandahar (Film)
2001. Dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Produced by Makhmalbaf Productions with French companies Bac Films and Studio Canal.
Context:
The Film:
"In Kandahar, as in Makhmalbaf's other recent films, actors play roles that approximate their own lives. Nelofer Paizira, an Afghan expatriate and writer of the story on which the film is based, plays Nafas. She returns to Afghanistan to save a sister, who is threatening to commit suicide before a solar eclipse, symbolising the impending eclipse of Afghan women's lives. As Nafas travels towards Kandahar, a destination she never reaches, she witnesses multifarious ills plaguing Afghan society under the Taliban following decades of intertribal warfare and the Great Powers' imperial exploits. Bandits, fraudsters and scavengers seize advantage of the breakdown in law and order. Innocent lives are wrecked by landmines: in a typically surreal image, Makhmalbaf shows a horde of landmine-maimed amputees hopping on crutches towards a supply of artificial limbs parachuting down from a Red Cross helicopter. In other remarkable images, women clothed head to foot in brightly coloured burkas move in groups across the desert"
Reception:
Kandahar premiered at Cannes in 2001 and drew sellout crowds in Europe and the USA in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. Its general release could not have been more timely: America was preparing to go to war; names of Afghan locations like Kandahar were on everyone's lips. It was even rumoured that President Bush wished to see it.
References:
Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema, 81.
Produced by Makhmalbaf Productions with French companies Bac Films and Studio Canal.
Context:
The Film:
"In Kandahar, as in Makhmalbaf's other recent films, actors play roles that approximate their own lives. Nelofer Paizira, an Afghan expatriate and writer of the story on which the film is based, plays Nafas. She returns to Afghanistan to save a sister, who is threatening to commit suicide before a solar eclipse, symbolising the impending eclipse of Afghan women's lives. As Nafas travels towards Kandahar, a destination she never reaches, she witnesses multifarious ills plaguing Afghan society under the Taliban following decades of intertribal warfare and the Great Powers' imperial exploits. Bandits, fraudsters and scavengers seize advantage of the breakdown in law and order. Innocent lives are wrecked by landmines: in a typically surreal image, Makhmalbaf shows a horde of landmine-maimed amputees hopping on crutches towards a supply of artificial limbs parachuting down from a Red Cross helicopter. In other remarkable images, women clothed head to foot in brightly coloured burkas move in groups across the desert"
Reception:
Kandahar premiered at Cannes in 2001 and drew sellout crowds in Europe and the USA in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. Its general release could not have been more timely: America was preparing to go to war; names of Afghan locations like Kandahar were on everyone's lips. It was even rumoured that President Bush wished to see it.
References:
Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema, 81.
The White Balloon (Film)
1995. Dir: Jafar Panahi. Scr: Abbas Kiarostami.
The Film:
The film's ending belies any reading of the film as charming fluff about cute children. Razieh retrieves her banknote, which disappeared down a grating, with the help of an Afghan balloon-seller [the narrative switches focus]. She departs without thanking him, buys the goldfish and returns home. The film concludes with off-screen sounds [important throughout the film as a tactic, e.g. the father shouting off-screen] of a clock ticking down to New Year and fireworks - and finally, a long-held freeze-frame of the Afghan refugee boy with his white balloon. Although both he and the white balloon have scarcely entered the film, this final, unexpected freeze-frame claims our attention and 'feeds back into and modifies the whole preceding "charming" narrative'.18 The Afghan is left alone; he has no home to go to. A harsh absent reality is rendered present - namely Afghan refugees, Iran's most mistreated minority.
Reception:
"A particular target was Panahi's debut feature The White Balloon, a story written by Kiarostami about a seven-year-old girl, Razieh, who loses her money in Tehran's streets on her way to buy a goldfish for New Year celebrations. The White Balloon won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1995 and became the most lucrative foreign-language film in the USA and Europe the following year. In Sight and Sound, Simon Louvish slated the film for shielding the regime's harshness, horror and despair, calling it a 'sentimental piece of slush [which] has had wide distribution in the West at the expense of far better Iranian films'."
The Film:
The film's ending belies any reading of the film as charming fluff about cute children. Razieh retrieves her banknote, which disappeared down a grating, with the help of an Afghan balloon-seller [the narrative switches focus]. She departs without thanking him, buys the goldfish and returns home. The film concludes with off-screen sounds [important throughout the film as a tactic, e.g. the father shouting off-screen] of a clock ticking down to New Year and fireworks - and finally, a long-held freeze-frame of the Afghan refugee boy with his white balloon. Although both he and the white balloon have scarcely entered the film, this final, unexpected freeze-frame claims our attention and 'feeds back into and modifies the whole preceding "charming" narrative'.18 The Afghan is left alone; he has no home to go to. A harsh absent reality is rendered present - namely Afghan refugees, Iran's most mistreated minority.
Reception:
"A particular target was Panahi's debut feature The White Balloon, a story written by Kiarostami about a seven-year-old girl, Razieh, who loses her money in Tehran's streets on her way to buy a goldfish for New Year celebrations. The White Balloon won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1995 and became the most lucrative foreign-language film in the USA and Europe the following year. In Sight and Sound, Simon Louvish slated the film for shielding the regime's harshness, horror and despair, calling it a 'sentimental piece of slush [which] has had wide distribution in the West at the expense of far better Iranian films'."
Monday 25 May 2015
The Spring (Film)
Cheshmeh. 1972. Dir: Arby Ovanessian.
The Film:
"Spring is narrated, to the degree that it is based on or is in need of any narrative, around a triangular speculation on love, lust, and loyalty. A man (played by the actor Arman) is about to die, and summons his son to tell him something important. We never see him actually telling his son anything, and the suggestion of a flashback is so visually attenuated that it remains quite unclear whether we are witnessing the story of this man's wife betraying him or else a visual reimagination of that story. From the tunnel-vision scene of a street, in which we see a woman approaching the camera while a little girl hops away from it, the story begins to re-unravel. The woman is Habibeh (Mahtaj Nojumi), going home to her husband. She becomes thirsty and tries to drink a handful of water from a spring when it suddenly stops flowing. She is startled; a door opens, a young man (played by Jamshid Mashayekhi) comes out, apologizes for having turned off the flow of water from behind the door, and offers to turn the water on for her to drink. She refuses and leaves, but the brief encounter is sufficient for the young man to fall madly in love with her. Habibeh's husband builds spring wells, and he and the man who has fallen madly in love with Habibeh turn out to be close friends. Meanwhile Habibeh herself is equally madly in love with yet another younger man (played by Parviz Pour Hosseini). When Jamshid Mashayekhi's character realizes that he has fallen in love with his friend's wife, he commits suicide at his own farm, at which point we find out that he was already married and has a wife and a little girl. The suicide adds fuel to Habibeh's already scandalous reputation, for having an adulterous relationship with the man she loves. The men and women of the village begin to gossip and plot to murder Habibeh. She too commits suicide, while the man she loves becomes desolate and, in despair, runs away to the desert, while her husband buries her body inside their home and on top of her grave constructs a reflective pool."
"On the basis of its astonishingly beautiful opening shot, Ovanessian proceeds with other staccato shots of an idyllic village, all edited beautifully with the syncopated rhythm of the chimes of a ringing church bell. As soon as these bells ring, about five minutes into Spring, you will start to realize that Ovanessian has been deeply influenced by the master Armenian filmmaker from the former Soviet Union, Sergei Paradzhanov"
"I believe Paradzhanov's Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, which is the tragic tale of two lovers separated by feuding families, was very much on Ovanessian's mind when he was making Spring, not so much in terms of narrative plot as in editing rhythm and melodic vision, in which terms he is also paying homage to Paradzhanov's The Color of Pomegranates."
"Cut against the rhythm of the church bell in the early minutes of Spring is a succession of staccato shots, lasting for a little more than five minutes, one shot after another, first of a wheel pulling a bucket full of water from a spring, and then the midday sun shining through a tree, a running brook, a shady veranda, an approaching man, a feminine hand fixing the white sheet and white pillowcases of a bed, that hand opening a door, and now the man who was walking on the veranda starts taking his shirt off, drops it on a chair, and the woman who was fixing the bed puts a jar and glass of water on a mantle, before we get a medium shot of an empty room with an empty chair, and then move to an exterior shot of a church, and then a village, its serene roofs, a horse in a pasture, another shot of the same spring, a sitting dog, the veranda again, and then a medium exterior shot of a wall and a door guarding an enclosed garden, and now the rhythmic sound of approaching drosh-kies, two of which appear, as a man comes out and knocks at that door, another man from the same droshky starts playing the naqqareb, a wind instrument, and finally a woman opens the door to an adjacent house. By now eight minutes and thirty seconds have elapsed from the first frame to this door, which a boy opens, saying, "My dad says come in!""
"Foremost in Spring is a minimalist mise en scene, confident long takes, melodic editing, and a very deliberate—almost self-conscious—rhythm that has over time become a hallmark of Iranian cinema. By the time the young boy opens the door, about eight minutes and thirty seconds into the film, and says to the man who has been knocking at the door, "My dad says come in!" the film has thoroughly established its melodic and space-conscious visual vocabulary. Thereafter, a dying man, laid literally on his deathbed, is the first narrative throw to enter the spatial universe that Ovanessian has already masterfully crafted. Who this anonymous man is, why he is ill, why his friends and relatives are paying him a visit, or any other piece of information of this sort becomes rather accidental to the rest of the film. Here is where I think Ovanessian's detractors and admirers have equally failed. Much of the anger and frustration with Spring emerges from habitually taking this suggestion of a narrative plot too literally, while much of the empty praise heaped on it comes from a fundamental failure to read the visual vocabulary that consistently takes precedence over the narrative. Almost flamboyantly, Spring calls attention to its spatial presence, rather than to what is taking place within that space. Ovanessian's cinema is a visual experience in the emotional charge of a space."
"imagination of space and verbal opacity of narrative, is that its terrible acting and even worse dialogue have a subtextual function of revealing what constitutes this film—its spatial reflections on moods and manners, gestures and sentiments, evocative tones and imperceptible temperaments. Ovanessian is neither a character director nor is he exactly a master of Persian prose. But he has a set of eyes that see otherwise invisible sights, and thus his spatial realism must be the principal point of any serious critique of his masterpiece. Spring commences, continues, and concludes with an intimation of categorical uncertainty. Nothing is ever conceptually clear about Spring. Because of this categorical uncertainty Ovanessian can intimate his visions of otherwise invisible sights; as if by turning down the volume of the narrative his camera's sense perception is increased."
"The reason that I keep emphasizing the bad acting, terrible (almost unbearable) dialogue, and the mere suggestion of a story in Spring is not to diminish a film that I consider one of the masterpieces of Iranian cinema, but instead to draw your attention to an organic link between these shortfalls of the film and what I suggest is its revolutionary, entirely unprecedented contribution, namely its spatial realism. The first scene in which Habibeh appears is in my judgment one of the best shots in the entire history of Iranian cinema. Nothing of thematic or narrative significance happens in this scene. It is of an empty, almost desolate street, with a mud-brick wall darkened by the shade of trees. Tall and wearing a white chador, Habibeh is walking toward the camera in a wide-angle long shot, while away from the camera frog-jumps a little girl in a dark shirt, playing what appears to be a game of hopscotch by herself. The camera remains motionless. It is an invitation for the soul of the space to breathe, to be fully present."
"Consider the mourning ceremony, after the death of the husband, Arman, on the banks of the brook. A group of men are sitting around a spread and preparing to drink to their fallen friend. The scene is entirely iconic, ritualistic, stylized, and visually mannered—and precisely in those terms Ovanessian has managed to generate and convey a spontaneous sense of space that never moves to make an atmospheric suggestion. We scarcely have any notion of those people's thoughts, emotions, reflections, or the nature of their relationship to their friend—and yet when Ovanessian privileges the spatial complexion of their gathering he manages to capture the soul of the reason why they are there. He does so not with dialogue but by the way he arranges his actors around their drinking paraphernalia, by the manner in which one of them pours the wine, by the solemnity of their dignified toast, by the murmuring flow of the brook that is running nearby, by the melodic incantation of the music that we hear, by the sound of the glass cups being thrown and falling into the brook, and ultimately by the sense of mourning that becomes evident in the space that Ovanessian has created."
[Dabashi, M&M]
Reception:
"As far as the box office was concerned, the film was screened for only five days at the Capri Cinema in downtown Tehran, with miserable sales. As for the critics, its detractors accused Spring of useless and boring formalism, of not having really anything to say. And, as I mentioned before, worse than his detractors were Ovanessian's admirers, who could come up with nothing better than calling the film "quiet and poetic."" [Dabashi]
The Film:
"Spring is narrated, to the degree that it is based on or is in need of any narrative, around a triangular speculation on love, lust, and loyalty. A man (played by the actor Arman) is about to die, and summons his son to tell him something important. We never see him actually telling his son anything, and the suggestion of a flashback is so visually attenuated that it remains quite unclear whether we are witnessing the story of this man's wife betraying him or else a visual reimagination of that story. From the tunnel-vision scene of a street, in which we see a woman approaching the camera while a little girl hops away from it, the story begins to re-unravel. The woman is Habibeh (Mahtaj Nojumi), going home to her husband. She becomes thirsty and tries to drink a handful of water from a spring when it suddenly stops flowing. She is startled; a door opens, a young man (played by Jamshid Mashayekhi) comes out, apologizes for having turned off the flow of water from behind the door, and offers to turn the water on for her to drink. She refuses and leaves, but the brief encounter is sufficient for the young man to fall madly in love with her. Habibeh's husband builds spring wells, and he and the man who has fallen madly in love with Habibeh turn out to be close friends. Meanwhile Habibeh herself is equally madly in love with yet another younger man (played by Parviz Pour Hosseini). When Jamshid Mashayekhi's character realizes that he has fallen in love with his friend's wife, he commits suicide at his own farm, at which point we find out that he was already married and has a wife and a little girl. The suicide adds fuel to Habibeh's already scandalous reputation, for having an adulterous relationship with the man she loves. The men and women of the village begin to gossip and plot to murder Habibeh. She too commits suicide, while the man she loves becomes desolate and, in despair, runs away to the desert, while her husband buries her body inside their home and on top of her grave constructs a reflective pool."
"On the basis of its astonishingly beautiful opening shot, Ovanessian proceeds with other staccato shots of an idyllic village, all edited beautifully with the syncopated rhythm of the chimes of a ringing church bell. As soon as these bells ring, about five minutes into Spring, you will start to realize that Ovanessian has been deeply influenced by the master Armenian filmmaker from the former Soviet Union, Sergei Paradzhanov"
"I believe Paradzhanov's Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, which is the tragic tale of two lovers separated by feuding families, was very much on Ovanessian's mind when he was making Spring, not so much in terms of narrative plot as in editing rhythm and melodic vision, in which terms he is also paying homage to Paradzhanov's The Color of Pomegranates."
"Cut against the rhythm of the church bell in the early minutes of Spring is a succession of staccato shots, lasting for a little more than five minutes, one shot after another, first of a wheel pulling a bucket full of water from a spring, and then the midday sun shining through a tree, a running brook, a shady veranda, an approaching man, a feminine hand fixing the white sheet and white pillowcases of a bed, that hand opening a door, and now the man who was walking on the veranda starts taking his shirt off, drops it on a chair, and the woman who was fixing the bed puts a jar and glass of water on a mantle, before we get a medium shot of an empty room with an empty chair, and then move to an exterior shot of a church, and then a village, its serene roofs, a horse in a pasture, another shot of the same spring, a sitting dog, the veranda again, and then a medium exterior shot of a wall and a door guarding an enclosed garden, and now the rhythmic sound of approaching drosh-kies, two of which appear, as a man comes out and knocks at that door, another man from the same droshky starts playing the naqqareb, a wind instrument, and finally a woman opens the door to an adjacent house. By now eight minutes and thirty seconds have elapsed from the first frame to this door, which a boy opens, saying, "My dad says come in!""
"Foremost in Spring is a minimalist mise en scene, confident long takes, melodic editing, and a very deliberate—almost self-conscious—rhythm that has over time become a hallmark of Iranian cinema. By the time the young boy opens the door, about eight minutes and thirty seconds into the film, and says to the man who has been knocking at the door, "My dad says come in!" the film has thoroughly established its melodic and space-conscious visual vocabulary. Thereafter, a dying man, laid literally on his deathbed, is the first narrative throw to enter the spatial universe that Ovanessian has already masterfully crafted. Who this anonymous man is, why he is ill, why his friends and relatives are paying him a visit, or any other piece of information of this sort becomes rather accidental to the rest of the film. Here is where I think Ovanessian's detractors and admirers have equally failed. Much of the anger and frustration with Spring emerges from habitually taking this suggestion of a narrative plot too literally, while much of the empty praise heaped on it comes from a fundamental failure to read the visual vocabulary that consistently takes precedence over the narrative. Almost flamboyantly, Spring calls attention to its spatial presence, rather than to what is taking place within that space. Ovanessian's cinema is a visual experience in the emotional charge of a space."
"imagination of space and verbal opacity of narrative, is that its terrible acting and even worse dialogue have a subtextual function of revealing what constitutes this film—its spatial reflections on moods and manners, gestures and sentiments, evocative tones and imperceptible temperaments. Ovanessian is neither a character director nor is he exactly a master of Persian prose. But he has a set of eyes that see otherwise invisible sights, and thus his spatial realism must be the principal point of any serious critique of his masterpiece. Spring commences, continues, and concludes with an intimation of categorical uncertainty. Nothing is ever conceptually clear about Spring. Because of this categorical uncertainty Ovanessian can intimate his visions of otherwise invisible sights; as if by turning down the volume of the narrative his camera's sense perception is increased."
"The reason that I keep emphasizing the bad acting, terrible (almost unbearable) dialogue, and the mere suggestion of a story in Spring is not to diminish a film that I consider one of the masterpieces of Iranian cinema, but instead to draw your attention to an organic link between these shortfalls of the film and what I suggest is its revolutionary, entirely unprecedented contribution, namely its spatial realism. The first scene in which Habibeh appears is in my judgment one of the best shots in the entire history of Iranian cinema. Nothing of thematic or narrative significance happens in this scene. It is of an empty, almost desolate street, with a mud-brick wall darkened by the shade of trees. Tall and wearing a white chador, Habibeh is walking toward the camera in a wide-angle long shot, while away from the camera frog-jumps a little girl in a dark shirt, playing what appears to be a game of hopscotch by herself. The camera remains motionless. It is an invitation for the soul of the space to breathe, to be fully present."
"Consider the mourning ceremony, after the death of the husband, Arman, on the banks of the brook. A group of men are sitting around a spread and preparing to drink to their fallen friend. The scene is entirely iconic, ritualistic, stylized, and visually mannered—and precisely in those terms Ovanessian has managed to generate and convey a spontaneous sense of space that never moves to make an atmospheric suggestion. We scarcely have any notion of those people's thoughts, emotions, reflections, or the nature of their relationship to their friend—and yet when Ovanessian privileges the spatial complexion of their gathering he manages to capture the soul of the reason why they are there. He does so not with dialogue but by the way he arranges his actors around their drinking paraphernalia, by the manner in which one of them pours the wine, by the solemnity of their dignified toast, by the murmuring flow of the brook that is running nearby, by the melodic incantation of the music that we hear, by the sound of the glass cups being thrown and falling into the brook, and ultimately by the sense of mourning that becomes evident in the space that Ovanessian has created."
[Dabashi, M&M]
Reception:
"As far as the box office was concerned, the film was screened for only five days at the Capri Cinema in downtown Tehran, with miserable sales. As for the critics, its detractors accused Spring of useless and boring formalism, of not having really anything to say. And, as I mentioned before, worse than his detractors were Ovanessian's admirers, who could come up with nothing better than calling the film "quiet and poetic."" [Dabashi]
Sunday 24 May 2015
Arby Ovanessian (Director)
Born: 1941, Isfahan.
Of Armenian descent.
He worked as a set designer, until 1963 when he traveled to England to study cinema. He returned to Iran in 1966 and became one of the most prominent theater directors of his generation. Before he turned to Spring he had directed a number of shorts, among them a documentary (about thirty minutes) called Lebbeus Whose Surname Was Thaddeus, 1967.
This is an exquisite black-and-white film shot on location about a pilgrimage of Armenians to the mausoleum of a saint, which begins with a contemplative survey of the scared site, culminates in the congregation of the pilgrims, and concludes, after they pack and leave, with a magnificent final shot of the solitary site of the church in the middle of the desert, suddenly covered by a wandering cloud.
Ovanessian's documentary is shot with pious regard for the sanctity of the site, considerable attention to the social character of the event, and the wondrous occasion of a solitary sacred site suddenly transformed into a social event, and then turned back to its originary solitude.
He developed a close collaborative rapport with Ali Mohammad Afghani, though it was suddenly aborted by the unfortunate events surrounding the production otAhu Khanom's Husband.
Burned by that unfortunate experience, Ovanessian turned to an Armenian story by M. Armin, from which he adapted his own screenplay. When it was first released, in 1972, Spring was a box-office disaster, while critically it sharply divided its admirers and detractors—some thinking it beautiful, poetic, lyrical, and revolutionary, while others considered it boring, banal, and complicated.
Of Armenian descent.
He worked as a set designer, until 1963 when he traveled to England to study cinema. He returned to Iran in 1966 and became one of the most prominent theater directors of his generation. Before he turned to Spring he had directed a number of shorts, among them a documentary (about thirty minutes) called Lebbeus Whose Surname Was Thaddeus, 1967.
This is an exquisite black-and-white film shot on location about a pilgrimage of Armenians to the mausoleum of a saint, which begins with a contemplative survey of the scared site, culminates in the congregation of the pilgrims, and concludes, after they pack and leave, with a magnificent final shot of the solitary site of the church in the middle of the desert, suddenly covered by a wandering cloud.
Ovanessian's documentary is shot with pious regard for the sanctity of the site, considerable attention to the social character of the event, and the wondrous occasion of a solitary sacred site suddenly transformed into a social event, and then turned back to its originary solitude.
He developed a close collaborative rapport with Ali Mohammad Afghani, though it was suddenly aborted by the unfortunate events surrounding the production otAhu Khanom's Husband.
Burned by that unfortunate experience, Ovanessian turned to an Armenian story by M. Armin, from which he adapted his own screenplay. When it was first released, in 1972, Spring was a box-office disaster, while critically it sharply divided its admirers and detractors—some thinking it beautiful, poetic, lyrical, and revolutionary, while others considered it boring, banal, and complicated.
Saturday 23 May 2015
A Moment of Innocence (Film)
1995. Dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Co-produced by MK2. The Iranian title, Nun Va Goldoony means 'The bread and the vase', but Makhmalbaf 's French co-producer MK2 preferred A Moment of Innocence.
The Film:
"This picture (and with it the sequence and the entire film) is a cinematic will to rewrite history, to remake the world, to revise its destiny, modify its verdict. Here Makhmalbaf the rebel is in full control of a cinematic urge to dismantle and dismember the fate of an entire nation. This is a deliberate act of mis-remembering history in order to let it forget itself—for its own good. Makhmalbaf himself may wish here to apologize, to seek forgiveness, to solicit absolution. But Makhmalbaf the filmmaker is after a much bigger fish—for there is nothing to forgive, and no one to forgive."
Kiarostami's influence is evident in the film's minimalist style and formal organisation, with title cards and clapperboards opening and ending scenes. But, more significantly, in the blurring between reality and its staged remake, A Moment of Innocence embodies the multiplicity of truth through 'a quiet erosion of the dead certainties, that separates the real from the make-belief, and that is precisely the trade-mark of the best of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema'. These 'dead certainties' include the single-mindedness of terrorists who believe that there is no other course of action.
In the final freeze-frame, the veiled woman (representative of Iran's revolutionary Islamicisation) and the Young Policeman (emblem of the despised Pahlavi regime) are the astonished recipients of peace offerings. The image 'arrests' the moment where the past - Makhmalbaf's original terrorist act - is transfigured by the present - the young actors' spontaneous refusal of violence. But the 'moment of innocence' of the film's title could refer to numerous other meanings embedded in this image: Islamic militancy, revolutionary idealism, terrorism, law and order, adolescent romance, unrequited love, revenge and pacifism, and so on. This freeze-frame, which holds multiple competing ideologies within the same image, succinctly expresses Makhmalbaf's revised stance on his past: 'I no longer believe in absolutes and have accepted that I don't have all the right answers.'
Reception:
The film won the Special Jury Award at the Locarno Film Festival in 1996.
The film was banned in Iran until 1997.
Co-produced by MK2. The Iranian title, Nun Va Goldoony means 'The bread and the vase', but Makhmalbaf 's French co-producer MK2 preferred A Moment of Innocence.
The Film:
"This picture (and with it the sequence and the entire film) is a cinematic will to rewrite history, to remake the world, to revise its destiny, modify its verdict. Here Makhmalbaf the rebel is in full control of a cinematic urge to dismantle and dismember the fate of an entire nation. This is a deliberate act of mis-remembering history in order to let it forget itself—for its own good. Makhmalbaf himself may wish here to apologize, to seek forgiveness, to solicit absolution. But Makhmalbaf the filmmaker is after a much bigger fish—for there is nothing to forgive, and no one to forgive."
Kiarostami's influence is evident in the film's minimalist style and formal organisation, with title cards and clapperboards opening and ending scenes. But, more significantly, in the blurring between reality and its staged remake, A Moment of Innocence embodies the multiplicity of truth through 'a quiet erosion of the dead certainties, that separates the real from the make-belief, and that is precisely the trade-mark of the best of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema'. These 'dead certainties' include the single-mindedness of terrorists who believe that there is no other course of action.
In the final freeze-frame, the veiled woman (representative of Iran's revolutionary Islamicisation) and the Young Policeman (emblem of the despised Pahlavi regime) are the astonished recipients of peace offerings. The image 'arrests' the moment where the past - Makhmalbaf's original terrorist act - is transfigured by the present - the young actors' spontaneous refusal of violence. But the 'moment of innocence' of the film's title could refer to numerous other meanings embedded in this image: Islamic militancy, revolutionary idealism, terrorism, law and order, adolescent romance, unrequited love, revenge and pacifism, and so on. This freeze-frame, which holds multiple competing ideologies within the same image, succinctly expresses Makhmalbaf's revised stance on his past: 'I no longer believe in absolutes and have accepted that I don't have all the right answers.'
Reception:
The film won the Special Jury Award at the Locarno Film Festival in 1996.
The film was banned in Iran until 1997.
Sunday 3 May 2015
Crimson Gold (Film)
Tala-ye sorkh. 2003. Dir: Jafar Panahi. Scr: Abbas Kiarostami.
Based on actual events.
The Film:
Hossein is perfectly cast. His face is vacant, his demeanor forlorn; there is not a trace of connectedness to anything or anybody about him. He is sullen and apathetic, brooding with a subdued anger with no apparent origin or purpose. [Dabashi]
Based on actual events.
The Film:
Hossein is perfectly cast. His face is vacant, his demeanor forlorn; there is not a trace of connectedness to anything or anybody about him. He is sullen and apathetic, brooding with a subdued anger with no apparent origin or purpose. [Dabashi]
Thursday 19 March 2015
Prince Ehtejab (Film)
1974. Dir: Bahman Farmanara.
Context:
Based on seminal novel by Houshang Golshiri.
Golshiri's novel is ostensibly set in the context of the decadent Qajar aristocracy (1789-1926)—as one ominous servant of the dynasty, Morad (Hossein Kasbian), keeps bringing to one of its last descen-dents, Prince Ehtejab (Jamshid Mashayekhi), the news of his cohorts dying, one after the other.
Farmanara's visual narration of the story gave a particularly poignant spin to its contemporary accent—all too evident in Golshiri's novel but far more pronounced in Farmanara's imagining of it. What is paramount in Farmanara's adaptation of Prince Ehtejab is the labyrinthine convolution of three generations of murderous decadence narrated and woven into each other. Memories of Prince Ehtejab's grandfather and father join his own translucent presence to form a multiplicity of successively degenerate reminiscences of each other, each engaged in one mode of murderous banality or another. [Dabashi, M&M]
"There is a cathartic release in the exercise, for it is as if both Golshiri and Farmanara take a mischievous, childlike pleasure in first identifying the source of a collective terror and then erasing it."
The Film:
Prince Ehtejab is tortured by the remembrance of his ancestral cruelties—the brutal asphyxiation of a disobedient family member on one occasion (his tied-up hands are used as an ashtray by the murderer prince), the massacre of a group of protestors in another. The ghostly character of his remembrances of things past assumes a generational depth and Prince Ehtejab traces the declining days of a decadent dynasty into the collective subconscious of a nation.
Prince Ehtejab is the iconic personification of two corrosive forces—congenital corruption and diseased memory—sitting in a dark dungeon of a room, compelled to remember that cruel history. (Almost a Borgesian touch?) Prince Ehtejab reeks in corruption and soaks in his memory of it, and by the time that Golshiri's pen and Farmanara's camera pay him a visit, the criminality in his blood is degenerating from a historically murderous tendency into an immediate and personally homicidal urge aimed at his wife and servant.
As suggested by his name, Prince Ehtejab is ostensibly impotent both sexually and politically. His wife, Fakhr al-Nisa, maintains an obvious moral and intellectual superiority over him, and as a result he much prefers the company of his servant girl, Fakhri, who is forced to accommodate the vulgarity of his dysfunctional sexual advances. He forces Fakhri to dress like his wife so that in her disguise he can claim to have a wife that, he knows all too well, he can actually never have.
As a psychoanalytical treatment of a historical trauma at the very core of our collective consciousness, Prince Ehtejab works through a simple suggestion of dream narration, in which the very act of telling the nightmare of the prince's memory structures its meaning and significance. Keep in mind that Prince Ehtejab is not a character but a persona, and as such he is a narrative device through whose memorial remembrances Golshiri and Farmanara tell this collective nightmare. Prince Ehtejab is both the narrator and the object of the narration, both the memory of the trauma he represents and the memorial evidence of his own testimony.
Golshiri's sinuous narrative, twisting and turning around its own insights, and Farmanara's tortuous imagery, probing the exterior of his set designs as if they were the labyrinth of his characters' consciousness, come together both to simulate that collective memory and make it visible.
Reception:
At the Tehran International Film Festival of 1974, Farmanara won the Grand Prix.
Context:
Based on seminal novel by Houshang Golshiri.
Golshiri's novel is ostensibly set in the context of the decadent Qajar aristocracy (1789-1926)—as one ominous servant of the dynasty, Morad (Hossein Kasbian), keeps bringing to one of its last descen-dents, Prince Ehtejab (Jamshid Mashayekhi), the news of his cohorts dying, one after the other.
Farmanara's visual narration of the story gave a particularly poignant spin to its contemporary accent—all too evident in Golshiri's novel but far more pronounced in Farmanara's imagining of it. What is paramount in Farmanara's adaptation of Prince Ehtejab is the labyrinthine convolution of three generations of murderous decadence narrated and woven into each other. Memories of Prince Ehtejab's grandfather and father join his own translucent presence to form a multiplicity of successively degenerate reminiscences of each other, each engaged in one mode of murderous banality or another. [Dabashi, M&M]
"Heads chopped off and piled on each other to make a pyramid, that was the enduring memory of the Qajar dynasty—eyes gorged out, bodies torched, living human beings buried alive, young men castrated, young women raped, visionary government ministers like Amir Kabir murdered in the prime of their noble endeavors, corrupt politicians put to preside over the livelihood of defenseless people. The record of the Qajar dynasty was one of systematic abuse of a nation at large, overburdened with cruel and unusual punishment for the slightest transgression against the whimsical, sickly, and torrid reign of terror historically identified with foreign invasions and inbred tyranny. The savagery with which the Babi movement was suppressed during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar was reminiscent of the legendary cruelties of the founding figure of the Qajar dynasty, Agha Muhammad Khan. The public rape and execution of young children who had dared to sing satirical songs ridiculing Agha Muhammad Khan while he laid siege to the city of Kerman led parents to hide their children in chimneys and between walls, covered with bricks and mortar for fear of their lives. Agha Muhammad Khan's generals would bring young people from Kerman to his court on top of a hill where he would have their ears cut off, their eyes gorged out, their throats slit, and their dead bodies tossed down the hill. Women were raped and murdered, children sold into slavery, men blinded and slaughtered. When Lotf Ali Khan Zand was brought to Agha Muhammad Khan, he had his servants sodomize him savagely and then blind him. None of these savageries were depicted in Golshiri or Farmanara's Prince Ehtejab. But all of them were at the forefront of its readers' and viewers' minds as they considered the sickly figure of Prince Ehtejab, brilliandy portrayed by Jamshid Mashayekhi in one of the legendary roles in Iranian cinema.""The terror at the heart of Prince Ebtejab had both a local and a colonial genealogy. Iran's dynastic history concluded its medieval longevity with the Qajar monarchy, which coincided with the rise of colonial modernity in Iran. As Qajars terrorized us in our nightmares, colonial modernity robbed us of our historical agency—by suggesting the possibility of that agency in its modernity and yet ipso facto denying it by the colonial manner of delivering it. What this miraculously important film did for the restitution of Iran's historical agency was not limited to its grasp of historical despotism immediately beneath the surface of our collective unconscious; it was equally critical in confronting our systematic de-subjection in the face of colonial modernity."
"There is a cathartic release in the exercise, for it is as if both Golshiri and Farmanara take a mischievous, childlike pleasure in first identifying the source of a collective terror and then erasing it."
The Film:
Prince Ehtejab is tortured by the remembrance of his ancestral cruelties—the brutal asphyxiation of a disobedient family member on one occasion (his tied-up hands are used as an ashtray by the murderer prince), the massacre of a group of protestors in another. The ghostly character of his remembrances of things past assumes a generational depth and Prince Ehtejab traces the declining days of a decadent dynasty into the collective subconscious of a nation.
Prince Ehtejab is the iconic personification of two corrosive forces—congenital corruption and diseased memory—sitting in a dark dungeon of a room, compelled to remember that cruel history. (Almost a Borgesian touch?) Prince Ehtejab reeks in corruption and soaks in his memory of it, and by the time that Golshiri's pen and Farmanara's camera pay him a visit, the criminality in his blood is degenerating from a historically murderous tendency into an immediate and personally homicidal urge aimed at his wife and servant.
As suggested by his name, Prince Ehtejab is ostensibly impotent both sexually and politically. His wife, Fakhr al-Nisa, maintains an obvious moral and intellectual superiority over him, and as a result he much prefers the company of his servant girl, Fakhri, who is forced to accommodate the vulgarity of his dysfunctional sexual advances. He forces Fakhri to dress like his wife so that in her disguise he can claim to have a wife that, he knows all too well, he can actually never have.
As a psychoanalytical treatment of a historical trauma at the very core of our collective consciousness, Prince Ehtejab works through a simple suggestion of dream narration, in which the very act of telling the nightmare of the prince's memory structures its meaning and significance. Keep in mind that Prince Ehtejab is not a character but a persona, and as such he is a narrative device through whose memorial remembrances Golshiri and Farmanara tell this collective nightmare. Prince Ehtejab is both the narrator and the object of the narration, both the memory of the trauma he represents and the memorial evidence of his own testimony.
Golshiri's sinuous narrative, twisting and turning around its own insights, and Farmanara's tortuous imagery, probing the exterior of his set designs as if they were the labyrinth of his characters' consciousness, come together both to simulate that collective memory and make it visible.
Reception:
At the Tehran International Film Festival of 1974, Farmanara won the Grand Prix.
Wednesday 18 March 2015
Houshang Golshiri (Culture/History)
1937/38?-2000.
One of the most gifted and influential writers of his time, Golshiri was born in Isfahan and raised in Abadan, and thus brought a fresh and unexpected vision to the Persian fiction of his time, which had become increasingly based in Tehran. Golshiri's family returned to Isfahan, where he finished high school, and where he went on to attend the University of Isfahan. Upon graduation, he began teaching at various elementary and high schools in the region. His increasing political activism landed him in jail in 1962. By the mid-1960s, Golshiri had published a potpourri of poems and short stories, and then was instrumental in establishing Jong-e Isfahan, a progressive literary journal that quickly moved to the vanguard of Iranian fiction. Between 1965 and 1973, Jong-e Isfahan was among the leading literary journals of the time, initiating some serious critical discussions about the nature and function of fiction.
Golshiri had begun writing fiction in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s his short stories and poems were appearing in various literary journals. His first collection of short stories, Mesl-e Hamisheh (As Always, 1968), announced a major literary voice—confident, defiant, with detailed attention to a range of prose and narrative techniques. But it was not until the publication of Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) that the Tehrani literary critics had to pay a visit to Isfahan. This novel was adapted into a film by Bahman Farmanara in 1974: see Prince Ehtejab.
Golshiri's second novel, Christine va Kid (Christine and the Kid, 1971), was not as critically acclaimed as Prince Ehtejab, but as an experiment in autobiographical narrative it was a tour de force of unparalleled daring and experimentation—staccato phrases, broken and unreliable memories, miniature-like narrative depictions, implication of the reader in the narrative, and many other similar tropes. His political activities then once again landed him in jail for about six months in 1973.
At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, Golshiri was active in organizing the famous "Ten Nights" of poetry and prose readings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran, a watershed of revolutionary mobilization against the Pahlavi regime. In the summer of 1978, he was invited to attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. While in the US he gave a series of lectures to Iranian students across the country.
One of the most gifted and influential writers of his time, Golshiri was born in Isfahan and raised in Abadan, and thus brought a fresh and unexpected vision to the Persian fiction of his time, which had become increasingly based in Tehran. Golshiri's family returned to Isfahan, where he finished high school, and where he went on to attend the University of Isfahan. Upon graduation, he began teaching at various elementary and high schools in the region. His increasing political activism landed him in jail in 1962. By the mid-1960s, Golshiri had published a potpourri of poems and short stories, and then was instrumental in establishing Jong-e Isfahan, a progressive literary journal that quickly moved to the vanguard of Iranian fiction. Between 1965 and 1973, Jong-e Isfahan was among the leading literary journals of the time, initiating some serious critical discussions about the nature and function of fiction.
Golshiri had begun writing fiction in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s his short stories and poems were appearing in various literary journals. His first collection of short stories, Mesl-e Hamisheh (As Always, 1968), announced a major literary voice—confident, defiant, with detailed attention to a range of prose and narrative techniques. But it was not until the publication of Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) that the Tehrani literary critics had to pay a visit to Isfahan. This novel was adapted into a film by Bahman Farmanara in 1974: see Prince Ehtejab.
Golshiri's second novel, Christine va Kid (Christine and the Kid, 1971), was not as critically acclaimed as Prince Ehtejab, but as an experiment in autobiographical narrative it was a tour de force of unparalleled daring and experimentation—staccato phrases, broken and unreliable memories, miniature-like narrative depictions, implication of the reader in the narrative, and many other similar tropes. His political activities then once again landed him in jail for about six months in 1973.
At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, Golshiri was active in organizing the famous "Ten Nights" of poetry and prose readings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran, a watershed of revolutionary mobilization against the Pahlavi regime. In the summer of 1978, he was invited to attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. While in the US he gave a series of lectures to Iranian students across the country.
Tuesday 17 March 2015
Bahman Farmanara (Director)
Born: Tehran, 1942.Raised and educated in Iran, Bahman Farmanara received his higher education at the London School of Music and Dramatic Arts and then at the University of Southern California. In 1966 he returned to Iran and began a career with the National Iranian Radio and Television. His first film was 'Nowruz and Caviar' (1971), a documentary about the famous Iranian delicacy and the poverty of its producers. His first feature film, 'Qamar Khanom's House' (1972), was a complete flop. Soon after that, Farmanara began working at a film production company financed by the royal family. But by 1974, he had quit that dubious distinction and directed Prince Ehtejab, based on the novel by Houshang Golshiri.
At the beginning of the revolution, Farmanara made another film based on Golshiri's story 'Tall Shadows of Wind' (1979). And after the revolution Farmanara moved to France and then to Canada, where he established a film distribution company. In the early 1990s, family matters brought him back to Iran, where he began teaching at the Tehran College of Cinema and Theater. By the end of the decade, Farmanara made a triumphant return to cinema with his wise, mature, confident, and caring Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (2000). Two years later, his House Built on Water created yet another storm of controversy with the censors.
Friday 27 February 2015
Brick and Mirror (Film)
1965. Dir: Ebrahim Golestan.
Context:
The title is taken from a verse by Attar: “What the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.”
Golestan had come to make Mud Brick and Mirror after an impressive career as a major voice in modern Persian letters, as well as a successful career as a documentary filmmaker.
Golestan began shooting this film in the spring of 1963 and filming was interrupted by two crucial incidents: A very expensive lens in his camera fell and broke while shooting the courthouse scene; and Ayatollah Khomeini led his first, aborted attempt at toppling the Pahlavi monarchy in June of the same year. It was produced at a particularly poignant moment in the history of Iranian cinema. After decades of commercial and melodramatic filmmaking, something serious was bound to happen, and Golestan was steadfast in seeing that it did.
The Film:
The portrayal of the relationship between Hashem and Taji is by far the most successful such depiction in the Iranian cinema of the time (and perhaps one of the first of its kind, in its intimacy). Hashem is obnoxious and overbearing. Taji is, by and large, accommodating, and yet persistent.
His camera movement in the orphanage sequence is equally confident and fluent—competently conveying the sense of bureaucratic formality and emotive vacuity of the space. But by far the most enduring cinematic aspect of Brick and Mirror is Golestan's extraordinary competence in shooting on location, something quite rare that early in Iranian cinema. This was not without its contingent hazards. In the course of shooting the courthouse scene, an expensive lens in Golestan's camera fell and broke. He had to wait for months before he could secure another lens from Europe.
In an interview Golestan has said he had to choose and measure the length of the streets he shot (as the background of his protagonists), the street traffic, and the conversation between the couple in a way that would be compatible with the rhythm of their dialogue and the length of their exchange. The result is an astoundingly atmospheric depiction of the city of Tehran in the early 1960s.
In an interview quoted by Dabashi, Golestan has said of his film:
Reception:
Brick and Mirror was a box-office fiasco, a critical failure, and a victim of paralyzing official censorship. Politically, the timing of Brick and Mirror could not have been worse. Though it wasn't released until 1965, it was shot during the June 1963 uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini against Mohammad Reza Shah. Though the uprising was brutally suppressed, at the time government officials were in no mood for what they considered to be the dark and critical atmosphere of Golestan's first feature film.
Dabashi: "Socially, its release coincided with that of the most popular melodramatic film in the history of Iranian cinema, Siyamak Yasami's Qaruns Treasure (1965). While Golestan's Mud Brick and Mirror was stumbling at the box office, Yasami's Qaruns Treasure was breaking every record on the books. Mud Brick and Mirror, however, had been categorized as an intellectual film that was too arcane for even public intellectuals to grasp. But that was simply because Golestan's film was too new for the Iranian public, which was used to films like Yasami's, to understand. There was as yet no language, no diction, no visual memory or aesthetic parameter with which to understand Golestan's valiant effort to transform the Persian literary tradition and imagination into a contemporary visual art." [M&M]
References/Resources:
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2007/05/ebrahim-golestan/
Context:
The title is taken from a verse by Attar: “What the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.”
Golestan had come to make Mud Brick and Mirror after an impressive career as a major voice in modern Persian letters, as well as a successful career as a documentary filmmaker.
Golestan began shooting this film in the spring of 1963 and filming was interrupted by two crucial incidents: A very expensive lens in his camera fell and broke while shooting the courthouse scene; and Ayatollah Khomeini led his first, aborted attempt at toppling the Pahlavi monarchy in June of the same year. It was produced at a particularly poignant moment in the history of Iranian cinema. After decades of commercial and melodramatic filmmaking, something serious was bound to happen, and Golestan was steadfast in seeing that it did.
The Film:
The portrayal of the relationship between Hashem and Taji is by far the most successful such depiction in the Iranian cinema of the time (and perhaps one of the first of its kind, in its intimacy). Hashem is obnoxious and overbearing. Taji is, by and large, accommodating, and yet persistent.
His camera movement in the orphanage sequence is equally confident and fluent—competently conveying the sense of bureaucratic formality and emotive vacuity of the space. But by far the most enduring cinematic aspect of Brick and Mirror is Golestan's extraordinary competence in shooting on location, something quite rare that early in Iranian cinema. This was not without its contingent hazards. In the course of shooting the courthouse scene, an expensive lens in Golestan's camera fell and broke. He had to wait for months before he could secure another lens from Europe.
In an interview Golestan has said he had to choose and measure the length of the streets he shot (as the background of his protagonists), the street traffic, and the conversation between the couple in a way that would be compatible with the rhythm of their dialogue and the length of their exchange. The result is an astoundingly atmospheric depiction of the city of Tehran in the early 1960s.
In an interview quoted by Dabashi, Golestan has said of his film:
You ought to see this film like a prism. A prism can have some seven or eight parallelographic sides. If you were to look at it from just one side you would only see that one side. But if you were to turn it around, you would see that it has another side, and then if you turned it yet again, you would see yet another side. If you get away from it, you will see that its parallelographic sides will form a volume, and if you were to turn it around very fast, according to the famous experiment of Newton, all the colors will come together and form white. I have made the entire film on this principle. You should not consider any one of these parallelographic sides independent of each other. They all ought to be seen simultaneously, as they are set next to each other, so that the voluminous feel of the whole film is grasped.
Reception:
Brick and Mirror was a box-office fiasco, a critical failure, and a victim of paralyzing official censorship. Politically, the timing of Brick and Mirror could not have been worse. Though it wasn't released until 1965, it was shot during the June 1963 uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini against Mohammad Reza Shah. Though the uprising was brutally suppressed, at the time government officials were in no mood for what they considered to be the dark and critical atmosphere of Golestan's first feature film.
Dabashi: "Socially, its release coincided with that of the most popular melodramatic film in the history of Iranian cinema, Siyamak Yasami's Qaruns Treasure (1965). While Golestan's Mud Brick and Mirror was stumbling at the box office, Yasami's Qaruns Treasure was breaking every record on the books. Mud Brick and Mirror, however, had been categorized as an intellectual film that was too arcane for even public intellectuals to grasp. But that was simply because Golestan's film was too new for the Iranian public, which was used to films like Yasami's, to understand. There was as yet no language, no diction, no visual memory or aesthetic parameter with which to understand Golestan's valiant effort to transform the Persian literary tradition and imagination into a contemporary visual art." [M&M]
References/Resources:
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2007/05/ebrahim-golestan/
Monday 16 February 2015
The Cow (Film)
1969. Dir: Dariush Mehrjui. Scr: Mehrjui and Gholamhossein Saedi.
Regarded as one of the seminal works of the 'First Iranian New Wave', and one of the first Iranian films to garner international recognition and acclaim.
Context:
This was only the second directorial effort of Mehrjui, a young and ambitious director, who teamed up with his friend, the famous dramatist and writer Saedi, a partnership which helped Mehrjui grow in stature as a director. In 1970, Nasser Taghvai would also film an adaptation of a Saedi story, Calm in the Presence of Others.
Hamid Dabashi writes of Saedi: "Saedi's particular manner of realism was anchored in an almost clinical psychopathology of the uncanny, and his perceptive articulation of psychosis (neurotic anxiety, to be exact) in his fiction was utterly unprecedented in Persian literature. Saedi's psychedelic realism, through its evocation of the supra-normal and the creative use of superstition, hallucination, and delusions, effected an acute intensification of a literary awareness of reality" (See also http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saedi-gholam-hosayn)
The Film:
Reception:
"The Cow premiered two years after its completion at the Venice Film Festival in 1971 to a very positive but altogether imperturbable reception. Both at home and abroad, the film suffered from a mind-numbing over-politicization by film critics who insisted on reading it as a mere political allegory. The principal culprit was, of course, the censorship that forced Mehrjui to preface the film with a disclaimer explaining that the story had taken place about forty years earlier, to insure that audiences did not associate the backwardness portrayed in the film with the modern image of Iran the Shah of Shahs was trying to foist upon the world." [Dabashi, M&M]
Regarded as one of the seminal works of the 'First Iranian New Wave', and one of the first Iranian films to garner international recognition and acclaim.
Context:
This was only the second directorial effort of Mehrjui, a young and ambitious director, who teamed up with his friend, the famous dramatist and writer Saedi, a partnership which helped Mehrjui grow in stature as a director. In 1970, Nasser Taghvai would also film an adaptation of a Saedi story, Calm in the Presence of Others.
Hamid Dabashi writes of Saedi: "Saedi's particular manner of realism was anchored in an almost clinical psychopathology of the uncanny, and his perceptive articulation of psychosis (neurotic anxiety, to be exact) in his fiction was utterly unprecedented in Persian literature. Saedi's psychedelic realism, through its evocation of the supra-normal and the creative use of superstition, hallucination, and delusions, effected an acute intensification of a literary awareness of reality" (See also http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saedi-gholam-hosayn)
The Film:
Reception:
"The Cow premiered two years after its completion at the Venice Film Festival in 1971 to a very positive but altogether imperturbable reception. Both at home and abroad, the film suffered from a mind-numbing over-politicization by film critics who insisted on reading it as a mere political allegory. The principal culprit was, of course, the censorship that forced Mehrjui to preface the film with a disclaimer explaining that the story had taken place about forty years earlier, to insure that audiences did not associate the backwardness portrayed in the film with the modern image of Iran the Shah of Shahs was trying to foist upon the world." [Dabashi, M&M]
Dariush Mehrjui (Director)
Born: Tehran, 1939.
Proclaims the influence of Italian Neorealism, Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith.
His second feature as director, The Cow, won international and critical acclaim, and was a collaboration with the renowned writer Gholamhossein Saedi, who had also written the initial story the film was based on.
"After his early upbringing and education he left for the United States, where he attended college at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying film, although he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Mehrjui returned to Iran in 1965 and began his long and extraordinarily productive career with a bizarre spoof called Diamond 33 (1965), a frivolous adaptation of the James Bond films—a rather inauspicious beginning for an otherwise seminal figure in Iranian cinema. While in Los Angeles, Mehrjui had become interested in Gholamhossein Saedi's dramatic works, and soon after the fiasco of Diamond 33 he approached Saedi and the two of them began collaborating on the screen adaptation of one of his short stories—"The Cow"—which became by far the most significant achievement of Iranian cinema after the pioneering works of Farrokhzad and Golestan, before the sudden rise of a new generation of visionary filmmakers in the 1980s." [Dabashi, M&M]
His films are mostly adaptations of literary or theatrical works, of Persian or European literature, including 'Woyzeck' and a Henrik Ibsen play.
Proclaims the influence of Italian Neorealism, Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith.
His second feature as director, The Cow, won international and critical acclaim, and was a collaboration with the renowned writer Gholamhossein Saedi, who had also written the initial story the film was based on.
"After his early upbringing and education he left for the United States, where he attended college at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying film, although he graduated with a degree in philosophy. Mehrjui returned to Iran in 1965 and began his long and extraordinarily productive career with a bizarre spoof called Diamond 33 (1965), a frivolous adaptation of the James Bond films—a rather inauspicious beginning for an otherwise seminal figure in Iranian cinema. While in Los Angeles, Mehrjui had become interested in Gholamhossein Saedi's dramatic works, and soon after the fiasco of Diamond 33 he approached Saedi and the two of them began collaborating on the screen adaptation of one of his short stories—"The Cow"—which became by far the most significant achievement of Iranian cinema after the pioneering works of Farrokhzad and Golestan, before the sudden rise of a new generation of visionary filmmakers in the 1980s." [Dabashi, M&M]
His films are mostly adaptations of literary or theatrical works, of Persian or European literature, including 'Woyzeck' and a Henrik Ibsen play.
Ebrahim Golestan (Director)
Born: Shiraz, 1922.
He was a writer of short stories before moving into cinema, influenced by the then golden era of modern Persian literature (e.g. Sadegh Hedayat). He was just as keenly interested by photography and cinema as he was by literature. He was from an upper-middle class background and benefited from advantageous connections. For a while, he was a member of the Iranian Socialist party (Tudeh).
Famously had a professional collaboration and a romantic liaison with Forough Farrokhzad.
Soon after the publication of his second collection of stories, Golestan shifted gear and established his movie studio, Golestan Films, in 1956. A Fire (1958) was among his first productions. The film was directed by Golestan, shot by his younger brother, Shahrokh Golestan and edited by Farrokhzad, was the very first Iranian film to receive acclaim at an international film festival.
In 1963, Golestan made Tappeh-ha-ye Marlik (Marlik Hills), a documentary about archeological excavations in northern Iran, which won him yet another award at the Venice Film Festival.
"There is no escaping the fact that Golestan's The Tide, the Coral, and the Granite (1961) is an effective over-aestheticization and simultaneous de-politicization of the neocolonial robbery of Iranian oil by a corrupt monarchy and a conglomerate of transnational oil companies. But at the same time, there is no escaping the equally important fact that the visual vocabulary of Iranian cinema and the poetic disposition of Golestan's prose are blossoming like beautiful water lilies on the surface of this very dirty swamp. This paradoxical phenomenon is endemic to the politics of Iranian poetics." [Dabashi, M&M]
In 1963, he started filming what is generally considered his masterpiece, the fiction feature Brick and Mirror.
Dabashi labels his style, both in his prose and in his films, as 'affective realism' (in the sense of affectation, artificial etc.). In this he sees an early link to the blend of fact and fantasy taken from pre-modern Persian literary and theatrical (taziyeh) traditions into Iranian cinema.
He was a writer of short stories before moving into cinema, influenced by the then golden era of modern Persian literature (e.g. Sadegh Hedayat). He was just as keenly interested by photography and cinema as he was by literature. He was from an upper-middle class background and benefited from advantageous connections. For a while, he was a member of the Iranian Socialist party (Tudeh).
Famously had a professional collaboration and a romantic liaison with Forough Farrokhzad.
Soon after the publication of his second collection of stories, Golestan shifted gear and established his movie studio, Golestan Films, in 1956. A Fire (1958) was among his first productions. The film was directed by Golestan, shot by his younger brother, Shahrokh Golestan and edited by Farrokhzad, was the very first Iranian film to receive acclaim at an international film festival.
In 1963, Golestan made Tappeh-ha-ye Marlik (Marlik Hills), a documentary about archeological excavations in northern Iran, which won him yet another award at the Venice Film Festival.
"There is no escaping the fact that Golestan's The Tide, the Coral, and the Granite (1961) is an effective over-aestheticization and simultaneous de-politicization of the neocolonial robbery of Iranian oil by a corrupt monarchy and a conglomerate of transnational oil companies. But at the same time, there is no escaping the equally important fact that the visual vocabulary of Iranian cinema and the poetic disposition of Golestan's prose are blossoming like beautiful water lilies on the surface of this very dirty swamp. This paradoxical phenomenon is endemic to the politics of Iranian poetics." [Dabashi, M&M]
In 1963, he started filming what is generally considered his masterpiece, the fiction feature Brick and Mirror.
Dabashi labels his style, both in his prose and in his films, as 'affective realism' (in the sense of affectation, artificial etc.). In this he sees an early link to the blend of fact and fantasy taken from pre-modern Persian literary and theatrical (taziyeh) traditions into Iranian cinema.
Monday 9 February 2015
ABC Africa (Film)
2001. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.
Context:
Documentary set in Uganda, commissioned by the UN organisation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, who invited Kiarostami to make a film there. Of course Kiarostami, who had worked for so long as the Kanun making commissioned films ostensibly for educational viewing by children, but which he shaped with his own intents, was no stranger to commissioned projects. It was Kiarostami's first documentary in a decade (since Close Up?). It is quite likely he had Farrokzhad's The House is Black as an ideal in mind. Like that film, the initial project gives way to very personal depths.
Marks Kiarostami's DV debut. He in fact travelled to Uganda, together with photographer/cinematographer Seidollah Samadian, first with the intention of shooting some practice rushes cheaply with a digital camera, but in the end liked this footage so much that it ended up making the film and no other footage was shot.
They had over 20 hours of footage which took them 8 months to edit into the final feature.
The film follows a similar template to many of his earlier films, having a stranger/foreigner (this time no more surrogates, it is himself) wandering around a foreign region which they at first do not understand at all but are eventually transformed and affected by. It can also be seen as the first step outside Iran of a filmmaker who would later make films only outside Iran. So it is once again a tale of journey and discovery, and also once again a film about children (the Ugandan orphans and AIDS victims).
The Film:
Several critics have noted that the film becomes worthy of interest as more than a mere commissioned documentary from the scene at the hospital in Masaka, moving from purely educational tone (a waste of Kiarostami's great talents as filmmaker naturally) to more personal and contemplative insights.
Context:
Documentary set in Uganda, commissioned by the UN organisation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, who invited Kiarostami to make a film there. Of course Kiarostami, who had worked for so long as the Kanun making commissioned films ostensibly for educational viewing by children, but which he shaped with his own intents, was no stranger to commissioned projects. It was Kiarostami's first documentary in a decade (since Close Up?). It is quite likely he had Farrokzhad's The House is Black as an ideal in mind. Like that film, the initial project gives way to very personal depths.
Marks Kiarostami's DV debut. He in fact travelled to Uganda, together with photographer/cinematographer Seidollah Samadian, first with the intention of shooting some practice rushes cheaply with a digital camera, but in the end liked this footage so much that it ended up making the film and no other footage was shot.
They had over 20 hours of footage which took them 8 months to edit into the final feature.
The film follows a similar template to many of his earlier films, having a stranger/foreigner (this time no more surrogates, it is himself) wandering around a foreign region which they at first do not understand at all but are eventually transformed and affected by. It can also be seen as the first step outside Iran of a filmmaker who would later make films only outside Iran. So it is once again a tale of journey and discovery, and also once again a film about children (the Ugandan orphans and AIDS victims).
The Film:
Several critics have noted that the film becomes worthy of interest as more than a mere commissioned documentary from the scene at the hospital in Masaka, moving from purely educational tone (a waste of Kiarostami's great talents as filmmaker naturally) to more personal and contemplative insights.
Saturday 7 February 2015
The Wind Will Carry Us (Film)
1999. Dir: Abbas Kiarostami.
Context:
Based on a story by Mahmud Aydin (who is he?).
The film is set in Iranian Kurdistan, and was followed by a couple more interesting films set in that region: Blackboards by Samira Makhmalbaf, and A Time for Drunken Horses, by Bahman Ghobadi, who actually was Kiarostami's AD on The Wind Will Carry Us and cameos as Yusuf. The Kurdish setting of this film is seen as some as an indirect political statement, recognising Kurdish existence by going to film there. Kiarostami, as is usually the case for him, has been far more guarded when asked about any direct political intentions. However the trip to a region that was new both for his films and to him personally, will mirror the trip made by the main character Behzad and hence deepen the autobiographical resonance (see further down) of the film. In some sense this trip, by the character and by Kiarostami, also figure as a reworking of Life and Nothing More.
The shoot itself was problematic, partly due to difficulties communicating with the reticent locals and due to conflict between Kiarostami and his DP Mahmud Kalari. Post-production was no less stressful, taking nine months, and Kiarostami has said that he was even close to abandoning the project at some point.
The Film:
Like so many other Kiarostami films, this is a journey of self-discovery, though a slow, unexpectedly tortuous one, for the character of Behzad. As usual there is a 'guide' to this journey, in the character of the doctor (a pir, an initiating teacher: see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pir_%28Sufism%29), who arrives after the accident of the gravedigger reawakens a sense of solidarity within Behzad. He offers to Behzad a new perspective and outlook onto the world and life (and he also recites an Omar Khayyam quatrain).
Kiarostami has himself stated that the doctor's advice to 'open the eyes of the heart as wide as those of the body' as the central theme of the film.
Like in many other of his films, set in rural Iran, the nature and countryside of these rural regions have a special meaning to Kiarostami which he moulds into a symbolic setting, transcending its actual material limitations. They represent something to him, closely tied to his deep love of nature and contemplating it (c.f. his photography), and this is partly why he used it as a setting so many times. (Think of a very loose analogy, like what Mexico represent to Peckinpah, an idyllic oasis and a paradise lost, but of course in his films far removed from any real Mexico).
We are not provided with all the information we usually expect from a narrative, but instead have to construct meaning from what little we do see and hear.
It is also a film about the gaze and the re-education of the gaze (ties in with the camera being used as 'mirror' during shaving scene and the autobiographical elements, and Behzad's outlook being altered, and the final scene where Behzad washes his car's windscreen - his vision of the world has now been 'purified').
The final shot then follows the bone thrown by Behzad, as it flows down the stream (mirroring the rolling apple earlier, and perhaps referenced in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), resonating with the ideas of cycles of life and nature. Of course, via the title, it also carries a resonance with the poetry of Omar Khayyam, where all things eventually turning into dust is a recurring motif.
Poetry plays an even more prevalent role in this film than in earlier Kiarostami works, with actual poems and passages being recited or referred to, namely the works of Omar Khayyam, Shohab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad (from whom the title of the film is taken). The sensualist poetry of Farrokhad, especially of the poem 'The Wind Will Carry Us' from her anthology 'Rebirth', ties in well with the strands of Khayyam's poetry Kiarostami uses to flesh out his themes here. Her poem implies we should make the most of life, take as much pleasure out of it while we can, before the cycle of all things inevitable comes to fly us away, like leaves, from the tree we thought we were rooted to. Behzad then himself recites Farrokhad's poetry, to the girl, down in the cellar.
In this film Kiarostami self-consciously tackles the issue of film directors, from a more urban, 'sophisticated' world, coming to spend time in a rural region they don't fully understand (and in the case of Behzad make no effort to) with only the single-minded aim of shooting a film and then going home. Kiarostami addressed this also, in more or less direct ways, in films like Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees. In the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum: "the particular ethics of The Wind Will Carry Us consist largely of Kiarostami reflecting on his own practice as a 'media person' exploiting poor people: Behzad may be the closest thing in Kiarostami's work to a critical self-portrait, at least... since The Report. ... Kiarostami is critiquing the whole premise of his film-making from an ethical standpoint"[from Rosenbaum piece on this film published in Chicago Reader]. Kiarostami has himself admitted an autobiographical element in this film [interview with Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana].
Reception:
The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Domestically however, and unsurprisingly, it faced the usual censorship problems.
References/Resources:
http://www.asharperfocus.com/Wind.html
Context:
Based on a story by Mahmud Aydin (who is he?).
The film is set in Iranian Kurdistan, and was followed by a couple more interesting films set in that region: Blackboards by Samira Makhmalbaf, and A Time for Drunken Horses, by Bahman Ghobadi, who actually was Kiarostami's AD on The Wind Will Carry Us and cameos as Yusuf. The Kurdish setting of this film is seen as some as an indirect political statement, recognising Kurdish existence by going to film there. Kiarostami, as is usually the case for him, has been far more guarded when asked about any direct political intentions. However the trip to a region that was new both for his films and to him personally, will mirror the trip made by the main character Behzad and hence deepen the autobiographical resonance (see further down) of the film. In some sense this trip, by the character and by Kiarostami, also figure as a reworking of Life and Nothing More.
The shoot itself was problematic, partly due to difficulties communicating with the reticent locals and due to conflict between Kiarostami and his DP Mahmud Kalari. Post-production was no less stressful, taking nine months, and Kiarostami has said that he was even close to abandoning the project at some point.
The Film:
Like so many other Kiarostami films, this is a journey of self-discovery, though a slow, unexpectedly tortuous one, for the character of Behzad. As usual there is a 'guide' to this journey, in the character of the doctor (a pir, an initiating teacher: see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pir_%28Sufism%29), who arrives after the accident of the gravedigger reawakens a sense of solidarity within Behzad. He offers to Behzad a new perspective and outlook onto the world and life (and he also recites an Omar Khayyam quatrain).
Kiarostami has himself stated that the doctor's advice to 'open the eyes of the heart as wide as those of the body' as the central theme of the film.
Like in many other of his films, set in rural Iran, the nature and countryside of these rural regions have a special meaning to Kiarostami which he moulds into a symbolic setting, transcending its actual material limitations. They represent something to him, closely tied to his deep love of nature and contemplating it (c.f. his photography), and this is partly why he used it as a setting so many times. (Think of a very loose analogy, like what Mexico represent to Peckinpah, an idyllic oasis and a paradise lost, but of course in his films far removed from any real Mexico).
We are not provided with all the information we usually expect from a narrative, but instead have to construct meaning from what little we do see and hear.
It is also a film about the gaze and the re-education of the gaze (ties in with the camera being used as 'mirror' during shaving scene and the autobiographical elements, and Behzad's outlook being altered, and the final scene where Behzad washes his car's windscreen - his vision of the world has now been 'purified').
The final shot then follows the bone thrown by Behzad, as it flows down the stream (mirroring the rolling apple earlier, and perhaps referenced in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), resonating with the ideas of cycles of life and nature. Of course, via the title, it also carries a resonance with the poetry of Omar Khayyam, where all things eventually turning into dust is a recurring motif.
Poetry plays an even more prevalent role in this film than in earlier Kiarostami works, with actual poems and passages being recited or referred to, namely the works of Omar Khayyam, Shohab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad (from whom the title of the film is taken). The sensualist poetry of Farrokhad, especially of the poem 'The Wind Will Carry Us' from her anthology 'Rebirth', ties in well with the strands of Khayyam's poetry Kiarostami uses to flesh out his themes here. Her poem implies we should make the most of life, take as much pleasure out of it while we can, before the cycle of all things inevitable comes to fly us away, like leaves, from the tree we thought we were rooted to. Behzad then himself recites Farrokhad's poetry, to the girl, down in the cellar.
In this film Kiarostami self-consciously tackles the issue of film directors, from a more urban, 'sophisticated' world, coming to spend time in a rural region they don't fully understand (and in the case of Behzad make no effort to) with only the single-minded aim of shooting a film and then going home. Kiarostami addressed this also, in more or less direct ways, in films like Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees. In the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum: "the particular ethics of The Wind Will Carry Us consist largely of Kiarostami reflecting on his own practice as a 'media person' exploiting poor people: Behzad may be the closest thing in Kiarostami's work to a critical self-portrait, at least... since The Report. ... Kiarostami is critiquing the whole premise of his film-making from an ethical standpoint"[from Rosenbaum piece on this film published in Chicago Reader]. Kiarostami has himself admitted an autobiographical element in this film [interview with Thierry Jousse and Serge Toubiana].
Reception:
The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Domestically however, and unsurprisingly, it faced the usual censorship problems.
References/Resources:
http://www.asharperfocus.com/Wind.html
Sunday 1 February 2015
A Fire (Film)
1958. Dir: Ebrahim Golestan. Edited by Forough Farrokhzad.
http://vimeo.com/20373488
"By the late 1950s, Golestan had solidly established himself as a major literary voice with momentous poetic vision. The style he had carefully cultivated in his literary works—two impressive collections of short stories—was now fully at his disposal to transform a simple documentary about a runaway fire in an oilfield into a work of art. From this moment forward, the direct transformation of commissioned documentary to a work of art becomes the defining occasion of Golestan's aesthetic—navigating the creative distance between factual evidence and its affective sublimation. The lyrical diction of Golestan's voice-over in A Fire is strategically located somewhere between the poise of its contemplative nature and the pose of its poetic performance." [Dabashi, M&M]
Reception:
Won the Bronze Medal at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and hence became the first Iranian film to win such international recognition.
http://vimeo.com/20373488
"By the late 1950s, Golestan had solidly established himself as a major literary voice with momentous poetic vision. The style he had carefully cultivated in his literary works—two impressive collections of short stories—was now fully at his disposal to transform a simple documentary about a runaway fire in an oilfield into a work of art. From this moment forward, the direct transformation of commissioned documentary to a work of art becomes the defining occasion of Golestan's aesthetic—navigating the creative distance between factual evidence and its affective sublimation. The lyrical diction of Golestan's voice-over in A Fire is strategically located somewhere between the poise of its contemplative nature and the pose of its poetic performance." [Dabashi, M&M]
Reception:
Won the Bronze Medal at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and hence became the first Iranian film to win such international recognition.
The House is Black (Film)
1962. Dir: Forough Farrokhzad.
The scientiffic voiceovers were written and most probably narrated by Ebrahim Golestan, while Farrokhzad's narration is more 'poetic' and refers to biblical passages.
The film was commissioned, and partly produced, by a governmental agency responsible for curing lepers. However the filmmakers were allowed a largely free hand, and despite the scientific voiceover and leprosy-curing discourse in part of the narration, it is clearly possible to read in the film an underlying mood that is more poetic, personal and has nothing to do with leprosy in particular but more universal things instead.
Farrokhzad used a camera crew from Golestan Films, the company of Ebrahim Golestan, whose documentaries she had edited and helped to make. This had formed an apprenticeship to cinema for her, and hence she was at this stage ready to make her own project.
Shot in 12 days, at the Baba Daghi leper colony in Tabriz, north-west Iran.
Farrokhzad won the trust of the people at the colony and in fact adopted one of the boys after making the film.
Farrokhzad said of the film, that it is "about the life of the lepers and at the same time about life itself—an example of life in general. This is a picture of any sealed and closed society—a picture of being useless, isolated, insular, futile. Even healthy people living outside a leprosarium in the apparently healthy society may share these characteristics, without being afflicted with leprosy. There is no difference between a young man who aimlessly loiters in the streets and that leper in my film who keeps walking by the wall. This young man too has certain pains of which we are unaware."
Dabashi, making reference to the science-religion divide among other things, writes: "Farrokhzad used the leper colony as a metaphor for Iranian society and thus revealed the far more pervasive social leprosy of her time". But it must be remembered that this was the Shah's Iran, an ideologically different dictatorship than the later Islamic Republic. He also suggests that her own status as social pariah (due to the scandals following her and her supposed promiscuity) is what intuitively led her to relate to the lepers in The House is Black, for they too were marked, literally, as social outcasts.
Reception:
It was strongly criticised and ridiculed in Iran, even subjected to some sexist attacks on Farrokhzad's claims to being a filmmaker, with some sectors openly attributing the film wholly to Golestan. This reaction could be partly the cause for her never returning to the experience of filmmaking, and instead concentrating on her primary love, writing poetry.
However at the 1963 International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, it had a much kinder reception and won the top prize.
References
Dabashi, M&M.
The scientiffic voiceovers were written and most probably narrated by Ebrahim Golestan, while Farrokhzad's narration is more 'poetic' and refers to biblical passages.
The film was commissioned, and partly produced, by a governmental agency responsible for curing lepers. However the filmmakers were allowed a largely free hand, and despite the scientific voiceover and leprosy-curing discourse in part of the narration, it is clearly possible to read in the film an underlying mood that is more poetic, personal and has nothing to do with leprosy in particular but more universal things instead.
Farrokhzad used a camera crew from Golestan Films, the company of Ebrahim Golestan, whose documentaries she had edited and helped to make. This had formed an apprenticeship to cinema for her, and hence she was at this stage ready to make her own project.
Shot in 12 days, at the Baba Daghi leper colony in Tabriz, north-west Iran.
Farrokhzad won the trust of the people at the colony and in fact adopted one of the boys after making the film.
Farrokhzad said of the film, that it is "about the life of the lepers and at the same time about life itself—an example of life in general. This is a picture of any sealed and closed society—a picture of being useless, isolated, insular, futile. Even healthy people living outside a leprosarium in the apparently healthy society may share these characteristics, without being afflicted with leprosy. There is no difference between a young man who aimlessly loiters in the streets and that leper in my film who keeps walking by the wall. This young man too has certain pains of which we are unaware."
Dabashi, making reference to the science-religion divide among other things, writes: "Farrokhzad used the leper colony as a metaphor for Iranian society and thus revealed the far more pervasive social leprosy of her time". But it must be remembered that this was the Shah's Iran, an ideologically different dictatorship than the later Islamic Republic. He also suggests that her own status as social pariah (due to the scandals following her and her supposed promiscuity) is what intuitively led her to relate to the lepers in The House is Black, for they too were marked, literally, as social outcasts.
Reception:
It was strongly criticised and ridiculed in Iran, even subjected to some sexist attacks on Farrokhzad's claims to being a filmmaker, with some sectors openly attributing the film wholly to Golestan. This reaction could be partly the cause for her never returning to the experience of filmmaking, and instead concentrating on her primary love, writing poetry.
However at the 1963 International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, it had a much kinder reception and won the top prize.
References
Dabashi, M&M.
Forough Farrokhzad (Culture/History & Director)
Born: 1935, Tehran. Died: 1967, Tehran (Automobile accident).More famed as a modernist poet, of iconoclastic and feminist tendencies, she also made her name as a filmmaker with the short documentary about a leper colony, The House is Black, made in 1962.
Before this she had made her first steps into the world of cinema by working with Ebrahim Golestan, whose 1958 documentary A Fire she edited. That documentary, with its Bronze Medal award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival represents the first Iranian film to win international acclaim. She then collaborated on more of Golestan's films. She and Golestan were in love and were rumoured to be having an affair (Golestan being married). She also wrote scripts and acted in a few films. All of this was perfect apprenticeship, but one should not get the idea that filmmaking was particularly important to her creative life. Her poetry remains what is regarded as her greatest achievement and is not diminished in the slightest if one removes her brief brush with cinema. Nor is there any evidence that she value cinema any more than her other non-poetry artistic endeavours, such as painting or travel writing.
The failure of her marriage (she was a 16-year-old bride who convinced her father to let her marry) and subsequent divorce leading to her having to leave behind her only son, were traumatic and guilt-inducing experiences which inspired her art. In a way she had to leave behind her husband and son (and her father, i.e. all three patriarchal symbols) in order to fully emancipate herself as an artist. Dabashi reads in her art a simultaneous fear and attraction to the guilt and shame that consumes her. He also suggests that her own status as social pariah (due to the scandals following her and her supposed promiscuity) is what intuitively led her to relate to the lepers in The House is Black, for they too were marked, literally, as social outcasts.
Dabashi writes: "I feel I have wasted my life," she once wrote in a letter to Golestan, "and know much less than I should at the age of twenty-seven." This was in 1962, by which time she had published three of her five volumes of poetry and made The House Is Black, The same sentiment is evident in her travelogue from her trip to Europe in 1956. Whatever great work of art she saw in Italy left her feeling far more humbled than inspired.
Her works of poetry include the collections:
- Captive (1955)
- The Wall (1956)
- Rebellio (1958)
- Another Birth (1964)
- Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (1967)
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