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:

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/

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]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)