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/
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