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]