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."
Wednesday 10 June 2015
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'."
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