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]