La femme et l'animal (Feri Farzaneh, 1962)

La femme et l'animal

A much-welcomed online streaming of a series of short art and culture documentaries by Mostafa Farzaneh is significant in the sense that it allows for adding a few pages to the still being drafted history of the birth modern cinema in Iran. When I say "being drafted", I'm directly pointing at the question of access which is particularly relevant to these type of films, as Iran remains one of the last cases in cinema history where access to certain films is still systematically denied, with the majority of the films made prior to the 1979 revolution not available to the public.

Films like La femme et l'animal (Mostafa Farzaneh, 1962) whose director worked and was known in France as Feri Farzaneh, have been overlooked in reassessing the ebbs and flows of modern experience in Iranian cinema mostly due to that fact that they stand in a no man's land: produced in France with a French crew and in French language but essentially meant to promote Iranian cultural heritage through the medium of moving images to non-Iranians. Hence it is both "institutional cinema" in its approach to the subject and "cultural heritage cinema" in its reverence for it. So if Charles Ravier arranges French 13th music for this film whose subject is ancient Iran and the artifacts from Achaemenid Empire and earlier, it is because the film somehow clings to the common practices of "institutional cultural heritage" cinema, aiming for a cinéma de qualité.

Edited by Denise Baby (a regular Henri Calef collaborator), the film is built around the delightfully symbolic significance of the small objects and ornamentation from around 2500 years ago, focusing on those dealing with femininity, parturiency, and animals. As in some other ancient representational arts, the two, human and beast, sometimes become one. The artifacts are mindbogglingly expressive (a woman with a goat standing on her head looking partly like horns on her head, partly an extension of her body and character), a man holding in his arm a baby lion. And other mighty beasts showing off their golden teeth in their scary smiles of assurance. Like good art, the beasts are given soul, identity and spiritual function.

Shot by Jean Gonnet (who later worked with Marin Karmitz on his Comrades, 1970), it is often straightforwardly filmed, adhering to frontal, flatly lit filming of the objects. However, midway through the film, it introduces a play of darkness and light, adding more depth and volume. (Particularly memorable is a shot of objects flying in the air, briefly coming under light where they can be seen only for a few seconds before vanishing into darkness again.)

Farzaneh, second from left, shooting a scene in the Louvre in 1961.

There is cut then to an aerial view of Persepolis where hypothetically the artifacts have been sourced. The film ends with the narration suggesting the Roman–Persian Wars and the exchanges with The Byzantine Empire didn't affect or uproot this art which the film calls "humanist", that it remained intact, a common narrative of the mid-century Iran trying to restore the glories of Persian Empire.

The minimal and didactic narration whose role's been limited to delivering the facts is spoken by Jean Négroni who, in the same year, gave his voice to Chris Marker's La Jetée. Alas, none of that poetry and sense of timelessness of objects remains here. Nor it shares the dazzling cinematography which brings objects to life or the haunting voice-over that turns objects into floating concepts the way Ebrahim Golestan does it in Hills of Marlik which went into production around the same time as La femme et l'animal even though it was shown slightly later. More importantly, where Golestan subverts, Farzaneh remains loyal to the notion of "institutional cultural heritage" cinema and instead of presenting his thesis in the way he uses the medium that he works in, he becomes a curator of objects and demonstrates his view in the choice of them. — Ehsan Khoshbakht