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| Esmail Koushan |
When serving as the editor-in-chief of the now defunct Underline arts quarterly, I celebrated the centenary of Iranian film director-producer by commissioning two pieces on him. This is the second essay (the first one, by Nima Hassani-Nasab, is already available here), written by the untiring historian of Iranian cinema Abbas Baharloo. I'm publishing it here for the first time. — EK
Esmail Koushan: The Storm of Life
By Abbas Baharloo
A portrait of Esamil Koushan, one of the fathering figures of Iranian cinema
Esmail Koushan, producer, director, screenwriter, cinema owner and founder of the largest film studio in Iran, has been described as both ‘the father of Iranian cinema’ and ‘the bad guy of Iranian cinema’.
From the very beginning, Koushan was determined to be a pioneer. He was responsible for the first foreign film to be dubbed into Persian; he founded the first film studio in Iran, Mitra Film, after cinema had experienced a fallow period (1937-47) following the art form’s initial development there; and was the producer of the first Iranian talkie to be made in Iran, The Storm of Life (1948). He made possible the production of the first episodic film in Iran (The Spring Variety, 1949); he initiated the making of the first black and white CinemaScope film (Accusation, directed by Shapur Yasami, 1956), colour CinemaScope film (The Runaway Bride, which he directed himself, 1958), and the first films co-produced with France (Ebram in Paris, directed by himself, 1964), Turkey (Divine Justice, 1969), and West Germany (The Sleeping Lion, directed by Esmail’s brother, Mahmoud Koushan, 1976). He also initiated the publication of one of the first Iranian film magazines (Alam-e Honar or ‘The World of Art’, 1951).
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| Divine Justice (1969) |
Esmail Harir-Forush (his surname meant ‘the silk merchant’), who following the example of his uncle changed his surname to Koushan, was born in Tehran in 1917. He passed away in the same city on 5th July 1983. He began his studies at the Dar ol-Fonun School, and at the end of autumn 1937, at a time when the reign of Reza Shah had led to a contraction of commercial relations with Britain and an increase in contacts with Germany, he moved to the latter country to continue his education, studying economics in Berlin. At a time when he benefited from no financial assistance, he made the acquaintance of Bahram Keykhosro Shahrokh, son of a prominent Iranian politician and a newsreader for Radio Berlin.
During the Second World War, thanks to his press card from the Mard-e Azad (‘Free Man’) newspaper (the organ of the Tajaddod Party, an Iranian political organisation of the time committed to nationalism, secularism, and modernisation), he was able to join Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda apparatus and with help from Shahrokh became a Nazi Party journalist on the Eastern Front. During the same period, Koushan was a narrator of German war films and every night read the news and war reports on Radio Free Iran, broadcast to the Middle East from eastern Berlin. With the defeat of the Nazi army on the Eastern Front, he felt his collaboration with the Nazis would endanger him, and fearing the Allied armies fled to Austria.
Koushan made ends meet by selling newspapers and meanwhile obtained work as an actor at Wienfilm. There he made the acquaintance of an assistant director called Grueber, who showed him different film production processes, including those relating to the laboratory, the camera and dubbing. One day the police along with a British officer appeared and showed Koushan a photograph of himself that had appeared in a German newspaper, questioning him about it. Koushan immediately fled to Yugoslavia. From Belgrade, he went to Turkey, where he remained for a time.
Koushan was afraid to return to Iran. He had heard that someone called Mostafa Tajaddod, founder and general manager of the Bazargani Bank, had been arrested on his way back from Germany to Iran. As a result, Koushan resolved to do something profitable. Having seen a number of French films dubbed into Turkish, he decided to explore the possibility of dubbing films into Persian. Having consulted a number of Iranians, including his brother Ebrahim Koushan, and raised some capital with the help of two Iranian merchants, a Mr Pirayesh and his partner Aziz Talebi, he acquired a French film (Henri Decoin’s Premier rendez-vous, whose name in Persian he changed to The Runaway Girl) and a Spanish film called The Gypsy Girl from the manager of the Ses studio. With the help of a number of Iranian students Koushan dubbed the films at the same studio.
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| Premier rendez-vous (1941), dubbed and renamed as The Runaway Girl |
Koushan finally returned to Iran in 1946, formally registering the Mitra Film company that he had earlier founded while in Turkey. On 26th November 1946, he showed The Runaway Girl in the Crystal Cinema as the ‘first film ever dubbed into Persian’. The film’s positive reception was very exciting for the shareholders of Mitra Film. In the credits he made for the film, Koushan removed the name of the film’s original producers, the Continental Company, and replaced it with Mitra Film and the names of the dubbing artists. He likewise changed the names of the characters to Iranian names. These alterations led many to hold the erroneous belief that Mitra Film had produced the picture in one of the Turkish studios.
After this success, Koushan set up a laboratory in the courtyard of his father’s house, and rented the upper floor of the Metropole Cinema, moving some of his dubbing equipment there. At that time Seyfollah and Ghodratollah Rashidian, the owners of the Rex Cinema on Lalehzar Street and influential merchants, had just acquired four British films from the company of Arthur Rank, an English producer, and they gave them to Koushan to be dubbed. Koushan invited Ali Kesmai and Parviz Khatibi-Nuri to work with him, thereby expanding the size of the dubbing industry. The former was a translator and the second a playwright and well-known songwriter active in theatre and radio.
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| The Storm of Life (1948) [image source +] |
Koushan and his partners did not limit themselves to dubbing foreign films but resolved to make the first domestic film of the second period of Iranian filmmaking (1947 onwards). This film, The Storm of Life (directed by Ali Daryabeigi, 1948), was not well received by its audience at its first public screening. Koushan was, however, able to follow the trail earlier blazed by Avans Ouganians and Ebrahim Moradi, whose efforts had been instrumental in establishing filmmaking in Iran between 1921 and 1936, and to realise the dream of Abdolhossein Sepanta (another early pioneer) by founding a filmmaking institution in Iran with private capital and without state assistance.
In June 1948, after the failure of The Storm of Life, the shareholders of Mitra Film voted unanimously to wind up the company. Koushan immediately set up a new studio called Pars Film and began filming Amir’s Imprisonment (1948). This film and Pars Film’s next work, The Spring Variety (directed by Parviz Khatibi, 1949), were not commercial successes. Yet despite the mocking gaze of friends and family, the modest hope that Koushan had for the success of his work was not diminished.
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| Don’t Joke, I’ll Get Upset (Reza Safai, 1966), produced by Ismail Koushan |
Pars Film’s next work, Ashamed (1950), directed by Koushan himself and featuring the well-known singer Esmat Delkash and Hossein Daneshvar, had not yet been released when Koushan moved his premises from the Metropole Cinema to the Green Room on Takht-e Jamshid Street. This had previously been the cultural and leisure centre of British soldiers and officers in Tehran during the Allied occupation of Iran. After making a number of changes to this rented location to make it suitable for administrative work, editing, sound recording, a laboratory and screenings, Koushan had established a studio more worthy of the name. When Ashamed became a commercial success, as well as being shown at the Indian Film Festival, Koushan’s efforts to grow the studio and its technical and marketing capacities increased. Having produced two films in 1951, he then made three in 1952, and even a dreadful fire at Pars Film did nothing to dent his determination.
After the fire, Koushan bought a 2,000 square metre plot of land fourteen kilometres from Tehran on the road to Karaj. Construction work on the studio began in 1953 and ended in 1956. The studio had two big spaces, one a sound stage and the other a laboratory; two dubbing and screening rooms and numerous rooms for directors, actors, and writers. Alongside it, Koushan also had six villas built for his family. This was the largest film studio in Iran.
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| Gereftar [Caught] (Mahmoud Koushan, 1969), produced by Ismail Koushan |
In the years from 1947 to 1978, Koushan produced, directed, and shot tens of films, and for many years was president of the Union of Iranian Film Industries. Some years he made up to four or five films, but by the 1970s he was less involved in his productions, and in films where he was credited as the director he handed over all responsibilities to his brother, Mahmoud. Pars Film produced over ninety films between 1951 and the early 1970s. Critics constantly took the studio to task for the poor quality of its productions. During the middle period of Pars Film’s activities, Koushan generally remained quiet in the face of these criticisms, and only occasionally spoke out in defence of himself and the practices of his studio.
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| Usta Karim Nokaretim (Mahmoud Koushan, 1974), produced by Ismail Koushan |
At Pars Film, Dr Koushan spent all his life, and capital, on behalf of Iranian cinema. All his efforts went towards producing and presenting song-and-dance filled melodramas and superficially historical and epic films. He guided Iranian cinematic production for many years in terms of content, and the great bulk of Iranian cinema followed the example he and Pars Films had set. What became somewhat contemptuously known as ‘Filmfarsi’ is intimately bound up with his name. All the same, Koushan was one of the great lovers of cinema and in spite of all the failures he experienced, never did he choose to spend his life and labours in any other field.
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