The Stranger and the Fog on Criterion Blu-ray

 

A holy grail of Cinema-ye Motafavet or Iranian New Wave, found and brought back to life in 2023, is now being released on Blu-ray by Criterion as part of the sixth volume of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. Impossible to see for decades, Bahram Beyzaie’s dazzling The Stranger and the Fog, about a mysterious stranger who arrives at a coastal village in a drifting boat and falls for a woman, was restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Bahram Beyzaie. The 4K restoration used the original camera and sound negatives and was carried out at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.

The film’s endlessly symbolic tale (ghosts of the past, narrow-minded villagers, and forces beyond the characters’ control) is a dizzying labyrinth of rituals. In its meticulously structured circular narrative, characters, times and spaces rhyme with and mirror one another, turning filmmaking into an act of dreaming. The Stranger and the Fog also gives prominence to a strong-willed woman played by Parvaneh Massoumi – both in terms of attention and desire, and in terms of agency and control – through which it transcends the confines of the victimised women so prevalent in 1970s Iranian cinema.

After Downpour and Chess of the Wind, this is the third pre-revolutionary Iranian modern classic to make its way first to the Bologna laboratories and then into the invaluable World Cinema Project boxed sets.

This release also marks a logical and welcome reduction in the size of the sets, from six titles to four, allowing more room for supplementary material.

The Stranger and the Fog will be released alongside Mortu nega, São Paulo, Incorporated and The Woman with the Knife. There is no real connection between these films, either stylistically or thematically, beyond their being among the more recent works to benefit from the Film Foundation’s support for international cinema. I would love to see these titles released as individual discs, although I understand that this might have been a financially riskier proposition for the distributors.

My contribution to The Stranger and the Fog took several forms. I coordinated the film’s shipment out of Iran, with special thanks to Ladan Taheri. It was my idea to ask the well-known actor Babak Karimi to carry it as passenger luggage, thereby avoiding potential complications that could have resulted in the film being confiscated by Iranian customs. (This is a banned film – period.) I also acted as an intermediary between the late Beyzaie, in Palo Alto, and Giandomenico Zeppa in Bologna, who was responsible for the film’s colour grading. Finally, I translated the English subtitles.

The set’s booklet includes a substantial essay by me on the film’s production history, Beyzaie’s life and work, and my interpretation of the labyrinthine narrative of the film, one of the more challenging films of the 1970s to interpret.