Night of the Hunchback (Farrokh Ghaffari, 1964) | MoMA

Shab-e Ghouzi (Night of the Hunchback). 1964. Iran. Directed by Farrokh Ghaffari. Screenplay by Ghaffari, Jalal Moghadam. With Ghaffari, Pari Saberi, Paria Hakemi, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz.

Inspired by a tale in A Thousand and One Nights, this black comedy takes place over the course of one of those nights, as a troupe of traveling actors, the father of a bride, and a hairdresser and his assistant (played by director Farrokh Ghaffari himself) try to rid themselves of an unwelcome corpse while uptown Tehranis party to Ray Charles R&B. In a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, Ghaffari, also a critic and film historian, intended this film as a critique of upper-class pretensions and an ode to simple folkloric pleasures, and while the film was a commercial flop the film nonetheless gained international attention and promised a new beginning for Iranian cinema. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Four Iranian New Wave Films That You Must See

The Cow (1970)

Written for the catalogue of the 2015's edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato. The two other essential titles which were restored and shown in Bologna a few years after this were Brick & Mirror and The House Is Black.


A SIMPLE EVENT: THE BIRTH OF IRANIAN NEW WAVE CINEMA


This programme offers one way of looking at the birth of modern cinema in Iran, a development now commonly referred to as the Iranian New Wave. The films presented here (The Night It Rained, Night of the Hunchback, The Cow, A Simple Event) make up roughly one quarter of the New Wave films and were selected according to accessibility and print quality above notions of artistic merit alone.

This particular narrative concerns four filmmakers, each of whom returned home to Iran following a period spent overseas, in order to revolutionise, even if subconsciously, their national cinema. In doing so they also rebelled against a society they found apathetic and divided over matters of justice.

Night of the Hunchback (Farrokh Ghaffari, 1965)

From my Iranian New Wave programme notes, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, 2015. -- EK

SHAB-E GHUZI
Iran, 1965 Regia: Farrokh Ghaffari
T. int.: Night of the Hunchback. Scen.: Farrokh Ghaffari, Jalal Moghaddam. Dial.: Jalal Moghaddam. F.: Gerium Hayrapetian. M.: Ragnar. Mus.: Hossein Malek. Int.: Pari Saberi, Paria Hakemi, Khosro Sahami, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Farhang Amiri, Farrokh Ghaffari. Prod.: Iran Nema Studio.

Set over the course of one night, this black comedy focuses on the efforts of a group of stage actors, the father of a bride, and a hairdresser and his assistant (played by Ghaffari himself) to rid themselves of an unwelcome corpse, against the backdrop of uptown Tehranis partying to Ray Charles.

If this pioneering Iranian arthouse film is somehow difficult to pigeonhole, it’s partly due to Farrokh Ghaffari’s own resistance to easy categorisation within Iranian cinema: on the one hand, a true cinephile and intellectual disapproving of a society which he saw as a hotbed of deceit and corruption; on the other hand, a white collar worker at the very institutions which contributed to such cultural backwardness.

Ghaffari lived in Europe from the age of 10. A regular at the Paris Cinémathèque, he befriended Henri Langlois and with his encouragement returned to Iran in 1949 to initiate the Iranian equivalent of the Cinémathèque, Kanoon-e Melli-e Film, which hosted 616 screenings up to the time of the revolution.