Showing posts with label Iranian New Wave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iranian New Wave. Show all posts

Wednesday 25 October 2023

Tabi’at-e Bijan [Still Life] (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)

Still Life

Tabi'at-e Bijan (Still Life). 1974. Iran. Written and directed by Sohrab Shahid Saless. With Zadour Bonyadi, Mohammed Kani, Hedayatollah Navid. 93 min.

An elderly railway signalman is unable to understand the meaning of “retirement” when he is handed over his retirement letter. Still Life, the film that shook Iranian cinema to its core and won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, is an unforgettable, masterfully paced exercise in stillness and loneliness that doesn’t shrink from depicting exploitative tendencies within contemporary Iranian society. Shahid Saless uses the inarticulacy of his protagonist as an aesthetic strategy and finds poetry in seemingly dead moments. Made only in 11 days and shot with the painterly vision of the cinematographer Houshang Baharlou, this landmark work pushed the boundaries of cinema like no other Iranian film of the 1970s. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Tuesday 24 October 2023

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

Monday 16 October 2023

Dayereh-ye Mina [The Cycle] (Dariush Mehrjui, 1974)

The Cycle (Dariush Mehrjui, 1974-76)

Dariush Mehrjui and his wife were brutally murdered on October 14, 2023. MoMA screens this film on November 1.


This harrowing tale of poverty and drug addiction in the slums, in which people desperately sell their blood to survive, is based on Gholam-Hossein Sa’dei’s short story “Garbage Dump.” Banned due to objections from the Iranian Medical Association, The Cycle was shelved for three years before it was eventually shown at the Shiraz Arts Festival. The left saw the story of the poor selling contaminated blood for injection into new veins as a metaphor for the corruption of Pahlavis. For Mehrjui, however, this was more a candid investigation of a real problem, and it eventually helped inspire the formation of the Iranian Blood Transfusion Organization. The casting of the popular filmfarsi star Forouzan was controversial, but her fine performance proved the versatility of Iranian actors. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969) | MoMA

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

Dariush Mehrjui and his wife were brutally murdered on October 14, 2023. MoMA screens this film on October 26.


This milestone of the Iranian New Wave portrays, with heartbreaking intensity, the themes of solitude and obsession in the story of a poor villager (unforgettably played by Ezzatolah Entezami) whose only source of joy and livelihood is his cow. When the cow is mysteriously killed one night, the metamorphosis begins. Based on short stories by psychiatrist Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, The Cow was smuggled to the Venice Film Festival in defiance of an export ban, where it was almost immediately and internationally recognized as a masterpiece. Poignantly wrapped in layers of religion and leftist politics (two major forces of the 1979 revolution), The Cow came under the spotlight more than a decade later, when Ayatollah Khomeini hailed it as an example of “good cinema,” as opposed to the many “corrupting films” of the Pahlavi era. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Wednesday 30 August 2023

Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974) reviewed by John Gillet for Sight & Sound


Perhaps Berlin’s main achievement was to reveal the progress of the young Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Sales, with A Simple Event (reviewed from last year’s Tehran Festival) in the Forum and Still Life in competition. The new film continues his preoccupation with the lives of inarticulate people—in this case, an elderly railway signalman who receives news of his retirement with utter incomprehension— developed through lengthy scenes in which the characters are simply observed going about their daily chores. Without Sales’ extraordinary control, the result could be  intolerable, but for me the film’s exact placing and timing of shots, rather like a slow symphony scored pianissimo throughout, was entirely hypnotic. 

Thursday 20 July 2023

Tranquility in the Presence of Others (Nasser Taghvai, 1969)


Tranquility in the Presence of Others

Nasser Taghvai, 1969, 84 min, Persian with English subtitles


Often seen as one of the indispensable films of the Iranian New Wave, Tranquility in the Presence of Others [Aramsh Dar Hozor-e Digaran] is a poignant and brisk cinematic adaptation of a story by leftist (and later exiled and banned) writer Gholam-Hossein Saedi, attacking the indecisiveness and empty rhetoric of Iranian intellectuals, as well as dissecting the patriarchal core of Iranian society. Banned after a single screening at the Shiraz Arts Festival of 1969 – a ban which was not removed until 1973 – it tells the story of a retired army general who travels to Tehran with his newlywed wife to visit his daughters, only to observe their unhappiness and casual affairs. As his mental condition deteriorates, the film’s tone shifts from sardonic to tragic. Tranquility in the Presence of Others delves into the anxieties of a country that is seemingly marching forward but retains a troubled, melancholic relationship with the past. The gender and social conflicts of Saedi's story are brilliantly translated into a bleak vision of Iranian society and the confusion of the middle classes.  – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Monday 5 June 2023

Peter Cowie on Gharibeh va Meh (1974)


"Two years in the making, it is a vast, symbolist drama, set in some remote historical period (hazy even to Iranians), and bursting at the seams with action and bloodcurdling confrontations. Why a young man arrives in a boat to disturb the ritual of a small village, why he is pursued by a band of ominous, black-clad strangers, and why he takes once more to the sea, seems unimportant, for Beizai’s [sic] dazzling technique, clearly influenced by Kurosawa, sweeps all before it. No other Middle Eastern cinema could sustain such an ambitious and visually exciting production."  Peter Cowie / Sight & Sound, April 1975

Tuesday 30 May 2023

Cherike-ye Tara [The Ballad of Tara] (Bahram Beyzaie, 1979)

The Ballad of Tara
 

Bahram Beyzaie's seamless blend of myth, symbolism, folklore and classical Persian literature in The Ballad of Tara is unparalleled in its complexity. Yet, apart from Downpour (1972), which was restored and revived a decade ago, the director with the most consistent body of work in the Iranian cinema of the 1970s is also, unjustly, one of the most invisible masters of the Iranian New Wave. Here, as well as directing, he has also produced, written, set-, costume-designed and edited a mesmerising tale that fuses the ceremonial legends of the past with contemporary life. Tara, a strong-willed widow encounters the fleeting ghost of an ancient warrior in the forest next to her village. The ghost's appearances become more frequent and finally he talks to her, claiming a sword that she has found among her father's effects. Without the sword, the dead warrior can't rest. But when the sword is restored to him, it's his love for Tara that prevents him from returning to the land of the dead.

Tuesday 18 October 2022

Earthly Songs: Ebrahim Golestan at 100 – A Viennale retrospective

 
This retrospective took place in Vienna, as part of the Viennale. RIP Ebrahim Golestan (1922-2023) – EK


Session#1: Fires of Forough

Fire-Fight at Ahvaz (1958) / A Fire (1961) / Courtship (1961) / The House Is Black (1962)

Total running time: 88 mins

A look at Golestan's oil documentaries, as well as examining his collaboration with poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad. In 1958, an oil well in southwest Iran caught fire. Abolghassem Rezaie, the son of one of the pioneers of Iranian cinema, made Fire-Fight at Ahwaz about the disaster. When Golestan saw the black-and-white footage, for which he wrote the narration, he saw that the story held even greater potential and decided to produce his own version of the events – this time in colour. Golestan's version, A Fire, proved to be his first major international success. It was edited by Farrokhzad, who combined her poetic sensibilities with Golestan's more symbolic approach. Farrokhzad also acted in Courtship, a short made for Canadian television, in which Golestan demonstrates a marvellous ability with mise-en-scène, especially in his assured use of the camera. In the same year, Farrokhzad made The House Is Black, set in a leper colony in northwest Iran. Celebrated as one of the greatest films ever made, it is a dialogue between the passions of the poet (Farrokhzad) and the voice of reason (Golestan).

Thursday 29 September 2022

Chess of the Wind: The Glorious Miniature of an Upheaval

Chess of the Wind

When Chess of the Wind premiered in November 1976, at the fifth Tehran International Film Festival, nobody knew what to make of it. A mix-up in the order of the reels at the first of three screenings—either a technical issue or a deliberate act of sabotage—made the plot almost unintelligible, while faulty projector lamps meant that the interior scenes, certain of which are artfully lit using candlelight, appeared so dark that viewers became angry. Moreover, despite the film’s historical setting—the drama unfolds in a feudal mansion, following the death of a matriarch—this tale of deceit and intrigue was a little too close to the bone for a society that had become increasingly polarized since the beginning of the seventies. Complete with breaks in the fourth wall, a delicately handled lesbian scene (the first of its kind in Iranian cinema), and an ending in which a working-class woman overthrows a male-dominated household and liberates herself, this enigmatic work was both perplexing and reflective of a changing Iran...

Read the full essay on Criterion website

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Saturday 20 August 2022

Doroshkechi (Nosrat Karimi, 1971)


The new digital copy of Doroshkechi that world-premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022 (for which this note was composed) is now (September 12, 16:00) playing at Forum des Images in Paris. I shall be introducing the Parisian screening of the film. – EK


Doroshkechi [The Carriage Driver] (Iran, 1971, black & white, 115 min)
Writer and Director: Nosrat Karimi
Writer: Nosrat Karimi. Cinematographer: Houshang Baharlou. Editing: Sirus Jarrahzadeh. Music: Mojtaba Mirzadeh. Cast: Nosrat Karimi (Gholamali), Shahla Riahi (Zinat Sadat), Masoud Asadollahi (Morteza), Arghavan (Pouri), Babak Karimi (Hassan), Ezattollah Navid, Diana. Producer: Manouchehr Sadeghpour. Scanned in 5K and digitally cleaned in 4K by CNC.

Wednesday 18 May 2022

Iranian Films at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022

The Carriage Driver (Nosrat Karimi, 1971), shot by Houshang Baharlou (Chess of the Wind)

The forthcoming edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 25-July 3, 2022) doesn't include an individual strand for Iranian cinema, however, it'll nonetheless feature at least five dazzling Iranian films, made between 1961 and 2022, shown across 3 different strands.

The documentary section will see the Italian premiere of À vendredi, Robinson (Mitra Farahani, 2022), a dialogue between Ebrahim Golestan, a giant of Iranian cinema and literature (now only a few months shy of his 100th birthday) and Swiss-French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. This is a truly beautiful work and should prepare you for what comes next.

A Fire (Yek Atash) by Ebrahim Golestan was premiered at Venice Film Festival in 1961. We screened it in 2016 when a retrospective was dedicated to Golestan's cinema of poetry and politics. Now we have updated the faded 35mm print previously shown with a 4K restoration of the film, presented for the first time in its original Persian voice-over, spoken by a famous voice artist, Asadollah Peyman. (The 2016 screening was from an English-dubbed version.) 

Friday 15 April 2022

Cinema Reborn 2022 catalogue (featuring The Deer essay)

The 2022 edition of Cinema Reborn focuses on the worldwide activity of film preservation and restoration. Held in Sydney from April 27 to May 1, the festival would see the Aussie premiere of The Deer (Masoud Kimiai, 1974) on which I have written an essay for the festival catalogue. The catalogue is now available in digital format and print formats.

Download the catalogue (in PDF) here.

Friday 11 March 2022

The Prose-Poetry Cinema of Ebrahim Golestan


"And the earth is a woman, with reveries and roots," says the Iranian filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, narrating over the image of a 3,000-year old skeleton as it is unearthed, in his short documentary The Hills of Marlik (1964). This is where the heart of the filmmaker, who recently turned 100, lies: in the earth, to which he returns repeatedly in his films...

 

Read the full essay -- a tribute to Ebrahim Golestan -- in the March 2022 issue of Sight & Sound magazine.

Wednesday 24 November 2021

La revolució oblidada. Cinema iranià anterior a 1979


Programme curated for Filmoteca de Catalunya (December 2021). — EK 

[Short introduction in Catalan]


La revolució del 1979 va canviar el destí i el rostre de l’Iran. Com la majoria de les revolucions, també va suprimir el passat i les seves imatges, i amb això un dels cinemes més innovadors d’aquella època. Aquest programa mostra algunes de les pel·lícules clau de la revolució cinematogràfica més progressista, interrompuda per una altra de social per la qual el país va acabar sent conegut.

Aquesta retrospectiva de cinema iranià anterior al 1979 fa reviure pel·lícules prohibides, perdudes o simplement oblidades. Obres mestres de la Nova Onada Iraniana que s’estrenen ara, acabades de restaurar, al nostre país.

Wednesday 19 May 2021

The Forgotten Revolution: Iranian Cinema Before 1979 (A Retrospective at Sinema Transtopia, Berlin, September 2021)

Downpour (1972)

The Revolution of 1978-79 changed both the fate and face of Iran. Like most revolutions, it also suppressed the past and its images – and with it one of the most innovative cinemas of its time. This programme aims to show some of the key films from the more progressive cinematic revolution, which was discontinued by a social one for which the country eventually became known. Films banned, lost or simply forgotten are revived in this overview of Iranian cinema before 1979, which features German premieres of newly restored Iranian New Wave masterpieces. Starting and moving forward from the 1962 Oberhausen prize-winner The House Is Black, directed by poet Forough Farrokhzad, the programme traces the course of the blazing years before the Revolution. — Ehsan Khoshbakht


This selection of Iranian pre-revolutionary films plays at Bi'Bak's Sinema Transtopia (Berlin) in September 2021. For further information on the screenings and tickets visit Transtopia's website here.

Monday 3 May 2021

The Crown Jewels of Iran (Ebrahim Golestan, 1965) | Notes on the film and its restoration

Ebrahim Golestan's 1965 short documentary, Ganjineha-ye Gohar [in English: The Crown Jewels of Iran], will be screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021. This will mark the world premiere of the restored version and a new beginning for a film very difficult or even impossible to screen in a cinema for almost 55 years. Like its title, The Crown Jewels of Iran is a true jewel of Iranian cinema, though so far a buried one. 

Made for the Central Bank of Iran to celebrate the collection of precious jewels kept in the treasury, this film remains filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan's most visually dazzling work, embellished with terrific camera movements. 

Some of the most iconic landscape photography in the history of Iranian cinema can be found within a minute after the opening credits, in which peasants of various ethnicities and tribes are quickly reviewed, all posed in a graceful manner, like kings without being kings. Like a work of musical composition, a simple act of ploughing is spread across shots of various size and angle, creating an intimate visual symphony. And then appears one of Golestan's allegorical match-cuts: a farmer seen on the horizon before a cut to a diamond on a dark background – the farmer is the jewel. 

Friday 30 April 2021

The Deer Freed — On International Rediscovery of Masoud Kimiai's Classic

The Deer گوزنها

اولین حضور رسمی فیلم گوزن‌ها در صحنۀ بین‌المللی کمی دیر رخ داده، اما برای دیده شدن فیلم‌هایی با اهمیت تاریخیِ گوزن‌ها هرگز دیر نیست.

فستیوال رتردام 2021 در هلند، گوزن‌ها را برای نمایش در بخش Regained فستیوال انتخاب کرده است، فیلمی که به خاطر حوادث سیاسی و اجتماعی‌ای که به طور مستقیم و غیر مستقیم به نمایش این فیلم در ایران گره خورده و محبوبیت کم‌نظیر آن بین تماشاگران و منتقدان ایرانی (در واقع یکی از معدود فیلم‌هایی ایرانی که هر دو دسته دربارۀ آن متفق‌القول‌اند) باید دهه‌ها پیش دوباره کشف می‌شد.

من همیشه دربارۀ شانس موفقیت گوزن‌ها در خارج از ایران تردید داشتم و مطمئن نبودم فیلمی باشد که غیرایرانی‌ها آن را دریابند. نمایش‌های اخیر فیلم و ارزش‌های مسلم آن ثابت کردند که من اشتباه می‌کردم. بازی بهروز وثوقی (یکپژوهشگر و استاد دانشگاه اسپانیایی/بریتانیایی اخیراً بازی وثوقی را بهترین و دقیق‌ترین تصویر اعتیاد در سینما خواند)، فضای خانۀ سید، مضامین سیاسی فیلم و الهام خلاقانه از سینمای آمریکا، به خصوص موج فیلم‌های «دورفیق» از ایری رایدر تا بوچ‌ کسیدی و ساندنس کید، این اثر مسعود کیمیایی را به یکی از محبوب‌ترین فیلم‌های ایرانی نمایش داده شده در خارج از ایران تبدیل کرده است.

نمایش این فیلم هم‌چنین مهم‌ترین وظیفه‌ای را که در قبال گوزن‌ها داریم یادآور می‌شود: این فیلم باید هرچه زودتر مرمت شود. دلیلی برای به تأخیر انداختن آن وجود ندارد. در فیلم، رقص برهنه یا سکس وجود ندارد. فیلمی است که سرنوشت‌اش پیوندی محکم با مسیر انقلاب ایران دارد. آیا مشکل هم‌چنان بهروز وثوقی است؟ اگر این حدس درست باشد، ایران یکی از معدود کشورهای دنیاست که قصد دارد یکی از بهترین بازی‌های سینمای ملی‌اش را به خاطر مهمانی آخر شبی که بازیگر آن نیم قرن پیش رفته، زنده‌به‌گور کند. آیا 42 سال شکنجۀ دائمی وثوقی در خواب و بیداری کافی نیست؟

Tuesday 27 April 2021

Brecht in a Persian Miniature: A 1978 Interview with Iranian Filmmaker Marva Nabili

The Sealed Soil (1976-77)

Marva Nabili's The Sealed Soil has been rediscovered and reclaimed in recent years as a feminist masterpiece. However, judging from the interview you are about to read, the film didn't enjoy the same enthusiastic reception upon its initial release. Though premiered at the Berlinale Forum (along with films by Dorothy Arzner, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Germaine Dulac, Laura Mulvey, Karin Thome, Ursula Ludwig, John Cassavetes, Barbara Kopple, Godard & Miéville and Taviani brothers) and enjoying a healthy festival run afterwards, it was forgotten until its name appeared on a couple of lists about great films made by women directors. It was then that both Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound took note of the film and the filmmaker (who made only one other work, for the US television.) In Sight & Sound, the film's "poetic tone, sparse dialogue and focus on its heroine’s daily life" was compared to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.

Chronicling the life of woman in a small village in southwest Iran, the film's US premiere took place on January 25, 1978, at Pacific Film Archive where my friend, Tom Luddy, interviewed Marva Nabili. Below is an edited version of that conversation of which an audio tape of poor sound quality survives. Since some of the audience questions are inaudible even to the people present in the auditorium, Tom occasionally repeats them for Marva. He also has the unenviable task of translating and abridging the long-winded, abstract questions. (I have altered the order of some of the question/answers to have the more general questions appear at the beginning.)

The reason I bothered to transcribe the interview was the fact that I was hoping to show the film in Berlin next month (Sinema Transtopia, May 2021) but I discovered that the Arsenal/Berlinale print of the film is too worn-out to be screened. Even before this revelation. I knew a restoration was much needed and already long overdue. If someone comes forward, there's a good chance that we could make this great piece of cinema available to general audiences. Hopefully, next time around they'll ask more sensible questions.

* * *

TOM LUDDY: Is the first American showing of the film to a public audience?

MARVA NABILI: Yes.

LUDDY: Well, we're very honoured. Can you talk a little bit about your life as a woman filmmaker in Iran?

Wednesday 9 December 2020

The Deer (Masoud Kimiai, 1974)


The Deer plays at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021.


For two consecutive decades and in various Iranian critics' poll, The Deer has occupied the very top place as "the best Iranian film ever made." Known for his rape/revenge drama Gheysar (1969)—which changed the course of Iranian cinema—director Masoud Kimiai (former assistant to Jean Negulescu and Samuel Khachikian) adds an explicitly political dimension to the story of his typically defiant characters. Here, in a nod to Hollywood's "buddy film," the familiar hero of Iranian popular cinema is prompted into social action, far beyond the usual romantic conquests. There is a sense of an imminent revolution in this story of a former champ turned junkie who reunites with a leftist classmate and is redeemed by revolutionary anger. Picking up where the anti-hero of Gheysar left, the leading character (Seyyed, played by versatile method actor Behrouz Vossoughi) again takes the law into his own hands and challenges the established order.

Behrouz Vossoughi, Faramarz Gharibian