Tales from Iranian New Wave in Helsinki

Downpour (Bahram Beizai, 1972)

A Simple Event: Tales from Iranian New Wave Cinema will be running at Helsinki's Cinematheque from February 2 to 20, featuring films by Farrokh Ghaffari, Kamran Shirdel, Dariush Mehrjui, Sohrab Shahid Saless and Bahram Beizai.

This a slightly revised, expanded version of the mini retrospective I had curated for Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. This edition will feature Bologna's own restoration work, Downpour [Ragbaar] as well as all the once banned documentaries by Kamran Shirdel which are among the most compelling examples of the 60s militant cinema.

For the full line up, as well as my introductory essay (in Finnish and English) please visit the official website of the Orion Cinema, here. The films will be playing with English subtitles which means non-Finish or Farsi speakers can attend.

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969) | Il Cinema Ritrovato

GAAV (The Cow)
Iran, 1969 Regia: Dariush Mehrjui
T. int.: The Cow. Sog.: Azadaran-e Bayal [Gholam-Hossein Saedi]. Scen.: Dariush Mehrjui. F.: Fereydon Ghovanlou. M.: Dariush Mehrjui. Mus.: Hormouz Farhat. Int.: Ezzatolah Entezami (Mash Hassan), Mahin Shahabi (Hassan's wife), Ali Nassirian (Mash Islam), Jamshid Mashayekhi (Abbas), Jafar Vali (Kadkhoda). Prod.: Ministry of Culture (uncredited).

The Cow (1969)

There are other films about men and cows (La vache et le prisonnier, for one) but unlike The Cow they can hardly be called love stories, nor are they works that so powerfully explore madness, solitude and obsession as this film does. This milestone of Iranian New Wave cinema tells the story of a poor villager (played by stage actor Ezzatolah Entezami in one of Iranian cinema’s greatest performances) whose only source of joy and livelihood is his cow, which provides milk for the village. (Not surprisingly, when the film came out, the milk was viewed by the left as symbolic of oil.) One night the cow is mysteriously killed and that’s when the madness, or rather transformation, begins.

Amos Vogel on Postchi

Amos Vogel on Dariush Mehrjui's Postchi [Postman, Iran, 1971]:

"[Mehrjui's] successful fusing of pathos, humor, and preoccupation with the poor resembles nothing less than Chaplin or early De Sica in its ferocity. In his earlier The Cow, the only owner of such a precious animal in a poverty-stricken village goes insane over its loss and assumes its place; berserk, he is put into a harness, is dragged off to a nearby hospital, beaten like an animal, and finally dies the death of a beast in a mudhole. The Mailman is an unforgettable Woyzeck-like figure, the eternal simple-minded victim who finally rises to mistaken grandeur in a murderous gesture that leaves him braying with despair over the body of his victim. Since such films can never be popular, they are living proof of the fact that box-office returns must not be allowed to determine the life of a work of art."

Source: Film as a Subversive Art

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.

A Simple Event: La Nascita Della Nouvelle Vague Iraniana

My programme notes for the upcoming Iranian cinema sidebar at Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 27 - July 4, 2015, Bologna, Italy)

A Simple Event: the Birth of Iranian New Wave Cinema

A Simple Event

A Simple Event: the Birth of Iranian New Wave Cinema

Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, Italy

June 27-July 4, 2015

Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, in collaboration with the Iranian National Film Archive

At the end of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 the country found itself, somewhat unexpectedly, marginalized. The upheaval also forced into obscurity and inaccessibility many Iranian films from the 1960s and 1970s, whose contemporary politics were condemned by the revolution.

Now, thanks to certain shifts in the cultural climate, the doors of The National Film Archive of Iran are open. We have grabbed this opportunity to review four key films made between 1965 and 1973 – a period later dubbed the Iranian New Wave. It is a happy coincidence that the oldest film of the bunch, Night of the Hunchback, was made by one of the founders of the National Film Archive, Farrokh Ghaffari.

Representing some of the key filmmakers of the New Wave – Kamran Shirdel (The Night It Rained), Darius Mehrjui (The Cow) and Sohrab Shahid Saless (A Simple Event) – this selection not only reveals some of the early signposts of an Iranian cinematic revolution, it also hints at those social and political changes that were to reshape the country a decade later.

Films:

• Shab-e Ghuzi (Night of the Hunchback), Farrokh Ghaffari, 1965. [New print]
• Oon shab ke baroon oomad ya hemase-ye roosta zade-ye gorgani (The Night It Rained or the Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy), Kamran Shirdel, 1967. [2K restoration]
• Gaav (The Cow), Dariush Mehrjui, 1969. [2K restoration]
• Yek ettefagh-e sadeh (A Simple Event), Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1973. [New print]