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| Entezar [Waiting] |
Entezar, Amir Naderi’s second film for Kanoon – the Iranian institution in charge of producing cultural goods, including films, for children and young adults – was a deft and calculated move away from the gritty street dramas and crime films of the early 1970s that made Naderi famous but also left him feel artistically unfulfilled.
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| The Sealed Soil |
The digital restoration of The Sealed Soil [Khak-e Sar bé Mohr], directed by Marva Nabili, will be premiered at UCLA Film & Television Archive on June 15 and a week later at Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato.
Khak-e Sar bé Mohr chronicles the repetitive and repressed life of Roo-Bekheir, a young woman in a poor village in southwest Iran, and her resistance to forced marriage. It’s a formally rigorous, if emotionally distanced, critique of patriarchy and the spurious reform of Iranian agricultural life that was a factor in the 1979 revolution.
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| Jacques Tati, tombé de la lune |
Jacques Tati, tombé de la lune (2022)
Directed by Jean-Baptiste Péretié
Jacques Tati needs no introduction but it is exactly the kind of "filmmaker who needs no introduction" that is worth revisiting repeatedly, in viewing, in film literature and now in the increasingly popular format of television documentaries. Jean-Baptiste Péretié, director of other works on Keaton, Al Pacino and John Wayne, has efficiently captured the jazzy architecture of Tati's universe in this fine introduction to a jolly genius.
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| High Treason |
Samantha Leroy, in charge of "la programmation et d’exploitation" at the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé in Paris asked me to curate a season on architecture and silent cinema. This short essay was written to accompany my 40-film selection for a retrospective which was held in conjunction with an architecture exhibition, dedicated to Renzo Piano's magical design for the Fondation's building in the south of Paris. – Ehsan Khoshbakht
A love story of sorts, the relation between cinema and architecture. Architecture saw in the cinema what it had dreamed of for centuries: being equipped with eyes more penetrating and observant than those of human beings, a tool that could examine architecture from every possible angle and measure it in time. Cinema, in return, found incredible potential in architecture when architectural monuments and soon studio-built sets added attraction, realism, and drama to the movies.
During its golden age, Columbia Pictures produced some of American cinema’s most iconic films across a panoply of varied styles and popular genres. In 1924, the relatively small-scale motion picture company Cohn-Brandt-Cohn rebranded itself as Columbia Pictures. This new studio would eventually feature, as its masthead and in the preamble before each film, the Lady with the Torch, the Statue of Liberty-like female figure who was, at first, draped nobly in the American flag and has become recognizable to film lovers everywhere.
Organized in partnership with the Cinémathèque suisse, The Lady with the Torch will present the studio in all its glory, shining a light on lesser-known genre filmmakers like Max Nosseck or William A. Seiter, as well as celebrating major auteurs like Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, George Stevens, and John Ford, who made some of their most characteristic as well as most surprising films while passing through the studio. So too did its movies do much to hone and define the screen presences of treasured stars like Rita Hayworth, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, and William Holden, and lay the groundwork for the new era of more intensely psychological acting that would come to dominate in the 1950s, working with a new generation of directors coming from the theater, such as Joshua Logan. Columbia Pictures was the home – intermittent or otherwise – of figures as diverse as Boris Karloff, the Three Stooges and George Cukor, Ben Hecht and William Cameron Menzies. Notably, it is also where Dorothy Arzner, one of only two female filmmakers to work in the classical era of Hollywood, produced some of her most pioneering works. It is to this varied spectrum of artists, performers, and beloved figures of fun that the Festival pays tribute.
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A dazed boy is standing on the beach, hollering at the ships leaving the Persian Gulf for other worlds. The vessels of escape, carrying oil tanks and dreams, are fading ghosts on a pale horizon. To overcome a world full of hostility and indifference, the boy must learn to run.
Amir Naderi’s autobiographical masterpiece The Runner (1984) was one of the first postrevolutionary Iranian films screened and celebrated internationally. The epic scene of boys racing across the oil field toward a cube of melting ice, their trophy, became the emblem of the new Iranian cinema that emerged in the 1980s.
Amiro is an orphan living in the southern Iranian port city of Abadan, working odd jobs until he realizes that he has to better his life by learning to read and to run—the first in recognition that other worlds exist, and the second in order to reach them. Paradoxically, this film that sizzles with the desire for freedom was made in 1983–84, the darkest years of Iran’s recent history, when the grip of the Islamic regime on every aspect of life, including the newly nationalized Iranian cinema, became total.
The biblical title ("When the people heard the sound of the trumpet, they raised a great shout and the wall fell down." Joshua 6:20) has actually very little to do with the story of this drab and cut-rate mystery film, except its ending.
Playing on May 29 at Closeup Cinema in London. EK
This one of the crowning jewels of American cinema, nearly as good as the best of Roberto Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman, is strangely one of the least known masterpieces of the 1950s.
