Directory of World Cinema: Iran

Parviz Jahed

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781841503998
• eBook ISBN: 9781841505954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

 

Iranian cinema has an extraordinary history that has been marked by religion and ever-shifting political, economic, and social environments. This addition to Intellect's Directory of World Cinema series turns the spotlight on the award-winning cinema of that nation, with particular attention to the major movements, historical turning points, and prominent figures that have helped shape it. A wide range of genres are presented, including comedy, Film Farsi, new wave, children's films, art house film, and women's cinema. For the film studies scholar, students working on alternative or national cinema, or for all those who love Persian cinema and wish to learn more, Directory of World Cinema: Iran will be an essential companion to this prolific and prominent film industry.

The Cow, Iranian Ministry of Culture.

The New Wave of Iranian cinema, or what was later called by this name, is closely tied to the name of one of Iran’s greatest storywriters. Even though Gholamhossein Sa’edi, a prolific and inventive psychiatrist/writer, never made any films himself, he wrote the main material for two prominent New Wave films. Some of the greatest theatrical performers in Iran, who all had roles in his play Gaav/The Cow (Jafar Valizadeh) (once in the TV adaptation and one in the theatrical performance), took part in its movie version this time under the direction of a young director introduced by Sa’edi himself. This young director was Dariush Mehrjui who had studied philosophy at ULCA and only had one dull and commercially failed movie called Almas 33/Diamond 33 in his resume. In a rather strange and paradoxical move, the ministry of art and culture, which happened to be the producer of the film, banned the screening of the film due to it ‘displaying ruins and poverty in Iranian villages’.

Mehrjui brought success to the film by secretly taking it to the ‘Venice Film Festival’, and the influential and positive reviews of international critics caused Iranian cinema to be taken more seriously than before. In retrospect, almost all of this film’s success is owed to Sa’edi’s powerful script and Ezatollah Entezami’s superb performance in the main role, which make the primitive technique and mostly blurred shots of the movie look not that irritating to the audience. The subject of the film, i.e. the gradual metamorphosis of a villager into his only possession (a cow with an unknown cause of death), is the main theme in most of Sa’edi’s works, which has been utilized in various ways in his stories and plays. The gradual psychological decay of a person after normalcy is taken away from their life is also noticeable in Sa’edi’s other works that were the best among the initial New Wave films, i.e. Aramesh dar Hozore Digaran/Tran-quility in the Presence of Others (Nasser Taghvaee, 1970).

In this film, a retired colonel, whose days in the armed forces are over and who has turned into a miserable and melancholic creature, has more or less the same sad fate as the villager in the movie The Cow, except with the difference that in this contemporary and horrifying urban story, the family and the whole of society is living with this horrible illness. His two daughters live with a deep confusion, which becomes evident when the elder daughter commits suicide. The educated regular customers of the cafe (in a scene reminiscent of the cafe sequence of Ebrahim Golestan’s Khesht va Ayeneh/The Brick and The Mirror [1964]) also have no choice but to just nag, look forward to their nightly parties, and forget about their sad lives.

Tranquility in the Presence of Others was caught in a ban as well, and was released years later. The delay in its public screening was an irreparable blow to the Iranian New Wave Cinema. Maybe if it had been shown in its year of production (1970), Iranian cinema would have taken a different path, and the film-maker would have been able to continue his work the way he preferred. But at any rate, Nasser Taghvaee, who was already known as a successful documentary film-maker and whose short story titled Summer had won great acclaim that same year, became one of the most important names of the New Wave alongside Dariush Mehrjui. Due to the unsuitable circumstances under which they were released, neither of these two films managed to attract a huge number of cinema lovers to movie theatres (The Cow was produced by the ministry of art and culture and Tranquility was co-produced by the state TV); but right or wrong, most of the attention of people interested in cinema was focused on the commercial success of new films. So the intellectuals too, along with the populace, voiced their praise for a film that introduced a new formula to Iran’s commercial film-making, in which the personal vendetta of the film’s hero was interpreted as a bloody uprising against the injustice of that time: Qaysar (Masoud Kimiai, 1968).

Masoud Kimiai was warmly embraced by commercial producers, and during the 1970s he managed to make seven more films; a chance that none of the other New Wave directors received. In retrospect, there is no clear correlation between Qaysar and the Iranian New Wave Cinema. The Cow and Tranquility in the Presence of Others demanded awareness from their audience, and went beyond the temptation of sensationalism, exaggerated plays, and the creation of phony legends. But the hero of Qaysar keeps on with the drumbeat of revenge and violence, and shouts: ‘it’s a matter of honor!’ The film’s famous sequence, which won the praise of the New Wave pioneer Ebrahim Golestan, was the killing of the first brother in a public bath, where (the use of) still images and the complete removal of all dialogues demonstrated the director’s abilities, and constituted the film’s only acceptable scene. Yet, there is an undeniably huge distance between Qaysar as a second-rate imitator of classic film-making and its completely traditional and reactionary view of social concepts, and the idea of ‘New Wave’ as symbols that belong to a new trend and a novel approach to promoting modern institutions.

The major trends of the New Wave: New Wave and commercial film-making Qaysar’s unprecedented success at the box office quickly drew the younger generation to the movie theatres, and three major trends gradually started to emerge in the New Wave: the first one that was the most distant from the (ideals of) New Wave and had a direct effect on commercial film-making was created and represented by Masoud Kimiai and Ali Hatami. Kimiai loved creating western-style heroes based on an Iranian theme; and Hatami showed an inclination towards traditional Iranian theatre and literary narration (known in Farsi as Naghali). Aside from the influences of an autocratic upbringing and the deeply rooted self-centredness in Iranian culture, the especial attention paid to monologues as opposed to dialogues in both of these film-makers’ films is also a sign of disregard for dramatic speech. The commercial success of Qaysar and Hassan-Kachal/Hassan the bald guy (Hatami’s first film) brought a change, at least in appearance, to the formulae of commercial film-making. Hatami’s next film, i.e. Towghi, was an imitation of Qaysar, which of course was combined with his mythical and fatalistic ideas. The commercial failure of two weak and low-grade films by these film-makers (Reza Motori/Reza the Biker and Baba Shamal) caused them to make a new attempt at surviving in commercial film-making. His weakness in developing characters and lack of command in storytelling and depiction, and despite making one of his best and most personal films, Khastegar/The Suitor, which was a parody of ‘ever lasting love, Iranian style’ as well as a weak heroic tragedy mixed with the idea of ‘incestuous love’ (which he was forced to modify) in a film called Ghalandar, and finally a film named Sattar-Khan about the life of one of the most well-known heroes of the Iranian constitutional revolution, caused Hatami to end up with three failed movies, and in 1973 to go into television and stay away from cinema for five years. During this period he made two television series named Mowlavi’s Stories (based on five tales from Rumi’s Spiritual Couplets) and Soltan-e Sahebgheran/The Wealthy Sultan (based on the life of Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar),¹ then made a comeback to cinema with his most famous film Sooteh Delaan/The Lonely Hearts. The characters in Hatami’s films are like loudspeakers, from which rhyming monologues come out with a style similar to the texts of the Qajar era. That is why in his films, storytelling and logical relations have been replaced by a fragmented narration of stories in which the scenes do not follow a logical succession. In other words, the idea of ‘dramatic procession’ has turned into a sort of narrative improvisation in him films. From a technical perspective, and due to Hooshang Baharloo’s good cinematography, The Lonely Hearts has been known as Hatami’s outstanding and signature work.

Masoud Kimiai took a more secure path back to commercial film-making, and by using the story Dash Akol (Sadegh Hedayat) won the hearts of the ordinary audience as well as the intellectuals. He narrates the story of a middle-aged hero who gets to experience forbidden love for a young girl. He himself organizes her wedding and eventually gets cowardly killed by the neighborhood’s dark-faced evil macho man. Hedayat’s story is completely devoid of the concept of chivalrous heroism, exactly what is extensively focused on in the film, and it is somehow at odds with Hedayat’s world view (tragedy against tradition and fatalism). Kimiai’s traditional hero still keeps on with his usual traditional method, and in films like Baluch, Khaak/The Soil, Gavaznha/The Deer [1974], and Safare Sang/The Millstone Journey does not think of anything but heroic revenge. The combination of heroism and realism, the adding of prostitutes as complementary elements (from Qaysar to The Soil), and violence are among the characteristics of his films. The obvious contradiction in developing characters is quite evident even in his interpretation of Borges’s story Intruder in the film Ghazal. Despite being the most popular New Wave figure among the critics, it was Kimiai’s strategic and ideological distance from the New Wave that allowed him to continue with his commercial film-making in spite of having made a number of unsuccessful movies. The leftist movement saw its dreams materialize in his films, especially The Deers. The young gun-carrying eyeglass-wearing type (Ghodrat, played by Faramarz Gharibian) had the visual characteristics of the leftists’ favorite guerilla fighter; the same way that the villagers in The Mills...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction by the Editor
• Film of the Year
• Independent Cinema and Censorship in Iran
• Directors
• The Emergence of Cinema in Iran
• Film Farsi as the Mainstream Cinema
• The Forerunners of the New Wave Cinema in Iran
• Iranian New Wave (1969-79)
• Melodrama in Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema
• Post-Revolutionary Art Cinema in Iran
• The Image of War in Iranian Cinema
• The Image of Children
• Cultural Diversity in Iranian Cinema
• Recommended Reading
• Iranian Cinema Online
• Test Your Knowledge
• Notes on Contributors
• Filmography