Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6(56)

Farrok Ghaffari b.1921 Ebrahim Golestan n b.1922 Dariush Mehrjui b.1939 Sohrab Shahid Saless b.1944

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Forugh Farrokhzad

The Shah of Iran and the ruling elite's modernisation policies provided access to US film and TV companies at the expense of the indigenous film industry. Earlier last century Iran produced an extraordinary range of poets, one of whom, an 18 year old female poet, Forugh Farrokhzad, in 1962 pointed the way for indigenous film-making with a short film, Khaneh Siyah Ast/The House is Black about a colony of lepers, simply filmed in black & white with a poetic commentary written by herself. and produced by writer Ebrahim Golestan (1922-2023) who had his own film studio, a major source of film footage of Iran in the 50s and 60s. “What really set the tone for much of Iranian cinema thereafter was this film's sincerity of tone, its deep humanity and its attempt to move beyond simple description […] Most of the parts were played by real people” (Mark Cousins 314).

A few years earlier a socially conscious film, realistically and critically set in urban poverty, Jonub-e Shahr/South of the City (1958), made by a young European-educated film-maker, Farrokh Ghaffri (1922-2006), had been banned and the negative mutilated. Golestan made The Treasure of Jinn Valley in the early 70s deemed to be critical of the Shah. He sold his film studio soon after and settled in England.

At the end of the 60s the local film industry which had been producing low-quality melodramas, comedies, and tough guy ('luti') films, delivered a jolt. A well-crafted luti, Qeysar (1969), the second film of Masoud Kimiai, Qeyser was a major local success with audiences. Kimiai turned the genre on its head by linking the good with Iranian culture and tradition and the bad with its violators (read: encroaching westernisation and secularisation).

Dariush Mehrjui

At about the same time Dariush Mehrjui (1939 -2023) made Gav/The Cow (1969) about a farmer who loses his livelihood when his cow, which had been producing milk for the whole village, mysteriously dies. It so affects him that he begins embodying the animal in spirit. The film revived the sparse realist style of Ghaffri’s 1958 film enlivened by the originality of the script written by one of Iran's leading contemporary writers. The Cow was funded by the Ministry of Culture which banned it for a year then reversed its decision in light of its positive international reception and critical acclaim at international film festivals. This opened the way for Ministry financial support for a succession of 'art' films including Mehrjui's second film The Postman (1970). These two films caused historical change and are now regarded as the precursors of the Iranian New Wave.

The popular success of Qeysar, a tough rape-revenge drama, was attributable to Kimiai's radical revision of the 'luti' genre's cultural elements, by the foregrounding of socially marginal characters speaking in the dialect of the streets. As a writer-director Kimiai's innovations in a popular genre also achieved some festival success with films like his seventh, The Deer (1974), which resulted in Kimiai's arrest and was banned for a time after winning Best Actor award at the Tehran Film Festival to his 31st feature, a political crime drama Killing a Traitor (2022), played out “in the spirit of Warner's gangster films.”

After making The Cow Mehrjui worked at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, an organisation, known as Kanun, founded by the Shah's wife Farrah.

Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) had come from fine arts as a 20 year old to design advertising posters and illustrate children's books. In 1969 he started making short Kunan-funded films. His first film, Bread and the Street, was with a 7 year old boy and an untrained dog which later provided the basis for his breakthrough feature Where is My Friend's House? (1987), the first of a trilogy that screened worldwide. Working with non-professionals Kiarostami described as “being a blueprint for my work” which had advantages and disadvantages but he enjoyed the latter because he learned a lot more by having his pre-conceptions continually challenged by working with non-professionals and children, forming the basis for “an on-going relationship.”

At the same time as these state-controlled developments, Iranian film culture was boosted by a group of foreign-trained film-makers who made films departing from traditional genres introducing greater realism and improved technical standards. Those dissatisfied with opportunities provided by the state formed the New Film Group which produced the second feature by Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944-98), Tabi’at-e bijou / Still Life (1975). Saless had already made more than 20 shorts and a feature A Simple Life (1973) in which the dispassionately observed austere daily life of a 10 year old boy, ignored by his father, is transformed by the death of his mother. In Still Life Saless directs the camera’s gaze on an aging Iranian, the sole attendant of a desolate train station resigned to the loneliness and boredom of the job he has done for 33 years. His wife devotes herself entirely to weaving cloth in their nearby home. Their son has left home to join the army. The stasis in the lives of the couple is abruptly threatened by the unexpected visits of two men to the station and the house. Still Life is a landmark film in Iranian cinema winning the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Sohrab Shahid Saless

Saless left Iran when he was not able to complete his third feature without interference. In Dar gorbat /Far From Home (1976) made in Germany he drew on his own experiences as an immigrant moving from job to job in Vienna. He cited Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai as an important influence in showing how colour can be deployed as if it were black and white, and how one can make a humane film (on the “solitude of man”) about a murderer who trusts no-one in a sick society. He emphasised his on-going commitment to a form of minimalism created in the editing room, that reaches beyond neo-realism in creating a solitary and uncompromising cinematic world that is both original and necessary. He identified a developing theme in his films as “man's fear of himself,” a subject replacing conventional plot. The only external source for a film he said he would consider was an adaptation from Chekhov.

What was happening in Iran, beginning in the late 60s, was by the mid 80s beginning to be recognised as a remarkable instance of “an indigenous realist movement, somewhat comparable to Italian neorealism' [that] becomes more conscious of the conventions involved in realism, and develops more abstract experiments in form” (David Bordwell 161). “The filmmaker can only raise questions, and it is the audience who can seek the answers” (Kiarostami).

“The realism of Close-Up and Through the Olive Trees is not the transparency to reality sought by Italian neorealism, the illusion of actually being there. Rather, it is the realism declaring its artifice, vividly depicting a reality without letting us forget we're watching a film. Kirostami blends realism and modernism, a representation of life and a reflection on how life is represented on the screen.” (Gilberto Perez 190)

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Don Ranvaud interview with Sohrab Sahib Saless in Framework Spring 1976

Hamid Naficy, “Iranian Cinema” Oxford History of World Cinema ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith 1996

Ehsan Khoshbakht “The Deer” Cinema Reborn 2022

Nassid Hamid “Near and Far” an interview with Abbas Kiarostami Sight and Sound February 1997

Gilberto Perez The Eloquent Screen A Rhetoric of Film 2019 pp. 188-197

Adrian Martin “Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016):Three Essays 2003,2010,2016 Film Critic :Adrian Martin

David Bordwell Poetics of Cinema 200 p.161

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NOTE - Renumbering is still due to take place

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links.

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series