Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts

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.) 

Wednesday 23 February 2022

Company Cinema in Abadan — A History (by Abbas Baharloo)

Taj Cinema in Abadan

Commissioned by me and originally published in the now defunct Underline magazine, this piece by the prolific (and Abadani) historian of Iranian cinema, Abbas Baharloo, sheds light on a lesser-known and nonetheless very significant chapter in the history of film culture in pre-revolutionary Iran. — EK

 

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company ushered in a ‘golden age’ of cinema-going in Abadan before nationalisation in 1951. Overseen by the Company, however, popular entertainment and propaganda were mixed, and screenings did little to bridge social divisions. 

By Abbas Baharloo

 

Many years ago now, Abadan was a city that welcomed immigrants and a place where many settled. Its population was made up of people from many different Iranian and international cities; Isfahanis, Shirazis, Baluch, Kurds, Lors, Arabs, and Azeris lived alongside Britons, Americans, Indians, and people from Rangoon in Burma. At the time Abadan was a bustling city and a vibrant centre of all sorts of cultural and artistic activities. There were leisure clubs; modern cinemas; libraries housing books and other publications in Persian, English, and Arabic; theatre, photography, and gardening associations; concerts of Iranian and foreign music; lectures on literature, music and painting, and sporting competitions. Despite all this, in Abadan doors were not always open to everybody. The prominent Iranian filmmaker Nasser Taghvai, born in Abadan in 1941, remembers it thus:

Saturday 29 January 2022

Rivalry in the City


Tehran’s newly built modernist buildings shown during the title sequence of Reghabat dar Shahr [Rivalry in the City] (Uncredited, 1963)

This is the censored and re-edited version of Jonob-e Shahr [South of the City] (Farrokh Ghaffari, 1958)

Wednesday 29 September 2021

The Curious and the Downcast: An Interview with Kamran Shirdel

Kamran Shirdel at the exhibition. Photo (c) Houshang Golmakani

The Curious and the Downcast: An Interview with Kamran Shirdel

By Houshang Golmakani


An interview with the distinguished Iranian filmmaker, photographer, and writer about his latest exhibition of films and photographs taken during the days of the Iranian Revolution. I commissioned this for a winter 2019 issue of Underline magazine but by the time this was translated and edited, the Underline project was abruptly folded. I publish it here for the first time. — EK


As we approach the 40th anniversary of the revolution that saw the monarch of Iran overthrown and replaced with an Islamic republic, renowned documentary filmmaker and photographer Kamran Shirdel is now exhibiting his photographs and raw, unedited footage of the historical event for the first time at a gallery in Tehran. Born in 1939, Shirdel originally studied architecture at the University of Rome before going on to study film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Upon his return to Iran in 1964, he produced a number of documentaries on Iranian social issues in the space of just a few years, the most famous of which include Women's Prison, Women's Quarter, Tehran Is the Capital of Iran, and his satirical masterpiece The Night It Rained. Due to their controversial subjects, all of these early documentaries were banned at the time of their release and Shirdel had several encounters with the Shah's secret police force SAVAK as a result. With the exception of his first and only feature-length film, The Morning of the Fourth Day (1972), Shirdel was forced to pursue industrial documentary filmmaking in the years that followed. 1978 saw a rise in strikes and social unrest that fuelled the fires of an impending revolution: the event that Shirdel had been waiting for ever since his return to Iran. Armed with a video camera and a camera, Shirdel took to the streets of Tehran, tirelessly documenting every development throughout the course of the revolution.

40 years later, and for the first time since they were taken, Shirdel's photographs and footage from those days are now being exhibited at the Nabshi Centre in Tehran from 30 November 2018 to 25 January 2019.  Shirdel, who was 39 years old at the time of the revolution, will turn 80 later this year. Despite his age and a spinal condition that requires him to use a walking stick, Shirdel still attends the exhibition almost every day in order to see the effects of his work first-hand. The exhibition itself is relatively large, covering two floors, with mostly large-scale photographs displayed on the walls and 40-year-old, antique television sets showing 8mm footage on repeat. Unfortunately, Shirdel's 16mm footage was confiscated in the days following the revolution and no trace of them has been seen since then. 

Wednesday 1 September 2021

Duke Ellington in Isfahan

Duke Ellington in Isfahan 

Director: Ehsan Khoshbakht

UK, 12', 2018/2021, colour/b&w

World premiere: Telluride Film Festival 2021


This short documentary by the Iranian filmmaker, writer and archivist Ehsan Khoshbakht tells the story of Duke Ellington's concert tour of the Middle East in 1963 and the development of one of the most beautiful jazz standards.  

The legendary composer and bandleader was seen as the ideal cultural ambassador for the United States at the height of the Cold War, when President Eisenhower's desired perception of the US as a moral force for good in the world was being undermined by an awareness of its treatment of African-Americans. 

Arriving in Iran with his band, Ellington was inspired by the historical city of Isfahan and especially its architectural riches. It would give its name to one of the pianist's most enduring compositions, and the tour as a whole helped to shape a Grammy Award-winning album, Far East Suite, which showed how much Ellington had absorbed from the sounds of his travels. 

Using archival images and video footage, and with added insight from broadcaster and jazz historian Alyn Shipton, Duke Ellington in Isfahan shines a light on a largely forgotten episode in jazz history and political history, and provides a clearer sense of the ways in which Ellington's music was affected by, and reflects, his vision of the East.

Wednesday 18 August 2021

The Lady of the Harem (Raoul Walsh, 1926)

Hollywood Orientalism involving Iran#1: The Lady of the Harem

A lost silent from 1926, produced by Paramount, directed by Raoul Walsh.

"Jesse L. Lasky announced that The Lady of the Harem has been selected as the title for the Paramount picture which, under the working title of "The Golden Journey," Raoul Walsh has just made from James Elroy Flecker's play Hassan. The new title is considered exceptionally appropriate, as the story deals largely with the lavish harem of the Caliph of Khorasan, Persia, during the twelfth century. 

"Featuring Ernest Torrence, Greta Nissen, William Collier, Jr., and Louise Fazenda," said Mr. Laskey, "The Lady of the Harem will be one of the most colorful and sensational pictures ever produced by this company. Mr. Walsh, who directed The Wanderer and The Thief of Bagdad has filled  this new spectacle with all the colorful atmosphere of the East and I am confident that this production will receive an even  greater reception than was accorded The Wanderer." [From Moving Pictures, 1926]

Saturday 15 May 2021

Ahmad Shah Qajar Being Filmed for Fox Newsreel

The last Qajar king being filmed

 
Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last shah of the Qajar dynasty (1789-1925), being filmed in Paris by Frédéric Fesneau for the Fox Newsreel in either 1925 or 1926 (a year after he was stripped of his title, so no longer the Shah of Iran).

Tuesday 30 March 2021

Revolution, Televised


This article was commissioned by the Iranian documentary streaming website, DocuNight. The programme dedicated to films about Iranian revolution featuring an array of thoughtfully selected titles is still live and many of them are seeing their internet premiere. Highly recommended. — Ehsan Khoshbakht


It has happened more than once. While speaking with documentary filmmakers of a certain generation (Med Hondo, one of the greatest African filmmakers, for one) I have been told how much they would have loved to go to Iran in 1978 to film, document and report back on the revolution as it was happening – followed by an expression of regret, that they couldn’t get into the country. This conversational turn has been repeated often enough that when that great documentarian of our time, Jocelyne Saab, talked about wanting to shoot the Iranian revolution, I hastily and foolishly jumped ahead, saying “But you couldn’t get in, could you?” She gave me one of her calm smiles and replied: “I could, and I made a film about it – Iran, Utopia in the Making – which was shown on public television in Japan, Algeria, Sweden and Switzerland.”

Monday 16 November 2020

His name was Negahdar Jamali...


نگهدار جمالی، سینمادوست، مبلّغ سینما و فیلمساز خودآموختۀ شیرازی که برای فیلم‌های ویدئویی وسترن، تارزانی و اکشنی که با کمک دوستان و هم‌محله‌هایش می ساخت، اول در شیراز و بعد به لطف مستند کامران حیدری، «من نگهدار جمالی وسترن می‌سازم»، در سطحی جهان به شهرتی کوچک رسیده بو،د شب پنجشنبه، 22 آبان، بر اثر ابتلا به کرونا فوت کرد.

این خبر را کامران حیدری مستندساز تأیید کرد که قصد داشت فیلم دیگری با مرحوم نگهدار بسازد.

تماشاگران بین‌المللی با وجد فراوان «من نگهدار جمالی وسترن می‌سازم» را در لندن و نیویورک و شهرهای دیگر دیدند و به دنیای ساده اما دیوانه‌وار این وسترن‌باز شیرازی خندیدند، نه از سر تمسخر، بلکه از سر همراهی با شیدایی او و ایمانش به کاری که می‌کرد.

وقتی اولین بار این فیلم را دیدم، نگهدار را رومانتیکی یافتم که شکست‌های متعددش چیزی از عشقش به سینما نکاسته و درباره‌اش نوشتم «نگهدار جمالي يكي از وجدآورترين فيلم‌هاي سال 2013 است كه مي‌تواند هر بيننده‌اي را تحت تأثير قرار دهد و فقر فيلم‌هاي اين مؤلف شيرازي ناخودآگاه او را به وسترن‌هاي اوليه ادگار اولمر پيوند مي‌دهد.»

Tuesday 28 July 2020

André Breton on Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl

Sadegh Hedayat

Nasturtiums Purple

Of Sadegh Hedayat, who committed suicide in Paris on April 9th, 1951, reached us, in the beautiful translation of Roger Lescot, The Blind Owl, a hopeless sign in the night. Never more such a dramatic apprehension of the human condition has aroused such an examination  of our shell, nor such a knowledge of  timeless struggle in a maze of mirrors, with the attributes that are our common lot ... The acuity of the sensations and the violence of the impulses which like  Wölfli, make a confounding use of certain stereotyped images, gasping from one end to the other, those that Hedayat excludes from the world of the "scoundrel". A Masterpiece if any! A book that must find its place near the Aurelia of Nerval, the Gradiva of Jensen, the Mysteries of Hamsun, which takes part in the phosphorescence of Berkeley Square and the prisons of Nosferatu. (Jose Corti Library). A. B. [André Breton]

Thursday 25 June 2020

The State of Cinema in Iran, 1933

Only 6 cinemas in Iran could show sound films in 1933


From The 1934 Film Daily Year Book, a report on the state of cinema in Persia AKA Iran.



Agitation: None.

Censorship: Active and strict censorship of all films to be shown in Persia is maintained by the Amusement Section of the Imperial Police. All films are shown before a board of Police Officers at whose discretion the entire film or parts of it may be rejected. The following scenes are usually barred from films to be shown in Persia:
(a) Any scenes reflecting directly or indirectly on Shah.
(b) Scenes containing political propaganda.
(c) Scenes depicting the horrors of war, suggesting pacifism, or inciting to revolution.
(d) Scenes thought to be detrimental to public morals.

Thursday 11 June 2020

Willow and Wind, an Overlooked Gem Scripted by Abbas Kiarostami

Willow and Wind

Willow trees bend easily in the slightest breeze, but even the wildest wind cannot uproot them. That is, more or less, the story of children in Mohammad Ali Talebi’s cinema; they are affected by every turn, every event, each nuance of the adult world, but they never fall down or stop fighting.

Willow and Wind is Talebi’s greatest cinematic achievement, both in terms of narrative and visual style. It tells an amazingly simple, sometimes absurd story. Like a Persian miniature, it is expressed through fine details. It depicts the efforts of a young boy to carry a large piece of glass some distance across country, to reach the school where he has broken a window during a football match. He’s not allowed back into class until he mends it.

Saturday 11 April 2020

From the Archives: Iran - Rich Land, Poor Land

click to enlarge

Poster (newsmap) produced by the US Army Information Branch in February 1946 to provide the army members with the basic information regarding the post-war landscape of Iran. Courtesy of the University of North Texas.

Citation:

[United States.] Army Information Branch. Newsmap for the Armed Forces : Iran, rich land poor land, poster, February 18, 1946; [New York]. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc830/m1/1/?q=iran: accessed April 11, 2020), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.

Wednesday 25 March 2020

I've Got Something to Say that Only You Children Would Believe — A Book Illustrated by Abbas Kiarostami


Abbas Kiarostami had a long, colourful career as an illustrator, graphic and film title sequence designer, and photographer before his career as a filmmaker got kick-started in the early 1970s.

His slow success and even a slower international recognition meant that this first part of his artistic life had vert little chance to be appreciated in time and not surprisingly, it was overlooked even by his ardent audience. One could argue, his eventual coming back to these fields (plus poetry and installation) in the 21th century was itself a classic case of Kiarostamian "return" as often seen in his films: returning to a home, to a place, to a landscape, in this case, to old passions.

A great portion of the achievements of these early years remain unavailable but here we have a wonderful example of his illustration work which he contributed to a children book, written by modernist poet and author Ahmad Reza Ahmadi.

One of Kiarostami's illustrations for the book

Monday 2 March 2020

Four Iranian New Wave Films That You Must See

The Cow (1970)

Written for the catalogue of the 2015's edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato. The two other essential titles which were restored and shown in Bologna a few years after this were Brick & Mirror and The House Is Black.


A SIMPLE EVENT: THE BIRTH OF IRANIAN NEW WAVE CINEMA


This programme offers one way of looking at the birth of modern cinema in Iran, a development now commonly referred to as the Iranian New Wave. The films presented here (The Night It Rained, Night of the Hunchback, The Cow, A Simple Event) make up roughly one quarter of the New Wave films and were selected according to accessibility and print quality above notions of artistic merit alone.

This particular narrative concerns four filmmakers, each of whom returned home to Iran following a period spent overseas, in order to revolutionise, even if subconsciously, their national cinema. In doing so they also rebelled against a society they found apathetic and divided over matters of justice.

Saturday 19 October 2019

Filmfarsi Chat with Toby Miller


Toby Miller interviews me for his Cambridge radio show on the movies. The occasion is the screening of Filmfarsi at Cambridge Film Festival on October 22 and 23. He has posted a transcription of the interview on TAKE ONE website:

Toby Miller: How did you decide to shine a light on the movies of Filmfarsi?

Ehsan Khoshbakht: Before I began my career in writing and working on film, my background was in architecture and urban design, and it was this background that actually initiated the Filmfarsi project. I decided to look at the use of modern architecture in Iranian popular films from before the Revolution. As I began to watch this period of Iranian cinema I realised that people outside Iran really didn’t know much about them.

Toby: And where does the term Filmfarsi originate from?

Ehsan: Filmfarsi was coined by one man in 1953 – the same the year as the coup. Amir Houshang Kavousi – educated in France and very interested in Art-house cinema – came up with term knowing that in Persian if you merge two words the result, as with Filmfarsi, is something that means neither Film nor Farsi (Persian). So it was a derogatory description by somebody who saw themselves as an enemy of Iranian popular cinema. But what I try to do in my documentary is show that the word today couldn’t be something entirely negative. What began as a way to make fun of Iranian commercial filmmakers is now rather something which describes a cinema which ran parallel to the Iranian art-house cinema we know as the New Wave.

Thursday 23 May 2019

50 Essential Iranian Films

Kako (Shapur Gharib, 1971)

Few years back, I asked Houshang Golmakani, the editor-in-chief of the Iranian Film Monthly, to produce a list of his 50 favourite Iranian films to be published on Keyframe. It was published around 2014 but later Keyframe went through some design and organisational changes, and the original posting, as well as some of my other contributions, vanished without any explanation. So I decided to re-post here with some minor alterations and more stills.

As I said, Golmakani edit the Film Monthly, the longest-running film magazine in Iran and one of the first to be established after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Aside from his full-time presence in the office of Film Monthly in downtown Tehran, he has written books on Iranian cinema and directed Stardust Stricken (1996), on Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

This is not a standard listing of Iranian arthouse classics but more of a personal map of Iranian cinema -- both commercial and arthouse -- sketched for those curious people who want to explore beyond what the English film literature on Iranian cinema manages to offer, reminding the reader that Iranian cinema is not limited to names like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf or Panahi. Aside from the work of great filmmakers with artistic ambitions since 1960s -- often dubbed as Iranian New Wave -- there are certain kinds of commercial films that deserve attention, especially those working within the confines of “national genres". This list is rather good at that. Nearly 5 years have passed since this was first compiled by Golmakani and I'm sure now his take on the subject, especially concerning recent years, would be something very different.

Ehsan Khoshbakht


Fifty films essential to understanding Iranian cinema

By Houshang Golmakani
(Additional notes by Ehsan Khoshbakht)

Monday 14 May 2018

A Hollywooder in the Land of Persia: Remembering Esmail Koushan (by Nima Hassani-Nasab)


Originally written by my friend Nima Hassani-Nasab for Underline -- the magazine I edit for the British Council -- I'm reposting it here with the intention of adding more images and posters of the notoriously prolific filmmaker Esmail Koushan. - EK


Was Esmail Koushan ‘the father of Iranian cinema’? Did he father a monstrosity? Several decades after the career of this noted figure ended, these questions still have no clear answer.

History accords to Dr Koushan an indisputably important role in the development of the Iranian film industry. An appreciation of this fact, and of Koushan’s considerable efforts as pioneer and influence within the industry, has meant that his renown has endured regardless of the quality and value of his works from an aesthetic perspective. He deserves credit for his stubborn and combative efforts to ensure the development of a professional production process in every area of the industry; from this point of view, Koushan certainly has the right to be considered the father of Iranian cinema.

Friday 2 March 2018

Interview with Kamran Shirdel

Kamran Shirdel (right) on the set of The Night It Rained

Kamran Shirdel (born 1939)

One of the giants of Iranian modern cinema, Shirdel is mostly remembered for his clandestine documentaries about poverty and injustice as well as his Rashomonesque The Night It Rained (1967) which became an instrumental film in the birth of New Wave. It’s been hardly noted that he was also responsible for remaking À bout de souffle under the title The Morning of the Fourth Day (1972).

Shirdel today

  • How conscious were you about the New Wave while making your “new” film?

In 1965, after finishing my film school in Rome (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia), I returned back home mostly for a family visit when I encountered the unbelievable and ridiculous socio-economico-political situation in Iran. No Iranian school of filmmaking existed and there were very few [educated] film directors – mostly graduated from foreign film schools trying to do their best at the only place existing for documentary filmmaking in Iran which was The Ministry of Culture and Art. And the filmmakers’ job was to satisfy The Ministry with their commissioned orders. Under these circumstances I had the rare chance to be called – quite accidentally - to make a series of so called propaganda films for the Iranian Women Organization (headed by Ashraf, the twin sister of the Shah!) The subject of the films opened the tightly closed doors of hidden worlds of, respectively, Women’s Prison and Tehran’s red light district (in Farsi, Shahre No) which I showed in Women's Quarter, as well as other poor slums of southern Tehran. I got hold of this rare chance and benefitted from this unexpected situation by relying on my zero experience in the field of documentary filmmaking which was balanced by my love to approach the socio-political problems. I directed them one after another and in a very short time.