When A Separation became the first Iranian film to win an Academy Award, more people gained awareness of the country’s rich film legacy. Hamid Naficy, a leading authority on Middle Eastern cinema, lists a selection of his favorite Iranian films.
The House is Black (1961), directed by Forugh Farrokhzad
This is a documentary about the lives of the lepers in the Babadaghi
Leper Colony near Tabriz–one of the few films about disability in
prerevolution Iran. This was not a typical institutional documentary,
however, as it did not laud the services of its sponsor, the Society for
Assistance to Lepers, and it did not use the official documentary style
(except in a brief medical midsection). In fact, it set the tone and
became the model for poetic realist documentaries and their vision of
“radical humanism”. The film begins with scenes of bitter irony in the
classroom of the leper colony in which voice and image counterpoint each
other to create a powerful third message. A boy whose fingertips have
been eaten away by the merciless disease and another whose face and eyes
are ravaged read out loud from a textbook: “Lord, I praise thee for
having given me hands to work / Eyes to see the beauty of the world”. In
other scenes the lepers act like other people: they celebrate a
wedding, put on make up, dance. This best poetic realist film by the
foremost female poet of the last half of the 20thcentury, also
manifested the parallel between writing poetry and film editing. A
detailed examination of films she edited shows that she took a similarly
careful approach to film editing as she did to composing poetry. Her
written work is characterized by words that are highly evocative,
atmospheric, emotional, sensorial, and corporeal. One of her coworkers
at Golestan Film Workshop, Karim Emami, noted that many of her words
“appertain to senses and the nervous system.” Her words refer to the
physicality of reality in the same way that each shot of a
documentary—the type of film she made—indexes an external reality. In
addition, her poetic realism stems from her working with each shot in
her films as though it were a word in a poem, with great care and
precision.
This is a fiction film about a villager who owns a pregnant cow, the
sole source of milk for the village, to whom he is very close. One day
when he is town his cow disappears and his wife and other village elders
decide to hide that fact from him, claiming that she had simply ran
away. The villager does not believe this, but he is so traumatized by
the loss of the cow that he gradually becomes the cow, assuming his
identity, sleeping in the cowshed. The film helped bring about the new
wave movement, which put Iranian cinema on the map of the world cinema.
Based on a short story by a prominent writer and psychiatrist,
Gholamhosain Saedi, and adapted for the screen by the UCLA trained
director, the film inaugurated the theme of the return to authentic
Iranian roots in the face of ersatz westernization then in vogue.
However, it was also filled with the fear and anxieties of a modernizing
nation under authoritarian rule—inaugurating another important theme of
art cinema. It was banned for several years but after its triumph at
the Venice film festival it was eventually released to great acclaim.
This film is about an ordinary man, an out of work print-shop worker,
Hosain Sabzian, who is an extraordinary fan of the director Mohsen
Makhmalbaf and his film The Cyclist. His identification with the
director is both total and expedient, as he deftly impersonates
Makhmalbaf for the entertainment of his friends and to impress
strangers, among them Mrs. Ahankhah, whom he meets on a city bus. In
this apparently simple story of the power of cinematic identification
and fandom, culled from his social milieu, Kiarostami finds larger
social and philosophical meanings, turning it into a sly humanist tale
of a man’s desperate search for identity and dignity. If in the
prerevolution era film directors were derided as sleazy entertainers,
they are now stars, worthy of making a film about. Both Sabzian’s action
and Kiarostami’s seminal film are examples late in the twentieth
century of Iranians’ struggles through the years for individual
self-empowerment and national self-representation by cinema. Sabzian
defends his fraud on the grounds of increased “self-confidence” and
increased “respect” for himself from others. The film also is one of the
best examples of self-reflexivity in cinema.
The May Lady (1997), directed by Rakhshan Banietemad
In her phase one and two evolution as director Banietemad presented a
rather conservative image of women, but in her phase three movie, The
May Lady, she presents a more modern subjectivity in which the male and
female characters both quote poetry to each other, some of it apparently
their own. The film pushes the boundaries of female expressivity
further by centering the story entirely on a female documentary film
director who is a divorced single mother intent on pursuing her
profession, on a liaison with a man to whom she is not married, and on
raising her rebellious teenage boy who likes photography and partying.
However, the film breaks more taboos than divorce, single motherhood,
and unmarried relations. It expands the vocabulary and grammar of
veiling in cinema by introducing fascinating mise-en-scène, filming, and
narrative innovations. One of Banietemad’s narrative innovations is the
way in which the male lover is simultaneously both effaced and
inscribed in the film by means of a complex game of veiling and
unveiling, as well as of voicing and unvoicing. He is visually absent
from the entire film, but he is simultaneously present throughout by
means of telephone calls, letters, and personal voice-over poetry. The
film ties Iranian art cinema to the tradition of poetry, which is very
strong in the country.
This was filmed in Afghanistan in Persian, English, and Pashtu, an
example of Iranian multilingual and extraterritorial cinema that deals
with issues and stories that occur in the Persianate world and culture.
Kandahar is about the return to Afghanistan of a Canadian Afghan
expatriate, Nafas (Nelofer Pazira playing herself), to search for her
roots and to prevent her sister from going through with her planned
suicide. It examines the ravages of the wars against the Soviet Union
and the Taliban. While doing so, however, the film aestheticizes and
exoticizes Afghanistan in a visually stunning fashion, particularly the
women, who wear confining but colorful burqas, and disabled men and
children who have lost limbs. Particularly dramatic are scenes of scores
of artificial limbs attached to parachutes being dropped from the sky
by a plane and of the disabled men and boys running, limping, and
crawling toward them. The film became famous because of its striking and
exotic visualization and deft political timing, that is, the
coincidence of the release of the film with the American-led invasion of
Afghanistan and the ouster of the Taliban regime. It was also
controversial because of its casting, involving an intriguing African
American actor, née David Belfeld, who fled to Iran in 1980 after
assassinating Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian diplomat and press attaché
to Iran’s embassy in Washington who was an outspoken critic of the
Islamic Republic. He played the doctor in the movie.
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