A Richer, More Comprehensive Canon

Fellow film critic Victor Morton and myself discussed Iranian cinema on To Be Cont’d. I highly recommend you read the full exchange, but for the purpose of posterity here is my first contribution:

Victor,

As far as American film criticism is concerned, writers like Godfrey Cheshire and Jonathan Rosenbaum have done much to raise the profile of Iran as a national cinema worth exploring. I came to appreciate this when I was discovering both Iranian cinema and film criticism for the first time. Their work has been crucial in helping cinephiles overcome potential biases of a country that has a negative image in the media–and I’m not just talking about xenophobes like your archivist. We all have unchecked, subconscious biases, and this extends to cinephiles. It’s partially thanks to the reviews and profiles written by American critics that a Western appreciation and understanding of Iranian filmmakers has developed, something we take for granted as more and more Iranian films find distribution or win accolades. When Peter Labuza interviewed Cheshire on The Cinephiliacs he elaborated on his discovery of Iranian cinema in the late 80s/early 90s at a time when virtually nobody was writing about it. This is something younger cinephiles can’t really appreciate; it’s easy to imagine that Iranian films always had a strong international presence. Today, we have so many more options for seeking out and watching foreign films, and our collective awareness of world cinema has greatly expanded. This is not to suggest that the international film community was completely blind to Iranian cinema–certain movies were screened, won awards at film festivals and were reviewed before the Iranian auteurs became internationally famous. For example, Dariush Mehjrui’s The Cow won the FIPRESCI Prize at Venice Film Festival in 1971. But household-name recognition is necessary before a more populist discourse and canon can form (however spotty or incomplete).

Rosenbaum, too, has been important, especially in profiling Abbas Kiarostami. He co-authored the University of Illinois Press Contemporary Film Directors’ book on Kiarostami with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa–a great resource, but I recommend Alberto Elena’s The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami over it. Rosenbaum also included four Kiarostami films in his top 100 list (Orderly or DisorderlyWhere is the Friend’s Home?Close-Up and The Wind Will Carry Us), plus Forough Farrokhzad’s vital documentary short The House is Black. Rosenbaum’s top 1,000 films include other Iranian filmmakers, like Panahi and Makhmalbaf. Since he’s one of the most popular Western critics it’s no wonder that for many cinephiles curious about Iranian cinema, his entries offer a great starting point. But all too often, it’s an ending point with regards to older Iranian films.

I realized the limitations of the canon after exhausting the filmographies of the well-known Iranian auteurs. Like you, I had wanted to learn more about Iranian culture, especially when I turned 25 and began to feel a little embarrassed about not knowing more about my roots. Growing up, I’d rejected much of the Iranian diasporic cultural identity in an effort to fit in at school, though I was always deemed the other, no matter how hard I tried to act white. My limited exposure to the diaspora, which was comprised mostly of the L.A.-based satellite stations my parents watched religiously, didn’t give me many options to learn about Iranian art. As an adolescent, my knowledge of the diaspora thus did not really schematize an international community. It looked more like a pop culture from an alternate reality, one that I couldn’t truly grasp because my limited Farsi skills didn’t allow me to understand the political discourse. Also, I wasn’t exactly enthralled by the Iranian equivalents of Dr. Oz or The Young and the Restless. I wouldn’t call my parents philistines, but they didn’t teach me about Iranian artists outside of pop-musicians, because they weren’t into arthouse cinema or literature and assumed I wasn’t either. I didn’t know about Kiarostami or Farrokhzad until I started studying film.

When I was 25 I went back to school for a second BA in Film Studies, having previously completed a degree in Communication and Psychology. The department at my alma mater, Carleton University, specialized in national cinemas, and the more I watched new wave films from other countries, the more I became curious about the state of film in Iran.

Kiarostami was my first major discovery. I devoured the first films of his that I watched–the Koker trilogy and Taste of Cherry. To this day he remains my favourite filmmaker. Keep in mind that the only fictional exchanges in Farsi I’d seen came from the tepid, one-dimensional soap operas and family melodramas my parents liked to watch. Not that Iranian characters in American films fared any better. Their representation in Hollywood has been abysmal and these images only added to my confusion about my cultural identity. Hearing the back and forth between the old man and Ahmed in Where is the Friend’s Home? was something else entirely, not only on an aesthetic level but a cultural and personal one. Growing up, I’d mostly conversed in Farsi with my elders, rarely my peers. I really wanted to get to know Kiarostami’s characters and learn more about Iran through them.

My family is originally from Tabriz but now primarily based in Tehran, where I was born. As such, my family speaks Azeri Turkish with Tehrani accents, which is the closest Iran gets to an official accent, as it’s ubiquitous and has been normalized on television and radio. It was very illuminating to see the vast multicultural makeup of Iranian society in Kiarostami’s films. He incorporates different dialects, tongues and ethnicities and treats them with respect (whereas elsewhere in Iranian television and film, accents are mocked for sounding different). I loved to hear these characters talk, as Farsi is such a melodic language that falls into natural rhythms with an occasional sing-song feel (detectable even when people are shouting at each other). I love learning new words from Iranian films. A personal favourite is an expression I heard in The Experience, one of Kiarostami’s early features. An older man chastises the young male protagonist for looking at erotic images of women. Instead of speaking literally, the man uses the memorable turn of phrase: “You can still smell milk in your breath.” A challenge in learning Persian is understanding the frequent use of idioms, which, much like English, requires not just grammar and phrase books, but cultural immersion. I’d like to believe that outside of real-life Persian conversation or an expensive, arduous trip to my home country, films offer a suitable alternative. These films are basically like a home away from home. I don’t know if or when I’ll ever visit the homeland that I’ve heard and read so much about, so for now I must be content to live out my fantasies via cinema, much like you, Victor.

So far I’ve never come across unnatural speech like you mentioned in your anecdote, though Kiarostami likes to play with dialogue; he turns it into a highly visible device in films like Certified Copy and Shirin. There’s a reason why there’s so much repetition in the words spoken between Ahmed and his mother in Where is the Friend’s Home?–it’s so repetitive that the dialogue becomes unrealistic, even possibly surreal–and that reason is to underscore the lack of real communication that takes place between parents and their children. Intergenerational differences make up a major cultural phenomenon in Iran (you could call it a problem, even), and Kiarostami is attuned to that. This abstraction of dialogue is one of the reasons I resist the frequent “neo-realist” description of Iranian films like Where is the Children’s Home?, because I don’t think they are always realist works unto themselves.

In addition to films by Kiarostami, there is a demand in seeing older works by other directors, however small. When I worked at Bay Street Video in Toronto earlier this year I was gobsmacked to find The House is Black–a 22-minute short–on DVD in the foreign-cinema section. But outside of it and a few others, like The Cow, it’s rare for older Iranian films to be released on home video here. It’s no surprise that the ones that do have been long-championed by Western critics and/or are by the likes of Mehrjui or Kiarostami, well-known filmmakers still working today. Another Iranian New Wave film that one can easily access in the Western market is Kiarostami’s The Report, which Criterion included as a supplement in its release of Certified Copy.

So who are these other Iranian New Wave filmmakers I keep referring to without outright naming? Well, there are so many I could write whole books on the subject. Some scholars who are a thousand times more intelligent and knowledgeable about Iranian cinema have thankfully saved me the trouble. I’d strongly recommend the chapter entitled “A Dissident Cinema” in Hamid Naficy’s A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941-1978. Of course I’d also recommend the whole series. Naficy has chronicled the entire history of Iranian cinema from 1897 to 2010 across four volumes. Keep in mind that the New Wave is only one story in a long and complex history, and by no means is it even necessarily the most interesting. I’m still wading through other chapters right now, including the commercial film-Farsi period, contemporary women’s cinema, and war films and documentaries released in the 80s and 90s. Naficy’s series is a comprehensive bible on Iranian cinema, in which he outlines noteworthy films and artists within their sociocultural and political contexts, and this includes the important government figures who helped fund and/or censor films. Naficy is also keen on highlighting the importance of Islamic values, Iranian postmodern literature, the ancient tradition of poetry, and other cultural influences that helped to develop Iranian cinema with every evolutionary step. Granted, this series is a social history, so even though Naficy devotes considerable space to film analysis, his primary focus is to provide context, not expand into essay-length aesthetic considerations of each and every film. Though there have been some great books that analyze older Iranian films (a classic is Hamid Dabashi’s Close Up: Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future), they have mostly focused on films by the greats, or they’re either dense academic theory texts or much tinier versions of Naficy’s series that operate like world-cinema readers.

Though Iranian cinema has become a noteworthy subject in film academia and has expanded to include lesser-known territory, within the film criticism world there is still much work to do. I occasionally read of retrospectives by various film societies or university film departments in places like L.A., New York City or London, but we are past the point where traveling to major cities to see rare prints is a common cinephilic rite, especially for younger critics like me who became autodidacts in the digital age. In a perfect world, I would love more writing on New Wave artists and DVD/VOD access to these older films. A small, representative sampling would include Sohrab Shahid Saless, Bahman Farmanara, early Mehrjui and Kiarostami, Kamran Shirdel, Parviz Kimiavi, Bahram Bayzai, Naser Taghvai, and Amir Naderi. And yes, Victor, the Iranian New Wave was pretty much dominated by male directors. Beyond The House is Black, it’s hard finding dissident works by women from this era. Female filmmakers started working in much higher numbers after the Islamic Revolution. Though I haven’t been able to locate theories on why this was the case, it could be that fewer women were in the workforce in the 60s-70s, and that filmmaking was still a relatively novel profession, with no particularly easy career paths for women.

Since my main argument in this conversation piece is that lack of access prevents a resurgence in New Wave awareness, I’d like to direct attention to films that one can find online (on YouTube). Certainly, the subtitles and audio-visual quality aren’t the greatest, and watching movies in this manner doesn’t exactly serve as a legal substitute, but the ability to stream rarities is certainly better than nothing. If this conversation leads to more cinephiles and critics learning, and maybe one day writing about, the Iranian New Wave, maybe that will encourage legal releases in North America. That’s my genuine, albeit ambitious, hope!

One of my favourite discoveries of the New Wave period has been Sohrab Shahid-Saless, who went into exile in Germany right before the revolution. One of his early films, Still Life (1974), which won the Silver Bear for best direction at the 24th Berlin International Film Festival, can be found on YouTube with subtitles (I had a chance to write about it earlier this year for Spectrum Culture). The film is a peculiar work with very little narrative and sparse dialogue, and like Where is the Friend’s Home?, the film undercuts notions of realism with its use of discontinuity and sly playfulness with temporality. Still Life doesn’t make much sense if you try to follow the story in a linear fashion, and yet it still seems to encourage you to do exactly that, outside of a few, curious moments.

Other important works to mention in this conversation piece, which are available online: a few revelatory shorts from documentary filmmaker Kamran Shirdel, including Women’s Quarter, The Night It Rained,Women’s Prison and Tehran is the Capital of Iran. If you do a search for its Iranian title you can also find Bayzai’s Downpour (Ragbar) on YouTube, though the print quality is woefully subpar and the subtitles are hard to read. And here’s a pleasant surprise: last year Downpour was restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation and has since screened publicly for some retros. I sincerely hope that passion projects like this one encourage Western critics to become more curious about older Iranian films, and that we continue to have more conversations about them. With rediscovery comes recognition, new restorations and releases, and ultimately, a richer and more comprehensive canon.

-Tina