Movies, Iranian Style: A Survey of Directors & Films

Finding your way into the film culture of any nation involves learning the names of representative directors and films as a means of getting your bearings. The lively and fertile Iranian film culture has been producing a healthy crop of new names and films every year, and novices will quickly become overwhelmed. The following, then, is a survey of some of the most important and well known Iranian directors whose films are available in the West, offered not as exhaustive topography of Iranian cinema but as an outline of the territory.

         An appropriate starting point for this tour is director Dariush Mehrjui, a pioneer and elder-statesman of the Iranian film renaissance, who helped inspire both the original New Wave under the Shah with his landmark political allegory, The Cow (1970) and has continued to work under the strictures of the Islamic regime. Mehrjui has created a distinctive body of work: more than a dozen films, both comedies and dramas, featuring styles from gritty, realism to gorgeous surrealism, always with a provocative philosophical or socially-conscious edge. Mehrjui's films portray an Iran of shiny European cars, cosmopolitan businessmen, ringing telephones, Western videos playing on the VCRs, and Chinese restaurants (though he also loves to dwell lovingly on Iranian food preparation and serving): We are shown an ancient land with modern conveniences and modern problems — though, admittedly, the setting features sometimes peculiar local twists.

Mehrjui's work includes adaptations of Western literary works from J.D. Salinger (Pari, 1994, based on Franny and Zooey) to Henrik Ibsen (1993's Sara, based on A Doll's House). As Iranian movies have become known worldwide, and especially the unique homegrown genre of children's films, Mehrjui has stubbornly maintained a naturalistic, urban, contemporary approach, and criticized some of his more popular colleagues for making what he sees as idyllic crowd-pleasers that have little to do with the problems his people face in their everyday life. There's certainly nothing idyllic about, say, The Tenants (1987), a domestic tragi-farce that reminds one of the loose wackiness of 70s Altman: here the tenants in rundown apartment fight with each other and unscrupulous real estate agents trying to steal their home in a socio-political allegory that makes the structural issues structural indeed. Hamoun (1990) is a black comedy about an intellectual in mid-life breakdown: Hamid Hamoun is a writer in existential paralysis married to an artist who has her own problems and has had enough of his. Hamoun's favorite books (Fear and Trembling, Franny & Zooey, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Repair) are woven into both the thematic structure of the story and the dream sequences — Fellini meets Bergman meets David Lynch — the Japanese electronics buff turned Samuri swordsman who duels with the Muslim Imam is especially breathtaking. Leila (1996) is a wrenching "social problem" drama in the vein of, perhaps, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — though the answer here is possibly even more disquieting than a black son-in-law: when the wife of only son Reza learns she cannot have children, Leila caves in to her mother-in-law's obsessions to join a humiliating quest for a second wife for her husband who can bear the family a much-wanted heir. The Pear Tree (1998), offers a bittersweet and autobiographical musing on life, death and change by a filmmaker who has seen much of each, working under unimaginably difficult circumstances, and never receiving the acclaim his work has been due.

         The Iranian filmmaker most lavishly praised by Western cinematic cognoscenti, lauded by master directors like Akira Kurosawa, is Abbas Kiarostami. "Americans don't know it yet," says one critic, "but we are living in the age of Kiarostami." Film Comment polls named him director of the 90s. Not everybody agrees, however, including Roger Ebert who thinks this emperor has no clothes, and called the director's universally-acclaimed masterpiece "lifeless" and "boring." Without question, Kiarostami deliberately eschews Hollywood style: his artistic evolution began with metafictional quasi-documentary and continues to descend further into naturalism, of late stripping down from film and crews to hand-held mini-DV. The director-screenwriter's typical story sends a character on a simple quest — buying a goldfish, returning a notebook, searching for lost children — and follows in real time, from a single point of view, with no subplots, spending most of the film in meanderings and encounters along the way. Kiarostami represents one of several ongoing punk protests to the bloated arena rock of Hollywood (another being the Dogme 95 movement). Those who appreciate his style find it "elliptical" and poetic: those more accustomed to Hollywood suggest his films go nowhere and take forever to get there. Certainly a major influence among other Iranian filmmakers, Kiarostami serves to anchor one end of a stylistic continuum whose opposite extreme is director Majid Majidi, whose mastery of Hollywood polish and accompanying popularity has been an irritant to Iran's school of naturalistic filmmakers.

Kiarostami directed a dozen and a half mostly short films before beginning in 1987 what became his semi-improvised "earthquake trilogy." The first chapter is a film marketed in the West as Where is the Friend's Home? (1987), though a better translation might be "Where Is My Friend's House?" — an example of the sometimes bad translations which, with misspelled and sketchy subtitles, are a feature of some of the available Iranian releases. In this film, we meet the pair of school boys who become the object of the quest in the next film, Life and Nothing More (1992), in which an actor playing Kioarostami drives to the earthquake ruined-village where the first film had been made. The third film in the trilogy, Through the Olive Trees (1994), goes the next logical step, stepping even further backstage, and depicts the making of a film about a director looking for actors in a film. Kiarostami's metafictional burrowing is also the focus of Close-Up (1990), in which a man is put on trial for impersonating fellow director Mohsen Makmalbaf, and includes actual footage of an actual such trial, along with, of course, the actual Makmalbaf (who has scratched his own metafictional itch with films about filmmaking, appearing as himself shooting a movie in one of his movies). A Taste of Cherry (1997), the first Iranian film to win the Palm d'Or at Cannes, is an austere treatment of a man's determined quest to commit suicide and what he discovers along the way: this is the film some Western critics declared a masterpiece and Roger Ebert declared overrated. More recently, the UN invited Kiarostami to document orphans in AIDS-ravaged Uganda. The director brought his mini-DV camera as an afterthought, he says, but then he ended up shooting the entire project, ABC Africa (2001) in the format, thereby joining the DV revolution in filmmaking.

         While ultra-naturalism would be enough if nature was all there was, humans are also creatures of culture, that is to say, of symbol. Thus Mohsen Makhmalbaf, another of the most prolific and esteemed — if also controversial — of recent Iranian filmmakers, is a step across the stylistic continuum from Kiarostami's stark naturalism to a brand of magical realism that draws upon European symbol mongerers like Fellini or Buñuel — though the mythic aspects of his work are sometimes displaced into more realistic stories featuring more conventional tellings. Makhmalbaf combines an astonishing visual sense with playful humor balanced by a tragic sense — one that resists the more typically European drift into existential despair. He offers us one provocative image after another: a typewriter facing down an Iraqi tank brigade, a madwoman attacked by doves, eyes pride open with match sticks, a house that rearranges itself by means of a tv remote control.

Not that there isn't some controversy over whether this emperor, too, is clothed: the documentary Makhmalbaf: Unveiling an Islamic Filmmaker (1998) clashes assessments: whether the director is the greatest artist of the Islamic revolution who has come to subversively criticize the regime in his work, or a poser and lackey of the regime whose propagandistic films are made because he never criticizes the Islamic Republic. Some contrast the carte blanche given to Makhmalbaf by the authorities with the struggles with the establishment by filmmakers like Bahram Beizai, an artist whose films have been banned and whose career has been blocked every step of the way. Most observers who aren't expatriate Iranians (and some who are, like academic Jamsheed Akrami) conclude that while Makhmalbaf began his career as a true believer (like Eisenstein in some ways), he has evolved into an authentic filmmaker with a unique vision.

Indeed, some of Makhmalbaf's works may be easier entry points than others for newcomers. Boycott (1985) is the film where sympathetic critics detect Makhmalbaf's turn from his earlier stiff, propagandistic films toward more nuanced views and artful presentation. The Cyclist (1987) takes the measure of refugee desperation, as a former Afghan cycling champ with a sick wife agrees to ride his bike for a week straight to raise money for her treatment, providing unforgettable images of determination. The Peddler (1987) offers three stories with three different cinematographers; Akrami calls the second "the strongest statement made against a government that I have ever seen." Even critics admit that the powerful Marriage of the Blessed (1989) suggests all is not well with the regime. Here the perspective of a holy fool suits well the director's Buñuelian tendencies: a photojournalist shell-shocked by the war with Iraq flashes back to various battlefields and sufferings from which he can no longer be detached.

Like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf makes movies about making movies: Once Upon a Time, Cinema (1992) is a surreal and loving comedy about the movies that uses archival footage from Iranian cinema history and features a Chaplain-look-alike hero who brings his camera to the early 20th century Persian court. Continuing to hold a mirror to cinema, The Actor (1993) features an overworked film star and his insane wife who Punch-and-Judy their way from comedy to tragedy, from crazy ha-ha to crazy disturbing. Salaam Cinema (1995) presents a "cattle call" audition for a film, in which the desperation of the would-be actors and bullying of the director provokes further reflection on cinema and society. Among those turning up for an audition is the policeman who twenty years before under the Shah's regime had arrested and beaten Islamic radical Makhmalbaf: the director talked the ex-cop into appearing in a recreation of those events in A Moment of Innocence (1999).

More recently, the filmmaker seems to have settled into what may be seen as his most accessible period. Gabbeh (1996) is a gorgeously-photographed fairy-tale based on lives of nomadic Iranian carpet weavers. In The Silence (1998), a blind boy works as musical instrument tuner, and his ultra-sensitive hearing at times gets him in trouble but always reveals a wondrous world oblivious missed by others. When production on Kandahar (2001) began, a different title was thought necessary for Western release until events thrust the Afghan name and place into the center of Western consciousness. Suddenly, this is a film of a vanished culture: an Iranian woman dons a burqua to search for her sister in the land of the Taliban. Semi-documentary, semi-improvised, Kandahar is a step toward the Kiarostami end of the continuum, with the gripping images for which Makhmalbaf is known.

         Meanwhile, both Kiarostami and Makmalbaf are actively mentoring other filmmakers — including family members. The same year he directed Kandahar, Moshen Makmalbaf co-wrote and produced The Day I Became a Woman (2001), three related stories depicting stages of womanhood, directed by his wife, Marzieh Meshkini. The daughter of these two filmmakers, Samira Makhmalbaf, was only seventeen when she directed The Apple (1998), a bizarre family story, simple on the surface, with deeper political implications: a man and his blind wife keep their children locked away from outside world. Bahman Kiarostami has followed his own famous father's footsteps in his career as a maker of documentary films, such as Tabaki (2001).

         It is, however, Kiarostami's one-time assistant director Jafar Panahi who seems the master's most promising student at present. Panahi's work bears the mark of his teacher in his naturalistic and linear narratives, beginning with The White Balloon (1995), written by Kiarostami, in which a little girl determines to obtain a new goldfish for New Year's. The Mirror (1997), is a docu-drama that, once again, follows the path of a child protagonist, but abruptly questions the entire enterprise of filmmaking. Most recently, in The Circle (2000), Panahi regains enough confidence in narrative to skip the metafictional debates and tell the stories of various women whose stories are different, yet the same, under the Islamic regime. Banned at home, The Circle was Best Film at the 2000 Venice Film Festival.

         Not all the Iranian directors are so hung up on deconstructing their movies while making them. Majid Majidi (who early in his film career played the lead in Makhmalbaf's 1985 breakthrough Boycott) just wants to tell stories. Not surprisingly, Majidi is the Iranian director whose films have found the widest audiences in the West, in large part because he has mastered the Western (some might say "Hollywood") style — right down to, his detractors would say, the schmaltzy happy ending. With the cinematographer for his most recent two films, Mohammed Davudi, Majidi has proved he has all the directorial tools: an eye for composition and art direction, an ability to tell a story with the camera, and a sense for the kind of stories people want: that last skill can be read in a couple ways, but having a sense of universal appeal is neither always nor necessarily the same thing as pandering to the masses. Majidi has made his name with astonishly beautiful films, usually about children, which one might class as "pastorals". His movies are sometimes labeled children's films, but that glib tag sets unfortunate limits on the scope and depth of his vision.

Majidi's films have been released to increasingly higher profile in the west. Children of Heaven (1997) tells the story of a brother and sister forced to share the same pair of shoes, and ran away with virtually every prize at the Montreal Film Festival, only to lose out to Life is Beautiful for Best Foreign Language Oscar. The Color of Paradise (1999), likewise a classic of the Iranian children/village life genre, is a gorgeously-photographed story (like Makhmalbaf's The Silence) of a blind boy who sees more clearly the beauty of this world than those with eyes to see. Appearing on several critics' Top Ten Lists this year, Baran (2001) eases off the sentimentality, following the education of a young irresponsible boy by a shy Afghani, as both work low-level jobs on a high-rise construction site.

         Some important names are not featured in this survey as they should be: in the case of veteran Iranian filmmaker Bahram Beizai , unfairly so, for the reason that Beizai has found it extremely difficult to get his films made under the present regime. Some clues as to why might be seen in his Bashu, the Little Stranger (1991) with its provocative imagery of animated bombers flying through the credit sequence, more violence than one usually expects in Iranian film, and a tale of a dark-skinned orphan of the Iraqi war who is rejected by an Iranian village and taken in by the quirky single mother who talks to animals. Pushing the envelope with the censors is the path of hardship, Tahmineh Rezaie Milani , will likewise attest. Milani's sympathetic depiction of political resistance to the Islamic government in The Hidden Half (2001), landed her in political prison, with a death threat hanging over her head, until she was released on the entreaties of the First Film Buff, reformist President Mohammed Khatami. Two young directors, both former assistants to Abbas Kiarostami, made impressive debuts in recent years. Bahman Ghobadi is a Kurd whose film, A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), is set among Iranian Kurdistan along the Iraqi border. The film was 2000 co-winner of the Camera d'Or at Cannes. In a measure of the overwhelming acclaim of Iranian films, the other co-winner of that prize that year was Djomeh (2000), the directorial debut of Hassan Yektapanah , in which a lonely and love-sick Afghan refugee "milk boy" longs for what he has no hopes of achieving — a very human tragedy in the bleak, Iranian countryside.

Mention must be made of some distinctive documentaries. While not strictly Iranian films, the work of co-directors Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini has provided stunning access to the everyday world of Iran's people and the special burdens placed upon its women. Divorce, Iranian Style (1998) put set a camera at the bench of an Iranian divorce court to record both the institutionalized discrimination against women, and the unofficial ways Iran's women take some measure of control in their lives. Likewise, Runaway (2001), set in a girls' home, shows us that while females in the Islamic Republic are systematically oppressed, their defense of their own and their own dignity is as relentless and even more sophisticated.

Finally, Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the Revolution (2000), directed by Columbia University film historian Jamsheed Akrami , is much more comprehensive and knowledgeable introduction to Iranian film than our survey here, with film clips, analysis, and interviews with directors that demonstrate both their understanding of the complexity of their position under the Islamic regime and the resilience and originality of their individual artistic visions.