All eyes have turned to Iran in art houses around the world and the international film festival circuit. For the past two decades Iranian directors such as Abbas Kiarostami and Bahman Ghobadi have made acclaimed films despite working under the restrictions of their country’s authoritarian Islamic republic. Some of the commentators interviewed for Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution also point out that their artistic success became possible—at least in part—because of the regime.
The documentary by French-born Nader Takmil Homayoun folds a pocket history of 20th century Iran into a succinct, multi-faceted survey of the nation’s cinema. The Shah and Khomeini, the embassy hostage crisis and Iran’s war with Saddam Hussein are intelligently worked into an account of developments in Iranian cinema. Revolution draws from a rich vein of archival footage along with interviews with many Iranian filmmakers, film critics and officials from the semi-official organizations that produce the country’s movies.
According to Revolution, the first Iranian feature film was made in the early 1930s by a member of the country’s Armenian minority, Hovhannes Ohanian. A comedy lampooning backward social attitudes, it probably served the purposes of the monarchy’s program of modernization. The regime, later inherited by Shah Reza Pahlavi, reformed some aspects of the country while tolerating social inequality and repressing its foes. These policies provoked the 1979 Islamist reaction led by Ayatollah Khomeini, whose followers burned movie theaters, which they condemned as pits of Western decadence.
What saved Iranian filmmaking from destruction was a Shah-era movie, The Cow, which Khomeini happened to catch on television. Unlike the Hollywood-influenced product often turned out in the Shah’s last years, The Cow was influenced by Italian neo-Realism in its depiction of everyday lives up against injustice and poverty. It became a model for a new wave of Iranian filmmakers, many of them trained in government-supported academies.
But every step into the light leaves a shadow in its trail. Revolution shows snippets of the propaganda potboilers that encouraged young men to die in the trench war with Iraq during the 1980s. At the same time, the country’s best directors were learning how to depict and even critique their society within a censorship regimen scarcely more irrational than the Production Code that governed Hollywood until the 1960s. Alongside carefully mapped realism rose a more poetic strain of filmmaking, possibly influenced by Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov but also drawing from centuries of Persian poetry.
Some of the directors interviewed for Revolution ruefully admit their films have served the regime. By gaining international acclaim, they have helped soften the face of the Iranian government. On the other hand they have also presented the world with the human condition of Iran and offered a stark alternative to Hollywood. “Why should one country do our dreaming for us,” as one of Iran’s directors said about America’s dominance in world cinema.
Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution will be screened 1:30 p.m., May 24-25 and 7 p.m., May 26 at the Times Cinema.
