Sunday May 15, 2011, At 6:30 PM
A Tribute To:
EBRAHIM GOLESTAN
Brick and Mirror
a film by:
EBRAHIM GOLESTAN
In Persian with French subtitles
A high point of Iran’s first new wave, this 1964 masterpiece by Ebrahim Golestan takes its title from the classical Persian poet Attaar, who wrote, “What the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.” The philosophical implications of this are fully apparent in Golestan’s tale of a young man who finds a baby girl in his cab and spends a night with his girlfriend debating what to do with the infant. Though this black-and-white ‘Scope film superficially resembles Italian neorealism, especially in its indelible look at Tehran street life and nightlife in the 60s, its spirit is a mix of Dostoyevsky and expressionism: minor characters periodically step forward to deliver anguished soliloquies, contributing to an overall lament both physical and metaphysical.
In Persian with French subtitles. 124 min. (JR)++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A Letter From Ebrahim Golestan
Mr. Golestan's fascinating letter indicates that how hard it was in those days to make a film in Iran and at the same time, how smart and inventive were the people he had trained to work with him. It is really astonishing. As it is a very informative and a very important historic document, I am posting it on our website for the benefit of those interested in his works as well as in Iranian Cinema.Hassan Fayyad
Dear Mr Fayyad,
Sorry for the late reply, and thanks for your initiative to correct the
mistake which is usually made and eternally unimportant. Owing to
the circumstances in which I began filming, the whole of my ways of
film making was rather different from what is the normal and the
usual way elsewhere. In all the films that I made the number of the
co-workers and assistants that I had never exceeded six persons.
None of them had any knowledge of filming and sound recording
when I engaged them.The best artistically was Mahmoud Hangwall.
He was in sound work from recording to editing and mixing. He was
the one with the greatest of artistic talents. He was sent to me by a
friend who, like him was, from Khorasan. The friend had found him
working in a damp cellar with the first signs of rheumatism or worse,
and had asked me to give him a job as a menial worker, a cleaner. He
was first taught how to splice films and tapes. In a few week’s time he
showed a liking for sound evaluation and recording. Then he simply
soared. If you have a copy of a short film called “Water and Heat"
that I made with Foroogh, you would see the unprecedented kind of
sound that he actually MADE and arranged. This was three or four
years before the eerie sequence of an oil refinery in Deserto Rosso
by Antonioni. He was also the major contributor to the sound track
of "A Fire".The other valuable man of the team was Samad Purkamali
who was a messenger boy for me and Parviz Ra'ein when we shared a
tiny office in the 1950’s, he for the Associated Press and me when I
was covering news for various international TV news services and
companies.Then one day, a few years later I took a taxi and I saw that he was the
driver. He explained to me that he was running a taxi during the day
and he was working at nights as the desk manager of a small hotel
when he used time to prepare himself for the end of the year finishing
exams of Dabirestan. I offered him to join my set-up and just sit and
rehears his subject for the exams, concentrating solely on preparing
himself for the crucial end of the school year so that once the exams
were over he could consider if he liked a work at my place and if not,
take those three or so months as having been my guest, my gift for
the time he was so effective in his job as my messenger. He began
next morning, and after two or three months he passed his exams
with success and chose to work for me if I had any technical matter
and job for him to learn. I arranged for him to take a few months of
training in Europe, with Phillips in Eindhoven, Holland, and with
Arnold Richetr in Germany who were the makers of the Arriflex cameras,
and with Film Centre in London, the agency organization under
Stuart Legg the very well-known documentarian and writer. Samad
finished the programs that were prepared for him in those centers
in less than half the foreseen time. Luck was smiling at us and
although I had placed an order for a sound mixing console with
the firm of J. Arthur Rank and Samad had been practicing with
them in London, a representative of the American Westrex who
had come to Tehran offered me the recently developed transistorized
mixer—out of competitive concern at much reduced cost for immediate
shipment. All my brand new sound recordings arrived and I had also
engaged from London a very nice man who had been involved in sound
installation and recording at Pinewood Studios. All of these
developments enhanced Samad’s capabilities so much that the noble person
that was John Woodiwiss, the Pinewood man, came to me to say that his
conscience makes him tell me that with Samad around there was no need for me to
spend great sums for his salary and expenses and he likes to go back to
London. In those days there still existed the legendary noble
Englishmen.Samad took care of actually constructing recorder units, and when he saw
that I was looking at a catalogue for a camera-crane he asked to look
at it. He finally came up with a suggestion that he could arrange for making
one in Tehran.He even thought of searching in the Iranian Air Force’s depot of broken
aluminum parts, mostly propeller blades, and from the details in the
catalogue he eventually got a carpenter make a matrix with wood, and
by melting ad recasting those broken propellers he finally produced the
crane which could carry the heavy Mitchell camera and two operators,
with the arm turning 340 instead of the catalogue’s 270 degrees, plus
a displacement from 25 cm lower to 80cm higher than that of the one
in that British catalogue. As for cost, we spent about one fifth of the
price in the catalogue, and we did not have to pay either for the transport
and shipping nor for the import and Customs duties. When everything was
organized and smoothly running at my studio, Samad suggested that I
allow him to go and open a repair shop of his own with a legally
binding contract that whenever I needed him he would do my works first and
free! I accepted his going and dropped the legally binding proviso. He opened
a successful business and he helped every time I needed him--right up
to the time when I was restricted out of my work and had to leave Iran
in 1974. He had his prosperous shop until he left the country, and died
young and talented, in U. S.Another member of the team was Solomon. or Soghomon, or Soleiman
Minassian. The three names are the different pronunciation of the same
word in Latin or Armenian languages, or in Arab Persian. He had been
jailed in his youth for distributing leftist newspapers after the
organization of the leftist military officers was discovered with some executed and
some jailed. Soghomon's crime was aggravated because he was Armenian and
he was in the northern provinces. This was in 1954. He was released in
1958 and had gone to work in the building trade. A fellow prisoner who
had been with him and prior to that had been working as a junior clerk for
the oil company in Abadan and had been engaged to work as an office worker in
my set up had told me that he knew a sturdy young man whom he had
encountered a day or so ago in the street and, he suggested, that he
could carrying the heavy luggage and filming boxes when crews go on location
in the south. He suggested I should see him. He was brought in and one
could see that he could perform that sort of heavy duty. I asked him
of his pay expectation. He said he was getting 80 rials per day. This was two
cents below the value of just one dollar in 1958, the time of the interview.
I asked him “240 tomans a month?” He said he did not get the day to day job
every day. He said he would be lucky any day if he could be selected by the
"Boss", the head-builder. I really was appalled. I decided that I could not pay
him nearly less than half of what I was paying to the boy at the office who swept
the place and brought tea to the office employees. He could not believe
when I told him that I would pay him something like 600 tomans a month. To
make him believe the size of the offer I told him that it was because it was
hard work and heavy gears and all in a very hot climate. He was sent with the
team that were filming sequences of a documentary that became “Wave, Coral &
Rock.”The crew was happy with his swiftly and intelligently carrying the heavy
Load and his keen and fast identifying the various pieces they required.
He also assisted Samad in the making of the crane. He had great
Endurance but not enough finesse. His curiosity was helping him understand the
Various equipments but had not much sense of solving the aesthetic points. But
as he could listen well and forcefully execute the arrangements to me he was
a valuable camera operator that had to be closely watched and directed.
But that was not a great problem if it was you who had to plan and
arrange the quality of the lights and shadows and the angle of view and the
choice of the scene. In this respect, anyway, I had all my years of
photography as well as the camera handling, and was the interpreter of my own stories and themes.Minassian had a brother who had just finished his military
service and had a better education as he had not spent his years in
jail, as his elder brother had. He was also a very good, patient and keen
up observer and learner. Herand worked in editing and sound and
grew in an excellent way.There was also Zakaria Hashemi who had come to me to act in
a film as a "siahi lashkar" but his dormant talent flourished from
the few first scenes of the second film in which I had given him
the leading male role. He is Hashem of the Brick and Mirror.
He was given an accommodation in my studio and he was
discovered by Foroogh as a writer. The best war book ever
written in Farsi is his. And he also went to direct several
films. His own training was when we were making Khesht
va Ayeneh and in scenes and sequences when he did not
have to be on camera, he was helping everybody in everything,
and there is no better training in this.Dear Mr. Fayyad, I began with a limited intention of replying your letter
and I drifted into this long one without a plan or even intention.
Looking at the length of this I think it could be of some use to
someone who is running a film club. I wish you success.E. G.
You will please skip any mistake in typing that has occurred. I see that it is really too long to look for errors either in spelling, typing, or just plain writing.
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Ebrahim Golestan Introduction
Dr. Abbas Milani
Stanford University
May 6, 2007
Any fair description of Ebrahim Golestan courts the danger of hyperbole. Of Andre Malraux it has been said that he was the quintessential intellectual of his country. Golestan is truly the quintessential artist of his generation.
The contours of his luminous career, spanning over half a century, cover everything from cinema and fiction to Shakespeare and Shaw; it includes nearly every major intellectual, and artistic movement in twentieth century Iran, and nearly in every field he either reached the apex, or was one of the first to offer a radical critique of the movement. He was a little over twenty years old when he was named the editor of the Tudeh party’s chief organ; and long before criticizing Stalin became an intellectual fad,Golestan was amongst the first Iranians to criticize the intellectual sclerosis, and the naked nationalism that defined Soviet Marxism. His short-stories, brilliant in their pith and parsimony, heart-wrenching in the depth of their perception of the human condition, and of the follies and failures, no less than the virtues and valor of the human kind, his internationally acclaimed documentaries no less than his two trail-blazing feature-films, and finally his essays on the aesthetics of modern painting and poetry will, I am convinced, go down in the annals of twentieth century Iranian history as an oeuvre unmatched in its variety and richness, its innovation and experimentalism. Decades before Iranian cinema became a darling of film critics, Golestan was winning prizes and praise in some of the most prestigious festivals around the world. He was responsible for introducing Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway to Iranian readers.
His pioneering work in fiction and cinema was accompanied by a remarkably prescient sense of history. Much has been rightly made of the failure of intellectuals and scholars, as well as governments and intelligent agencies in predicting the Islamic revolution in Iran. Yet, at the height of the shah’s power, Golestan made easily not just the most daring political film of his generation, but predicted with eerie accuracy the advent of the Islamic revolution. Long before scholars began to talk about the oil curse and its power to deform politics and power in countries like Iran, Golestan’s film, Mysteries of the Ghost Valley points out the perils of sudden subaltern wealth.
About the time he made the Ghost Valley, a good decade before the largest mass exodus of Iranian from their country, Golestan decided to opt for a life of exile. The conjunction of the personal and the political, of the grief of losing Forough Farokhzad, his beloved in easily the most poetically celebrated love affair in the last several centuries of Iranian canon, led to his decision to leave home for Diaspora.
Golestan has an unwavering ethos of speaking truth to power, of standing up to injustice or ignorance with fearless abandon. In a country given to tagiyeh and ta’araf— the first a Shiite concept similar to Jesuitical dissimulation and the second the Persian social habit of verbal and invariably exaggerated deference— where circumlocution in discourse and demeanor is synonymous with circumspection, Golestan’s habit of frank talk, bereft of frills, as well as his aversion to dogma and to intellectual fads, have provided his foes some opportunity for a campaign of whispers. Surely in the long run of history, it is the mettle and measure of the work that determines an artist’s place andeasily overshadows the petty politics of personal innuendo. And though predicting the contours of History is a folly of ideologues, let me nevertheless venture a guess: When the history of our age will be written in future, the works of Golestan will stand out as singularly creative and daring, erudite and innovative. And talking of his work, many of his fans have been worried that exile has meant silence. Let me break the good news that for some time now he has been working on two books that combine personal touch and taste of a memoir and the flair for prose and narrative that define his fiction.
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The Secret of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley
Having moved to London in 1967, the distinguished Iranian writer, translator, producer, and director Ebrahim Golestan returned to his homeland to make this unpleasant allegorical comedy (1972), his second and final feature to date. A bitter satire about the shah’s corrupt regime, it centers on a poor peasant who plunges into a hidden cave, discovers a cache of valuable antiques, and becomes a grotesque nouveau riche tyrant. Golestan tackled a related theme in his exquisite 1965 short The Iranian Crown Jewels, which was commissioned and then banned by the shah’s cultural ministry, but that film attacked the very elitism that subsumes this one. The print being shown is badly faded, but the period ambience is still vivid. In Farsi with subtitles. 118 min. (JR)
Documentaries by Ebrahim Golestan
This remarkable program collects four pioneering shorts by Iranian writer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, who began producing industrial films for the oil companies in the 50s and evolved into an ambitious and accomplished artist; in some ways his documentaries are comparable to the early work of Alain Resnais. The Wave, Coral and Rock (1961, 40 min.), the most conventional, chronicles the building of a jetty and the laying of pipelines, while A Fire (1961, 25 min.), edited by the great poet Forough Farrokhzad, chronicles a protracted oil fire. The Hills of Marlik (1963, 15 min.) beautifully and suggestively documents archaeological excavations, and The Iranian Crown Jewels (1965, 15 min.), commissioned and then banned by the shah’s cultural ministry, is a formally dazzling and politically provocative brief on its subject. The first three are in English and subtitled Farsi; the last is unsubtitled, but copies of the English text will be provided. (JR)
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Before the Revolution
Ebrahim Golestan:
Lion of Iranian CinemaJonathan Rosenbaum
Imagine how different our understanding of film history would be if we were denied access to everything made before the so-called sound revolution. A much more profound revolution interferes with our grasp of the history of Iranian film. During the fundamentalist revolution of 1979, the Islamic clergy said cinema was a form of Western exploitation as corrupt as prostitution and over 100 movie theaters were burned to the ground.
Much of what we know today as the Iranian New Wave — the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi — reflects some of that anxious background. But there were actually two new waves: most of the major figures from the first were driven into exile, their films rendered practically invisible in the process.
Both new waves are associated with Italian neorealism and the ethics of humanism, but there are pronounced differences. The second has notably developed in relative independence from commercial filmmaking practices in the West. But the first, associated with Ebrahim Golestan, Parviz Kimiavi, and Sohrab Shahid Saless, was contemporary with the French New Wave, and reflects the modernity of that period. Bahram Beizai, Dariush Mehrjui, and Amir Naderi are among the few filmmakers who might be stylistically associated with both waves, but given how seldom their prerevolution films are seen nowadays (apart from Mehrjui’s The Cow) it’s difficult to say much about them.
I saw my first Iranian film, Kimiavi’s The Mongols (1973), a biting Godardian satire about the stereotypical way Iranians are viewed in the West, in London in the mid-70s and haven’t seen it turn up anywhere since. If it’s ever been shown in the U.S., its impact has been slight. The same could be said for Golestan’s no less modern Brick and Mirror (1964) and Saless’s equally innovative A Simple Event (1973). When Golestan immigrated to England, Kimiavi to France, and Saless to Germany, their films were left behind or displaced, and are now absent from our sense of film history. But an excellent subtitled 35-millimeter print of Brick and Mirror, along with five other films by Golestan (four of them shorts), wound up in a local archive, and this week the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing them, with the director in attendance.
An important literary figure in Iran, Golestan is celebrated both for his short stories and for his Persian translations of American literature, including Huckleberry Finn and works by Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene O’Neill. In 1956 he set up his own film-production business to make “industrials” for oil companies and gradually branched out, releasing increasingly ambitious films through the mid-60s (including Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black, for me the greatest of all Iranian films, and the only one from the first wave available on DVD). Judging from the five shorts I’ve seen from this period, his remarkable development is comparable in some ways to Alain Resnais in France during the previous decade.
Resnais’ shorts were commissioned documentaries, but while taking on such topics as African sculpture and colonialism, the Nazi death camps, the French national library, and plastic manufacturing, he was able to incorporate creative camera movements and edits as part of his formal structures as well as poetic meditation, literary narration, and at times controversial political positions. Similarly, Golestan appears to have approached his films on a protracted oil fire (1961’s A Fire) and archaeological excavations (1963’s The Hills of Marlik) as highly productive workshops. The Iranian Crown Jewels, a 1965 film commissioned and then banned by the shah’s cultural ministry, features dazzling edits and camera movements and a charged narration assaulting economic disparities. (This is the only Golestan film in the series lacking English subtitles, but a translation of the text will be handed out at the screenings.)
Golestan has made only two features, Brick and Mirror and The Secret of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley (1972). Only seven years separate them, but they hardly seem the work of the same man. Jinn Valley, a satirical, allegorical farce about a peasant corrupted by wealth, is interesting for its brassy visual style and what it says about Golestan’s escalating rage toward the shah’s regime, but it’s also bitter, misanthropic, and elitist.
Brick and Mirror, by contrast, is a masterpiece, perfectly focused in its withering portrayal of hypocritical intellectuals preaching altruism. Its tragic narrative, taking place over 24 hours and moving from a rapid first half to a slow second, shows us a Tehran radically different from anything we’ve seen in the second Iranian New Wave — especially in an early nightclub scene featuring a woman dancing onstage, at least one gay audience member, and a lot of bohemian atmosphere.
What’s deceptive about the film is that it combines a neorealistic look (in black and white and ‘Scope) with visual and dramatic modes that suggest expressionism and metaphysics. Peripheral characters periodically take over the story, and some of their monologues suggest Dostoyevsky in recounting the world’s misery. (The title derives from a somewhat cryptic line by the 13th-century Persian poet Attaar that says what the old can see in a mud brick, youth can see in a mirror.)
The film opens at night with a cabdriver named Hashemi (Zackaria Hashemi) listening to a man on the radio read a story set in a nocturnal forest. (The voice is Golestan, recognizable from his prosaic portion of the narration in The House Is Black.) Hashemi picks up a woman (Farrokhzad, seen only obliquely in a cameo) who directs him to a dirt road on a hillside. After dropping her off, he discovers she’s left a baby girl in the backseat. Clutching the baby, he runs after the woman and suddenly finds himself at the head of a steep stairway descending into darkness. Three rapid jump cuts moving down the steps and away from him emphasize his paralysis and isolation. He eventually winds up at a huge construction site, no less theatrically lit, speaking to a homeless woman in a scene that in its ambience briefly recalls Orson Welles’s The Trial.
We move next to a noisy nightclub where Hashemi, baby in tow, explains his dilemma to a group of flippant, dandyish friends and acquaintances as well as to his girlfriend, Taji (Taji Ahmadi). Later, at a police station, he’s advised to take the baby to an orphanage if no one claims her by morning. Taji meets Hashemi there and insists on returning with him to his one-room flat, where they spend an uneasy night: he’s paranoid that the neighbors will jump to conclusions about his sex life, she’s anxiously hopeful that they’ll keep the baby and get married.
The film’s emotional climax occurs the next morning, with Taji alone in the orphanage. It’s an extraordinary sequence, alternating documentary footage of orphans looking at the camera with Taji’s playful and compassionate responses to them, and culminating with a powerful tracking shot that moves down an endless corridor away from her. Formally it’s a precise complement to the earlier jump cuts, as slow and meditative as those were rapid and breathless, each locating a protagonist in a wider world that’s metaphysical as well as physical, standing on the brink of inconsolable grief.
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Ebrahim Golestan:
Treasure of Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa
One of the most exciting moments of my life as an Iranian exile in Chicago was meeting Ebrahim Golestan, the remarkable filmmaker and writer of pre-Revolutionary Iranian cinema. He came to Chicago for a retrospective of his films for a week in May 2007. Golestan – who had been out of the public eye for nearly thirty-five years – agreed to fly to the US and appear in front of an audience. The program was titled Golestan, the Lion of Iranian cinema.
Except for a couple of bootlegged videos of his films and a transfer of his short A Fire (Yek Atash, 1958-1961) included on a DVD released by the French film journal Cinéma, Golestan’s films are not accessible to the public. Apart from archives in Iran, the Cinémathèque française has most of his films (though unfortunately some of these were damaged or destroyed in a fire a few years ago). The only other place that has 35mm prints of his film is the University of Chicago, which has two of his features, Brick and Mirror (Khesht va Ainah, 1964) and The Secret of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley (Asrar-e Ganj-e Darre ye Jenni, 1974), and four of his shorts: Wave, Coral and Rock (Mowj, Marjan, va Khara, 1961), The Hills of Marlik (Tappehha-ye Marlik, 1963), The Crown Jewels (Javaherat-e Saltanati, 1965) and A Fire – all donated by Golestan in the early ‘80s.
The lack of access to Golestan’s films (like many other pre-Revolutionary films that are locked away in Iran’s film archives), and the shortage of written sources about him in English, have made it very difficult to learn about him and his work. Readers with knowledge of Persian at least have the advantage of being able to read his books, available from Rowzan Publishers. Only one of his short stories, ‘Esmat’s Journey’ (‘Safar-e Esmat’, 1966), has been translated into English. (1) As well, Golestan has translated important works of world literature into Persian, introducing Iranian readers to Ernest Hemingway, Huckleberry Finn and works by Eugene O’Neill, Stephen Crane and William Faulkner.
The day that Golestan came to Chicago, I went to the airport to meet him. Based on what I had heard, I expected to greet a serious-looking, arrogant aristocrat who walked like a king. But the 85-year-old whom I met in the airport was very different – warm and friendly, with a sweet smile, down to earth and charming. He looked much younger than his age. He talked passionately about politics. He carried a small Samsonite suitcase, and when I tried to give it to the driver to carry, he objected and said he could carry it himself. He was robust and had a strong posture, full straight white hair, and was humorous and sharp – somehow unlike any Iranian director I have ever met. He showed interest in my films, which I found significant coming from a filmmaker of his stature. I also discovered that I was distantly related to him – he is the uncle of my cousin’s cousin.
The non-Iranian audience in the US who have been exposed to a good dosage of post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema are probably unaware of the rich pre-Revolutionary film culture of Iran. One has to know the sacred place of literature – in particular poetry – and the important role of cinema in Iranian culture to appreciate the significance of Golestan as a writer and filmmaker. In the late ‘60s, many Iranian youths wanted to be poets; in the early ‘70s, with all the publicity about films and film festivals, every young person I knew dreamt of becoming a film director.
Cinema was seen as a new political tool or weapon, and a fast track to glory and fame, making it the hot topic of most conversations. There were certain cafés in the north of Tehran where established as well as wannabe intellectuals gathered and discussed movies, the latest books, poetry and politics. The political filmmakers were looked up to by people and watched as well as feared by the government. After the Revolution, many filmmakers left Iran, but some returned home. For example, Parviz Kimiavi, Dariush Mehrjui and Bahman Farmanara left for France and the US but then returned to Iran during the first decade after the Revolution. Golestan belongs to the generation of directors who left Iran during the Shah’s time. Sohrab Shahid Saless, another major director, left Iran for Germany in 1975 when he was 31, frustrated with the regime and its censorship, and continued making films there – in fact, more than eighteen features, In 1978, Golestan left Iran for the second time (the first time was in 1967, when he was 45) and, ever since, has been focused on writing novels in Persian.
Partly because the audience that he has in mind is still Iranian, and partly because he does not want to be at the mercy of foreign producers who might dictate to him what to do, he has given up making films. When he was in Iran, he was completely independent. He had his own studio and equipment, and the same small crew that he had trained. He was well-off financially. This is one of the reasons some have called him an ‘American Marxist’ who came from an upper-class family and became a radical leftist. This term is widely used in Iran for wealthy intellectuals who become Marxist out of fashion – therefore not to be trusted, out of touch with the reality of life – and would flee to the bosom of the West or America as soon as they smelled a revolution.
But everyone knew that Golestan never compromised, although he was close to the Royal Family; he never made films to please them. In fact, he did the opposite. For example, in his beautiful and poetic The Crown Jewels, which was made at the request of Sami’I (the director of the Central Bank) for the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Shah in power, he put in a narration that directly criticised kings and their jewels as the empty objects of their pride. Later the Minister of Art and Culture, a relative of the Shah and an ardent enemy of Golestan, censored the film. (The copy of the film owned by the University of Chicago has the original uncensored Persian narration.)
I come from a generation born in the ‘50s, with a collective memory of a political betrayal – the famous 1953 CIA-assisted coup against Dr Mohammad Mosaddeq, the nationalist and popular Prime Minister of Iran. The generation that saw the modernisation of Iran in the ‘60s and ‘70s embraced western culture and Hollywood movies, saw the possibilities of Women’s Lib, and were excited about film festivals, The Beatles, Antonioni, Bergman, Welles, Camus, Kafka, Mao, Che Guevara and Dostoyevsky. The Shah was the US’ friend in the region, and the oil money bought technologies, arms and plastic. The corruption and hypocrisy of the system, uneven distribution of wealth and political repression motivated much unrest. There was a sense of being robbed by the West of our oil money and cultural identity. The underground leftist movements became very active.
There was fascination for Western technology and culture (in particular, cinema) and, at the same time, a strong sense of resentment for feeling belittled by its dominating culture and technologies. The ideology of the left was very popular amongst the youth in this period. China and the Soviet Union were looked up to as the ideal systems. Every now and then, there was a student revolt at the University of Tehran and many students would be arrested or killed (the fear of the Savak, the Shah’s secret police, was prevalent). There was also a strong radical religious movement against the regime and against television and cinema as symbols of Western culture. This showed itself fully during the years of the Revolution, when hundreds of movie theatres were burned in Tehran, including the tragic fire at the Rex Cinema in Abadan, which killed nearly three hundred people who were watching a movie.
I recall first hearing the name of Ayatollah Khomeini in summer 1963, when there was a riot in Tehran. The clergy then was against the modernisation of Iran and Western culture, including Women’s Lib, cinema and television, and agrarian reform – all parts of the Shah’s ‘white Revolution’ plans to develop Iran. In this climate, many important poets, writers and filmmakers emerged; their work was charged with political rebellion and existential despair, as well as a skeptical view of progress and development. The anxiety culture resulting from the conflict between traditional and modern, poor and rich, the loss of the nation’s treasure and values, and fear of the system, was the subject of many movies.
Sher-e No (New Poetry) and Mowj-e No (New Cinema) refer to a group of films and works of poetry and prose that were created in the 60’s and 70’s. Examples would include works of Forugh Farrokhzad, Mehdi Akhavan Saless and Ahmad Shamlou in poetry; and in cinema the films of Fereydun Rahnama, Farrokh Ghaffari, Modhammd Aslani and Draiush Mehrjui. Key films include: Mehrjui’s The Cow (Gav, 1968), Brick and Mirror, Saless’ A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaghe Sadeh, 1973) and Still Life (Tabiat-e Bijan, 1974), Parviz Kimiavi‘s Mongols (Mogula, 1973), Masud Kimavi’s Gheysar, Kiarostami’s Report (Gozaresh, 1977), Ovanesian’s Parviz Sayyad kamran Shirdel Nasser Taghvai (The Spring Cheshmeh, 1972) and Bahram Bayzaee’s Downpour (Ragbar, 1971). Although similar movements and growth happened in the other arts (including theatre, music and performance), none was comparable in terms of power and attraction to poetry and cinema. As the cinematographer Aziz Saati put it: in the period before the Revolution we discovered Hollywood; and after the Revolution the West discovered us (through our cinema).
Most films of the Mowj-e No New Wave were set in the rural areas of Iran and were replete with metaphors. For example, The Mongols compared the destructive and alienating role of television and cinema in villages and remote parts of Iran to the invasion of the Mongols in Iran and the loss of the country’s treasures. But some of the films were realist, like Still Life, which showed the hypocrisy of the system and the forgotten poor in the rural north area of Iran. Downpour portrayed an activist teacher in the poor area of Tehran who is forced to leave his job; he is taken away by a death figure reminding the audience of the Savak.
Golestan turned to filmmaking right after the Coup. In fact, he filmed the last days of Mossadeq. He was once a member of the Tudeh party, the famous pro-Soviet Union Communist Party, but he left it due to conflict with the leadership. He soon started making documentaries for the oil companies in Iran. He bought state-of-the-art film equipment and opened his own studio. Brick and Mirror is the first feature film in Iran to be shot with direct sound. Golestan’s films were both realistic and metaphorical. His years of freelancing as a photojournalist and news cinematographer for foreign television stations and his background in documentary gave his work a strong sense of realism, while his poetic and political interests made it philosophical and symbolic.
Golestan has always been a legendary and fascinatingly mysterious figure for me ever since I was a teenager living in Iran in the mid ‘60s. Beyond his achievements and connections, he also had an intimate and controversial relationship with the feminist and revolutionary poet, Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967). Forough was the Joan of Arc of modern Persian poetry. Many worshipped her, but at the same time her bold rebellious voice angered male critics. She talked openly about her feelings and desires, challenged the repressive norms and expressed her despair about the social system of Iran. For more than a decade, she was the centre of controversy. The day she was killed in a car accident at the age of 32, the whole country mourned her loss. She became a cultural martyr, a myth, a sacred figure, the most beloved, respected and popular modern poet. (It is interesting to see that even those who banned her poetry, the most radical Islamists, quote her lines regularly, often not knowing their source.) Forough met Golestan in 1958 and remained in a close relationship with him until her death. She worked in his film company, the Golestan Film Unit, learnt about filmmaking, and made her amazing short documentary The House is Black (Khaneh Siah Ast, 1962), which Golestan produced and also co-wrote part of its narration. She collaborated with Golestan on many of his other films. She edited A Fire, acted in his unfinished film, Why the Sea Became Stormy (Chera Darya Tufani Shodeh, 1962) and The Arranged Marriage (Khastegari, 1962), and briefly appeared in black chador in the beginning of Brick and Mirror as the passenger who gets into the taxi and leaves her baby in the car.
When I took an interest in filmmaking in Iran, I saw Golestan’s short documentaries and witnessed the praise of the film critics (both inside and outside of Iran), especially for the shorts Wave, Coral and Rock and The Hills of Marlik. And finally I saw his last feature, The Secret of The Treasure of the Jinn Valley, a bold political film about the Shah’s regime and the corruption of the system. Soon after, I heard that Golestan had left Iran and settled in a palace-like castle near London, not wanting to be bothered by anyone.
Although many Iranians were curious about his relationships to both the Shah and to Forough Farrokhzad, no one dared ask him about either. Perhaps they sensed an unwillingness to talk about his private life. When I interviewed him about the origins of Brick and Mirror, he talked about the film as an allegory of the country at the time: the failure of the Tudeh party; the downfall of Mossadeq; the destruction of the country by corrupt people and agencies; and the mistake of people (especially the Tudeh party) in not supporting Mossadeq. He never made the slightest reference to anything personal, but it is possible to see some resemblance between his life with Forough and the relationship of the couple in the film: the unafraid strong woman and the athletic man who is reluctant to commit himself fully to her – he does not keep the child she wants and is concerned about the neighbors. Although the film clearly represents the fear dominating Iran at the time and the Shah’s Savak, there is also room for this personal reading.
Golestan spoke to me about an exhibition of the excavated objects he visited before creating The Hills of Marlik. A beam of light hitting these objects, buried for thousands of years, inspired him to make the film. He told me the story of how the one of the Shah’s young relatives would come in the middle of the night to the site and steal the precious objects to sell to foreigners. He said it made him want to cry – adding that, for him, this was the history of the innocent people of Iran.
A unique aspect of Golestan’s films is their beginnings. They make us see the present time in the light of the past: the history of the film’s subject. He told me that ‘when you tell a story, it has to become everyone’s story’. That is why Golestan sets the tone for each of his films: providing us with a introductory scene to relate it to a much bigger world, inviting us to view the work in that context. The Hills of Marlik starts with a shot of the hands of the archaeologist (Ezzat Negahban) sitting by a stream, putting the broken pieces of an ancient excavated object together. Then we see an excavated statue of a farmer plowing the earth, using cows set in the foreground of a landscape, and then the present time where we see a farmer plowing the earth in the background, also using his cows. The image shows the similarity between the two and makes us think that nothing has changed in the course of thousands of years; the farmers are still using the same technology to plow the earth.
Later on Golestan shows some excavated swords and other weapons against a black background; they are paraded before our eyes, flying across the screen. These are the objects that have been used in fights and wars in ancient times. In the following scene, we see the statuettes of a naked man and a naked woman placed opposite of each other against the natural background of Marlik hills. The voice-over talks about the call of male and female for love, mating and procreation – another emphasis on the same story of human life. As the film reaches its end, our attention is led towards the question of change and a more philosophical quest for a different vision that human beings need to have for the future.
The Crown Jewels starts with the landscape of a village and some poor sweating farmers working on the land. Then we see the beautiful jewels set on red velvet in the museum of the Central Bank of Iran. We never see a long shot of the museum or its visitors, but we hear them in English, French and Persian admiring the jewels displayed in different windows. The opening scene has nothing to do with the crown jewels, but Golestan brings the image of the poor farmers to our attention before we see the jewels.
Wave, Coral and Rock is about the three-year process of developing an oil export terminal in the Kharg island of the Persian Gulf. The construction process involves the laying and burying of pipelines under the ground, from the oil field to the island and under the water, as well as the building of the exporting station by the water. The film opens with a long shot of a tanker parked on the blue waters of the Persian Gulf. Then the camera goes under the water to show the life at the bottom of the sea. It follows the fish swimming around. We hear the narration asking the fish what they’re looking for. Then the camera emerges from under the water to reveal the white coral rocks on the shore. This scene is followed by a series of shots moving through the ruins, finally ending on a static shot of a shepard combing his beard while he sits next to his cattle – a peaceful environment that is suddenly shaken by the sound of a landing airplane and an explosion in the water, the first steps in building the oil terminal. The narration brings our attention to a distant history. These beautiful opening shots provide us with the context, a bigger picture that gives us a sense of history of the place, and a philosophical question about life, before we watch the process of construction.
The opening scenes of Brick and Mirror also set the tone and create a context. The film starts with night shots of Tehran’s streets lit by several neon lights. A cab driver comes into view. We see that he is listening to his car radio. We hear a play (specifically, Golestan’s voice) talking about fear, chaos and a sense of confusion, the enemy who is in disguise, and the hunter and the prey who are in the dark. This narration sends a message of paranoia and anxiety. The driver picks up a veiled woman (played by Forough) who leaves her baby in his car. After dropping the woman, he notices the abandoned infant in the back seat of his cab. To find the baby’s mother, he goes back to where he dropped her. But he enters a deserted construction site with darkened stairs. He meets a homeless couple and a woman with an absent-minded look who tells him, in a theatrical tone, about the desertion and destruction of the place. (Golestan told me that the scene was, for him, an image of Iran after Mossadeq’s time.) In the same vein, the driver looks around and goes up and down the dark stairways before finally returning to his taxi and taking refuge from barking dogs. This scene, setting the tone, stands out from the rest of the film, because its treatment is not realistic; its expressionistic and allegorical look is in contrast with the documentary realist style.
Another significant aspect of Golestan’s films is their narration. The precise, poetic voiceovers always add a historical and philosophical dimension. The Hills of Marlik, The Crown Jewels and Wave, Coral and Rock all have great narrations recited by Golestan’s beautiful voice. I cannot recall such a powerful, poetic voiceover in any other industrial or documentary films made in Iran, apart from Forough’s narration in The House is Black.
Golestan edited all of his films and paid close attention to the sound effects and their orchestration. The hypnotic rhythm of the shots of children looking at the camera in the orphanage, and the fantastic rhythm of machinery laying the foundation of the oil terminal in the water in Wave, Coral and Rock, like the musical structures of both The Crown Jewels and The Hills of Marlik, or the court scene where the cab driver goes in and out of doors to find the right person in Brick and Mirror, are good examples of how documentary/industrial films can be turned into poetic films (as in Alain Resnais’ Le Chant du styrène [1958]).
Other than editing and the duration of the shots, camera movement and the rhythms of both dialogue and performance contribute to the overall rhythm of the film. Brick and Mirror has many poetic moments due to the arrangement of dialogue and the silences between the couple. Their long, silent walk on the street after a heated conversation, in which the woman loses hope in her lover, as well as the orchestration of the pseudo intellectuals’ dialogues in the café, are great examples of these arrangements. Also, the dramatic beats of the performances are very important to the overall movement. The camera lingering on certain moments of non-action – such as when the man or the woman are waiting and thinking, uncertain and confused – gives the film a particular quality.
Although Golestan’s documentaries have similar styles, his two features are very different. Brick and Mirror is an existential slice-of-life about an unmarried couple over the course of a night and a day. Their relationship falls apart following the experience of having a child for one night and then losing her the next day, due to the lack of sense of responsibility and the weakness of the man ‘s character. Although the story opens with the man, it shifts to the woman and her strong character. The documentary scenes of Tehran’s streets and Government offices are placed next to the more theatrical bedroom, where the man spends the night with his lover. The fear of the invisible neighbours, whom he constantly checks from behind the curtains, dominates his personal life. Golestan is one of the few Iranian male directors (apart from Bayzaee) to have such a powerful, loving woman character. The woman (played by Taji Ahmadi) is strong because she loves and cares, is both unafraid and responsible.
In the café scene at the beginning of Brick and Mirror, we see a short but intriguing action of a woman singer. Instead of appreciating her performance, several members of the male audience get into a fight. Disgusted with their stupidity, the woman stops singing and leaves the stage. Golestan uses the streets of Tehran as a major part of the narrative. He also distances us from the characters when we enter a public space and a social institution. (Sometimes this created problems for him. For example, when the couple passes an alley, not talking to each other, a coffin is carried through. People in the alley thought it was a real coffin; when they found out it was fake and a part of the movie, they got angry at the crew.) Golestan’s camera stays on the minor characters longer than necessary for the plot, in order to allow us to listen to and see the dilemma and struggles of ordinary people. For example, in the long scene in the orphanage and police department, we remain inside scenes long enough to hear other people‘s complaints and issues that signify the typical social and cultural problems of the time (the long conversations of the nurse and the woman who wants to adopt a child, and the longer scenes of the bored, indifferent police officer who talks to the angry doctor). Golestan does this skillfully, without turning these characters into caricatures of social types. Every minor character has a life and not just a function to advance the story. This is very similar to the scene in Report where the main hero eats his sandwich in a deli so that we can hear other men talking about cars and economy. Such distancing gives Brick and Mirror a kind of episodic character, culminating in the final sequence, the long scene in the orphanage. The orphans whom we never get to know nail us to the screen for a solid amount of time – as do the children in The House is Black.
With his last feature, The Secret of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley, Golestan moves to a different style. The film is a strong social critique of the Shah’s time. A villager finds gold treasure under the ground. He buys himself many imported goods and rules the village like a king. He remarries and builds himself a tower (very similar to the tower that the Shah made in Tehran at the time). But soon his glory falls apart and he loses everything. According to Golestan, the film predicted the fall of the Shah, given the hypocrisy and the corruption of his era. Its allegories, and the similarities of its characters to real people, were very obvious to Iranian audiences at the time. They were amazed by Golestan’s bravery in mocking and criticising the regime in such an obvious way. But, in Golestan’s account, when the film was premiered for the authorities and dignitaries, many of whom the film directly criticised directly, no one in the audience noticed its real message. This was mainly due to the fact that the characters and actors were the same as in a famous popular television show of the time. Parviz Sayyad played Samad, a sweet naughty villager in Golestan’s film. Consequently, most members of the audience thought it was another film about Samad’s comic adventures. It was only later that the censor noticed the film’s true agenda.
This film is entertaining mainly due to the amazing acting of Sayyad, one of the best actors in contemporary Iran. But otherwise it lacks poetry and the other qualities of Golestan’s previous films. It is his angry response to what was going on in Iran at the time. Seeing it recently for the second time, just like the first time I saw it in Tehran on its initial release, I again found it both passionless and contemptuous towards its characters, despite its accurate depiction of society. (Golestan told me that, at the time of shooting, no one knew the film’s real purpose; he kept it from all cast and crew members in order to protect it from the censors’ sabotage.) The Secret Treasure of the Jinn Valley is full of references to the Shah’s time and culture, the stupidity and the megalomania of the ruling class, their empty pride. It is an overtly political film about the system and culture of the Shah, the self-absorbed dictator and the opportunists who follow him, the innocents who become corrupt overnight and the few who remained honest but were crushed – like the teacher who is mocked and harassed, or the loyal patriotic soldier who gets killed while trying to do the right thing.
Although Golestan’s features are impressive, my favorite films of his are he shorts The Hills of Marlik and The Crown Jewels, especially the latter. It is remarkably condensed, very beautiful and powerful – the best example of Golestan’s mastery of form and rhythm in a cinema that is both political and poetic.
