Fragmented Allegories of National Authenticity:

Art and Politics of

the Iranian New Wave Cinema, 1960-79

by

Farbod Honarpisheh

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2016
 © 2016
Farbod Honarpisheh
All rights reserved
 Abstract
Fragmented Allegories of National Authenticity: Art and Politics of the
Iranian New Wave Cinema, 1960-79
Farbod Honarpisheh

The New Wave (Moj-e Now), as the rather large body of “quality films” made in Iran before the
1979 revolution came to be known, forms the main thematic concern of this study. From start to
end, however, this primary track of investigation is opened up to other mediums of cultural
production: modernist Persian fiction and poetry, the visual arts scene, the discourse on
ethnography and “folklore studies,” and the critical texts produced by public intellectuals. The
second main theme coming to the fore is the intersection of the emergent “discourse of
authenticity,” the Iranian intellectuals’ growing demand for “cultural rootedness,” and the
production of modernist aesthetics in literature, arts, and cinema. Introduced early in the text, the
idea of “modernism of uneven development” provides the theoretical frame for this project; the
recurrences of the hypothesis, particularly as it pertains to a temporal divide between the city and
the countryside, are discerned and analysed.

The Iranian New Wave Cinema, I contend, always showed an ethnographic register, as it too
was after worlds and times deemed as vanishing. This “movement” in cinematic modernism
first emerged from within the documentary mode, which began to flourish in Iran from the
1960s. Cutting right across this study, the perceived divide between the urban and the rural
finds its reflection even in the way that some of its chapters are organized. Hence, the allegory
of the city, and that of the country. But, where ends the national allegory, a matter still
conditional on imagined continuity, other forms of allegory come to the surface. Critical reading
in this sense becomes an act of reproduction, further opening up fissures and discontinuities of
what is already deemed as petrified, whether of the national or of realism. Retaining a faith in
the cinema’s ability to redeem physical reality though, certain manifestations of materiality
come to the fore through my close readings of films from the New Wave. A number of these
material formations come to focus as the “objects” of the study: the museum display, the ruin,
the body, the mud brick wall, the moving car, and the old neighborhood passageway.
 Table of Contents

n List of Illustrations...................................................................................................ii

n Acknowledgments………………………………....................................................iii

n Introduction………………………...........................................................................1

n Chapter One – The Immediate Past……………………..........……....................29

n Chapter Two – Ethnographic Documentaries…………….................................79

n Chapter Three – Allegory of the Country…………………..............................133

n Chapter Four – Allegory of the City……………………...........…....................175

n Conclusion………………………………………………….................................230

n Filmography………………………………………………….......................…...242

n Bibliographies (English, Persian, Turkish)…………………………........…....245

  i  
 List of Illustrations

Figure 1 The Mongols (Parviz Kimiavi, 1973)......................................................................................24

Figure 2 Hedayat (middle) in Paris, 1928..............................................................................................42
Figure 3 The Hall of Mirrors (Kamal-ol-Molk, 1895-1896)................................................................. 51
Figure 4 Fighting Rooster logo..............................................................................................................65
Figure 5 The Hand (Hossein Zenderoudi, 1959)................................................................................... 67
Figure 6 Hedayat in a montage postcard, Paris, 1926........................................................................... 78
Figure 7 Persepolis (Fereyerdoun Rahnema, 1960).............................................................................. 89
Figure 8 The Silver Canvas (Kamran Shirdel, 1965)............................................................................ 99
Figure 9 The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1962)................................................................. 104
Figure 10 Bronze Prophet (Parviz Tanavoli, 1963).............................................................................119
Figure 11 The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)...................................................................................... 137
Figure 12 The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)...................................................................................... 139
Figure 13 The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)...................................................................................... 139
Figure 14 The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)...................................................................................... 141
Figure 15 Kharg Island, (Marcos Grigorian, 1963)............................................................................ 143
Figure 16 Untitled, (Marcos Grigorian, 1968).....................................................................................144
Figure 17 Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)............................................................................... 167
Figure 18 Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)............................................................................... 172
Figure 19 (Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)................................................................................................... 187
Figure 20 Constructing Ministry of Finance on debris of a Qajar Palace........................................... 197
Figure 21 The Brick and the Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)......................................................... 203
Figure 22 Tranquility in the Presence of Others (Nasser Taghvai, 1969)...........................................215
Figure 23 The Mina Cycle (Dariush Mehrjui, 1974)........................................................................... 215
Figure 24 Reza Motori (Masoud Kimiai, 1970).................................................................................. 224
Figure 25 Reza Motori (Masoud Kimiai, 1970).................................................................................. 228
Figure 26 The Mongols (Parviz Kimiavi, 1973).................................................................................. 234

  ii  
 Acknowledgments

In the beginning, the gratitude must go to the distinguished New Yorkers who formed my
dissertation committee and allowed it to have its time under the sun. To Hamid Dabashi for his
warm intellect and commitment. To Jane Gaines for always being there, even when you don’t
know it. To Andreas Huyssen who is a solid and generous scholar. To Sudipta Kaviraj who is a
proof of erudite ways. And, to Robert Stam, for all he is.
But, before everything, I must thank my peerless teachers in Montreal. I am thankful to George
Mitchell who believed in this immigrant kid and in his goal of studying films. I will always
remain grateful to Peter Rist because his knowledge of cinema and passion for the world go
hand in hand. Tom Waugh was the walking (or swimming) model, in academic rigor, in
pedagogic responsibility, and for proving the power of playfulness in intellectual matters. Katie
Russell might not know this but she taught me theories and texts that turned out the most
enduring in my work.
Somehow strangely, there were in my life these anthropologists, forward-looking and
experimental, who were both best of friends and sources of inspiration. Michael Taussig,
Setrag Manoukian, Jasmine Pisapia, and Seema Golestaneh.
“Meet friends in the rain,” Sohrab Sepehri wrote sometime in the early 1960s. I too had some
great friends along the way, in New York, Montreal, Istanbul, Tehran, and Shiraz. They were
present before and during the writing this dissertation. Shahin Parhami, Afshin Bayat, Ali
Amiri, Naira and Ariel Santana, Dariush Tasaodi, Michael Best, Amir Baradaran, Simon
Latendresse, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Foad Torshizi, Burçe Çelik, Khatereh Khodai, Veli
Yaşın, Saharnaz Samaeinejad, Lisa Ross, Cheryl Leung, and....
I am grateful to all those who through the years contributed to this project. Ladan Taheri and
her colleagues at the National Film Archive of Iran were indispensable in helping me find the
great but hardly seen films they hold in their collections.
Words cannot describe my indebtedness to Ella Shohat, for her work, kindness, and strength.
With my family, we went through a lot. I thank them for their unwavering support, and for
keeping the memories of our parents alive.

  iii  
 For Rhoda Abagis

  iv  
 – Introduction –

When it comes to deception, the heart and soul appreciate authenticity.

-- Siegfried Kracauer in “Calico-World”, 1926

We have seen how from social and economic standpoints [our] society is afflicted
with an incongruous and patchy organization, an amalgam of a pastoral economy and a
rustic or newly urbanized society dominated by great economic powers from abroad,
having the nature of trusts or cartels. We are a living museum of old and new social
institutions.

-- Jalal Al-e Ahmad in Occidentosis, 1962

On the Thematic Tracks

By now, it is rather well known that Iran enjoys one of the most productive film

cultures of our times; what is less known by contemporary audiences, however, is the

formative past of this vibrant cinema. The creativity, modernist lyricism and social

commitment of the filmmakers active before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 is recognized by

few film critics and historians outside the country. The vast and stylistically heterogeneous

cinematic corpus they left behind eventually came to be known as the Iranian New Wave (Moj-

  1  
e Now) or the Different Cinema (Sinemay-e Motefavet). It first emerged in the early-1960s (in

tandem with its counterparts in the rest of the world), often maintaining an intimate

relationship with the highly experimental documentary scene of the time (which included the

works of filmmakers such as Forough Farrokhzad, Ebrahim Golestan, Kamran Shirdel, and

Nasser Taghvai). In the following decade, with a guarded increase in state support, the New

Wave was a full-scale art cinema movement, with its own institutional structure, designated

auteurs, thematic and aesthetic characteristics.

It was during this era that many prominent figures of today’s Iranian cinema (like

Abbas Kiarostami, Dariush Mehrjui, Bahram Beizai, and Massud Kimiai, just to name a few)

started to make names for themselves as a group of young innovative filmmakers. For young

Iranian cineastes though, unlike for the Cahiers critics in France, there was no cinéma de papa

to protest against and the idea of creating a cinéma de qualité was not anathema. As proponents

of the interrelated ideals of cinema as Art (honar-e sinema) and auteur cinema (sinema-ye

moa’lef), they challenged, and in the process, defined themselves against the dominance of the

nation’s screens by the locally-made song-and-dance melodramas (collectively and somewhat

pejoratively referred to as filmfarsi) and the imports from Hollywood. Following the fall of the

monarchical Pahlavi order in 1979, regarded as a “cinema of quality,” the New Wave came to

function as a source of inspiration and a model in economic/institutional, thematic, as well as,

formal/artistic matters, for the nascent post-revolutionary film industry and culture.

The second main theme, around which the dissertation is organized, is the dialectics of

the “discourse of authenticity” (Dabashi 1993, 2001; Boroujerdi, 1996; Mirsepassi, 2000;

  2  
Nabavi, 2003), as it pertains to the cultural and political arena of Iran during the two decades

leading to the Revolution. I will discuss and situate exemplary filmic texts in the context of a

broader ideological reversal of the country’s intellectual scene marked by growing demands for

“cultural authenticity” (esalat-e farhangi). It should be remembered here that during the first

half of the Twentieth Century, what characterized the Iranian (non-clerical) intellectual scene

was an almost universal adherence to the ideals of the Enlightenment, such as secular

nationalism and progress (cultural and technological); the hegemony of this paradigm started to

falter rapidly from the late 1950s onward.

The emergent discourse of authenticity was enunciated by a number of leading public

intellectuals, chief among them, Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman, Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e

Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Ehsan Naraqi, and Dariush Shayegan.1 They were modernist and

cosmopolitan through and through, and they called for “cultural rootedness.” In time, in their

role as iconic intellectuals, they succeeded in collectively articulating a nativist alternative by

putting the question of cultural authenticity on the public agenda, in the face of an “era of

alienation” that was defined as a threat to its very existence. Theirs were congruence with the

ideas, methodologies and styles put forward by a number of Third Worldist and European

thinkers, particularly Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Albert Memmi, Jean-Paul

Sartre, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger.

Unlike the scarcity of academic writings on the pre-revolutionary cinema in Iran, the

scholarship on the country’s political and intellectual history is abundant. In almost all

                                                                                                               
1  Key  book-­‐length  texts  include:  Jalal  Al-­‐e  Ahmad’s  Gharbzadegi.  [Occidentosis:  A  Plague  

  3  
accounts of the post-World War II era, the “sudden” appearance in 1962 of the book

Gharbzadegi or Occidentosis: A Plague From the West by Al-e Ahmad is regarded as a turning

point in the political culture of the land. (The term gharbzadegi is translated into English as

“Weststruckness,” “Westoxication” or “Occidentosis”.) The already well-known author of this

influential book, however, was also a former seminary student, a one-time Communist, a

translator of Sartre and Camus, a self-taught ethnographer travelogue writer (United States,

Israel, Mecca and Medina, Soviet Union), an Ingmar Bergman and Eugene Ionesco enthusiast,

and, most of all, a writer of fiction—connections that I will foreground in the following

chapters.

Al-e Ahmad’s provocative monograph was initially written as a report on the behest of

the “Committee for the Guidance of Iranian Culture” (Shora-ye Hedayat-e Farhang-e Iran), a

government-affiliated institution that also refused to publish it. Breaking away from nearly a

century-long tradition of universalism in Iranian Leftist and Liberal thought, Al-e Ahmad

harshly criticizes the middle and upper class “malady of Westernization” as a source of

personal and collective destruction and alienation, as a form of “plague.” As for the solution,

he called on the intelligentsia to look anew towards the “East”—not to be understood as a

geographical entity, but as an “economic concept”: the Third World—and find inspiration in

the “authentic culture” of their people. For my study here though, equally relevant as his

Gharbzadegi, are Al-e Ahmad’s sizable but rarely discussed ethnographic texts, which he

composed throughout his career as a member of the literary intelligentsia. Starting from 1955,

he began a series of ethnographic pieces on various villages located in different regions of the

country. In each of these monographs—which he described as “sketches of rustic life”—Al-e

  4  
Ahmad details the locals’ folklore, religious beliefs, mourning and wedding ceremonies, local

cuisine and social issues. They were compiled in a form closer to an informal travelogue than

to a disciplinary academic study, a genre he saw as “inevitably written to Western criteria.”2

His primary intent in this endeavor was, in his own words, to record “the devastation of an

economic and cultural unit of the country” in the face of “machine and machine civilization.”3

He persistently and passionately asked his contemporaries to do the same, and many heeded

the call.

n n n

On the Theoretical/Thematic Fields

“Volatility became the theme. The world was unstable, people were rootless, reality

was amorphous, relations were changing, ideals were mutable. But in the midst of all this

fluidity of atmosphere, a certain consistency was in the air, a certain consistency between

what prophetic poets proclaimed and what their readers dreamed” writes Dabashi in Close

Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future.4 In full agreement, I will take this

observation of the constitution of modernist Persian poetry (She’r-e No) in the decades

following the Second World War and extend its grasp to the New Wave (a move facilitated

by Dabashi’s text itself), and, beyond, to the realm of socio-political criticism, gathered

under the umbrella term of “discourse of authenticity” offered by the intellectuals

mentioned above. Hence, the complex dynamic relation between aesthetic modernism and

                                                                                                               
2  Quoted  in  Hamid  Algar’s  Introduction  to  Jalal  Al-­‐e  Ahmad’s  Occidentosis:  A  Plague  From  

the  West  (Berkeley:  Mizan  Press,  1984),  12.    

 
3  Hamid  Dabashi,  Theology  of  Discontent:  The  Ideological  Foundations  of  the  Islamic  

Revolution  in  Iran  (New  York:  New  York  University  Press,  1993),  58.    
 
4  Hamid  Dabashi.  Close  Up:  Iranian  Cinema,  Past,  Present,  and  Future.  (London:  Verso,  

2001),  44.  

  5  
visions of modernity marked by senses of “volatility,” “disintegration,” and “rootlessness”

will be constructed as a third thematic track running through the text of the dissertation (in

addition to the two themes of the New Wave and the “discourse of authenticity”). In this

endeavor, I will rely to varying degrees, and in swaying intensity, on the theoretical output

of a number of writers: Siegfried Kracauer, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and

Marshall Berman.

So the last shall be first. In his All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of

Modernity (1982) Marshall Berman offers several inspiring analytical tools and insightful

perspectives. At the outset, the most relevant to our project here, is his conception of the

modern, not just as a fascination with the new, but also as turmoil, destruction, and loss. To

live in the world of modernity, he writes “is to experience personal and social life as a

maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble

and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid

melts into air.”5 Berman catches instances of the maelstrom in various sites, from the

literary to the architectural, from the pastoral modern to Baudelaire, “Petersburg vs. Paris,”

from the past to the recent past, from Goethe to Dostoyevsky to Brooklyn. But, of the most

inspiring to me, in this whirlwind of a script, is the way Berman foregrounds the literary in

the “non-literary,” the Communist Manifesto; this circumvention of the compartmentalizing

“dualism” that hermetically seals off the literature on (socio-economic) modernization from

the literature on (aesthetic) modernism, he argues, allows for the emergence of the

modernist themes and strategies at work in Marx’s writing (his peculiar, and complete,
                                                                                                               
5  Marshall  Berman,  All  That  Is  Solid  Melts  Into  Air:  The  Experience  of  Modernity  (New  York:  

Penguin  Books,  1982),  346.  

     

  6  
cutting out of Engels is a different story). Berman on Marx’s “modernist melting vision” in

the Manifesto: “Take an image like this: ‘All that is solid melts into air.’ The cosmic scope

and visionary grandeur of this image, its highly compressed and dramatic power, its

vaguely apocalyptic undertones, the ambiguity of its point of view—the heat that destroys

is also superabundant energy, an overflow of life—all these qualities are supposed to be

hallmarks of the modernist imagination.”6 Through this book, I revisit some of the key (and

some lesser-known) writings of the public intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly

those of Al-e Ahmad and Shayegan, and in the process foreground their underpinning

modernist traits. Juxtaposing the recurrent thematic interests, “images,” and tropes—of

ruination, of volatility, of disintegration, of rootlessness, of loss, and of memory—

produced by these writers with selected imagery and words from the New Wave of the

Iranian cinema is a main strategy (starting with the chapter on experimental

documentaries). But more of that later.

Two more ideas from All That Is Solid have found their echoes in my inquiry into

the New Wave, at times directly, other times more through works of others. (I am hesitant

to call them theories mainly because they are not named as such by Berman, and they

remain not fully developed as such even until the end, largely being taken up as themes in a

language that is above all descriptive and analytical.) To begin with, of course, there is the

modern city. On the formal level, it is the theme around which All That Is is structured

(subchapters on Paris, Petersburg, New York); conceptually, it (or rather the collectivity of

the “great cities of the West”) presented as the definitive symbolic and material expression

of modernization; when considering aesthetics, it is the site that gave birth to modernism
                                                                                                               
6  Ibid.,  89.  

  7  
(that trajectory of Baudelaire to Dostoevsky to Le Corbusier to the Futurists to the Soviets).

At times, Berman postulates the city and its crowded streets as the harbinger of the modern

man, proof of which, is the modernist text: “This, then, is the setting for Baudelaire’s

primal modern scene: ‘I was crossing the boulevard, in great hurry, in the midst of a

moving chaos, with death galloping at me from every side.’ The archetypal modern man, as

we see him here, is a pedestrian thrown into the maelstrom of modern city traffic, a man

alone contending against an agglomeration of mass and energy that is heavy, fast and

lethal.”7

The second idea of interest in All That Is is also related to the theme of the city, to

the point that the two are enmeshed together in analysis: Berman calls it the “modernism of

underdevelopment.” Berman argues for the existence of an inherent linkage between

modernist artistic production and conditions of incomplete modernization or

underdevelopment. To put it in other words, it is the awareness of “simultaneously living in

two worlds,” one developed and one still “pre-modern,” which produces modernism. This

sense of a life split in two becomes particularly manifest and productive when it turns into

a genuine “anguish of backwardness,” as the case of Russian politics and arts, from the

1820s well into the Soviet era, have shown. That period in Russian history, then, Berman

observes, can be seen as an “archetype” for the non-Western parts of the world of the

twentieth century: “In that hundred years or so, Russia wrestled with all the issues that

African, Asian and Latin American peoples and nations would confront at a later date.”8

                                                                                                               
7  Ibid.  159.  

 
8  Ibid.,  175.  

  8  
That the Eurocentric and deterministic underpinnings of this statement and, others like

them, in All That Is turn this otherwise very interesting account of the dynamics of early

modernism into a story of expansion, linear and unidirectional, is of course worthy of note

here. But it is even more important to note the peculiarly unabashed normativity, which

produces generalities and hierarchy, of this kind of differentiation (if only to beware of its

ever-present danger of their return, even among the most radical of thinkers). Still focusing

on Russia, Berman writes: “In relatively advanced countries, where economic, social and

technological modernization are dynamic and thriving, the relationship of modernist art and

thought to the real world around it is clear, even when—as we have seen in Marx and

Baudelaire—that relationship is also complex and contradictory. But in relatively backward

countries, where the process of modernization has not yet come into its own, modernism,

where it develops, takes on a fantastic character, because it is forced to nourish itself not on

social reality but on fantasies, mirages, dreams.”9 The peculiar thing here of course is that

in a text built on a ground of “melting visions,” losses of meaning, disintegrations (of the

solid things of all kinds), lost homes (of past and present), and returns to their “ghosts”—all

taken from the Western canon—one can still talk of lack of clarity and reality, and of the

excesses of fantasies and mirages.

What Berman calls “modernism of underdevelopment” makes a return in Fredric

Jameson’s A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2009), a book that

reconciles its shortness with elegance and eloquence, as modernism of “incomplete

modernity.” Unlike Berman, however, even though not discussing the matter in detail

(surely a factor that in fact contributes to its production as theory, a “substantive

                                                                                                               
9  Ibid.,  236.  

  9  
hypothesis,” in his own words), Jameson is very clear in his proposition that aesthetic

modernism, fundamentally, is a “by-product” or a “situation” of incomplete

modernization.” And here too one can find the two dialectical, and consciously dualistic,

groupings of “city-and-country” (mostly within societies/nations) and “advanced-and-

backward” (between different societies/nations). The disparities between the big industrial

urban center and the “peasant countryside” (a situation marked by incomplete

modernization or capitalism, we should still remember) are experienced in terms of time,

they create “distinct temporalities.” This particular mode of experience, Jameson suggests

(in engagement with Althusser and Balibar), is heightened during times of “transition”:

In this transitional era, people – but it would be better to say, intellectuals, and
the writers and the ideologists who are part of that category – still live in two
distinct worlds simultaneously. This simultaneity can no doubt for the moment
be cast in terms of some distinction between the metropolis and the provinces:
but it might better be imagined in terms of a situation in which individuals
originate in a ‘pays’, a local village or region to which they periodically return,
while pursuing their life work in the very different world of the big city.10

Again, reminiscent of Berman in All That Is, this hypothesis is offered as an

explanation for the intensified modernist cultural productiveness during certain historical

periods in unlikely places (Dublin/Ireland before Cambridge/Britain, the American South

exporting its vocabulary to both the American North and Britain, the Soviet Union ahead of

Western Europe); again, a potential is seen for better understandings of various,

particularly third world, “national-literary traditions” (away from “classical comparative

literature” and the notion of “influence”). The term modernismo, Jameson reminds his

readers, was first publicized by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío in 1888, ahead of Spain

or France.
                                                                                                               
10  Fredric  Jameson,  A  Singular  Modernity:  Essay  on  the  Ontology  of  the  Present  (New  York:  

Verso,  2009),  142.    

  10  
 It needs to be mentioned here that Jameson’s proposition on “incomplete

modernization” as a requirement for the emergence of modernism holds many promises but

also some dangers. On the one hand, in his arguments Jameson comes a long way (at least

here) from the unconcealed Eurocentrism of some of his colleagues. Jameson, for one, does

not place the process, exclusively in the “peripheries” of the Third World, or in Russia and

Italy, as it is customary; linked to the capitalist patterns of development it is at work at the

heart of Western Europe itself. On the other hand, however, the term “incomplete

modernization” carries with it a level of ambiguity: the word “incompleteness” after all

points towards the existence of a place and a time wherein the process is completed, which

could be designated by some, again, as Europe (not a rewarding conclusion) or point

towards a future in which modernization will finally bring itself, and with it the idea of

“modernist art” to an end (a development which holds some promises).

Raymond Williams’ writings, his body of work overall, and in the two books The

Country and the City (1973) and Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists

(2007) in particular, engage extensively and in detail, in fact anticipate, the issues and

debates brought up here so far—a world in disintegration, the city, and the question of

modernism. First, again, the image of a disappearing world (akin to its “melting vision”

forwarded by Berman): looking at the specific field of English literature in The Country

and the City, looking at it in a downward movement back in time, as though in an

“escalator,” Williams points to the constant re-appearance of a disappearing world. In his

critical project, the (literary) historian’s glance backward, even beyond the time period

  11  
generally accepted as the modern, encounters and re-encounters a general perspective in

each era—that the world of the recent past, always seen as a more organic and stable one

(and more English in Williams’ study), is quickly vanishing. In Williams’ own words:

“And then what seems an old order, a ‘traditional’ society, keeps appearing, reappearing, at

bewilderingly various dates: in practice as an idea, to some extent based in experience,

against which contemporary change can be measured.”11 This now old dynamics of the old

and the new plays itself out primarily in the productive—above all discursive, but also

experiential—contrast between the countryside and the big city.

The twin problematics of the capitalist metropolis and that of its special relationship

with modernism/the avant-garde were taken up by Williams in The Country and the City

and Politics of Modernism from a number of angles. In the latter, for instance, Williams

lays out some of the recurrent themes of modernist literature (themselves borrowed from

older “pre-modern” modes of expression): the “city as a crowd of strangers”; the figure of

the “isolated individual”; urban crime and the figures of the criminal and the detective; and,

finally, the city as a site of not only alienation but also of “new kinds of human solidarity.”

(All these, all interrelated, are finding their way into my study of the New Wave.) What is

more, as though in an act of creative twisting of these very same tropes, Williams analyzes

the modernist artist/writer residing, or rather, arriving, in the big modern city as a stranger,

an immigrant facing isolation and estrangement. The estrangement of the new, the
                                                                                                               
11  Raymond  Williams,  The  Country  and  The  City  (New  York:  Oxford  University  Press,  

1973),  35.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  the  preceding  sentence  in  this  quote  hints  at  an  
understanding  of  historical  change  in  a  manner  resonant  with  the  conditions  Jameson  (see  
above)  was  discussing  within  the  framework  of  the  concept  of  the  transition:  “The  detailed  
histories  indicate  everywhere  that  many  old  forms,  old  practices  and  old  ways  of  feeling  
survived  into  periods  in  which  the  general  direction  of  new  development  was  clear  and  
decisive.”  Ibid.,  35.    

  12  
defamiliarizing effects of modernist strategies, thus emerges, not merely as a form of

stylistic innovation, but more as a reaction to an environment in which even the language

loses its customariness and must be held at a distance. In this passage, (representative also

of the shocking economy of language often displayed in his prose), Williams brings

together a sociological observation to literary studies, the metropolis to modernism, the

thematic to the formal:

Thus the key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the
metropolis: in these general conditions, but then, even more decisively, in its
direct effects on form. The most important general element of the innovations
in form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be
emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense,
immigrants. At the level of theme, this underlines, in an obvious way, the
elements of strangeness and distance, indeed of alienation, which so regularly
form part of the repertory. But the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level.
Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in
quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions,
encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from
which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers
and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a
community of the medium, of their own practices.12

Bringing into attention the metropolitan formation of those “novel and dynamic

common environments,” allows Williams’ analysis also to provide a social base for the

emergence, and ups and downs, of modernist and avant-garde art. As I see it, understanding

of these “new environments” should be extended to go beyond the early circles and the

informal networks that connected the cultural producers, to include the city-based formal

institutions involved in production and dissemination (and, at times, containment) of art—

journals, festivals (national and international), museums, universities, and governmental

agencies. Linked together, these institutions build up into what I like to call a “new urban

                                                                                                               
12  Raymond  Williams,  Politics  of  Modernism:  Against  the  New  Conformists.  (New  York:  

Verso,  2007),  45.    

  13  
infrastructure,” one that shapes the cultural landscape around it and even further afield. By

constantly reminding ourselves of the centrality of this social base in our analysis,

material(ist), but not in the way that the old reflective base/superstructure model was, it is

my hope that the drawbacks of what Williams describes as falling into the “ideology of

modernism” will be avoided. So, the question of “the beginning of modernism,” a spot in

time always moving further away in the past, if one is only recording the now well-known

(stylistic/thematic) breaks, needs to be answered in a more worldly fashion: “For it is not

the general themes of response to the city and its modernity which compose anything that

can be properly called Modernism. It is rather the new and specific location of the artists

and intellectuals of this movement within the changing cultural milieu of the metropolis.”13

On modern institutions being among the primary agents in producing art, ideas about art,

artists, and their “specific location” in the world is something that many critics might easily

agree with (and more easily forget about), what is still needed, however, is to show their

workings in specific situations, in national, and transnational, milieus.

While underlining the metropolitan and cosmopolitan social base of modernism

(particularly in its formative stage) Williams also constantly refers to those tendencies that

might have seemed as somewhat of a contradictory element to his reader at the time: the

predisposition of modernism to have recourse to simpler times (the past, again), to the

simpler forms of the exotic, to the folk or popular artistic mediums and genres of their own

culture. These tendencies are now generally called primitivism. The scholarship that has

emerged in the last two or three decades, particularly within the body of writing known as

postcolonial studies, has studied many different historical instances of primitivism in

                                                                                                               
13  Ibid.,  44.    

  14  
modern art and literature, some of the examples of which are: James Clifford’s The

Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988);

Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century

Literature (1994); Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush’s Prehistories of the Future: The

Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (1995); Petrine Archer-Straw’s

Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (2000). Although fully

appreciative of the insight and the rigor of this generally more focused literature, I believe

that using, and expanding upon, Williams’ discussion of this very important topic can still

be productive. In Politics of Modernism, building on what seems to be like a recurrent

nexus (undeclared) of concern for content and form in the book, Williams presents

historical primitivism as above all a critique of the bourgeois order (social content) and/or

as a source of inspiration for formal and stylistic rejuvenation (form). He points out that the

desire for the ways of the marginal and the primitive, seen as more genuine and true to life,

has repeatedly been championed by those who are critical of the dominant order of their

society, as in the case of the Romantic Movement. The championing of the ‘folk,’

particularly when regarded as oppressed, could lead to very different political positionings,

of course. The primitive and exotic, seen as closer to nature and/or the oppressed

unconscious, and whose “art” became increasingly available to Europe because of

imperialism, functioned as a source of inspiration for the modernists and avant-gardists.

The primitive and the folk modes of expression, indeed modes of being, represented other

times and other places, and as Williams reminds us, they were simultaneously also

contrasted with the “most evident features of a modern urban industrialized world: the city,

the machine, speed, space.”14 Williams’ observations on primitivism strike me as

                                                                                                               
14  Ibid.,  53.  

  15  
particularly interesting in his critical entanglement of the European modernists’ reliance on

the exotic ways and objects of the distant lands and the appropriation of the folk and the

popular manifestations of their own cultures, contemporary or of the past. On the whole his

analysis views the various manifestations of primitivism as a seemingly seamless

continuum, as though another series of images produced by the backward vision of the

“escalator” (the method for historical inquiry explained in The Country and the City). This

inclusion of the self (of the folk and the popular) in the idea and practice of primitivism,

even if only implied here, I take as an opening for appropriating the category for other

places where modernists appealed to very similar desires, as did those who made the

Iranian New Wave.

My critical project is saturated with ideas and methods inspired by Siegfried

Kracauer (at times in dialogue with other critical theorists of the Frankfurt School), from

his Weimar essays as well as his writings in America. Only three of which, however, I

discuss here: his vision of a world in disintegration; the cinema as the medium of a fallen

world; the sensory experience of film. The key concept, that of the “disintegrating world”

of (capitalist) modernity, of course displays, not coincidently, certain similar features at its

heart with the already mentioned observations of Williams (vision of a disappearing and re-

appearing organic world) and Berman (“all that is solid melts into air”). Especially in his

earlier writings of the 1920s, Kracauer portrays the world of capitalist modernity as one

thrown into havoc by the forces unleashed since its inception, since the passing of the

“traditional,” faith-based, organization of the social. Weltzerfall, or disintegration of the

world (“a world without spirit,” one has to remember that passage from the Communist

  16  
Manifesto made famous by Foucault at last) generates, and is generated by, conditions of

spiritual loss, demise of meaning (Sinn), disappearance of real experience, loss of

community, homelessness. Thomas Levin and Miriam Hansen, two judicious readers of

Kracauer, note that he makes a clear distinction between the organic community of

Gemeinschaft and the rationalized technological society of Gesellschaft, a binary

opposition apparently adhered to by many thinkers of the time. Both Levin and Hansen also

describe Kracauer’s rather pessimistic account of a fallen world as lapsarian, both also

attaching the adjective metaphysical to it (with the latter openly welcoming its passing

away in his later phases).15 Kracauer uses the term Ratio for the driving force behind the

progressive destruction of the old world. A form of ever-expanding, abstract, instrumental

rationality, Ratio is embodied by capitalist economic growth, modern science, and

technology and is responsible for the de-realized nature of contemporary civilization.16

But, in line with the belief that modernity could be overcome through its own

destructive drive, Kracauer designates the cinema, a product of technological advancement

par excellence, with the greatest potentials. Film, then, with its nature (misnomer intended)

built on discontinuity and fragmentation, is the ideal medium for a world in disintegration.

Cinematic technology (machineries of camera, projection, and more) and aesthetics in

general, and the practice of montage in particular reproduce the experience of living in a

world distorted by bourgeois modernity. Through the technique of editing, cinema can
                                                                                                               
15  Miriam  Bratu  Hansen’s  Cinema  and  Experience:  Siegfried  Kracauer,  Walter  Benjamin,  

and  Theodor  W.  Adorno  (Berkeley:  University  of  California  Press,  2012),  7.  Thomas  Y.  
Levin’s  Introduction  to  The  Mass  Ornament:  Weimar  Essays  /  Siegfried  Kracauer,  ed  and  
trans.  Thomas  Y.  Levin:    (Cambridge  and  London:  Harvard  University  Press,  1995),  13.    
     
16  Hansen’s  Cinema  and  Experience,  7.  

  17  
juxtapose miscellaneous things and shots, of various places and times for example, creating

a jarring shock effect (as it is often seen in the early Soviet cinema or in the post-WWII

modernist/art cinema); or, alternatively, it can mend and create a semblance of unity and

continuity from what are obviously divergent fragments (often the case in what is known as

the classical cinema).17 But, for Kracauer the fact that it all starts before the editing table

and the procedure of the cutting of filmed footage into smaller segments—in effect a form

of fragmenting what is already a fragmented world—emerges as a starting point upon

which he builds his more ambitious contentions. This tracing of the course of

fragmentation to an earlier moment in cinematic montage, and in fact beyond to a pro-

filmic world, is a hypothesis he elaborates repeatedly, directly or not so directly. In the

essay “Calico-World: The UFA City in Neubabelsberg” (1926), for instance, he suggests

that the civilized world surrounding us, as exemplified in the uncanny site of the film city

of the UFA studios (an environment made of papier-mâché, facades, and ruins), is the

antonym of cohesiveness and organicness, and yet, it is at the very same time reconstructed

in such a fashion that it appears excessively real, even nature-like: “Everything guaranteed

unnatural and everything exactly like nature.”18 If cinema comes into being principally

through a mechanism of fragmentation/cutting and assemblage/association (montage), for

Kracauer it becomes that “distorting mirror” (Zerrspiegel), a negation of a negation,

                                                                                                               
17  In  Theory  of  Film:  The  Redemption  of  Physical  Reality  (1960)  Kracauer  underlines  the  

importance  of  editing  in  very  clear  terms:  “Of  all  the  technical  properties  of  film  the  most  
general  and  indispensable  is  editing.  It  serves  to  establish  continuity  of  shots  and  is  
therefore  unthinkable  in  photography.”  (Princeton:  Princeton  University  Press,  1997),  29.  
 
18  Siegfried  Kracauer,  “Calico-­‐World:  The  UFA  City  in  Neubabelsberg,”  in  Thomas  Y.  

Levin’s  The  Mass  Ornament,  282.    

 

  18  
capable of showing the truth of the contemporary world of disintegration (not so dissimilar

to the pravda in Dziga Vertov’s kino-pravda, I would like to add).19

Kracauer puts his faith in the institution of cinema on other, even more worldly,

levels as well. In an era in which the possibility of genuine experience was thought to be

quickly vanishing, when everything was reduced to the assemblage of facades, cinema he

believed was capable of capturing and transmitting the materiality of the world. Film, in its

photographic quality, and in its ability to re-produce the movements and rhythms (and later

sounds) of the world, offered the possibility of new sensory experiences. Kracauer argued,

in his later writings in particular (in his Theory of Film most clearly), that cinema’s

“inherent affinity” with the external world, provided the medium with a potential for the

“redemption of physical reality” (Hansen, Levin); this latent power to document historical

reality, however, was fully materialized when it was partnered with the deployment of

certain stylistic strategies (in editing, lighting, framing, etc.).20 In his earlier Weimar

essays, however, we find a Kracauer who, more in step with the “lapsarian” vision of the

fallen world of modernity, stresses the new medium’s radical bond with fragmentation,

distortion, destruction (spatial and temporal). “In the streets of Berlin,” in his essay “Cult of

Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces” Kracauer wrote, “one is often struck by the

momentary insight that someday all this will suddenly burst apart. The entertainment to

                                                                                                               
19  See  Hansen  on  the  notion  of  the  “distorting  mirror”  as  a  corrective  analytical  tool  in  

Kracauer  and  other  critical  theorists  like  Adorno  and  Benjamin.  Cinema  and  Experience,  7-­‐
8.  
   
20  See  Hansen’s  Introduction  in  Kracauer’s  Theory  of  Film,  p.,  ix.  Also,  Hansen’s  Cinema  and  

Experience,  12.      
 

  19  
which the general public throngs ought to produce the same effect.”21 Fragmentation and

discontinuity, particularly when sudden and shock-like, are qualities, effects if you will,

that point towards montage above all, of course. They can be found across various genres,

and for Kracauer writing during the 1920s, even more so among those arising from the

realm of mass culture, where the materiality of the world is at its most manifest and

troubling: slapstick, thrillers, adventure dramas, musicals, and “city films” (my extension

of meaning for the already existing genre at the time, namely the “city symphonies”).

What comes to the surface, if you will, in Kracauer’s Weimar essays, (such as his

multiple articles on Karl Grune’s 1924 film Die Straße) is a belief in the congruence of the

cinema and the big city (or the “technological enclave” as Jameson put it, you recall) as the

two ultimate sites of the industrial modern. And they are both at their “best” when volatile,

transitory, and in disintegration. Formally both the metropolis and cinema expose the

individual, whether in the crowd of the street or in the audience of the theater, to random

images, rhythms of industrialized life, the prospect of anonymity, fleeting moments, and

the like. One on the streets of the major urban centers or in their movie theaters loses a bit

of her/his “oneness” having to respond to the constant presence of stimuli. Kracauer’s is a

modern subject whose subjectivity is withering away, melting away, markedly different

from the rationalized, self-governing, closed-off ideal of bourgeois humanism. Part of the

materiality of the world in flesh and blood, and still other to it, Kracauer’s subject, fallen

                                                                                                               
21  Siegfried  Kracauer’s  “Cult  of  Distraction:  On  Berlin’s  Picture  Palaces”  printed  in  Thomas  

Y.  Levin’s  The  Mass  Ornament,  327.  

 

  20  
but not dead, has a porous skin.22 If the “hero” of the serialized genre of the detective novel

stands allegorically for the workings of the sovereign Ratio, the cinematic figure of the

“lonesome wanderer” (“Sehnsüchtiger”) brings together the anguished modern subject and

the experience of the big city street, fragmented spatially and temporally, together:

What intrudes upon the lonesome wanderer in the voracious streets of the
night is expressed by the film in a vertiginous sequence of futurist images,
and the film is free to express it this way because the pining inner life
releases nothing but fragmentary ideas. The events get entangled and
disentangled again, and just as the human beings are living dead, inanimate
things participate in the play as matter of course. A lime wall announces a
murder, an electric sign flickers like a blinking eye: everything a confused
side-by-side [Nebeneinander], a chaos [Tohuwabohu] of reified souls and
seemingly waking things.23

The persona of the “lonesome wanderer,” referred to as “Sehnsüchtiger” by

Kracauer, of course shares similarities and differences with the figure of the flâneur as

conceptualized by his long-time friend and interlocutor Benjamin. Both of these types of

the urban idler can also be found in the two entangled intellectual trajectories crossing

French (with such icons as Balzac, Baudelaire, Proust) and German (Georg Simmel, Franz

Hessel) cultural landscapes. These two, along with Williams’ “recurrent themes” of the

urban “isolated individual,” the detective, and the criminal, will find their way into my

study of the New Wave, particularly in the chapter entitled “Allegory of the City.”

At last, also shared by Kracauer and Benjamin, is the perception of the existence of

multiple temporalities—around which the dualities discussed here were also developed: of

                                                                                                               
22  My  wording  here  is  a  re-­‐working  of  Hansen’s  alteration  of  Adorno’s  description  of  

Kracauer,  a  subject  “without  skin.”  See  Hansen’s  Cinema  and  Experience,  18.  
     
23  Kracauer  on  his  1924  review  of  Grune’s  1924  film  Die  Straße  quoted  in  Hansen’s  Cinema  

and  Experience,  9-­‐10.  

  21  
the country and the city (Williams, Berman), developed and underdeveloped (Berman),

modernity and uneven modernization (Jameson), primitivism (Williams, Clifford)—as a

key predicament of urban as well as cinematic modernity. For Kracauer, the uncanny

meshes of temporalities on the screen and on the street are a byproduct of the “radical

dismantling of the world’s contents.” Thus, walking through the “ruins” of the UFA studio,

a site that epitomizes the temporal and spatial fissures of the city as well as the cinema, he

points out heterogeneity, in temporality and in generic/stylistic codes (two categories

closely related to each other):

The ruins of the universe are stored in warehouses for sets, representative
samples of all periods, peoples, and styles. Near Japanese cherry trees, which
shine through the corridors of dark scenery, arches the monstrous dragon
from the Nibelungen, devoid of the diluvial terror it exudes on the screen.
Next to the mockup of a commercial building, which needs only to be
cranked by the camera in order to outdo any skyscraper, are layers of coffins
which themselves have died because they do not contain any dead. When, in
the midst of all this, one stumbles upon Empire furniture in its natural size,
one is hard pressed to believe it is authentic. The old and the new, copies and
originals, are piled up in a disorganized heap like bones in catacombs.24

This juxtaposition of the miscellaneous elements, of the old and the new, are

particularly perceptible when it comes to the sets designed to stand for urban landscapes:

“The remains of modern houses have been integrated into an old-fashioned alley.”25

Kracauer’s vision here comes ever so close to Walter Benjamin’s repeated observation of

the modern city as site of multiple temporalities. In The Arcades Project (1927-1940), for

instance, we come across this passage:

The most heterogeneous temporal elements thus coexist in the city. If we step
from an eighteenth-century house into one from the sixteenth century, we
                                                                                                               
24  Kracauer’s  “Calico-­‐World”  in  The  Mass  Ornament,  282.    

 
25  Ibid.,  283.  

  22  
 tumble down the slope of time. Right next door stands a Gothic church, and
we sink to the depths. A few steps farther, we are in a street from out of the
early years of Bismarck’s rule …, and one again climbing the mountain of
time. Whoever sets foot in a city feels caught up as in a web of dreams, where
the most remote past is linked to the events of today. One house allies with
another, no matter what period they come from, and a street is born.26
(Emphasis added)

One can easily find comparable images from the cultural scene of twentieth-century

Iran, shaped by the ebbs and flows of aesthetic modernism from home and abroad. Fleeting

images of melting worlds, of villages in decline, neighborhoods of the everyday, cities,

streets, images of the now, of the haunting past. In the second half of the century, the gaze

towards the past became stronger and sharper, a movement hardly unprecedented, and a

sign of the time for sure. In 1932, almost exactly at the time Benjamin and Kracauer wrote

the last two quotes, Sadeq Hedayat, the icon of contemporary Persian literature par

excellence, made a trip to the “ancient city” of Isfahan. The result of that trip was a

travelogue piece, one of the earliest of its kind written in Persian, entitled Isfahan Is Half of

the World:

Shrine of Imam-zadeh Ismael—It is located in the faraway neighborhood of

the city (Isfahan), for going there one must pass through narrow alleys, dry
without trees, and between tall walls fortress-like, with houses enmeshed into
one another, in a way that will take one into a quagmire a thousand years old, all
these arrangements (pirâyesh-hâ) are so made for the staging of Oriental films,
and without wanting I remembered some of the famous cineastes (pirâyesh-
garân) of the cinema like Fritz Lang, or Pabst and Erich Pommer who whenever
seeing these alleys, new thoughts were revealed to them.27
n n n

                                                                                                               
26    Benjamin,  Walter,  The  Arcades  Project.  trans.  Howard  Eiland  and  Kevin  McLaughlin  

(Cambridge  and  London:  Harvard  University  Press,  1999)  M9,  4,  p.,  435.    
 
27  Sadeq  Hedayat,  Esfahan  Nesf-­‐e  Jahan  [Isfahan  Is  Half  of  the  World]  (Tehran:  Entesharat  

Negah,  1383/2004),  44.  

  23  
 The  Mongols  (Parviz  Kimiavi,  1973)  

Overall Panorama

The Iranian cinematic New Wave always showed an ethnographic register; in fact, I

will argue in Chapter Two that the “movement” first emerged from within that category called

ethnographic documentary, which began to flourish in Iran during the first half of the 1960s.

By making this proposition, I will be engaging in a kind of historical revisionism (in line with

Dabashi and Naficy), as the starting point of the New Wave is customarily claimed by most

critics and film historians to be 1969, the year that saw the release of three ground-breaking

fiction films: Mehrjui’s The Cow, Kimiai’s Caesar, and Taghvai’s Tranquility in the Presence

of Others. The New Wave never lost its relation with the documentary, particularly in its

ethnographic variant, a mode of filmmaking with a history of affinity with primitivism (Jean

Rouch and Maya Deren, for example). With the increase in the number of agencies supporting

production, with the crucial involvement of the Ministry of Culture and Arts (Vezarat-e

Farhang Va Honar), throughout the 1960s Iranian documentaries thrived and diversified. In

small or large crews, many young Iranian documentarians set out to discover, explore, and bear

witness to the diversity of those who inhabited the vast landscape of the country. Their main

  24  
objective at this time was to record what was seen as authentic and purportedly vanishing

customs, rituals, and arts of a fast-changing nation. In a story not unlike that of their

counterparts in other parts of the world (Alain Resnais, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Denys

Arcand, just to name three), several of these young documentarians eventually became

prominent fiction filmmakers.

The importance of the parallel process of institution building cannot be

overemphasized. From the late 1960s on (coinciding with the rise in oil revenues), an

increasing number of institutions and cultural and art-related festivals were founded by the

Pahlavi state for the stated purpose of promoting Iran’s “rich cultural heritage,” among them,

the Festival of Culture and Art (Jashn-e Farhang va Honar), Shiraz Festival of the Arts

(Jashn-e Honar-e Shiraz), and the Festival of Popular Culture (Jashnvâr-e Farhang-e Âmmeh).

The role of the state in setting up a network of institutions to provide support to an “Art

Cinema” (Sinema-ye Honari), while at the same time setting its boundaries, was instrumental

in shaping the size (the number of films produced, the non-commerciality of some of them, the

size of their production, etc.) and aesthetics of the New Wave. Three institutions that played a

particularly important part in this project were the Institute for the Intellectual Development of

Children and Young Adults, the International Tehran Film Festival, and later the Tehran

Museum of Contemporary Art.

The discourse of authenticity, in return, had its impact on the institutional and textual

manifestations of the Iranian film culture of the time and beyond (after the Revolution). In

addition to governmental intervention (financial and organizational support along with

  25  
censorship), the desire for salvaging the indigenous informed theoretical enquiries as well as

stylistic practices of the New Wave. This newly intensified interest in “the local” made itself

visible in a variety of ways: proliferation of ethnographic and arts-related documentaries;

linking Realism and the “real people,” particularly those living in the countryside, as the

embodiment of authenticity; drawing inspiration from older modes of image-making (for

example, movement towards, and in, two-dimensionality, as in Persian miniatures and religious

iconography); recuperating older forms of storytelling (like journey narratives and pardeh-

khâni); and the experiments with “traditional” theatrical genres (appropriating the style of

Shi’a passion plays for cinema by filmmakers like Beizai and Kimiavi).

In the films made in Iran during the 60s and 70s, the spectator is faced with a strong

tendency for condensed, tension-ridden and often critical, representations of the state of the

nation. These coded images and narratives, sometimes ambivalent (Golestan’s 1965 The Brick

and The Mirror; Kimiavi’s The Mongols, 1973), sometimes overt and didactic (Mehrjui’s

Postchi, 1970) could be read as “national allegories,” then and now. Film plots tended to be

crowded with emblematic characters, unfolding in symbolic spaces (like old narrow

alleyways). The historical determinants of class, gender, and sexuality were given additional

signifying facets. The poorer segments of the Iranian society, the urban working class living in

the “south of the city” and the rural communities, emerged as embodiments of the genuine

values of the country (Kimiai’s 1969 Caesar and his 1977 Journey of the Stone). Entangled

with the discourse of authenticity, was also the idea of gender, an issue contested by various

social forces. Iranian women were often, once again, seen and portrayed as the ultimate

  26  
expression of the nation’s cultural identity, and as its nurturers (Taghvai’s 1969 Tranquillity In

the Presence of Others).

The reading of the New Wave films as national allegories, rehabilitating and localizing

Jameson’s rendition of the concept you might say, is only the starting point and not the

endgame though. Therefore where ends the national allegory, a matter still conditional on

representation in history and continuity, other forms of allegory surface. Critical reading in this

sense becomes an act of reproduction, further opening up fissures and discontinuities of what is

already deemed as petrified, whether of the national or of realism. Retaining a faith in the

cinema’s ability to redeem physical reality though, certain manifestation of materiality come to

the fore through my close readings of exemplary films from the New Wave. Starting from

Chapter Two, slowly a number of these material formations come to focus as among the main

themes of this study: the museum, the ruin, the body, the mud brick wall, the car, and the old

neighborhood passageway.

While acknowledging the important effects of these ideas and practices, not least as

positioning strategies, my analysis builds on a more dialogic approach (Bakhtin), drawing

attention to the extra-national and trans-cultural interactions. Even though specific in some of

its features, Iranian audiences and film culture were never sealed off from the international

scene. Cinema in Iran, as in everywhere else I can imagine, grew in creative negotiation with

the cultural currents and economic conditions from beyond the nation’s borders. So the

uncanny: the aesthetic strategies borrowed from the “traditional” modes of artistic creation

(some mentioned above) ended up performing remarkably like other familiar modernist textual

  27  
maneuverings. In consequence there is an abundance of distanciations, reflexivities (often

infused with a neo-realist gaze), allegorical narratives, extreme long takes, multiple viewpoints,

and more.

  28  
 – Chapter One –
The Immediate Past

Iranian intellectuals either become melancholic, or heroin addicts, or modernists, or

mad, or Westernized…
-- Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Of Service and Betrayal of the Intellectuals, 1964

The first step taken by every new movement is to break the old idols.
-- “The Nightingale’s Slayer Manifesto,” The Fighting Rooster Society, 1951

To open up the story of the emergence of the New Wave to other cultural and

political currents might explain it better, but it will not make it easier. Part of the

complication of these hoped-for openings concerns the question of direction: to what way

one should turn? Towards literature or visual arts, or the political landscape of the time? Or

in all directions at once? How much weight does the local scene carry, and how much the

transnational ones? One particularly daunting question is that of the beginning, made even

more particular and daunting as it entails the story of “an emergence.” Talking about an

emerging corpus in a “creative” field is to talk about “a new,” and, as such, from the start

entangled with that ever-expanding, ever-elusive, problematic called modernism.

The Coup:

By the middle of the 1950s Iran was, at least in terms of state organization and

geopolitics, fully in line with the west. A coup had made that possible. The Iranian

military’s putsch in 1953 against the popular nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad

  29  
 Mosaddegh had restored the authority of the king, Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi. It was

backed, and for the most part organized, by American and British intelligence services.

Mosaddegh’s rise and fall was in turn linked to the nationwide movement for the

nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian oil company. That movement and Mosaddegh’s place

in it were linked to the political changes that followed the fall in 1941 of the first Pahlavi

King, Reza Shah. The years between the end of the Anglo-Soviet occupation in 1946 and

the overthrow of Mosaddegh’s government in 1953 were characterized by proliferation of

political movements in an increasingly open and untidy political environment. Liberal,

communist, ultranationalist, and religious parties and personalities worked with and

competed against each other. Ethnic and regional tensions came to the fore. Street

demonstrations and confrontations returned to the major urban centers like never before.

The coup changed all that, for some time at least.28

From the mid-1950s onward the Shah’s authority over the state and country was

increasingly solidified. The already existing institutions, like the army and the Ministry of

Education, were strengthened, while new ones were created, like the Organization of

Planning and Budget and the Ministry of Sciences and Arts. For the first time in almost two

centuries the two major Imperial powers affecting Iranian affairs, Tsarist Russia/Soviet

Union and Britain, had to retreat in the face of rising American influence and power. With

the Cold War in full swing, America contributed with money and expertise to the building

and reform of many institutions, from training and equipment for the military to progress in
                                                                                                               
28  For  a  concise  historical  account  of  the  oil  nationalization  movement  and  the  coup  d'état  

that  followed  it  see:  Ervand  Abrahamian’s  A  History  of  Modern  Iran  (Cambridge  and  New  
York:  Cambridge  University  Press,  2008),  113-­‐122.  For  a  highly  accessible  and  detailed  
chronicle  of  Mosaddegh’s  fall  see:  Stephen  Kinzer’s  All  the  Shah’s  Men:  An  American  Coup  
and  the  Roots  of  Middle  East  Terror  (Hoboken:  John  Wiley  and  Sons,  INC.,  2008).    

  30  
agriculture and development of the then-new media. The first professional

newsreel/documentary film units in the country were established with assistance delivered

under the umbrella of the Point Four Program. America also helped with the Organization

of Intelligence and National Security, better known as SAVAK. Enforced stability and an

accelerating incorporation into the capitalist world had its benefits too. The economy grew,

first steadily and slowly, and then, near the end, in the years near the fall, in a rapid but

unsteady way. Iranian educational bodies and individual students had easy access to

Western institutions of higher learning, albeit still subject to the usual class and gender

conditions. Young students and practitioners of the visual and performing arts, literature,

and the cinema gained extensively from these transnational connections. Galleries,

museums, biennales, and festivals, institutions that were beginning to become more and

more visible in the capital city, could boast of connections with the latest on the

international scene.

Expansion and rationalization of state affairs were moving at a fast pace even before

the oil boom of the early 1970s. That the Shah’s Iran was committed to an ideology of free

market and private entrepreneurship did not mean that the state played a minimalist role in

the economy, quite the contrary. A classic case of a country with an “underdeveloped

national bourgeoisie,” as Marxist critics would have it, and a state treasury adorned with

petrodollars, Iran has officially claimed a “mixed economy” for at least five decades now

(before and after the Revolution). This has meant continuous state planning and

intervention in the economic sphere on a massive scale. The state’s reach, in a country

whose nationalists and reformers historically once, particularly in the late nineteenth and

  31  
 early twentieth century, lamented the weakness of its central governments has been indeed

wide and deep. This kind of economic and bureaucratic expansion, the changes it brings

and make visible, at times can only be described as dramatic. The narrative and numbers of

one social venue of this expansion, in the bureaucratic sphere, provided by the prominent

historian Ervand Abrahamian in his 2008 book A History of Modern Iran, gives us a sense

of how things were taking shape:

The Shah’s expansion of the state bureaucracy was equally impressive. In these
years, he increased the number of fully fledged ministries from twelve to twenty –
including the new ministries of energy, labor, social welfare, rural affairs, higher
education, art and culture, tourism, and housing and urban construction. By 1975,
the state employed more than 304,000 civil servants as well as some one million
white-collar and blue-collar workers. The prime minister’s office, which oversaw
the Plan and Budget Organization as well as the religious foundations, employed
24,000. The ministries of education and higher education together employed
515,000, and administered 26,000 primary schools, 1,850 secondary schools, 750
vocational schools, and 13 universities. The interior ministry with 21,000
employees, redrew the administrative map of the country, increasing the number
of provinces from ten to twenty-three and subdividing into 400 administrative
districts, each with a mayor, village headman, or rural council appointed from the
center. For the first time in history, the arm of the state reached not just into cities
and towns but also into far-away villages and rural hamlets. By 1977, the state
was directly paying one of every two full-time employees.29

A number of points can be discerned in this reporting that are relevant to us. As

already mentioned, the Shah’s government in the decades following the destructive rupture

brought about by the western-supported coup of 1953 was able to consolidate its rule while

creating, expanding, and reforming, state apparatuses. The expansion of the state was

massive in scale and fast in pace. Consistent with growth in the economy, which included

private and semi-private components, a large class of salaried men and women was

produced. As expected most of the members of these newly-created middle and working
                                                                                                               
29  Ervand  Abrahamian,  A  History  of  Modern  Iran.  (Cambridge  and  New  York:  Cambridge  

University  Press,  2008),  126.  

 

  32  
classes were city-dwellers. The Pahlavi state however, as Abrahamian points out, and

contrary to what many of its critics used to argue, had its eyes on the countryside.

The Country and City Divide

In the early 1960s, as the Pahlavi order metamorphosed into a clear-cut dictatorship,

the Shah felt confident enough to launch one of his grandest projects, the White

Revolution. Essentially a set of ambitious socio-economic reforms, at its heart the White

Revolution had the goal of bringing modernity to the countryside. Lurking in the

background of the rhetoric offered was the will to further weaken the old landed and tribal

gentry in the countryside, and to immunize the society against a “red revolution,” in both

the city and in the country. Surplus agricultural land of large private estates was to be

bought, broken up, and then distributed among landless farmers. Success, since the stated

goal was to alleviate rural poverty and “backwardness,” was only partial. Some received

land too small to be viably productive for an acceptable standard of life. Many, like those

who received small or unproductive lots or not at all, simply abandoned their villages and

moved to major cities. To compare with the countryside, the cities, specially the larger

cities, were much wealthier and offered promises of a better life, in reality and in

imagination. In its reality, this was a condition of “uneven development” harsh and simple.

The cities were receiving the greater part of the attention, in the romantic ideas built around

them (or at least some of them), in planning, and in budget. This upfront form of

prioritizing of one segment over another was based on a paradigm of development favored

by higher echelons of the decision-makers that rationalized the modern city’s privileged

position. It was as though the city was the vanguard of development and progress. Within

  33  
 the cities, Tehran was positioned as a world apart. The division between the forward-

looking city and a countryside belonging to the past though, as is often the case did not

hold. Increasingly the people of the rural areas took to the new paved roads that were

connecting them to the city for a one-way migration. Some cities, chief among them

Tehran, developed shantytowns for the first time in their history.30

The trail of what we call the “discourse of authenticity” can be traced to around this

time, to the immediate years following the end of World War II. It is not that it appeared

first in that exact moment in history. There were earlier instances of Iranians, opinion-

makers and laymen, critiquing and mocking those who mimicked (taghlid or tashbih)

European ideas and mannerisms (farangi-moabi, mostafrangi). Some members of the

clergy engaged in the rhetoric as far back as the second half of the nineteenth century. The

most well-recognized critic of “Westoxication” Al-e Ahmad himself reminds his readers in

Of Service and Betrayal of the Intellectuals (published posthumously in 1977) of the

tension-ridden and age-old relationship, “this great divide,” between the clergy and the

figure of the Europeanized intellectual and bureaucrat. Al-e Ahmad points at the clergy’s

historical “intense suspicion” of intellectuals, a historical attitude he traces back to the early

decades of the Qajar dynasty’s rule (1785-1925).

In the same text Al-e Ahmad also lays out the characteristic of the “commoner

perception of the intellectual” (bardasht-e avamaneh) which he defines as both the views

                                                                                                               
30  For  more  on  the  widening  gap  between  the  large  urban  centers  and  the  countryside  

after  the  White  Revolution  see  Ervand  Abrahamian’s  A  History  of  Modern  Iran  (Cambridge  
and  New  York:  Cambridge  University  Press,  2008),  142.  
 

  34  
 of the intellectual held by the “common man,” and, simultaneously, as the modern Iranian

intellectuals’ own superficial perceptions of their place in the world.31 “In the beginning,

for the ordinary man of the alley (koocheh) and bazar and village an ‘intellectual’ was a

‘fokoli,’” Al-e Ahmad writes. He proceeds by registering some of the perceptions of the

type held by the commoner: displaying European ways, in clothing, in table manners, in

using European-origin words, he dances, goes to cinemas, etc.; lack of religion or suspicion

of it, not going to mosques, if he goes to a place of worship it would be a Christian church

because of the organ they play there, if not against Muslim prayer it is because he sees it as

a form of morning exercise, and etc.; he is educated, a quality though that ordinary people

saw as the last, and not the first, necessary condition for making one into a westernized

intellectual. He knows a little from physics and chemistry, but for sure expresses strong

opinions on psychology, Freud, and psychoanalysis, “sciences that have a long way to go to

become sciences.”32

Alongside, but not completely separated from the clerical discourse and the ordinary

believer’s negative perceptions, other forms of the critique of the “westoxicated”

(gharbzadeh) existed, even before it was popularized by Al-e Ahmad, even before the term

was dubbed. So, as early as in 1921, Hassan Moghadam in his highly popular stage play

Jafar Khan Has Come From Europe gave a satirical portrait of educated Iranians who

mimicked the ways of Europe and lived in a state of disconnect from their own people and

their authentic culture. The one-act play by Moghadam, who had lived and studied in
                                                                                                               
31  Jalal  Al-­‐e  Ahmad,  Dar  Khedmat  va  Khianat-­‐e  Roshanfekran  [Of  Service  and  Betrayal  of  

the  Intellectuals]  (Tehran:  Entesharat  Kharazmi,  1978/1357),  41-­‐46.  

 
32  Ibid.,  25.    

  35  
 Europe for many years himself, revolves around the amusing situations as well as serious

issues faced by a son of an old respectable family who has just returned from years of study

in Europe. The son now holds strange ideas and speaks an eclectic Persian infused with

foreign words. He thinks that because of his education he will be granted a good job at a

government ministry, but everything turns out to be more complicated.33

A most fantastic tale of an educated Iranian returning from an alienated and

alienating Europe is left for us by Sadeq Hedayat in a short story he published in 1932

called “The Doll Behind the Curtain” (“Aroosak-e Posht-e Pardeh”). This is a story of a

young Iranian sent for schooling in France. He is a shy boy from a good family, with a

domineering mother and cousin fiancée waiting for him back home. One day walking

in the crowded streets of the northern French port city of Le Havre he discovers a

green-dressed figurine behind a shop window and falls in love with her. From the eyes

of his “hero” strolling down the streets, Hedayat portrays the city and its inhabitants as

grotesquely strange and petrified:

“Started to walk again. Red lights of lowly taverns, fat men, peculiar and strange
faces, small and mysterious coffee shops that were made for these people, all
passing by his eyes, one after another....
Then with faster steps he went towards the Etats Unis, an unpaved road with a
cement (Hedayat here uses the word sement, pointing to a time before the word
siman was standardized in Persian) dam built in front of it. A large ship was
docked by the edge of the sea and the lights on that side were glittering from afar.
One of these ships that [are] like small worlds, like a floating city breaking
through the waves of the sea and would bring a group of people with strange and
peculiar manners and faces and languages from faraway lands to the port, and
then little bit by bit they would be digested.
                                                                                                               
33  For  more  on  Hassan  Moghadam  and  his  plays  see:  Jamshid  Malekpour.  Adabiat  

Namayeshi  dar  Iran  (Jeld  Sevom):  Melli-­‐garai  dar  Namayesh  ,  1320-­‐1300  h.s  [Performance  
Literature  in  Iran  (Third  Volume);  Nationalism  in  Performance  (Arts)]  (Tehran:  Entesharat  
Toos,  2007/1386),  184-­‐189.  
   

  36  
 These strange people, these peculiar lives he was making pass in front of his eyes
one after one, made-up faces of women he was focusing on. Were these the ones
that made men enchanted and mad? Weren’t each one of these even more
degenerate than that figurine behind the shop window? All life seemed artificial,
illusory (mowhoum) and senseless to him.”34

“Artificial, illusory and senseless.” These are the senses of the imagistic ruminations

coming through Hedayat’s depiction of “a world without spirit” (Marx) in a modern

European city. The constant flow of stimuli on the street is not a source of inspiration, and

the multiplicity of incoming peoples and languages does not create a life-flow of diversity

and heteroglossia. To say that this strange “new world”—a miniature of a French city street

called United States—is a place of conformity and assimilation is an understatement, as it

swallows the people, “digesting them little bit by bit.” Followed immediately after the

words quoted above, in a modernist move par excellence, the solitary “hero” of the story is

entangled in what Berman in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air would have called a “melting

vision” of the world: “It was like at this hour he was grasping for air while sinking (dast o

pa mizad) in a thick and sticky material and couldn’t rescue himself from it.”35 After taking

in the sights and sounds of the streets and crowds for only a few more lines, the young

student from Tehran suddenly turns, goes back to the boutique with the display, and buys

the mannequin in the green dress.

Five years later, he returns to Iran with three suitcases, one of which was very large

like a coffin. His family, particularly his mother and his fiancée who also lives in the large

                                                                                                               
34  Sadeq  Hedayat,  “Aroosak  Posht-­‐e  Pardeh”  or  “The  Doll  Behind  the  Curtain”  in  short  

story  collection  Sayeh  Roshan  (Chiaroscuro)  (Tehran:  Amir  Kabir,  1963/1342),  89-­‐90.      
 
35  Ibid,  90.  

  37  
house with them, soon realize that he is a new person now. He is no longer the same, shy

and obedient, son of the past. The fiancée he is now rejecting and refusing to marry,

Derakhshandeh (meaning the radiant, the glittering), grows especially suspicious,

especially of the doll he is keeping in an upstairs room. Mimesis was the way forward:

On the other hand, for winning Mehrdad’s heart, Derakhshandeh found his taste
and style in the statue. She had her hair cut and permed like the statue, made a
green dress like the one on the statue, even chose the style of her shoes after the
statue, and during the day when Mehrdad was leaving the house, Derakhshandeh
would go to his room, and imitate the statue in front of a mirror…In reality she
wanted to imitate the soul of the statue. The little resemblance she had with the
statue made this job relatively easy.”36

This state of affairs in “The Doll Behind the Curtain” draws in our consideration.

Before everything else, it should be mentioned that in this instant too, what is the object of

desire is a commodity that breeds other commodities. The mannequin placed behind the

window shop triggers a purchase, in turn, producing other acts of purchasing when it

becomes a source of imitation for a young woman living thousands of miles away. Further,

it is important to note that as a complex model of mimetic othering/encounter/contact (a

ploy as modern as it can get) it is initiated, and carried through time, by someone who is

positioned as an oriental and a woman. Derakhshandeh’s complex interaction with the

figurine from France renders her position as unique, not completely deprived of power, but

also not completely a form of unfettered subjectivity. If she is a subject here, and if not, it is

dependent on a number of outside variables, or what we also call outside mediation. Even

the beginning, her “act of initiation” in the course of fashioning her-self after the doll, is

                                                                                                               
36  Ibid,  94.  

  38  
not a matter that can be determined with certainty. She does have some control, as she

initiates and carries on with the act, but, on the other hand, did not the route to crossing

begin because she wanted to please him? Did she not start it all out of a desire to “win his

heart”? Also noteworthy in this passage is that it shows how the drive for mimesis can be

shaped from afar, affected by forces habitually regarded as “out of context.” The doll on

display, the window shop framing her, and the metropolitan commercial district housing

them, have been portrayed in many artistic renditions and analyzed in even more critical

works. More often than not though, the underpinning assumption is that they stand for a

particular stage in the development of capitalism, a particular context. Mass consumerism

must be linked to mass production, or else, its cultural products will not appear, or if they

do, they are out of place (and out of time) and incoherent. In “The Doll Behind the

Curtain,” however, the mannequin in green becomes perhaps even more powerful after

traveling. She gains a soul more desirable, more imitable, than ever before.

Long before Alfred Hitchcock made Vertigo in 1958, but still contemporary to

German Expressionist cinema, Hedayat in this short story constructs a narrative around the

themes of urban angst, decay of man, female doubles, mimesis between the living and

dead, popular Freudianism, and the violent coming of a death foretold. As “The Doll

Behind the Curtain” nears its end, the original fiancée’s efforts to entice her reserved and

bookish cousin meets with some success. As Hedayat puts it, he is confronted with an

“internal war,” both impressed and tempted by her persistence. After agonizing over the

matter for some time, he decides to put an end to his relationship with the statue. But it had

to be done properly, “because she was a living human more true and real to him than other

  39  
 living humans.”37 He buys a small revolver, but delays acting. On a drunken night, and in

confusion, he ends up shooting Derakhshandeh who had slipped into the room posing as

the statue. The story ends with the image of the shy student-turned-killer lifting his cousin’s

head as she rolls in blood.38

Mehrdad, the figure of the lone male wanderer in The Doll Behind the Curtain can

be placed within a well-known literary corpus that can be traced back almost a hundred

years. Think Poe and Baudelaire. Or, to think of a second, still linked, route, this dystopian

tale from 1932 can be analyzed in synchronicity with other cultural products of the early

decades of the twentieth century, more convincingly for instance German Expressionist

cinema or the way the poems and persona of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1131)

were being interpreted at the time (a project to which Hedayat contributed greatly). Even

within this rich web of intertextuality, The Doll Behind Curtin still stands striking today,

for the differences it reveals as well as the similarities it holds.

                                                                                                               
37  Ibid.,  95.  

 
38  We  know,  based  on  accounts  left  to  us  by  his  friend  (and  future  filmmaker)  Mostafa  

Farzaneh,  that  during  his  student  years  in  Paris  Hedayat  was  passionate  about  German  
Expressionist  films.  However,  the  closest  story  to,  and  one  that  I  can  think  of  as  a  possible  
source  of  inspiration  for  “The  Doll  Behind  the  Curtain”,  is  a  biographical  one.  In  1918,  the  
expressionist  painter  Oskar  Kokoschka  ordered  a  life-­‐size  doll  from  a  well-­‐known  
dollmaker.  The  doll,  which  at  times  accompanied  Kokoschka  carried  into  public  places,  was  
meant  to  be  the  substitute  for  his  onetime  lover  Alma  Mahler  (wife  of  Gustav  Mahler).  It  is  
said  that  after  a  few  years  the  doll  was  ceremoniously  beheaded  at  a  late  night  champagne  
party.  For  more  on  Hedayat’s  connections  with  the  cinema,  particularly  German  
Expressionist  films,  see  Gholam  Heidari’s  short  and  resourceful  article  “Sadeq  Hedayat  and  
the  Cinema”  in  Gholam  Heidari,  Sinema-­‐ye  Iran:  Bardasht-­‐e  Natamam  [Iranian  Cinema:  
Unfinished  Take]  (Tehran:  Nashr-­‐e  Chekameh,  1991/1370).  
             

  40  
 If in The Doll Behind the Curtain the contemporary European city is a topography of

estrangement and moral decay, it is only so as an extension of modern man’s omnipresent

homelessness. There is no home anywhere. The fictive young Iranian student’s flâneurie in

the streets of Le Havre is only unique because his gaze is adding another layer, more

intense, of isolation and melancholy to an already existing vision of a world in downward

disintegration. What is shocking today though, unlike most other contemporary tales of the

“Occidental Exile” (the concept developed by mystic philosophers Ibn Arabi and Shahab

ad-Din Suhrevardi, I use with a twist) that emerged in the milieu of the corpus we refer to

as the “discourse of authenticity,” in Hedayat’s story there is no home anywhere. To be

more specific, the “home” the student comes back to has very little redeeming qualities

about it. There is his mother, but she only is concerned with upholding traditions and

superstitions, good manners and obedience. Most shockingly, the home has no materiality.

While Hedayat calls up so much force and imagination to create a painterly ambience for

the northern French city, by contrast the segment that covers the events taking place in Iran

lacks descriptions of the space. There are accordingly no exterior scenes in Iran; all space is

interiority, physical and psychic. As for the scarce physical spaces there are, namely the

family home and their son’s room, there is a complete absence of descriptions of them.

This peculiar omission of the materiality of the “Iranian home” for the young man

returning from years of life in diaspora, and the significance of this absence, becomes more

evident if we remember the abundance in representation of such places in literary works,

political commentaries, and films, in the following decades. At this point, in this short tale

of return written by Hedayat sometime in the early 1930s, the only signifiers pointing to a

more hopeful Iranian past are the names of the only two Iranian characters named in the

  41  
 story: Mehrdad (the gift of love, gift of a savior figure from Zoroastrianism or Mithra) and

Derakhshandeh (the radiant, the illuminant).39

Hedayat (middle) in Paris, 1928

Perhaps ironically, some of the earliest and most influential demands for preservation

of cultural identity, culminating in what we now call the discourse of authenticity, came

from the educated men who lived in Europe or America for years, had gained degrees from

                                                                                                               
39  By  the  1930s  these  “pure  Persian”  names  would  have  still  been  extremely  rare.  It  is  only  

in  the  following  decades  that,  particularly  after  the  1950s,  that  these  two  names  became  
common.  Another  significant  choice  of  name  is  found  in  the  science-­‐fiction  short  story  
Hedayat  published  in  the  same  1932  collection  (Chiaroscuro),  called  “S.  G.  L.  L.”  wherein  
the  futurism  emerges  as  doomsday.  The  name  of  the  Iranian  woman  in  “S.  G.  L.  L.”,  the  only  
recognizably  Iranian  element  in  the  story,  is  Susan  which  means  Lotus  or  Lily.  These  
choices  are  congruent  with  Hedayat’s  positive  views  of  pre-­‐Islamic  Zoroastrian  history  and  
civilization,  a  political  conviction  that  at  times  lead  to  open  racism  and  one  that  was  shared  
by  other  intellectuals  at  the  time  as  well.    

  42  
 there, and had returned to positions in the expanding civil service and/or academia. In

1948, a book was published entitled The Conquest of Western Civilization (Taskhir-e

Tamaddon-e Farangi), one of the first (non-fiction) monographs in Persian to deal with the

topic of the Iranian encounter with the West as a problematic of culture. The author of

Conquest, Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman (1907-1967), was an intellectual and statesman

educated in elite schools in Iran, England, and France. After studying and working in

Europe and America for almost two decades, he had come back to a host of governmental

appointments, including, director of the Iran Insurance Company, minister of agriculture,

minister of finance, minister of justice, the vice regent of Imam Reza Shrine Properties, and

director of the United States Point Four program in Iran (1954). In The Conquest Shadman

set out with a vision of the end of the West, but, rather, he warns his readers of the end of

Iran, “the victory of the Western civilization in Iran would be our last defeat.”40 He

reserves his strongest denunciations for the opponent from within, those Iranians who

neither know deeply the West nor Persian culture but criticize aspects of their own people’s

culture as impediments to progress and call for their reform or complete abandonment. To

refer to these pseudomodernists he uses an already-existing term, fokoli, bringing it to the

center of his criticism and elaborating on it for the first time in print. Already carrying a

number of pejorative associations since the time of its coinage in the late nineteenth

centaury, the word fokoli was derived from the French faux-col, meaning a detachable (or

“fake”) collar, and was used mostly in clerical and popular discourses to refer to those who

adopted European ways blindly and excessively. Shadman, who was both a nationalist and
                                                                                                               
40  From  Seyyed  Fakhroddin  Shadman,  Taskhir-­‐e  Tamaddon-­‐e  Farangi  [The  Conquest  of  

Western  Civilization]  (Tehran:  Winter  1326/1948)  quoted  in  Mehrzad  Boroujerdi,  Iranian  
Intellectuals  and  the  West:  The  Tormented  Triumph  of  Nativism  (Syracuse:    Syracuse  
University  Press,  1996),  55.  
 

  43  
 a practicing Muslim, opposed the view, very common at that time among certain

intellectual circles, that Islam was incompatible with rational thought and science and a

cause for underdevelopment. Foregrounding the role of culture he put particular emphasis

on one domain within it, the Persian language, seeing its preservation and elevation as the

first line of defense against the encroachment of the imperial West. He stressed the

importance of the classical poetry of Persians was scornful of the modernist “new poetry.”

Although less known to the public, Shadman’s ideas in general and his attacks on the figure

of the fokoli in particular, were a precursor to arguments put forward by public intellectuals

in the following decades.41

Another intellectual taking off with his calling at around this time was Ahmad Fardid,

a philosopher who did not became public, an academic who did not publish, but, at the end,

distributed his ideas through others. Like Shadman before him, Fardid studied in Iran and

Europe, in Germany and France. From what we know about him in the 1940s and 1950s he

was associated with an intellectual circle gathered around Sadeq Hedayat.42 Fardid left a

mark with his dissemination of German philosophical thought both as a professor of

philosophy at Tehran University and through the study and debate groups he led. A number

of soon-to-be leading members of the intelligentsia were associated with him, several of

whom came to be known as the Fardid Circle (including a few I will discuss later, like

Dariush Shayegan). More specifically, it was his long-standing engagement with the ideas

                                                                                                               
41  For  more  on  Shadman’s  life  and  ideas  see  Boroujerdi’s  Iranian  Intellectuals  and  the  West,  p  

54-­‐63;  and  Ali  Gheissari,  Iranian  Intellectuals  in  the  Twentieth  Century  (Austin:  University  of  
Texas  Press,  1988),  84-­‐88.  
 
42  Boroujerdi,  Iranian  Intellectuals  and  the  West,  63.  

  44  
 of Martin Heidegger that in time became particularly productive and consequential. Fardid

took the Manichean civilizational talk of the East and West divide, already rooted in the

country by decades of modern Iranian thought not to mention centuries of European

Orientalism before it, and gave it a philosophical depth, and a history. In his 1996 study,

Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism, Mehrzad

Boroujerdi provides us with this rare and revealing quote from Fardid:

In my view, the present age throughout the world is the age of civilizational
traditions and not cultural memoirs. All Islamic countries and indeed all oriental
nations, without exception, are situated in a phase of history in which, contrary to
their Western counterparts, they can no longer be in possession of their own
historical trust. This is due to the fact that since the eighteenth century, Western
culture has metamorphosed into the historical tradition or civilization. (Fardid
1974, 19)43
Boroujerdi further presents a clear summary of Fardid’s thought in the form of the

ontological dichotomies it produces through historical epochs. The Occident (gharb),

starting with the rise of Greek philosophy, represents reality and the world, the Orient

(shargh), in contrast, stands for celestial revelation and Truth. The evolution of Western

thought from one grand era to another, through a series of metamorphoses, has led to the

anthropologism and anthropocentrism of the Modern Age. And yet, the spirit strikes back.

Just as the progression is concluded and total, as the East too comes under the domination

of the machine and the Western Weltanschauung, Fardid unexpectedly offers a way out.

The break out of the modern age of darkness is not through mimesis, but through a

crossing, and engagement in new-word-making. It is rarely remembered now that Fardid

invented the now-famous word gharbzadegi for Persian, later variously translated into

                                                                                                               
43  From  “Soqut-­‐e  Hedayat  dar  chaleh-­‐ye  harz-­‐e  adabiyyat-­‐e  Faranse”  [“Hedayat’s  Descent  

into  the  Cesspool  of  French  Literature.”]  Ettela’at,  24  Feb.,  19.  Quoted  in  Boroujerdi,  
Mehrzad.  Iranian  Intellectuals  and  the  West,  64.  
 

  45  
 English as “Weststruckness,” “Westoxication,” “Occidentosis,” or “Euromania.” The

term’s definition however was not exactly consistent with its meaning later popularized by

Al-e Ahmad and his 1962 book of the same name. For Fardid, the concept behind the term

pointed to a stage, a transitional stage in epistemology one has to cross. It is only after

becoming thoroughly “west-struck,” becoming fully aware of the West’s essence, that one

can confront it ontologically. Only then, one begins to regain the unity of the self, which

once existed in the East.44

After the War, in the Field of Visual Arts

By the late 1950s, Shadman was a respected historian and statesman and Fardid had

influence among a select circle of intellectuals, nevertheless, the most productive discourse

around the ideal of return to a more authentic past was really taking place in another area of

cultural production, in the finer field of visual arts. The decade saw the process of

institution building for the arts started during the years of the first Pahlavi monarch

expanded and speeded-up. In 1948 the College of Fine Arts (Honar-kadeh Honarha-ye

Ziba, founded in 1940) became affiliated with Tehran University and renamed the Faculty

of Fine Arts (Danesh-kadeh Honarha-ye Ziba). For the first few years the Faculty

continued with the pedagogical orientation and administrative leadership established by its

predecessor the College.

The director of the College from the start was André Godard (1881-1965), a man

whose capacities and mantle extended beyond his role as academic. Trained in archeology,
                                                                                                               
44  For  a  brief  and  helpful  discussion  of  Fardid’s  conception  of  gharbzadegi  or  Westoxication,  

and  its  comparison  to  Al-­‐e  Ahmad’s  notion  of  it,  see  Gheissari,  Iranian  Intellectuals  in  the  
Twentieth  Century,  88-­‐89.  

  46  
architecture, and a historian of art and antiquities, Godard played an important role in each

of these fields, and as a link between them, in their development in twentieth century Iran.

Having studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Godard began as one of the few non-

Iranian employees of the Iranian government when he took up the position of the

directorship of Iranian Archeological Services in 1929. In addition to leading excavation

activities across the country he was also appointed by Reza Shah as the director of the

Antiquities Museum and Library in Tehran. He worked under two Pahlavi kings and during

his decades-long tenure in Iran, lasting until 1960, he held multiple prominent positions

including, head of the College of Fine Arts, director of Archeological Services, dean of the

School of Architecture, and honorary member of the Society of National Heritage.

Furthermore, he worked as the designer and chief architect for several large heritage and

history-linked undertakings, most notably, construction of the Archeological Museum of

Ancient Iran (Mouzeh Iran Bastan), Tehran University, the Ferdowsi mausoleum in Tus,

and the restoration projects of Friday Mosque and Shah Mosque in Isfahan. Godard’s high-

profile Persian résumé, in addition to issues like the development of heritage preservation

and cultural nationalism, points to the close parallel development of archeology, museum-

building, fine arts education, and the development of modernism. As I will show by

returning to these issues later in this book, this parallel development was not just a matter

of a concurrence in historical time, of developments simply taking place at the same era in

a country’s history, but had seminal ramifications for the way aesthetic modernism was to

form in Iran, and consequently for the corpus that came to be known as the New Wave

cinema.

  47  
 Godard was commissioned to shape the College of Fine Arts into an institution along

the lines of Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts by the then Minister of Education Esmail Merat,

who was also at the control of the administration of Tehran University and had been

interested in the French school since his earlier years in Paris. Positive ideas and feelings

towards École were not limited to Godard and Merat as it was an orientation that pervaded

the Faculty of Fine Arts as a whole with many of its members being graduates of the École

system themselves. As Hamid Keshmirshekan writes in his seminal and far-reaching 2013

book Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives, “The same method and curriculum

were adopted, taking course outlines and projects translated into Persian and used in

reading.”45 Keshmirshekan also notes that even though nothing suggests that Godard had

any intention for the Faculty to champion the contemporary European avant-garde, still the

“European instructors did expose the students to late-nineteenth-century French modern

art.”46

From the chronicles that have come to us from the immediate years after the

formation of the Faculty, not the only institution of art education in the nation but by far

the leading one, the stage was set for a conflict between the “traditionalists” and

modernists. One comes across several accounts of this escalating rivalry in various

sources, for instance this anecdote in Kamran Afshar Mohajer’s valuable 2012 book:

In the evaluation hall where each week the students’ works were displayed, Sadeq
Hedayat with his round black frame glasses and a playful gaze would translate
Madame Ashub Aminfar’s [a teacher of architecture from France with the maiden
                                                                                                               
45  Hamid  Keshmirshekan,  Contemporary  Iranian  Art:  New  Perspectives  (London:  Saqi  

Books,  2013),  52.  

 
46  Ibid,  p,  52.  

  48  
 name Marthe Célestine Éve] words for the kids. [Hedayat was an employee of the
Faculty of Fine Arts for a few years.] Two opposing groups would always come
to face each other. Madame Ashub at the head of the modernists (now-garayan),
and Master at the head of the traditionalists, as intense arguments would ensue
between them, always Master Heydarian would end up exiting fired-up and in
fury.47
The scene depicted in this passage is a classic confrontation between des Anciens and des

Modernes. There are two camps. One has the new ideas and youth, while the other is

equipped with an institution it dominates, established titles (Master or ostad), and lack of

discourse flexibility. The scene of course ends, repeatedly, with those aligned with tradition

leaving in frustration.

The Iranian rendering of this turn of events, as accurate and as imagined as all the

other variations of the encounter between the old and the new (that some more steadfast

critics would call the “ideology of modernism”), has peculiarities of its own though. To

start with, if we step back a little from the immediate time frame of this encounter in the

late 1940s in a hall of Tehran University, the “ancients” involved here had in fact a

relatively short history behind them to point to for themselves and for the ideals they stood

for (at least within the confines of Iran). The story of their institutional and aesthetic

predominance on the national arena at the most could be extended back to the first decades

of the century. It is only with a slight tinge of generalization that we can claim the story of

the style they promoted, which had later come to be known as “academic painting,” was
                                                                                                               
47  Kamran  Afshar  Mohajer,  Honarmand-­‐e  Irani  va  Modernism  [The  Iranian  Artist  and  

Modernism]  (Tehran:  Daneshgah-­‐e  Honar-­‐e  Iran,  2012/1391),190.  Quoted  in  Manizheh  

Armin’s  Kimiagran-­‐e  Naqsh  (Tehran:  Entesharat  Howzeh  Honari,  1998/1377),  309.  In  the  
brief  segment  called  “Author’s  Introduction”  Afshar  Mohajer  writes  that  his  book  is  based  on  
his  doctoral  dissertation  defended  in  2003.  In  the  same  place  he  states  his  hope  is  that  his  
book  will  contribute  to  the  goal  of  the  “Iranian  artist  to  know  his  place  in  history  and  to  have  
a  general  view  of  [aesthetic]  modernism’s  entry  into  Iran  and  its  impact  on  the  Iranian  
artist.”(The  one  page  long  “Author’s  Introduction”  begins  before  the  book’s  page  numbers  
and  therefore  does  not  have  a  page  number.)              

  49  
tied to the life story and efforts of one outstanding figure who went by the honorary title

given to him, Kamal-ol-Molk (or Excellence of the Kingdom). The contribution made by

him to the development of that style through the years has been regarded as so central that

the Iranian critics writing in Persian until today use the term “School of Kamal-ol-Molk” as

often as “academic painting.”

Mohammad Ghaffari (1845-1940), later to be known as Kamal-ol-Molk, was born

in a village near the city of Kashan into a family that had produced distinguished painters

for generations, many of them affiliated with the court and aristocracy. He moved to

Tehran as a young adult to study painting at Dar-ol-Fonun, one of the country’s foremost

schools of higher learning modeled along European lines. Still a young man, he was invited

to the royal court and began to produce some of his most celebrated works. Some of the

paintings from this phase in his life are, The Howz-Khaneh of Sahebqaranieh Palace

(1883), The Fortuneteller (1891), The Hall of Mirrors (1895), and multiple portraits of the

king and nobility. His paintings show a high degree of faithfulness in reproducing detail,

and this virtuosity is put in the service of replicating the outward appearance of the world.

Two techniques used by Kamal-ol-Molk—not exclusive to him as they were part of the

repertoire of painting practices in the Iran of his time, but still indicative of a generational

break with centuries of Persian painting—show his commitment to verisimilitude: He

reproduced, mostly for training purposes, countless copies of works by old European

masters like Raphael, Titian, and Rembrandt; he also painted from daguerreotypes and

photographs.

  50  
 Kamal-ol-Molk, The Hall of Mirrors, 1895-1896.
Oil on canvas, 90 x 100cm.

The painting style developed by Kamal-ol-Molk’s has often been named as realism

or naturalism (the latter a term he used to refer to his work too). In her insightful 2002

essay, “Another Modernism: An Iranian Perspective,” Fereshteh Daftari gives a brief and

thoroughly illuminating analysis of The Hall of Mirrors, in which she puts forward the

elaborate painting that took five years to finish as one that “hovers between different modes

of representation.” Further, she points out, “Its architectural structure, notably the heavily

tilted ceiling, does not bow to perspectival law.”48 Still, in his Contemporary Iranian Art:

New Perspectives Keshmirshekan gives examples of eclectic treatments of naturalism

                                                                                                               
48  Fereshteh  Daftari,  “Another  Modernism:  An  Iranian  Perspective,”  in  Picturing  Iran:  Art,  

Society,  and  Revolution,  ed.  Shiva  Balaghi,  and  Lynn  Gumpert  (London:  I.B.  Tauris,  2002),  
41.  
 

  51  
 among Iranian painters before Kamal-ol-Molk and maintains that it was not until his time

that “we see Iranian norms of art appreciation turn rather significantly to European

standards.” Interestingly, he chooses The Hall of Mirrors and draws a very different

conclusion to that of Daftari just mentioned:

In fact it could be argued that Kamal-ol-Molk effectively ended the eclectic style
of Farangi-sazi [literally “European-making”] that had started from the late
Safavid period [dynasty ruling Iran between 1501 and 1722] and continued
through Qajar [ruled from 1785 to 1925] royal painting. The Hall of Mirrors
(1885-1890) – the first painting signed by the artist as Kamal-ol-Molk – is typical
of the naturalistic view in painting and can be compared to royal nineteenth-
century European painting. In this work, the artist depicts all the details of the
vast Hall of Mirrors in the Golestan Palace.49
Kamal-ol-Molk and the stylistic principles he believed in became even more influential in

the following years. In 1897, he travelled to Europe with assistance from the state for three

years to further his studies in the cities of Florence, Rome, Paris and Vienna. It is said that

on his 1900 trip to Europe (during which he was introduced to, also purchased the

equipment for, the "cinematographe") Mozaffar Al-Din Shah met the master painter in a

Paris museum copying a work by one of Europe’s old masters. In 1911, even before the

establishment of Tehran University, Kamal-ol-Molk founded the School of Fine Arts

(Madreseh-ye Sanayeh-ye Mostazrafeh) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of

Education.50 Although “Kamal-ol-Molk’s style”, when positively defined by its aesthetic

characteristics, was a form of realism, in the Iran of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century it was a clear-cut marker of the new, as a mode of modernism in the more extended

                                                                                                               
49  Keshmirshekan,  Contemporary  Iranian  Art,  32.  

             
50  The  School  (Madreseh)  should  not  be  confused  with  the  Faculty  (Danesh-­‐kadeh)  of  Fine  

Arts  created  (within  Tehran  University)  in  1948,  and  that  institution’s  predecessor  the  
College  (Honar-­‐kadeh)  of  Fine  Arts  founded  in  1940.  Although  the  words  used  in  the  names  
of  these  three  institutions  might  seem  similar  when  translated  into  English,  they  carry  
different  connotations  in  Persian.          
 

  52  
 definition of the word. Set against the older forms and practices, it has been understood,

then as well as now, as a representative of rationalism, reform, and liberal nationalist

values.51

Explaining the Iranian art scene of the 1940s, Alisa Eimen refers to the corpus of

painting built and disseminated by Kamal-ol-Molk and the institutions he headed as “an

aesthetic formalism informed by a European-style arts education.” She explains the Iranian

art scene of the 1940s in relational (really binary) terms in her 2014 essay “Shaping and

Portraying Identity at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (1977-2005),” and writes:

Until this point, there had been predominantly two general categories of painting
in Iran. One category was grounded in an aesthetic formalism informed by a
European-style arts education, and the other was largely untrained and rooted in a
vernacular tradition of narrative works, illustrating popular, religious and
legendary stories. This latter category functioned as visual aid as the stories were
recounted to crowds at coffee houses. Coffeehouse paintings, as they became
known, were not viewed as valuable artworks until recent decades, largely
because of their naïve style and connection to non-elite classes.52
Before everything it should be said that the characterization of the non-academic genres

here as largely being “untrained,” “rooted in narrative,” and functioning as “visual aid” for

storytelling performances, hides more than it reveals of the diversity and vibrancy of the

different modes of image-making that existed in Iran (and in fact across the Persianate

world) before and after the arrival of formal academic painting. In the same vein, it would

be hardly helpful to put all the existing modes and genres, whether they had patronage from

                                                                                                               
51  The  1984  film  Kamal-­‐ol-­‐Molk  by  the  celebrated  Iranian  filmmaker  Ali  Hatami  recruits  

his  life  story  to  strengthen  the  consensus  on  the  influential  painter  as  a  nationalist  and  
anti-­‐authoritarian  figure.          
 
52  Alisa  Eimen,  “Shaping  and  Portraying  Identity  at  the  Tehran  Museum  of  Contemporary  

Art  (1977-­‐2005),”  in  Performing  the  Iranian  State:  Visual  Culture  and  Representations  of  
Iranian  Identity,  ed.  Staci  Gem  Scheiwiller  (New  York:  Anthem  Press,  2014),  86.  
 

  53  
 popular, aristocratic, Islamic, minority, or, a combination of some of these sources, under

the term the coffeehouse painting (naqashi ghahveh-khanei). It should be remembered that

the term “coffee painting” was coined and popularized years later, only after the 1950s, and

as a corpus it had its own specific social and aesthetic reservoir, or aesthetic commons, it

engaged with.53 To give one example, how are we to account for the widespread practice of

painting of objects, like boxes and pen holders (known as ghalamdan-negari)? That was

surely a creative vocation that was non-narrative, and non-religious. Having said that, the

analysis offered by Eimen, for that very reason of its schematic arrangement, its outlining

of the “two general categories of painting,” reveals something important; it shows how by

that juncture, the late 1940s, the first category which we can still call the School of Kamal-

ol-Molk had progressively secured the position of “Art,” while the other, Eimen’s second

category had unambiguously become a vernacular, a tradition. I will raise these issues and

more of the discussions related to them later.

The completion of this division between the “Fine Arts” (at that moment regarded

as “learned,” “realist,” and “Western oriented”) and the rest (“folkloric,” “traditional,” and

“authentic”) set the stage for how things developed in the following decades. So, in the

1950s and 1960s, when aesthetic modernism was also taking shape in an avant-gardist

fashion, and the call for the authentic and the indigenous was gathering momentum, the
                                                                                                               
53  It  should  be  remembered,  if  only  as  a  side  note,  that  the  genre  of  “coffeehouse  painting”  

is  far  less  traditional  than  many  have  come  to  think.  As  Afshar  Mohajer  reminds  his  readers  
although  “the  roots  of  this  category  of  painting  goes  back  to  the  Safavid  Era,  but  the  
painting  of  these  [particular]  type  of  canvases  and  giving  them  a  function  is  related  to  the  
Qajar  Era,  particularly  to  the  Constitutionalist  period.”  Afshar  Mohajer,  Honarmand-­‐e  Irani  
va  Modernism,  163.  The  Constitutional  Revolution  took  place  in  the  first  decade  of  the  
twentieth  century,  and  that  is  contemporary  to  the  middle  years  of  Kamal-­‐ol-­‐Molk’s  
professional  life.  
 

  54  
 latter category, the category of the “other,” could return as an object of desire and a source

of inspiration. By then the traditional was already a vanishing object, in need of protection

and preservation, warranting to be sent to a display at a museum or in a film. It was exactly

at this point laid in the near future of those decades, that the “coffeehouse painting,” along

with a whole array of other visual and performance practices were “rediscovered.”54

We should go back to the point where we started our excursion, back to the scene of

those weekly student and faculty gatherings at the Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine

Arts. That was in the late 1940s, you recall. It is said every week during those meetings

passionate debates were taking place between the “modernists” and the “traditionalists.”

(See above.) I contended that the accounts of those public contests recall the well-known

story of

des Anciens and des Modernes. I also said that the era of academic aesthetics interpreted

and honored for a few decades by Kamal-ol-Molk and his prominent students, was rather

brief, from the 1900s until 1940s at the most, and its supremacy hardly ever complete. A

number of Iranian art critics and historians (and at least one filmmaker, Mohsen

Makhmalbaf) have come in retrospect to criticize Kamal-ol-Molk for not familiarizing

himself with Europe’s contemporary art movements (the Impressionists, Post-

Impressionists, and Fauvists are often mentioned) and instead importing an outmoded style

into Iran. The criticism points to a disjuncture, a deformity in the process of development

really, that was sustained between the trajectory of modernist art in Iran and the outside
                                                                                                               
54  Some  of  those  other  visual  and  performance  practices  included  ayneh-­‐kari,  pardeh-­‐

khani,  pardeh-­‐keshi,  zarih-­‐sazi,  divar-­‐negari  of  holy  shrines,  shamayel-­‐negari,  ghalamdan-­‐

negari,  eidi-­‐sazi,  kheymeh-­‐shab-­‐bazi  (a  form  of  puppetry),  tazieh,  and  weaving  carpets  with  
images.    
 

  55  
 world, understood mostly as Europe and America. “A seventy year delay,” Afshar Mohajer

calls it without any hesitation in his book The Iranian Artist and Modernism (which also

gives us the passage above depicting the weekly encounters between “traditionalists” and

“modernists” at the Faculty of Fine Arts).55

In an ironic twist of affairs, Kamal-ol-Molk is still censured by some critics both for

making excess of a connection, or, at the same time by others, for not making a sufficient

degree of connection, with the West. For the first group, then, the master painter created a

rupture in the “natural development” of Iranian painting by throwing it along a fully

European course. In this view the ascendency of Kamal-ol-Molk’s academic style

prevented the emergence of an Iranian national model of painting. A prominent art

historian, and former director of Tehran’s Museum of Anthropology and Museum of

Decorative Arts, Yahya Zoka writes in his 1975 A Look at Painting in Iran (Negahi beh

negargari dar Iran dar sadeha-ye 12 va 13 h.gh):

If the style of painting of [painters like] Abol-Hassan Ghaffari [better known as

Sani-ol-Molk, also an uncle of Kamal-ol-Molk and one of his early mentors] and
Mahmood Khan Malek-ol-Sho’ara was allowed to continue and evolve, and was
not condemned and destroyed by the style Kamal-ol-Molk promoted, perhaps
now Iranian painters would have had an especial, authentic, and well-known
school of painting, and would have had taken forward Iran’s art of painting based
on their own national arts.56
The tension arising from the dynamics of “imported” against “national,” or “mimetic”

against “authentic” if put differently, in Kamal-ol-Molk surfaces even in the writings of the

                                                                                                               
55  Afshar  Mohajer,Honarmand-­‐e  Irani  va  Modernism,  181.  

 
56  Yahya  Zoka,  Negahi  beh  negargari  dar  Iran  dar  sadeha-­‐ye  12  va  13  h.gh  [A  Look  at  

Painting  in  Iran  in  the  18th  and  19th  Centuries]  (Tehran:  Daftar  Makhsoos  Farah  Pahlavi,  
1375/1354),  87.  Quoted,  in  complete  agreement,  in  Afshar  Mohajer,  Honarmand-­‐e  Irani  va  
Modernism,  98.  
 

  56  
 critics and scholars who are not critical of his overall contribution. Then, any erudite

understanding of the style he helped to create and become a leading force within Iran’s

high culture, feels that it needs to address those anxieties. Like in the short quote above,

these are anxieties that are raised even without raising the questions behind them directly.

These are worries and tensions that more often rather than being the byproducts of

demands for cultural and/or aesthetic purity, are about the overwhelming power of the

European world in such encounters. The second category of criticism of Kamal-ol-Molk,

by no means unrelated to the first type, is built on the observation that he did not meet the

West sufficiently enough. It is argued that he did not acquaint himself with the

contemporary Europe’s cultural and artistic currents. In spite of his much admired efforts

and contributions, it is remembered that he gave much of his time and talent to learning and

passing on the intricacies of the masterworks of Rembrandt and Titian, while remaining

oblivious to the vibrant modernist movements taking shape around him.

The disjuncture between the history of arts in Iran and the world was to dissipate, in

a crash, it seems. In art historiography, now in Iran as in elsewhere, modernist aesthetics

arrive like pent-up energy, like tidal waves. (That subjectivity too arrives in this fashion,

again and again, is another story we are not telling here.) Describing the fate of academic

painting, Afshar Mohajer uses words, tellingly and self-reflexively:

The waves of artistic modernism in the West reached Iran with a seventy year
delay and at a time when Iranian painters were drawing from obsolete European
movements (maktabha), Western modernism broke all the fences, walls, and
dams like a flood coming down.57

                                                                                                               
57  Afshar  Mohajer,  Honarmand-­‐e  Irani  va  Modernism,  181.  Ruyin  Pakbaz  in  his  book  

Naghashi-­‐ye  Iran:  Az  Dirbaz  ta  Emrooz    [Iranian  Painting:  From  Olden  Times  Until  Today],  
first  published  in  2000,  gives  a  similar  portrayal,  in  addition  to  a  “seventy  year”  calculation  

  57  
 Even Daftari, an exceptionally incisive critic who does not give to lyricism and tropes

easily, while writing about the gathering strength of the “new aesthetic visions” in the late

1940s and their quarrel with Kamal-ol-Molk’s legacy, compares the new to an “avalanche

of expressions.”58 What is more, Afshar Mohajer has earlier told us that the latter years of

these seventy years, when the academic style had hegemony, are the years when Tehran

had “a particular surface combined of tradition and modernism.”59 This awareness of

eclectic times, specially played out on the face of the big city, is akin to what Marshall

Berman would describe as the experience of “uneven development.” And, as we will see, it

is to come back again and again, like the escalator envisioned by Williams gazing back.

The years for the tidal waves came right after the time of those weekly meetings of the

“moderns” and the “traditionalists” in the evaluation hall of the Faculty of Fine Arts. Those

intense gatherings that always purportedly ended with the head of the traditionalists, Master

Heydarian, who was once a student of Kamal-ol-Molk, exiting the room. Earlier I called

the scene “a classic scene of confrontation between des Anciens and des Modernes.”

Somewhat in contradiction though, I also said that it was a strange thing to call them as

such since des Anciens had been in place for a rather short period, from 1900 to the 1940s

at most, and, that they were for the most part considered themselves as modern and were

regarded as such as their European and scientific methods were recognized as the epitome

of progress by many. Nevertheless the face-off between the two groups, which surely was
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
of  the  years  of  “delay”:  “Almost  seventy  years  after  the  inception  of  the  modernist  art  
movement  in  the  West,  its  echo  (pejvak)  reached  Iran.”  (Tehran:  Entesharat  Zarrin  va  
Simin,  2000),  202.  
 
58    Daftari  ,  “Another  Modernism,”  45.  

 
59  Afshar  Mohajer,  Honarmand-­‐e  Irani  va  Modernism,  180.  

  58  
playing beyond the exemplary scenario unfolding weekly on the premises of Tehran

University, had all the genuine meanings and impressions the quarrel must have. The key

aspect of it though was that the configuration of the forces made, and makes, sense as a

rebellion against the old. It made sense even though what was deemed as tradition had a

rather small corpus (with hardly a canon yet, except for the figure of Kamal-ol-Molk) and a

very short time span behind it. What made it all coherent, at least for those who had a

stronger claim to be the forward-looking guard, was the immediate past. Somewhat

ironically, it was against that entity the moderns were defining themselves, and renouncing

nostalgia.

However, it was not just with an eye for contradictions that I used the word

“classic” in referring to the weekly encounters of Tehran University as “a classic scene of

confrontation.” Despite the world-historical differences of the situation, call them context

or history, there are more reasons to the sense of familiarity emanating from this affair. It

all seems like a rerun. By saying that the quarrel comes across like a repeat I am not

alluding to a mimetic modernity (of producing similarities and differences), and even less

to any variation of influence. What is being taken up here are two conceptions of the

modern put forward by Jameson in A Singular Modernity. Firstly, is his suggestion that

“modernity” (a category that with Jameson of the late, encompasses a theory, a shifting

stage in history, a description of certain aesthetics, and maybe an experience too) be

considered as a trope, a new kind, that unlike its predecessors from olden times, is self-

referential in its own act of narrativization; as a rhetorical device, and a very excessive one

at that, the trope of “modernity” dramatizes itself and what it lays claim to (like its birth

  59  
 and its breaks). At its most overarching in his argument, Jameson proclaims that, as a trope,

the very idea of modernity is a modern invention. He quickly proceeds to list some of the

main “effects” (all interrelated, I would say) of this peculiar narrative structure, like its

“libidinal charge” (that it is always enclosed with an intense emotional component), like its

attachment to that other “trope of ‘for the first time.’’’60

Secondly, more importantly, is Jameson’s proclamation that “the trope of

‘modernity’ is always in one way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of

previous narrative paradigms.”61 So, astonishingly, in this Jameson turns that which has

above all been associated, true very often with libidinal energy even, into a (signifying)

process of “all utterance, the already said!” The first steps for this act of theorization are of

course already taken earlier when he established that “modernity” is a “trope,” or, in the

parallel words used by him, a “kind of rhetorical effect;” from there, from rendering

modernity into an incidence in speech (with an obsession for “for the first,” an anxiety

about origins you might say), it is not impossible to free one’s imagination to seeing each

appearance of the claim to modernity as a defamiliarization of what, a sign or an utterance,

has already said. He further expands, at the same time solidifying and opening to a nuance:

In my opinion, then, all of the themes generally appealed to as ways of identifying

the modern – self-consciousness or reflexivity, greater attention to language or
representation, a materiality of the painted surface, and so on and so forth – all
these features are themselves mere pretexts for the rewriting operation and for
rescuing the effect of astonishment and conviction appropriate to the registering of
a paradigm shift. This is not to say that those features or themes are fictive or

                                                                                                               
60  Fredric  Jameson,  A  Singular  Modernity:  Essay  on  the  Ontology  of  the  Present  (London  and  

New  York:  Verso,  2002),  34-­‐35.  

 
61  Ibid.,  35.  

  60  
 unreal; it is merely to affirm the priority of the rewriting operation over the
alleged insights of historical analysis. (Emphasis is added.)62
It is not a stretch of the imagination to say that Jameson’s insistence on the expansiveness

of “the rewriting operation” contains echoes of the Russian Formalists in general and

Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism more particularly. That rewriting act of the trope of

already-said, referred to as a “sign of modernity,” and one with the effects delivered by its

hidden “temporal structures,” surely bears resemblance to the idea of defamiliarization. A

resemblance that not surprisingly includes their desired aftereffect, re-embodied here as the

“effect of astonishment.”

Immediately after the above passage, Jameson ventures into advancing the rise of

Nazi Germany as an example for testing his proposition on modernity as rewriting. In

doing so, in foregoing the more recognizable instances of Luther and German objective

realism, his aim is to allow the drama of the Nazi modern (including the figure of Hitler) to

emerge as “a powerful defamiliarization of the recent past as well as a scandalous rewriting

procedure.”63 More interestingly, that is to say more relevant to our concerns in this project,

this rereading of the story of modernity in European heartlands during the 1930s and 1940s,

brings Jameson back, if only for a passing moment, to the developmental frame we set as

one of our main theoretical themes earlier: “uneven development.” This situation, you

recall from our Introduction, was also called “incomplete modernity” by Jameson, and, as I

argued was congruent with the condition Berman describes as “incomplete modernization.”

The idea now makes an appearance in Jameson’s reflections on Germany and the Third

                                                                                                               
62  Ibid.,  36.  
63  Ibid.  

  61  
 Reich. It returns as an analytical reframing of the older and more familiar explanations of

the Nazi movement, as one that “posits the ‘final solution’ of the problem of feudalism, and

the sweeping away of all those feudal and aristocratic or Junker survivals that characterized

Germany’s uneven development in ‘modern’ times and its class dynamics as well as its

legal and social institutions.”64

The trope of the modern, its re-writing operations, its flood-like energy, its uneven

planes. In the context of Iran of the 1940s and 1950s they came to play as well, albeit with

some differences. Modernist aesthetics were going to have a splash, again, first in paintings

and then on film. They did have a classical “traditionalist” opponent to define themselves

against, that was realist and academic, that was the school of painting promoted by Kamal-

ol-Molk and disciples. Part of that collective identity-building process was to dissent

against their rivals’ strongest institutional base, the Faculty of Fine Arts headed by a

Neoclassicist architect André Godard. Similarity and difference, again. Establishing a self

in contradistinction to a grouping of master painters committed to naturalism and realism is

a re-writing of the old drama of modernism. It makes for the release of certain kinds of

creative energy, especially if one identifies with the finer arts. At times it must feel like a

flood. The difference was in timing, as many critics have reminded us. The Iranian painters

and sculptors that could positively be described as modernists and avant-gardists appeared

                                                                                                               
64  Ibid.,  37.  It  should  be  noted  in  this  footnote  in  his  1935  Heritage  of  Our  Times  (Erbschaft  

dieser  Zeit)  Ernst  Bloch  brings  the  concept  of  "non-­‐simultaneity"  to  his  analysis  of  the  
National  Socialist  ascendancy  in  Germany.  For  Bloch,  “non-­‐simultaneity,”  or  the  presence  
of  multiple  temporalities  in  an  era,  was  produced  by  the  existence  of  different  levels  of  
social  and  economic  development  that  could  persist  in  one  country.  For  him,  the  Germany  
of  the  1930s  still  presented  a  classic  case  of  heterogeneous  modernization.  Heritage,  trans.  
Neville  ans  Stephen  Plaice  (Cambridge:Polity  Press,  1991).  
     

  62  
 in increasing numbers from the 1950s onward. If the trajectory of the trope in the context of

Iranian visual mediums of painting and sculpture was already somewhat defamiliarized

(Jameson) because of its late arrival, there was a strange historical-epochal overlap between

the modernist painters and their counterparts in the cinema, at home and abroad. The

historical course of cinema, too, displayed a disjuncture with the development of

modernism in the other arts as it took the modern turn against its own “classical tradition”

rather late, in the 1950s;65 a “rewriting” of the trope of modernity that went through its own

revision not long ago (Hanssen).

n n n

Intellectual  currents  can  generate  a  sufficient  head  of  water  for  the  critic  to  
install  his  power  station  on  them.  The  necessary  gradient,  in  the  case  of  
Surrealism,  is  produced  by  the  difference  in  intellectual  level  between  France  
and  Germany.  What  sprang  up  in  1919  in  France  in  a  small  circle  of  literati…  
may  have  been  a  meager  stream,  fed  on  the  damp  boredom  of  postwar  
Europe  and  the  last  trickle  of  French  decadence…  [But]  the  German  observer  
is  not  standing  at  the  head  of  the  stream.  That  is  his  opportunity.  He  is  in  the  
valley.  He  can  gauge  the  energies  of  the  moment.66  
-- Walter Benjamin in "Surrealism”, 1929

The picture of the quarrel from 1948, between the “traditionalists” and

“modernists,” that I have been drawing and redrawing is not telling the whole story. The

scene was dramatically expanding by the 1950s. New institutions, art venues, and social

and personal players were being formed. Some of the early figures of the creative currents

to burst into the art scene though were among the former students of the Faculty of Fine
                                                                                                               
65  András  Bálint  Kovács,  Screening  Modernism:  European  Art  Cinema,  1950-­‐1980  (Chicago:  

University  of  Chicago  Press,  2007).  

 
66  Walter  Benjamin,  “Surrealism,”  in  One-­‐Way  Street,  trans.  E.  Jephcott  and  K.  Shorter  

(London:  Verso,  1979),  225.  Also  quoted  in  Fredric  Jameson’s  A  Singular  Modernity,  213.      
 

  63  
 Arts, Danesh-kadeh Honarha-ye Ziba (or its predecessor institution, the College or Honar-

kadeh Honarha-ye Ziba).

One of the graduates of the Academy, soon to leave his mark on the history of

modern painting in Iran, was Jalil Ziapour who had gone in 1946 to Paris to study on a

government bursary. He studied with the Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote.

Returning home in 1948 he formed a group called Fighting Rooster Society (Anjoman-e

Khoroos-e Jangi) with a small number of other Tehran-based artists and writers.67 They

published a periodical, also called Fighting Rooster, committed to avant-garde ideals in

visual arts, literature, theater, and music. In 1951, the group, or society (anjoman) as it was

called, put out their first and last manifesto “The Nightingale’s Slayer.” In the document,

radical and utopian as the more well-known avant-gardist manifestos of the century, they

called for the victory of the new over the old. They declared: “New art that sees sincerity

and intimacy with the inner layer (daroon) as the path to artistic creativity (afarinesh-e

honari), holds all the spiral and vibrancy of life and never separates from it.” In his own

work, Ziapour developed a style characterized by fragmentation, assemblage of tile-like

pieces, geometric lines, flatness (omission of spatial depth), and sharp colors. On the

thematic level, from very early on he opted for an imagery of rural and nomadic life,

materials that make up both the everyday and folklife. His interest in folkloric subjects led

him to self-styled ethnological expeditions in the countryside and writing essays on

                                                                                                               
67  In  addition  to  Ziapour,  who  did  not  stay  with  the  group  until  the  end,  the  first  core  

members  of  the  Fighting  Rooster  consisted  of  Gholam-­‐Hossein  Gharib  (literature),  Hassan  
Shirvani  (theater  and  music,  a  future  head  of  the  Tehran  Opera  Bureau),  and  Morteza  
Hannaneh  (music,  prominent  composer,  including  for  a  number  of  New  Wave  films  later  
on).  Two  of  the  future  pioneers  of  the  New  Wave  cinema,  Farrokh  Ghaffari  and  Ebrahim  
Golestan,  participated  in  their  activities.      
       

  64  
“Iranology” (Iran-shenasi). Increasingly he came to explain different aspects of his work

based on his ethnographic activities. In time he also became the head of the Tehran

Museum of Ethnography. Aside from his overall impact as a pioneer in modernist art,

Ziapour is particularly associated with a brief cubism moment in Iranian painting during

the 1950s. A moment that was brief, but its aftereffects stayed for decades to come.68

Fighting Rooster logo

Printed opposite of “The Nightingale’s Slayer Manifesto,” 1949

Saqqa-khaneh Movement

A few years after the coup d'état of 1953, and as the earlier signs of an emergent

critique of excessive westernization were becoming visible, the most successful claim for

upholding authentic local forms and ideals was made, but not in literary discourse or

                                                                                                               
68  For  more  on  Ziapour  see  Keshmirshekan.  Contemporary  Iranian  Art,  56-­‐61.  

  65  
 political thought. Before becoming a homogenizing force in other social venues, the idea of

return to the indigenous came to the fore within the social and textual spaces of the visual

and plastic arts, through the works and words produced by the most forward-looking

members of those fields. This was exemplified by what came to be known as the Saqqa-

khaneh movement, which has remained one of the country’s most celebrated schools in

painting and sculpture. Saqqa-khaneh, despite its unplanned origins and its continuous

heterogeneity to the end, can still be characterized as a movement without much difficulty.

Those associated with the movement—among them, Hossein Zenderoudi, Mansoor

Ghandriz, Faramarz Pilaram, Sadeq Tabrizi, Parviz Tanavoli, Jazeh Tabatabai—

consciously strived to create a local modern by appropriating for their work the motifs and

forms of what was seen as folkloric, traditional, and authentic. Old as well as everyday

objects, objects used in rituals, decorative materials and modes, elements from popular

genres of painting, Persian letters, (Iranian) soil, and religious iconography were taken up

directly or reinterpreted. However, as suggested by the movement’s name, Saqqa-

Khaneh—a public structure built in city corners holding water for the pedestrian to drink in

the memory of the thirsty lips of Imam Hossein and his companions in Karbala69—it was

Shiism, its popular manifestations to be exact, which was above all to be recruited for the

purpose of the new.

                                                                                                               
69  Hossein  Ibn  Ali,  a  grandson  of  Prophet  Mohammad,  is  a  central  and  sacred  figure  in  Shia  

history.  He,  and  most  of  his  companions,  lost  their  lives  for  their  beliefs  in  the  dry  plains  of  
Karbala  in  680  AD.  His  martyrdom  is  commemorated  in  a  number  of  ways,  most  
importantly  through  the  annual  gatherings  of  Ashura  and  Arbaeen.    A  number  of  the  
documentary  films  discussed  in  the  next  chapter,  for  instance  Arbaeen  directed  by  the  New  
Wave  filmmaker  Nasser  Taghvai,  revolve  around  these  communal  practices.                  

  66  
 Hossein Zenderoudi, The Hand, 1959.
Natural pigments, gold and silver paint on paper.

The brief liaison with Cubism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, spearheaded by

Ziapour, and the arrival of the Saqqa-khaneh artists on the scene in the late 1950s,

anticipated the New Wave cinema in decisive ways. First, in their re-staging of the drama

(or, as Jameson would have it, trope) of the “modernists” against “traditionalists” they

functioned (unintentionally) as rehearsal for the New Wave cinema, a precedent in a not-

so-distant past that could become one more crucial source of inspiration; it should be

remembered that the Iranian New Wave, which also went by the name “sinema-ye

motefavet” or the “Different Cinema,” did not have a classical/realist filmic tradition, nor a

  67  
cinéma de papa, to create its identity in contradistinction to a high-brow cinematic corpus.

Secondly, these painters and sculptors approached the contemporary Iranian locality around

them, with its practices, beliefs, tales, and objects, as a world on the verge of disappearance

or out-and-out destruction. Not surprisingly a number of them became well-known for their

practices of traveling the country in search of such treasures (Zenderoudi for metal locks,

Tanavoli for tribal rugs, and Ziapour for colors). This desire for salvaging the vanishing

was a discourse particularly present in and around (that is in institutional and critical

aspects) those films I call the ethnographic documentaries of the New Wave. These

documentaries formed an exceptional body of work in their own right but also left their

mark on the Iranian fiction film, a contribution that has not been analyzed in detail by film

critics and historians. Thirdly, mostly because of their underpinning drive to salvage, which

meant engaging with certain creative forms from a point of reverence, both Saqqa-khaneh

and the New Wave rarely backed away from indulging in the pleasures of form and artistry.

This was hardly surprising when, as in the case of the documentaries dealing with

architecture, rituals, crafts (many of them producing highly formalized objects), or with

“decorative arts,” the world in front of the camera already provided cues for cinematic

virtuosity in editing, rhythm, and cinematography. Congruently, it was a common practice

among Saqqa-khaneh painters and sculptors to take materials from such creative mediums

as tile and “mirror works” (ayneh-kari), calligraphy, popular and religious paintings,

various types of handicrafts, and use them in their own work, either directly or as a source

of inspiration. Finally, the Saqqa-khaneh works and the New Wave films, again at least

partly as a consequence of the salvage drive permeating them, showed a strong tendency

towards collage compositions. In Saqqa-khaneh this sometimes was carried to the point of

  68  
 bursting the two-dimensional surface of a painting with the installment of a “found object”

(of course also an instance of drawing attention to the materiality of surfaces), as in the

medium of filmmaking it showed itself in a proclivity for creating montage vignettes out of

artifacts displayed in museums, or out of old ornate walls, from shots of painted glass, from

filmed fragments of old paintings, or in sequencing of images filmed from moving cars and

trains.

Cities and Galleries

The arrival of the Saqqa-khaneh artists on the scene in the late 1950s coincided with

the sudden increase in the number of western-style art venues. The first privately owned art

gallery called Apadana Gallery was opened in 1949. Immediately after returning from his

studies in Rome, the prolific artist and teacher Marcos Grigorian (whose work I will briefly

discuss in Chapter 3 in relation to Dariush Mehrjui’s film The Cow) founded Galerie

Esthétique. Grigorian was also instrumental in organizing the First Tehran Biennial of

1958. The year 1960 saw the opening of Gilgamesh Gallery and Atelier Kaboud by already

well-known artists Hannibal Alkhas and Parviz Tanavoli respectively.70 Soon the new

festivals, grand performance halls, and museums of all kinds, funded by the government,

were to bring a sense of glitter and cosmopolitanism to the capital. After the oil boom, in

the 1970s, Tehran was beginning to resemble what Iranian modernizers had envisioned it in

their dreams long time ago. If one sets aside the more romantic understanding of these

matters, this burgeoning of artists and the social spaces for the most part was reflective of

                                                                                                               
70  For  more  on  the  history  of  exhibition  venues  and  practices  during  the  last  three  decades  

of  Pahlavi  Iran  see  Media  Farzin’s  essay  “A  Short  History  of  Art  Exhibitions  in  Iran,  1946—
78,”  in  IRAN  MODERN,  ed.  Fereshteh  Daftari  and  Layla  S.  Diba  (New  York:  Asia  Society,  
2014),  67-­‐71.  

  69  
 the new position the ever-expanding Iranian middle class was being placed at, both at home

and in its relationships across the frontiers. This was a middle class caught in a position

both familiar and strange, bounded in a doubly tenuous arrangement of less and less

representation in formal politics and more and more connectivity to the outside world.

For the ones regarded as the young artists of the nation—by no means necessarily

from a middle class or Tehrani background—the modern city played determining, and

diverse, roles in their works and lives. By diverse here I mean at least in three ways, which

I raise with help from words from Raymond Williams again, even though for at least one of

those issues one can consult with others just as fittingly. There is first the question of

whether it is the tale of just one city or more. Writing about earlier times in the historical

transfiguration that paralleled modernism in its more radical forms, the era of European

avant-gardist movements of the first half of the twentieth century—earlier that is of the

Saqqa-khaneh artists, but just about the time that Hedayat was going through his first stay

in Paris—Williams argues in Politics of Modernism:

The true social bases of the early avant-garde were at once cosmopolitan and
metropolitan. There was rapid transfer and interaction between different
countries and different capitals, and the deep mode of the whole movement, as
in Modernism, precisely this mobility across frontiers: frontiers which were
among the most obvious elements of the old order which had to be rejected,
even when native folk sources were being included as elements or as
inspiration of the new art. There was intense competition but also radical
coexistence in the great imperial capitals of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and
Petersburg, and also, in more limited ways, in London. These concentrations
of wealth and power, and of state and academy, had each, within their very
complexities of contact and opportunity, drawn towards them those who most
opposed them. (Emphasis added.)71

                                                                                                               
71  Raymond  Williams,  Politics  of  Modernism:  Against  the  New  Conformists  (New  York:  Verso,  

2007),  59.  
 

  70  
In this what I would call Williams’ variation on “downstream Surrealism,” (see Benjamin

passage above), things were happening, not just in the big cities of Europe, but, even more

so, also in the interactions and movements between those cities. These dynamics, I have no

reason to believe were fundamentally different in the later times of the following decades

when the cultural producers from the colonies and the third world were moving back and

forth between these cities and other ones not mentioned by Williams in this passage.

Calcutta, Shanghai, Mumbai, Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, and in so many ways, in Tehran

and Isfahan. Intellectuals and their ideas, the discourses they produced, travelled between

these southern cities, and between them and the imperial capitals of Paris, Petersburg,

London, and Vienna. These movements and interactions too were riddled with

“complexities of contact and opportunity,” just as those cities had these complexities each

within.

Within Williams’ reflections on modernism there are repeated openings to explain

its nature in relation to life in the metropolis. At times his analytical attitude comes across

as a stylistic approach, in step with an intellectual tradition that explains modernism above

all in terms of an evolution or a series of ruptures (or cyclical repetitions) in formal

practices. To give one example, when he states, “the key cultural factor of the modernist

shift is the character of the metropolis: in these general conditions, but then, even more

decisively, in its direct effects on form.” Williams however is clear that he regards a

discourse that centers stylistic and/or thematic innovations as one that falls “back inside the

ideology [of modernism].”72 At other times, in his consideration of the physical effects of

                                                                                                               
72  Ibid.,  43-­‐44.  

  71  
the big industrial city his critical voice seems to come close to that of those we know as

materialist thinkers, Kracauer and Benjamin especially. In finer turns of Williams’

observation, then, the effects of metropolitan life and topography are transfigured into a

new literary style, maybe even a new human perception. For instance, when asserting in

The Country and the City how in Dickens’ writing the language of fiction is steeped in the

experience of the street:

As we stand and look back at Dickens’ novel the general movement we

remember—the characteristic movement—is a hurrying seemingly random
passing of men and women, each heard in some fixed phrase, seen in some fixed
expression: a way of seeing men and women that belongs to the street. There is
at first an absence of ordinary connection and development. These men and
women do not so much relate as pass each other and then sometimes collide.73

Today, what I find particularly constructive in Williams’ linking of modernism and

the big city lies somewhere apart his very astute understanding of that linkage’s bearing on

literary forms, that by itself surely something he carries with astonishing attractiveness into

his own detailed analysis of texts. What I have come to appreciate in his work on cities and

modernism as particularly engaging to my purposes in this project are his more intermittent

considerations of that linkage in terms of social relations. In nearly all instances when this

different kind of materialism, almost sociological, certainly old-fashioned in comparison

with the critical currents of the last three decades, comes to the fore it involves the

appearance of modernism (a story with implications of an origin, I admit, but choose to set

aside as a concern for now). The first case belongs to those who have come to the big city

from other places, the immigrants he calls them. Immigration becomes a determining and

expansive factor in his theorizing schema as he returns to it repeatedly in different guises.

Earlier on we saw him intimating the idea in his passage on Europe’s “imperial capitals”
                                                                                                               
73  Williams,  Raimond.  The  Country  and  the  City,  155.  

  72  
 when he mentioned, in passing, “this mobility across frontiers” (see above). And, here,

presenting in directness:

The most important general element of the innovations in form is the fact of
immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many
of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants. At the level of
theme, this underlines, in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and
distance, indeed of alienation, which so regularly form part of the repertory. But
the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level. Liberated or breaking from their
national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native
languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and
dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were
obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only
community available to them: a community of the medium; their own practices.
(Emphasis added.) 74
The social element is never left alone, at an instant it is knitted back into a range of

recurrent themes knitted into formal practices of a novel language, or medium, for a

community. The estrangement of an immigrant and the estrangement of language.75

Williams’ premise here holds more promises. On a more immediate level for our

study in sight, tracing thematic consistencies and formal dialects of modernism to a

situation of migration to the big city (not the same as becoming an immigrant to a country)

provides us with an analytical frame to look at the topics and players we are concerned

with. This would include some personas I have mentioned already who lived and worked

outside Iran for years, writers like Hedayat, painters like Ziapour, and some whom I will

                                                                                                               
74  Williams,  Raymond.  Politics  of  Modernism,  45.  

 
75  As  a  footnote  I  add  that  Edward  Said’s  interpretation  of  the  effect  of  Joseph  Conrad’s  life  

as  a  Polish  émigré  writing  in  English  on  his  literature  can  be  seen  as  a  more  localized  
variation  of  Williams’  theorization  of  the  relationship  between  immigration  and  aesthetic  
modernism.  It  is  of  course  well-­‐known  that  Said  had  a  long-­‐standing  interest  in  Conrad,  
from  his  first  published  book  (based  on  his  doctoral  dissertation)  Joseph  Conrad  and  the  
Fiction  of  Autobiography  (1966)  through  discussions  of  his  writings  and  persona  on  
different  occasions  including  in  Culture  and  Imperialism  (1993),  Out  of  Place  (2000),  
Reflections  on  Exile  and  Other  Essays  (2002).  

  73  
present later, filmmakers like Fereydoon Rahnema and Parviz Kimiavi. Often if they are

given a place solely and reductively within a discourse of “national traditions” then they

are discussed along the notion “in-betweenness,” a sophisticated theoretical and political

positioning that despite all its productiveness it still alludes to an earlier independence and

wholeness of national cultures and/or civilizations. What is more, Williams’ inspired

maneuverings in this course of reasoning, in addition to his variant of uneven modernism

played out in the country and cityscapes of Europe, allows for inventive adaptation of his

argument on immigration to the other cities of the world, from Bombay, to Istanbul, to Rio

de Janeiro, to Tehran.

Williams’ turn to the societal and metropolitan factors of modernism also opens up

paths for explaining its very emergence. On this matter too, his reflections in Politics of

Modernism present an approach away from the formal, that when taken to the full extent of

their logic, give shape to a view that is extraordinarily simple and worldly. So at the end of

a passage in which he offers a quick critique of formalist and structuralist methodologies

for falling “back inside the ideology,” he writes:

For it is not the general themes of response to the city and its modernity which
compose anything that can be properly called Modernism. It is rather the new and
specific location of the artists and intellectuals of this movement within the
changing cultural milieu of the metropolis. (Emphasis added.)76
Neither the innovative use of forms on their own, nor the themes, and definitely not the

relation between them. What is new is the place the modern artist and “his creation,”

modern art, occupy in the city. For Williams, it is this “new and specific location,”

increasingly produced by institutions of production, education, and dealership, which gave

                                                                                                               
76  Williams,  Politics  of  Modernism,  43.  

  74  
 meaning to the new notions of artist and art, distinguishing them from “traditional art.”

From the figure of the bohemian artist, feelings of isolation and detachment, to art schools,

galleries, and museums. He also attaches a time (and a continent) to the beginning of this

relationship, sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century. And even though we do

not want to attach too much significance to any axis of chronology-geography, it is still

fascinating to note that Williams, too, saw an extension of this linkage between modern art

and the big city to the whole world, in the second half of the twentieth century.77

The post-war international outlook passingly referred to by Williams matches

effortlessly with the Iranian setting we described earlier. The competition between the

moderns and the school of Kamal-ol-Molk in painting, the rebelliousness of the Fighting

Rooster Group and then the arrival of Saqqa-khaneh artists in the 1950s, was followed by

the proliferation and diversity of modernist art in the 1960s. The opening of privately

owned art galleries, the launch of the Tehran Biennial, was met with change of attitude on

the part of the government, which became increasingly more interested in supporting

modernist art, as long as the content did not cross certain red lines. (The publication of first

series of The Fighting Rooster periodical was halted by a government agency; the journal’s

return a year later in 1950 is perhaps the time to mark as the turning point in this change of

attitude, from indifference to a guarded support.) In the following decades the Pahlavi state

became progressively involved in founding art colleges, exhibition venues, and festivals of

                                                                                                               
77  Ibid.,  44.  The  reader  might  recall  that  Marshall  Berman  gave  a  more  or  less  similar  

timing  for  the  global  unfolding  of  modernism.  Although  written  in  the  1980s,  Williams’  
mention  of  the  expansion  of  modernism  into  the  rest  of  the  world  is  very  brief  and  is  in  an  
exploratory  tone  of  a  prediction  rather  than  that  of  an  observation  of  a  history;  all  the  more  
so  he  refers  to  phenomenon  as  a  “historical  phase”  that  was  “potentially”  to  extend  to  the  
entire  world,  in  the  second  half  of  the  twentieth  century.  Ibid.                  

  75  
all kinds in the capital and the larger cities. In conjunction (but not necessarily in harmony)

with the private sector’s activities this cultural scene confirmed “the new and specific

location of the artists and intellectuals,” which, as Williams saw it, was to be formed

“within the changing cultural milieu of the metropolis.” (See above.)

n n n

In the evaluation hall where each week the students’ works were displayed, Sadeq
Hedayat with his round black frame glasses and a playful gaze would translate Madame
Ashub Aminfar’s words for the kids.

The Iranian New Wave cinema should be seen as part of a milieu similar to the one

Williams talks about. The filmmakers, cinematographers, editors, scriptwriters, art

designers, and graphic artists, who were passionate about and made the diverse trend that

later became the New Wave came from different backgrounds and stood up for different

political and aesthetic ideals. They all shared “the new and specific location” that ever-

expanding metropolitan site where ideas about the arts and cinema were received,

translated, and produced (with the auteur theory, or “teory moallef” in Persian, of course

being a most potent idea in the realm of cinema, then and ever since). If the advent of the

cinematic New Wave was anticipated by the developments in the visual arts of the 1950s, it

also corresponded with the modernist current in Persian poetry—in form, in content, in

politics. Almost always traced to the luminous figure of Nima Yushij (1896-1960), known

as the “father of Modern Persian poetry,” the “new poetry” (She’r-e No) was going through

a particularly productive period in the three decades following World War II. It is in these

years that we see the final solidification of modernist poetry, and its vanguard, the

modernist poet, as the primary site of cultural innovation. This was of course achieved in a

complex dialogue with, and against, the classical, and represented by such now well-known

  76  
names as, Mehdi Akhavan Saless, Ahmad Shamlu, Siavash Kasrai, Forough Farrokhzad,

Nader Naderpour, and Sohrab Sepehri.

“In the evaluation hall… Sadeq Hedayat with his round black frame glasses and a

playful gaze would translate…” The weekly appearance of Hedayat, the archetypal

modernist author, in those stormy meetings at the Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts,

might be more of a fantasy than reality. The image still has an emblematic quality to it.

Alone and fearful of the future, he committed suicide while on a trip to Paris in 1951 and

never lived to see the modern exhibits of Tehran, the New Wave of Iranian cinema, the

avant-garde theater of the 1960s and 1970s, the whirlwind of the Revolution. For me

though his presence in this chronicle points to the significance of the current that has

forcefully crisscrossed paths with the Iranian cinema from its earliest years until today,

modernist Persian literature. One of the ways Persian prose and poetry intersected (and

continues to do so) with visual, performance, and cinematic productions was as rehearsal

sites for re-playing, or “re-writing” as Jameson would have it, modernism. In so many ways

modern Persian letters still play that role, as accounts of those creative fields continue to be

produced, their entangled histories constantly revisited and retold. Perhaps, that was what

was behind the playfulness of Hedayat’s gaze in that image. Aesthetic strategies and

themes were exchanged. Many film directors came from literature to filmmaking. The

sway of literature was not always as direct and as clear though. For literature was tied, in

links that are still missing in the discussion, with the course, ups and downs, and texture of

the discourse on authenticity. The Figure of Al-e Ahmad might epitomize that relationship,

  77  
but it was more than that and at a deeper level. In the following account of the New Wave I

will keep them, the written words and moving images, together.

Hedayat in a montage postcard, Paris, 1926.

  78  
 – Chapter Two –
Ethnographic Documentaries

For  the  first  time,  Ambroise  Morton  in  1885  called  ancient  relics  and  the  literature  of  
the  masses  Folk-­‐Lore,  meaning  knowledge  of  the  common  people.78  
-­‐-­‐  Sadeq  Hedayat,  1944              

Institutional History:

In the early 1960s in Iran the production of documentaries, particularly those

considered as quality films, diversified and proliferated. A number of institutions,

mostly governmental, were responsible for this increase in numbers and broadening of

genres in documentary filmmaking. Three of these institutions, two governmental and

one privately-owned, played particularly influential roles in this development (and in

fact beyond): the Ministry of Culture and Arts (MCA), the National Iranian Radio and

Television (NIRT), and the Golestan Film Workshop (GFW). This chapter will offer an

account of the development of these institutions, analysis of some of the more

influential films they produced, and their entanglement in the notions of culture and

authenticity.

                                                                                                               
78  Folklor  ya  Farhang-­‐e  Tudeh:  Nemooneha  va  Dastoor-­‐e  Jam’avari-­‐ye  an  [Folklore  or  the  

Culture  of  the  Masses:  Examples  and  Manuals  for  Collecting  and  Noting  Them]  (2/3-­‐6  
Esfand  1323-­‐Khordad1324  Š./1944-­‐45);  repr.,  Majmu’eh  Neveshteha-­‐ye  Parakandeh-­‐ye  
Sadeq  Hedayat  (Tehran:  Nashr  Saless,  2000/1379),  495-­‐540.  The  reader  might  want  to  
know  that  Ambroise  Morton  was  not  an  author  who  had  ever  lived  but  the  pseudonym  for  
British  antiquarian  William  John  Thoms.  Hedayat  does  not  share  this  information  with  his  
readers.      
 

  79  
 The newly created Ministry of Culture and Arts immediately became the

leading agency for producing non-fiction films (documentary, newsreels, and

educational films) in 1965. In addition to an overall surge in governmental budget and

activity in the field, the MCA attained its central position by absorbing the facilities,

staff, and creative personnel of a number of already existing bodies involved in

filmmaking and laboratory services. Most important among these entities coming under

the MCA’s control was the Fine Arts Administration (FAA), an organization engaged

in supporting and supervising various art-related activities (visual arts, theatre, music,

festivals, museums, etc.), and in possession of well-equipped facilities for 16mm and

35mm film production.79 The head of the FAA, Mehrdad Pahlbod, became the powerful

Minister of Culture and Arts, a position he held for many years to come. A confidant of

the royal court, Pahlbod was a key figure in overseeing the ever-expanding role of the

state, one with increasing oil income at its disposal, into cultural matters, from the

visual arts to cinema, to archeological activities, to restoration of historical/heritage

sites, to opening of new festivals and museums.

The National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT) was another large

governmental body created in the 1960s that took up a leading role in the production of

New Wave documentaries (and in fact, as we will see later, feature films). It was

created after the state takeover of the privately owned Iran Television (established in

                                                                                                               
79  See  Hamid  Naficy,  A  Social  History  of  Iranian  Cinema  Volume  2:  The  Industrializing  Years,  

1941-­‐1978  (Durham:  Duke  University  Press,  2011),  63-­‐65.    

 
 

  80  
 1958) and was directed by Reza Ghotbi, a relative of the Empress Farah Diba. Hamid

Naficy notes the well-funded NIRT’s dual tracks of expansion and systematization

through the late 1960s and 1970s:

“It created nine program production and research departments, or “groups.”

These were music, family and children, religion and ethics, Iranzamin (the
later on the history, geography, archeology, and arts of Iran, headed by the
filmmaker Feraidun [sic] Rahnema), contests, basic informational programs,
serials and entertainment, art and science, and dramatic productions. In
addition through its subsidiary company Telfilm, established in 1971 by
Malek Sasan Veissi, NIRT engaged in quality feature filmmaking, particularly
with new-wave filmmakers, coproduction with foreign movie companies,
serial production, and TV documentaries.”80
The Iranzamin unit, with the French educated filmmaker Fereydoun Rahnema as its

director, immediately emerged as one of the two most important centers for

documentary filmmaking in the country. It employed some of the trainees of the MCA

(like Manouchehr Askari-Nasab) and Golestan Film Workshop (like Nasser Taghvai,

Zakaria Hashemi, Mahmud Hangval) and actively recruited young graduates of

European schools returning home (like Parviz Kimiavi and Sohrab Shahid Saless).81

The Golestan Film Workshop was founded in 1958 by Ebrahim Golestan (born in

Shiraz, 1922), a well-known intellectual, journalist, essayist, and writer of modernist

short stories. The Golestan Film Workshop, although a privately owned production

company, was originally set up with a loan from the National Iranian Oil Company,

which commissioned many of its earlier documentaries. From the beginning, even

when mostly making “industrial films” for the oil industry, GFW positioned itself as a

                                                                                                               
80  Ibid.,  67.  

 
81  See  Mohammad  Tahaminejad’s  Sinema-­‐ye  Mostanad-­‐e  Iran:  Arseh-­‐ye  Tafavotha.  

(Tehran:  Sorush,  2002/1380),  95-­‐97.  

 

  81  
collectivity aspiring to “creativity,” to “art.” Under the tutelage of its founder and

director, Golestan, the GFW brought a number of enthusiastic young men and women

together, a gathering that contributed to their intellectual as well as technical

development. It could be said, that the GFW was part film production company, part

film school, part an intellectual salon. Such future New Wave filmmakers like

Rahnema and Taghvai (also a short story writer) once worked there, so did prominent

men of letters like Mehdi Akhavan Saless and Najaf Dariabandari. Forough Farrokhzad

(1935-1967), in time to become the most celebrated poetess of modern Iran, is of

course the most iconic figure associated with the GFW. Already published and

divorced, she was hired by the company as an office worker at a very young age. Soon

she received training, first in Tehran and then briefly in London, and started to

participate in the GFW’s film projects. She was the editor for A Fire (Yek Atash, 1958-

61) and co-edited and co-directed Water and Heat (Ab o Garma, 1961), both of them

documentaries made for the NIOC. In time, her relationship with Golestan developed

into a creative partnership, a passionate romance, a legend.

The Hills of Marlik (Ebrahim Golestan, aka Tapeha-ye Marlik, 1963)

This year,
last year,
thousands and thousands of years,
With the wind, the smell of pine’s oldness…

These words begin Golestan’s 1963 The Hills of Marlik. These words, to be

repeated again, from the beginning mark the film as one concerned with temporality.

  82  
The brief preceding images are of a pair of hands piecing together the broken parts of

what seems to be an ancient relic. A man sitting by a stream of water, the camera

reveals. When he finishes the (re)assemblage, a shot of a stylized clay pitcher placed by

the stream. “This year, last year, thousands and thousands of years….” The

accompanying images are of men tilling a field in a green valley, plowing, turning over

the earth, with shovels and picks in their hand. The medium and close-up shots of these

farmers are replaced, without any notice, with images of another group of men working

the field, a group of archeologists. From this moment on both the film’s visual track

and its lyrical voice-over commentary move between, and in the process form, three

main thematic/narrative layers, one of cultivating the land (fertility/creativity), one of

archeological excavation (history), and one of exhibiting artifacts (creativity across

time).

“And the soil is a woman fallen sleep, with mysteries, and roots, and dreams. A

pulse, a vision, a moment of seeing.”82 One theme emerging gradually in The Hills of

Marlik, one becoming overarching in time, is that of “creativity” (khallaqiyat). The

power to create is portrayed as something ageless, belonging as much to the present as

to the oldest of times, to the past of “thousands and thousands of years.” Golestan’s

voice also intimates creativity is to be found in many places as it exists in “soil,” in

“people who are like trees, with roots in the earth,” in “woman” (zan). Alongside this

constant meshing of creativity with fertility, the social with the natural, there is also the

interchangeability of the artisanal (production of ancient artifacts) with the artistic. In

                                                                                                               
82  “Va  khak  yek  zan-­‐e  beh  khab  rafteh  ast,  ba  raz  o  risheh  o  roya.    

Yek  nabz,  yek  khial,  yek  lahzeh  deed.”  

 

  83  
 the film’s discourse, the celebration of the authentic ingenuity of ancient artifacts,

regarded as vision crystallized in time, is completely congruent with the modern ideals

of artistic vision and originality. Creativity, the voice-over tells more than once, and the

images suggest, is a material embodiment of (fleeting) “seeing” (the Persian word used

is “deed,” with a meaning between seeing, vision, and insight).83

This (romantic) agelessness of creativity is rendered universal through and

through, out-lasting historical and natural circumstances, prevailing over the passage of

time. “A pulse, a vision, a moment of seeing. In the soft, moist, black, coldness of the

soil, a living dream was side-by-side with the one who dreamt, and was dead….” We

see a group of men, the archeological excavation team of Marlik, with their small picks

and brushes painstakingly unearthing the remains of a human skeleton. Suddenly, to the

cue of a developing atonal music, a wipe cut radically changes the setting. The new

scene is opened by a travelling camera moving in a dark space passing through rows of

objects suspended in the air (most likely placed on pedestals that are cropped out

through composition and/or lighting). These floating objects are ancient artifacts,

perhaps ornaments. As I see it this segment should be termed as The Hills of Marlik ’s

first “museum display sequence” even though there are no indications in the diegetic

world of the film, or in the written titles, that it was filmed in a museum (and therefore

there is still the possibility that these shots were made in a studio). There are two main

reasons for why I insist on this characterization: one because of the segment’s

relationship to other comparable films made in Iran at the time (Golestan’s own 1965

                                                                                                               
83  For  Golestan’s  ideas  about  the  importance  of  “seeing”  see  his  Gofteha  [Sayings]  (Tehran:  

Baztab  Negar,  1387/2008).  

  84  
 The Crown Jewels, and Kamran Shirdel’s 1965 The Silver Canvas, just to give two

examples), and, secondly, because of the aesthetic constitution of these scenes which

correspond with those of the museum display. It is not only a workable grouping, but

also an analytically productive one, to elaborate this sub-category for the main subject

of our study in this chapter, the trajectory of Iranian art cinema in the1960s. What is

more, past the immediate historical frame of this chapter, this twofold engagement with

archeology and the “museum display,” this fascination with excavating old objects and

bringing them to the present time, shaped in the formative years of the New Wave, was

to come back again and again in its later years (in Parviz Kimiavi’s 1973 The Mongols

and his 1977 O.K Mister!, Golestan’s 1974 The Secret of the Treasure of the Jinn

Valley, Rahnema’s 1976 The Son of Iran Has No News From His Mother).

  The  scenes  built  around  displayed  artifacts  in  The  Hills  of  Marlik  establish  

Golestan’s  montage  virtuosity  beyond  the  field  of  word  and  syntax.  The  film’s  

“museum  display  sequences”  principally  consist of images of sharply lit excavated

objects suspended in the air.84 The suspended objects are filmed in various angles and

from changing distances to the camera, at times moving, and at other times static. They

have an ethereal appearance against a background that is immaculately black. These  

museum  sequences  strike  the  viewer  with  a  wide  array  of  editing  and  lighting  

arrangements,  camera  movements,  and  optical  printing  methods;  the  cinematic  

                                                                                                               
84  It  is  completely  plausible  that  these  scenes  were  shot  in  a  studio,  an  environment  that  

would  have  facilitated  many  aspects  of  the  filming  such  as  lighting  and  camera  movement,  
even  making  the  post-­‐production  editing  more  fluid,  more  congruous.  This  possibility  does  
not  however  affect  our  analysis  here,  since  even  if  these  scenes  are  shot  in  a  studio,  the  film  
offers  an  atmosphere  that  is  fully  made  to  resemble  museum  exhibits.  The  same  argument  
can  be  made,  in  most  cases  even  more  forcefully,  about  other  filmic  texts  exposing  similar  
“museum  aesthetics.”  

  85  
techniques  put  on  display,  most  of  them  drawn  from  the  inventory  of  Twentieth  

Century  cinematic  modernism,  include  jump  cuts,  traveling  shots,  close-­‐ups,  

extreme  close-­‐ups,  stop  motion  cinematography,  dissolves,  and  fades  (not  always  

to  black). It is through editing however that The Hills of Marlik differentiates itself

from most documentaries. The broad scope of editing strategies, often taken up in

combination, includes metric, graphic, rhythmic, and intellectual editing. Equally

significant is the use of montage within the frame. The objects in these scenes, relics,

ornaments, statues, and weaponry, are filmed in high contrast and set against each other

in multiple arrangements, static, animate, in dissolves, in fades. This stagy practice of

montage within the frame is not limited to the museum display sequences of the film as

elements, objects as well as graphic forms, from these segments seep into the rest of the

film; the “museum pieces” spread and are scattered, with or without justification from

the commentary voice-over, into the countryside landscape, appearing in or next to the

images of the villagers standing in front of their mud-brick homes. A result of these

unexpected juxtapositions is that the shots take on a collage-like quality. In the face of

this high degree of fragmentation, it is the flawless blackness of the background, and

Golestan’s words, that conceive connection and lucidity.

“This year, last year, thousands and thousands of years….” In The Hills of

Marlik, the image offered of (Iranian) history is one of loss and rupture. The excavated

skeletons, the ancient objects displayed on museum pedestals, and, above all, the

commentary, all point to a long process of destruction and decay. “History was lost, the

cast (or form) became dust, and head that was the bowl of thought is no more.” The

  86  
calamity perhaps started by terror of (an) invasion from the outside, by a “tribe,” an

“evil idea,” a “deceiving tyrant.” The gravest consequence of this history of

disintegration was the disappearance of “seeing” (deedan) and its interchangeable

properties of “thinking” (andishidan) and “giving birth” (zaeeidan). But, suddenly, in

the midst of this thousand-years-long destruction, is the possibility of renewal. Across

time, comes the power “to create” (afaridan and khallaghiyat). Golestan’s poetic

discourse gives the promise of a life-giving force that can come, across the boundary of

time, to this land. “May the ancient roots blossom again! May the god of seed salute the

valley! May the eyes see! And seeing becomes life anew.”

Persepolis (Fereydoun Rahnema, aka Takht-e Jamshid, 1960)

Fereydoun Rahnema’s 1960 film Persepolis too showed a ruin of antiquity. This

twenty-minute long black-and-white documentary is a lyrical portrayal of the most iconic

archeological site in contemporary Iran. Persepolis, once the ceremonial palace of the

first Persian empire (550-330 BC), was fully excavated in the early 1930s, and has since

occupied a particular place in the Iranian national(ist) imagination, particularly in its

visual expressions.

In Rahnema’s Persepolis, imperial grandeur and stylistic playfulness—visual,

audio, and verbal/literary—live side by side. Very early in the film, a pick hits the soil,

then a sledge, and we see a stone column erected through a montage of different columns

at various states of fracture; quick succession of shots of these broken columns combined

with fast-paced upward tilts of the camera create the impression of a column being

  87  
 constructed (somewhat reminiscent of the awakening stone lions in Sergei Eisenstein’s

Battleship Potemkin, albeit more elaborate and temporally extended). Large parts of

Persepolis are built of close-ups framing the numerous bas-reliefs of the ancient

structure. In quick succession, against the sound of a zurkhaneh and a female voice-over

in French, we see stylized flora, hands, hands holding vases, mythological creatures, rows

of soldiers, spears, shields, faces.85 The second half of the film meanwhile is dominated

by long shots of different sections of the grand palace, nestled against mountains and a

cloudy sky. Dispersed images of broken columns and statues, a solo tar plays on

intermittent with the voice-over.

“But, suddenly war….” Similar to The Hills of Marlik, Persepolis is drenched in a

sense of historical loss and grief. The destruction of the palace, which the voice-over

declares was once a garden, is evoked through the imagery, music, and sound. The act of

remembrance becomes increasingly more manifest as the film’s rhythm slows as it

progresses. Camera moves, in tilts and pans, from one remnant of destruction to another,

but also giving panoramas of the destroyed city and the large valley it is facing. The

soundtrack, still collage-like, for the most part continues with natural noise and the voice-

over (the opening titles set aside credit for “Musique Concrète”), ending with a sad solo

nay. The scale of ruin is expansive. Not naming the invading army responsible, adding so

subtly yet another shade to the film’s overall ambiance of ambiguity, the tragedy of

                                                                                                               
85  This  is  the  first  use  of  a  zurkhaneh  drum  in  a  film  I  have  noted.  Associated  with  the  

lowbrow  genre  of  the  “traditional  gymnasium,”  and  carrying  strong  connotations  of  
authenticity,  this  percussion  instrument  was  to  make  many  more  appearances  in  the  
Iranian  New  Wave  cinema.      
     

  88  
 destruction is instilled into all of Iranian history, if not to all history.86 The expansion of

the temporality of destruction across ages means opening the door to another form of

allegorical arrangement, that of the slow destruction, the decay.

Persepolis (Fereydoun Rahnema, 1960)

Differentiated from abrupt “destruction by man,” the decay (in a built structure)

for Georg Simmel was significant because it was brought about by the non-conscious, yet

creative, forces of nature.87 In his 1911 essay “The Ruin” he wrote:

That the overwhelming of a work of the human will by the power of nature
can have an aesthetic effect at all suggests that nature has never completely
extinguished rightful claim to this work, however much it may be formed by
the spirit. In its material, its given state, it has always remained nature, and if
now nature becomes once more completely mistress over it, she is merely
exercising a right which until now has remained latent but which she never, so
to speak, renounced.88
                                                                                                               
86  Soon  after  the  fall  of  the  Persian  Achaemenid  Empire,  the  army  led  by  Alexander  burned  

Persepolis.    
 
87  Georg  Simmel,  “The  Ruin,”  in  Essays  on  Sociology,  Philosophy  and  Aesthetics,  ed.  Kurt  H.  

Wolff  (New  York:  Harper  and  Row,  1965),  26.  

 
88  Ibid.,  26.  

  89  
After remembering the willful destruction from outside, the storied fire started by an

invading army, Persepolis dwells on the gradual, still ongoing, destruction brought on

by the natural elements on the body of the City of Persians. “On this land, covered by

other elements, covered by vegetation, that grows in the halls….” Nature is still

advancing over the ruin, a reality emphasized not only by the voice-over narrative but

also by countless images of broken stone objects, stumps of pillars amidst grass and

flowers, shots of small animals wandering around the place, birds singing, sounds of

wind and water.

“After, today, other realities, to see, to know …” Similar to the excavated objects

and skeletons of The Hills of Marlik, the sight of antiquity here interrupts the continuity

of the present time. Ruined structures, ancient or modern, it should be remembered, are

believed to evoke other lives and worlds. Again, as Simmel saw it, the genuine ruin

(ancient and decayed but not yet rendered unrecognizable in its fundamental formal

features) creates “the present form of a past life,” and that it does so in the fashion of “an

immediately perceived presence.”89 Explaining “the peace whose mood surrounds the

ruin” Simmel writes:

Expressing this peace for us, the ruin orders itself into the surrounding landscape
without a break, growing together with it like tree and stone—whereas a palace, a
villa, even a peasant house, even when they fit perfectly into the mood of their
landscape, always stem from another order of things and blend with that of nature
only as if in afterthought. Very old buildings in open country, and particularly
ruins, often show a peculiar similarity of color to the tones of the soil around
them… the influence of rain and sunshine, the incursion of vegetation, heat, and
cold must have assimilated the building abandoned to them to the color tone of

                                                                                                               
89  Ibid.  

  90  
 the ground which has been abandoned to the same destinies. They have sunk its
once conspicuous contrast into the peaceful unity of belonging.90
But in the place where Simmel looked for “balance,” “unity of form,” “metaphysical

calm,” and the re-connections of nature and the spirit in the face of opposition and

conflict, cinema is capable of opening radical fissures even when it brings together. And

so in Persepolis the ruin of the past, set against a forceful and lively present time,

emerges as a ghostly interruption.

While the historical monument of the film in its materiality is facing a slow form

of erosion by the natural elements, steadily fading away into them on its edges, it still

stands on celluloid in sharp contrast to the world around it, formally, discursively. The

body of the ancient ruin of Persepolis is a marker of the past in the world of presence. In

the context of Twentieth Century Iran, it is the (distant) past that turns history into

mythology. As such, it is only “natural” that it opens the gates of history to its most

ancient times. Through a soundscape that is for the most part a collage of sounds and

noises, Persepolis introduces its recurrent strategy of juxtaposing various elements from

across the temporal gap. The well-known drama of the burning of the city by a barbarous

army is recreated by adding the uproar of galloping horses, clashing of metals, and cries

of men, to the images of the ruin. For the rest, aside from the film’s voice-over and the

sound of a tar, it is a clatter of the everyday, sounds of birds, passing cars in the distance,

well-rhymed crickets, rain, and wind. Despite this focus on the happenings of the present-

day life, the ruin here does not lose its uncanny otherworldly impression.

                                                                                                               
90  Ibid.,  p.  26  (p.  383).  Further  in  the  essay,  Simmel  describes,  in  passing,  the  quality  

gained  by  old  age  and  decay  in  terms  highly  reminiscent  of  Benjamin’s  descriptions  of  
aura:  “the  profound  peace  which,  like  a  holy  charmed  circle,  surrounds  the  ruin.”  Ibid.  

  91  
 In effect, it could be said, the decaying structure leaves its impact on the life

around it in multiple ways, including in the ways of cinema. Again and again, the

imperial capital, with its myriad of stylized features—architectural structures, abstract

designs, floral and human figures—informs the filmic strategies taken up in the mise-en-

scène and editing. The film, for instance, starts with an upward moving tilt, bringing to

view the vertical shape of the palace with its still-standing gates and columns. Other tilt-

up shots soon follow, to become part of the scene (already discussed above) that

assembles a column through montage. The repetition of this sparse movement,

supplemented with recurring camera pans, builds a particular rhythm for the film from

early on. A small number of these horizontal camera movements, this time appearing

unavoidably as traveling shots, move across rows of bas-reliefs of Achaemenid soldiers

(the so-called Immortals). One of the earliest instances of filming Persepolis’ “guards” in

this fashion, this particularly animate way of representing the engraved imagery has been

reproduced in countless films and videos, over time finding a truly iconic status.

“We pay homage to water, source of light….” Rahnema’s Persepolis ends with a

scene of the ruin in the aftermath of a rain. The soil and stone, with which the film

started, are wet. This scene brings the film’s underpinning thematic cycle, one built on a

particular set of natural forces, one that becomes visible only at the end, to an end. This

cycle, the reader should bear in mind, surfaces when one considers Rahnema’s long-held

beliefs and concerns, and even then, it should be regarded as a loose one. First, it should

be remembered here that from very early on in his life, from his student years in Paris,

  92  
Rahnema became deeply attached to Zoroastrianism, the dominant faith of ancient

Iranians. To him Zoroastrianism embodied the most essential and affirmative component

of the Iranian identity. This source of life and beauty though was in need of recovery, a

form of “unearthing” may I say, as it was submerged under a history of cultural amnesia.

The three films Rahnema made before his untimely death in 1975, as well as in his

writings, point to his concerns for this grand project. It is against this context, both

personal/authorial and social, that the accentuated presence of natural elements in

Persepolis amount to something more, that within the plot of the film one can speak of a

cycle (or a constellation, if you prefer) of elements. These elements, now hardly possible

to simply call “natural,” are of course the seven primordial pure elements of creation in

Zoroastrian cosmology: earth, air, water, fire, animals, plants, and men. If Persepolis

started with soil and stone, it ends with soil and stone drenched under a wet sky. Inspired

by the past unearthed, discursively as well as materially, Rahnema’s lyricism thus turns

even Alexander’s soldiers’ fire, ignited at the original moment of destruction and decay,

into a letter of renewal and hope.

On this possibility of rebirth, that is to come after centuries of decline, both The

Hills of Marlik and Persepolis share. Another shared intellectual article between these

two less remembered films of the New Wave is that the excavated past belongs to the

ancient, that is pre-Islamic, history of Iran. This characteristic becomes more significant

since, as we will see later, in the following years it was Shiism, particularly in its

contemporary, popular, manifestations that was to come out as the primary site of

reference for Iranian cultural authenticity. This shift in historical imagination took shape

  93  
 as the Third Worldist anti-colonial discourse gained momentum, and, simultaneously, the

arguments for rehabilitation of Shia Islam became more popular and more radical. It is at

this time, sometime in the mid-1960s, that intellectuals like Al-e Ahmad, Shariati,

Shayegan, and Naraqi started to become the public faces of this newer discourse of

authenticity, each producing a different tendency within it (from revolutionary to liberal

nationalist). The generation before them, who left their impact in the field of cultural

production from the 1900s to 1950s, was far more invested in an idealized vision of

Ancient Persia (Iran-e bastan), often fusing that with an openly anti-Islamic rhetoric.

Whether a modernist writer, like Sadeq Hedayat, or a pioneer filmmaker, like Abdol-

Hossein Sepanta, that now-older generation had searched in ancient myths, languages,

and artifacts from the time of the Zoroastrian empires (and even before) in order to

retrieve material for the essays, stories, plays, and political treaties they produced. In

retrospect now we can see the works and beliefs of intellectuals like Golestan and

Rahnema (and the visual artist Massoud Arabshahi in his earlier work) still engaging with

an Iran of a distance past as a source of creativity and renewal—itself a form of quest for

authenticity—as the vestiges of an era in its twilight. 91

“And this, that will remain in the museums next to the necklaces… Mixing with

the earth, mixing with the sky.” Persepolis also shares with The Hills of Marlik the

return of the ancient object, after millennia of burial under the soil, in the form of a

museum display, in the form of an “aesthetics of museum” in fact. The scene that can

                                                                                                               
91  For  more  on  the  tendency  of  bastangarai  or  “ancietism”  among  Iranian  intellectuals  see  

Reza  Bigdeloo,  Bastangarai  dar  Tarikh-­‐e  Moaser-­‐e  Iran  [Archaism  in  the  Contemporary  
History  of  Iran]  (Tehran:  Nashr-­‐e  Markaz,  2001/1380).    
       

  94  
unambiguously be called a museum display scene in Rahnema’s film is rather brief,

however it comes at a narratively determining moment. It comes soon after the “battle

scene,” created out of fragments of bas-reliefs and simulated clamor of war you recall,

ends. An eerie calm settles in with a series of shots of the ruin, synthesized noise of

crickets and distant dogs in the air. Unexpectedly, a few images of one, then two,

human skulls. Few caskets filled with old objects, tagged and numbered, are also

shown. The commentary adds: “And this, that will remain in the museums next to the

necklaces….” It is from this moment on that the film noticeably slows down. After the

animate scenes of simulated construction (of the column) and simulated war, the two

segments with which the film starts, the shots become longer and the tragic mood of

decay settles in. If the arrival of the museum in Persepolis brings with it a slowing

down of the film’s rhythm, in The Hills of Marlik it accelerated it; both, however,

herald the moment of change in pace. The two scenes intervene with temporality in

more than one way, they come and rupture. What I called “the first museum display

sequence” in The Hills of Marlik begins when the scene of archeologists excavating the

site, exhuming human bones and skulls, is cut to a dark space, through which the

camera moves between rows of sharply-lit suspended artifacts. The cut, an optically

printed wipe cut, visually opens the film not only into another space but also to another

time, the past, for the first time. In Persepolis, on the other hand, the referral to the

museum’s holdings, which are skulls and artifacts, is the first indicator of contemporary

times, the present. Despite seemingly moving in opposite directions, the museum

scenes in both films accomplish a similar creative feat, a great leap over decline and

decay.

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 Even though the museum scene is exceptionally brief in Persepolis, the film as

a whole is permeated by the same principles, the same aesthetics indeed, that make the

other “museum films” I discuss here. In editing, a most important component of these

films, Persepolis takes up a wide array of possibilities including, graphic, rhythmic,

metric, and intellectual, methods of montage. That the site in front of the camera is

Persepolis is different though—unlike the other films in the category, objects are not

filmed in a museum, or in a museum-like space—means certain divergences. The

dissimilarity in location, however, does not diminish the stylistic resemblances. In

Golestan’s The Hills of Marlik and The Crown Jewels the ancient objects (ornaments,

vases, armory, etc.) are filmed within a completely black environment as the

background, an exceptionally controlled space, while in Persepolis nearly the entire

film is photographed outdoors. Despite this major difference, made even more

significant if one is considering a question in aesthetics, Persepolis uses strategies

comparable to those used in Golestan’s museum scenes. As a general rule, these

museum scenes tend to what I see as a movement towards extraction. This is a drive for

casting off, for reduction, for turning spatial, graphic, and plot, complexities into more

recognizable schematic outlines. Showing itself particularly in compositional matters,

this formal predisposition reduces, reframes, and crops the larger outer contours of

objects, sometimes to the point of near-complete abstraction. In the Hills of Marlik this

could mean the extreme close-up created by the camera’s movement on one of the

floating objects, and in Persepolis, further fragmentation of a bas-relief through

cropping the image curved in stone, until only a mythical floret remains. The jolting

  96  
disjunctions which these museum scenes produce, and are produced by, are

counterpointed with strategies that bring some degree of accord and continuity. There

are, then, the recurrences in graphic and textural correspondences across the shots that

allow these scenes to hold together, so to speak. In The Hills of Marlik and The Crown

Jewels the blackness of the background, itself a replication of the classical museum

display set-up with its stands and well-lit objects delivers this kind of cohesion. In

Rahnema’s Persepolis, even though photographed outside the space of a museum, it is

those shades of gray of the decaying stone, often reduced to a two-dimensional surface,

that serve a similar purpose.

The Silver Canvas (Kamran Shirdel, aka Boum-e Simin, 1965)

That there are many Iranian art films with museum scenes, or that evoke the

aesthetics of the museum exhibit, should not come as a surprise. Looking at the

institutional context of the time reveals some basic explanations in this regard. Despite

their differences, in social purpose or in bureaucratic style and goals, all the state agencies

involved in film production shared in their adherence to a dominant form of cultural

nationalism. Among these governmental apparatuses engaged in cinema affairs the

Ministry of Culture and Arts had the leading role in training, production (outside the

private sector), distribution, and implementing the rules (including censorship). In the late

1950s (as well as now) from its central location in front of the Parliament at Baharestan

Square, the Ministry of Culture and Arts was in charge of an ever-expanding network of

institutions, personnel, exhibition sites, historical monuments, and projects. Included under

the supervision of the Ministry of Culture and Arts were the matters related to the nation’s

  97  
museums. This was rather a new institution, for the most part established under the reign of

the first Pahlavi monarch Reza Shah (r. 1925-1941).

The Silver Canvas was made in 1965 by Kamran Shirdel, a young graduate of

Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia who was to become one of the most

recognized names in documentary filmmaking in Iran. Shirdel made this twelve minutes

long film for the Ministry of Culture and Arts soon after his return from Italy. It was

customary practice for the Ministry to ask aspiring filmmakers to make a small film as part

of their professional portfolio before hiring them with longer-term contracts.92 This rather

conventional tryout required by the Ministry was of course indicative of a number of

normative institutional features, for instance, certain expectations of technological

professionalism and creative abilities. Moreover, the choice of making a debut film on the

history of art of silverware in Iran was a most practical choice as it tallied with the state

body’s milieu already established for some time, in infrastructure and in discourse. The

Ministry recommended and encouraged making films not only on certain general themes,

like the arts and historical monuments, but more specifically on activities that fell directly

under its jurisdiction. The Silver Canvas is filmed in a museum, or a museum-like space,

certainly not a politically neutral site as it was legally, economically, and logistically linked

to the Ministry on the national level, and to the politics and poetics of the museum display

internationally. All these associations left their impacts on the pro-filmic space of a

museum in Iran and by extension on Shirdel’s first Iranian film.

                                                                                                               
92  This  information  was  kindly  provided  to  me  by  Kamran  Shirdel  in  an  interview.    

  98  
 “For millennia, silver has been won from its ore, cleared from its impurities and

shaped into objects, upon which the feelings of the artist has been eternalized into beautiful

forms.” The Silver Canvas starts with a perfectly symmetrical and ornate design filling the

screen, with the credits written across it. The voice-over immediately follows declaring

from the start the ancientness of silverware production and the status of those producing it

as artists. What is more, in a remarkable display of verbal economy, parallel with

designating the customary “artisan” as the “artist” this short opening passage also

articulates a classic romantic definition of what constitutes art: an artist’s feelings rendered

timeless in beautiful forms. The timelessness of beautiful forms is immediately, and rather

effortlessly, infused with the narrative of the nation: “Ancient Iranians placed a high value

on beauty, and Iranian art can be designated as an art of pure form.” In this talk of the

creative spirit, and of its endurance across the ages, from primordial Iran to modern Iran,

one can decipher echoes of The Hills of Marlik and Persepolis.

The Silver Canvas (Kamran Shirdel, 1965)

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 The museum scenes in The Silver Canvas come very early into the film and

maintain their significance, with little interruption, until the end. A few close-ups of hands

at work with chisels and miniature hammers carving out intricate designs on silver trays.

And, then, “a glance at ancient times,” the voice-over announces. A round artifact comes

to light from the darkness surrounding it as the camera closes in. This sudden appearance

of the past long gone, marking the beginning of the film’s museum scene, bears striking

similarities with those comparable moments from The Hills of Marlik and Persepolis. To

start with, in The Hills of Marlik the museum scene begins as images of hands and pickaxes

of the archeologists are cut to images of artifacts suspended in a black space, overall an

arrangement very similar to that of The Silver Canvas. Also, both scenes start with a

camera movement forward, horizontal and even, into a darkened space. A far more

interesting point of correspondence between these scenes is that they come as a shift in the

temporal plane, as a plunge into the distant past. (This rupture, as I argued earlier, takes

place with the arrival of museum objects in Persepolis too, but there it is more of a jump

forward into the present era.) In both The Hills of Marlik and Persepolis, the break in

continuity of time is also a break in documentary style as images of real human figures

under natural light are replaced with the decided artifice of the museum display, high-

contrast studio-like lighting, stylized designs, and stylized bodies (or the “pure forms of the

Iranian art,” in other words). And as if to underline (or is it to smoothen out?) the shock of

the sudden temporal shift the voice-overs in these films announce these sprawling time

passages: The Hills of Marlik announces the break and the loss that came with lyricism,

with the words “This year, last year, thousands and thousands of years;” the commentary

in The Silver Canvas describes its museum-oriented gaze “a glance at ancient times.” In a

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manner that now we can see as characteristic to museum aesthetics, The Silver Canvas

shows formal playfulness in simultaneously breaking down the world into smaller

components of shapes and designs, and, then, building them up anew.

The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, aka Khaneh Siah Ast, 1962)

Cheh mahib ast karha-ye to,

cheh mahib ast karha-ye to.

How strangely frightening your works,

how strangely frightening your works.

Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black starts with Golestan’s voice. Golestan’s

detached commentary offers a brief introduction to leprosy, stating that what is going to be

seen is “an image (naqsh) of an ugliness,” and a “vision (deed) of a pain” in this world. His

words against a total black background. What follows is a highly intricate and dense twenty

minute long film with many currents and countercurrents in its imagery, sound, verbal, and

discursive components. We see glances of the people inhabiting the never-named

Babadaghi Leper Colony, going about their daily activities, attending classes, prayer

sessions, standing still, and their medical treatment procedures. On the audio track,

Golestan’s voice returns only one more time with an even more detached discourse

providing medical and sociological insight on the contagious disease of leprosy. The

striking images of diseased bodies and Farrokhzad’s sorrowful voice, her poetry and words

from the sacred scripture, inundate the rest.

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 With The House Is Black in effect Farrokhzad introduces the two elements of body

and religious motives into the Iranian New Wave at a moment when it is not fully born yet.

She reads from the Old Testament: “For I’ve been made in strange and frightening shape.

My bones were not hidden (penhan) from you when I was being created in the hidden

(nahan), and was being molded in the bowels of the earth. ” The decaying bodies of the

inhabitants of the leper colony are put on full display. Close-ups of blind eyes, faces with

deep sores, swollen blisters, and amputated arms fill the screen. The medical personnel’s

examinations of the patients are filmed closely. At times the film’s desire to capture the

disintegrating flesh goes well beyond the “life caught unaware,” self-consciously arranging

for more and more visibility. In a number of shots the camera is placed under a glass too

transparent to be seen, and the patient’s fingers are pressed against the glass and filmed in

extreme low angles in sharp black and white.

Farrokhzad reads from the Old Testament: “For I’ve been made in strange and

frightening shape. My bones were not hidden from you when I was being created in the

hidden, and was being molded in the bowels of the earth. ” In The House the body is

diseased, photographed, and in ruin. The dominant human body here is a figure of excess,

its flesh either constantly in lack or in overflow. This is a body in complete alterity to that

healthy productive body of progressive history, an ideal that modern Iran has been fully

committed to for a very long time. In an imaginative evocation of Mikhail Bakhtin and

Michel Foucault, Dabashi puts as such the relationship of the body of the leper in

Farrokhzad’s film and the world:

What happens when the site of unseen is made visible? A leprosarium is a

transgressive place—a grotesque, forbidden space where bodies ruined by disease

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 are locked away so as not to disturb the legislation of bodily normalcy. Opening the
door on a defiant semiotics of the grotesque, Farrokhzad releases a disruption of the
semantic legislation of the body.93
The most unforgettable, the most astonishing, in the film belongs to the patients with

missing body parts, amputated hands, lost legs, faces with deep wounds in place of noses

and eyes, absent lips. In one particular scene the camera, again placed in a frontal low angle

position, shows a man praying at the community’s mosque with his hands, or what is left of

them, raised in prayer; the scene is completed with shots of the metal hand-like religious

standards (alam) resting next to a pulpit (menbar). And, at other times, the body of the

leper is also in overspill of the normal body. Large lumps in necks and skulls, massively

overblown faces, and overgrown and decaying tissue shown being cut by scissors. These

corporeal excesses of the pro-filmic world, of what that is in front of the camera, makes the

viewer of The House Is Black highly conscious of the materiality of the body. The quality

of the cinematography—with the camera’s tendency to be frontal and in the proximity of

its subjects, sharp focuses, depth of field—keeps the bodies on the screen coming across as

tactile as the cinema allows. The skin of the men and women, young and old, looks very

tangible, and their gazes at the camera effective.

                                                                                                               
93  Hamid  Dabashi,  Masters  and  Masterpieces  of  Iranian  Cinema  [Washington,  DC:  Mage  

Publishers,  2007],  65.  

  103  
 The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1962)

The human body’s excess here is also a feature of the uncanny. A lot of things in

The House Is Black cannot be explained with certainty, and to this, the foregrounding of the

body element contributes. The diseased human body, then, contributes to the film’s

photographic realism as well as its undoing. Like in the ruin, the flesh in its very

materiality is a register of temporality. Through time the elements leave their marks on our

bodies, and so does the process of aging. Scars leave their sign on the skin and passage of

time deepens the lines. But in The House Is Black the life of the lepers has altered these

processes, throwing the possibility of putting a calendar onto the faces into question. The

age of many of the subjects filmed cannot be determined easily. The faces, the words, and

the “body language” of so many among the patients shy away from fully disclosing that

information. Although there is an awareness of time that comes with the effects of decay,

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 the historical trajectory it has taken remains unclear. This particular time-based ambiguity

of the film persists even in the section when the gathered group is expected to point toward

a consistency in age, as in the film’s famous school classroom scenes. With a few other

instances, it becomes clear that delivering the shock of this temporal uncertainty is

consciously, albeit subtly, deployed, like when a small figure with big long locks combing

her hair turns her face towards the camera revealing her smile and wrinkles.

As a lyrical avant-garde work, the body of the filmic text in The House Is Black is

also a ruin. The photography and the choice of location notwithstanding, the makers of the

film take very few steps to create a realist world of diegetic unity, narrative coherence, and

spatial and temporal clarity. It is as though The House itself, like the bodies inhabiting it, is

constantly on the verge of overspill and breakage. Passing glimpses of people, body parts

(or their absences), trees, water, animals, seem to have been amassed together free of

narrative considerations and more for rhythmic and affective impact. The sound and

Farrokhzad’s voice-over contribute to the rhythm but seldom, if at all, coincide with the

diegetic in content. The film utilizes a device that decades later came to be associated with

some of the most celebrated from the Iranian art cinema, the strategy of repetition.94.

Repetition of course can be produced in a number of mediums, in literature or in film, and

in various forms and aesthetic terrains within those mediums; Visual, auditory, verbal, and

narrative, components of a film are “tracks” through which seriality comes into existence,

                                                                                                               
94  Repetition  in  Iranian  cinema  has  been  observed  and  analyzed  in  relation  to  some  of  the  

films  of  Abbas  Kiarostami  and  Mohsen  Makhmalbaf.  Particularly  well-­‐known  in  this  
respect  are  Kiarostami’s  Where  Is  the  Friend’s  Home?  (Khane-­‐ye  Doost  Kojast?,  1992),  and  
Under  The  Olive  Threes  (Zir-­‐e  Derakhtan-­‐e  Zeitoun,  1994)  and  Makhmalbaf’s  Moment  of  
Innocence  (Noon  va  Goldoon,  1995).      
 

  105  
consciously or not so consciously. As we saw, both Rahnema and Golestan added another

touch of “poeticness” (and rhythm) into their prose by uttering and re-uttering a few words

or phrases in Persepolis and The Hills of Marlik respectively. In one of the earliest scenes

in The House Is Black a man dressed in rags is shown walking back and forth next to a

building, at every few steps he reaches and touches ever so lightly the brick wall of the

dilapidated structure. The façade of the building is of bricks and windows stretching from

the right side of the frame to near infinity. Over this intriguing scene, Farrokhzad’s voice

slowly reads the names of the days of the week again and again:

“Saturday…Sunday…Monday…” and so on. The world of The House Is Black seems to

revolve on the cyclical time of the myth and not a progressive one, and, that, too, is a

messenger of horror. As an aesthetic device repetition’s history entangles with modernist

Persian poetry and prose, before its presence was felt in Iranian films. Farrokhzad, already

a recognized voice in poetry by the time The House Is Black was made, played a crucial

role in allowing the ways of poetry to travel to the cinema.

It is above all by way of words that temporality in The House Is Black becomes

textured and complicated. Forming the film’s omnipresent commentary the passages

recited by Farrokhzad point to other times so distant their historical beginning and

ending cannot be determined. Dabashi acknowledges this air of timelessness in

Farrokhzad’s cinematic masterpiece, seeing it as a consequence of the particular choice

of textual references for the commentary: “By stretching beyond the Qur’anic and

reaching for the biblical (Farrokhzad was always fascinated by the Persian translation

of the Bible), Farrokhzad embraces an antiquity of diction that is no longer religious but

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 metaphysical, no longer spatial but eternal, no longer cultural but cosmic, no longer

political but mythic.”95 While, the Qur’anic verses in the film (recited by the man with

raised amputated hands in the mosque scene) have diegetic justification, most of

Farrokhzad’s voice-over is composed out of her borrowings from the Old Testament

(Ahd-e Atiq in Persian). More specifically, the quotations from the Hebrew Bible are

mostly fragments from the Book of Psalms, Job (Chapter 30), and Jeremiah (Chapters 6

and 8). It should be noted here though that to quote or mimic the vocabulary and tone

of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was far from an isolated occurrence in the

Iran of the time (and in fact ever since). Modern Persian authors from the 1950s onward

had turned to multiple sacred writings, from Zoroastrian to Abrahamic faiths, from the

Avesta to the Bible to the Qur’an, finding inspiration in them and using them for

stylistic re-invention. Also, ancient texts were exceptionally useful for constructing

allegories. The literature associated with this return to older narratives and forms was

by the 1960s to an extent that literary historians speak of the emergence of the new

genre of “mythical” or “scriptural,” and even a “Torati” (inspired specifically by the

Torah) sub-genre.96 In poetry, Farrokhzad’s own The Earthly Verses (Ayeha-ye zamini),

published in 1964, evoked the verbal and imagistic compositions of the Old Testament

                                                                                                               
95  Dabashi,  Masters  and  Masterpieces  of  Iranian  Cinema,  67-­‐68  

 
96  In  his  comprehensive  Hundred  Years  of  Iran’s  Story  Writing,  Hasan  Mir  Abedini  lists  and  

analyzes  some  of  these  “mythical”  and  “Torati”  texts  belonging  to  what  he  characterizes  as  a  
“literary  current”  (jaryan-­‐e  adabi),  including,  Taqi  Modarresi’s  Yakolyā  va  tanhāʾi-­‐e  u  
[Yakolya  and  Her  Solitude]  1955;  Bahram  Sadeghi’s  Malakoot  [Heavenly  Kingdom]  1961;  
Kourosh  Salahshoor’s  Ejdeha-­‐ye  Koochak  [The  Small  Dragon]  1964;  and  Mahmood  Kianoosh’s  
Mard-­‐e  Gereftar  [The  Busy  Man]  1964.  For  more  see  Hassan  Mir  Abedini,  Sad  Sall  Dastan-­‐
nevisi-­‐ye  Iran  -­‐  Jeld-­‐e  Avval  o  Dovvom  Ba  Tajdid-­‐e  Nazar-­‐e  Kolli  [Hundred  Years  of  Iran’s  Story  
Writing]  (Tehran:  Nashr-­‐e  Cheshmeh,  2009/1387),  341-­‐349.  
 

  107  
 and the Qur’an.97 These letters from antiquity pointed to the past, framing a backward

gaze. This strategy was already utilized in the visual arts, most of all by the Saqqa-

khaneh painters, and (as I will show later) was going to be used by other filmmakers of

the New Wave.

Wind of Jinn (Nasser Taghvai, aka Bad-e Jen, 1969)

The story of Nasser Taghvai’s involvement with professional cinema begins with

the Golestan Film Workshop. Then, it is said that as a young man who had recently arrived

in Tehran from the South he was enthusiastic about literature and the arts, and wrote short

stories that in style and language were compared to Ernest Hemingway’s fictional prose.

He soon rose to prominence as a documentary filmmaker working within the Ministry of

Culture and Arts and the National Iranian Television and Radio (NITR), and later for

making fiction films with the private sector. Taghvai’s professional trajectory points to a

crossing between institutions as he begins with the Golestan Film Workshop and the circle

of cineastes gathered around it in the later years of 1950s, and then moves to the

government-funded agencies in charge of filmmaking. As the latter years of the 1960s

approached, this was not just a personal story, rather pointing to a shift in cinematic and

cultural institution-building, a historical shift in effect. All the avant-garde films I have

been discussing so far in this chapter (The Hills of Marlik, Persepolis, and The House Is

Black) were made by individuals and institutions that were not directly under state

jurisdiction, either as an employee or as an organization linked to a ministry. The

                                                                                                               
97  For  an  analytical  account  of  the  “scriptural  structures”  and  other  religiously-­‐inspired  

borrowings  in  modern  Persian  poetry  and  particularly  in  Farrokhzad’s  poems  see  Fatemeh  
Keshavarz,  Recite  in  the  Name  of  the  Red  Rose:  Poetic  Sacred  Making  in  Twentieth-­‐Century  
Iran  (Columbia:  University  of  South  Carolina  Press,  2006),  65-­‐83.  
   

  108  
 exceptional role played by individuals like Golestan (and his film studio), Rahnema, and

Farrokhzad, making sophisticated films largely based on individual and small group

initiatives was further sidelined as the much larger state players entered the scene, bringing

with them more funds and a certain degree of centralization. This changing of the

infrastructural environment however should not be interpreted that the change translated

into less inclination towards experimentation, less willingness for creating an “art cinema”

for the nation. Many of Taghvai’s documentaries can be described as ethnographies, and

they are unabashedly lyrical and formalist. Most of his better known documentaries were

filmed in the southern provinces, on the shores of the Persian Gulf, where he was born and

spent his childhood years.98

Wind of Jinn brings two of our themes for this chapter, the ruin and the body,

together. The opening scene is of waves of the sea hitting at a harbor town that seems

emptied of its inhabitants. Mixing with the sound of waves is the sound of wind. The voice-

over, this time belonging to Ahmad Shamlu, an icon of modern Persian poetry, gives

somewhat of an introduction to the place. “In the broken and ruin (khord o kharab) port of

Lengeh still comes the sound of relentless battle, of waves and the rocks of shores without

men.”99 What follows are shots of decaying buildings, alleyways, and dusty cemeteries.

With the images of ruination the sound track picks up a lullaby in a mournful female voice

(remarkably reminiscent of Rahnema’s Persepolis). Here, too, as in the other films

discussed earlier, The Hills of Marlik and Persepolis, the ruin simultaneously points to a
                                                                                                               
98  For  a  short  professional  biography  of  Taghvai  see  Hamid  Naficy,  “Iranian  Cinema,”  in  

Companion  Encyclopedia  of  Middle  Eastern  and  North  African  Film,  ed.  Oliver  Leaman  
(London  &  New  York:  Routledge,  2001),  212-­‐213.  
 
99  The  titles  credit  Taghvai  for  the  writing.    

  109  
past synonymous with life, as well as to the long process of decay that has followed.

“Lengeh was destroyed by the winds,” and, now, the shops of its bazaar the haunt of the

burning sun and jinn, the voice-over reveals.

The male voice-over’s grieving is also for the “Southern Blacks,” and their

pains. The Winds, specially the one called Wind of Jinn, are said to be responsible for

the outburst of untold maladies among the remaining populace as well as the

destruction of the port city. Amid the death and decay though, the locals have found the

remedy within them, a gift deposited within those who (reportedly) came from the

shores of Africa. It is not that the Winds did not exist before the arrival of Africans, the

commentary intriguingly discloses, but they had remained “unknown” (na-shenakhteh),

“like the power in a diseased body, like the oil under the sea, like consciousness in the

head of the uncultured.” The Winds have existed for long but they needed the “tradition

of the Black” in order to become known, as that tradition was able to recognize the

“resemblance” (shabahat) and become the healer. The healing was in mimesis.

From its highly fragmented early scenes of fallen alleyways and objects The

Wind of Jinn moves on to a relatively long possession/exorcism sequence. If so far the

film was finding pleasure in the haunting beauty of open spaces, of stormy seas,

deserted shores, and deserted cemeteries, with its possession scene we move into the

closed space of a crowded room. The film has already established this desolate small

structure, where a not-yet-described community called “People of Hava” convenes, as a

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site of alterity and transgression. The voice-over locates the house: “Behind this

cemetery, there is another cemetery, and behind that there is a sacred house. People of

Hava come to this house at nights, to find cure in the remedy of belief.” The camera

shows a mosque, giving the impression that it is the house the voice-over is referring to.

Then, it slowly pans and reveals another, smaller, structure: “People of Hava at nights

in the room behind this wall, expel the jinn from the body.” It is at this point that the

setting moves into an interior space, and the film’s possession sequence begins.

The possession act in The Wind of Jinn encompasses one of the longest and

earliest moments in the Iranian documentary cinema in which the human body seizes

the center. It takes off with the beat of percussion. A group of men and women have

packed a small room, playing dafs (a large frame drum), a drum, clapping hands,

singing in a language other than Persian. Slowly some in the group start to move to the

center of the room, their bodies convulsing at an increasing rate. Cutaway shots to the

ruins outside interrupt the flow of both the visual and sound tracks. Is there a link

between the two? Others stand to cover those in trance to assist and comfort them,

covering them with white sheets. At the end the drumming stops, movements stop, and

they console each other. The film ends with a shot of a man wrapped in the middle of

the room, as the lullaby we heard earlier returns.

In comparison to the films examined in this chapter until now, the possession

sequence in Wind of Jinn can make a stronger claim to the materiality, even reality, of the

world. For the most part this scene moves forward in linear time uninterrupted (if we

ignore the short cutaways of the ruins mentioned earlier that is) with long takes of the

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interior of the room. The cinematography is not in oblique angles and the camera

movements facilitate continuous visibility of the subjects and their actions. It is here that

for the first time in the film we see human faces. Also unlike the other films discussed

earlier, this long sequence is almost entirely in synchronized sound, a quality that increases

its connection to the human figures of the pro-filmic world, and, if we consider the

reception end, also to those watching/hearing the film later. As a result of this “direct

sound” the rhythm built by the clapping hands, by the chants, by the sound of percussion,

affects the bodies present at the moment of filming, by inspiring the tempo, limits, and

duration of their movements. In these moving bodies of the pro-filmic we should also count

the members of the filmmaking crew as well. That bodily movements and sounds produced

by the “subjects” being filmed have an impact on the documentary/ethnographer

filmmakers (sound as well as filming crew) might be by now a part of an old wisdom, an

old wish of the participatory cinema and its kin in the ideal of “shared anthropology”; the

idea is still alive though, even if we only take up Jean Rouch’s thesis on “cine-trance” at its

minimum reach (and not its maximalist dream of complete dissolve in the native’s ritual).

Neither the Jinns nor the Winds can be reduced to materiality though, particularly to

the kind of materiality that can be captured on celluloid. They escape cinematic

representation. In her seminal and inspiring 1999 book, Experimental Ethnography: The

Work of Film in the Age of Video, Catherine Russell argues for the ethereal, anti-illusionist,

aspect of possession in documentary cinema:

Possession poses a challenge to the ideology of realism, confounding the

principles of visual evidence. The spectacle of the writhing body, upturned
eyes, and frothing mouth is visual “proof” of the existence of gods or spirits
that have entered the body of the performer. The body becomes signifier of that

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 which has no referent. In resisting referentiality, it marks the limit of visual
language and rational thought.100
Wind of Jinn, in its lyricism, in its stylistic playfulness, makes no claim either to

“referentiality” or to “rational thought.” A level of the “unknown,” the term the film

itself uses to refer to the Winds, surrounds many of the film’s thematic components to

the end. This attitude of turning away the gaze, if you will, is applied to both those who

are possessed and those who possess. During the possession sequence, the camera for

the most part is positioned above the height of the participants and the filming is at a

slightly tilted angle with the result that faces of the possessed are rarely at the center of

the frame. Additionally, there are only a few close-ups, and those few are mostly at the

earlier, less intense, stage of the gathering. In fact, just following the lyrical prose of the

commentary, it can never be said with certainty if the zar (pronounced zâr) ceremony is

a form of trance, exorcism, or possession. The voice-over also more than once refers to

the purpose of the gathering as a bazi, a word that can be translated both as “game” or

“play.” It seems when not facing the “tradition of the Black” the unknown still

continues to exist, but only, as the voice-over puts it, “like the power in a diseased

body, like the oil under the sea, like consciousness in the head of the uncultured.”

Films on possession have a special place in the history of art cinema. I say “art

cinema” even though they consistently emerge from, and/or are placed within, the two

traditions of ethnographic documentary or experimental film. Sometimes, particularly more

recently, they have been analyzed within the intersection of those two categories. In

Experimental Ethnography, Russell brings together the two seemingly distinct categories of

                                                                                                               
100  Catherine  Russell,  Experimental  Ethnography:  The  Work  of  Film  in  the  Age  of  Video  

(Durham  and  London:  Duke  University  Press,  1999),  197.  

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 the experimental and the ethnographic together stressing upon their underlying

connections. The four canonic possession films featured prominently in Russell’s analysis

are, Trance and Dance in Bali (Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, filmed during the

1930s and released in 1952), Les maîtres fous (Jean Rouch, aka The Mad Masters, 1954-

1955), Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Maya Deren, filmed in Haiti between

1947 and 1954, released in 1985), and I Do not Know What It Is I Am Like (Bill Viola,

1986). Through readings of these filmic texts Russell extends other notable observations,

including, that (Western) cinema’s fascination with possession is linked to a “fundamental

ambivalence of primitivism in the modernist imagination.”101 And, more important to us

here, she proposes that in possession film lays a model for the “intersection of modern

aesthetics and anthropology.”102

As I see it some of the insight of this observation on the distinct link between the

avant-garde cinema and filmed possession not only can be extended to Iranian

documentaries specifically on possession, like Wind of Jinn, but also to a whole array of

other films depicting rituals.103 First in line are of course the various collective acts and

rituals built around intense bodily involvement, and in this particular sub-genre of

documentary Iranians made aplenty. From the middle of the 1960s, parallel to the

                                                                                                               
101  Ibid.,  193.  

 
102  Ibid.,  194.            

 
103  Other  noteworthy  Iranian  documentaries  on  possession/trance  are  Taghvai’s  Southern  

Music:  Zar  (aka  Musiqi  Jonub:  Zar,  1971),  Manuchehr  Tabari’s  A  Few  Moments  with  Qaderi  
Dervishes  (aka  Lahazati  Chand  ba  Daraish-­‐e  Qaderi,  1973),  a  film  known  for  explicit  
depiction  of  bodily  acts,  and  his  follow-­‐up  documentary  The  Dance  of  Love  (aka  Motreb-­‐e  
Eshq,  1975-­‐77).    
 

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 expansion and streamlining of the institutions engaged in filmmaking, there was an upsurge

in documentaries dealing with “traditional” and “folk” cultural activities, such as rituals,

dances, non-professional dramatic performances, pilgrimages, and older crafts. The

subjects of these films, whether ritualistic practices or objects or people, where seen as

authentic vestiges of a past in danger of vanishing. Film crews made of mostly young

directors, cinematographers, and technicians, were created and sent to the “distant” corners

of the country to record the moment. Also, among the new festivals being created, dealing

with cinema or other cultural fields like music, entire programs were curated around the

goal of collecting folklore. In parallel, the projects for architectural heritage preservation,

and the debates around the issue, were on the rise.104 The cinema was increasingly

entangled in this larger shift in priorities of the nation on multiple grounds, organizational,

ideological, and aesthetic. It is in this context, then, that the surge in films dealing with the

authentic culture of people, and within that more specifically the documentaries on rituals

should be seen in order to reach a better understanding.

Many of these films on rituals display spectacular collective acts played out by

bodies of the participants. The director of the Wind of Jinn, Nasser Taghvai, made some of

the most influential documentaries of the New Wave, some of which are the best

representatives of the sub-genre of ritual films. In addition to Wind of Jinn, working as a

documentary filmmaker for the National Iranian Radio and Television, Taghvai made such

titles as the Sword Dance (Raqs-e Shamshir) in 1967, Arbaeen in 1970, and Mashhad-e

Qali in 1971. These films, along with a number of other New Wave documentaries on

                                                                                                               
104  See  Talinn  Grigor,  Building  Iran:  Modernism,  Architecture,  and  National  Heritage  under  

the  Pahlavi  Monarchs  (Penzance:  Periscope  Publishing,  2009).  

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religion-related themes like Parviz Kimiavi’s 1971 Gowharshad Mosque and O Protector

of Deer, have influenced generations of Iranian filmmakers ever since. What is more, these

films have in a more diffused way shaped the general formal registers of the religiously-

inspired visual culture in Iran, from art photography to television reportages to music

videos.

Arbaeen (Nasser Taghvai, 1970)

Arbaeen starts with a slow zoom on an illuminated object, a small replica of a Shia

shrine placed in the middle of a very large room. The zoom continues until it all falls out-

of-focus, the candles and light bulbs placed on the replica turning into large hazy circles.

The music has already started and the image cuts to a small dusty back alley where men are

beating on large drums. The music consists of two percussion instruments from the south of

Iran called sanj and dammam. Until this point, the camera movement is hand-held and the

whole scene has a rather informal touch to it. Arbaeen is going to be the first film we have

discussed in this chapter without a voice-over commentary. Then, suddenly, as soon as we

might have thought we are seeing an Iranian equivalent of direct cinema, another scene

begins that flaunts the film’s predilection for fragmentation and stylization. An abrupt cut

to a black fabric with flowers and Qur’anic scripture on its edges is followed by a quick

succession of shots of tainted glass. These backlit glass windows, perfectly symmetrical

and two-dimensional, appear to be suspended against the pitch black framing them, and,

they appear to be moving vertically as well as horizontally: both these “appearances” are of

course illusions created through the very basic cinematic means of lighting and camera

movement: the windows emerge as colorful designs suspended in a black space because

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 they are backlit briskly while the walls around them are not (a matter of lighting), and they

seem like they are moving because the camera’s position vis-à-vis them is changing

(camera movement).

In the midst of this montage of appearing and vanishing color windows are also

edited images of fabrics and banners. “High noon, in Karbala” and, then, “River of

Euphrates.” These colorful textiles tell the story of the Battle of Karbala, the narrative sewn

on them in pieces, in illustrations and in words. After stylized drawings of hands, saintly

faces, horses, arrows, and red-winged birds, these words give the high point of the story:

“Oh! Hossein Was Killed!” This rather short segment, a condensed reference to the tragic

events of the Battle of Karbala, is of course linked to the Shia ritual of Arbaeen.105. In its

virtuosity in editing and pictorial composition this segment surely supports Taghvai’s

standing as a great stylist of the Iranian cinema. Even more analytically illuminating,

however, it would be to take in all the characteristics, in form and in content, that this

passage in the film shares with the visual art scene of the time, namely with the paintings

and statues produced by artists associated with the Saqqa-khaneh movement. We should

remember that the Saqqa-khaneh movement, starting just about a decade before the making

of Taghvai’s Arbaeen, too was largely a loose collectivity of artists using motifs and

aesthetic techniques taken from Iranian “traditional arts” and “folk culture.”106 As

                                                                                                               
105  A  solemn  occasion  in  the  Shia  calendar,  each  year  the  day  of  Arbaeen  is  marked  

worldwide  on  the  fortieth  day  after  the  martyrdom  of  Hossein  the  Third  Imam  of  the  Shia.  
Every  year  the  pains  and  sorrows  of  the  slain  saint  and  his  companions,  brutally  killed  and  
decapitated  on  the  plains  of  Karbala  in  680AD,  are  commemorated  by  a  whole  series  of  
acts  and  rituals  including,  pilgrimages,  prayers,  chanting,  passion  plays,  collective  self-­‐
flagellation,  etc.  
 
106  See  Chapter  One  for  more  on  the  Saqqa-­‐khaneh  painters  and  sculptors.  

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recounted earlier in this study in Chapter One, it was particularly popular manifestations of

Shi’ism, a rich depository of visual and dramatic creativity, that emerged as the most

significant source of borrowings. Old talismans, zarihs (metal structures placed on graves

of sacred figures), locks, patterned mirror works, banners with religious themes, finely

drawn calligraphy of prayer texts, and stylized imagery of mosques were among the items

ripped out of their everyday usage and used by the artists time and again. Remembering the

Saqqa-khaneh and its modernist ways allows us to see Taghvai’s uses of devotional

material differently, not just as a sign of authorial preoccupation, but as elements of

cinematic works fully in correspondence with the creative and intellectual milieu around

them specially the field of contemporary visual culture. The stained glasse segment in

Arbaeen resembles some of the works from Saqqa-khaneh, both in its “raw material,” the

patterned symmetries of glass, and in its strategies of abstraction and fragmentation. Even

more uncannily, the stained glasses segment has shares with the mirror and glass works of

Monir Farmanfarmaian (an artist who emerged only a decade after the Saqqa-khaneh

movement, and hence a contemporary of Taghvai and his films), like her 1975 piece called

Eight Times Eight, which were also borrowed, materially and conceptually, from the

interior of Shia shrines (and sometimes palaces). (I am giving an example from the year

1975, well after Arbaeen was made, with the intention of dispelling any narrative of one-to-

one “influence” that might arise from my juxtapositions here.) Similarly, the fabrics and

banners used in the stained glass segment, and in fact throughout Arbaeen, are the same

kind of materials that inspired such paintings as Charles Hossein Zenderoudi’s 1960 Who Is

This Hossein the World Is Crazy About? As for the replica of a shrine in the opening of the

film, it should be recalled that such religiously-inspired structures, zarihs specially, had

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already been in style in artistic productions, in paintings and statues particularly. We should

then think of Parviz Tanavoli’s many statues, like his 1963 Bronze Prophet.

Bronze Prophet, Parviz Tanavoli, 1963.

The stained glass segment in Arbaeen also to a great extent corresponds with the

notion I referred to earlier as “museum aesthetics.” Like the museum scenes in Golestan’s

The Hills of Marlik and The Crown Jewels, and Shirdel’s The Silver Canvas the viewer is

made to look at artifacts, beautiful and (seemingly) antiquated, flash and move across a

black surface, a reproduction of the effects of the museum display vitrine. Also, as in those

films and Rahnema’s Persepolis (with the assembly of a column from shots of broken ones,

and in the film’s simulated war scenes), small plots of action and drama are constructed

from shots of objects and fragments of their parts. In Arbaeen too the story of a war, the

well-known tragedy of the Battle of Karbala, that is retold, in a most condensed form

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possible, through the fast-paced assemblage of inserts of glass dyed in red and slices of

banners with words and paintings.

What follows, barren dark alleys and ghostly figures of two women passing through

them, then one, then two again, with their shadows against the tall walls appearing and

disappearing. The accompanying sound is of a steady swish-like noise. These are the basic

materials from which another sub-segment in Arbaeen is built. These veiled women and

their alleys hark back to the scene of a masked woman walking through cemeteries in Wind

of Jinn, with both these segments also coming before each film’s ritual scene. The

cinematography and lighting here are as important in shaping the mystery as the editing.

The walking lanes and outer walls of the buildings are framed in a way that defies a

unidirectional perspective or even clear-cut symmetry. The result is a dis-orienting effect

only enhanced by a sharp-contrast lighting that shed light only on isolated planes within the

picture and the existence of backlit windows positioned at random high above. This

complexity of composition and lighting creates multi-plane tableaux out of these shots, an

architectonic of light and shadow if you like.

Now, here, I would like to contend for a broader significance for what this segment

represents by the way of a diversion, a crossing between mediums and times, through an

excerpt taken from a literary text from a few decades earlier (and which I have already

quoted in Introduction). In 1932, Sadeq Hedayat, wrote a travelogue-like account of his trip

to the ancient city of Isfahan under the title Isfahan Is Half of the World, and in it he wrote:

Imam-zadeh Ismael—It is located in the faraway neighborhood of the city, for

going there one must pass through narrow alleys, dry without trees, and between

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 tall walls fortress-like, with houses enmeshed into one another, in a way that will
take one into a quagmire a thousand years old, all these arrangements (pirâyesh-
hâ) are so made for the staging of Oriental films, and without wanting I
remembered some of the famous cineastes (pirâyesh-garân) of the cinema like
Fritz Lang, or Pabst and Erich Pommer who whenever seeing these alleys, new
thoughts were revealed to them.107
In this passage, scripted four decades before the making of Arbaeen, and as a modern

Persian travelogue one of the earliest in the genre, one can extract a number of currents,

tropes if you like, running through both of Taghvai’s and Hedayat’s texts. First, the space

matters. The neighborhood of Imam-zadeh Ismael, named as such because of the existence

of a shrine (an imam-zadeh) in the vicinity, is described as a “faraway” place. To this

distance one should add the travels, and travails, already made on the road from Tehran and

penned down in the travelogue by the journeying intellectual Hedayat in detail. The place is

laid bare and foreboding, with “narrow alleys, dry without trees, and between tall walls

fortress-like.” It is further rendered strange, surreal really, “with houses enmeshed into one

another,” in a description almost word-by-word fitting to the narrow alleys depicted in

Arbaeen. Then, also, the temporality matters. Those passageways of the old city seem to

open up to other times, to very old times, taking the one going through them “into a

quagmire a thousand years old.” The memories of the past though, coming abruptly at the

moment of seeing and without one’s wanting, are of other texts and text-makers. Hedayat

sees the “arrangement” of the narrow alleys and the enmeshed houses and sees Oriental

films and filmmakers of the immediate past. In their masterful casualness, the language and

style of these sentences do not allow the reader to undo the projected entanglement

between those staged arrangements of cinema and the physical “documentary” reality being

                                                                                                               
107  Sadegh  Hedayat,  Esfahan  Nesf-­‐e  Jahan  ,  44.  Erich  Pommer  worked  as  a  film  producer  

first  in  Germany  and  then  in  the  United  States.  F.W.  Murnau’s  Faust  (1926)  and  Lang’s  
Metropolis  (1927)  are  two  titles  among  the  many  produced  by  him  in  Germany.        

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 witnessed.108 That which comes first, or which shapes the other more, are questions never

asked. What is important, Hedayat in a twist contemplates, are that these are materials from

which inspirations are drawn, for “Oriental films,” for German Expressionist filmmakers,

and for him.109 Those faraway winding alleys, tree-less, with their tall walls fortress-like,

are to reveal “new thoughts.”

The reading of these spatial and temporal tropes in this extraordinary excerpt from

Hedayat next to a segment from a Taghvai film made in 1970 is not to foreground

similarities for the reason of telling new narratives of artistic influence or origin. The

purpose of these juxtapositions, however, is to foreground those tropes at their earlier

moments of emergence so we can recognize and understand them better in the New Wave

cinema (and in the coexistent visual art scene) of the 1960s and 1970s, when they were in

full bloom. The differences are telling though too. For instance, the arguments that have

come to be identified with “media specificity” still carry intellectual potency. The “tall

walls fortress-like” surrounding the old alleys Hedayat is describing are very similar to the

towering walls of the segment from Arbaeen, but they are not one, because the

photographic reproduction is not literature. Some of the ideas and visual tropes I posited

with this fragment from one of Hedayat’s lesser-known texts will be taken up later as this

study develops. As I see it, these are constellations where certain formal arrangements,

                                                                                                               
 
108  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  the  word  pirâyesh-­‐garân,  which  I  translated  as  “cineastes”  

(although  there  is  a  possibility  that  Hedayat  is  using  it  as  “directors”)  is  not  in  use  as  a  
word  related  to  cinema  in  contemporary  Iran;  it  points  towards  an  era  when  there  was  not  
yet  a  standardized  film-­‐related  vocabulary.          
 
109  According  to  Mostafa  Farzaneh  who  was  close  to  him,  Hedayat  was  a  cinema  enthusiast  

and  particularly  appreciated  German  Expressionist  films.      

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narratives of time and space, come together and then continue to resurface in slightly

different variations. Most recurrent will be the underpinning drive to construct temporal

distances, the drive towards spatial distances, and to carry on with those drives in the

streets and alleys of old and new.

In Arbaeen, the segment depicting veiled women walking in desolate alleys also

functions as a transitory scene (just as in its predecessor in Wind of Jinn). In fact, from the

start this segment is enmeshed with images and sounds of what is to come. Before the

segment comes to its end a faint chant begins to rise from the distance, and the beat of the

swish-like sound returns. The sources of these noises are not revealed. The scenery quickly

changes to a brightly lit large interior, and the ritual sequence, or what I see as the film’s

“body sequence” begins. In contrast to the streets outside, here the interior space is the

male territory. The large room is filled with men stripped of their shirts, young and old, and

of all colors. They form circles around circles, with one hand holding the next line, and

with the other beating their bare chests in a steady beat—the source of the swish-like sound

from before is now revealed.

In this sequence, by far the longest in the film, the human body not only becomes

central thematically, it also bursts into the screen in its very materiality. With the arrival of

this sequence the film’s rhythm slows down, longer takes take precedence, and the

camera’s gaze follows the mourners. With a hand-held but stable cinematography,

sufficient depth of field, and complete absence of a commentary voice-over, the beginning

of this sequence comes closest to meeting the basic conditions of observational direct

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cinema, certainly a first among the documentaries I have discussed so far. Longer durations

of the shots and their deep focus allow the viewer to see significantly more. This

affirmation of the visual evidence becomes even more intimate as the camera slowly moves

closer and closer to the center of the room and among the men engaged in the ritual.

Different body types, skin textures, muscle contractions, shining body sweat, bodily

eccentricities, occasional tattoos, and more of the kind, become visible. As the men beat

their bare chests the redness of the skin where their hands hit comes to view. Moreover,

this act of hitting the upper body, simultaneously measured and improvisational, personal

and collective, produces another effect, a rhythm. The rhythm generated here, itself in a

“dialogue” with the sad lament sang by the singer, sets the tempo for the group’s

movement in the pro-filmic world and, in turn, informs the pace of the film. Both the

activities of the crew at the moment of filming (as Rouch’s utopian ideas on cine-trance

remind us) and the choices made at the editing table are affected by the sounds and

movements produced by the bodies of mourners, in a somewhat diffused form of

materiality proclaiming and “redeeming” itself.

In Arbaeen, nonetheless, the movement towards more detail and visibility

(indexicality?) is paralleled by something different, a drive towards fissure and instability.

As the ritual continues, as the mourners’ circular movement intensifies, the camera gets

closer and closer to its subjects. As expected this closeness first brings more clarity of

sight, but that can continue only to a point as after a while the now fast-moving hands and

torsos start to fall out of focus and become a blurred mass. This arrangement of bodies

enmeshed into one another, organized in tight circular lines ringing other circles made of

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 human forms, as though in a whirlwind of flesh, becomes a visual celebration of the

possibility of collectivity. But, even before this obstruction of vision brought about by the

interaction between kinetics and optics, there are those cutaway shots, more “cut-outs” in

truth, a technique we have seen before from Taghvai in Wind of Jinn.110 As the showcasing

of the procession continues in the interior there are multiple cuts to the world outside,

images of the blue sea, dead fishes by the shore, sailing boats, and farmers working under a

blazing sun. But all these exterior shots are in full daylight, while the mourning ritual is

supposed to be taking place at night. The echo of the beating of chests for the martyred

saint holds Arbaeen together, from the scene of nocturnal alleyways, to passageways of

veiled female figures, to the large room filled with mournful men, to the cut-outs of open

seas.

Despite its impression of constructedness, Arbaeen is a film that, like many

others in the category ritual/possession documentary, celebrates the intrinsic possibility

of real experience. Most ritual/possession ethnographic films, as with their counterparts

in other mediums, project a foundational desire to capture the vestiges of genuine,

unmediated, authentic, life. Through and through this is a modernist wish (and not just

of its aesthetic variation, since it has its own tradition within political theory as well,

both of left wing and rightist orientation). That there is a strong and recurrent

fascination among the Western modernists and avant-garde artists and thinkers for the

exotic and the primitive is an observation made by quite a few critics of course. Russell,
                                                                                                               
110  Here  I  am  alluding  to,  and  appropriating,  the  literary  montage  technique  used  more  

famously  by  the  Dadaists  and  William  Burroughs.  The  main  purpose  for  this  appropriation  
of  this  literary  term  is  that  the  shots  referred  to  here,  in  Wind  of  Jinn  as  well  as  in  Arbaeen,  
go  well  beyond  in  their  radical  disruptiveness  than  the  conventional  cutaway  shots  used  in  
the  cinema.        

  125  
who has produced one of the most complex explorations of the phenomenon to date,

sees behind this historical fascination for possession the belief that those practices can

give “a documentary form to a whole range of Western desires for transcendental

experience, from drugs, to dance, to creative trance.”111 Raymond Williams provides us

with of the earlier instances of academic commentary on the link between modernism

and the primitive and how the latter was seen as an alternate source of creativity, in

aesthetics and in life:

It is a striking characteristic of several movements within both Modernism

and the avant-garde that rejection of the existing social order and its culture
was supported and even directly expressed by recourse to a simpler art: either
the primitive or exotic, as in the interest in African and Chinese objects and
forms, or the ‘folk’ or ‘popular’ elements of their native cultures. As in the
earlier case of the ‘medievalism’ of the Romantic Movement, this reach back
beyond the existing cultural order was to have very diverse political results.
Initially the main impulse was, in a political sense, ‘popular’: this was the true
or the repressed native culture which had been overlain by academic and
establishment forms and formulas. Yet it was simultaneously valued in the
same terms as the exotic art because it represented a broader human tradition,
especially because of those elements which could be taken as its ‘primitivism’
a term which corresponded with that emphasis on the innately creative, the
unformed and untamed realm of the pre-rational and the unconscious, indeed
that vitality of the native which was so especially a leading edge of the avant-
garde.112

This extract contains within it a number of points of special relevance to our

discussion at the moment, and, by extension, even to the larger themes of interest in this

treatise. Williams begins by laying down his acknowledgment of modernism’s persistent

enchantment with the cultural practices deemed as “exotic” or “primitive.” All through for

him though this interest is a relational matter, for the modernist and avant-garde artists to
                                                                                                               
 
111  Russell,  Experimental  Ethnography,  194.  

 
112  Williams,  Politics  of  Modernism,  58.  

  126  
 position themselves in rejection of the normative tenets of the socio-cultural order.

Modernism needs to define itself in opposition.113 More significantly, Williams moves on

to a more extended understanding of the primitivist tendency, as the artists’ “recourse to a

simpler art” is not limited to the regions other to Europe, it also involves the turning to the

“‘folk’ or ‘popular’ elements of their native cultures.” The folk and popular components of

one’s own culture, if seen as repressed by “academic and establishment forms and

formulas” can become as powerful as the material appropriated from distant lands. In

addition to expanding the geographic reach of the phenomenon, he also stretches the

tendency’s historical reach beyond those eras customarily discussed (Paris and Berlin of

the 1920s and 1930s above all, on occasion also the time of the Impressionists). And, so,

Williams mentions the “medievalism of the Romantic Movement” as an earlier example of

the modern impulse to look back in time in search of inspiration in the “simpler” forms of

the past. And, finally, the issue of experience. Williams sees a connection between all these

three drives—the backward gaze towards one’s native culture, the openness towards the

popular and folk elements in the contemporary era, and the search for the exotic and the

primitive outside Europe; what brings all these drives together, what turns all those

territories into primitive lands, is the avant-garde’s fascination with the “innately creative,

the unformed and untamed realm of the pre-rational and the unconscious, indeed that

vitality of the native.”114

                                                                                                               
113  In  political  standing  though,  Williams  makes  it  clear,  modernist  movements  and  

individual  players  within  them  can  choose  different  positions,  from  the  left  to  the  right.  In  
the  paragraph  immediately  following  the  one  quoted  above  he  writes:  “The  ‘folk’  emphasis,  
when  offered  as  evidence  of  a  repressed  popular  tradition,  could  move  readily  towards  
socialist  and  other  radical  and  revolutionary  tendencies.”  Ibid.,  58.  
 
114  Ibid.,  58.  

  127  
 These drives and urges were not unknown in the non-European world. And I mean

that in both senses. On one hand, there was a critique of the European artist’s power to trot

around, select, and shape the cultural products of the people around the globe. And, on the

other hand, some of those drives and impulses existed and were acted upon by many, with

some differences or exactly in the same fashion. In 1962, Jalal Al-e Ahmad wrote in

Occidentosis (Gharbzadegi):

Apart from these (Western) masters, the imperialistic Westerner occasionally

has brought a Gauguin in his caravan, or a Joseph Conrad, a Gérard de Nerval,
a Pierre Loti, or more recently an André Gide or an Albert Camus, each of
whom grew enamored of some part of the beauty and freshness of the East
and thereby shook to their foundations the West’s criteria for judgment in life,
art, or politics. Gauguin distilled the essence of light and color on his canvases
and in bringing them to Europe gave such a shake to the dark and murky
painting of the Flemish school that the mannerisms of Picasso and Dali are
already dated. In 1934, Gide exposed the corruption of the ivory and gold
companies of the Congo to the world with his Travels in Congo, André
Malraux brought word of civilizations in Southeast Asia (Khmer) predating
by far the four columns of the Roman Forum or the Acropolis of Athens.
Others in seeking out other ways of life in the East, Asia, and South America,
came upon worlds of which Europe, the West, had heard nothing, enclosed
within its walls. Jazz, which is another story, is the black African who is
roaring under the skies of New York, that same African who once brought as
a slave to serve the newly arisen aristocracy of America and the nascent
Western companies in New Jersey or Mississippi by planting cotton and who
now shakes Carnegie Hall with his trumpet and drum. In no time he will make
his way into the Gothic churches that prior to World War II admitted none but
Bach and Mendelssohn.115
Always conscious of the relationship between culture and power, particularly imperial

power, Al-e Ahmad here (and in the following paragraphs in his book) gives a deluge of a

list of movements and names that in some way used the non-West in their creative work.

Typical of Al-e Ahmad’s style of writing, this listing comes at a breakneck speed. In

between this torrent, however, flashes of some of the main ideas brought up in this chapter

                                                                                                               
115  Jalal  Al-­‐e  Ahmad,  Occidentosis:  A  Plague  from  the  West,  trans.  R.  Campbell,  ed.  Hamid  

Algar  (Berkeley:  Mizan,  1984),  127.  

  128  
in relation to the question of primitivism. For Al-e Ahmad these writers, painters, and

musicians cross the boundaries of their cultures in search of “the beauty and freshness of

the East.” (The word for the East, sharq, in Al-e Ahmad’s discourse, in fact for much of the

writing in Persian should be understood as the non-Western world together, Africa and

Latin America included.) The newness of this beauty and freshness brought back by the

adventurer-artist, or carried within the figure of diasporic black, seems to have a

devastating effect; it “shakes,” it “exposes,” and “roars.” The main purpose served by

engaging with the cultural products of the other, on the part of artists of a petrified and

alienated West, is to gain access to the vitality, creativity, and real-life experience that the

rest of the world still retained.

Al-e Ahmad’s primary concern however was that now, in the Twentieth Century,

the traditions of the rest of the world were on the verge of disappearance. Just as it had

happened in Europe of the recent past, the intellectual heritage and deep-rooted cultural

practices of Africa, Asia, and Latin America were now facing the onslaught of what he

called the “machine culture” (farhang-e mashin). In this belief in the imminent vanishing

of all that was deep-rooted, he in fact shared with many of the intellectuals and artists of

the West (and of the Third World) who were invested in a salvage paradigm of one kind or

another.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, Al-e Ahmad was a most passionate proponent of

anthropology and a prolific producer of ethnographic literature in Iran. Al-e Ahmad started

his ethnographic writings in the early 1950s and continued to produce monographs, mostly

  129  
 on the life in remote villages, until his early death in 1969. He did not have any training, or

claim, in the discipline of anthropology for producing such literature but took advantage of

his capabilities as a literati and social critic. Hamid Dabashi perceptively describes Al-e

Ahmad’s 1954 monograph, Urazan, as “something of an ethnography with the prose and

diction of a travelogue.”116 Additionally, he also contributed to the growing field by

working as a director and/or advisor to a number of publishing venues and research

institutions active in producing ethnological material.

Al-e Ahmad represented Iran in the Seventh International Congress of

Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences held in Moscow in 1964. In his published

account of his participation at the Congress, which he playfully and tellingly describes as

the “passing of a wolf in the market of the fur-makers” (gozar-e gorgi beh rasteh-ye

poostin-doozan), he includes a brief report on the state of ethnographic literature and other

related fields in the country. He notes the three governmental institutions in charge of

anthropology as the “General Bureau of Fine Arts,” the “School of Literature of Tehran

University,” and the “Office of Atlas of Linguistics.” He adds that of these three agencies

the first one carries most of the task: “In this branch of the human sciences, the General

Bureau of Fine Arts, has the main responsibility. With the Museum of Anthropology—

which is under the jurisdiction of this bureau— and the Office of Popular Culture, which is

another office of the (Bureau of) Fine Arts, and then with the two well-ordered and regular

                                                                                                               
116  Dabashi,Theology  of  Discontent,  59.  This  book’s  chapter  on  Al-­‐e  Ahmad,  entitled  “Jalal  

Al-­‐e  Ahmad:  The  Dawn  of  ‘the  Islamic  Ideology’”  provides  one  of  the  most  detailed  
accounts  of  his  life  and  political  thought  to  this  date.        
 

  130  
 journals that the Fine Arts publishes.”117 It is important to note that the Bureau of Fine

Arts, soon to be incorporated into the Ministry of Culture and Arts, was also the institution

in charge of the cinematic affairs of the nation, and the agency that produced most of the

country’s documentaries. This institutional intersection above all points to a larger societal

change, the emergence of a discourse of ethnography cutting across political affiliations,

that saw the nation’s “traditions,” customs, folklore, and accents, on the verge of vanishing

and in need of recording in letters and on film. Al-e Ahmad gives this observation in

“Report on the Seventh Anthropological Congress:”

In addition to what was already said [about the involvement of governmental

bodies], contemporary Persian literature and media have not been ignoring
anthropology either. For the reason of speed in modernism (tajaddod-
khâhi)—the infiltration of machine and re-structuring (tajdid-e banâ)—
anybody in command of a pen (har sahib qalami) feels the rush to document
and record what [remains] of rites, customs, and the past, that is in danger of
disappearance. To this effect, in the last twenty years, more than a 100 books
related to anthropology have been published, and about 250 different essays
about issues in accentology, folklore, customs and traditions and conditions of
life in villages, among nomadic tribes, and in distant towns. And this is a
source of honor for this speaker [writer] that he has been the writer of four of
those books, and some of the essays.118
This paragraph is a report on the constantly growing production of ethnographic literature

in 1964, the year these words were written down. In the following years, throughout the

1960s and 1970s, ethnographic literature was to grow, along with the contribution of the

writer of these words who was one of its strongest supporters and practitioners. Soon the

creation of academic departments of anthropology provided the discipline with another

                                                                                                               
117  Jalal  Al-­‐e  Ahmad,  Gozaresh-­‐ha:  Majmoo’eh-­‐ye  Gozaresh,  Goftar,  Safarnameha-­‐ye  Kootah  

[The  Reports:  Collection  of  Reports,  Speeches,  and  Short  Travelogues  ](Entesharat  
Ferdows,  1386/2007),  35-­‐36.  Al-­‐e  Ahmad’s  article  “Gozaresh-­‐e  Haftomin  Kongereh-­‐ye  
Mardom  Shenasi”  [Report  on  the  Seventh  Anthropological  Congress]  printed  in  this  book  is  
based  on  a  talk  he  gave  at  the  Iran-­‐USSR  Society  in  Tehran.    
 
 
118  Ibid.,  37.    

  131  
forum. However, as so subtly, and somewhat sarcastically, pointed out by Al-e Ahmad in

this passage what characterized the literature whose growth he was bearing witness to was

distinguished by two qualities: First, that it was, for good or bad, really a work of people of

letters, those he calls “in command of a pen,” and not a territory monopolized by the social

scientists. Secondly, that its driving force, its raison d'être, was a “speed in modernism”

that has lead to “the infiltration of machine and re-structuring.” These two components

guaranteed a productive coming together of a writerly discourse and a discourse of

authenticity, once more.

These two components also shaped the contours and textures of the Iranian New

Wave films, which continued to retain the ethnographic register given to it, if you will,

during its years of birth (ursprung). The making of highly creative documentaries

continued apace into the 1970s. For the making of these films, too, the cameras were turned

on the distanced corners of the country in search of practices and people who were thought

to belong to another era, even when they were seen of the majority and of the everyday.

The flowering and sustainability of the Iranian modernist documentary, or the New Wave

as a whole, was congruent with the proliferation of cultural institutions, most importantly

festivals, whose stressed aim was to bring to visibility what Al-e Ahmad thought the new

ethnographic literature was about: “folklore, customs and traditions and conditions of life

in villages, among nomadic tribes, and in distant towns.”

  132  
 – Chapter Three –
Allegory of the Country
 
 
And  you  know  the  result:  strange  cities,  extraordinary  countrysides,  worlds  twisted,  
torn  apart,  the  cosmos  given  back  to  disorder,  being  given  over  to  becoming,  
everywhere  the  absurd,  everywhere  the  incoherent,  the  dementia.119  
 
-­‐-­‐  Aimé  Césaire,  “Poetry  and  Cognition”,  1944  

From the early 1990s onward, as the films from post-revolutionary Iran found more

visibility on the global stage, with the festival circuit as the main venue for this presence, a

number of presuppositions about this “new national cinema” became prevalent. The foremost

among these was that Iranian film plots mostly take place in rural areas, that for the most part

they are played by non-professional actors, and that the films are neo-realistic. These

perceptions were produced and disseminated mostly, but not only, by the category known as

journalistic criticism. For some others, however, those with access to more information on the

state of the Iranian cinema of the time, this was a distortion of reality primarily based on an

assessment of limited data, the small number of films reaching international festivals; they

argued, justifiably of course, that these artful depictions of the rustic life of the country

                                                                                                               
119  Quoted  in  A.  James  Arnold,  Modernism  and  Negritude:  The  Poetry  and  Poetics  of  Aimé  

Césaire  (Cambridge:  Harvard  University  Press,  1998),  66.  

 

  133  
represented only a fraction of the large output of the Iranian film industry (producing about

ninety features annually by the end of the 1990s). What was absent in this debate though, if

there was one, was that the fascination of the Iranian art cinema with the countryside, as it was

the case with many of its counterparts around the world (Brazil’s Cinema Novo and its relation

with Bahia for instance) was fashioned long ago, in its formative years.

The previous chapter’s discussion of the “ethnographic documentaries”

provides a fitting foundation for this chapter’s main concern, the New Wave and the

countryside. Both categories are built on a particular discourse of temporality, a belief in

multiple temporalities that is. The rural is a place of another time, and as such, it is more

authentic. Both the ethnographic documentaries and these feature fictions of the rural deal

with vanishing ways of being, vanishing worlds really. In the case of the country more

specifically, as Williams so persistently observed in The Country and the City, the idea of

the rural always appeared entangled in a play of contrast with that of the metropolis. As I

see it, this dynamic relationship can also be found in the case of the Iranian New Wave

cinema (and within modern Persian literature). It was staged in diverse ways, once as a

form of the country blocking out the city for example (as in Mehrjui’s 1968 film The Cow),

once as the latter destructively infringing upon the former (as in Mehrjui’s 1970 The

Postman and Marva Nabili’s 1977 The Sealed Soil). Looking back however, from the

privileged position of a contemporary reader, I will argue that the relationship of the city

and the rural in the “country films” of the New Wave now comes across as frozen, more of

a general perspective (Williams), than based on experience.

  134  
 But the desire for the real sets down its marks still, particularly on celluloid. That is

a kind of relationship, a relationship with the materiality of the world if you like, that does

not completely diminish no matter how sophisticated our critical distance might be. As

Jane Gaines convincingly argues, the appeal to the real, whether as a “strategic rhetorical

move” functioning as a form of social positioning, or as a specifically filmic/interpretive

foregrounding of the “more real” (to be distinguished from a critically naïve faith in

empirical reality), still makes a difference, on the larger social sphere, on the screen, and on

the reception side (bodies of viewers). In step with Gaines’ reworking of Kracauer’s

statement “what the camera captures is more real than reality itself,” I will use interpretive

strategies that put emphasis on the “more real” in the filmic images I will take out for

examination.120 This task of underlining the photographic register’s iconicity, will therefore

be undertaken whether I agree with a film’s characterization as (neo)realist or not. In the

case of Mehrjui’s The Cow, then, for instance, it is the close-ups of the faces belonging to

the villager “non-actors of the film” (na-bazigaran-e film), their sunburnt wrinkled skins

filling the screen, shaping its surface, that still stand for the film’s claim to reality and

authenticity.

Among the basic matters explored in this chapter are the poetics and politics of the long

take, a stylistic preference for many of these “country films” (with Shahid Saless’ A Simple

Event and Still Life, and Nabili’s The Sealed Soil offering great examples), and one often

associated with the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. This is a stylistic choice that is far from

arbitrary of course. To start with, films mostly composed of long takes create a slower rhythm.
                                                                                                               
120  Jane  Gaines,  “Introduction:  ‘The  Real  Returns,’”  in  Collecting  Visible  Evidence  ,  eds.  Jane  

Gaines  and  Michael  Renov  (Minneapolis:  University  of  Minnesota  Press,  1999),  4.  
 

  135  
The slower rhythm of a film is also suggestive of a “slower world” associated often not only

with rural life but also with “tradition,” and ultimately with the past. Also, a shot with longer

duration, when uninterrupted by such cinematic means as optical manipulation, advances the

spectator’s ability to see and feel the “materiality of the world” filmed. The discussion of long

take aesthetics here, then, is about the photographic image’s tactility as well as its iconicity.

Alongside the theme of the long take, placed within the discussion on authenticity in general, I

also consider the accompanying audio tracks of films and examine the sound-related issues of

recording, dialogue, noise, and silence.

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, aka Gav, 1969)

Then, in The Cow I moved a little more daring and fearless. In The Cow I was even able to
create metaphysical and surreal ambiences, or the ambience of meaningful silences…121
-- Dariush Mehrjui

Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow, the most celebrated film of the Iranian New Wave, is

perhaps the ideal film to start a discussion that is going to revolve around the country and

fiction. The first feature-length fiction film discussed in this study, it is still a film with subtle

links to ethnography, and, therefore, carries a connection with the previous chapter. The script

is based on a story from the 1964 novel The Mourners of Bayal (Azadaran-e Bayal) written by

Gholam-Hossein Saedi a well-known author of fiction and stage plays. Contemporary to Al-e

Ahmad and a friend of his, Saedi too was an avid producer of folklore studies and
                                                                                                               
121  Esmael  Mihan-­‐Doost,  Jahan-­‐e  Now,  Sinema-­‐ye  Now:  Goftegoo  ba  Kargardanan-­‐e  Sinema-­‐ye  

Iran  [New  World,  New  Cinema:  Dialogues  with  Directors  From  Iranian  Cinema]  (Tehran:  
Nashr-­‐e  Cheshmeh,  2008/1387),  16.  
 

  136  
ethnographies. In his 2004 book Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges:

Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry Michael Fischer writes:

Sa’edi, as well as being a writer, is a psychiatrist and has provided the best ethnography
to date of the zar possession cults along the Persian Gulf. In Gav [The Cow], he
presents a case of pathological mourning in a way that illuminates much about the
philosophical structure of Persian culture, transcending the rural setting of the story,
“the harsh realism of its ethnographic portraiture that allegedly caused it to be banned
for a time” (Naficy 1981).122
The claim for The Cow’s realism and more specifically the claim made for its alleged

ethnographic, meant as objective, depiction of rural poverty has been made by many

commentators. As I see it though this key of the New Wave might hold an ethnographic

register, but even in that it is not a realist text. Furthermore, as I hope to show in the following

analysis, the film’s engagement with what is deemed as authentic, and the temporal divide it

upholds, renders it even further away from realism.

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

                                                                                                               
122  Michael  M.J.  Fischer,  Mute  Dreams,  Blind  Owls,  and  Dispersed  Knowledges:  Persian  Poesis  in  

the  Transnational  Circuitry  (Durham  and  London:  Duke  University  Press,  2004),  211.  
 

  137  
 The Cow has a rather simple narrative. It is a story of a village, unnamed and

unlocated, a man living in that village called Mashhadi Hassan, and his cow. It is a poor

community and the cow is the only one of the village. They seem to be driven by a spirit of

camaraderie, for the most part. They are haunted by fears of a group of outsiders, whose name,

the Buluries (Buluria), is about the only thing we learn about them with certainty. One night,

when Mashhadi Hassan is away in the city nearby, his cow dies. The villagers first try to hide

the bad news from him, out of concern for his feelings. That is to no avail, and Mashhadi

Hassan’s reactions are frightening. Images of rituals to cast off the evil eye, mourning rituals

take place. The Buluries turn out to be more of a nuisance than a real threat. The most

unexpected takes place: Mashhadi Hassan metamorphoses into something new and begins to

think that he is his dead cow. When all fails, the villagers decide to take him to the city, but he

dies on the way.

The Cow opens with a title sequence composed of overexposed positive shots in

black and white, blurry, distorted, and abstract. These shots show the contours of a human

figure, an animal, and the soil they stand on, against a blackened sky. Everything is reduced to

a bare minimum. In line with this elementality the letters of the titles appear as the coarse

handwritings of a child. The music, played with a combination of Iranian (like santoor and tar)

and western instruments (flute), is classical Persian but with an unconventional, some would

say modern, composition and arrangement.123 The title scene is followed by a series of faces,

mostly close-ups, looking towards the camera. These frontal portraits belong to non-

                                                                                                               
123  The  music  was  composed  by  Hormoz  Farhat,  a  composer  and  musicologist  who  had  

worked  as  a  music  academic  in  the  United  States  before  returning  to  Iran  in  1969.  Mehrjui  
himself  played  the  santoor  of  the  film’s  score.    
 

  138  
professional actors, old men, old women in chadors, and children. The faces mostly are sun-

burnt and wrinkled.

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

The title sequence and the opening scene establish a number of features that shape

the film to the end. First there is the will to discard. Both in its narrative and its visuality The

Cow shows a disposition for shedding away the “non-essential” to the point that what remains

is only the determining outlines of the story or image, nearly bare-bone. This bareness starts

with the name of the film, and continues from there. Instead of resulting in simplicity,

however, the film’s fascination for austere structures produces a form of stylization. These

austere sets, especially those in the exterior shots of the village, contribute greatly to the film’s

particular and hard-to-forget look.124 This eminence of the architectural atmosphere was

already on display in the book that the film’s script was based on, Saedi’s The Mourners of

                                                                                                               
124  The  title  sequence  credits  Ismael  Arham  Sadr  for  the  “décor.”  

  139  
Bayal. Dabashi writes in the chapter on The Cow from his 2007 book Masters and

Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema:

The Bayalis do not have houses; they have rooms with small windows, and an
occasional hole in their roof for light and perhaps, surreptitious exit and entrance.
Saedi is very particular about the architecture of Bayal, and gives it a creepy,
labyrinthine, and dreamy feel. The setting of the story thus becomes the story.
Bayal itself, the prototypical village that Saedi creates out of the myriad of his
travels around Iran, is perhaps the most daunting character of the story.125

The walls, the houses, and the alleys they create are all made of what seems to be

mud bricks covered with a coating of mud plaster. This adobe material is formed into smooth

curvaceous surfaces. This material, as dust, as dry or wet soil, is also everywhere on the ground

at the courtyards and alleys of the village. The adobe soil is of course the most common

element used in buildings in Iran (and around the world), old and new. It is used as bricks and

plaster. Until recently, in rural Iran particularly, unbaked soil mixed with dry hay was the basic

building material (called kah-gel). In their earth-like tone and texture, and in their association

with the homes of “the down-to-earth people,” these materials of construction stand for

authenticity, in architecture and in culture. In many of the films filmed in the countryside mud

bricks and mud plaster are part of the scenery inevitably; in that Mehrjui’s The Cow is an

exception only because of the rather overwhelming degree of this visibility of earth, mud, and

dust.

                                                                                                               
125  Dabashi,  Masters  and  Masterpieces  of  Iranian  Cinema,  123.  

  140  
 The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

Even before Mehrjui made his classical New Wave film though, the adobe earth

had already entered, discursively and in its very physicality, the world of Iranian visual

modernism. Marcos Grigorian, whom we already encountered in our earlier discussions of

modernist paintings and sculpture, provides us with the most celebrated case of the use of

adobe earth in arts. A graduate of Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti, Grigorian returned to Iran

in 1954 and immediately became an influential player as an artist, academic, curator and

gallery owner. He organized the First Tehran Biennial of 1958, designing its now iconic poster.

  141  
Grigorian was among the earliest proponents of “traditional” and “naïve” creative forms like

the local popular genre known as ghahveh-khaneh or coffee house painting, which, as I

mentioned earlier in Chapter One, characteristically depicted themes and motives from Persian

literature and mythology as well as Shia hagiology. Daftari writes this about the trajectory of

use of elemental materials such as soil, and their increasing significance, in Grigorian’s work:

Grigorian’s own trajectory reflects that search for an expression that is modern
but not borrowed. By 1960 the intense expressionism he had imported into his
own work from his years in Italy, exemplified in his twelve-panel painting Gate
of Auschwitz (1950-60), was dissolving in favor of the very stuff of the Iranian
desert: parched earth and mud. With these humble materials the entire grand
tradition of painting, traditionalist and modernist alike, crumbles into dust.
(Emphasis added.)126

“The very stuff of the Iranian desert” Daftari refers to here, in which were dissolved

the expressionism of Grigorian’s early years in Italy, became increasingly important in his

milieu from the early 1960s onward, the time span that also saw the emergence of the New

Wave. This creative use of Iran’s “parched earth and mud” by Grigorian can be seen in such

works like Kharg Island (1963), Spiral (1967), and Desert (1972), eventually culminating in a

series entitled “Earthworks.” Made mostly out of adobe soil, at times mixed with that other

old-fashioned non-industrial building material, dry hay (kah in Persian), the “Earthworks”

pieces are distinguished by a minimalism that allows the texture of the adobe, cracked and

rustic, to come to the fore. At the same time, the compositional sparseness takes in simple

rectangular or curved shapes. Rectangles framing other rectangles and circles. The colors of

these pieces, exhibited first on the walls of art galleries of Tehran and later around the world,
                                                                                                               
126  Daftari,  “Another  Modernism,”  65.  

  142  
were of the earthy shades of the surfaces of Iranian homes and of Iranian soil. Daftari explains

the larger significance: “If critics were condemning the rise of an abstraction lacking local

roots, Grigorian’s abstraction was born out of the Iranian land—a medium speaking for a

culture.” 127

Marcos Grigorian, Kharg Island, 40 × 60 cm, 1963

                                                                                                               
127  Ibid,  65.    

  143  
 M a rc o s G rig o ria n , U n title d , 1 0 0 x 1 0 0 c m ., 1 9 6 8

When observed together, the settings of The Cow, so fundamental to the film’s

makeup, its look and its story, reveals striking similarities to Grigorian’s creations. The

sunbaked walls and rooftops of the “décor” in Mehrjui’s film have a pronounced presence in

most of the scenes, curvaceous and symmetrical at the same time. The characters of the story,

the villagers, are filmed against them, more often in frontal tableaux-like shots. The façade of

the humble homes crafted out of these adobe walls and roofs are also symmetrical complicated

by curves of windows and arches. The outward simplicity of the surface and design are only

punctured by doorframes and small windows. Even on their own, before the intercession of the

camera, these rectangular-shaped openings and the walls framing them resemble Grigorian’s

Earthworks. The resemblance is in the texture and colors of the materials used, adobe and dried

hay, as well as in the compositional/graphic character of the two groups of structures. Time

after time though, through cinematography and lighting the surfaces of the buildings are

framed in such a manner as to close them off from their surroundings, a strategy that creates a

  144  
most geometrically basic graphics. In one instance, a highly lit building at night comes across

as a cube standing against a background of a dark night.

There are of course also differences that need to be mentioned: the rectangular and

circular layouts of Grigorian’s paintings/installations only slightly undermine the overall two-

dimensionality of the pieces, by raising the surface only by a few inches, and by being only

suggestive of openings behind the outward surfaces; In The Cow, however, those orifices

constantly slip into the film’s narrative as openings into other spaces. Repeated references

therefore are made to the existence of other spaces behind the two-dimensional exteriority of

the walls’ surfaces. The most recurrent of these references are when those windows, in one

case that is more of a hole in the ground, are shown with a man looking out and constantly

pestering the passersby about the happenings in the village. In another instance, coming earlier

in the film, the villagers are being served hot tea from behind a window, and the excess smoke

that every few moments gushes out makes them suffer. It is interesting to note in many of these

instances the portrayal of these strangely minimalist windows are accompanied with a touch of

humor, rare in a film distinguished for its overall mood of sorrow and loss; a purpose of these

fleeting moments of playfulness, perhaps to draw attention to the stylistic playfulness of those

windows.

In 1969, then, the adobe bricks and coating of the walls of the village in The Cow

were already linked to homes across the country as well as to the art displays on the walls of

the galleries of the capital. On either of these sites, whether on celluloid, on the walls of actual

homes, or as art, this quotidian building material was entangled with a literary-illuminated

  145  
ethnographic prose. The film’s most direct link with the contemporary ethnographic scene

came in the persona of Saedi who co-authored with Mehrjui the script based on one of his own

novels, The Mourners of Bayal. As touched on earlier in passing, Saedi was one of the

strongest voices in the surge in the literature of travelogues, ethnologies, and folklore studies in

the Iran of the 1960s. Dabashi’s analysis provides a description of Saedi, his engagement with

ethnographic literature, and its place in the era:

Saedi had cultivated a deep friendship with Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-69), the
most celebrated and influential public intellectual of his generation—and the
two of them traveled extensively throughout Iran and wrote path-breaking
sociological accounts of places they visited. Saedi’s fiction grew out of travels
and reflections. Three years after the publication of The Mourners of Bayal,
Saedi published Fear and Trembling (1967), changing the scene of his
psychological observations from northern to southern Iran, on which he also
wrote an ethnographic study, “The People of Hava” (1967). In a southern
world plagued by hunger and submissive to its fate, Saedi reaches for the
texture of the mysterious in the ordinary, where fact and fantasy transgresses
their respective boundaries and sheer strangeness animates the daily reality.128
“The people of Hava,” the reader might recall is exactly the name given by the voice-over to

the community engaged in the ritual of possession/exorcism in Taghvai’s documentary

discussed in the previous chapter, Wind of Jinn. In line with Saedi, the commentary in Wind of

Jinn also portrayed the South, represented by its “Southern Blacks,” as a land familiar with

hunger, a land besieged by mysterious maladies brought by the winds and jinn. In Taghvai’s

documentary though, the People of Hava knew how to “expel the jinn from the body.” And

that is what the people in Mehrjui and Saedi’s The Cow seem to have forgotten.

The transmutation that the grieving Mashhadi Hassan goes through is of the most

radical form, affecting him both from within and outside. It is a source of unimaginable agony

for him and the people around him, and it places the film’s narrative on a new, unexpected,
                                                                                                               
128  Dabashi,  Masters  and  Masterpieces  of  Iranian  Cinema,  112-­‐113.  

  146  
course. When he is told of his cow’s death, Mashhadi Hassan refuses and begins to change. He

becomes the dead animal. Is this a story of a spirit possession, or one of a metamorphosis? Part

of the strangeness of the film I believe comes exactly from this tension between these two

different modes of alterity-becoming, that it is both of those. To draw out the components that

would position Mashhadi Hassan’s dramatic change as one of possession one can look as near

as at Saedi’s long-standing interest in ethnographic writing and folk studies; in this regard “The

People of Hava” from his 1967 Fear and Trembling provides the closest link. Or, at somewhat

of a distance, one can consider the broader discursive terrain produced by the proliferation of

other films and literary texts built around the dual phenomena of possession and trance, like

Wind of Jinn a film made also exactly at the same time as The Cow.

Like in possession/trance films, Mashhadi Hassan’s condition finds its primary

medium in the body. Although the catastrophic changes have taken place somewhere “inside”

him, within his soul, or in his psyche, it is only through his outward actions, his performance,

that the viewer can become aware of his turbulent existence. Following the narrative, what

appears to lie at the heart of his agonies is a transgression of his inner self, breaking its claims

to wholeness and independence. He is not himself anymore. “I am not Mashhadi Hassan” (Man

Mash Hassan nistam), are the words repeatedly cried out by the new Mashhadi Hassan,

followed by “I am Mashhadi Hassan’s cow,” signifying the completion of his transition.

Performed by one of the most respected actors of stage and screen in Iran, Ezzatollah

Entezami, this implausible protagonist takes on a path of excess from this moment on. An

inventory of bodily excess is put on display, rolling eyes, crying aloud, head hitting against

walls, eating cattle feed, howling. Both acting and cinematography assist in the creation of the

  147  
anguished man-cow appearance. If mimesis in possession rituals is a performance/dance of

empowerment over an alterity (à la Taussig), in The Cow it leads to the horrors of alienation.

The radical change endured is also a metamorphosis, in Saedi and Mehrjui’s

account of a man in mourning believing he has become a cow. This understanding of the

transmutation of the anguished villager as a reworking of one of the most well-known parables

of modernism, comes to the foreground when the story is explored in juxtaposition against the

larger world of its context, which should be understood both as its socio-cultural context and as

its multi-directional intertextual links. Narratives of speedy, disastrous mutations of the “self”

were recurrently resurfacing in a country, and in a world, constantly on guard against what

used to be called alienation. I say “in a country, and in a world” because I perceive the

persistent appearance of high literary tropes of metamorphosis at the time, in the two or three

decades following World War II, as yet another sign of the coevalness of a world haunted by

images of collapse (visionary and real). For a person who in his typically imaginative way

captured this trend in the depictions of metamorphosis, individual and on a mass scale, we can

once again turn to Al-e Ahmad. In the year 1966 Al-e Ahmad published his Persian translation

of Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros, adding to it a short introductory essay or “The

Surplus Introduction” (moqadameh ziadi) as he entitles it. In this rather short opening piece,

which bears the hallmarks of his condensed style in writing and in humor, he discusses a

number of subjects by mostly bringing them up in relation to different intellectual personas,

foremost among them, Martin Heidegger and powerlessness of man vis-à-vis industry, Franz

Kafka and metamorphosis, Frantz Fanon and the end of Europe (as a model), Oswald Spengler

and his book The Downfall of the Occident (aka The Decline of the West, 1918), and Ionesco

  148  
and his life and the place of the absurd (which he translates as mazhakeh) in his work, etc. Al-e

Ahmad’s writing fascinatingly, and at times astonishingly, sustains an overall coherence,

bringing all the sometimes disparate texts and names he reviews together and producing an

account of the contemporary literature, and a critique of the world behind it. Assisting Al-e

Ahmad in holding his radical and rather expansive discourse together is his technique of

intermittently going back to a small number of themes, namely, the machine’s ascendancy over

man, the decline of Europe, the apocalypticism of modern literature, and, ultimately, the

metamorphosis.

Al-e Ahmad sees a future besieged by the horrors of metamorphosis. He sees the

alarming signs of this collective fate in the literature of the twentieth century, in plays, novels,

essays, and monographs. His introduction to Rhinoceros begins with a quote from “His

Holiness Heidegger” (Hazrat-e Heidegger) on how men of the nuclear age have become the

“slaves without knowing” of “industrial objects,” Al-e Ahmad swiftly adds, “And, this

essentially means “metamorphosis” in the form that Kafka saw it even before His Holinesses

the Philosophers.”129 After dubbing Ionesco’s Rhinoceros as his “humorous proposal” on the

matter, he follows by enlisting a whole array of the earlier, lowbrow, manifestations of

metamorphosis as “übermensch” (mard-e bartar): Ionesco’s “humorous proposal” Rhinoceros,

and, before that, “the soldiers of the [French] Foreign Legion,” “the gangster,” James Bond,

                                                                                                               
129  Jala  Al-­‐e  Ahmad,  trans.,  Kargadan  [Rhinoceros  ]  (Tehran:  Majid,  1384/2005),  7-­‐8.  The  

humor  in  referring  to  Heidegger  as  “His  Holiness”  is  as  much  targeted  at  Al-­‐e  Ahmad  himself,  
known  for  his  use  of  folksy  language  and  for  his  championing  of  religiously  inspired  ideas  
and  practices,  as  at  the  German  Philosopher  known  for  his  attachment  to  the  Black  Forest.  
This  is  classic  Al-­‐e  Ahmad.  
         

  149  
“the ranger,” and the “Stakhanovite worker.”130 While the metamorphosis portrayed by Kafka

was a source of sorrow, the “new metamorphosis” as represented by Ionesco, with groups of

human beings regressing into massive, thick-skinned, “armed” animals is horror incarnate. He

places both The Metamorphosis and Rhinoceros within a long trajectory in literature:

“Although before the [arrival] of the metamorphosis = diminution [kahesh], we heard the

earlier alarm sirens in the form of contagious diseases.”131 For Al-e Ahmad what befalls the

inhabitants of Rhinoceros’s small French town is also a disease, one that “Ionesco says has

come from the colonies,” he notes.132 Ionesco might come at the end of the line of those

writers, from Marx onward, who foretold of the collapse of European spiritual supremacy

(Europai keh digar farmayeshash vahy-e manzal nist), but he is not the only one:

“This giving the news of the Western apocalypse now has turned into artistic
production. Specially in the work of this His Holiness [Ionesco] and [Samuel]
Beckett. Who are two main pillars of the contemporary theater, which I don’t
know why it has been called theatre of the absurd… and why not apocalyptic
plays?”133

                                                                                                               
130  Ibid.,  9.  

 
131  The  examples  of  those  works  of  fiction  and  poetry  that  for  Al-­‐e  Ahmad  gave  in  their  

literary  renditions  of  “contagious  diseases”  or  “disaster”  (balâ)  early  indications  of  the  
forthcoming  catastrophe,  the  present-­‐day  epidemic  of  metamorphosis,  are:  Albert  Camus’  The  
Plague  (1947),  Aldous  Huxley’s  Brave  New  World  (1932),  T.  S.  Eliot’s  The  Wasteland  (1922),  
Fyodor  Dostoyevsky’s  The  Possessed  (aka  Demons,  1872),  and  Joseph  Conrad’s  Typhoon  (1902).  
Ibid.,  10.  
 
132  Ibid.,  12.    

 
133  Ibid.,  p.  14.  For  theater  of  the  absurd  Al-­‐e  Ahmad  here  uses  two  Persian  equivalences  of  

“teatr-­‐e  poochi”  and  “teatr-­‐e  bihoodegi,”  which  can  be  translated  (back)  as  “emptiness”  and  
“purposelessness”  respectively.  On  a  different  note,  this  interest  in  the  apocalypse  and  
apocalyptic  literature  on  the  part  of  Al-­‐e  Ahmad  is  certainly  worthy  of  note  as  it  sheds  light  
on  some  of  his  other  writings,  for  instance,  the  ending  of  Occidentosis,  the  end  of  Chapter  
11  entitled  “The  Hour  Draws  Nigh.”    
 

  150  
 Al-e Ahmad abruptly ends his “Surplus Introduction” to Rhinoceros by noting its

“impact” on “young European playwrights.” In this category he mentions three names from

three countries, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Edward Albee, and Harold Pinter, and, then and there, he

ends the piece with a fragment of a sentence, “and here upon Saedy and [Bahman] Forsi.”134

Aside from this sweeping, and astonishingly brief, claim there is one other passage in the entire

text that can be seen as a reference to Saedi’s story in The Mourners of Bayal and The Cow. It

comes at the beginning of the second paragraph discussing the play itself: “Mr. Beouf (Boeuf =

Cow) is the first person who becomes a rhinoceros, because there is not much from cow-ness to

rhinoceros-ness and etc.… let us also pay attention to the reason for each of the players

becoming a rhinoceros. That mostly it is the disappointment in love.”135 Although certainly

thought-provoking, neither of these two passing observations by Al-e Ahmad, one suggestive

of Ionesco’s “impact” on Saedi, another on the significance of Mr. Boeuf transmuting into a

rhinoceros and Mashhadi Hassan becoming a cow, should be regarded as proof of Ionesco’s

“influence” on Saedi; if the idea of influence is a contested matter, it is for good reasons.

Rather, what is analytically pertinent in them, and even more so in Al-e Ahmad’s expansive

reading of the literary trope of metamorphosis, is that they point at some of the strong historical

currents of their time in Iran. The intellectual arena that was receptive of these allegorical

narratives of metamorphosis and possession, of which Al-e Ahmad and Saedi and Mehrjui

were members of, was keenly aware of their global currency. And more importantly,

simultaneously, these stories of radical, self-shattering transmutation were produced and

                                                                                                               
134  Ibid.,  15.    

 
135  Ibid.,  13.    

  151  
interpreted as ones with particular local relevance and coloring. It is in this light that a film of a

man (thinking) becoming his dead cow, in a desolate village, should be seen.

The “theater of the absurd” as a literary and artistic current and the concept of the

“absurd” as a larger cultural condition were in fact among the most intensely debated topics of

the time. Not surprisingly, some of the public intellectuals engaged in what we call the

“discourse of authenticity” were among the most ardent contributors to these debates. Dariush

Shayegan, for instance, in his influential book Asia Facing the West sets aside a sub-chapter

entitled “Appearance of the ‘Absurd’” in which he expands on the phenomenon both as “a

concept in thought and the arts” and as “one of the manifest aspects of the historical destiny of

the West (vojooh-e barez-e taghdir-e tarikhi-ye gharb).”136 The list of the authors discussed by

him here is very similar to the one by Al-e Ahmad: Kafka (The Trial), Camus (The Myth of

Sisyphus), Becket (Waiting for Godot), and Ionesco (The Lesson). He has praise for only one

Iranian author, one who in his words “lived absurd and died absurd,” Sadeq Hedayat and his

1937 novella The Blind Owl.137 Even though his is a more philosophical and multifaceted

analysis, Shayegan like Al-e Ahmad conceives of absurdist literature as primarily a reflection

of a reality that precedes it. A reality that is inescapable, all-encompassing, and frightening: “In

a world where one’s home is ruined, empathy (hamdeli) becomes an exchange of information,

just as humanity is separated from the familiar home and stricken by the horror of exile. In

such a situation there is no more connection and everybody is waiting for Godot, though they

                                                                                                               
136  Dariush  Shayegan,  Asiya  dar  barabar-­‐e  Gharb    [Asia  Facing  the  West]    (Tehran:  Amir  

Kabir,  2536/1977a),  123.    

 
 
137  Ibid.,  126.    

  152  
know who or what he is.”138 At times Shayegan’s trajectory of post-Enlightenment history

reads like a retelling of a story of epistemic violence, how it appeared on the scene, world-

shattering. But things are more convoluted and lyrical for him, particularly when it comes to

the non-Western parts of the history. Shayegan continues with a sub-chapter called “In Our

Societies the Absurd Is Brought by the Clash of Different Cultural and Historical Planes.”139

Shayegan asserts that in the West the absurd is the culmination of an “internal development

and direct experience of Nihilism” and as such it is a form of detached awareness, albeit a

bitter one. In the non-western societies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, on the other hand,

the process has not been completed and the archetypes of mythical and allegorical thought still

live within us, Shayegan tells us. The non-Western manifestations of the absurd and Nihilism

are fated to be of an interrupted, disjunctive, and “mutant,” (a term he uses several times, along

with the analogy to Frankenstein) variant:

In this fashion our absurd mannerism along with having a tint of the Western
absurd (since still the absurd is the zeitgeist in this age of passage) also gains a
particular tint and a special state. The absurd in Asian and African societies is
an abnormal and disagreeable (na-hanjar) state that is brought about by
clashes of different cultural and historical layers. The Asian and African
civilizations have different layers with different cultural and historical
conditions.140

At the heart of the “mutant” of Shayegan’s discourse, the painful co-existence of

distinctive “cultural and historical layers (gheshrha) and planes (sotooh),” is an observation

                                                                                                               
138  Ibid.,  127.  

 
139  Ibid.,  129.    
140  Ibid.,  133.  

  153  
on temporalities. To put it schematically, the different planes are different because they

belong to different times. Shayegan tellingly ends the sub-chapter “In Our Societies” by

discussing Tehran as an example of the absurd. Paying particular attention to its “hellish”

traffic he describes the capital city as an “insane asylum.” The big city, grown

inorganically “unlike our cities of the past,” is a site of aggression and exile. He asks:

“Why is the Iranian, who in friendship is so committed to politeness (adab) and etiquette

(toarof), suddenly behind a wheel, i.e. an environment of strangeness and exile, has such

violent behavior?”141 For Shayegan the “reification” and “abstraction” of life in the big

city, either in the East or West, makes strangers of its inhabitants. For “the “Easterner,”

however, the process has not been completed and he cannot see others solely as “things”

and as a result “we feel like strangers in the ‘inhumane’ atmosphere of a big city and this

estrangement/exile causes violence and aggression. In other words, the machine needs

functional [fuktiunal, a loan word from French Shayegan uses here] order and the human

being needs emotional relationships, the clash between these two brings about all sorts of

absurd behavior.”142

When is the story of The Cow taking place? It is well known that after its

completion the film was denied a screening permit by the Ministry of Culture and Arts (MCA),

the same government body that had produced it. The “ban” was lifted only after a disclaimer in

                                                                                                               
141  Ibid.,  135.  
142  Ibid.,  136.  

  154  
the form of a written caption was added to the beginning of the film stating that the film’s plot

belonged to older times.143 Naficy recounts the episode:

Even before the MCA had given him filming permission, Mehrjui
whitewashed the village walls and spruced up the village setting to make it
presentable. The advantage of working with the ministry was that it not only
financed the film but also put at the director’s disposal a cadre of experienced
actors that it employed in its theater division. When the completed film print
went for MCA review to obtain an exhibition permit, the director was asked to
add a caption at the film’s head that would historically place the story forty
years earlier, before Reza Shah’s main reforms had been inaugurated. These
preproduction and postproduction changes constituted attempts to deny the
existence of poor villages like the one in which The Cow was filmed.144
The words of that caption do not solve the question of time in The Cow at the end, possibly

even making it more convoluted. All the talk around the film’s realism notwithstanding, Saedi

and Mehrjui’s design remains a highly ambiguous text on so many levels, including the

temporal one. There are several factors preventing the viewer from deciding with certainty

what historical period the film is referring to. This is largely achieved through a series of

absences. Things, whether objects or information or connections, are left out of what

ordinarily, that is ordinarily in realist representation, constitute a sensible world. Most

strikingly, in the unnamed village of the film (unlike its literary counterpart in Saedi’s novel,

Bayal) there is not a single trace of the technological devices and appliances associated with

the twentieth century. There is not even a car or a train on the distant horizon, those two

emblems used so many a time in the history of cinema to suggest the intrusion of the new,

and/or the urban, on the countryside. Nobody has a radio, and there are no papers. The clothing

of the inhabitants of the village, in their conventionality, one can also say in their

                                                                                                               
143  This  written  statement  is  absent  from  the  digital  English  subtitled  versions  of  the  film  

distributed  on  DVDs  in  more  recent  years.        

 
144  Hamid  Naficy,  A  Social  History  of  Iranian  Cinema  Volume  2:  The  Industrializing  Years,  

1941-­‐1978.  (Durham  and  London:  Duke  University  Press,  2011),  346.  

  155  
stereotypicality, is surely suggestive of country life. Women then wear chadors, and men are in

collar-less shirts, buttons closed, shawls around their waists. This conventionality has a

particular quality to it however, it is very Iranian. In this quality the clothing is congruent with

the film’s sets, standing for a particular form of “Iranianness” in the public imagination, itself

a domain which cinema and television have been instrumental in building. The village in The

Cow, in its timelessness, in its absence from specific regional or provincial locality, is

archetypal, and it is archetypal because it represents the country.

In the film’s last sequence, Mashhadi Hassan is taken by a small band of his fellow

villagers to the nearby city, but he dies along the way. His death brings the plot to an end, but

the film’s enigmas remain unsolved. Indeed the ambiguities have become progressively more

tortuous as the story moved forward. It is as though the meaning is always withering away at

the end, just as you thought it might finally be grasped. Interestingly though, there is

coincidence, a symbiotic relationship, between the construction of the film’s ambiguities,

particularly those of time and space, and its construction of the archetypal, the authentic; they

both reinforce each other. Time and space are rendered “remote” along with the village,

distanced from contemporary time of the late-1960s Pahlavi Iran. What remains in this

estrangement of reality, is the peeling and wrinkled walls made of mudbrick and adobe plaster,

and the lined faces of the non-actors sitting in front of the camera.

The  Postman  (Dariush  Mehrjui,  aka  Postchi,  1971)  

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 Only a few years after the release of The Cow, in 1971 Mehrjui made The Postman

(Postchi) based on Georg Büchner’s stage play Woyzeck.145 The story of The Postman takes

place in the countryside, unfolding, at least on one level, along the country-city schema. This is

the dynamics that is also at play within the two other features directed by Mehrjui before the

victory of the revolution, Mr. Simpleton (1970) and The Mina Cycle (1976).146 In all these

films made after The Cow, a major part of the tragedy, the modern horrors befallen on the

characters’ lives, comes not just from the opposition between the country and the city, but,

more exactly, from the predestined victory of the latter over the former.

The Postman starts with a long take of a man sitting against a pale wall in a small

room. The sound track is a combination of convulsive tunes (by Hormoz Farhat, also the music

composer for The Cow), exradiegetic noise of men shouting, and a rising male voice counting

numbers. The postman of the plot, called Taghi, is consumed by his desire to hit big on a

winning lottery ticket one day. He lives with his beautiful young wife Monir in a lone small

building by a country road. There is also the old local land-owning family (arbab) in whose

decaying mansion Taghi and his wife work as domestics. Taghi is impotent and in this he is

being assisted by the town’s veterinary physician, a truly colorful figure who is prescribing him

a diet of herbs, leaves from wild bushes, and cannabis seeds as treatment.147 A nephew of the

                                                                                                               
145  Büchner’s  play,  considered  a  seminal  work  in  the  history  of  German  modern  drama,  

was  still  unfinished  by  the  time  of  his  death  in  1837.  What  he  left  behind  as  a  compilation  
of  fragments  was  in  the  decades  to  come  completed  by  other  authors.  Woyzeck’s  first  
appearance  in  print  was  in  1879.  Its  first  cinematic  adaption  in  Germany  was  Werner  
Herzog’s  well-­‐known  1979  film  of  the  same  title.    
 
146  The  Postman  was  produced  by  the  production  company  Studio  Misaqieh.    Mr.  Simpleton  

and  The  Mina  Cycle,  too,  were  produced  by  the  private  sector.    
 

  157  
landowner they are working for returns from his studies in the West, with an engineering

degree and a white woman. Meanwhile, the sheep are dying one by one as a result of a

mysterious disease. The turn of events suggests that the veterinarian is an impostor, he not only

is without a permit to work as a doctor but might even be a madman on the run. The engineer

seduces the sexually frustrated Monir. Taghi’s life and mental order disintegrate. In complete

breakdown, he stabs his wife to death at the end of the film.

Mehrjui, now on his way to be recognized as one of the original auteurs of the

Iranian cinema, offers his audiences continuity by placing in The Postman signposts that lead

to his masterwork from a few years ago, The Cow. The elements pointing to the older film can

be direct or subtle and diffused. Like in The Cow, The Postman creates a world that is both

familiar and strange, with the second quality taking over as the narrative progresses. Though

unlike in The Cow, wherein the realism of the text is constantly strained by the uncanniness of

the space (the impossible isolation of the village, the ambiguity of the location, the sets), The

Postman presents a world deformed by everyday senselessness. It is as though when all seems

ordinary about the place, a green small town somewhere in northern Iran, there is an

undercurrent of sinister forces that trouble the surface, pastoral and tranquil as it appears. Total

madness, now and again, and not just in the case of the poor postman.

The task of making the collective madness visible in The Postman is carried out

primarily by its assortment of colorful characters. To start with, there is the head of the
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
147  The  role  of  the  “Doctor”  is  played  by  Bahman  Forsi,  a  writer  of  modernist  plays  and  

short  stories.  The  reader  might  recall  that  Forsi  is  the  playwright  whose  name,  along  with  
Saedi,  is  mentioned  by  Al-­‐e  Ahmad  in  his  “Surplus  Introduction”  to  Rhinoceros;  they  are  
noted  by  him  as  the  examples  of  Iranian  authors  whose  writings  bear  the  impact  of  
Ionesco’s  theater  of  the  absurd.                

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landowning family, a patriarch with a decadent, paternalistic, often brutish, and, at the same

time, disorderly and confused, demeanor. His role is played by Ezzatollah Entezami, the actor

who performed Mashhadi Hassan in The Cow. At a first glance he appears familiar, as what

one expects from a member of the “decadent landed gentry,” a type well known because of its

many renditions in the history of modern literature and cinema.148 He worries about his future

and the future of the family’s property, concerns that only grow as his engineer nephew reveals

his plans for the “modernization” of the old estate. This development in the story, of the old

nobleman feeling threatened by the encroaching forces of the new economic order, is of course

well within the narrative model of the decadent gentry, whether in the cinema or in literature.

The reactions of the patriarch of the old family in The Postman though are out of the ordinary.

He acquiesces easily to the new plans, which consist of the demolition of all there is and the

building of a pig farm in their place. Meanwhile, he himself begins to acquire animal-like

qualities. He is shocked to see the one by one dying of the last flock of sheep they have. He is

ever more portrayed in ways that, whether through cinematography or body language or body-

wear, link him with the animal world. He begins to wear a sheepskin. In one particular scene

he is seated behind two sheep wearing his sheepskin, as the camera zooms in on them.

                                                                                                               
148  The  decline  of  the  landed  gentry  and  the  rise  of  capitalism,  the  main  theme,  at  least  as  a  

subtext  runs  through  many  novels,  novellas  and  fiction  films  set  in  diverse  cultural  and  
historical  backgrounds.  Even  with  a  cursory  review  of  some  of  this  literary  and  cinematic  
corpus,  one  can  notice  the  reappearance  of  a  certain  type  of  character  who  stands  for  the  
“indolence  of  the  gentry”.  The  history  of  the  novel  and  fiction  film  is  packed  with  stories  of  
ill-­‐fated  men  of  noble  lineage  who  lack  a  capacity  for  action  and  a  sense  of  the  practical:  
Ilya  Ilich  in  Ivan  Goncharov’s  novel  Oblomov  (1859),  Robert  in  Jean  Renoir’s  The  Rules  of  
the  Game  (1939),  Prince  Ehtejab  in  Bahman  Farmanara’s  film  Prince  Ehtejab  (1974),  the  
sons  of  the  Chaudhari  family  in  Guru  Dutt’s  Sahib  Bibi  aur  Ghulam  (1962),  the  wealthy  
zamindar  Biswambhar  Roy  in  Satyajit  Ray’s  Jalsaghar  (1958),  and  Wajid  Ali  Shah  and  the  
nawabs  of  Ray’s  Shatranj-­‐ke-­‐Khilari  (1977).    

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 In several scenes in The Postman though, the references made are to another

animal, the cow. In this other animal analogy, again constructed mostly out of the figure of the

aging patriarch, both Mehrjui and the actor playing the role, Entezami, make full use of the fact

that he also performed the character of Mashhadi Hassan in The Cow. First there are a number

of shots in which both cinematography and Entezami’s masterful performance evoke the

scenes in the older film when the character he played was taken over by the spirit of the dead

animal. Then, when he visits the country veterinarian Dr. Shafighi, seeking help for his

mysterious symptoms, all possible uncertainties about his links to the earlier film and to the

figure of Mashhadi Hassan disappear. He looks for the “Doctor” and tracks him down sitting

behind a square-shaped hole in a wall. What follows in the dark space behind those mud-brick

walls of that hut, a cattle shed, is a scene interspersed with references to The Cow in

cinematography, dialogue, action, and acting. Dr. Shafighi, himself an excessive personality

whose actions and performance constantly verge on the absurd, moves from one cow to

another, injecting them with a large needle. His speech is a mixture of scientific verbiage,

authoritarian demands, fantasy, and utter poppycock. He is also from time to time accused of

being responsible for the death of animals in the village and sometimes for Taghi’s impotency.

“An animal is an animal, cows, calves, goats, camels…they’re all the same!” the Doctor shouts

at the apprehensive patriarch.

Despite all the references to The Cow and the death of the sheep, it is the fear of

another animal, the pig, that brings the man of the landowning family to the Doctor in the first

place. He is haunted by the idea of his engineer nephew’s plans to convert their estate into a

pig farm. He informs the Doctor that the Engineer wants to destroy it all and “and in its place

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build a pig empire.” The tale of the mysterious epidemic that has been killing the region’s farm

animals and the prospect of the dystopian advent of a “pig empire” can be seen as form of

dispersed, collective, metamorphosis; this would be a reading in line with Al-e Ahmad who

saw in the narratives of epidemics, as in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, alarming signs of the mass

metamorphosis submerging humanity, a collective tragedy far more frightening than Kafka’s

Metamorphosis. In the same vein, to the deadly epidemic afflicting the animal world in The

Postman one can add the increasing signs of mental breakdown descending on many in the

film (Taghi, the feudal patriarch, the Doctor) and read them together as a trope of collective

mutation, mass metamorphosis.

However, The Postman is also a different film from The Cow. In comparison, it is a

more clear-cut text. If in The Cow the meaning appears to be always escaping the reader, even

when we pinned down the allegory of the temporality of the old and new on it, The Postman is

built around a rather transparent allegorical arrangement of opposites. A one-to-one

relationship, then, can be assigned to these opposite elements as representatives of larger social

forces—one way of reading it as an allegory. This understanding tallies with what Jameson in

his famous “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” calls “our

traditional conception of allegory” which to him is characterized by “an elaborate set of figures

and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences.”149 If in The

Postman the tensions are arising from an epochal clash, the arrival of the new, it is the figure of

the nephew-turned-engineer that stands most explicitly for the new in that time-based drama.

The Engineer, then, is an emblematic figure through and through. Without any hint of
                                                                                                               
149  Fredric  Jameson,  “Third-­‐World  Literature  in  the  Era  of  Multinational  Capitalism,”  Social  

Text  15  (Fall  1986):  73.  

 

  161  
psychological depth, he pushes for the complete demolition of the old family estate, without

any expression of remorse and to the point of absurdity. How is one to understand his dream of

building a large state-of-the-art pig farm in a Muslim-majority country? In his aggressiveness,

he knows no boundaries. He also has more foreign, that is Western, connections than anybody

else, in education, in ideas about development, and in attire. The film’s critical representation

of this character, as a personification of a drive for unrestrained technologization, is indicative

of the kind of discourse produced by the public intellectuals of the time. This critique, that

found its most articulate variations in the writings of the more oppositional, more radically

anti-colonial, intellectuals like Al-e Ahmad and Samad Behrangi portrayed the Pahlavi era’s

bureaucratic and entrepreneurial elite as agents of negative change. They were criticized for

being ruthless and rootless.

The Postman also differs from the examples I gave earlier from literature and

cinema with the theme of the “decline of the landed gentry.” Unlike in Oblomov or in

Jalsaghar, in Mehrjui’s film the past is not a pre-modern past that could be idealized, at least

by some, as noble and beautiful. The only allusion to that kind of memory comes with a scene

in which the old patriarch puts on an attire resembling those of the Qajar era aristocracy, and a

sword, and performs for himself in front of a mirror (very much like a similar scene in

Jalsaghar); this scene however is very brief and isolated, with the illusion evaporating as soon

as he discovers that Taghi is looking at him through a window. Unlike most of the other

versions of the trope of the decadent landed gentry, wherein feudalism decays and capitalism

rises, in The Postman capitalism seems to be already well-entrenched for quite some time. It is

just that a more aggressive, more technological, more nonsensical, version of it is taking over.

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What is new is the destruction that the fantasy of building the grand pig farm and

slaughterhouse is about to unleash. The representative of the old family sets aside his concerns

and joins the Engineer in the project, in one scene we see them both presiding over workers

and bulldozers tearing down walls of old homes. If there is anything organic in this new world,

any trace of a past worth saving, it is being wiped out by the epidemic that is destroying the

bodies of the animals from within. The deadly contagious disease killing the sheep is

introduced early, setting the tone for the things to come, a dystopian mood that is only

heightened by the coming to the fore of endemic madness. All this comes to its end with the

killing of the postman’s wife.

The Postman is different, especially in its style, its brash modernism, from the

majority of the New Wave films representing rural life, the films I call here “country films.”

However, both in narrative and theme it provides images and patterns that can be taken up as

starting points when this study moves on to other films that fall within that mold. The recurrent

and often intersecting, narrative components are, the opposition between the country and the

city, the encroachment of the latter over the former, the vanishing of a way of life (just like in

the ethnographic documentaries), and, above all, the country as a site for the authentic. But

before that, an analysis of the influential films directed by Sohrab Shahid Saless is in order.

Still  Life  (Sohrab  Shahid  Saless,  aka  Tabiat-­‐e  Bijan,  1974)  

Still Life opens with a fade into a stationary/static shot of a country railroad. An old

man wearing a cap and a worn-out uniform is the sole human figure in sight. He is slowly

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lowering the metal safety barrier on a small dirt road crossing the single rail track. He is the

caretaker of the track at this rural outpost. A train passes by. The old man retreats to the

solitary cabin near the crossroad, takes off his cap and sits for a while. Outside, a flock of

sheep passes by. Almost all this is filmed in wide shots for the landscape and medium shots

for the man. The sound is diegetic for this scene, and will remain so for the rest of the film.

The setting and performances are shockingly bare.

The story too in Still Life is elemental. The opening scene ends with a brief visit to

the old man’s outpost by three men, two civil servants and a guard from the rail company.

They ask a few questions and leave. The film continues with a series of long scenes during

which very little is happening, nothing furthering the narrative. They are the routine acts of

the everyday, the man and his old wife at home, her weaving a carpet, a visit from their

out-of-town son, familial meals. The only hurdle introduced in the plot, one that initially

comes like a simple event but brings about a weighty consequence, is the arrival of a letter.

It notifies the old man of his impending retirement. He makes one attempt to stop the

bureaucratic process, which will lead to him losing his home provided by the company, but

fails. In the last scene we see him and his wife packing their few belongings and leaving

their home. The very last shot is of him looking at his face in a small mirror on the wall,

and taking the mirror down from the cracked wall behind it.

Still Life’s cinematic distinction, its richness, mainly comes from its

cinematography and rhythm. These two elements come together with the film’s austerity of

narrative, each furthering the significance of the other. The cinematography is unbroken,

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steady, and calculated. It is unbroken because throughout the film there is a universal

consistency in not hampering the visibility of what is being filmed. There is therefore no

fragmentation, no blurriness of the image, no oblique angles, no extreme close-ups, and no

loss of focus. For the most part Still Life is photographed in frontal medium shots, with the

close-ups of the few characters as the only significant exceptions. Even more constant is

the steadiness of the camera. This excessive adherence to lack of camera movement in all

its variations—absence of pans, tilts and travelling shots—places Still Life within the very

small number of its kind in the history of cinema; even the legendary Yasujirō Ozu uses

more camera movement, so as hard as it might be, perhaps here one needs to think of

Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 The Color of Pomegranates. The shots are overwhelmingly

composed in a frontal fashion, with the human figures placed and framed by symmetrical

backgrounds like the interior of a room. Furthermore, the camera’s position is persistently

at shoulder level for the exterior shots, and roughly at the height of the seated person for

the interior shots.

An even more arresting aspect of Still Life is its extremely slow rhythm,

distinguishing it from much of the cinematic corpus, while prefiguring a trait that became

associated with the post-revolutionary cinema. The film is composed of long takes and

relatively long sequences. It moves chronologically forward with no temporal getaways,

and it does so with a tempo that remains constant from the beginning to the end. If the

film’s slow pace is a reflection of reality, it is at times painstakingly so. The editing,

understood as juxtaposition of shots, is of course highly crucial to the construction of the

rhythm in Still Life, a film consisting of many long takes of similar length and only a few of

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medium length. Editing as the assemblage of shots, however, is not the only contributing

factor to the film’s excessive slowness as there is also the montage and rhythm taking place

within each of the shots. A universal sense of stillness permeates all the shots, a condition

mostly built by the austereness of the setting, actions and performances. Even the nature,

melancholic and cloudy without cessation, seems to have been recruited to this end. The

acting, as we know carried out by “non-actors,” has always been regarded as a foundation

of the film’s realism. Everyday activities are enacted within everyday settings, ever so

slowly, and in silence. In their extreme motionlessness and silence, the human figures of

Still Life stand apart from what is customarily expected from realistic acting. It is as though

the conventions of “the real man in the real world” have been carried to such extreme

levels that they turn against themselves and come to a standstill.

Still Life, and Shahid Saless’ cinema in its totality, have historically been construed

as Iranian cinematic realism par excellence. This is an understanding that is difficult to

argue against because it enjoins a line of reasoning that has a number of points lined up for

it, some already mentioned, like the film’s non-professional cast, real locale, realistic

cinematography, long takes, and depiction of everyday events. Despite all, it is still

critically illuminating, for then and for now, to remember the film’s “excesses” in style.

The words “still life,” or “lifeless nature” to take the literal translation of the film’s title in

Persian (Tabiat-e bijan), comprises a term that in Persian has no application, in fact no

history, aside from the historiography of fine arts. Considering these words’ particular links

to the history of painting, their adoption for the film’s title points to a hyperconsciousness

of style and the painting-like qualities of cinema in Shahid Saless’ film. This was an

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 awareness of style on the part of the makers of the film for sure, and perhaps an awareness

that was hoped to be extended to the viewers of Still Life. Even more crucially, this

“stillness” of the world portrayed is a quality that the film mobilizes all stylistic means at

its disposal to sustain to the utmost. It is in this light, that the slowness of movement on the

part of the main characters (father, mother, and their young son), their prolonged and

repetitious bodily calm and silences, emerge not only as performances, but, more

importantly, as a form of excess.150

 
Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)

A more rewarding analysis of Still Life turns its attention to the film’s exceptional

ability in recording the materiality of the world it depicts, as Kracauer would have it. This

would be a critical repositioning, akin to the tradition that comprehends this now-canonic

                                                                                                               
150  This  is  an  aspect  of  Still  Life  acknowledged,  decades  later,  by  the  scene  referencing  the  

film  in  Once  Upon  a  Time  Cinema,  Mohsen  Makhmalbaf’s  1992  homage  to  a  century  of  
filmmaking  in  Iran.  

  167  
 film within the trajectory of Iranian realism, but not quite one with it. It is a method that

aims for the underlining of the photographic register’s iconicity, instead of its faithfulness

to the real. The many stylistic strategies taken up by Still Life, particularly its unhindered

cinematography and slow rhythm (editing between and within shots), facilitate the inherent

bond between the photographic image and the material world. The stain and crack in the

walls of the old man’s home come to view, a visibility that because of the long takes and

“uneventfulness” of the scenes the viewer can explore even beyond the ordinary. Similarly,

a major part of the visual landscape within Still Life is made of the faces, and sometimes

hands, of the main characters, the railroad attendant, his wife, and after those two, their son.

The opening scene starts with a medium shot of the old man, like in The Postman, and the

very last shot, long and silent, is of his face framed in a small mirror on a wall in his now

emptied home. His gaze is tired and uncomprehending, his skin wrinkled and with stubble,

just like one of the faces of the “non-actors,” the locals, in the opening of The Cow.

While certainly it is the old man and his rustic surrounding that the camera is

mostly interested in, Still Life still contains references, brief but very crucial to the

narrative, to those that stand as a threat to him and his quiet life. Interestingly, it is not the

trains and tracks that exemplify the societal forces threatening his world, as it is the case in

many well-known films in the history of cinema, but the bureaucratic structure behind

them, the national rail company and its people.151 In Still Life, the old man comes face to

face with the representatives of the company’s administration and each of these encounters

is a theater/scene of contrasts, wherein the social determinants of class and the city/country
                                                                                                               
151  Examples  of  films  in  which  trains  and  railroads  are  emblematic  of  change,  the  coming  

of  modernity  to  rural  societies,  include,  Turksib  (Viktor  Turin,  1929)  and  Pather  Panchali  
(Satyajit  Ray,  1955).  

  168  
divide are pushed to the fore. Theirs are two worlds apart, as the saying goes. The first time

the company representatives make an appearance is in the beginning of the film, just at the

end of the opening scene. They arrive on a single railcar and stop at a noticeable distance

from where the old attendant is waiting for them. Two civil servants in neat suits and ties

and a third man dressed like a guard step down the railcar and start walking along the

tracks, with the guard at a distance and with a military salute. The long takes, the stationary

camera, a long lens that further stretches the distance, and their unhurried steps turn the

scene into a drawn-out act. The old man’s face, filmed in a medium close-up, slightly

shows signs of unease. His hand reaches and buttons up his worn-out uniform. They ask the

old man about his age and he says he does not know, they ask him how long he has been

working at his post and he says for thirty-three years. They turn around and leave, as the

old man looks on. Soon after, the old man receives the letter from the railroad company

informing him of his retirement. After suffering much sorrow and anxiety, for the most part

in silence, he gathers his strength and makes a trip to the city to make a plea with the

company. When he finally finds the company office in town he comes once again face to

face with two suit-wearing employees. The representation of these probably mid-ranking

civil servants sitting behind a desk in this scene completes the first encounter between the

old man and the bureaucratic system of the state company. There is no hope that the gap

between them can be overcome. They are aloof and nonresponsive. Judging by their words

and body language, they are far more interested in sharing photos of female acquaintances,

their jokes, and news of a friend who had made it in America.

  169  
 In this representation of the salaried civil servants Still Life is congruent with much

of the New Wave films, and the writings of the critical intellectuals of the time. Above all,

the members of the country’s bureaucratic and technocratic personnel, by then a large

mass, are portrayed as alienated, on the personal level and collectively/culturally. What is

more, this was a condition that seemed to increase in accordance with one’s ascent within

the administrative hierarchy. For the public intellectuals, the criticism could vary from a

liberal position to radical and harsh. While Al-e Ahmad reserved the greater part of his

criticism for those occidentosists (gharbzadegan) at higher positions of the bureaucracy he

also warned of the spread of their ways throughout a society subdued by the “culture of the

machine.” Consequently he saw the danger of conformity at all levels, particularly

“conformity in the workplace”:

To conform before the machine, to be regimented in the workplace, to come

and go right on the dot, and to do one kind of wearisome work throughout
one’s lifetime becomes second nature to all who are involved with machines.
To be active in the party and union, which requires a single dress, manner,
greeting and mode of thought, becomes in time a sort of third nature.”152
For Al-e Ahmad those recruited into the apparatus of the state in contemporary Iran, served

an alienated and alienating logic that was not only responsible for the destruction of the

nation’s authentic understanding of its “self” but also affected the “occidentotic” person’s

life, his way of being in the world, to its core. He is a conformist, consumerist, and an

opportunistic person. In his description of the occidentotic as a type Al-e Ahmad navigates

between what could pass as critical sociology, ethnographic reporting, and literary

reflections. In the seventh chapter, entitled “Asses in Lions’ Skins, or Lions on the Flag” he

writes:

                                                                                                               
152  Al-­‐e  Ahmad,  Occidentosis,  124.  

  170  
 An occidentotic who is a member of the nation’s leadership is standing on thin
air; he is like a particle of dust suspended in the void, or a shaving floating on
the water. He has severed his ties with the depths of society, culture, and
tradition. He is no link between antiquity and modernity, nor even a dividing
line between old and new. He is a thing with no ties to the past and no
perception of the future. He is not a point on a line, he is rather a hypothetical
point on a plane or even in space, just like the suspended particle. How, then,
has he reached a position of leadership? Through the inexorable logic of the
machine and of a policy that has no recourse but to follow larger policies.153
In this passage Al-e Ahmad abandons the long-established mainly time-based trope of the

“modernizer as link between old and new” in favor of a more abstract graphic

demonstration of the occidentotic person’s societal place in relationship to the society

around him. The distance, between him and the society around is emphasized, but it is

illustrated in special terms, not temporal. It is interesting to note that this instant of

distancing from the all-too-prevalent story of the modernizer leading towards a future

comes at a moment when Al-e Ahmad is unabashedly suspending his social science

posturing and letting his literary ruminations loose. One result of allowing the literariness

to come to the fore is that the image of a world in disintegration bursts onto the scene of his

discourse.

At the heart of the New Wave’s country films though is the issue of temporality, or,

to be more exact, the perceived distance in time (in rhythm as well as in historical time).

This is shown even in Still Life, a film built around subtleties and as such perhaps the most

difficult film in its class to use as an example to illustrate that claim. Like Still life, these

films tend to have longer takes, a stylistic choice that creates a slower rhythm. The slower

rhythm of a film is also suggestive of a “slower world” associated often not only with rural

life but also with “tradition,” and ultimately with the past. Also, a shot with longer
                                                                                                               
153  Ibid.,  92.  

  171  
duration, when uninterrupted by such cinematic means as optical manipulation, advances

the spectator’s ability to see and feel the “materiality of the world” filmed. The discussion

of long take aesthetics here, then, is about the photographic image’s tactility as well as its

iconicity. The films photographed in rural settings, at least a trend within them, also tend to

have more minimal soundtracks.

Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)

The clearest examples within the sub-grouping I like to establish here, the country

films with slow rhythms, are the films produced by the Institute for the Intellectual

Development of Children and Young Adults. Not surprisingly, some of the Institute’s

“classics,” films that have reached a canonical status within Iran and that have certain

thematic and formal qualities that makes them recognized as exemplary, were filmed in the

countryside. Some of the most important among them are: Nasser Taghvai’s Release (aka

Rahai, 1970), Hassan Tehrani’s The Story of Peach Tree (aka Gheseh Derakht Holou,

1970, a free interpretation of the story One Peach, A Thousand Peach [Yek Holou, Hezar

  172  
Holou] by Samad Behrangi), Shahid Saless’ A Simple Event (aka Yek Etefagh-e Sadeh,

1972), Amir Naderi’s Harmonica (Saz Dahani, 1974), Arsalan Sassani’s Bamboo Fence

(aka Parchin, 1975), and, Massoud Kimiai’s The Horse (aka Asb, 1976). Two from these

titles, Shahid Saless’ A Simple Event and Sassani’s Bamboo Fence display aesthetic

strategies comparable to Still Life, (and comparable to the traits Iranian cinema came to be

associated with later on) —naturalistic photography, long takes, a slow rhythm, and austere

narrative.

Bamboo Fence tells a simple story. A young boy befriends a dog, follows her, takes

away one of her cubs, hides the little dog in the family farm house, plays with it secretly for

a few days, loses it one day, finds the puppy back with its mother. The film is divided into

vignettes, more or less, with scenes corresponding with the clauses of the sentence just laid

out. There is almost no dialogue and the takes are mostly long. Despite sharing these

characteristics with Still Life though Bamboo Fence is a different film. Neither the

performances nor the camera positions draw attention to themselves, as it was the case with

the “excessive minimalism” of Still Life. The style here can be designated as realism with

much more ease. The tempo is steady for the most part, but still rises and falls according to

the action slightly. Nature is exceptionally crucial in Bamboo Fence and it is far from being

“lifeless” (the art-related term “still life” is translated to Persian as “lifeless [or “soulless”]

nature” we should recall), even though the locations in both films are chosen from the more

green Northern regions of Iran. In comparison to Still Life, the natural world in Bamboo

Fence is distinguished by being life-affirming. The life-giving quality given to nature—to

be understood as encompassing plants, animals, and humans—shapes both the film’s

  173  
imagery and narrative. In addition to the ever-presence of greenery (starting with the hard-

to-explain title of the film), then, the story is driven by the effortless affinity of a disabled

child and a family of vagabond dogs.

For most country films though, including those composed in long takes and a slow

rhythm, the idea of the countryside belonging to another time is delineated also through

much more schematic means, through narrative. The age-old story of the old and new, then,

is played  out  in  a  rather  transparent  and  conscious  way,  in  accordance  with  a  more  

familiar  conception  of  allegory  (and  not  in  Benjamin’s  renditions  of  it).  The  

juxtaposition  of  the  old  and  authentic  next  to  the  new  and  rootless  becomes  an  

unambiguous  and  diametrical  opposition.  This  is  a  contrast  that  surely  had  existed  

before  the  New  Wave  in  cinema,  but  it  seems  new  ways  are  found  for  it  to  be  

expressed.  And  with  more  intensity.      

  174  
 – Chapter Four –
Allegory of the City
 

What is it to me that no Persian poet for instance has brought the word “explosion” in
his poetry! I, from morning to night, no matter in what direction I look at, see that
something is exploding…. If the word explosion does not fit into the [internal] rhythm
and for instance creates a shock (sekteh), let it be!

-- Forough Farrokhzad, Interview, 1964154

 
 

If the countryside stands for a past whose tranquil pace is interrupted with arrivals

(of a train track, a phone line, a television set, a stranger), the newly turned

metropolitan capital, Tehran, is a “world in disintegration” (Kracauer) par excellence. It

is an assemblage of light-flooded boulvars and boutiks, traffic, shoppers, crowds of

strangers that lead to one disaster after another. This, of course, is the “melting vision”

(Berman) of urban modernity that was yet another, perhaps the most influential, image

one finds intersecting the writings of the Iranian public intellectuals of the time and

many of the New Wave films. It is worth to read again this passage from Al-e Ahmad’s

                                                                                                               
154  Interview  with  Forough  Farrokhzad  printed  in  Shafiee  Kadkani  and  Mohammad  Reza,  

Ba  Cheraq  o  Ayeneh:  Dar  Jostojoo-­‐ye  Risheha-­‐ye  Tahavvol-­‐e  She’r  Moaser-­‐e  Iran  (Tehran:  
Entesharat-­‐e  Sokhan,  2011/1390),  292-­‐293.            
 

  175  
Occidentosis in full, where he talks about the cities, their crumbling authenticity, and the

state of their cinemas:

The cities, these cancerous members that grow by the day with no pattern,
with no authenticity, daily demand more food processed by Western industry.
Daily they sink further into decline, rootlessness, and ugliness: every
intersection with a statue in the middle of the square according to the
directives; bazaars’ roofs in ruins; neighborhoods widely scattered; no water,
electricity, or telephone services; no social centers and libraries; mosques in
ruins; no functioning parties, no clubs, no places of entertainment; nothing
more than a cinema or two that serve only to excite the lower members [of the
body], places where one can only kill time or amuse oneself to no point; and
religious centers crumbling, takyas [where Shia tazieh passion plays or Sufi
rituals are meant to be performed] grown meaningless. Our cinemas do not
instruct or aid in the intellectual transformation of our people. Every cinema
in this part of the world is nothing more than a child’s bank into which every
city resident drops two or three tumans a week so that the principal
stockholders in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer will become millionaires. Our city
dwellers’ thoughts are molded by these cinemas, by government radio, or by
the illustrated weeklies. They all follow a road that leads to conformism,
everyone turned into carbon copies: identical houses, identical clothes,
identical luggage, identical plastic tableware, identical airs, and worst of all,
identical ways of thinking. This is the greatest danger in our new wave of
urbanization.155

The outcomes of this “new wave of urbanization,” are what he earlier in the book

terms “counterfeit cities,” built by architects “with no roots,” where people are “turned

into carbon copies.”156 (Remember Kracauer’s description of the streets of the film city

of UFA studios as “nature” built out of papier-mâché, facades, and ruins?) In Al-e

Ahmad’s lapsarian rendition of the modern urban civilization, the older, authentic

centers of community building and religious life like mosques, bazaars, takyas are left

to ruination, while at the same time the state has shown a failure to provide even the

basic promise of modern technology, water, electricity, telephones, libraries. The force
                                                                                                               
155  Al-­‐e  Ahmad,  Occidentosis,  104-­‐105.  

 
156  Ibid.,  96-­‐97.  

  176  
behind the new urbanization is destructive even when it builds. It separates and

polarizes, it leaves “neighborhoods widely scattered.” That other byproduct of the new

urbanization, the Iranian cinema culture, which incorporated a massive input from

popular foreign films and celebrity culture, is depicted in Al-e Ahmad’s rather

totalizing critique as hardly anything more than an apparatus of conformity and

escapism (somewhat resonant with Adorno and Marcuse’s views on the culture

industry). In his assertion that “our cinemas do not instruct or aid in the intellectual

transformation of our people” one can notice a clear preference for the discourse of

cinema as a pedagogical (modernizing) social tool at the expense of one that sees the

cinema as entertainment, as a site of fantasy and pleasure.

Despite his unforgiving critique of the general state of the cinema and film-going

in the urban culture of his time, Al-e Ahmad’s writing itself betrays affinities with the

most modern conditions and practices of the cinema. Al-e Ahmad often used verbless

sentences and was known, or notorious, for a prose style described by Dabashi as

“quick and telegraphic” with frequent “twists and turns.” As though composing with

“urgency,” his style fragmented the “rhythm and reasons of the prose.”157 Even at his

most didactic, Al-e Ahmad’s jarring style repeatedly communicated through

assemblages of short, hurried, imagistic, and yet tactile, clauses that transmitted senses

of instability, improvisation, and transience: “bazaars’ roofs in ruins; neighborhoods

widely scattered.” These are aesthetic qualities and thematic textures posited also in the

New Wave films depicting Tehran, that archetypal site of the destruction wrought by

“our new wave of urbanization.”

                                                                                                               
157  Dabashi,  Theology  of  Discontent,  55.  

  177  
 So, Kracauer instead of Adorno, again. If the previous chapter (the country, the

long take, the texture of mud-brick houses) connected with Kracauer’s foregrounding

of the photographic image’s iconicity, this chapter engages his ideas regarding the

cinema’s ability to re-produce the rhythms and movements of the big city. The streets

of the modern city, or at least their cinematic adaptations, visually build, or destroy,

their fast-paced tempo on discontinuities, random images, passing glances, and fleeting

surfaces. This, of course, adds up to a proclivity towards montage, in Iran as elsewhere.

In this sub-category I dub the “city films” of the Iranian New Wave two particular

“vehicles” for this montage tendency stand out: the figure of the wanderer and various

means of transportation. The wanderer of city streets, often solitary, almost always

male, appears in the works of many, including some of those mentioned here so far, for

instance, Kracauer’s “Sehnsüchtiger,” Benjamin’s flâneur, and Williams’ personas of

the urban criminal and the detective (a beloved of Kracauer too). The urban criminal,

almost always portrayed as a figure of rebellion, lonesome and tragic, appears in many

Iranian films from before the Revolution. This cinematic type is perhaps best

exemplified in the leading role played by Behrooz Vossoughi in Kimiai’s Gheysar, a

film that since its release in 1969 has been associated with the New Wave’s origin.

Vossoughi went on to play similar roles in many other films. Sequences built on shots

showing him roaming the streets, visiting the alleyways of childhood, or on the run,

have become among the most remembered for many today. Mostly filmed in black and

white with shaky hand-held camera these scenes clearly differ from the long takes and

  178  
 tableau imagery of the past chapter. In keeping with the fast cuts, the high contrast

cinematography breaks into blurriness with the occasional swish pan.

A second channel for the construction of montage-based scenes is provided by a

creative bringing together of the apparatuses of the cinema and those of transportation

like cars and trains. Instead of laying down tracks for elaborate travelling shots,

cameras were mounted (hand-held) on cars.158 In part a result of economic calculations,

and a characteristic new wave/art cinema move, one of this formal strategy’s many

effects was that it facilitated compositions of a certain type of city scene built on

rapidly passing images, montage-based sequences that no street idler could have

achieved with his flâneurie, no matter how sharp his gaze or his memories.

As material embodiments of mechanical technological advancement cars and

trains (Fordism and the industrial revolution in turn) share some essential qualities with

the medium of the cinema. Especially as it pertains to the human senses and how they

receive the stimuli produced by the modern world, theirs is a relationship I find

comparable to that drawn by Benjamin between the cinema, and modernism in general,

and the assembly line: “That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor

belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film.”159 (Kimiavi’s 1973 The

                                                                                                               
158  This  is  of  course  a  feature  that  decades  later,  particularly  with  the  rise  in  international  

standing  of  Abbas  Kiarostami  (in  films  like  Close-­‐Up,  And  Life  Goes  On,  and  Taste  of  Cherry)  
and  Mohsen  Makhmalbaf  (Moment  of  Innocence),  came  to  epitomize  the  Iranian  cinema  for  
many  of  its  observers.  
 
159  Walter  Benjamin,  Illuminations:  Essays  and  Reflections,  trans.  Harry  Zohn,  ed.  Hannah  

Arendt  (New  York:  Schocken  Books,  1969),  175.  In  another  reference  to  the  shock  of  the  

  179  
 Mongols, a film constructed as a collage of radically disparate visual and narrative

components, and one with segments that reflect on the history and nature of cinema,

including scenes that make analogies between the film and revolving objects and

shapes; this film will play an important role in the final version of this study.) From this

point of view, then, I see the coming together of the three foremost emblems of

industrial modernity—the city, the film, and the modern apparatuses of transportation

(the linkage between the first two stressed by Kracauer and Benjamin, and others)—as

a productive analytical ground for the study of the New Wave. In addition to a

correspondence with an arithmetical reality, the large number of the city films using

this theme, this method of camera movement engendered through the movement of a

vehicle like an automobile, makes it possible to gain, in a very practical fashion, from

the insights provided by one of the most common theories of aesthetic modernism—

that modernism came with technological modernization, as a reflection of the

conditions of advancements in industry and in the media. This historical explanation,

clear and omnipotent, still runs the danger of metamorphosing into technological

determinism of one sort or another (that “trains and cars created a new form of

subjectivity,” and/or, “New Wave cinemas came into being because of the development

of smaller camera and sound recording equipment,” etc.). Here, instead, I take the

methods, concerns, and vocabularies from this form of analysis (and some others, like

“modernism as stylistic renewal,” or, as “acceleration”) and interject them within the

idea that sees the existence of the perception of two or multiple temporalities—brought

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
assembly  line  Benjamin  writes:  “The  shock  experience  which  the  passer-­‐by  has  in  the  
crowd  corresponds  to  what  the  worker  “experiences”  at  his  machine.”  Ibid.,  176.  

  180  
about by the conditions, imagined or real, of uneven development—as a pre-condition

for modernism, political as well as aesthetic.

It is within this framework of uneven developments and temporalities (or

“memories of underdevelopments,” as Alea would have had it, I like to add) that the

discussion of the cinematic capital of Tehran would take place. In this Tehran too, the

country plays hide-and-seek with the city, as Benjamin once observed on Moscow. The

perception that the great metropolis by the Alborz Mountains is divided by a

multiplicity of temporal plains finds its most well-known dualistic manifestation in the

division between the South and the North. In many regards, this is a split that projects

inward the already existing division between the rural and the urban: the “south of the

city” (jonoub-e shahr, also the name of a 1958 film by Farrokh Ghaffari that could have

been seen as the New Wave’s first fiction feature if it were not destroyed by the

authorities) stands for the working class, underdevelopment, narrow alleyways

(koochehs), structures in decline (in recent times often called “baft-e farsoodeh” or the

“dilapidated texture” in official and popular discourse), “traditional” food, mosques and

azans, men with black open shirts, women with chadors, communities and genuine

camaraderie, but also, poverty, crime, crowds, and suffocating old ways. The “north of

the city” (shomal-e shahr), on the other hand, means affluence, highways, boutiques,

imported commodities, decadent parties, and foreign food. In the city films of the New

Wave, this encounter of the old and the new, in effect articulated as a dialectics of

authenticity versus the triumphalism of a fallen world, plays itself out in a thousand and

one ways.

  181  
 nnn  

The Brick and the Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, aka Khesht o Ayneh, 1965)

The night black and thick had fallen on the prison. But beyond the barrier of the bars,
the dawn was cutting away the faraway clouds and forest-covered peaks from darkness.
The steady clatter of the factory’s machines, interlaced with the night’s darkness, was
spread over everything. The light from the lamp on top of the factory gate was passing
through the space between the bars, splattering a dim color on the prison’s outside
wall.

– Ebrahim Golestan, In the Middle of Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1949160

After years of working as a writer, photographer and documentary filmmaker

Ebrahim Golestan made his first feature fiction in 1965. The film, The Brick and the

Mirror, according to Golestan did not have a name even after the filming was over, not

until the “poem from Sheikh Sa’di came to help and the film was named.”161 The film

is more than two hours long, and its back-and-white photography in the widescreen

ratio (a first in Iranian cinema). For decades after its initial release The Brick and the

Mirror did not have public distribution in any format and therefore its status as a

milestone in the history of the New Wave is a matter that is still coming to light.

                                                                                                               
160  From  the  short  story  “In  the  Middle  of  Yesterday  and  Tomorrow”  reprinted  in  Azar,  

Mah-­‐e  Akhar-­‐e  Paeez:  Haft  Dastan  az  Ebrahim  Golestan  [Azar,  the  Last  Month  of  Autumn]  
(Tehran:  Baztab  Negar,  2005/1384),  114.    
 
161  Jamal  Omid,  Tarikh-­‐e  Sinema-­‐ye  Iran  (1279-­‐1357)  [History  of  the  Iranian  

Cinema](Tehran:  Entesharat-­‐e  Rowzaneh,  1995/1374),  381.  

 
 

  182  
Golestan’s place at the time of directing his first feature was already prominent both as

writer of short fiction and as a director and producer of documentary films (See Chapter

Two for an analysis of The Hills of Marlik). The impact of his literary production on the

films he made, and conversely the imprint of his engagements with the cinema on his

written words, are questions still in need of more work. The issue of cinematic

techniques affecting literature becomes even more intriguing in places like Iran where

writers created texts that displayed cinematic influences even before a film industry

was fully established within the borders of their respective nation-states. With the

following close analysis I will once again foreground the importance of language in

Golestan’s cinematic work.

The Brick and the Mirror opens with a long take of a busy Tehran street, the

only thing visible at night, the city’s lights and cars in sharp black and white. The sound

is of a steady percussion, the sole beat of an old-style tombak, perhaps a loop. As the

words of the credits run out, a taxi stops at a lower corner of the image and lets

somebody out. What follows is a long driving sequence, with images of the city

flashing past in sharp black and white. Passing cars, flickering streetlights, rotating

neon signs, their hazy reflections. The driver switches between different radio stations,

the first one playing a radio drama in which a man and a woman talk about burying a

corpse and burning a house, then, on another channel, a “literary program” in which

Golestan’s own voice recites a monologue, and then we hear a couple of loud

advertising announcements for commodities such as “Soap of Familiarity” (Saboon-e

  183  
 Ashena). The on-and-off rhythmical sentences delivered by Golestan’s voice during the

radio’s “literary program” are at once lyrical, bookish, ominous, and baroque.

A female voice announces: “After the Mongol [invasion], until the beginning of the
Constitutional [Revolution]…”
[Change of the radio station]
By then the silent twilight was dissolved in the dark cold night of dried up branches.
The hunter man was slowly passing by. But in the midst of darkness the pulse of
danger was beating nonstop.
The jungle was filled with sparks of fright and horror.
The night was hard.
The night seemed enduring.
No other shape (naqsh) was settling down in the round of the owl’s eyes except the
shape of anxiety.
The only sign remaining was that of fear of life.
The hunter man was slowly passing by.
Every beast had his gaze frozen on the prey.
The eye of deterioration, the eye of danger, were open.
The night was with all its darkness,
But in the darkness nobody was aware who the prey is, and who the hunter.”

The “mood” created between these words, and between these words and the imagery of

moving light and shadows, in streets that seem empty of people, fringes on the

absurd.162 Aside from a prevailing mood, there are very few other elements holding this

sequence together. If it were not for them it would have been destroyed. The shock of

the ruptures would have been simply too many. As in other similar scenes in the history
                                                                                                               
162  I  am  using  here  the  term  “mood”  as  a  referent  to  two  words  often  used  by  Golestan  as  

two  of  the  most  vital  elements  in  the  creation  of  good  art  and  literature,  atmosphere  (fazâ)  
and  disposition/mood  (hâlat).  

  184  
of modern cinema, these jolting cuts across the windshield, across the windshield in

almost every angle possible, maintain visual contiguity mainly because they share an

internal rhythm. Also, the shots share in graphic continuity; they are all composed of

pitch black surfaces of night imagery pierced by moving spots of light. In this it could

be said that they correspond with the museum scene from The Hills of Marlik the

documentary Golestan directed not long ago (and The Crown Jewels of Iran he made in

1965).

As the car travels the city it is called on by a female voice: “Taxi!” The driver

pulls aside and a woman covered in a black chador (played by Forough Farrokhzad)

gets into the backseat. The destination turns out to be a faraway neighborhood,

desolate, only half-built, and half-lit. The car stops on a dirt road next to a mud wall.

When the woman leaves the car and disappears in the dark, the driver realizes that she

has left a child. This is the beginning of the second sequence in the film, also its most

perplexing. The driver immediately picks up the infant and runs in different directions

in the dark, but the woman is already vanished. At one point he finds himself at the top

of a long concrete stairway, a moment that is all of a sudden stretched through an

extremely fast-paced series of jump cuts with each shot photographed from a different

distance as the camera is moved back, and down, a few stairs away. In lighting and

montage resembling what one would expect from a Soviet film from the 1920s, this in

essence is a different variation of some of the techniques Golestan has already used in

his documentary films. More specifically, the high-contrast cinematography and the

quick editing of shots with similar content evoke particularly the segments from his

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documentaries I placed in the category of “museum scenes” wherein objects appear

animate on the screen.163

From that moment at the stairway, the enigmatic quality of the sequence, itself

the film’s most unsettling passage in terms of narrative and spatio-temporal logic, only

gets more and more convoluted. The driver, still holding the child, runs further into the

thick of the dark and enters what appears to be a ruined building. This desolate

structure is inhabited by three ghostly characters. First, there is an older woman whose

face, framed in black chador and a pitch black background, emerges out of nowhere.

She seems ethereal, her figure moving across the frame as though suspended into the

air. (Once more the cinematic means taken up here, particularly in lighting and camera

movement, are reminiscent of what we have seen in the “museum scenes” from

Golestan’s documentaries.) She begins to recount the sad story of the place and its

occupants, as the driver begins to travel the building’s bare stairways. There is a

disabled man, “a cripple content with playing a flute,” she says. And, then, a younger

woman sitting on the floor, pregnant and abandoned by her husband “a long time ago.”

They are all waiting for somebody to come. The older woman is waiting for her son to

come back, the pregnant woman is languishing in the dream of her husband’s return,

and the disabled man, too, is hoping that the old woman’s son, “his friend,” is going to

reappear one day. At the same time, the woman seems to believe in something else:

“Nobody has come. There is nobody to come.” and, again, “Here is a ruin. Nobody

comes here.” (Inja kharâbeh ast. Kasi inja namiad.)

                                                                                                               
163  See  “Chapter  Two:  Ethnographic  Documentaries.”  

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 The Brick and the Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)

In a booklet printed for the film’s audiences when it was released Golestan

gives a short account of this ruin scene:

After that is the literary program on the radio about a hunter in a jungle. I have
tried for the sentences to correspond with the driver’s inner life (zendegi
nafsani) and in general the things we see in the image at the time. Then when
the driver enters the ruin, the form of the old woman’s appearance in the thick
darkness and the stories she tells and the stairs that appear in an illusory
fashion (betor-e talghini) behind him. And then when he climbs the stairs and
when in his wandering he separates from the old woman but the woman’s
stories continue to be heard and in truth they are like a song that not only
reflect the anxieties but also inform the driver’s weight and rhythm of walk
and his descent down the stairs.164

But, the ruin in The Brick and the Mirror is a ruin with a difference. Golestan

on different occasions has used the same term, as in his written words on the film just

quoted, while also contesting the designation at other times. In an interview published

in 2005 he insists that the site “was a home, it is not a ruin, it was an unfinished home

(khooneh na-tamam) that was near the (Golestan) Studio and was the first place we
                                                                                                               
164  A  large  segment  of  this  booklet,  that  was  first  printed  for  the  film’s  general  audiences,  is  

reprinted  in  Jamal  Omid,  Tarikh-­‐e  Sinema-­‐ye  Iran  (1279-­‐1357)  [History  of  the  Iranian  
Cinema](Tehran:  Entesharat-­‐e  Rowzaneh,  1995/1374),  381.  
 

  187  
 went and filmed.”165 This inconsistency is perhaps a continuation of the larger semantic

uncertainties of the ruin, as an idea, a representation, as well as a materiality. As Julia

Hell and Andreas Schönle remind us:

The ruin is a ruin precisely because it seems to have lost its function or meaning
in the present, while retaining a suggestive, unstable semantic potential. The
ruin has blurred edges in more ways than one. As an aesthetic and conceptual
category, it is uniquely ill-defined. Where does the ruin start, and where does it
end?166
The discrepancy we face in the accounts of the building in this most hard to pin down

scene in The Brick and the Mirror might not be a bad thing. Between a ruin and an

“unfinished home,” in their existence in the lexicon and beyond, is I believe a built-in

tension that when further aggravated will bear good results for critical analysis. The

building/structure where we watch the driver enter, explore, and leave more

disoriented, certainly shows some of the characteristics associated with ruins; it is

dilapidated, to the point of being without a façade, without exterior walls altogether; it

is covered in dust; it looks as is it is missing different parts as though they were lost in

time to decay, or suddenly in a moment of violent destruction, as in an explosion; its

different floors, like different layers piled on top of each other, as in an excavated site;

it is not supposed to be a place for humans to live in; it stands apart from its

surroundings, as though out of its time.

                                                                                                               
165  Parviz  Jahed,  Neveshtan  ba  Doorbin:  Roodarroo  ba  Ebrahim  Golestan[Writing  with  the  

Camera:  Face-­‐to-­‐Face  with  Ebrahim  Golestan](Tehran:Nashr  Akhtaran,  2005/1384),  188.  

 
166  Julia  Hell  and  Andreas  Schönle,  eds.,  Ruins  of  Modernity  (Durham  and  London:  Duke  

University  Press,  2010),  6.  

 

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 An unfinished structure though, distinct from the ruin, looks to the future. That

is to say that it is shadowed by a particular, more flamboyant, futurity, invested in the

site from the moment its material construction begins (if not earlier). An unfinished

building is not only different from the ruins of antiquity (like Persepolis in Rahnema’s

documentary of the same name discussed in Chapter Two) but also different from the

ruins with chronicles of ruination falling within modern times in one way or another (as

the destroyed town of Guernica taken up in Picasso’s painting from 1937 and Resnais

and Robert Hessens in their documentary of the same name from 1950). The unfinished

structure, unlike other ruins of modernity, has hardly had its chance under the sun to

experience the effects of decay and destruction, natural or otherwise, in a visible

fashion.167 (Exceptions in history do exist, and Iran again provides us with one, as in

the case of all those building projects from the Pahlavi era that were left unfinished for

almost a decade, if not more, after the Revolution.)

All said, rendering an unfinished building as the ruin, in naming, in conception,

contains within it a buried critique of the original project of chronological progress.

And, this is what “the ruin scene” in The Brick and the Mirror mobilizes to do, and not

just in secret. If the classical ruin in its romantic representation stands as a testimony to

the tragic and transient nature of history, the unfinished structure as ruin points to the

blind eye of the faith in the future. If as Golestan insists the building in The Brick and

the Mirror’s ruin scene is “a home unfinished” it is one with all its deformities, in fact
                                                                                                               
167  The  wording  and  the  idea  of  untimely  destruction  in  this  sentence  was  drawn  with  an  

eye  on  a  passage  in  Kracauer’s  "Calico-­‐World:  The  UFA  City  in  Neubabelsberg":  
“Destruction  catches  up  with  some  things  when  they've  scarcely  had  a  chance  to  enjoy  
their  place  in  the  sun.”  He  is  talking  about  a  film  studio  here,  the  large  film  sets  of  UFA.  
 

  189  
stillborn. The skeleton of the structure, is made out of bricks and metal but unlike the

great monuments of modernity has no façade and no utopian claims. The stairways cut

across darkness connecting the different floors, the driver with the child in his arms

traverses them, only to find out that each layer holds very little except stories of

separation and sorrow. The old woman, her figure and voice progressively

disembodied, her last words narrating their history:

Poor souls, they still are hopeful.

But nobody is coming back.
Here was once a farming land.
One day they came and sold it all.
The wheat and barley were ready to seed. (Gandoma o joha dooneh basteh boodan.)
But one day they came
with steel.
They dug for foundations
they filled with concrete
they built walls
they built walls.
Everywhere, everyone, constantly built walls.
Woe from this building of walls!
And this one who wanted to build a house …
they suddenly said stop … they suddenly said stop!
It’s many long years now.
Not a courtyard pool (howz), not a kitchen, not a room.
No grain, no barley… nor any wheat.

The passage starts with a rebound to the old woman’s earlier description of the

building as ruin where everyone lives in waiting, in the dream of someone who is

coming back. “But nobody is coming back,” she repeats. In the recurrence of this

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 utterance the ethereal woman turns a long tradition of Iranian millenarianism upside

down, turning it into a vision of a dystopia old and new. It is well known that Iranians

have a special relationship with millenarianism, from their conception of Zarathustra’s

virgin birth to the Shia messiah’s secret birth, from their ancient and medieval

messianic movements to the later day modern forms of radicalism. Academic accounts

abound of this historical bond with the sacred dream of a just world at the end of

time.168 Also existing are numerous contemporary appropriations of the trope of the

apocalypse and of the savior in modern Persian poetry, instances of them on the rise

especially since the 1950s. From these poems Forough Farrokhzad’s canonic “Someone

Who Is Not Like Anyone” (“Kasi keh Mesl-e hichkas nist”) first printed in 1966 takes

up a child’s vernacular to mold together a critical portrayal of Tehran, the ideal of a

more egalitarian society, and the possibility of messianic hope.169 In the midst of The

Brick and the Mirror’s ruin though if there is hope of a return of someone it is a

symptom, most probably a cause, of stagnation and decay. The usually future-oriented

                                                                                                               
168  For  some  of  the  book  titles  on  the  topic  see:  Henry  Corbin,  Spiritual  Body  and  Celestial  

Earth:  From  Mazdean  Iran  to  Shî'ite  Iran,  trans.  Nancy  Pearson  (Princeton:  Princeton  
University  Press,  1977);  Abbas  Amanat,  Apocalyptic  Islam  and  Iranian  Shi'ism  (London  and  
New  York:  I.  B.  Tauris,  2009).  
 
169  In  another  instance,  in  her  “Let  Us  Believe  in  the  Beginning  of  the  Cold  Season,”  

Farrokhzad  envisions  a  dead  savior  and  more  uncertain  future:  

 
Time  passed,  
Time  passed  and  the  clock  struck  four  times.  
Today  is  the  21st  of  December.  
I  know  secrets  of  seasons;  
And  I  understand  the  words  of  instants.  
The  redeemer  is  buried,  
and  the  soil,  this  welcoming  soil,  
is  pointing  to  salvation.  
   
Time  passed,  
and  the  clock  struck  four  times.  

  191  
ideal of “Waiting” (entezar in contemporary Persian), the anticipation of renewal

through the re-appearance of “the one who is coming,” is turned against itself, its

forward look turned into a suffocating stillness. Here, in The Brick and the Mirror, the

creative discursive strategy brought upon the utopian idea of the messiah is a match to

what the unfinished building is in the realm of ruins. Both destroy futurity, one

progressive, and one the older type.

“Here was once a farming land. One day they came and sold it all.” With these

words the old woman recollects the past of the ruin, or the “unfinished home,” where

the waiting souls live. The place was once, sometime within her living memory, a

farming land with blooming greenery. The construction of the now languishing

building was sudden and destructive. “But one day they came, with steel.” With the

proliferation of steel and concrete, walls and walls were erected. These verses,

mournful and multilayered as they are, are also a tale of the arrival of the city. The

moment of separation and disintegration, her voice tells, started when the green lands

were sold and changed into construction sites. One can find allusions to this moment of

the city’s arrival, or its expansion in this case, across the literary and cinematic scene in

Iran, appearing time and again. From those, Golestan himself provides us with an

example, one that also sheds some light on the mentioned farmlands of wheat and

barley in The Brick and the Mirror; in 1968 he wrote these words, from the point of

view of a young boy, in one of his lesser-known short stories (pointedly) called From

Bygone Days Fable (Az Roozegar-e Rafteh Hekayat):

Tomorrow when I was going to school I saw that our new home is in the
street. But it is not [really] a street—it is a line of stone and clods of soil with

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 few houses scattered all around, nearby fields of wheat and barley. The plain
seemed familiar to my eyes. Wasn’t this the same place that me and Baba [the
family’s old servant] would come riding to for sightseeing?170
In The Brick and the Mirror, however, in the long years since the moment of

destruction of the fields not even the promises of providing homes to the land’s new

dwellers were fulfilled. The story of the crippled man playing flute in the ruin is a

reminder of that failure. At the end there were no places left they could realistically call

home, only memories of a green past. “Not a courtyard pool, not a room, not a kitchen.

No grain, no barley… nor any wheat.”

The ruin scene in The Brick and the Mirror, standing somewhat apart from the

film’s plot as well as its overall style, might be the only passage in the film conjuring

up a pre-urban past, and as such it carries a particular weight.171 This is a singular

significance that I would further magnify as it relates to the principal themes and

premises this project is concerned with; Twentieth Century cinematic/literary

modernism in Iran; how it is reflective of what Jameson calls a “situation of incomplete

modernization”; and, the place of the city and country in this schema as Williams

would have it. In the cinematic depiction of the film’s already existing ruin, or the

“unfinished home” if you recall, the two temporalities of the city and pre-city, the

country, are crystallized. As I discussed earlier in the Introduction, Jameson sees the

                                                                                                               
170  Ebrahim  Golestan,  Az  Roozegar-­‐e  Rafteh  Hekayat  (Tehran:  Entesharat-­‐e  Baztab  Negar,  

2004/1383),  33.  
 
171  It  should  go  without  saying  that  Golestan  cannot  be  described  as  a  filmmaker  who  

espoused  a  romantic  vision  of  a  pre-­‐industrial  pastoral  life,  or,  even,  as  an  intellectual  as  a  
proponent  of  authenticity.  Quite  the  contrary.  The  bigger  picture  however  is  about  the  
persistence  of  certain  perceptions  and  tropes  that  were  at  their  heart  congruent  with  
societal  discourses  produced  and  reproduced  in  the  arts  and  literature.        
 

  193  
 simultaneous existence of these two particular temporalities as a characteristic

condition of the transitional epochs (from feudalism to capitalism for instance). He

writes in A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present:

And this makes for a world that is still organized around two distinct
temporalities: that of the new industrial big city and that of the peasant
countryside.…In this transitional era, people – but it would be better to say,
intellectuals, and the writers and the ideologists who are part of that category –
still live in two distinct worlds simultaneously. This simultaneity can no doubt
for the moment be cast in terms of some distinction between the metropolis and
the provinces: but it might better be imagined in terms of a situation in which
individuals originate in a ‘pays’, a local village or region to which they
periodically return, while pursuing their life work in the very different world of
the big city.172
The Brick and the Mirror’s ruin is standing on the edges of an ever-expanding city, and

it is built on a farming land. The walls of the city that emerged from the destruction of

that pre-city land not only divided people from each other (destruction of organic

community) but also fractured the temporality of the place (discursively). The two

distinctive worlds created live simultaneously side by side, in their materiality as well

as ethereally in memory.

Even a scene as otherworldly as the ruin scene in The Brick and the Mirror can

have a claim to the materiality of the world. One way of reclaiming this concreteness in

criticism is for one to look, in an act of moving from the textual to the extra-textual,

into the stories of the profilmic. What is said and written about what brought about a

slice of the world in front of the camera, the way it did, can be at times very revealing.

The “ruin” in The Brick and the Mirror came to the makers of the film rather easily, as

                                                                                                               
172  Fredric  Jameson,  A  Singular  Modernity:  Essay  on  the  Ontology  of  the  Present.  (London  

and  New  York:  Verso,  2002),  142.  

 

  194  
 you might recall from Golestan’s remarks about the site mentioned earlier. In an

interview published in 2005 he insists that the site “was a home, it is not a ruin, it was

an unfinished home (khooneh na-tamam) that was near the (Golestan) Studio and was

the first place we went and filmed.”173 The site, an unfinished building, was near the

Golestan Film Studio. However, construction sites being nearby was a most seminal

feature of life in Tehran of the 1960s and 1970s, as it is now. A number of factors

contributed to this building frenzy, among them, urbanization at a breakneck pace,

expansion of the middle class, the Pahlavi ideology of modernization, and infusion of

petrodollars. This ever-accelerating excess in building though can be traced to earlier

decades, with the 1930s, the decade that started with Reza Shah’s rule (and modernist

Persian literature fully in place). The construction was always preceded by ruination of

one form or another. The rapid expansion meant the adjacent fields and orchards, some

of them to be found well inside the territory of the city, were to be appropriated,

commercially and administratively, and turned into new districts. In this sense, the area

depicted in The Brick and the Mirror’s ruin scene should be seen as a latter-day

variation of this ever-growing number of recently built urban wards. In the already built

areas the destruction’s main purpose was to metamorphose what was seen as an

Oriental city, with its labyrinthine alleyways and city walls and gates, into a modern

capital. In her 2009 book Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National

Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs, Talinn Grigor gives a picture of the demolitions:

In 1940, the U.S. embassy estimated that the number of residential structures
demolished ranged from 15,000 to 30,000. In a memo it remarked, "Tehran
looks as if it has been destroyed by an earthquake," underscoring that the
                                                                                                               
173  From  the  series  of  interviews  published  in  2005  in  Neveshtan  ba  Doorbin:  Roodarroo  ba  

Ebrahim  Golestan  [Writing  with  the  Camera:  Face-­‐to-­‐Face  with  Ebrahim  Golestan],  188.  
 

  195  
 ruthlessness of its methods is bewildering to anyone not used to the ways of
modern Iran." Rosita Forbes, an American traveller in the early 1930s,
described Tehran as "slightly Hollywoodesque, for the new streets looked as if
they had not quite settled where they were going, and the rows of new houses,
one room deep, were all frontage.
…
Others later characterized the 1930s urban renewal as “a massive unfinished
tableau worked on by several artists,” and a mere “external westernization”
aimed at impressing foreign observers. The state “ripped down sections of
cities,” a historian remarked, “ruthlessly destroyed mosques and other edifices
mellow with the charm of age, and replaced them with broad, tree-lined but
incongruous boulevards.”174
At this point there are two evocative images that should be noted in these concise

accounts of the decades during which a particular drive to re-order Tehran through

destruction was unleashed (or “originated” in the sense of an Ursprung, as Benjamin

defined it). First, the new Tehran is described as “Hollywoodesque,” a characterization

above all based on its physical similarity to a movie set with houses that look as though

they are only facades, “one room deep” and “all frontage”; closely linked to this sketch

of Tehran is the emergent metropolis’s comparison to an “unfinished tableau worked

on by several artists,” an analogy that points to the conditions of an existence on the

surface, art-like constructedness, and stylistic eclecticism. These observations of the

city are, again, highly resonant with Kracauer’s words in his exposé on the UFA City

film studios.175 Secondly, there is the feeling of an imminent disintegration. In the U.S.

embassy memo Tehran has been just hit by an earthquake, and the “new streets looked

as if they had not quite settled where they were going.” Those structures with an air of

durability granted them over time, “mosques and other edifices mellow with the charm

                                                                                                               
174  Talinn  Grigor,  Building  Iran:  Modernism,  Architecture,  and  National  Heritage  under  the  

Pahlavi  Monarchs  (Penzance:  Periscope  Publishing,  2009),  38.  

 
175  See  Kracauer,  “Calico-­‐World,”  282.  

  196  
 of age,” are sacrificed without compassion. And yet for other observers the tableau that

is the new capital seems “unfinished,” and the new boulevards “incongruous,”

somewhat set to come apart at any time.

Constructing the Ministry of Finance on the debris of a Qajar Palace,

Tehran, 1937176  

As Golestan implies in his recollections the unfinished building that became the

setting for the ruin scene in The Brick and the Mirror was found easily. “It was near the

(Golestan) Studio and was the first place we went and filmed.” The style of this

incident in filmmaking, that a small crew should choose and film at a location as

though in an improvisational fashion, is indicative of a New Wave mode of cinema-

                                                                                                               
176  The  location  depicted  here  is  in  the  vicinity  of  the  complex  of  Qajar  era  palaces  and  

government  buildings  formerly  known  as  the  Tehran  Citadel  (Arg).  Photo  by  Ali  Khadem  
(Institute  for  Iranian  Contemporary  Historical  Studies).  
 

  197  
making: low budget, small crew mobility, non-studio location, etc. The outcome

however, as the oneiric peculiarities of this particular scene shows, does not have to be

realism. What of the world is seized is perhaps the materiality of destruction and

construction of the Tehran of the time, and the atmosphere of fear the filmmakers and

writers were giving it. “The jungle was filled with sparks of fright and horror.”

As earlier mentioned when The Brick and the Mirror was released a booklet

was produced for its select audiences and in that booklet Golestan also includes his

account of the ending of the segment I have been calling the film’s “ruin scene:”

Then when the driver walks out of the ruin and gets stuck at a crossroad in
that remote district, he does not know what to do. And from that dark
ambiance full of ambiguity (por-ebham) he is forced to take refuge in his own
isolated corner that is his car. And in the middle of this we have seen a
number of dogs appear and when he closes the car’s door the dogs surround
him barking, they threaten him. And then the rain starts to fall.177
Ambiguity, incongruity, absurdity, confusion, angst, cars and streets. These are moods

and “ambiances” (fazaha to adapt a word from Golestan again) that will inhabit and

shape the film until the end. On the larger schema of things, the film will move from

one vignette to another. First, the driver enters a smoked-filled bar with the infant in his

arms, has a sudden fight, sits with a group of acquaintances, and leaves with his

girlfriend, a waitress from the bar. From a smoky bar to a police station, from there to

the streets of Tehran at late night, to a cab ride, to the driver’s back room, tomorrow to

a child adoption ward, to a grand courthouse, to the back alleys of old neighborhoods,

and, finally, to an orphanage. In each of the sequences a sense of tension and fear,

                                                                                                               
177  Reproduced  in  Omid,  Tarikh-­‐e  Sinema-­‐ye  Iran,  381.  

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sometimes explained, sometimes unidentified and unexplained, comes to the fore, in

the mise-en-scène, in the actors and actresses’ actions and words.

Fear seems enduring. It persists even when the main characters, the driver and

his girlfriend called Taji, take refuge in places that seem secluded. This is certainly the

case when late at night they retreat into the room he is renting in a house. From the start

he is consumed by the anxiety that the neighbors might see, or hear, the child, the

woman. The style in this scene, as in the rest, bears the brunt of this tension. For over

thirty minutes in the man’s room we see and hear them quarrel, the child cries, the man

moves back and forth, from one window to another, he complains and shouts, they strip

off their shirts, the woman changes the child’s dirty diaper, and brief moments of

tenderness. Taji tries to convince him that his fears of the unseen eyes and ears of the

neighbors are baseless. He contests. In the middle of the quarrels, shouts and cries, the

camera follows the characters’ restless movements. The editing, too, contributes to the

tension and nervousness. Seeing this scene, in fact the remaining of The Brick and the

Mirror, under the influence of a fear that is unknown in origin and yet ever-present and

destructive, add significance to the words from the film’s beginning (recited in

Golestan’s voice on the car’s radio). “No other shape was settling down in the round of

the owl’s eyes except the shape of anxiety. The only sign remaining was that of fear of

life.”

There are two driving scenes in The Brick and the Mirror with the driver, whose

name is Hashem, and Taji present together in a car. The first one is rather short in

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 length and inconsequential in the overall plot. The two of them, along with the child,

take a taxi back to his place. The scene almost entirely consists of one shot, a medium

shot taken from the cabin’s front window with all the passengers positioned somewhat

off the center and barely lit. An old man is the driver here, and from the moment Taji

and Hashem step into his taxi he starts to warn of all the things that can go wrong with

a child out at night. Specially, he repeats the name of one contagious disease after

another: “Now make sure, it won’t get a flu, fever, bronchitis, angina, mumps.”

Hashem shouts back in irritation: “Crap, plague, pestilence, cholera, polio, blindness…

a pair of horns and a tail! So much you nag!” To which the old driver responds: “If you

had driven a taxi all day, you’d have known what nagging is!” This brief scene portrays

a very grim picture of human encounters in a moving car, a space that was supposed to

provide a sanctuary for the inhabitants of the big city. It is the earliest example in the

Iranian art cinema I have encountered of a driving scene of its kind, with the camera

positioned outside the car filming its human subjects inside.178

In the next driving scene it is only Hashem and Taji. Having just emerged from

minutes of walking and arguing in alleyways they enter his cab and start riding through

the streets. Only a few minutes ago she has discovered that he has left the child in an

orphanage. She tells him that he has betrayed the child, her, and himself. “Tomorrow

again! You always have a ‘tomorrow’ in reserve!” She criticizes him for always

escaping from the responsibilities and possibilities of the present time by choosing an
                                                                                                               
178  Happy  and  playful,  maybe  even  carnivalesque  utopian,  variations  of  these  scenes  and  

of  the  interior  of  the  automobile  as  a  site  providing  mobility,  security,  and  the  possibility  of  
human  closeness,  are  plentiful  in  the  pop  culture  of  the  time.  Two  examples  also  involving  
a  male  taxi  driver  and  a  woman  are  Nosratollah  Vahdat’s  1962  European  Bride/Aroos  
Farangi  and  the  1960s  duet  song  Police!  by  the  popular  singers  Vigen  and  Pooran.                  

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artificial future, a never-coming tomorrow. He lives his life like someone waiting from

one week to another for a winning lottery ticket, a waiting that should never end “since

his tickets are the expired tickets of weeks past” she says. And that the child could have

been a new beginning for them. Hashem manages to hit back only sporadically but at

the end agrees to take her to the orphanage where he left the child, “I’ll come with

you.” This exchange between the woman and man is photographed as the car navigates

through the streets. Photographed in daylight and with the camera positioned on the

front of the vehicle the viewer is given clear view of the inside. As the camera is

decked solidly the two human figures and their vehicle appear steady, framed by the

contours of the front window. Behind and around them, the back window and the

smaller side ones, as though openings through which the outside world comes through,

mobile and disorderly. Passing across these frames-within-frames are cars, motorbikes,

buildings, city signs, pedestrians on sidewalks, and jaywalkers crossing streets. It is

against this background that the two leading male and female characters of The Brick

and Mirror move from one jolting round of verbal contention to another.

Preceding this driving scene there is another scene filmed in older alleys and

passageways of the city, and it is in this segment that Taji and Hashem begin, this time

on foot, to argue with each other. The location for this scene is composed of images of

districts that in the language of the social sciences are home to “popular classes.”

Homes and trades of the working and middle classes are to be found in the narrow lanes

of these “old districts.” These alleys in The Brick and the Mirror are mostly filmed with

a hand-held camera that moves along and around the two characters, often casting a

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side glance at what is around, streets, shops, and people caught in the middle of their

daily lives. These are stylistic devices rarely used in the rest of the film. These are also

qualities that usually bring an air of informality with them, and that is what they do

here, to some extent. Golestan and his crew filmed the shots that made up this segment

in different locations across the city:

But the most difficult parts were the scenes of those alleys. It was not easy to
find alleys with each being capable of creating the mood and atmosphere in
one part of the man and woman’s dialogue. Not only the alleys had to reflect
these moods but also their length had to be in pace with Hashem and Taji’s
steady walk as well as match the length of their dialogue’s sentences, and that
the end of each alley would be similar to the beginning of the next. The alleys
were scattered. One in the Blacksmiths’ Bazar, one near the Shah Mosque,
one near Seyyed Ismael, one in Rostam Abad, one in Darous…. Creating
these scenes that put together were five or six minutes long took two
months of work.179
At this point the significance of the information provided in this passage is not that it

gives us another indication of Golestan’s formal virtuosity (something we have already

seen in his documentaries) or that it sheds light on his concerns as an auteur. My aim

rather here is to show how the alleys, the “scattered alleys” of the city, emerge within

the Iranian cinema into a place of significance, in more than one sense of the word. The

alley, or koocheh in Persian, then, is important because of its frequent appearance on

the screen, because of how narrow alleys’ material compositions in the world shape the

films’ aesthetic qualities (just as do wider lanes), and last but not least, the alley as a

site of signification when it is bequeathed in the cinema (and other creative and

discursive mediums like in literature and painting) with an array of surplus meanings.

The alleys of The Brick and the Mirror provide us with one of the earlier examples of

this multiple aspects of the alley, which we will look at later in this chapter.

                                                                                                               
179  Quoted  in  Omid,Tarikh-­‐e  Sinema-­‐ye  Iran,  381.  

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 The Brick and the Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)

The Brick and the Mirror ends where it begins, on a busy street a woman in

black chador calling “Taxi!” It is getting dark and Hashem is sitting behind the wheel in

his car. But, right before the final scene, there is another scene. In the scene before the

last, the female protagonist enters the orphanage where her lover abandoned the child

earlier in the day. In the building she discovers countless little children on different

floors. Some in groups on the floor, some in tightly set rows of beds, some smiling,

some crying. Most look back at her with a bewildered look in their eyes. A few are

being injected. Many of the kids have an unusual repetitive body movement, back and

forth, back and forth (possibility of the illness known as Tremor disease). With these

images of entrapment and anguish it is as though The Brick and the Mirror opens a

door to The House is Black. She leaves the room, leans against a wall, and the camera

moves back in the hallway. Outside, the cab driver of the story’s beginning, Hashem,

buys for himself a soft drink and crosses the street and starts to look at rows of

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 television sets behind a shop window. A man in suit and tie, whom he recognizes from

the earlier scene in the courthouse, is delivering a lecture, his image replicated on

multiple screens. In the face of the previous scenes and what we had heard from him

earlier his bookish talk sounds increasingly hollow. This earliest image of mass media

as an apparatus of alienating and ersatz messages could not have been more

devastating. To make things worse the man is decorating his message with quotes from

famous lines from classical Persian poetry, ending his program with a smile and a quote

from Sa’di the great poet of the past whose fable gave the film its title.180 The cab

driver walks away and sits in his car as the twilight sets in.

“The night was hard.

The night seemed enduring.”
n n n

Until recently the year 1969 was customarily regarded as the beginning of the

Iranian New Wave. It is primarily the making of three feature films in this year that was

used as the reason for this designation: Mehrjui’s The Cow (a film discussed in the

previous chapter), Tranquility in the Presence of Others directed by Nasser Taghvai

(whose documentaries were discussed in Chapter Two), and last but not least, Gheysar

by Masoud Kimiai. The city has a particular bearing on all these three films, if in the

first one in its complete absence, in the case of the latter two in its overdetermined

presence. In Gheysar and Tranquility in the Presence of Others, then, the critic is faced

with a whole range of narrative designs, thematic patterns, visual and rhythmic

compositions, and imagistic tropes that are built around the modern city. Starting with
                                                                                                               
180  Sa’di  book  Golestan,  it  should  be  remembered,  also  gave  our  filmmaker’s  family  name  

as  his  father  was  the  founder  and  editor  of  a  journal  called  Golestan  and  chose  the  title  of  
the  journal  as  his  last  name.    
 

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 these stylistic and thematic elements from these two canonic films of the Iranian

cinema, criticism can then proceed more productively with the task of analyzing their

recurrences as they resurface in many other films, before and after the eventful year of

1969.

Gheysar (Massoud Kimiai, aka Caesar, 1969)

Gheysar starts with a title sequence made of images of tattooed male body

parts.181 A series of close-ups of arms, torsos and shoulders painted with figures and

animals from ancient Persian mythology (most famously put together in the epic poetry

book of Shahnameh) flash on the screen. The compositions within these shots are

minimalist and appear almost two-dimensional in their reduction of spatial depth, with

most of the body parts put on display against a solid black background. At the same

time, on the music track we hear a Zoor-khaneh percussion imbedded within an

orchestral arrangement, all in excess of emotions and movement.182 The very last shot

in the title sequence shows the design of a bell decorated with flowers tattooed against a

surface of skin. The metal bell is another age-old instrument always used in all-male

ritualistic sessions of Zoor-khaneh, and it is not surprising that it is incorporated into

the music score of Gheysar’s first scene (and the rest of the film for that matter). The

image of the tattooed bell and flora is cut, along with the music, abruptly to a screaming

                                                                                                               
181  This  title  sequence  was  created  by  the  now  renowned  filmmaker  Abbas  Kiarostami.  In  

1969  Kiarostami  had  not  directed  any  films  yet  but  was  known  as  a  talented  graphic  and  
advertisement  artist.          
 
182  In  Chapter  Two,  in  the  context  of  Rahnema’s  Persepolis  and  Golestan’s  The  Hills  of  

Marlik,  I  talked  of  how  the  Zoor-­‐khaneh  drum  is  often  associated  with  Iranian  cultural  
authenticity.  The  title  sequence  in  The  Brick  and  the  Mirror  also  starts  with  a  percussion  
piece,  most  likely  a  loop.  

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siren on the roof of an ambulance. The ambulance is speeding through wide tree-lined

streets. The ambulance’s speed makes everything in the frame except the contours of

the siren and ambulance’s white roof to appear out of focus, a mesh of passing shades

of black and white. The cut, from the spread out skin painted with the mythical figures

of Persian antiquity to the alarming image and sound of the speeding ambulance, is not

only a rupture that marks the end of a scene but also one that cuts through a body

politic severing it from another. The cut between the male bodies, their corporeality

within the close-ups of the title sequence only increased by the absence of their heads,

and the ambulance can above all be read as an interruption of the Iranian body of the

past, a body that was once wholesome and heroic. What follows this splitting-in-half is

also to (re-)create, in cinema, the delivery of the new world, with its rapacious body

politic replacing that of the old, its scattered boulevards replacing the alleys of

familiarity. What follows in Gheysar gives strength to this not-so-new drama.

The blurred images and their accompanying sound of alarm, we will soon learn,

are indeed ominous. The ambulance rushes through wide boulevards and crossroads,

makes a few turns, and arrives at a hospital. The story from here on unfolds without

recess. The ambulance is carrying the body of a young woman. She dies because she

has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. She and her family are from an older

neighborhood in the south of Tehran, one of those neighborhoods that until today are

described as “traditional.” Her older brother, called Farman, is known and respected

locally for being a chivalrous man, and for his past life as a tough guy. Shocked by the

discovery that his sister committed suicide because she was raped, Farman rushes to

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confront the offender. In the ensuing scuffle with the culprit and his two brothers

Farman is stabbed to death and his body left on the rooftop of the bazar. The family’s

younger son, Gheysar, returns to Tehran and sets out to take revenge. He hunts the

three brothers one by one and kills them with his knife.

Among the most powerful segments in Gheysar, remembered by Iranian

audiences ever since, are its representations of the old neighborhoods of Tehran. The

first of these scenes is not of the film’s (anti-)hero, but of his brother Farman walking

toward his immediate death. As he walks through the streets of the neighborhood he is

framed by a hand-held camera following him from behind or from the sides. The shots

are not in the point of view form, as his figure is a major part of what is put on display,

along the small shops, brick walls, everyday men, chadori women, and hard-hitting rays

of sun. The shakiness of the hand-held camera does not undermine the flow, but, rather,

along with the rhythm of percussion in the music, only underscores the pulse of the

male figure’s bodily movements. Farman’s excess in performativity—in his bodily

movements, in his clothing, in the tone of his voice, in his words—makes him stand out

against the “life caught unawares” around him. The scene of the walk through the

neighborhood is short-lived and not of significance in the plot, but it is the first of its

kind in the film as it will return, as a leitmotif if you will, in the similar scenes with his

brother Gheysar. Similar and different rather, as Gheysar goes through those familiar

alleys before and after his killings.

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 The street and alleys of the old neighborhood in Gheysar should be seen as part

of a constellation of urban motifs, objects, and sites. One of these sites is the

neighborhood coffeehouse (ghahveh-khaneh) he visits, a popular place of gathering for

the male members of the community. Another such location creatively used in the film

is the bathhouse where Gheysar carries out his first killing. The public bathhouse, once

an important institution in communal urban life, was historically a place with its own

particular practices and rituals, but also a site with its life in legends, songs, and jokes.

Furthermore, like many other social phenomena depicted in the film, the Iranian

bathhouse at the time was an institution in decline as more and more of them were

closing down or simply losing their centrality in city neighborhoods. Other important

visual motifs in Gheysar are the designs, paintings, and icons that adorn the buildings

and walls of the old neighborhood and that are put on display for the camera. Together

they function as indicators, or signs of the residues, of a noble past.

Unlike in the case of some of the other films discussed here, that the project of

putting together an assemblage of authenticity is at the heart of Gheysar has been long

established by Iranian cinema critics and scholars. For instance, in his highly

informative book Tehran in Iranian Cinema (Tehran dar Sinema-ye Iran) published in

2012, Ahmad Talebinejad writes:

In addition to its other historical and artistic values in the Iranian cinema,
Gheysar is also deserving of examination from the perspective of its dramatic
use of architecture. The events of this film take place in the south of Tehran
and with the exception of one sequence—Gheysar and [his fiancée] Azam’s
meeting after his escape in the cemetery [from police], which takes place in
one of the relatively modern streets—the film’s other events unfold in
locations that are part of the traditional architecture of old Tehran and are
indicative of the authenticity (esalat) and continuous history (ghedmat-e

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 paydar) of Gheysar’s family.... Gheysar’s large family home with its semi-
aristocratic architecture, labyrinthine rooms, and a large courtyard is a sign of
their family’s identity and authenticity.183 (Emphasis added.)
Talebinejad acknowledges the significant “presence of architecture” (hozoor-e memari)

in other films produced before Gheysar, however almost all the examples he provides,

with the exception of one, fall within the popular filmfarsi category: The Generous

Tough (Majid Mohseni, 1958), The Swallows Return to the Nest (Majid Mohseni,

1962), and, Croesus’ Treasure (Siamak Yasami, 1965). The one title given as an

example of the “serious presence” of architecture is The Husband of Ahoo Khanoom

(Davood Mollapour, 1968), a film that used architecture for the purpose of creating the

“traditional atmosphere” of Southern Tehran.184 The Husband of Ahoo Khanoom is not

generally regarded by critics and historians as a filmfarsi, but, rather as an earnest,

realist, and socially conscious film. It needs to be noted here that the observations

articulated in the passage above on “serious presence,” or the “dramatic use of

architecture,” are not merely descriptive statements but also expose a discursive

purpose; they function as markers that not only establish the distinction between the

“traditional” from the “modern” in filmic representations of a city’s architectural

setting, but also distinguish the art cinema of the New Wave from the popular genres of

filmmaking (a separation that in Iran almost completely coincides with the division

between an auteur and a commercial filmmaker as well). It is through these discursive

maneuverings, we should not forget, that the categories such as “new wave” and “art

cinema” find coherence. The case of Gheysar is particularly pertinent to the argument

                                                                                                               
183  Ahmad  Talebinejad,  Tehran  dar  Sinema-­‐ye  Iran  [Tehran  in  Iranian  Cinema]  

(Tehran:Entesharat-­‐e  Rozaneh,  2012/1391),  21.      

 
184  Ibid.,  20-­‐21.    

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here, as it is a film that shares much with the popular cinema of its time in many of its

building components. Gheysar, like many of the other films directed by Masoud

Kimiai, is similar to what has come to be known as the “tough guy genre” of filmfarsi

in its themes, narrative development, localities used, and even in its cast of players. A

very convincing case can be made that Gheysar is on the borderline between the New

Wave and the popular cinema. What above all differentiates Gheysar from the rest is

that it is “well-made” (highly conscious of its own style, or its “dramatic use” of its

elements, in the words of Talebinejad), it is “serious,” and that its chain of disasters

does reach an end at the film’s ending (absence of a happy resolution).

Also, if one is to follow the trail of the modern and traditional distinction in

Gheysar, then there is certainly more than one scene in the film that is taking place in

the modern segments of the city. Gheysar’s very first appearance in the film is at a train

station. The moment, more than twenty minutes into the film, is when the train bringing

him from the country’s south, from the oil city of Abadan, enters the train station in

Tehran. The scene is one immediately following the scene of Farman’s murder. The

long shot of Farman’s dead body left on a rooftop of the old neighborhood is abruptly

cut to a shot filmed from underneath a moving train in a slanted angle. From behind

shaky metallic objects, the still tracks and earth passing in speed. The coach arrives,

and as though in a cinéma vérité film a few hand-held shots of the massive station and

crowds ensue. The first view of Gheysar, filmed from outside the wagon, shows him

dressed in black suit and slacks waking up. The music starts and as he starts walking

down the hallway a travelling camera follows him from outside, with his figure

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appearing and disappearing in the rectangular frames of windows. Somewhat like the

passing frames of the cinema itself. He steps out of the wagon and starts walking

through the grand space of the station, alone. For me to dwell on this scene is to draw

attention not just to the miniature stylistic abilities of a filmmaker whose work at the

time was compared to Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinema (by friend and foe), but also to use

scenes such as this as an entryway to draw attention to a much larger, but very often

forgotten, point in discussion of this canonical film in Iranian film history: the character

of Gheysar cannot be seen solely and straightforwardly as a representative, or defender,

of Iranian tradition. This is a point that the larger narrative reveals to a critical reader as

well, that the uncompromising figure has also links to the world outside the “old

neighborhood,” in fact to that most forward-looking city of the imagination of Iran,

Abadan, where he lives as a migrant worker. If he is an avenger of the old values of the

neighborhood, above all associated by his blades (as in the film’s famous poster), he is

also the youngest son and a figure who has returned home, after a time of separation.

Those men who never departed from the neighborhood and its (presumed) old ways,

Farman and the old uncle, have both at a point in life renounced the tough guy lives of

their youth and put aside their knives. For both it was an act of faith, the story tells us.

The train graveyard of Gheysar’s finale is a ruin, an industrial ruin. The film

ends with trains and tracks too, harking back to the scene at the railroad station and the

moment of Gheysar’s arrival. This time the setting, even if still indisputably modern, is

empty of crowds, it is a graveyard of the trains. Gheysar arrives at the morbid place for

his third and last hunt alone, facing his opponent in the middle of broken tracks,

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destroyed buildings, decaying carriages, and abandoned machines. A chase ensues as

the two run across a landscape of twisted rusty metals, captured in a combination of

hand-held and tracking shots. A group of uniformed police also joins the foray. Gheysar

manages to corner his enemy and put his knife in his body. Badly injured himself,

stabbed and with a bullet wound, he carries his body past the broken decaying trains.

The camera follows Gheysar’s walk against a halted train in a tracking shot, just as it

did in the first scene we saw him.

Tranquility in the Presence of Others (Nasser Taghvai, aka Aramesh Dar Hozoor-e

Digaran, 1969)

Made in 1969 but released a few years later, Tranquility in the Presence of

Others is the first fiction feature made by Nasser Taghvai director of two of the

documentaries discussed in Chapter Two, The Wind of Jinn and Arbaeen. What is

more, it is a film that brings Taghvai together with Saedi, the scriptwriter of The Cow

and Postchi, two films from Chapter Three. Coincidently, it is also the first feature film

directed by a director who was once affiliated with the Golestan Film Studio and the

young cinema and literature enthusiasts gathered around it. Particularly in its overall

narrative makeup, Tranquility in the Presence of Others reveals certain shared

elements. It portrays a world that is new and urban, and that is leading its characters

into fearful lives and mental disintegration.

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 The film opens in daylight with a young woman preparing to go to bed. In a

darkened room a young man joins her, but their words and embraces can hardly be

described as love-stricken. Their session is abruptly cut short as the home’s doorbell

rings. It is her father and his new wife, on an unannounced visit from the provinces. We

soon learn that the young woman and her sister live in this home and that they are

nurses by profession. Their father was a captain in the military, but now retired. The

captain is unhappy, constantly reminiscing about his past life of dignity and greatness

in the military. His wife, shy and much younger, shows her signs of melancholy. The

captain’s daughters tease and lecture her to live a carefree and up-to-the-minute life:

“Here is different from the provinces, here silence is a sign of prudishness. Don’t be so

quiet in front of others!” She looks after her husband and his eccentricities, and

observes her surroundings in silent moments.

While most of Tranquility in the Presence of Others takes place in the family’s

relatively large home, there are two significant outings into the city. The first one, starts

with a long shot of the captain walking in a large urban space. The sound of a military

band is heard. His tired steps appear somewhat in tune with the beat of the drums. The

continuity of the scene is occasionally interrupted with blurry close-ups of hands and

guns, of soldiers marching. He stops by an empty bar for some straight vodka and hits

the streets again. Again, a long travelling shot of him walking past a brick wall and

blast of a military march, although there are no soldiers nor a band in sight. On the side

of a busy street, with cars passing in speed, the captain calls out for a taxi, and the scene

ends. In another sequence one of the captain’s daughters, a young doctor who is her

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boyfriend, and another woman take to the streets for some fresh air. They are leaving a

party behind that has gone terribly wrong. The captain’s state increasingly deteriorated

during the party, a nighttime gathering of the daughter’s friends when alcohol,

superficiality, and talk of madness were constantly on the verge of coming to the

surface. The excursion into the city ends ominously for the three. With an American

jazz song playing on their recorder, they decide to forego the uptown bars and head

instead for the nocturnal leisure ground of the hills overlooking the city. This particular

hillside seems to be a particular meeting place. The doctor and the other woman leave

behind the captain’s frightened daughter in the car. The face of a stranger appears in the

pitch black of one of the car’s windows and says: “Don’t be afraid, I’m looking for my

wife.” For the rest of the film things take a downward spiral. On the day after the party

the colonel is taken by another doctor present on that fateful night, the one who talked

about patients who imagined ghosts, to a mental hospital. After that night, the daughter

refuses to talk to the doctor who was her boyfriend, and commits suicide by slashing

her wrists.

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 Tranquility  in  the  Presence  of  Others  (Nasser  Taghvai,  1969)  

In Tranquility in the Presence of Others just like in The Postman, a film written

by Saedi and made only one year later, it is the alien and alienating ways of the

wealthier, more educated, people from the city that trigger the final doom. In The

Postman, we might recall from the previous chapter, it was the engineer who wanted to

build a pig farm and in Tranquility in the Presence of Others it is the group of young

professionals that are mainly behind the impending disaster. Like in The Postman it is

the sexual laxity of these social classes, predatoriness in the case of their male

members, that spark the final spiral into madness and violence, violence on the body of

women that is. Also, in both films the narrative conflict, unfolding in the diegetic and

the world beyond, is built around the opposition between the provincial town and the

big city, or the intrusion of the latter on the former to be precise. The madness of the

new, however, is not destroying an innocent pastoral past. In The Postman what is

being replaced is represented by the old sheep farm and its decadent and half-mad

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 overlord, and in Tranquility in the Presence of Others it is the memories of an

honorable and disciplined past of an aging man who was once captain of the Imperial

Iranian Army. Mental disintegration is the awaited destiny in both films, and to that we

can add The Cow, also written by Saedi.185

n n n

The Mina Cycle (aka The Cycle), directed by Mehrjui in 1974 based on a script

co-written with Saedi, is yet another celebrated film of the New Wave taking up the

tragic theme of the arrival in Tehran.186 The film begins with images of a young man

and an ailing old man against an industrial landscape and ends with the son looking on

as his father is buried in a desolate landscape. What takes place in between is the story

of their fall, physical and moral, in an urban scene overwhelmed by deceit and

corruption. The father and son’s immediate environment throughout the film is a

hospital where they hope the old man can receive medical assistance. Instead, the son is

gradually recruited into the web of illegitimate activities developed around the hospital.

The most profitable is the illegal trade in blood, an activity that the son particularly

excels in. Buying a motorcycle allows him to move around the city, look after the

business, acquire an allure. In the scene before the last, he rushes to the rough streets of

                                                                                                               
185  See  Chapter  Three:  Allegory  of  the  Country  for  a  discussion  of  The  Cow,  mental  illness,  

and  possession.  
 
186  Dayereh-­‐ye  Mina  or  The  Mina  Cycle  has  been  distributed  with  English  subtitles  and  

called  The  Cycle  and  it  is  known  with  that  title  in  most  English  language  writings.  Other  
New  Wave  titles,  depicting  the  story  of  an  unhappy  Tehran  arrival  for  somebody  coming  
from  the  provinces  include:  The  Window  (Panjereh,  Jalal  Moqaddam,  1970);  Mr.  Simpleton  
(Agha-­‐ye  Halou,  Dariush  Mehrjui,  1970);  Baluch  (Masoud  Kimiai,  1972);  The  Traveller  
(Mosafer,  Abbas  Kiarostami,  1974).    
 
 
   

  216  
the city with a hired car to get the blood for an emergency operation. He takes two drug

addicts into the car and extracts blood from them as the driver speeds through the busy

streets of Tehran. It is before the end of this frenzied sequence at the hospital that others

try to give him the news of his father’s death. He rides his motorcycle to the outskirts to

be there for the burial. A friend beats, swears, and drags the son into the mud, for not

caring about his father’s death. In the end, as the father’s body is put into a grave, as the

names of the saints of Shiism are being recounted, he looks on.

The  Mina  Cycle  (Dariush  Mehrjui,  1974)

Turning wheels, flâneurie, travelling vehicles, cars and motorcycles, street

scenes. These are materials the cinema and its modernity are made of, and the Iranian

cinema is not an exception to that. It should not then come as a surprise that a great

archive of street scenery was created by the city films of the New Wave; but when

considered together as a category, the high number and aesthetic seminality of the street

scenes, appearing in and shaping one film after another, is still astonishing. The street

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 scenes come in two interrelated sub-categories of vehicle-oriented and pedestrian-

oriented. Both have had their place in the critical accounts of the cinema, with the latter

taking a more prominent place for a much longer time. Looking back at the last few

decades, one cannot fail but to acknowledge of how a certain current in critical

literature on the cinema has taken up Benjamin’s ideas on film, the metropolis, and his

conception of flâneurie and used them in productive and imaginative ways. This

passage from Esther Leslie’s 2000 book, Walter  Benjamin:  Overpowering  Conformism,

offers a condensed and articulate understanding of some of the main issues within this

still-developing discourse:

Benjamin was drawing on a well-established convention. In Weimar

Germany, the urban becomes not just a theme of the modern, but the very
emblem of modernity. And the city seems best represented – actually and
figuratively – by film, the most modern representational form. Film appears
perfectly capable of representing the city, of producing films that are set in
cities and providing accurate portraits of lives in those cities. There exists a
special intimacy between film as form, cinema as institution and city life as
social phenomenon. The earliest films chronicled masses of people on the
streets. Films of crazed chases through the big city traffic, and the glimpses
into metropolitan underworld soon followed these. The city reformulates
human experience – and film provides a mode of cognizing this. Shock and
simulation of the nerves is the norm, and cinema produces these jolts. Cinema
exploits the city-dwellers’ desire to escape the rationalized industrial,
technical world, and it does this by using a product of this world. Film records
the complexity and fluctuating impermanence of city life, its speed, fracture
and incessant movement.187
Of course, in more recent times, film studies’ scholarly discourse has also started to

incorporate into its reflections on the symbiotic relationship between the cinema and

the big city the long overlooked writings of Benjamin’s friend, Kracauer.

                                                                                                               
187  Esther  Leslie,  Walter  Benjamin:  Overpowering  Conformism  (London:  Pluto  Press,  2000),  

67.  
 

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 The reason behind the affinity between Kracauer and Benjamin in their

emphasis on the linkage between the cinema and the city street, in addition to their

friendship and a shared intellectual scene, is, of course, a joint devotion to the

aesthetics—and politics—of montage. Historically, for the radical proponents of the

principle of montage (or collage, if you prefer), leftists and avant-gardists of various

kinds, juxtaposition of temporally incongruent elements held the promise of the new, in

meaning and in experience. Both Benjamin and Kracauer were aware of the works of

those figures and movements which were engaged in theorizing and/or practicing

montage aesthetics, particularly those active in Germany (for instance, photomontages

of the Berlin Dada), the Soviet Union (specially the constructivists and filmmakers like

Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein) and France (the Surrealists most

distinctively). It is in fact not very difficult to detect in Kracauer and Benjamin (and in

Brecht for that matter), often clear, sometimes opaque, traces of a drive to adapt

montage strategies, or to look for their effects, in places outside the customary arena of

the visual culture; this search for collage crops up, for instance, in their discussions of

Surrealism, Baudelaire, flâneurie, and closer to our topics here, in the foregrounding of

the “temporal heterogeneity” of the street, in Berlin and Paris in the case of Benjamin,

and in the UFA studios and the filmic Berlin and New York, for Kracauer.188

                                                                                                               
188Benjamin  ends,  suddenly,  his  essay  “Surrealism”  with  an  image  that  largely  resembles  a  

dada  photomontage:  “They  [the  surrealists]  exchange,  to  a  man,  the  play  of  human  features  
for  the  face  of  an  alarm  clock  that  in  each  minute  rings  for  sixty  seconds.”  See  Walter  
Benjamin,  Reflections:  Essays,  Aphorisms,  Autobiographical  Writings,  trans.  Edmund  
Jephcott,  ed.  Peter  Demetz  (New  York:  Schocken  Books,  1986),  192.  Adorno,  too,  in  his  
“Looking  Back  on  Surrealism,”  retrospectively  sees  montage  at  the  heart  of  Surrealism:  “If  
thereafter  one  wishes  to  elevate  surrealism  to  a  concept,  one  must  go  back,  not  to  
psychology,  but  to  artistic  techniques.  The  model  of  these  is  unquestionably  the  montage.  It  
can  be  easily  shown  that  even  truly  surrealistic  painting  operates  with  the  motifs  of  the  
montage,  and  that  the  discontinuous  succession  of  images  in  the  surrealistic  lyric  has  the  

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 But, Kracauer equally pays attention to a kind of montage that he sees playing a

major, completely opposite, and very negative, role for the world of cinema and as it is

in effect in service of the capitalist order. It seems that for Kracauer the mechanism

which allows the contradictory and illusory nature of the world produced by the forces

of the capital—above all represented by the triumphant will of the category of

instrumental rationality he calls Ratio—to be concealed is also a form of montage.189 In

the essay “Calico-World” he suggests that the world surrounding us, as presented on

the film city of the UFA studios, is the antonym of reality, and yet, it is at the very same

time reconstructed in such a fashion that it appears excessively real, even nature-like:

“Everything guaranteed unnatural and everything exactly like nature.”190 Nevertheless,

the appearance of cinematic “naturalness,” a state that pretends to authenticity and

wholeness, is produced above all through a process of assembling that brings together

the otherwise divergent fragments of its raw material, the world. This process of

assemblage is surely a form of montage.

However, in an innovative analytical move, Kracauer moves away from the last

level in the process of editing in cinema, the joining of the selected shots, and directs

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
character  of  a  montage.”  See  Theodor  W.    Adorno,  “Looking  Back  on  Surrealism,”  Notes  to  
Literature,  I  (Columbia  University  Press,  1992),  86-­‐90.  
       
189  In  Kracauer,  Ratio  stands  for  the  abstract  reason  underpinning  the  progressive  

destruction  of  the  old  world.  A  form  of  ever-­‐expanding,  murky,  instrumental  rationality,  
Ratio  is  embodied  by  capitalist  economic  growth,  modern  science,  and  technology  and  is  
responsible  for  the  de-­‐realized  nature  of  the  modern  world.  
 
190  Kracauer,  “Calico-­‐World,”282.  

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his critical attention towards an earlier stage in the process, the act of cutting. What

should be noted here is that even though the cutting of filmed footage (the initial takes)

is one of the earliest and most crucial procedures in the series of functions that as a

whole form the cinematic montage, this act of elimination is rarely acknowledged in

film criticism; studies of “filmic texts”, a category seen as the final product of montage

(like mise-en-scène, regarded as a key component of the medium of cinema) privilege

the results of the juxtaposition shots and sequences, at the expense of the process that

led to them. Textual analysis, to put it simply, tends to forget the earlier stages of

montage, when certain material is eliminated, when things are cut into smaller

fragments. For Kracauer though, the fact that the procedure of cutting of filmed footage

into smaller segments is in effect a form of fragmenting what is already a fragment

emerges as a starting point upon which he builds his more ambitious contentions. This

tracing of the course of fragmentation to an earlier moment in cinematic montage—and

in fact beyond to a pro-filmic world—is an idea that Kracauer never fully articulates in

the conventional sense, only providing passing allusions to it (perhaps a consequence of

the limitations of the journalistic genre of feuilleton), and yet, it emerges as one of the

more promising features of his analysis of not only the cinema but also of the nature of

bourgeois modernity.

City films, Street Scenes, and the shock

Now, Kracauer, and the Calico-world of cinema. There are two main

reasons for me to take this detour through Benjamin and Kracauer. To start with, in

the writings of these two astute observers of contemporary culture one encounters a

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 complicated and intriguing merging of seemingly opposite entities. For Kracauer

the opposites brought together are: montage/editing as an instrument of connection-

building—illusion— as well as one of fragmentation—critical understanding. And

in the case of Benjamin: shock as the agent of disciplinary capitalist technology,

and its opposite, one of modern illumination.191 As I hope to show in the course of

this project, the double vision that comes with these incorporations of opposites

allows for creative readings. The streets of Iranian films in general, and those from

them I call the New Wave’s “city films” specially, provide a most fitting ground for

testing these new, and not-so-new, readings.

Reza, the Motorcyclist (Masoud Kimiai, aka Reza Motori, 1970)

with eyes deprived

with steps tired
there was a man, a man
night with a black coffin
sat in his eyes
the star darkened
fell unto the soil
…

The title sequence for Reza Motori was made by Abbas Kiarostami, like the one

for Gheysar before it. It is composed of black and white photographs of a face in pain,
                                                                                                               
191  A  plausible  argument  can  be  made  for  a  shared  genealogy  for  the  two  theoretical  

categories  of  montage  and  shock  tracing  them  to  the  cultural  scene  that  produced  the  
montage  theories  of  the  early  Soviet  Avant-­‐garde,  with  Eisenstein’s  “montage  of  
attractions”  as  one  of  the  earliest,  and  most  influential  expressions  in  the  trajectory  of  its  
development;  this  project,  although  certainly  worthwhile,  is  beyond  the  scope  of  this  book.                

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grainy and out of focus. The face is of the iconic actor Behrouz Vossoughi. After the

close-ups, credits, and song of the title sequence we see an ambulance with its flashing

light on top and sound of its siren arriving in a semi-dark street. The ambulance is to

pick up two inmates of a mental hospital to escape, all part of an unfolding heist. The

film’s main character (played by Vossoughi), one of the pretend inmates of the asylum,

goes by the name Reza Motori or Reza Motorcyclist. A “kid from the south of the city”

the story, with its outlandish twists and turns, takes him to the wealthy and powerful. A

brief romance takes place. But his past, and the film’s opening heist, cannot be left

behind and in time bring about his painful death at the end.

Reza Motori is a film built on movement in the streets. In fact in could be said

that both in narrative and in its visuality, the film is structured on its multiple scenes of

driving cars and riding motorbikes. The latter of course is the protagonist’s favorite, the

one that he praises in his highly performative working-class vernacular, and the one

that has given him his nickname, “motori.” The motorcycle, we learn much later into

the story, was also once his means of income, and, his connection from earlier times

with the cinema; we learn that Reza Motori’s former job was to ride his motorbike from

one cinema to another and deliver reels of films, when “ten cinemas showed one film at

the same time” (and went back to robbery when the practice disappeared). In the film

the motorcycle assists him in his criminal life as well as helping him in his move from

the south of the city to its posh north, literally, and, in the case of his short-lived faux

class mobility, in the narrative.

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 Reza  Motori  (Masoud  Kimiai,  1970)  

With Reza Motori the street scenes return over and over. There are even some

that stand for the film’s joyful moments, like the motorbike ride with his “fiancée”

when they maneuver the boulevards of northern Tehran taking in its sights and sounds,

and the wind in their hair. The film’s last ten minutes consists of two extended riding

scenes, cut through by a brief fight scene filmed in an empty cinema. The first one

begins in the narrow streets of a neighborhood in the city’s working-class south,

alleyways formed out of mud-brick walls of homes, but soon the backdrop changes to

downtown with its wide streets, traffic, and monumental structures. The subjects, Reza

and his bike, are photographed mostly by cameras placed on other vehicles. We see

them cross against an ever-changing, ever-similar, floating background of planes of

concrete and asphalt, buildings, cars, buses, the sky, and people. The effect is a collage,

but one that is in constant flux. Both the frame and its contents are constantly drifting.

Here it is not just the functioning of the human body “leaving its mark” on the scene’s

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rhythm (the role it played in some of the documentaries discussed in Chapter Two), but

what is primarily doing that function this time is the mechanical movements of multiple

machines at work. Layers and layers of mechanical technology in fact: machines of

mobility in the forms of cars, the motorbike, and, additionally, the camera (that is in

itself an assemblage of optical, electronic, and mechanical technology). So, the tempo

of the riding scenes of Reza Motori, as in similar scenes in similar films, is affected by

the matching of these multiple layers of mechanical technology, or their corresponding

(not to be understood as synchronized) conveyor belts to be more precise. (To say that

they “correspond” is not to say that they are in synchronicity, but, rather that they are of

the same nature, and that they intersect with each other in the type and tempo of their

movement.) Linking this detail in everyday modern life to the larger scheme of things,

this mechanism is yet another instance reminding us that, as material embodiments of

technological advancement, the (earth-bound) machineries of mobility, such as cars,

motorbikes, and trains (Fordism and the industrial revolution in turn) share some

essential qualities with the medium of the cinema. “The rhythm of reception in the

film” is received by the body of the viewers in a cinema theater, now we can imagine,

because the assembly line, the orderly punctured strips of celluloid in the camera, and

the reels of film passing in front of a projector all share a basis in their technological,

mechanical, produced movement.

In Reza Motori, the character and the film come to their end with a final street

riding scene, but before that there is a sojourn at a cinema. We see Reza leave his

motorbike on a busy downtown street and walk towards a movie theater. He enters the

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large and open space of a rooftop theater and retrieves a bag from behind the large

white screen. This is money from the robbery at the start of the film that he has been

hiding here, a location chosen perhaps because of his old connection with the cinema.

His partners in crime, tough guys from his neighborhood, turn up and a fight ensues. A

teenage boy among them takes a seat and watches the action with delight. Rows and

rows of empty seats, and the fight’s intensity of action and sound, bring to mind a

filmic affair. A knife cuts through Reza Motori’s body. He staggers across and puts his

hand on the cinema’s white screen in a bloodstained close-up. The moment of narrative

and cinematic self-reflexivity comes to its highlight in a flash of performance and

excess.

Wounded, out of breath, and repeatedly falling down, he carries his body

outside the theater and onto the street pavement and its crowds. It is nightfall now and

the streetlights are turned on. The hand-held camera, in one of its more trembling

demonstrations, follows him through the crowds as he reaches his motorbike. The

engine is ignited, outbursts of exhaust fume, drops of blood, and the song from the start

(title sequence) of the film returns: “…there was a man, a man, night with a black

coffin, sat in his eyes, the star darkened, fell unto the soil, not even his shadow will

remain….” What follows is, along with the opening scene from The Brick and the

Mirror, one of the longest driving/riding scenes of the New Wave. Passing cars, an

ambulance, street lights, flashing lights, objects and lights turning into a blurry mesh, a

face gasping for air, and a subject in pain in movement. Tehran’s now-famous traffic, it

seems, has always been there. The cars appear at the same time both real and ethereal,

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perhaps because of the instability of the camera wiping away the clarity of the vision,

perhaps because of the blistering song sinking the sound of the real. The lyrics of the

song are less abstract and less removed than the words recited in Golestan’s voice in the

opening of The Brick and the Mirror, but, strangely, they could have been exchanged

for...“The jungle was filled with sparks of fright and horror. The night was hard. The

night seemed enduring. No other shape (naqsh) was settling down in the round of the

owl’s eyes except the shape of anxiety.…”

As though what we have seen in these scenes, in the story overall, has not been

relentless enough, the film comes to its end with more shock. Our protagonist rides into

a garbage truck, his body thrown into the air crashes onto the asphalt. The wheels of the

truck crush the motorbike. His body moving between movement and seizure, Reza

Motori dies. Bystanders from a procession of cars, coming from a wedding party, help

put his body on the back of the truck. The last shot is of the truck and cars passing in a

procession, the music plays on, more like a funeral.

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 Reza  Motori  (Masoud  Kimiai,  1970)  

n n n

The male body in anguish, wounded and soaked in blood, makes its

appearance, and makes changes, in several city films of the New Wave. Kimiai’s

own pre-revolutionary urban corpus, from which I have analyzed Gheysar and Reza

Motori so far, also includes Baluch (1972) and The Deer (Gavaznha, 1975). Amir

Naderi allows the bloodstained body of the urban stranger a new level of corporeality and

tactility in The Tight Spot (Tangna, 1973) and The Eulogy (Marsieh, 1978). In the same

vein, Fereydoun Goleh’s Under the Skin of the Night (Zir-e Poost-e Shab, 1974) and

Hornets’ Nest, (Kandoo, 1975) are cinematic portraits of the excessive lives of the

petty-criminal and his trials of blood and flesh in the city. With The Journey (Safar,

1972) Bahram Beizai brings for the first time the figure of the child as stranger,

abandoned and part of the underclass, to the streets of the modern capital of Pahlavi

  228  
Iran. It is revealing to note that all the films mentioned here, with the exception of

the last Beizai’s The Journey produced by a state body, have a precarious relation

with the New Wave. They are films with mass appeal, made commercially, with

well-known casts (with Vossoughi almost ever-present), and a breathtakingly

eventful and affective storyline.In Iranian film criticism and history-writing, they

are placed on that borderline territory between the art cinema and the more lowbrow

popular films. Some among the audiences even mistake them as filmfarsi

sometimes. There are two main qualities that differentiates them from the popular

genres (particularly the closely linked “tough guy” category), one that they are

unambiguously regarded as “serious,” and, that they are “well made.” Seriousness,

as vague of a description as it is, above all stands for the tragicness of the narrative

in the filmic text, and, extra to the film, the earnestness of the filmmaker’s

intentions to create a work of quality. (In Iran too auteurism was developed in

parallel with a new wave.) The borderline status of these films once more points out

the arbitrariness of the construction of the new wave cinemas.

 
 

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– Conclusion –
Of Ruins, Excavations, and Museums
 
 
Force of the Past

I am a force of the Past.

My love lies only in tradition.
I come from the ruins, the churches,
the altarpieces, the villages
abandoned in the Appennines or foothills
of the Alps where my brothers once lived.
I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,
down the Appia like a dog without a master.
Or I see the twilight, the mornings
over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,
as the first acts of Posthistory
to which I bear witness, for the privilege
of recording them from the outer edge
of some buried age.
Monstrous is the man
born of a dead woman’s womb.
And I, a fetus now grown, roam about
more modern than any modern man,
in search of brothers no longer alive.
 
-­‐-­‐  Pier  Paolo  Pasolini,  La  Ricotta,  1962  
 
 

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 If I had to struggle, like all history writers of artistic and cinematic movements,

with finding the starting point of the New Wave, the fall of the Pahlavi order in 1979,

somehow makes the task of marking the end-time easier. In the aftermath, some of the most

important institutions involved in the New Wave survived the rupture of the Revolution. The

Ministry of Culture and Arts was renamed the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The

Ministry of Culture, as you might recall, was the same governmental agency that during the

1960s produced most of the early New Wave ethnographic documentaries analyzed in Chapter

Two, and some of its fiction films (The Cow, for instance). Today the Ministry of Guidance is

to be found in the same complex of the old ministry in downtown Tehran, on Baharestan

Square, right in front of the Parliament. The National Film Archive is also still housed there.

Across town to the north, to an aristocratic mansion with its shockingly green

garden, and here is the National Film Museum of Iran. The Film Museum is placed in this

renovated Qajar era structure, a grand example of Iranian architecture, since 2002. It gives its

account of the national film industry, its past as well as present, and its achievements in small

constellations organized around themes or well-known directors and actors. The New Wave is

present, placed in a progressive narrative. Here and there, on little well-lit stalls, as an old

poster on a wall, this is a homecoming of a sort for a cinematic corpus that one of its origins

can be traced back to a group of “museum films” and “excavation films,” like Farzaneh’s 1958

Persian Miniatures, Golestan’s 1963 The Marlik Hills and his 1965 The Crown Jewels. The

New Wave films constantly returned to the sites of the museum and excavation. This continued

after the earliest years which were mostly constituted of documentary films produced by the

Golestan Film Studio and the Ministry of Culture.

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 “We are in touch, with the world of the dead, with those who were lost in history.

We renew our historical affinity. Now the era of freedom in the heart of the soil ends, and it is

the beginning of authenticity.” Parviz Kimiavi’s highly playful and lyrical documentary, The

Hills of Gheytarieh (1969), opens with these words. Produced by the Ministry of Culture, it is a

film that brings excavation scenes and museum imagery together (as did The Hills of Marlik

before it). The film depicts an excavation team at work at an archeological site. The sound,

cinematography, commentary, and especially the workers’ actions are stylized. The workers

are organized like a regiment descending on the site with their pickaxes and barrows. The 3000

year or so old artifacts are unearthed in broken-up pieces and then put together. Meanwhile, in

a movement in reverse, the film breaks up the pro-filmic world and then reassembles it.

Showing a degree of self-consciousness and autocriticism, both towards the medium of cinema

and what we now call the heritage/memory industry, The Hills of Gheytarieh takes up an ironic

tone in its museum scene which through its accompanying soundtrack evokes an art auction.

The critical angle though is more apropos to the loss of “life” and “authenticity” of the

appropriated artifacts.

Kimiavi’s 1973 feature film The Mongols is constructed as a collage of disparate

visual, sound, and narrative components, including segments that think over the history and

nature of cinema. Produced by the National Iranian Radio and Television, The Mongols also

revolves around various forms of “unearthing” the past, from old artifacts buried under the soil

to moving images from the cinema’s history, and even from its pre-history. There are two

characters in the film, a young filmmaker for the national television network (played by

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Kimiavi himself) and his wife (played by the late Fahimeh Rastkar who worked mainly in the

dubbing industry) who is finishing a doctoral dissertation on the Mongol invasion of medieval

Persia. As he avidly reads on film history and worries about his assignment to a remote and

poorly developed province, his world is invaded by phantasms of Mongol soldiers from the

script of the unfinished dissertation. The “Mongols” (who the opening scene reveals are actors

recruited among ethnic Turkmens from north-east Iran), both very spectral and very real, make

their first appearance in the present time at an excavation site. We see men dressed in some

local attire from the eastern parts of Iran digging holes in the ground in search of ancient

artifacts, and, suddenly, the Mongols. The film’s treatment of film history moves in parallel,

back in time, as a form of excavation of primitive relics. Similarly, what comes to the fore,

breaking the continuity of the present time, is an onslaught from the cinema’s primal years and

the precursors to the apparatus: Eadweard Muybridge horses and men; Georges Demenÿ

uttering the words “Je vous aime” in 1891; William Kennedy Dickson The Gay Brothers (circa

1896); etc. The ancient relics taken out of the dry earth and the earliest moving images of

history emerge, in Williams’ prediction, as “sources and as fragments against the modern

world.”192

                                                                                                               
192  Examining  the  “range  of  basic  cultural  positions  within  Modernism”  Williams  includes  

“conscious  options  for  past  or  exotic  cultures  as  sources  or  at  least  as  fragments  against  
the  modern  world.”  See  Politics  of  Modernism,  43.  
 

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 The Mongols (Parviz Kimiavi, 1973)

Ruins are at the heart of The Mongols, and in more than one way. They are the sites

of illegal excavations, where the Mongols first arrive in flesh. They are where the characters

(the filmmaker, a dervish, an eccentric character from an earlier film) and the camera roam

about (in POV shots without identifiable subjects). Unlike Iran’s most well-known ruin

portrayed in Rahnema’s Persepolis (Chapter Two), however they remain unnamed until the

end. The anonymity only increases the effect as they are freed from specificities that bound

them to a place and a particular era. Directed by a graduate of IDHEC (L'Institut des hautes

études cinématographiques), who had started his work by making ethnographic documentaries

for the Ministry of Culture, The Mongols reveals nothing of the cultural or physical

characteristics of the remote province the main male character has been assigned to. The

countryside landscape at once breaking out into the protagonist’s vision and into the body of

the film is mainly made of sand dunes minimal in composition and colors, and scattered

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decaying ruins of mud brick structures. That region, where the filmmaker employee of the

national television is to bring telecommunication technology to, is not really a place. It is

absolute remoteness, in time as well as in geography. Not a dystopia but more akin to what we

in Persian call a na-koja-abad, a “nowhere-place.” The discursive strategies we saw at play in

other films, in The Cow specially, depicting the rural localities as sites of the uncanny wherein

things are tainted with an allegorical dimension, are pushed to their extreme in The Mongols.

The perception of “uneven development,” of seeing the world in multiple temporal territories,

becomes enmeshed in the narrative and cinematic devices.

Produced by the National Iranian Radio and Television, The Mongols offers a

cutting critique of the infiltration of the nation by the technologies of mass communication.

The bringing of telecommunication and with them the television to the remote regions leads to

either absurdities or complete damage. In time it emerges that the real foreign invasion is that

of Western technology, or as Al-e Ahmad would have called it the “machine,” for which the

Mongols stand only as an abstract point of reference. When the woman’s voice utters the

words “Speed of movement was the great skill of the Mongols,” images of the film’s Mongols

running in the desert are intercut with those from the late nineteenth century devices and

experiments that were precursors to the cinema. The destructive side of the imported

technology, spearheaded by the apparatus of television, is the inevitable erosion of old

indigenous cultural mediums and forms. The narrative and pictorial art of Pardeh-khani, in

which a story-teller recites in a rhythmic voice stories while pointing to the figures painted on a

large canvas or pardeh (a word that also means screen, as the cinema screen, in Persian). In

one scene we see a dervish telling the story of the martyrdom of the Third Imam of Shi’ism to

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a group of men and women, only to lose his audience when a television set arrives on the

shoulders of another group of villagers. At least in one interview Kimiavi has put forward the

idea that the non-linear, collage-like features of The Mongols are informed by the montage

techniques of the storytelling genres of Naghali or Pardeh-khani and the related pictorial genre

of coffeehouse painting.193 The reader should remember from Chapter One that these genres

were also taken up by the Saqqa-khaneh painters in the late 1950s in their pursuet of creating a

modernism based on native sources.

Kimiavi directed O.K Mister in 1979, his last film in Iran before the victory of the

Revolution. A remote village is shaken by the arrival of a group of strangers on a colorful air

balloon. The band of aliens on board, all westerners, consists of, a blond beauty named

Cinderella, a journalist, and an orientalist. Waiting for them on the ground is the famous

Australian oil industry explorer William Knox D’Arcy, the first man who discovered oil for

commercial exploitation in Iran, and the Middle East in effect, in the year 1908. Their moment

of landing is a moment of shock and awe. The camera captures an old woman’s face in a pose,

rendering it into a cinematic variant of Edvard Munch’s paintings The Scream. The village

gradually falls under the foreigners’ charm and power, with their Coca-Cola, toys, and radio

and television sets. The villagers begin to lose their culture. At the end though, they rise in

rebellion. O.K Mister, an Iranian film that could have easily been seen as part of the Third

Cinema corpus, was completed just as a popular revolution was being waged all across the

country. The film was denied screening by both the ancient regime (for its radical message)

and the revolutionaries replacing it (for its sexual Cinderella-related scenes). O.K Mister was

                                                                                                               
193  Moslem  Mansouri,  Sinema  va  Adabiyat:  Mosahebeh  ba  Dast-­‐andarkaran-­‐e  Sinema  va  

Adabiyat.  (Tehran:  Entesharat  Elm,  1998/1377),  125.  

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an Iranian-French coproduction but it was never released in France either, apparently because

of its biting critique of European colonialism.

The fear of native practices and ideals vanishing, and the intellectual and aesthetic

creative force that came with attempts to salvage them, constituted two tangled discursive

tracks shared by a wide range of the Iranian intellectuals of the time, from the more outwardly

politicized among them like Al-e Ahmad and Shariati to the New Wave filmmakers. In both

anxieties and hopes they had their contemporaries and predecessors. Parallels, for instance, can

be drawn with Negritude, that great literary movement, which started in France in the 1930s

and saw its most productive time in the following two decades, as they shared some primary

concerns: aesthetic modernism, desire for authenticity, and their links with ethnographic and

artistic primitivism.

Writings and views of the two leading figures of Negritude Aimé Césaire and Léopold

Sédar Senghor left a great impact on the Iranian intellectual scene of the 1960s. This was

particularly the case with the more pronounced anti-assimilationist sentiments and Third-

Worldist positions of their early years in Paris. Thoroughly creolized and cosmopolitan, and of

different backgrounds (Africa and the Caribbean), they called for pride in “blackness” and the

retrieving of African traditions and values in the face of colonialist ravages. For many of them,

and for Césaire in particular, it was Marxism, the Harlem Renaissance, surrealism (above all

through André Breton, Benjamin Péret), and ethnographic writing (Leo Frobenius and Michel

Leiris) that became the greatest sources of inspiration. Their knowledge of surrealism and

ethnographic literature’s inclination towards exotification of non-Europeans, did not diminish

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their appreciation for their primitivist register as a counterforce to Western rationalism, and as

material for refashioning the self. Césaire wrote in his 1944 manifesto-like “Poetry and

Cognition”: “And the most authentic vision of the world if, as I stubbornly continue to believe,

Rimbaud is the first man to have experienced as feeling, as anguish, the modern idea of

energetic forces in matter that cunningly wait to ambush our quietude.”194

Contemporary comparable cases to the Iranian New Wave, especially in its dynamic

relationship to the extra-cinematic and extra-national intellectual factors, abound in an era that

was marked with “new cinemas.” In Turkey in the mid-1960s the demands for the creation of a

national cinema, reflective of the country’s genuine culture and identity, were growing among

certain circles of intellectuals. At the forefront of these debates was the journal Yeni Sinema or

New Cinema. At the time the Turkish film industry commonly known as the “Yesilçam

cinema” after the name of the Istanbul street where most of the film studios and distribution

companies were located, was going through its most prolific period managing to reach a

production of almost three hundred features a year by the early 1970s. Yesilçam was based on

big stars and small studios, and the main genres within which it produced were melodrama,

comedy, historical adventure, and detective/gangster films, while not shying away from martial

arts, soft-porn, and science-fiction. The cineastes and critics affiliated with Yeni Sinema,

however, like their intellectual counterparts in Iran, and many other places for that matter,

wrote passionately against their country’s popular cinema which they saw as formulaic,

escapist, and exploitative. In 1971, Halit Refiğ, a key figure both as a filmmaker and an

essayist, published his Ulusal Sinema Kavgasi or The National Cinema Dispute in which he
                                                                                                               
194  Quoted  in  A.  James  Arnold,  Modernism  and  Negritude:  The  Poetry  and  Poetics  of  Aimé  

Césaire  (Cambridge:  Harvard  University  Press,  1998),  66.  

 

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“drew attention to the anti-imperialist role of cinema similar to what the theoreticians of Third

Cinema promulgated, and stressed the importance of promoting cultural heritage.”195

The proponents of Yeni Sinema though, by and large, aspired to create an art cinema in

line with auteurist ideals, with the films finding most of their audiences among the middle

classes. In time, it was around the new concepts Ulusal Sinema and Milli Sinema, interrelated

and seemingly very similar, that the two main competing politico-aesthetic tendencies were

formed. Supporters of the Ulusal Sinema, a term that can be translated as “national cinema,”

argued for a cinema that would stand for the authentic cultural ways and values of “all Turkish

people” of different localities (to include those outside the political boundaries of the Republic

of Turkey) and different times (to include the pre-Islamic days). Milli Sinema also means

“national cinema,” but with a difference in nuance, as it was to uphold the Turkish-Islamic

culture and heritage of the people of the country, with a particular Ottoman coloring, as the

connotations of the word milli suggested. The rhetoric behind the Ulusal Sinema and Milli

Sinema were meant to promote a contemplation of the past, or two pasts rather, for the sake of

rejuvenating a collectivity seen as threatened by excessive Westernization. It is important to

note that in the Turkey of the 1960s and 1970s, as in contemporary Iran, critiques of this kind

were coming forth from various corners of the intellectual scene. The appearance in 1975 of

Mehmet Doğan’s Batililasma Ihaneti, or The Treachery that Is Westernization, represented one

particular form of social criticism; it shared strong comparable elements with Al-e Ahmad’s

critique of Occidentosis while never reaching its popular appeal and social impact.196

                                                                                                               
195  Gönül  Dönmez-­‐Colin,  Turkish  Cinema:  Identity,  Distance  and  Belonging  (London:  

Reaktion  Books,  2008),  39.  

 
196  Mehmet  Doğan,  Batililasma  Ihaneti  (İstanbul:  Yazar  Yainlari,  2012).  

  239  
 Today, in Tehran, there is a very large highway named after Al-e Ahmad that cuts

through the body of the city from east to west. He bemoaned, you remember, the “scattered

neighborhoods” of the fallen world of our new cities in Occidentosis. The modern city, its

promises and its hazards, was a recurrent theme for the Iranian intellectuals of the second half

of the twentieth century, and the Iranian filmmakers were not exempted from that. The debate

always included in it the experiences and perceptions of the city in relationship to its temporal

other, the countryside. The city against the country nexus, which once Williams so eloquently

conceived for literature, was a spatio-temporal plain wherein Iran’s “uneven development” was

clearly at work and productive. Tehran as the capital city, and as the city where the statement

of the Pahlavi era focused their claim to modernization, had a place apart from any other city in

the discourses produced either by the government or its critics. The city was featured

prominently in the New Wave cinema. Tehran, in its very materiality, left its traces on film.

“And I, a fetus now grown, roam about more modern than any modern man, in

search of brothers no longer alive.” When it comes to what we now call the “discourse of

authenticity” of the 1960s and 1970s, if there is one thing constantly in danger of desertion, is

the contemporariness of the people and texts that produced the talk about authenticity. That

quality, the modernness of many other claims to the past and traditions, are time and again

recognized. Not so easily when it comes to Iran. By juxtaposing the literature, writerly to begin

with, with the films of the New Wave it was one of my hopes to also allow that quality to come

to the surface. To remember their coevalness, if you will. That in their broken language, in

their lyricism, we can still hear a different voice. That they warned of the age of “machine
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
 

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culture,” of plagues and demons, but not always called cleansings. Al-e Ahmad finished the

last chapter of his Occidentosis, written in 1962 (the same year Pasolini composed those

verses) with these words: ‘

And now I, not as an Easterner, but as one like the first Muslims, who expected to
see the Resurrection on the Plain of judgment in their lifetimes, see that Albert
Camus, Eugene Ionesco, Ingmar Bergman, and many other artists, all of them from
the West, are proclaiming this same resurrection. All regard the end of human
affairs with despair. Sartre’s Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street
blindfolded; Nabokov’s protagonist drives his car into the crowd; and the stranger,
Meursault, kills someone in reaction to a bad case of sunburn. These fictional
endings all represent where humanity is ending up in reality, a humanity that, if it
does not care to be crushed under the machine, must go about in a rhinoceros’s skin.
And I see that all these fictional endings raise the threat of the final hour, when the
machine demon (if we don’t rein it in or put its spirit in the bottle) will set the
hydrogen bomb at the end of the road for humanity. On that note, I will rest my pen
at the Qur’anic verse: “The hour draws nigh and the moon is split in two.”197

                                                                                                               
197  Qur’an,  54:1.  

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 Filmography

1950s

Esfahan (Esfahan, Mohammad Qoli Sattar, 1957)

Persian Miniatures (Miniatorha-ye Irani, Mostafa Farzaneh, 1958)
The South of the City (Jonoob-e Shahr, Farrokh Ghaffary, 1958)

1960s

Persepolis (Takht-e Jamshid, Fereydoun Rahnema, 1960)

A Fire (Yek Atash, Ebrahim Golestan 1961)
Iran’s Crown Jewels (Ganjinehha-ye Gowhar, Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)
Wave, Coral, and Rock (Mowj, Marjan Va Khara, Ebrahim Golestan, 1962)
The House is Black (Khaneh Siah Ast, Forough Farokhzad, 1962)
Black and White (Sepid va Siah, Ebrahim Golestan, 1962)
The Hills of Marlik (Tapeha-ye Marlik, Ebrahim Golestan, 1963)
Rhythm (Rhythm, Manouchehr Tayyab, 1964)
The Sacred Arena (Gowd-e Moghadas, Hajir Darioush, 1964)
Serpent’s Skin (Jeld-e Mar, Hajir Darioush, 1964)
The Night of the Hunchback (Shab-e Ghoozi, Farrokh Ghaffary, 1964)
But Problems Arose (Vali Oftadeh Moshkelha, Hajir Darioush, 1965)
Face 75 (Chehreh 75, Hajir Darioush, 1965)
Woman and Animal (Zan va Heyvan, Mostafa Farzaneh, 1965)
Croesus’ Treasure (Ganj-e Qaroon, Siamak Yasami, 1965)
Siavash in Persepolis (Siavash Dar Takht-e Jamshid, Fereydoun Rahnema, 1965)
Rural Associations (Anjomanha-ye Roustai, Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)
The Harvest and the Seed (Kharman o Bazr, Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)
The Brick and the Mirror (Khesht O Ayeneh, Ebrahim Golestan, 1965)
Tehran is the Capital of Iran (Tehran Paytakht-e Iran Ast, Kamran Shirdel, 1966, released in
1980)
Broken Column (Sotun-e Shekasteh, Hushang Shafti, 1966)
Come Stranger (Biganeh Bia, Massoud Kimiai, 1966)
The Night It Rained (Un Shab Keh Baran Umad, Kamran Shirdel, 1967)
Taxi Meter (Taximetr, Nasser Taghvai, 1967)

  242  
The Sunny Barbershop (Arayeshgah-e Aftab, Nasser Taghvai, 1967)
Sword Dance (Raqs-e Shamshir, Nasser Taghvai, 1967)
Forough Farrokhzad (Forough Farrokhzad, Nasser Taghvai, 1967)
Beyond the Barrier of Sound (Ansou-ye Haiahou, Khosrow Sinai, 1968)
The House of God (Khaneh-ye Khoda, Abolqasem Reza’i, 1968)
Ahu Khanom’s Husband (Shohar-e Ahoo Khanom, Davood Mollapour, 1968)
The Cow (Gav, Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)
Caesar (Qaisar, Massoud Kimiai, 1969)
Dance of the Dervishes (Raqs-e Daravish, Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1969)
Resurrection: The Repair of Historical Monuments of Persepolis (Rastakhiz: Ta’mir-e Asar-e
Bastani-ye Takht-e Jamshid, Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1969)
The Hills of Qeytarieh (Tapehha-ye Qeytarieh, Parviz Kimiavi, 1969)
Palm Tree (Nakhl, Nasser Taghvai, 1969)
Wind of Jinn (Bad-e Jen, Nasser Taghvai, 1969)
The Lovers’ Wind (Bad-e Saba, Albert Lamorrise, 1969)
Minab’s Thursday Bazar (Panjshanbeh Bazar-e Minab, 1969)
Tranquility in the Presence of Others (Aramesh Dar Hozoor Digaran, Naser Taghvai, 1969)

1970s

The Window (Panjereh, Jalal Moqaddam, 1970)

The Bojnurd Dance (Raqs-e Bojnurd, Parviz Kimiavi, 1970)
Hassan the Baldy (Hassan Kachal, Ali Hatami, 1970)
Towghi (Towghi, Ali Hatami, 1970)
Oh Protector of Deer (Ya Zamen-e Ahou, Parviz Kimiavi, 1970)
From Bojnurd to Quchan (Bojnurd ta Quchan, Parviz Kimiavi, 1970)
Mashhad’s Bazar (Bazar-e Mashhad, Parviz Kimiavi, 1970)
Shiraz 70 (Shiraz-e 70, Parviz Kimiavi, 1970)
Turkoman Local Dances (Raqsha-ye Mahhalli-ye Turkaman, Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1970)
Adamak / Effigy (Adamak, Khosrow Haritash, 1971)
Gowharshad Mosque (Masjed-e Gowharshad, Parviz Kimiavi, 1971)
The Mustachioed Uncle (Amu Sibilu, Bahram Beyzai, 1970)
Deliverance (Rahai, Nasser Taghvai, 1971)
The Fifth Shiraz Festival of the Arts (Panjomin Jashn-e Honar-e Shiraz, Nasser Taghvai,
1971)

  243  
The Tale of the Peach Tree (Qesseh Derakht-e Holou, [based on Samad Behrangi’s short
story “One Peach, A Thousand Peach”, Hasan Tehrani, 1971)
Religions in Iran (Adyan dar Iran, Manouchehr Tayyab, 1971)
Southern Music: Zar (Musiqi-ye Jonoub: Zar, Nasser Taghvai, 1971)
P like Pelican (P Mesl-e Pelikan, Parviz Kimiavi, 1972)
Postman (Postchi, Dariush Mehrjui, 1970, released in 1972)
The Morning of the Fourth Day (Sobh-e Rooz-e Chaharom/ Kamran Shirdel, 1972)
The Journey (Safar, Bahram Beizai, 1971)
Downpour (Ragbar, Bahram Beizai, 1971)
Baba Shamal (Baba Shamal, Ali Hatami, 1972)
Ghalandar (Ghalandar, Ali Hatami. 1972)
Baluch (Baluch, Massoud Kimiai, 1972)
Bita (Bita, Hajir Darioush, 1972)
Dash Akol (Dash Akol, Massoud Kimiai, 1972)
Recess (Zang-e Tafrih, Abbas Kiarostami 1972)
Sadeq the Kurd (Sadeq Kordeh, Nasser Taghvai, 1972)
The Spring (Cheshmeh, Arbi Avanesian, 1972)
The Curse (Nefrin, Nasser Taghvai, 1973)
Tight Spot (Tangna, Amir Naderi, 1973)
The Mongols (Mogholha, Parviz Kimiavi, 1973)
A Simple Event (Yek Ettefaq-e Sadeh, Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1973)
Tangsir (Tangsir, Amir Naderi, 1973)
Soil (Khak, Massoud Kimiai, 1973)
Compromise (Sazesh, Mohammad Motavasselani, 1974)
Desert Caravans (Sarebanan-e Jaras, Kumars Derambakhsh, 1974)
The Secret of the Treasure of the Jinn Valley (Asrar-e Ganj-e Darre ye Jenni, 1974)
Harmonica (Saz Dahani, Amir Naderi, 1974)
Prince Ehtejab (Shazdeh Ehtejab, Bahman Farmanara, 1974)
Still Life (Tabiat-e Bijan, Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)
The Traveller (Mosafer, Abbas Kiarostami, 1974)
Under the Skin of the Night (Zir-e Poost-e Shab, Fereydoon Golleh, 1974)
Kandoo (Hornets Nest, Fereydoon Golleh, 1975)
In der Fremde / In Exile (Dar Ghorbat, Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974-1975)
The Stone Garden (Bagh-e Sangi, Parviz Kimoavi, 1975)
The Stranger and the Fog (Gharibeh Va Meh, Bahram Beizai, 1975)

  244  
The Deer (Gavaznha, Massoud Kimiai, 1975)
The Mina Cycle (Dayereh-ye Mina, Dariush Mehrjui, 1975)
Bamboo Fence, (Parchin, Arsalan Sassani, 1975)
Ghazal (Ghazal, Masoud Kimiai, 1976)
The Son of Iran Has No News From His Mother (Pesar-e Iran az Madarash Bikhabar Ast,
Fereydoun Rahnema, 1976)
Chess of Wind (Shatranj-e Bad, Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976)
Doorman (Saraydar, Khosrow Haritash, 1976)
Malakut (Malakut, Khosrow Haritash, 1976)
Wedding Clothes (Lebas-e Aroosi, Abbass KIarostami, 1976)
The Crow (Kalagh, Bahram Beizai, 1976)
Naked Till Noon with Speed (Berehneh ta Zohr ba Sor’at, Khosrow Haritash, 1976)
Isfahan The City of Light and Life (Esfahan Shahr-e Noor va Zendegi, Manouchehr Tayyab,
1977)
The Broken-Hearted Ones (Souteh Delan, Ali Hatami, 1977)
Reminiscence (Beh Yad, Khosrow Haritash, 1977)
The Report (Gozaresh, Abbas Kiarostami, 1977)
The Journey of the Stone (Safar-e Sang, Masood Kimai, 1977)
O. K. Mister (O. K. Mister, Parviz Kimiavi, 1978)
The Eulogy (Marsieh, Amir Naderi, 1978)
The Sealed Soil (Khak-e Sar Beh Mohr, Marva Nabili, 1978)
Tara’s Ballad (Cherikeh-ye Tara, Bahram Beizai, 1978)
Tall Shadows of the Wind (Sayeha-ye Boland-e Bad, Bahman Farmanfarma, 1978)
Dead-end (Bon-Bast, Parviz Sayyad, 1978)

  245  
 Selected Bibliography (English)

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. (Minneapolis:
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Selected Bibliography (Persian)

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Selected Bibliography (Turkish)

Daldal, Asli. 1960 Darbesi ve Türk Sinemasinda Toplumsal Gerçekçilik (İstanbul: Homer
Kibabevi, 2005)
Scognamillo, Giovanni. Türk Sinema Tarihi (İstanbul: Kabalci Yayinevi, 2003)

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Refiğ, Halit. Ulusal Sinema Kavgasi / National Cinema Dispute (İstanbul: Derâh Yayinlari,
2009)

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