"Iranian New Wave 1960s-1970s" At Asia Society Illuminates An Influential But Little-Known Period Of Cinema History

THE COW (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

Mehrjui’s second film, based on a story by co-screenwriter Gholam-Hossein Saedi, is now a generally acknowledged landmark of Iranian cinema, but it was banned at the time because of its stark depictions of poverty in the countryside, which contradicted the Shah government’s efforts to promote Iran as a fully modernized country. When a man’s beloved cow and the pride of the village dies, he suffers a mental breakdown and eventually becomes convinced that he is his own cow. The village also collapses as a result, revealing the tenuous nature of its existence, since this one event manages to completely disintegrate its collective psychological stability. The Cow was smuggled to the 1971 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Critics Award, putting Iranian cinema solidly on the world stage; this allowed a belated release in Iran to great acclaim and popularity. The film also had an unlikely fan in the Ayatollah Khomeini, and The Cow has been credited with saving Iranian cinema from being banned completely after the 1979 revolution.

(November 2, 6pm)

THE LOST CINEMA (Jamsheed Akrami, 2007)

Akrami’s documentary, an updated version of his 1985 film Dreams Betrayed follows the development of Iranian New Wave cinema before the 1979 revolution. There are copious film clips of key works, along with interviews with filmmakers such as Dariush Mehrjui, Bahman Farmanara, and Parviz Sayyad (all represented in the series), as well as critics such as Andrew Sarris. The film illuminates the struggles and difficulties of directors to make works that spoke to Iranians’ real lives and to fully express themselves while working their way through the country’s censorship system. Some of these directors were forced into exile after Iran’s climate made it impossible for them to work. The Lost Cinema provides essential context in understanding this period of world cinematic history.

(November 8, 6:30, followed by director Q&A)

DOWNPOUR (Bahram Beyzaie, 1972)

Beyzaie’s debut feature Downpour was a major work of the Iranian New Wave that was nearly lost, with only one badly damaged surviving copy, the rest having been seized and presumably destroyed. Restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation and screened at last year’s New York Film Festival, this remarkable work has been rescued from oblivion. The plot concerns a teacher sent to a poor, conservative district of Tehran who encounters a young woman who is the sister of one of his students. After she confronts the teacher for expelling her brother from class, rumors spread concerning the two of them; these are initially baseless, but the teacher begins to develop romantic feelings for the young woman. Neo-realist style meshes here with more expressionist qualities in this potent allegory of state surveillance.

(November 15, 6:30pm)

THE NIGHT IT RAINED (Kamran Shirdel, 1967)

Kamran Shirdel, who studied filmmaking in Italy under such masters as Rossellini, Antonioni, and De Sica, made numerous documentaries focusing on the poor and marginalized in Iran sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Art. However, his films proved too revealing for governmental comfort, and he was eventually expelled from the country and forced into exile. One of Shirdel’s key works is The Night It Rained, a 35 minute film that examines a media story in which a village boy supposedly saved a train and its passengers from a fatal derailment. When Shirdel arrives at the village, he finds irresolvable contradictions between different accounts of the story, some defending its veracity, and others claiming it was completely made up. Shirdel doesn’t attempt to resolve this, putting all these opinions side by side, calling into question the possibility of arriving at a single truth among people’s self-serving agendas. The film ends with the repeated words, “It’s all a pack of lies,” which can be seen as making a statement of its own about Iran at that time.

(November 20, 6:30pm, part of the program “Kamran Shirdel – Social Documentaries”)

THE TRAVELER (Abbas Kiarostami, 1974)

The series concludes with this early classic by Kiarostami, about a young boy and diehard soccer superfan who scams and schemes his way to Tehran to watch a match with his favorite team. The film combines the sensitive portrayal of children that Kiarostami is renowned for with a tone that combines comic elements with more poignant moods. Kiarostami’s humanistic sympathy and psychologically acute observations of behavior were already in full flower.

(November 22, 6pm)