Revolution or revelation?

IRAN: A CINEMATOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION

BY NADER TAKMIL HOMAYOUN

98 MINUTES, 2006

In the documentary film Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution filmmaker Nader Takmil Homayoun tells the story of a national cinema that escaped the clutches of Hollywood. Under the authoritarian regime of the Shah, Iran's cinema was destined to go down the road of many a national cinema that aspires to nothing more than the faceless internationalism of an increasingly sensationalist mainstream American cinema. But as acclaimed filmmaker Mohsen Makmalbaf states succinctly in the film: "Why should one country do our dreaming for us and impose its lifestyle?" Everything changed with the Islamic revolution, the forced abdication of the Shah, and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran in 1979. Khomeini's fierce anti-Americanism and ban on Hollywood films seems to have inadvertently benefited the development of Iranian cinema. If it were not for the burning of cinemas after the departure of the Shah and the ban on imagery, the Iranian cinema would not have been forced to reinvent itself.

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The documentary is shot in traditional style with talking-head interviews interspersed with historical footage and numerous, sometimes extended, film excerpts. The carefully selected interviews give voice to a wide range of Iranian filmmakers, and an authoritative female voice provides coherence and interprets the events for us. In one of the film's most insightful interviews, Makmalbaf states: "We have no image culture here, images are prohibited here for religious reasons. Our images come from poetry." During the first phase of the revolution, more than one hundred cinemas were destroyed. When Khomeini publicly declared his fondness for The Cow (1969, by Dariush Mehrjui), a film made ten years earlier during the Shah's regime, Iranian filmmakers sighed a collective breath of relief. It was a film suffused with the Iranian filmic poetry that remains the chief strength of this nation's cinema. But it also depicts images of abject rural poverty and thus signaled that certain images once suspect under the previous regime could be produced and viewed again.

Homayoun develops his argument alongside two major revolutions: the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Aided by several interviews with influential filmmakers and film producers, he outlines how these two major upheavals gave rise to the much less visible revolution of the cinema.

In the 1920s Russian theatre and cinema experienced an unparalleled and short-lived heyday. A stream of Russian immigrants to Iran also brought with them knowledge of this cinematic revolution. In the political theater, fear of spreading Bolshevism led the West to support dictatorships in neighboring countries in an effort to "contain" the USSR. Thus, Reza Shah Pahlavi came into power and his family ruled the country until 1979. While he led Iran into modernity by changing the country's infrastructure, the majority of the population lived in extreme poverty.

Iran chronicles the phenomenon of a national cinema of international acclaim that flourished in a clerical state and how it might, by the sheer power of its national acceptance, be able to gradually subvert the reactionary policies of its homeland. The documentary says little about such films as Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) or Jafar Panahi's The Circle (2000), yet both are applauded internationally and also widely viewed in the country itself.

Iran is a celebration of a cinema that fully deserves acclaim but viewers can sense that the breadth of the undertaking omits much of the struggle of individual filmmakers. Furthermore, the film pays homage to the subversive power of cinema itself as Iranian women and men found ways to manipulate the system in order to create their art. For example, Makmalbaf would suggest one regime-friendly film to the censors while shooting another. When required to present his film to the censors, he inserted the accepted footage only to remove it again for the final release version. When the censors caught on, it was too late. Then there is the sheer tenacity of the female director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad who refused to give in to the censors. She finally got her film made when the censor was replaced. One director explains how filmmakers were able to continue working during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s by timing the intervals between bomb detonations.

Iran seems intended for an audience already familiar with Iranian cinema; for instance, Kiarostami, the name most identified with Iranian film, is barely mentioned. Unfortunately, Homayoun's description of the poetry of Iranian cinema fails to be presented in congruence with rarely seen film montage scenes shown at the beginning; while some other fine points are also left unmentioned. Nevertheless, Homayoun does manage to provide a wide portrait of a national treasure waiting to be explored further.

JOHANNES BOCKWOLDT teaches screenwriting and film production at the School of Film and Animation at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.