nika_kმამა ბასილი გამოუშვიათ. შეგვიძლია საქმეში ჩავრთოთ
მაშ ასე, დიდი ხნის დაპირებული
Cinema Iran
http://www.allshares.ge/download.php?id=37595B6B14ეს, ვისაც კითხვა არ ეზარება
ranian movie making has always been surprising. And you don't have to be a
movie buff to agree.
Right from the start, cinema was unpredictable there. In most countries around
the world, it was the working classes who first took to cinema. Movies in
America, Europe and Asia were seen as unpretentious fairground attractions, a
million miles away from the seriousness of middle-class theatre and the like.
But in Iran at the dawn of the 20th century, it was the Shah and his court that
first took to the flickering novelty.
In the decades to come, ordinary Iranians flocked to comedies and musicals,
often influenced by Bollywood and Hollywood. The sets and costumes in these
films of the 1930s-1950s were often elaborate, the themes were modern romance or
ancient Persia. But looking back, the second surprising aspect of the country's
cinematic evolution was, by the late 1950s, becoming clear.
Where the first British filmmakers raided the novels of Charles Dickens for
their stories, the pioneering French directors went to the books of Marcel
Pagnol, and the Americans, to Nathaniel Hawthorn, the Iranians had no equivalent
novel tradition on which to draw. But they had something else, perhaps even
better: poetry. Poetry is in Iran's bloodstream. Even illiterate villagers quote
the writings of Khayaam, Ha'fez and Sadi, in everyday conversations. The
pioneering filmmakers do so as much as anyone. This is crucial, this is what
makes them seem like magicians today. If your influences are not the great plots
of Dickens or the characters of Hawthorn, but the dazzling philosophical
observation of your national poets, then of course your films will set out along
a very different track from those of other countries.
The first great one to do so also introduces the third surprise in Iranian film
history. Most people now accept that Faroogh Farrokzad's documentary about a
leper colony, The House is Black, made in 1962, is the first remarkable movie
made in the country. Farrokzad was a poet - no surprise there - and the film is
edited will the brilliance of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Less
predictably, Farrokzad was a woman. No other national cinema in the world has a
founding creative figure who is female.
This is ironic for obvious reasons, but the story gets more complicated when we
note that few in the West saw The House is Black when it was first made. Iranian
cinema remained unknown for a further eight years until a modest black and
white, unsubtitled movie by a 28 year old director, Dariush Mehrjui, was
smuggled to the Venice film festival. The film was The Cow, a poetic (again)
account of a man's love of, and obsession with, his cow, one of his village's
only source of income. The film won a top prize at Venice, was acclaimed
internationally, opened the door to Iranian cinema abroad, and was so
influential back home that it set the course of Iran's documentary-style, fable-
like art films for a generation to come. The surprise this time, the fourth in
Iranian film history was that the country's oncoming political storm would
propel The Cow, into an even more powerful limelight.
8 years after the film's success, in 1979, the Shah was deposed and replaced by
Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic. In one of his first speeches, Khomeini
said that cinema had become decadent and titillating (which is arguably true)
and that it must play a more helpful and educative role in building social and
religious values. He mentioned The Cow as an example of what films could be -
hence the surprise - then his government set in place a serious of notorious
restrictions on what filmmakers could show in movies: women's hair, romance,
sexual longing or touching of any sort, "demeaning violence", etc. A recipe for
worthy but dull movies, you'd think, but here's the fifth surprise: Khomeini's
prohibitions improved Iranian cinema. They freed filmmakers from market
influence. They forced them to be more allegorical in their work. They charged
them to raise their game by not being more than forgettably entertaining.
When these rules sunk in, Iranian cinema entered a golden age. Its most famous
filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, made Where is the Friend's House? in 1986, at a
time when Western cinema was at its shallowest, and the contrast was
remarkable. Thereafter, Kiarostami became one of the most surprising (that word
again) humane and innovative filmmakers in the world. Soon after that, his
acclaim was matched by a precocious, self-educated former revolutionary, Mohsen
Makhmalbaf, who had been imprisoned by the Shah for attempting to stab a
policeman. In 1996, Makhmalbaf made what I think is the signature film of the
1990s, A Moment of Innocence, in which the policeman himself - and Makhmalbaf -
each film their versions of the stabbing.
Kiarostami's and Makhmalbaf's unique way of turning reality over before our
eyes, like a plough tills soil, was Iranian cinema latest challenge to
expectations, but it was not the last. At the end of the 1990s, Makhmalbaf's
daughter Samira became the latest women to join the country's swelling rank of
female directors - far more, in proportion, than in the so-called free West.
Samira's film The Apple took the 1998 Cannes film festival by storm and she was
- wait for it - only 18. And Iran's box of cinematic magic tricks was still not
over. A few years later, Samira's younger sister, Hana, became, at 15, the
youngest director ever to play in a film festival's main competition.
So the magicians of Iranian film have been dazzling us for years now.
Predictably, when digital filming came along in the mid 1990s, they took to it
more intelligently, with more daring, than directors from any other country.
Mania Akbari's new film 20 Fingers is the latest example of this. Together such
filmmakers have won more prizes than another other national group of directors.
What they have lacked in money they have more than made up for creatively.
დოკუმენტური ფილმები კინოზე, მსახიობებზე,რეჟისორებზე, მხატვრებზე...
