Iranian film
The Iranian cinema (also Persian cinema ) was and is honored internationally with numerous awards and festivals. Many critics regard films by Iranian authors, directors and actors such as those of the filmmakers Jafar Panahi , Abbas Kiarostami , Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf or Majid Majidi as artistically leading and compare them with Italian neorealism and similar currents of the past decades. In addition to the actual Iranian cinema, the term also refers in a broader sense to the film culture of countries such as Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which are culturally closely interwoven with Iran . It also includes Persian-language films that appear in Europe or the USA, as well as works by Iranian filmmakers who use languages other than Iranian.
History of the film in Iran
Early developments
Probably the first filmmaker in the country was Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkas Bashi . Shah Mozaffar ed-Din attends a film screening in Contrexéville and then gave his court photographer Akkas Bashi the order to buy a camera from Gaumont . The film recordings of Mozaffar ed-Din Shah's visit to a flower exhibition in Ostend are likely to be the first film recordings by an Iranian.
The first motion picture theater in Iran was opened in Tehran in 1904 by Mirza Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi. Short films were shown without interruption while lemonades or other refreshments were served. Sahhafbashi was known for his support for the constitutional movement , which resulted in his having to close his cinema again after a month because his house was confiscated for political reasons and he went into exile.
On September 5, 1907, Russi Khan opened a cinema. In 1906 he started showing short films in the harem of Mohammed Ali Shah . A year later he showed his films publicly. Russi Khan maintained good contacts with the Qajar court, but could not prevent his cinema from being looted and destroyed in the turmoil of the Constitutional Revolution. Russi Khan also left the country and died in Paris in 1968.
Aradashes Batmagerian is considered to be the man who should finally succeed in running a cinema permanently in Tehran.
The first Persian-language sound film was the melodrama Dukhtar-e Lor by Abdolhossein Sepanta . The film was made in Bombay in Ardeshir Irani's company Imperial Films . Sepanta is considered the "father of Iranian sound films" and also directed later films such as Ferdousī (1934), the life story of the poet Abū l-Qāsem-e Ferdousī , and Shirin-o-Farhad (also 1934), a classic love story known in Iran , and Tscheschmhaye siah (1936) about Nadir Shah's bloody attack on India in 1738. His last work was the love story Laili-o-Majnun from 1937.
post war period
The country’s film art and industry at the time owed its progress in large part to two bustling personalities, Esmail Koushan and Farrokh Ghaffari . By founding the National Film Society at the Bastan Museum in 1949 and organizing the first week of film at which English productions were shown, Ghaffari laid the foundation for alternative films in Iran that were not primarily oriented towards commercial success.
| Iranian feature film production | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| year | number | ||||||
| 1975 | 68 | ||||||
| 1985 | 42 | ||||||
| 1995 | k. A. | ||||||
| 2005 | 26th | ||||||
Some of the film's milestones in Iran were: Aruse darya (1965), Siavash in Persepolis (1967), Khesht va Ayeneh (1967), Khaneye khoda (1966) and Shohar-e Ahu khanom (1968).
With the films Gheisar by Masud Kimiai and Gāv by Dariush Mehrjui , both released in 1969, alternative films got their place in the film industry. Attempts to set up their own film festival, which had begun in 1954 around the Golrizan Festival, bore fruit when the Sepas Festival took place for the first time in 1969. Ali Mortazawi's efforts resulted in the establishment of the Tehran World Festival in 1973.
The founding of the Kanun-e Parvaresh film center , a children and youth organization that was launched in 1965 on the initiative of Farah Pahlavi , was of particular importance for the training of young talent . Filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami and Bahram Bayzai produced films for children and adolescents under the direction of Firuz Shirvanlu . The films produced by the filmmakers on behalf of the youth organization were shown at the children's and youth film festival and awarded prizes. Particularly noteworthy are the film Reise with four prizes and the film Golbaran (" Rain of Flowers "). In addition to color films, black and white films were also produced. The film Rahai (“Liberation”) was shown at the Venice Film Festival and was awarded first prize in San Francisco. The films Junge , Saaz (“Musical Instrument”) and The Birds also received awards at the Venice Film Festival.
The films that were produced by children and young people in 8 mm format in the 3-month workshops also took part in international competitions and were awarded prizes. Several generations of young Iranians became enthusiastic about the film through the work of the film department of Kanun-e Parvaresh. Many Iranians are still active in film production at home and abroad. The Kanun-e Parvareshe program laid the foundations for this development. All films produced as part of the program were archived and copies were made available to film theaters in the country for screenings. A film archive attached to Kanun-e Parvareshe served as the country's media center . It acquired the showing rights to films especially suitable for children and young people, dubbed them and showed them free of charge on public holidays in the cultural centers of the children's and young people's libraries in the country. The high standard of Iranian film is attributed to the exemplary and then worldwide unique work of Kanun-e Parvaresh in this field.
Islamic Revolution
As part of the Islamic Revolution , over 125 cinemas were burned to the ground, with the arson attack on Cinema Rex in Abadan alone causing 430 deaths. In 1982 it was announced that of the 524 cinemas in Iran, only 313 were intact.
The Provisional Government of Mehdi Bāzargān , proclaimed by Ayatollah Khomeini, appointed Parviz Varjavand as Minister of Culture. The office responsible for showing films had been abolished, and there was no longer any office responsible for regulating film distribution and screenings.
Iranian cinema today
Nowadays, among the financially successful films in Iran are mostly commercial Iranian films. Foreign films are usually not shown in theaters because of a ban on films made in the West. However, heavily censored versions of classic and current Hollywood productions are broadcast on state television. However, uncensored versions are easy to get on the black market. Iranian art films are often not officially shown and can be viewed through readily available illegal DVDs. However, some of these critically acclaimed films were shown with great success in Iran, such as Rasul Sadr Amelis Man, taraneh, panzdah sal daram (“I am Taraneh, 15 years old”), Rakhshan Bani-E'temad's Zir-e Pust -e Shahr ("Under the Skin of the City"), Bahman Ghobadis Gomgashtei dar Aragh ( Lost in Iraq , 2002) and Manijeh Hekmats Zendān-e Zanān ("Women's Prison").
Iran’s international award-winning cinema is very different from domestically oriented films. The latter is tailored to a completely different audience, most of which are under 25 years old. This type of commercial Iranian cinema is largely unknown in the west as the films are targeted at local audiences. There are 2 types of this type of film:
- Films about the victory of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war that are full of strongly religious and national motifs
- formulaic films with well-known actors
With a selection of 130 Iranian films produced each year in the hope of broadcasting, cinema managers tend to prefer public-enjoyment comedies, romantic melodramas and family comedies to other genres. Marmoulak ("Lizard", 2004), Outsider , Aquarium , Truce , Mim Mesle Madar ("M for Mother", 2006), Glass Agency , Charlatan and Killing Crazy Dogs were among the most successful post-revolutionary films.
Minorities in the film: Kurds and Azeri
Bād Mā Rā Chāhad Bord (German: The Wind Will Carry Us ) by Abbas Kiarostami was the first film in 1999 that was at least partially shot in the Iranian part of Kurdistan and that made it to international film festivals. It was shown in Cannes and Venice.
The following year, two films from Kurdistan and even in Kurdish were shown at the Cannes Festival: Textê Reş, Takhte Siāh ( Black Boards ), after The Apple ( Sib , 1998), the second film by Samira Makhmalbaf , and Dema Hespên Serxweş, Zamāni barāye Masti Asb-hā ( Time of the Drunken Horses ) by the director Bahman Ghobadi . Ghobadi, who is himself a Kurd, was represented again in 2002 with Gomgashtei dar Aragh ( Lost in Iraq ) and was able to celebrate international success with this film. In 2004 his hit film Turtles Can Fly was released .
In 2005, Jamil Rostami , another Iranian film director of Kurdish origin, was honored. For Requiem of Snow he received the award for best director in Asia and the Middle East at the Fajr Festival in Tehran.
In 2002 a documentary by the filmmaker Mehdi Parizad appeared on the cinema of the Aseri , the āzarbāydjān minority. An exhibition on this topic was opened on January 10, 2005 in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.
literature
- Heike Kühn, Subversive Images. A look at current Iranian cinema , epd Film 7/2003, pp. 18–21
- Sandra Schäfer, Jochen Becker, Madeleine Bernstorff (eds.): Kabul / Teheran 1979ff - film landscapes, cities under stress and migration (metroZones 6) b_books, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-933557-55-0
- Hamid Naficy: A Social History of Iranian Cinema
- Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941 , Duke University Press 2011, ISBN 0-8223-4775-X
- Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941-1978 , Duke University Press 2011, ISBN 0-8223-4774-1
- Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 , Duke University Press 2012, ISBN 0-8223-4877-2
- Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010 , Duke University Press 2012, ISBN 9780822348788
- Hamid Reza Sadr: Iranian Cinema - A political history , London [u. a.]: Tauris, 2006, ISBN 1-84511-147-8
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Iranian Cinema ( Memento from October 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Cinema in Persia, Encyclopædia Iranica , p. 567-569.
- ↑ http://www.massoudmehrabi.com/articles.asp?id=1414606616
- ↑ World Film Production Report (excerpt) ( Memento from August 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Screen Digest, June 2006, pp. 205–207, accessed on October 3, 2015.