We are proud to present this excerpt from Godfrey's Cheshire's latest book, In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema.
Besides a newly written memoir of my 30 years covering Iranian cinema, and essays and reviews of the work of Kiarostami, Panahi, Farhadi and other auteurs, my book includes accounts of some of my seven trips to Iran. This excerpt concerns my first and most eye-opening visit, in 1997. – G.C.
“Nights in Tehran”. First published April 1997 in New York Press
My first day in Iran they took me to the big “Death to America” march. I was the only American. It’s no tribute to my paltry reserves of courage to say that I was never scared, but I wasn’t. I was simply too giddy with amazement, too inoculated by a rush of adrenaline that outlasted the experience by an hour. I was, in a word, tripping. It took a while before I calmed down enough to muse that this startling cultural baptism may have reflected a deliberate, and even shrewdly benign, strategy on the part of my Iranian hosts—show him the cliché first since everything to come will explode it.
I’m not sure how many people were at this event, since I have a hard time telling the difference between 50,000 and 100,000. But there are enough to fill one of Tehran’s grandest boulevards, Azadi Street, as far as the eye could see. I was with a group of foreign visitors to Iran’s annual film festival being led on a short, escorted visit to the massive outdoor celebration, which was, in fact, in honor of Islamic Revolution Day, Iran’s holiday honoring its birth as an Islamic Republic in 1979. “Death to America” actually was no more than a prominent sub-theme, though one that easily caught my notice.
“I’m glad you don’t understand the language,” said my translator with an embarrassed laugh after a truck rumbled by filled with young men shouting slogans, their fists in the air. No, I don’t speak the language, but I understood perfectly. The gist was the same as in those various murals and mobile art displays that, for example, showed a crippled Iranian veteran riding his wheelchair over the Stars and Stripes, or Uncle Sam being strafed by jet fighters.
I had only begun to digest this—I mean, to gape at such images and feel my heart start to thump double-time—when a short, intense but generally unthreatening-looking guy ran up to me, greeted me in English and asked, “Where you from?” It was sheer reflexes combined with a stubborn disinclination to go on the defensive, I guess, that made me say immediately, “America.”
I’m not sure his mouth fell open, but he was clearly thunderstruck—for two, maybe three seconds. Then he grinned a big, welcoming grin to beat the band. I thought he was going to hug me.
No doubt it was because of the setting, but this was merely the most dramatic instance of something that happened to me over and over in Iran.
The question naturally arose a lot because I stood out like an Eskimo at a clambake. Being blond and blue eyed, I felt like I was on stage every moment that I was in public, and it never took long before someone got around to asking where I was from. The truth, it turned out, virtually assured a warmer, more interested response than I would have gotten if I’d claimed to be Czech or Canadian, say.
“Iranians adore Americans,” said an Iranian friend who lives in the U.S. Apparently they do, even when enjoying a big “Death to America” street shindig. The guy I met at the Islamic Revolution Day march fell in step with me— people were strolling purposefully, patriotically, in both directions along the boulevard; it reminded me of the North Carolina State Fair back home—and I made cautious reference to the ambient, colorful diatribes against my homeland. He waved his arm as if to say, “Oh, that—pooh! Silly stuff, pay no attention.”
I got more elaborately apologetic dismissals of the official anti- Americanism from educated, upper-class Iranians, but this guy was blue- collar, an ordinary Tehrani Joe. He was very proud of being Iranian and of the Revolution this holiday commemorated. He spoke in tones of passionate reverence about “the Imam,” as Iranians call the late Ayatollah Khomeini. As regards the apparent differences between our countries, he was equally fervent in voicing an opinion that I would hear a lot in Iran: “Iranian people like American people. People have no problem. Problem is with governments.”
A couple of days later, I heard the opposite view when a Dutch journalist told me of being at a press conference where a reporter from Time asked Iran’s president, the genial and media-savvy Hashemi Rafsanjani, what was up with this “Death to America” stuff that’s still part of Iran’s celebration of its Revolution. Reportedly, Rafsanjani smiled regretfully and said the government had nothing to do with it, it was simply the spontaneous emotion of the people.
My own impression was that public anti-Americanism at this point is basically pro forma, and that the forma is increasingly outdated. Certainly, it was current 18 years ago when the U.S. was seen as backing a Shah that a huge number of Iranians wanted deposed, just as it was current 12 years ago when we were viewed as supporting Saddam Hussein (you remember our good friend Saddam) in the grueling, hugely destructive eight-year war that Iraq and Iran fought. But much has changed in the last decade, even in the last two or three years, and today there are signs that official thinking in Iran is swinging closer to the friendly views of the man in the street—a change that won’t make much difference, of course, unless our policy makers are sharp enough to take advantage of it.
One obvious reason for this turn of events is that the Islamic Republic is no longer struggling to come into being, or to beat back the onslaught of a massively armed neighbor. It is at peace, increasingly prosperous and full of the kind of buoyant self-confidence that comes with surviving a protracted ordeal. In its government, nuanced pragmatism has rapidly overtaken the ideological purism that used to determine everything. One Iranian acquaintance, however, offered me the view that not all of the recent changes are traceable solely to Iran’s own experience.
“The collapse of the Soviet Union really made them look at things differently,” he said of Iran’s leaders.“ They were really surprised. They saw that the Soviet Union didn’t lose a military war, it lost culturally. So they started to see that that’s what Iran is in with the U.S.—not a war but a contest that will come down to culture.
Which is one angle on why this regime takes movies very seriously indeed, and why being the lone American film critic here at the moment entails a surprising amount of local celebrity (one night I’m interviewed so many times that I tell someone I feel like Sharon Stone) as well as a constant sense of fascination with the surroundings. Movies, after all, are only the tip of the cultural iceberg. When we got back on the bus after leaving the Islamic Revolution Day march, my adrenaline still surging, I started noticing the graffiti on Tehran’s walls. Besides the scrawls in Persian script, there were some in English, mainly the names of rock bands: MEGADETH and METALLIKA [sic], and my favorite of all, IRAN MAIDEN.
Tehran reminds me of L.A., and not just because both are movie capitals, the former to the international art film right now, arguably, what the latter is, perennially, to the global biz. Both cities are also sprawling urban arrivistes in countries harboring older and more elegant metropolises, and both are jammed with serpentine freeways and roads thanks to their addiction to the automobile. Since the Revolution, many, many thousands of displaced Iranians have understandably migrated to L.A. They call it Tehrangeles.
Tehran, though, seems to be winning the race to choke itself to death on air pollution. Like L.A., it’s situated in a natural bowl that produces smog-trapping temperature inversions. Most days the air makes the city look as if a gray-brown scrim covers it. On the rare clear day, the effect is startling; the snow-blanketed Alborz Mountains skirting the city’s northern edge appear as present, sharp and luminous as a diorama. Higher than the Alps, their near reaches contain three world-class ski resorts that, during my visit in February and March, are magnets for Tehran’s wealthy and athletic on the Thursday-Friday weekend.
A grandly tree-shaded and extremely long avenue called Valiasr, Tehran’s own, dustier Champs-Élysées, bisects the city, dividing east from west. A more striking cultural divide, however, cuts in the opposite direction. Like the world itself, Tehran is composed of a rich north and a poor south. And in that fact lies a defining irony: While Iran’s Revolution was powered by the lower classes (though amply supported by the others) and had a decided socialist component wedged into its intellectual framework alongside the dominant Islamic fundamentalism, it didn’t result in anything like a classless society. One encompassing look at the city tells you that.
While the city center contains all the business and government stuff you would expect, Tehran is most striking at its extremes. The southern sections are by no means squalid, and some signs—like a recent upsurge in small, clean parks backed by the city’s aggressively innovative and forward-looking mayor—suggest that things are improving rapidly. But the south still has a struggling, Third World air; you could be in Cairo. In the north, you could be in Bel Air. There are Mercedes and mansions and movie producers.
My own experience of the city changes as familiarity increases. On first arriving I am with a largish group of foreign visitors (from places including Bosnia, Lebanon, Korea and Japan) to the Fajr Film Festival. We are put up at the Azadi Grand, a posh enclave in the swanky north; its stationery bears the ingenuous legend “ex-Hyatt,” advertising its pre-revolutionary identity. Initially I like the security of the place and the group setting. Then restlessness sets in, and I begin peeling off at lunch-time and exploring the city center on foot. Eventually I move myself downtown to a hotel near Ferdowsi Square that costs about a third of what the Azadi costs. But I decide that this place is still too insulated, so I move to an establishment I discover that is, in a word, aces. I dub it the Chelsea Hotel of Tehran. The Hotel Naderi.
One of the most popular films in the international section of Fajr is Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Seeing that Jarmusch seems to have a sizable following in Tehran, I suggest that he make his next episode of “Coffee and Cigarettes” at the Naderi. The hotel’s coffee shop has been a hangout for bohemians and intellectuals for a half century, and you couldn’t find a movie set that fits that role more perfectly. I am so awed by this place’s cool that I sometimes just sit and gaze at it long after my coffee is finished.
Granted, the hotel’s elegance is several decades in the past, and cleanliness isn’t a byword. But I met a German woman who’d been there for six months while negotiating to sell a mansion she owns in the north, and she put it well in saying, “The staff are the nicest people, and the atmosphere is just unbelievable.” The Naderi costs about $8.50 a night. But then, everything in Iran is incredibly cheap if you have dollars. It is a tourist mecca just waiting to happen.
* * *
Abbas Kiarostami, who in France and other parts of the world is considered not just the greatest of the Iranian cinema’s masters, but chief among the world’s, lives in a pleasant, unostentatious house in northern Tehran. When I go there for dinner one night late in the month I spend in Iran, I notice that the living room is decorated with lithographs by Akira Kurosawa. These, in a way, represent one Iranian’s defense against charges of ideological impurity.
When I asked Kiarostami, on first meeting him in New York a couple years ago, if he had come under suspicion for being so acclaimed in Europe, he said he had, and that it had made things uncomfortable for a while. Ironically, relief came from the most eminent of Japanese directors. When Kiarostami’s films were shown in Tokyo, Kurosawa issued a statement that said. “I believe the films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami are extraordinary. Words cannot relate my feelings... Satyajit Ray passed away and I got very upset. But having watched Kiarostami’s films, I thank God because now we have a good substitute for him.”
Kurosawa had spoken out similarly, it was reported, only for three other filmmakers—Ray, John Cassavetes and Andrei Tarkovsky. The endorsement from the East, Kiarostami told me, stopped the charges that he was a tool of the West.
A filmmaker facing similar problems that have yet to end, Mohsen Makhmalbaf may be second to Kiarostami in international regard, but on home turf it’s another story: He is a celebrity whose renown, as I have noted before, is comparable to that of John Lennon’s. How he got to that position is a story that could only happen in Iran.
A product of Tehran’s poor southern district, Makhmalbaf started out as an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist. Captured, at age 17, after an assault on a policeman, he was locked up by the Shah’s security apparatus and tortured for four years. When he was released by the Revolution, he still had never seen a movie, but that soon changed. An autodidact who became a prolific writer (he has now some 20 books to his credit), he fashioned himself as an Islamic fundamentalist auteur; his earliest films were shown in mosques.
Then, as his own beliefs began to shift away from orthodoxy, Makhmalbaf made a series of films (The Peddler, The Cyclist, Marriage of the Blessed) that lashed out at injustices in Iranian society and culture while championing the poor, the scorned, the disenfranchised and war damaged. It was these movies that established him as a passionately revered national icon.
Yet the fact that Makhmalbaf converted from fundamentalism to stinging social criticism to, more recently, a kind of ecstatic cinematic poetry that brings to mind Rumi has not endeared him to his former brethren among the true believers, including those in the cinema establishment. On the contrary, he has been the target of ideological campaigns, and five of his films have been banned. His most recent, Gabbeh, was recently released in Iran only after getting a personal thumbs up, I’m told, from the nation’s current spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Makhmalbaf has not taken the attacks against him lying down. Gritty and unapologetic, he has returned the metaphorical fire without hesitation, and has recently announced that he’s so fed up with the obstructions Iran puts in front of its artists that he will make his next film in India. In a conversation with German director Werner Herzog that was printed in an Iranian film magazine, Makhmalbaf seemed to sum up his entire career in a single aphorism. “It is easier to attack an armed policeman with your bare hands than to attack ignorance with culture,” he declared.
The warmest, most down-to-earth and charismatic of Iranian directors, he takes me one day to see a famous mosque in southern Tehran, where he still lives. For once, I’m not the one that everyone is staring at. Women in chadors shyly approach him and ask for autographs. Another day a fax arrives from the head of the Singapore Film Festival saying, “Gabbeh is the most beautiful film I have ever seen.” This and the eye toward India make sense: Makhmalbaf is as opposed to Hollywood’s mechanistic brutality as he is to orthodox intolerance. His spirituality, like his cinema, belongs to the East.
Book Excerpt: In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema by Godfrey Cheshire. Roger Ebert, January 13, 2023.
My returning to work on a book about Iranian cinema that I’d put aside years ago, followed by the decision to produce the book independently, and then the choice of supporting this effort with an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign were all things set in motion by one terrible event: the death of Abbas Kiarostami.
That happened last July 4 in Paris, and it was a profound shock. I knew Kiarostami had been hospitalized for months in Tehran, but gleaned that he had turned a corner and was on the mend. Though it seemed his recuperation would take months, he had already mapped out plans for a new feature to be shot in China, and even in his hospital bed was putting finishing touches on the partly computer-generated feature “24 Frames” (which premiered in Cannes and will have a U.S. opening in the coming months).
His unexpected death was a jolt not only because I regard him as one of past century’s greatest artists in any medium, one whose work I’ve been writing about for a quarter century. More than that, he was a good friend. When I first met him in 1994, there was an immediate rapport, mainly, I think, because he sensed I got both his intelligence and his playful wit.
I was with him when “Taste of Cherry” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and “The Wind Will Carry Us” captured the Silver Lion at Venice. I visited him often at his home in north Tehran, where we discussed a vast array of topics ranging from the cinema of Jim Jarmusch to the poetry of William Carlos Williams (this was years before Jarmusch made a film that invoked Williams’ poetry and starred an Iranian actress.)
Once when I elected to spend a summer in Tehran, his generosity was boundless. He allowed me to interview him at length about all this films. In his battered Land Rover, he took me and his younger son, Bahman, on a bumpy five-hour road odyssey to the ruined rural village where he shot his Koker Trilogy. I know he developed friendships with other critics, but he always made me feel ours was special. The last time I saw him, he told me he regarded me as a member of his family.
The decision I made on hearing of his death was not at all rational or carefully considered. It was instinctual and almost instantaneous. I thought, “I now must finish that book.” It was the first and best thing I could think of to pay tribute to him.
I set the book aside originally for multiple reasons, mainly professional. In 2001, after I was laid off by New York Press, where I’d been chief film critic for a decade, my good friend and colleague Matt Zoller Seitz predicted that I would prove to be “the canary in the coal mine.” He was right. In the coming years, the Internet’s impact on print journalism decimated the number of writers earning a living as staff film critics.
I wasn’t too dismayed by this personally, though I considered the phenomenon a cultural blight. I’d long ago had the idea of emulating my heroes in the French New Wave by reaching a certain status as a critic, then leapfrogging into filmmaking. So I started working on various film and TV projects, both dramatic and documentary. The first of these to bear fruit was my documentary “Moving Midway.” (I’ve also kept my hand in as a critic, most recently writing for RogerEbert.com.) Meanwhile, the Iranian cinema book was out there, but drifting further and further away…until Abbas’ death.
The book I’m returning to is different than the one I originally set out to write. That one was meant to be an original-content book about Iranian cinema and I was determined “Kiarostami” would not be in the title, because I understood the view of many Iranians that his renown unfairly eclipsed the reputations of other great directors. The book I’ve resumed working on I’m calling “In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema,” not only in tribute to him but also in recognition that it covers the era in Iranian cinema that he dominated, and that ended with his death.
Roughly a third of the book will be new, unpublished writings. There are a couple of reasons why two-thirds of it will be previously published materials. First, I’ve often been told that my work introduced Kiarostami and Iranian cinema to Americans, and I’d like the book to be a record of that which indicates how my coverage evolved over time. Second, I know that some of my earlier pieces are taught in university courses yet teachers find many hard to access. Readers of this article may find one reason for that a bit shocking.
I wrote the New York Times’ first piece about Kiarostami, just as I did its first piece about my Taiwanese friend Edward Yang. Yet those pieces, along with others I wrote about Iranian cinema, cannot be found on the Times website because a few years ago the paper decided it would rather expunge them than pay us poor scribes for our digital rights. So much for “the newspaper of record.”
If those comments hint at my distant roots in DIY/punk media, they perhaps also point toward my decision to create the book independently. In recent months I’ve been working on an anthology that includes some of my writing with a young British guy who lives in Brooklyn and approached me saying he’d run an indie music label but wanted to start his own imprint to publish film books. He was so terrific to work with as an editor on the other book that, when I told him about my Iran book and he offered to work with me on that, I instantly accepted. Yet we both knew that getting from here to there would require some funding for things ranging from travel to translation. What to do?
I looked at various options until a 25-year-old friend convinced me to consider crowd-funding. Being a guy whose mind is still tied to the 20th century, such things are beyond my usual ken. But the more I looked at it, the more sense it made. People all said, “It’s a lot of work.” And guess what? It’s a helluva lot of work. But we started in early June, have reached more than half our goal, and are extending our Indiegogo campaign till the end of July.
I put together a team that included three people besides myself. Recently we added another member: a guy named Sujewa Ekanayake, who contacted us offering his services as a campaign manager (a role he’d recently played on a campaign by friend Matt Seitz). He has been super-industrious and highly effective, utilizing skills and knowledge that none of the rest of us have.
While I started out thinking that money was the campaign’s main point, I quickly saw that, in connecting us with literally thousands of people around the world, the Indiegogo page has created what’s essentially a massive pre-release publicity blitz for the book. It’s also re-connected me with me with lots of friends I haven’t heard from in ages, and with fellow lovers of Iranian culture and cinema.
I now realize that the book and the Indiegogo campaign don’t represent a goal, an end point, but rather a new beginning for me as a critic. When I went back to Iran in April, to take part in a Kiarostami tribute where I was the only American, it struck me that I had been granted a unique opportunity and privilege as the only U.S. critic to visit post-Revolutionary Iran six times.
I was honored to learn about its cinema close-up, and to write about it for a number of illustrious publications. I also delved deeply into Iranian philosophical thought and took part in a number of efforts to use cinema to improve relations between the U.S. and Iran — a cause as pressing now as it was 20 years ago.
All of this means more and more to me in retrospect. It has also made me determined to resume my engagement with Iran and its cinema; I already have a number of projects on the drawing boards. That’s a lot to thank Abbas Kiarostami for, but I do, fondly.
How Abbas Kiarostami Changed My Life: Godfrey Cheshire Reflects on a Master Filmmaker. By Godfrey Cheshire. IndieWire, July 4, 2017.
In
celebration of the opening of “Kiarostami: Beyond the Frame,” Oklahoma City
Museum of Art members were treated to an exclusive lecture by Godfrey Cheshire
examining the extraordinary scope and vision of Abbas Kiarostami’s filmmaking
career.
Godfrey
Cheshire is an award-winning film critic, journalist, and filmmaker based in
New York City. A specialist in Iranian cinema, he has written about the subject
for publications including the New York Times, Variety, Newsweek, Film Comment,
and Cineaste. He is a co-founder of the Iranian Film Festival New York and the
author of “Conversations with Kiarostami” (2019) and “In the Time of Kiarostami:
Writing on Iranian Cinema” (2022).
“Kiarostami:
Beyond the Frame” is on view at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art October 15,
2022-April 9, 2023 and is accompanied by weekly screenings of Kiarostami’s
films in the Museum’s Noble Theater. This exhibition was organized by the
Oklahoma City Museum of Art in association with The Kiarostami Foundation.
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, December 21, 2022.
Docunight
founder Ahmad Kiarostami appeared in conversation with film critic Godfrey
Cheshire to discuss the importance of Iranian documentary film. Kiarostami,
whose late father is the renowned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, is a
champion of Iranian documentary films and their power to tell diverse stories
from his homeland. (54 min., 18 sec.). Ahmad Kiarostami was the guest curator
for “So You Think You Know Iran,” a documentary film series presented by Asia
Society at the Movies in April 2022.
Asia Society, April 23, 2022.
In
theory, a fundamentalist religious dictatorship should not be a hospitable
environment for an extraordinary artistic flowering whose treasures
continue—four decades later—to please, confound, and reinvent themselves to
audiences around the world. Yet this seems to be exactly the case with Iran’s
cinematic output since 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers
consolidated power in the wake of the Shah’s departure. (The Shah was himself a
tyrant, but of the kind who sought to project a modern and art-friendly image.)
We are all familiar with artists, writers, and filmmakers circumventing
official and de facto censors to produce subversive masterpieces. But the
consistency of Iranian cinema’s march across the world stage over the last
30-plus years suggests that something more powerful than individual creativity
is at play—rather, a kind of relentless cultural force inexorably punching
through whatever obstacles an authoritarian government places in its way.
The movies did not come especially late to Iran, nor was there a shortage of talented auteurs. This makes it all the more astonishing that so much of the international acclaim for Iranian cinema came after the establishment of the Islamic Republic. This artistic space was occupied by the most celebrated (at least in the West) of Iranian filmmakers: among others, Abbas Kiarostami, who died in 2016; Mohsen Makhmalbaf; Bahram Beyzai; Dariush Mehrjui; Jafar Panahi; and Asghar Farhadi, who in recent years has twice won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, putting him on a short and highly distinguished list with Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Ingmar Bergman.
That information about Farhadi is a throwaway fact I learned while reading In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema (2022), film critic Godfrey Cheshire’s account of his decades-long association with Iranian films. Born and educated in North Carolina, Cheshire moved to Greenwich Village in 1991 to write for The New York Press, at the time the main competition to The Village Voice for readers of Gotham’s alternative weeklies. Serendipitously, this was also around the time Iranian films began to crop up on the festival circuit and garner critical notice. Few of those observers, however, were as smitten as Cheshire, who went on to visit Iran seven times and become personally acquainted with some of the giants of Iranian cinema, including Kiarostami—whom he describes on the dedications page as a “phenomenal artist, inspiration, and ever-generous friend.”
Engagement with Kiarostami, who is today virtually synonymous with the movement known as the New Iranian Cinema, comprises the largest and most substantive section of Cheshire’s book. It is preceded by two autobiographical chapters on the author’s involvement with Iranian cinema, original writing as well as republished journalism, and followed by a too-brief treatment of other Iranian filmmakers via previously issued reviews and conversations. Still, In the Time of Kiarostami is a worthy and insightful companion for those looking to climb the heights of Iranian cinema, a journey on which scaling Mount Kiarostami is simply unavoidable and undoubtedly for one’s betterment.
The author’s admitted lack of critical distance from Kiarostami is not so much a problem as it might seem. Cheshire, along with a handful of other alt-weekly critics like The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, was an early champion of the famed Iranian director long before their friendship began, and his initial euphoric feelings have long since been vindicated. However, this discovery of Kiarostami was only “early” in the context of international film criticism: by the early 1990s, he had been making films for a little over 20 years, starting as a house director for the state-run Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (known colloquially in Persian as “Kanoon”). Kanoon, founded with the support of Queen Farah Pahlavi, was a redoubt for left-wing artists, including filmmakers associated with the Iranian New Wave (roughly 1963–74). Kiarostami’s career spans the Iranian New Wave, the tumultuous revolutionary period, and the New Iranian Cinema, but he first came to the attention of international critics with the release of Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), perhaps the most sublime film ever made about childhood, which would become the first entry in his unofficial Koker trilogy.
Kiarostami was not one to make overtly political statements, in his films or in public commentaries. One major exception was First Case, Second Case (1979), his first film following the ouster of the Shah. This short work displays the ideological contradictions of postrevolutionary governance—when the act of defying authority, the very impulse which birthed the new regime, is criminalized. First Case, Second Case presents its argument as a classroom parable, in which a teacher removes an entire row of students from class because one of them repeatedly makes disruptive noises under the desk. In the first episode, one student decides to break this solidarity so he can return to his seat; in the next, the students leave the room and resolve not to betray the guilty student, even though it would allow them to reenter class.
Prior to showing the finales of the scenarios in First Case, Second Case, Kiarostami records interviews with the parents of the children playing the students, a diverse group that includes retirees, manual laborers, an accountant, and a navy colonel. What would they want their children to do? The answers vary but all center on whether the lesson of solidarity is worth more than a week of school.
Following the enactment of each finale, Kiarostami turns to prominent writers, experts, community leaders, politicians, and clerics to comment on the students’ choices. Most are sympathetic to the students who refuse to name the disruptive student and even condemn the teacher for practicing collective punishment. On these remarkable scenes, Cheshire writes: “Such anti-authoritarian views coming from the authorities themselves would have been unimaginable a few months before and would be so again a few months later—a prognosis that, as it turned out, was confirmed by the career of the film.” Fittingly for a film exposing the anxieties of a new political era, First Case, Second Case was first honored with an award and then totally banned (even for international export) by the young Islamic Republic.
Like the revolution itself, First Case, Second Case serves as a transition work from one period of Kiarostami’s career to another. In the decade before the revolution, Kiarostami directed four feature films, all of which are thematically rich and skillfully crafted but do not leave a distinct mark on the Iranian cinema of their time. They were squarely in the tradition of the Iranian New Wave, a realist cinema best exemplified by The House Is Black (1963), a raw 20-minute exploration of a leper colony by the poet Forugh Farrokhzad, and Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969), which placed the social deprivation experienced by rural Iranians in stark, psychologically harrowing relief. (The latter film angered the Shah’s government but found a crucial admirer in Khomeini.) In part inspired by the Italian neorealists, these films sought to lay bare the social inequalities and economic injustices of the Shah’s Iran. The failure of the 1979 revolution to resolve these inequities serves as a running theme in the succeeding New Iranian Cinema, a cinematic “wave” that continues to this day.
In isolation, the same perhaps is true of Where Is the Friend’s House?, Kiarostami’s first fictional work after First Case, Second Case, and the first in his Koker trilogy. But it was also the beginning of a legendary run of films that would help define what was most intriguing about the New Iranian Cinema, at least for viewers outside Iran—a critical distinction because, as Cheshire relays, Kiarostami in his lifetime was seldom viewed domestically as the country’s best director. His reputation in the West largely rests on six films he made between 1987 and 1999: The Koker trilogy, Close-Up, Taste of Cherry, and The Wind Will Carry Us. During Kiarostami’s meteoric rise, it was not uncommon to hear him dismissed by Iranians at home and in the diaspora as a festival director indifferent to the desires of Iranian cinemagoers. There are echoes here of criticism made of Kurosawa, whose films were thought to reflect more what a Western audience wanted to see in Japanese cinema.
In the book’s most perceptive essay, Cheshire makes two requests for admirers and detractors of Kiarostami’s work during this time, which he calls the “Masterworks Period.” To those who have judged Kiarostami’s work to be overrated or tedious, Cheshire implores them to “realize that the order in which you approach the films is crucial to how you understand them. Above all, view the Koker Trilogy in sequence, as a basis for watching the other films.” To the enthusiasts, he implores they go beyond placing Kiarostami within the context of Great International Auteurs and instead locate his work within Persian literary culture—in other words, to momentarily resist the urge to universalize the director’s work.
Having entered Kiarostami’s masterworks oeuvre at the wrong place myself, the first piece of advice struck me as quite sound. Clearly, Cheshire was prompted to offer it by the polarizing response to Taste of Cherry at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Though that film ended up sharing the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, it earned the jeers of certain critics and viewers who disliked this slow-moving account of a suicidal man traversing the outskirts of Tehran in search of someone willing to bury his body. Leading this pack was Roger Ebert, who called Taste of Cherry “excruciatingly boring.” Cheshire attributes this reaction to those critics not putting the film in its sequential and cultural context. (In fairness to Ebert, as Cheshire notes, he did add that Taste of Cherry generated many fascinating movie reviews—an indication that the late Chicago Sun-Times reviewer was really stating what he believed art films are for, rather than simply panning Taste of Cherry.)
To begin with the Koker trilogy is probably the best choice for the initiate, but it also helps to go in understanding how this unintended trilogy plays with temporality, genre, and form. Where Is the Friend’s House? is an affecting film about a child looking to return a notebook to a friend who lives one town over. The boy’s journey from Koker to Poshteh and back evokes for me the dramas of childhood that seem trivial in retrospect but once colored my entire world. Where Is the Friend’s House? unashamedly inhabits the child’s perspective, and Kiarostami shows that these experiences are as profitable a basis for good art as any other. For an artist operating under the Islamic Republic’s gaze, sometimes with its critical support, childhood also offers important narrative possibilities. If done less explicitly than in First Case, Second Case, student-teacher interactions can serve as a relatable demonstration of the capricious and unjust use of authority.
Where Is the Friend’s House? is the only entry in the Koker trilogy that resembles a conventional movie. The following two films, And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), were made in the wake of the 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake, which killed an estimated 50,000 people and left many more injured and homeless. The villages featured in Where Is the Friend’s House? were hit especially hard. Coming a mere two years after the end of the devastating Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), the earthquake exacerbated the pain and suffering rural families in Northern Iran were already enduring. Since Kiarostami seldom employed professional thespians for his films based in Iran, the actors in the film were drawn from the population of the villages, people directly affected by the disaster. In And Life Goes On, an actor (in real life, an unassuming economist whom Kiarostami encountered) playing Kiarostami returns to Koker and Poshteh with his son to find out if the cast members from Where Is the Friend’s House? survived. In Through the Olive Trees, another actor (this time a professional, Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz) plays Kiarostami, now reenacting the filming of And Life Goes On.
Watching these films as bodies continue to be excavated from the February 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the latter similarly pre-ravaged by man-made cruelty, it is impossible not to be moved by Kiarostami’s refusal to separate cinema from its participants. We are already emotionally invested in the characters of Where Is the Friend’s House? and, in And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, we now care for them as people. Kiarostami’s simple humanity might be the skill most evident in these sequels. It is also, however, easy to understand why some Iranians at the time saw these films as exploitative, despite appearing to international audiences as overwhelmingly empathetic.
Intensely self-critical and autobiographical, Kiarostami would go on to make a film in 1999 (The Wind Will Carry Us) about a news-crew director visiting a rural Kurdish village in the hopes of filming their rustic funeral rituals. Is this a thinly veiled alter ego contending with the dark ambulance-chasing underbelly of the filmmaker’s art? As Cheshire writes, “Kiarostami leaves numerous gaps in the film’s surface that invite, even demand, our imaginative participation.” There are various other autobiographical and symbolic readings of Kiarostami’s work, which Cheshire explores. But the director’s idiosyncratic style casts an interminable, enigmatic shadow over his output—one reason why his films provide a hefty return on repeated viewings. There are always new layers to uncover, hitherto unseen symbols to be interpreted and subsequently reinterpreted. Reducing a Kiarostami picture to a specific theme or two (or worse, “morals”) is as futile as doing the same to one’s own life.
In addition to the natural disaster that provoked And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, those films also reflected new artistic preoccupations for Kiarostami that arose with Close-Up (1990). In simple terms, Close-Up tells the story of a con man who convinces a stagnant upper-middle-class family that he is the socially conscious and politically audacious Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Makhmalbaf is, of course, a real person—and so is this story. But to say it is “based on a true story” would undersell its genius, as Close-Up itself became very much part of the story and has long since overtaken the events it supposedly depicts. Remarkably, Kiarostami secured the agreement of virtually everyone involved—Makhmalbaf, the fake Makhmalbaf (Hossain Sabzian), the victimized family, and the judge assigned to the case—to participate in the film. A bold mixture of reenactment, documentary footage, and a wonderfully staged climax, Close-Up was a complete departure from anything Kiarostami had done before and put him on a path of gutsy experimentation that would continue until his death in 2016.
The movies did not come especially late to Iran, nor was there a shortage of talented auteurs. This makes it all the more astonishing that so much of the international acclaim for Iranian cinema came after the establishment of the Islamic Republic. This artistic space was occupied by the most celebrated (at least in the West) of Iranian filmmakers: among others, Abbas Kiarostami, who died in 2016; Mohsen Makhmalbaf; Bahram Beyzai; Dariush Mehrjui; Jafar Panahi; and Asghar Farhadi, who in recent years has twice won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, putting him on a short and highly distinguished list with Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Ingmar Bergman.
That information about Farhadi is a throwaway fact I learned while reading In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema (2022), film critic Godfrey Cheshire’s account of his decades-long association with Iranian films. Born and educated in North Carolina, Cheshire moved to Greenwich Village in 1991 to write for The New York Press, at the time the main competition to The Village Voice for readers of Gotham’s alternative weeklies. Serendipitously, this was also around the time Iranian films began to crop up on the festival circuit and garner critical notice. Few of those observers, however, were as smitten as Cheshire, who went on to visit Iran seven times and become personally acquainted with some of the giants of Iranian cinema, including Kiarostami—whom he describes on the dedications page as a “phenomenal artist, inspiration, and ever-generous friend.”
Engagement with Kiarostami, who is today virtually synonymous with the movement known as the New Iranian Cinema, comprises the largest and most substantive section of Cheshire’s book. It is preceded by two autobiographical chapters on the author’s involvement with Iranian cinema, original writing as well as republished journalism, and followed by a too-brief treatment of other Iranian filmmakers via previously issued reviews and conversations. Still, In the Time of Kiarostami is a worthy and insightful companion for those looking to climb the heights of Iranian cinema, a journey on which scaling Mount Kiarostami is simply unavoidable and undoubtedly for one’s betterment.
The author’s admitted lack of critical distance from Kiarostami is not so much a problem as it might seem. Cheshire, along with a handful of other alt-weekly critics like The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, was an early champion of the famed Iranian director long before their friendship began, and his initial euphoric feelings have long since been vindicated. However, this discovery of Kiarostami was only “early” in the context of international film criticism: by the early 1990s, he had been making films for a little over 20 years, starting as a house director for the state-run Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (known colloquially in Persian as “Kanoon”). Kanoon, founded with the support of Queen Farah Pahlavi, was a redoubt for left-wing artists, including filmmakers associated with the Iranian New Wave (roughly 1963–74). Kiarostami’s career spans the Iranian New Wave, the tumultuous revolutionary period, and the New Iranian Cinema, but he first came to the attention of international critics with the release of Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), perhaps the most sublime film ever made about childhood, which would become the first entry in his unofficial Koker trilogy.
Kiarostami was not one to make overtly political statements, in his films or in public commentaries. One major exception was First Case, Second Case (1979), his first film following the ouster of the Shah. This short work displays the ideological contradictions of postrevolutionary governance—when the act of defying authority, the very impulse which birthed the new regime, is criminalized. First Case, Second Case presents its argument as a classroom parable, in which a teacher removes an entire row of students from class because one of them repeatedly makes disruptive noises under the desk. In the first episode, one student decides to break this solidarity so he can return to his seat; in the next, the students leave the room and resolve not to betray the guilty student, even though it would allow them to reenter class.
Prior to showing the finales of the scenarios in First Case, Second Case, Kiarostami records interviews with the parents of the children playing the students, a diverse group that includes retirees, manual laborers, an accountant, and a navy colonel. What would they want their children to do? The answers vary but all center on whether the lesson of solidarity is worth more than a week of school.
Following the enactment of each finale, Kiarostami turns to prominent writers, experts, community leaders, politicians, and clerics to comment on the students’ choices. Most are sympathetic to the students who refuse to name the disruptive student and even condemn the teacher for practicing collective punishment. On these remarkable scenes, Cheshire writes: “Such anti-authoritarian views coming from the authorities themselves would have been unimaginable a few months before and would be so again a few months later—a prognosis that, as it turned out, was confirmed by the career of the film.” Fittingly for a film exposing the anxieties of a new political era, First Case, Second Case was first honored with an award and then totally banned (even for international export) by the young Islamic Republic.
Like the revolution itself, First Case, Second Case serves as a transition work from one period of Kiarostami’s career to another. In the decade before the revolution, Kiarostami directed four feature films, all of which are thematically rich and skillfully crafted but do not leave a distinct mark on the Iranian cinema of their time. They were squarely in the tradition of the Iranian New Wave, a realist cinema best exemplified by The House Is Black (1963), a raw 20-minute exploration of a leper colony by the poet Forugh Farrokhzad, and Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969), which placed the social deprivation experienced by rural Iranians in stark, psychologically harrowing relief. (The latter film angered the Shah’s government but found a crucial admirer in Khomeini.) In part inspired by the Italian neorealists, these films sought to lay bare the social inequalities and economic injustices of the Shah’s Iran. The failure of the 1979 revolution to resolve these inequities serves as a running theme in the succeeding New Iranian Cinema, a cinematic “wave” that continues to this day.
In isolation, the same perhaps is true of Where Is the Friend’s House?, Kiarostami’s first fictional work after First Case, Second Case, and the first in his Koker trilogy. But it was also the beginning of a legendary run of films that would help define what was most intriguing about the New Iranian Cinema, at least for viewers outside Iran—a critical distinction because, as Cheshire relays, Kiarostami in his lifetime was seldom viewed domestically as the country’s best director. His reputation in the West largely rests on six films he made between 1987 and 1999: The Koker trilogy, Close-Up, Taste of Cherry, and The Wind Will Carry Us. During Kiarostami’s meteoric rise, it was not uncommon to hear him dismissed by Iranians at home and in the diaspora as a festival director indifferent to the desires of Iranian cinemagoers. There are echoes here of criticism made of Kurosawa, whose films were thought to reflect more what a Western audience wanted to see in Japanese cinema.
In the book’s most perceptive essay, Cheshire makes two requests for admirers and detractors of Kiarostami’s work during this time, which he calls the “Masterworks Period.” To those who have judged Kiarostami’s work to be overrated or tedious, Cheshire implores them to “realize that the order in which you approach the films is crucial to how you understand them. Above all, view the Koker Trilogy in sequence, as a basis for watching the other films.” To the enthusiasts, he implores they go beyond placing Kiarostami within the context of Great International Auteurs and instead locate his work within Persian literary culture—in other words, to momentarily resist the urge to universalize the director’s work.
Having entered Kiarostami’s masterworks oeuvre at the wrong place myself, the first piece of advice struck me as quite sound. Clearly, Cheshire was prompted to offer it by the polarizing response to Taste of Cherry at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Though that film ended up sharing the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, it earned the jeers of certain critics and viewers who disliked this slow-moving account of a suicidal man traversing the outskirts of Tehran in search of someone willing to bury his body. Leading this pack was Roger Ebert, who called Taste of Cherry “excruciatingly boring.” Cheshire attributes this reaction to those critics not putting the film in its sequential and cultural context. (In fairness to Ebert, as Cheshire notes, he did add that Taste of Cherry generated many fascinating movie reviews—an indication that the late Chicago Sun-Times reviewer was really stating what he believed art films are for, rather than simply panning Taste of Cherry.)
To begin with the Koker trilogy is probably the best choice for the initiate, but it also helps to go in understanding how this unintended trilogy plays with temporality, genre, and form. Where Is the Friend’s House? is an affecting film about a child looking to return a notebook to a friend who lives one town over. The boy’s journey from Koker to Poshteh and back evokes for me the dramas of childhood that seem trivial in retrospect but once colored my entire world. Where Is the Friend’s House? unashamedly inhabits the child’s perspective, and Kiarostami shows that these experiences are as profitable a basis for good art as any other. For an artist operating under the Islamic Republic’s gaze, sometimes with its critical support, childhood also offers important narrative possibilities. If done less explicitly than in First Case, Second Case, student-teacher interactions can serve as a relatable demonstration of the capricious and unjust use of authority.
Where Is the Friend’s House? is the only entry in the Koker trilogy that resembles a conventional movie. The following two films, And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), were made in the wake of the 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake, which killed an estimated 50,000 people and left many more injured and homeless. The villages featured in Where Is the Friend’s House? were hit especially hard. Coming a mere two years after the end of the devastating Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), the earthquake exacerbated the pain and suffering rural families in Northern Iran were already enduring. Since Kiarostami seldom employed professional thespians for his films based in Iran, the actors in the film were drawn from the population of the villages, people directly affected by the disaster. In And Life Goes On, an actor (in real life, an unassuming economist whom Kiarostami encountered) playing Kiarostami returns to Koker and Poshteh with his son to find out if the cast members from Where Is the Friend’s House? survived. In Through the Olive Trees, another actor (this time a professional, Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz) plays Kiarostami, now reenacting the filming of And Life Goes On.
Watching these films as bodies continue to be excavated from the February 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the latter similarly pre-ravaged by man-made cruelty, it is impossible not to be moved by Kiarostami’s refusal to separate cinema from its participants. We are already emotionally invested in the characters of Where Is the Friend’s House? and, in And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, we now care for them as people. Kiarostami’s simple humanity might be the skill most evident in these sequels. It is also, however, easy to understand why some Iranians at the time saw these films as exploitative, despite appearing to international audiences as overwhelmingly empathetic.
Intensely self-critical and autobiographical, Kiarostami would go on to make a film in 1999 (The Wind Will Carry Us) about a news-crew director visiting a rural Kurdish village in the hopes of filming their rustic funeral rituals. Is this a thinly veiled alter ego contending with the dark ambulance-chasing underbelly of the filmmaker’s art? As Cheshire writes, “Kiarostami leaves numerous gaps in the film’s surface that invite, even demand, our imaginative participation.” There are various other autobiographical and symbolic readings of Kiarostami’s work, which Cheshire explores. But the director’s idiosyncratic style casts an interminable, enigmatic shadow over his output—one reason why his films provide a hefty return on repeated viewings. There are always new layers to uncover, hitherto unseen symbols to be interpreted and subsequently reinterpreted. Reducing a Kiarostami picture to a specific theme or two (or worse, “morals”) is as futile as doing the same to one’s own life.
In addition to the natural disaster that provoked And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, those films also reflected new artistic preoccupations for Kiarostami that arose with Close-Up (1990). In simple terms, Close-Up tells the story of a con man who convinces a stagnant upper-middle-class family that he is the socially conscious and politically audacious Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Makhmalbaf is, of course, a real person—and so is this story. But to say it is “based on a true story” would undersell its genius, as Close-Up itself became very much part of the story and has long since overtaken the events it supposedly depicts. Remarkably, Kiarostami secured the agreement of virtually everyone involved—Makhmalbaf, the fake Makhmalbaf (Hossain Sabzian), the victimized family, and the judge assigned to the case—to participate in the film. A bold mixture of reenactment, documentary footage, and a wonderfully staged climax, Close-Up was a complete departure from anything Kiarostami had done before and put him on a path of gutsy experimentation that would continue until his death in 2016.
To return to Cheshire’s second note on “reading” Kiarostami: if the order of watching Kiarostami’s films is critical in grasping their surface meaning and formal qualities, it takes a more serious engagement with Persian literature and history to apprehend his films’ cultural grammar. Cheshire writes,
“Ultimately, the more one knows of their context, the more one realizes that Kiarostami and other Iranian directors need to be understood not so much in terms of Antonioni and Tati, say, but of Ferdowsi, Hafez, Sanai, Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Mulla Sadra, and other remarkable figures who share and illuminate their cultural lexicon.”
Cheshire, who admits to a shaky relationship with the Persian language, relies on scholars such as Henry Corbin, a 20th-century French Iranologist, to provide a basis for cultural interpretation, as well as extensive dialogues with Iranian artists and scholars. Cheshire particularly focuses on Kiarostami’s engagement with Sufism and how faith interacts with even more ancient Persian concepts drawn, in turn, from Zoroastrianism. To demonstrate these presences of Shiism, Persian poetry, and other culturally specific forms, Cheshire wisely chooses The Wind Will Carry Us as a case study. It is one of Kiarostami’s more difficult films, profuse in local references not immediately accessible to even the most attentive Western cinephile. It will be intriguing what specialists make of these cultural and historical readings, and one hopes In the Time of Kiarostami will hasten the publication of more academic literature on this subject.
While Kiarostami receives by far the most coverage of any director in the book, other major figures are not totally overlooked. Keen observations on the work of Makhmalbaf (as well as his daughter Samira), Mehrjui, Farhadi, Amir Naderi, Beyzai, and Panahi are threaded throughout. But it is only Kiarostami who appears to merit an extended analysis in a dedicated chapter of his own. This regrettable choice is mitigated by a solid and exhaustive index compiled by the book’s editor, Jim Colvill. Those making their way down the treasure-lined path of Iranian cinema will have no difficulty navigating the text in search of specific titles and individuals.
Indeed, one of Cheshire’s enviable skills as a writer is his ability to take decades of cinematic history and seamlessly tuck them into newspaper features and film reviews. His references to a director’s previous films, or their influences, never feel perfunctory or like exercises in flatulent name-dropping. Cheshire’s extraordinary access to Kiarostami as both an interview subject and a dear friend allows us to replace speculation with—whether fully factual or not—what the director wanted us to know. It is right to assume Kiarostami did not reveal everything, but he gave more than enough to appreciate every phase of his career, including a mystifying final work from 2017 (24 Frames). Viewers will likely struggle with several of Kiarostami’s films, as many critics did, but In the Time of Kiarostami hands us critical interpretive tools to appreciate them.
I began this review noting the not-so-peculiar coexistence of an oppressive government and a flourishing, internationally respected cinema. The ingenuity required of independent filmmakers looking to challenge audiences and critique the status quo is surely an important factor. Such Iranian films that make it through government approval naturally demand of the audience a greater degree of critical attention than was perhaps initially paid by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. But even that window is closing as the Islamic Republic confronts an existential threat: its own people.
In recent months, Iranians have taken to the streets in support of Women, Life, Freedom—just the latest sign of dissent the Islamic Republic has tried to crush. The filmmaker Jafar Panahi is now deemed so dangerous that he has been banned from working (and imprisoned several times, including for six months last year). The genius of Panahi’s most recent work, No Bears (2022), one of the best films of this young decade, clearly cannot be disentangled from the real-life persecution faced by its director. The art is extraordinary in large part because of the circumstances in which it was made.
Might this be why Westerners have become so fascinated with Iranian film in the last few decades—real and perceived qualities that denote a certain cleverness under pressure? If so, one should not evade the terrible discomfort brought on by “enjoying” such art. Still, understanding these films as a product of a rich Persian culture that predates the present authoritarianism offers a measure of relief, even hope. There will come a day when these works will be newly appreciated in an Iran free of theocracy and dictatorship.
A Close-Up on Iranian Cinema: On Godfrey Cheshire’s “In the Time of Kiarostami”. By Abe Silberstein. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 8, 2023.
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