In this second issue we turn to Paris, which has been a secular haven for generations of Iranians. It’s played host to many politicians across the ideological spectrum. Ayatollah Khomeini famously set up operations in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château in 1978. After the revolution, the MKO, Marxist activists, monarchists, republican nationalists, and independent leftist and progressive factions all established themselves in and around Paris. “Mapping out the groups of political exiles active against the Islamic Republic is like trying to describe a perpetually moving kaleidoscope of changing political patterns and colours,” wrote Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi in 1987.

Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, the comings and goings of kings, artists, and wanderers brought bits of France into our culture. In the Iranian imagination, France, unlike the British and Russian empires, was the “benign colonial power.” From my great-grandmother’s bistro chairs to the names of my grandfather’s heart ailments, France inspired our aesthetics and our constitution, and it was the premier destination for training in technology and modern medicine. Join us as we explore a few of Iranian culture’s many connections with the City of Light.

—Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, Editor in Chief

The post Paris: The Iranian Muse appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

The French-Iranian Film Connection dates back almost as far as the history of cinema itself. In 1900, making profligate use of a loan from the Russian tsar, Mozaffar al-Din Shah, fifth in the line of Qajar monarchs, undertook a months-long pleasure tour of Europe. He was accompanied throughout by his 26-year-old court photographer, Mirza Ebrahim Khan Sani-al Saltanah, known as Akkasbashi (literally, “official photographer”), who had lived for almost a decade in Europe and learned his craft there. In France, the shah saw motion pictures for the first time on July 8 at a private screening in the spa town of Contrexéville, documentary shorts that inspired him to order Akkasbashi—who had already seen motion pictures three years earlier in London—“to purchase all the equipment.”

Arriving in the French capital on July 29, the shah paid multiple visits to the Exposition Universelle—the Paris world’s fair. There, on August 5, he had his first real moviegoing experience, attending an exhibition of the Cinématographe, patented by the Lumière brothers just five years previously, in the vast, 15,000-seat Festival Hall. The shah recorded the momentous event in his diary:

They set up a very large screen in the middle of the hall, turned off all the electric lights, and projected the Cinématographe pictures onto that large screen. . . . Among the pictures were Africans and Arabians traveling with camels in the African desert, which was very interesting. Other pictures were of the Exposition, the passing street, the Seine River and boats crossing the river, people swimming and playing in the water, and many others that were all very interesting.

He reiterated his order to Akkasbashi to acquire the necessary equipment to make films once they were back home. The shah, meanwhile, had already been on film. After his breakfast on August 4, Le Figaro reported that the shah “received a photographer who makes talking cinematography. He posed in front of the lens and spoke into the phonographic apparatus, matching his words and movements.” The first known film of an Iranian was thus, remarkably, a sound film. The Exposition featured not one but three distinct systems that (roughly) synchronized sound and film, and it is unknown whether it was made with Phonorama, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, or Théâtroscope.

For his part, Akkasbashi was about to make the first motion picture by an Iranian even before he and the shah returned home. Two weeks later, on August 18, 1900, he used his new equipment to film their visit to a flower festival in Ostend, Belgium. Later that year, he filmed the lions at the Farahabad royal zoo, near where Mozaffar al-Din would construct a palace on Tehran’s eastern edge—perhaps the first moving images ever recorded in Iran.

For several years, motion pictures were shot in Iran exclusively for the entertainment of the shah, his court, and their circle of elites. Akkasbashi made most, perhaps all of them. (According to one of the shah’s great-great-grandsons, Mozaffar al-Din made a few himself—a claim best filed under family myth.) On any given day in one of the many Qajar palaces, films might be shown of such subjects as the shah firing a gun, the shah peering through a telescope, and the shah entering many, many carriages. There were also staged burlesques among his cherished court jesters and newsreels imported from France and Russia. Most of the locally produced films were no more than half a minute long and consisted of a single shot from a stationary angle.

Akkasbashi brought his camera to the streets as well, to shoot scenes including a Moharram procession, a parade of Cossacks, and the arrival of the train on the country’s sole railway, running from southeast Tehran five and a half miles to a Shia shrine in Rey. He also filmed the sybaritic shah’s Euro-tour reprise in 1902, made possible by yet another tsarist loan ostensibly meant to shore up Iran’s shaky state budget.

Two years later, Tehran’s first public motion picture screening took place behind an antique shop. In December 1904, the capital’s first public movie theater opened on Cheragh Gaz (now Amir Kabir) Street; only men were admitted. It quickly raised the ire of leading conservative cleric Shaikh Fazlollah Nuri—the owner was showing pictures of unveiled women, and ordinary Tehranis who could afford it now had access to a medium that was altogether modern, Western, and fun. Nuri issued a fatwa against the theater, and it was shut down by the shah’s authorities after a few weeks.

For the rest of The French-Iranian Film Connection, click here: 1 [2] [3] [4] [5]

The post Mozaffar al-Din Shah and Akkasbashi: The Initiators appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

The first Iranian to set out to make a career as a filmmaker, Khan-baba Khan Motazedi, learned the craft during his years as a student in Paris. Motazedi was born in 1892 in Tabriz, where at the turn of the century the French Catholic mission established the country’s first public cinema. After receiving his secondary education at an Alliance Française school, in 1908 Motazedi left for Switzerland and ultimately France to study electrical engineering. In Paris, he took a job with the Gaumont Film Company, one of the world’s first motion picture studios, attaining the rank of cinematographer. When he returned to his homeland it was as a trained filmmaker, with a full complement of Gaumont equipment: camera, film stock, processing chemicals, and projector.

Back in Iran, Motazedi started his independent cinematic career by taking images of the everyday lives of his own family members—home movies, developed in the lab he set up in his basement—but soon began to accept commissions from the royal court, the military, and the education ministry, along with private businesses. The French-Iranian Film Connection had yielded Iran’s first full-time documentarian.

Motazedi shot innumerable newsreels and nonfiction shorts, some of great historical consequence such as one showing the Majles assembly in December 1925 as it named War Minister Reza Khan—adopting the new surname Pahlavi—as successor to the Qajar dynasty officially deposed two months earlier. The following April, Motazedi filmed his coronation as the first Pahlavi king, Reza Shah. Among Motazedi’s other subjects were Crown Prince Mohammad Hassan Mirza, brother of the last Qajar monarch; the groundbreaking for the National Bank of Iran in 1928; military parades and horse races; and many films devoted to the country’s rapidly expanding network of railways, roads, and bridges. According to one source, he also made a comedic three-reeler (roughly half an hour) that would have been among the first fiction films produced in Iran, though evidence for its existence is scant.

In the late 1920s, Motazedi established several movie theaters as the import of overseas films rose in concert with Reza Shah’s modernization campaign. In 1928, a year that saw 305 films from abroad make their way to Iran, Motazedi opened the San’ati Cinema, the country’s third devoted to female audiences. Like the previous two, it closed after only a few months, in this case the result of a massive fire—possibly set by an anti-cinema group especially aggrieved with female patronage of the new medium. Undeterred, he went on to found the Tammadon and Pari theaters, where, in each case, one side of the house was accessible to men and the other to women. Motazedi (along with another Paris-educated entrepreneur, Ali Vakili) is credited as the first to make foreign films more intelligible to local viewers with the addition of Persian intertitles. Still-widespread illiteracy, however, prompted him to hire performers to read out the captions, in the manner of Japanese cinemas of the era.

During this period, Motazedi began an association with a filmmaker of Armenian heritage, Ovanes Ohanian. Born in the Ashkhabad area, not long after it was ceded by the Qajars to the Russian Empire, Ohanian had studied at Moscow’s Cinema Academy. He arrived in Tehran in 1925 with plans to establish a small film school that would be the country’s first. By the end of the decade, cinema was burgeoning in popularity: in 1929, no less than 460 foreign films were imported to Iran. The following year, Ohanian wrote and directed what is recognized as the first Iranian feature film—Abi and Rabi (Abi va Rabi)—for which Motazedi, who was in a position to provide crucial financial backing, served as cinematographer. Abi and Rabi premiered on January 2, 1931, at Tehran’s Cinema Mayak, reportedly attracting many notables. (Some sources date the production and release a year earlier, respectively, seemingly due to confusion in translating from the Persian to the Western calendar.)

The film largely took the shape of a series of vaudeville-style sketches patterned on the antics of the internationally popular Danish comedy duo billed as Fyrtårnet and Bivognen (Lighthouse and Sidecar; known in Iran by their German names, Pat and Patachon). As with many now unavailable films from the silent era, it is not easy to determine how long this “feature” ran: One reference work puts it at an even 60 minutes. Online resources echo the claim that it was 1,400 meters long—77 minutes, if shot at the era’s average of 16 frames per second, though films were often projected at faster speeds. Whatever its length, and however thin its narrative thread, it was apparently a popular success. Motion pictures were still treated as an ephemeral medium, however, and when a fire broke out in the Cinema Mayak a year or two later, the only known print of Abi and Rabi was destroyed.

For the rest of The French-Iranian Film Connection, click here: [1] 2 [3] [4] [5]

The post Khan-baba Khan Motazedi: The Professional appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

The 1950 box office success of the musical melodrama Sharmsar (later distributed as Ashamed) marked a turning point in the history of Iranian cinema. It made lead actress Esmat Baboli—as Delkash, already a celebrated singer—the country’s first true screen star. Domestic film production, entirely fallow from 1935 to late 1948 due to censorship pressures and lack of financing, blossomed quantitatively, so to speak, with an average of 20 feature films released annually over the proceeding decade and a half. In 1963, Tehran’s University of the Arts unveiled a well-resourced film division that would professionalize filmmaking in the nation in years to come. By 1965, the capital boasted 72 movie houses, with nearly 200 more around the rest of the country. The previous year had seen the release of the first Iranian film to be screened at international film festivals: Night of the Hunchback (Shab-e Ghouzi). Its director, Farokh Ghafari, was already a central link in the French-Iranian Film Connection.

Ghafari, born in Tehran in 1922, relocated to Belgium in the early 1930s with his diplomat father and then studied literature and theater at the University of Grenoble, in the foothills of the French Alps, where his love for cinema was first sparked. In the 1940s, he moved to Paris and into the heart of its vibrant cinephilic milieu, hired as an assistant by Henri Langlois, cofounder and director of the Cinémathèque Française. There, in a small screening room, the greatest and rarest films from around the globe were shown, typically three a night, at 6:30, 8:30, and 10:30. Most shows were packed to the limit, with young film lovers cramming the floor in front of the first row of seats, as Langlois was known for not repeating films—many of which he possessed the only copy of in France, if not the world—for years. In 1938, the Cinémathèque had been one of the founding constituents of the International Federation of Film Archives, for which Ghafari would serve as executive secretary.

At home again for a couple years, he led the drive to establish a cinema department within the national historical museum; the National Iranian Film Center, envisaged as the country’s version of the Cinémathèque, opened in December 1949, screening foreign films, new and classic. Along with fellow filmmakers Ebrahim Golestan and Fereydoun Rahnema, he organized the country’s first cinema festivals, focusing on British movies in 1950 and French ones the following year. Using the pseudonym M. Mobarak, he wrote film criticism for multiple left-wing periodicals.

Returning to Paris for much of the 1950s, he contributed articles on the history of Iranian film to Positif, one of France’s, and Europe’s, most important cinema journals. Ghafari moved back full-time to Iran late in the decade and began to make films. After the neorealist South of the City (Jonub-e Shahr, 1958) and the now hard-to-find comedy Who’s the Bride (Arus Kodum-e, 1959), described variously as “satirical” and “purely commercial,” came the original, distinctive Night of the Hunchback. Set in the present but hardly wedded to it, the film’s story is based on one of the older and more pivotal tales from One Thousand and One Nights. Ghafari’s film, despite lacking some of the benefits of professionalism in its performances and editing, is a visual marvel of black-(often very black)-and-white cinematography and craftily minimalist production design, as well as a deeply intriguing exploration of the interweavings of the ageless and the modern, the realistic and the fantastical, the Persian and the Western. Distinctive, as well, was how it contrasted with the national film landscape amid which it opened. Gönül Dönmez–Colin describes the character of the era’s quantitative blossoming:

In the atmosphere of increased political repression following the coup d’état of 1953, which overthrew the democratically elected prime minister, Dr Mohammad Mosaddeq, the Shah’s cultural policies grew lenient to Indian-style song and dance films, one-dimensional melodramas modelled on Egyptian or Turkish trends and the Persianized versions of the popular movies of the West. . . . What came to be known as film farsi exploited the woman’s body liberally with or without narrative justification. Party-girl/prostitute/cabaret-singer-dancer films dominated the screen.

Ghafari’s film is very far from all of this, and it assumed a place as the very first feature-length example of Iranian art cinema. 

“The Hunchback’s Tale,” one of the major framing stories in One Thousand and One Nights, in some languages is given a descriptive title that translates as “Who Killed the Hunchback?”—the vital question is not who did it, but who will hang for having their erroneous confession believed. The focus shifts a bit in Ghafari’s hands, to a macabre, madcap game of Hide the Corpse (and also Prop the Corpse Up, Give It a Makeover, and Dance with It). At the narrative level, it’s a dark farce in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955) or, to bow to the ageless, Weekend at Bernie’s.

The evocation of Hitchcock seems more than accidental. Ghafari, with his intensive film education in Paris and as one of the leading film collectors in Iran, was obviously well-versed in the oeuvres of world cinema’s leading lights, and his screenplay incorporates a quintessential Hitchcockian MacGuffin—a plot-driving device irrelevant to the story’s true concerns. Other detectable references include Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), the folkloric ghost story that was among the first wave of Japanese films to make an impact on the film festival circuit; early Federico Fellini films such as The White Sheik (1952) and La Strada (1954); late Orson Welles films such as Othello (1951), Touch of Evil (1958), and The Trial (1962); and—with one Hollywood-branded character—Jean-Luc Godard’s epochal Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960).

Ghafari’s film is intimate and idiosyncratic, but he was simultaneously working with elements of cosmopolitan style that transcend borders no less than do the tricks and tropes of commercial practice. At home, Night of the Hunchback was a commercial failure. In turn, the traces of this groundbreaking film can be seen in domestic and diasporic works with now little hope of Iranian release as disparate as Jafar Panahi’s masterpiece Crimson Gold (2003) and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014).

As a director, Ghafari completed only one more feature film—The Falconet (Zanburak, 1975), a picaresque road movie based on Iranian folktales and classical narrative modes, again playing with interwoven times and tones. He had a successful career behind the scenes as a cultural administrator, organizer of the Shiraz Arts Festival, and producer of documentaries for national television. Traveling abroad when the Revolution took place, Ghafari never returned to Iran. He eventually settled in Paris, where he died in 2006.

For the rest of The French-Iranian Film Connection, click here: [1] [2] 3 [4] [5]

The post Farokh Ghafari: The Cosmopolitan appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Born in Paris in 1922, Albert Lamorisse is best known for his 1956 film The Red Balloon (Le ballon rouge). Though only 34 minutes long and with but a few lines of dialogue, this pint-size saga of an adventurous five-and-a-half-year-old boy and the clever, frolicsome balloon that befriends him is a cinema classic.

Lamorisse also has a modestly scaled, marvelously achieved place in the French-Iranian Film Connection, and a tragic one. In 1970, while filming a documentary about the landscape of Iran under the auspices of the Shah’s cultural ministry, he died in a helicopter crash at the age of forty-eight. A stylistic innovator, Lamorisse was a technical one as well. Assisted by a marine gyro specialist, he had designed a shock-absorbent camera rig specifically for helicopter use. The apparatus, dubbed Helivision, allowed shots with an effect as if “the camera were mounted on a perfectly solid track in the sky,” in the words of one film critic.

In fact, when he took to the sky for the final time, Lamorisse had already finished shooting the material he sought for his vision of a cinematic tone poem, a reverie on Iran’s boundless physical and cultural wonders—but the project’s funder had brought him back for more. The film was one of a number of coproductions with Western partners Iran had launched in the late 1960s to temper its autocratic image. The fact of the partnerships was usually as much the point as what they yielded, and Lamorisse had proceeded under the assumption of creative freedom. The Shah, though, was dismayed that the rough cut he saw did not reflect the dynamic, modernizing Iran he aimed to promote. As cinema scholar Hamid Naficy describes, officials of the Ministry of Culture and Art (MCA) echoed this view, expressing

dissatisfaction with the film, for they apparently missed its subtle nationalist figuration and felt that although it had represented Iran lovingly, it was a predominantly pastoral and ancient representation that neither matched Iranian reality nor the state’s idea of syncretic modernity. Lamorisse was recalled to film additional sequences to emphasize the country’s industrialization.

Upon Lamorisse’s return, among the new locations imposed on his remit, he filmed extensive handheld footage in the bowels of Tehran University’s U.S.-supplied research nuclear reactor, which had become operational in 1967. He was then urged to move on to another American construction, the Karaj Dam, 40 miles northwest of Tehran, where the MCA was eager to have him record some of his signature aerial footage—the Shah had specifically lamented the lack of dams in what he’d seen.

As insistent as they were that Lamorisse return to Iran, the ministry had not paid for his crew to come back as well, so he was now there alone with his wife and 20-year-old son, Pascal—the young boy in The Red Balloon. Significantly, he was without his experienced helicopter pilot. An expert pilot himself, Lamorisse conveyed his concern about flying near the high-tension wires surrounding the dam, so the Shah’s personal pilot was assigned to operate the helicopter. On June 2, 1970, Lamorisse, assisted by Pascal, made the flight up to the dam, where they shot about ten minutes worth of footage before the helicopter got caught in the wires. Pascal survived; his father and the pilot fell to their deaths.

Working from the notes detailing his original vision from the film, Lamorisse’s Iran documentary was ultimately completed by his widow, Claude Jeanne Marie (née Duparc), and Pascal. It was released in 1978 as The Lovers’ Wind (Le vent des amoureux). The Persian title, Bad-e Saba, is particularly resonant, evoking the gentle morning breeze that carries sweethearts’ secret messages to each other and the “perfume of the Beloved’s tresses,” as described in the love verses of Hafez. Some might agree with Naficy’s assessment that the film’s dreamy, fabulistic narration is “overly poetic and flowery”; with its muted delivery, it’s easy enough to tune out. As for Lamorisse’s sumptuous, swooping, thrillingly fluid visuals, there is no sensible ground for debate—the film is mesmerizing.

A seven-minute-long pendant to The Lovers’ Wind (it has been variously presented as a prologue or epilogue to the feature) was assembled by an MCA staff producer—not Claude and Pascal, as some have surmised—based on the footage Lamorisse shot after being called back. After an opening crawl in Persian, which asserts that ineluctable “destiny did not grant him the opportunity to finish” his film, his handheld shots from the reactor, many accelerated, play over the sound of fierce winds and eerie musical themes, creating a spectral mood. A piano dirge accompanies the final images he recorded at the dam, retrieved from the depths of its reservoir. In honor of the Frenchman’s terminal devotion to immortalizing Iran on film, and tying together distant strands of the French-Iranian Film Connection, Mohsen Makhmalbaf would open his Images from the Qajar Dynasty (1992) with a sequence from The Lovers’ Wind, dedicating the archival picture—which includes more than a dozen pieces shot by Akkasbashi—to Lamorisse.

For the rest of The French-Iranian Film Connection, click here: [1] [2] [3] 4 [5]

The post Albert Lamorisse: The Innovator appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Cinema existed long before articulate speech appeared. Image, still or animated, goes back to the very beginnings of mankind. It preceded every other means of communication. . . . [R]eflect for a moment on prehistoric cave drawings and especially on what we know of the phenomena of nocturnal dreams and waking fantasies.

The source of this expansive view of the cinematic, Fereydoun Hoveyda, led a professional life that may seem like a waking fantasy. The younger brother of Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Iran’s prime minister between 1965 and 1977, Fereydoun was, among other things, a literary novelist, a science-fiction writer, a film critic, a social analyst, a screenwriter, a visual artist, co-drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and ambassador to the United Nations. Born in 1924 in Damascus, where his father headed the Iranian consulate, and subsequently raised in Beirut, he would become “open to the universe,” as he put it, with friends ranging from author Sadegh Hedayat to philosopher Raymond Aron to stage director Robert Wilson to everyone’s friend, Andy Warhol.

Having received his education at French schools in both Syria and Lebanon, Hoveyda joined the Iranian foreign ministry and, in 1946, was assigned to the Paris embassy. There, two years later, he met the Shah and completed his doctorate in international law and economics at the Sorbonne. In 1952 he left the diplomatic corps but stayed in Paris to work for UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communications, where he would spend nearly a decade and a half facilitating freedom of the press and media modernization in the developing world. It was during this period that Fereydoun Hoveyda became a core figure in the French-Iranian Film Connection.

Hoveyda was film-crazy and Paris in those years was a cinephile’s paradise. “Throughout the fifties, I went to the cinema almost every evening,” he later said. In 1953, at the 60-seat Cinémathèque Française, he befriended the famed film theorist André Bazin, editor and, two years prior, cofounder of Cahiers du Cinéma, along with a protégé of his, 21-year-old François Truffaut. Hoveyda joined the influential journal’s editorial board and, in the August–September 1955 issue, published what would be the first of his many critiques in it—a review of the Warner Bros. creature feature Them, in which he praised its explicit grappling with atomic-age dread: “Today, as the ‘big’ films have in large part become occasions for ‘escapism,’ it’s precisely a genre intended as ‘escapism’ that drags the spectator back, a bit despite himself, to exhausting reality.”

Associating near daily, “afternoons and evenings,” with future Nouvelle Vague directors Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard, over the rest of the decade Hoveyda was a frequent, witty contributor to the monthly Cahiers film diary, “Petit journal intime du Cinéma.” He wrote a multipart appraisal of the “Grandeur et décadence du Sérial” (“What has happened to the serial is what happens to all other cinematographic genres: as we have tried to impose strict rules on it, all poetry has disappeared, giving way to poor, dried-up skeletons comprising not even a shred of flesh”) and a lengthy essay on science fiction in the time of Sputnik; conducted an interview with acclaimed director Roberto Rossellini, with whom he had already collaborated on the script for India: Matri Bhumi (1959); and took on the daunting task of reviewing The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959), the feature film debut of his closest friend at the journal (“Les 400 Coups is not a masterpiece. So much the better for François Truffaut!”).

For a time, Hoveyda also reviewed a couple films a month for the science fiction magazine Fiction and contributed as well to Positif, Cahiers’ main competitor, both under the pen name F. Hoda. (He was actually published in Positif even before its rival: an essay on “Horror and Science Fiction” in November–December 1954.) He turned increasingly to novel writing in the 1960s, while continuing to write regularly for Cahiers. At the turn of the decade, he produced two of the most important film essays ever, at a rank just below the 1954–57 pieces in Cahiers and the weekly Arts in which Truffaut denounced the middlebrow “tradition of quality” in French film, proclaimed the politique des auteurs—the “policy” that the director of a film could be, should be, is, no less an author than is the writer of a book—and called on young filmmakers to make the “film of tomorrow”: “even more personal than a novel,” an “exalted adventure,” “an act of love.”

With “La réponse de Nicholas Ray” in May 1960, Hoveyda took a failed Hollywood studio film directed by a Cahiers favorite, declared it “admirable” and implicitly “perfect,” and proceeded to illustrate how, despite its shopworn script (“Party Girl’s story is idiotic. And so?”), Ray’s mise-en-scène (more or less, his formal treatment of the narrative substance) had made something out of nothing: “inventions keep raining down” in “a cascade of ideas.” Hoveyda was both true and, to use the anachronistic term, trolling when he declared, “If one continues to find Party Girl idiotic, then I cry, ‘Long live the idiocy that so dazzles my eyes, fascinates my heart, and opens the kingdom of heaven to me.’” (Hoveyda’s argument is heavenly. Party Girl is . . . decent.) Over several years, Truffaut had issued a transformative polemic: Our heroes have control. Seize control. Hoveyda now offered a provocative paradigm: See? With just formal control, you can turn even muck into magic.

When you’ve properly provoked with specifics, you’re sure to be invited to write a grandly conceptual follow-up. In “Sunspots” (“Les taches du soleil”) of August 1960, Hoveyda first takes on the value of film criticism—cheekily eviscerating the daily and weekly kind that aims to “predetermine the viewer’s choice,” while defending Cahiers’ monthly sort that “engages in a dialogue” about works already seen. Then, invoking his Ray blast, he declares, “When I assert that everything is expressed on the screen through the mise-en-scène, I in no way contest the existence and importance of the subject matter.” He proceeds: “I simply want to call to mind that the property of a great auteur is precisely knowing how to metamorphose through his technique the most idiotic plot.” The sentence’s modest preamble barely disguises that “the property” makes a claim even more radical than his previous one.

Hoveyda’s other major pieces in the 1960s included two more interviews with Rossellini and the first extensive consideration of the new cinéma verité movement. Among his reviews, one of the most pointed came under his sometime Cahiers pen name, Fred Carson—a drubbing of the big-budget, bien-pensant anti–atomic bomb drama On the Beach and its baldly stereotypical characters: “One swiftly begins to hope for their annihilation. Alas! It’s a very long wait.”

Hoveyda, by this point, was more willing than any of his Cahiers comrades to fully commit to a taste for pop cinema: not only did he cite Party Girl as one of the three best films of 1960, he gave sole pride of place to Mario Bava’s goth-horror Black Sunday in 1961 and sat not one but two Jerry Lewis films atop his 1963 ten best list. Of the 27 other critics who ranked their Cahiers lists, just three had The Nutty Professor in their top three; among the total of 41, just one other named The Errand Boy at all. Yes, French aesthetes’ fabled love for the man they dubbed the King of Crazy leans in part on an Iranian’s self-assurance. His last signed item for Cahiers during the era appeared in August–September 1964, a review of director John Huston’s Freud, the Secret Passion: “[The hero], denied all possibility of poetry, is suddenly revealed as a poet. This last aspect of the film undoubtedly explains the resistance of many spectators and critics. In this era of numbness, one doesn’t like to have one’s inner comfort disturbed.”

In 1966, with his brother having recently assumed the premiership, Hoveyda left France for Iran; he rejoined the foreign ministry, serving as an undersecretary. He was appointed UN ambassador in 1971, a position he held until the end of Pahlavi rule. In his 1980 account The Fall of the Shah (La chute du Shah)—first published in Paris, like a dozen other of his books—Hoveyda excoriated the corruption of the monarch and his kin, stating further that “the example of the royal family was a source of contamination which infected every level of society.” Few would contest the breadth of that “contamination,” though the story in Hamid Naficy’s magisterial Social History of Iranian Cinema that Hoveyda himself once summoned agents of SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious security service, to haul away a filmmaker over a political spat is thinly attributed and deviates widely at least once from verifiable fact.

Following the Revolution, and the grisly execution of his brother after a sham trial, Hoveyda settled in the United States. Though he focused mainly on international affairs as an author and policy consultant, six years before his death in 2006, he produced his lone book to focus on film: The Hidden Meaning of Mass Communications: Cinema, Books, and Television in the Age of Computers. While he laments how many of his Cahiers colleagues who became filmmakers lost their artistic edge over time (or in the case of Godard, “turned to ‘political’ cinema devoid of any artistic value whatsoever”) and how contemporary directors are becoming “mere technicians,” he concludes with a startlingly optimistic vision of the next “film of tomorrow,” even as he exemplifies the humility of an intellectual ever mindful of what tools he is working with:

I remember what the great film director Luis Buñuel once told our group of “cultists” and “film fans” at Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, and other magazines in the 1950s during a visit to Paris. He said that we will reach the peak of filmmaking when we will be able to sit in a room, switch off the lights and project on a wall, directly from our brains and through our eyes, the stories that we conceive in our heads!

I am sure that, one day, technology will develop the revolutionary means to accomplish such a feat. Then film would become completely personal and reach the “essence” of auteurism. Then, everyone would be an auteur in the sense of the reviews my friends and I were writing in the ’50s and ’60s.

Then image would finally supersede word.

Or would it?

For the rest of The French-Iranian Film Connection, click here: [1] [2] [3] [4] 5

The post Fereydoun Hoveyda: The Provocateur appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

“We rose early in the morning, went down into a boat, and pushed off for the shore,” says Naser al-Din Shah—a.k.a. the Shah of Persia—in his travelogue, recalling his arrival in Paris on July 6, 1873. It was indeed a reception filled with pomp and ceremony befitting a sovereign.

They all shouted: “Vive le Schah de Perse” and “Vive la France”…and they had prepared a beautiful illumination. In all the streets they had suspended crystal lamps like round globes; but the wind somewhat interfered with these…. A very pretty and choice triumphal arch had been erected also, of flowers and shrubs, bunches of flowers, chandeliers and the like, various devices with weapons—such as pistols, muskets, lance-heads. In truth, they had displayed talent.

At night, the Shah and his entourage, which consisted of almost his entire government after he had entrusted matters of state in Tehran to his son, ambled through the streets of Paris. In his travelogue, he describes a scene that is not too different from a modern-day stroll through Paris, save for electricity.

The lamps of the city are all illuminated with gas; so that it is a very bright, beautiful, and charming city. Numbers of people were seated in carriages and driving about; or, seated in the cafes and similar places, were enjoying themselves.

He visited botanical gardens, palaces, and the Victorian-era zoos that were becoming popular at the time, replete with flora and fauna from exotic and newly conquered places. Of all things to make an impression on the king of Persia was none other than the Kangaroo! He found the strange animal to be very “similar to the jerboa”—a small bouncing rodent endemic in the East.

At one point, the Shah of Persia met a Rothschild, “a Jew who is exceedingly rich,” as he recalls in his travelogue. He went on to document their amusingly prescient conversation.

[Rothschild] greatly advocated the cause of the Jews, mentioned the Jews of Persia, and claimed tranquillity for them. I said to him: “I have heard that you, brothers, possess a thousand crores of money. I consider the best thing to do would be that you should pay fifty crores to some large or small State, and buy a territory in which you could collect all the Jews of the whole world, you becoming their chiefs, and leading them on their way in peace so that you should no longer be thus scattered and dispersed.” We laughed heartily, and he made no reply. I gave him an assurance that I do protect every alien nationality that is in Persia.

Particularly noteworthy about the impressions of the Persian king in a foreign land was how he perceived the seeds of revolution that was defining much of Europe at that time. He writes about “the mayhem of Communes,” and how the people were split three ways in their preference for a monarchy. 

The city of Paris is now, in reality, the property of the peasantry and common people, who do whatever they like, as the Government has no adequate means of repression. The palace of the Tuileries, which was the finest building in the world, is now a mass of ruins, as the men of the Commune set fire to it. Nothing remains of the palace but its walls. We were sadly grieved for this; but, thanks be to God, the palace of the Louvre, which adjoins that of the Tuileries, has been saved and is not destroyed.

He takes note of the French—the “women and men,” as he refers to them—observing that they are “small made and attenuated of limb,” nothing like the inhabitants of Russia, Germany, and England, the places he had already seen. The French, he concludes, “more resemble the people of the East.”

Apparently claustrophobic, he writes of “holes in mountains,” a reference to railroad tunnels. He describes traveling through them as a “suffocating kind of sensation about the heart.”

But there is no mistaking that the King of Persia found a natural affinity with the jewel of Europe.

Paris is a beautiful and graceful city, with a delicious climate. It generally enjoys sunshine, thus much resembling the climate of Persia.

The post How Paris Bedazzled a Persian King appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Khan’s travelogue relies on comparing and contrasting the different cities to which he traveled, thus offering a comparative account of European cultures through the eyes of an outsider, someone who hailed from the East. At times, Khan’s observations inadvertently—and humorously—capture some of today’s clichés about the places he visited.

One example is rudeness. He first came across it while traveling in Ireland. But whatever incident made an impression on him (he does not relay it in detail), he quickly puts it into a broader perspective: “after experiencing the mode of traveling in France, I was convinced my former complaints [in Ireland] were all groundless.”

“The customer is king” is another example, even before the phrase was coined. Khan captures this sentiment when he poopoos the modes of transportation on which he traveled throughout Europe—all except for one place: “there is no country where the same attention is paid to the comfort and ease of the passengers as in England.”

He generally found London to be “superior” to Paris, as he put it, even though the latter offered “more superb buildings.” He adds of Paris, “it is neither so regular, kept so clean, nor so well lighted at night, nor does it possess so many squares or gardens [as London].”

“In short, I thought I had fallen from Paradise into Hell,” he proclaims, humorlessly, referring to his arrival in Paris after having visited Britain’s capital. 

But fear not, lest the lovers of Paris be left disappointed in Khan’s conclusion, he gives us this nugget:

“When I arrived in Italy, I was made sensible of the beauty of Paris.”

The post An Indian Occidentalist (Amusingly) Captures a Cliché About the French appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

An Iranian in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Diaries of Haj Sayyah 1859–1877 documents Haj Sayyah’s travels throughout Europe and, eventually, America, where he became a naturalized citizen—possibly making him the first Iranian-American. He is said to have been honored by American president Ulysses Grant, and might well have also met Mark Twain during his sojourn in North America. A wanderer and an activist, he was impressed by the democratic ideals of the West and, hastening his own demise, pushed to no avail for reforms in his homeland after he returned there. He died at the age of 89 after political imprisonment.

But there were happier days during his time abroad, and Paris, in particular, bedazzled him.

All the city looked like jewelry. There were music and singing in coffee shops and theatres. They were all full, with no place to sit…. The trees were festooned with green lights. Musicians played, and young people and children danced…. They enjoyed complete freedom.

He also documented exchanges he had with fellow travelers along the way, some of them Muslim.

My companion said: “A lot has been written about paradise in our books, but I don’t believe paradise can be better than this.” I answered: “Do not talk of religion, please. One can compare two places where he sees two of them. How can we judge now that we have not seen paradise? When we were in Lyon and Marseilles, we could not think of Paris being so much better; now that we see Paris we know it.”

Born poor, Haj Sayyah grew up in a peasant family that expected him to carry on with ordinary village life—marry his cousin and till the land until his death. But Sayyah couldn’t shake his wanderlust. So one night, before his marriage, he secretly left the village and embarked on a lifelong journey of travels. In the ensuing years, he learned Russian, French, English, and German, traversing the world. While in North America, he wanted to continue traveling west over the Pacific to Japan, but discovered that—unlike with his travels in Europe—he needed a travel document called a passport, which he did not possess. Seemingly unaware of naturalization hurdles, he asked for a U.S. passport and was granted one, thus becoming the first known Persian to become an American.

His world travels made a lasting impression on him, especially what he perceived as the cleanliness, order, and humanity of 19^th-century Europe.

On the streets the roads for carriages, the paths for animals, and the sidewalks for the pedestrians were separate. Police watched to ensure that all kept to their own places.

My companion said: “Can there be anything better than this?” I said: “Man has the ability to perform whatever he can imagine. He will certainly continue improving things in the future.”

After he returned to Iran, he indeed dared to imagine an improved future for his country, one grounded in personal liberty and democratic ideals. Alas, he was swiftly persecuted and jailed for his modernity by none other than the Shah of Persia, who himself had traveled through Europe and seen firsthand the seeds of revolution there.

The post Paris: A City That “Looked Like Jewelry” appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

The post Parisiens appeared first on Tehran Bureau.

Hover and click on any flag in the interactive map below, and you will see a popup of a satellite image of the military installation located there and a summary of its function.

According to open-source information, the Islamic Republic oversees the training and operations of around 80,000 militia—both Iranian and mercenary forces—who are scattered in military installations throughout Syria. Most of these installations are preexisting military structures that used to be operated by the Syrian military before being partially or wholly handed over to Iranian forces. This process began during Syria’s civil war to facilitate Iranian support for Assad’s military efforts. There are also reports that Iran has built at least one major military base from scratch inside Syrian territory.

Overview of Iran’s Military Bases in Syria

In 2014, Assad gave Iranian forces permission to use as IRGC headquarters a hotel near the Damascus International Airport, a structure dubbed the “Glass House.” The Israeli air force later targeted the structure with airstrikes, which prompted Iranian forces to shift the weight of their Syria headquarters elsewhere, mainly to the T4/Altyas military airport in the north and the Imam Ali base situated to the east, near the Iraqi border.

In 2015, Iranian forces began constructing what is believed to be the first Iranian structure built from scratch inside Syria, mostly below ground. It is operated by the Quds Force and connected by road to the Iranian-run T4/Altyas Airport base. This makes it a vital transportation point for personnel and material from Iran, Iraq, and other mercenary recruitment centers such as those in Afghanistan.

Regional Commands of Iranian Forces Inside Syria

In order to help bolster Assad’s forces in other parts of Syria, Iranian forces have organized their military command by region as follows:

Aleppo Region: In 2015, the IRGC began overseeing military operations from Jabal Azzan Base to bolster Assad forces in and around Aleppo province. The Iranian-backed militias that fought in this region include Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Nujaba Movement, the Afghan Fatimiyoun Brigade, and the Palestinian Jerusalem Brigade.

Southern Provinces: Al Seen Airport Base, along with Kiswa outpost, both oversee Iranian-backed militia known to operate in Syria’s southern provinces. These militias include Iranian Jaafari Forces, Lebanese Hezbollah, Syrian Baqer militia, and Afghan Fatimid Brigade as well as multiple Iraqi militias: Sayed al Shuhada, Abu Fadel Abbas, and the Abdal Movement. 

Central Provinces: The Shayrat Airbase serves as a forward operating base for Iranian materiel and personnel in support of Iranian-backed militia throughout Syria’s central region.

Lebanese Hizbollah Liaison Outpost: The Qusair Base, which sits near the Lebanese border, serves mostly as a Hezbollah military base in Syria and a liaison point with Iranian forces.

Additionally, there are two main underground Iranian-operated outposts that sit farther to the west, in proximity to the Russian navy base in the Syrian port city of Tartous. They are:

Jabal Maerin: An Iranian military base that is said to be buried almost entirely under a hill.

Jabal Zein al Abidin: An Iranian military and communications outpost that sits next to a Shia shrine 600 meters above sea level. It is said to house a joint-operational room staffed by both Syrian forces and the IRGC.

How we conducted our research:

Our first step in gathering information for this story came from scouring the internet for open-source material, including the list of websites provided below. After examining this information and tracing it back to its original sources, we determined that much of it originated from Syrian opposition figures, including the rebels who at times engaged militarily with the Iranian-backed forces listed throughout this story. Some information about Iranian-backed military bases also became publicly available after airstrikes were carried out against them. To corroborate the existence of these military installations, we then searched Google Earth by specific locations and/or coordinates and found the satellite images featured in our interactive map. We have only included the military installations that we could confidently verify in this way. To bolster our reporting on this sensitive story, we also interviewed (on background) several Western military experts who corroborated our overall findings.

Here’s a list of the main open sources that we credit for this research:

• www.iamhumanstory.com
• www.orient-news.net
• www.harmoon.org
• https://external-preview.redd.it
• www.thenational.ae
• www.reuters.com
• www.almodon.com
• www.crisisgroup.org
• www.aljazeera.net

The post Iran’s Military Assets Inside Syria appeared first on Tehran Bureau.