Why are Iranians such good filmmakers? There is a season of Iranian films coming up on British television in early May, the fullest ever retrospective of director Abbas Kiarostami at the National Film Theatre throughout the month, and an installation of his work at the V&A until June. Tehran-based directors have won, per capita, more movie prizes than those of any other country in recent years. In 1995, their feature films made 755 appearances at international film festivals. Britain, which has the same population, didn't manage half that. Some of the best women filmmakers in the world today are Iranian. Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog have called Abbas Kiarostami one of the great living filmmakers. An American critic said that "we are living in the era of Kiarostami, but we don't yet know it."?
How can a country that is not technologically advanced, not rich, was not involved in the invention of cinema, which made no films of consequence before about 1959, whose artists are far from free and whose religion is suspicious of imagery, be leading the way?
The first, unexpected, answer is Islamisation. Like other movie houses at the end of the 1970s, Iranian cinemas showed mostly escapist entertainment films with lots of sex and violence. In one of his first speeches on returning to Iranian soil, Ayatollah Khomeini said that he wasn't against cinema, just the sleazy direction it had taken. Like Lenin, he felt that movies could "purify" his country, and so his ministry of culture and Islamic guidance put in place a set of prohibitions: Iranian directors could not show women's hair or body parts, sexual touching of any sort, or any anti-government comment. What is less well known is that they also banned "demeaning behaviour," denigration of people on grounds of ethnicity or creed, or violence. The latter was a bit rich from a regime which was more murderous than the one it replaced, but the irony is that the puritanism of the new Islamic Republic was rather similar to, say, John Grierson's social ambitions for British documentary in the 1930s.
Such ideas can result in cinema of dull worthiness, but it can now be seen that the preference of Khomeini's henchmen for spiritual and community themes over sexual or violent ones has rendered Iranian films graceful and satisfying compared to those of commercial industries. Forbid your filmmakers from representing what is called in film studies the "male gaze" and you enter new territory, because much of cinema—Hollywood and the French new wave in particular—is based on it. The Islamisation of cinema in Iran decoupled looking and longing. The rest is history.?
International audiences saturated in the conventional, hyper-eroticised cinema of Hollywood, Hong Kong, Japan and elsewhere have fallen for the Iranian mix of allegory and decency which, rather than skimming the surface of life, looks with patience at its fine grain.
I went to Tehran recently to make a television documentary for Channel 4 to accompany a series of classic Iranian films it is screening in early May. My brief was to make a programme which would sketch the outlines of Iranian cinema history and explain its uniqueness. After three weeks there, however, I discovered an additional, very different reason why the country makes such great films. I had been to Iran before, but not to work there, and this was the eye-opener. I arrived hoping to interview all the key filmmakers and, in some cases, take them back to locations where they had filmed decades before. Without exception, they all said yes.?
This can-do attitude was a surprise, as was the complete flexibility of filming in Iran. We went there to make one documentary, but came back with three, including a 74-minute film for cinema about Kiarostami's famous Rostamabad trilogy. Take a small example of the flexibility involved. A film called The Cow, made in 1969 by the director Dariush Mehrjui and starring Ezzatollah Entezami, Iran's Sean Connery, was seminal. We suggested that, possibly, these two men might return to the village where it had been made. Neither is young, nor had either been back for 35 years. The trip meant five hours' driving through snowed-up roads. Yet both agreed to go. In Britain, agents, limousines, PRs, PAs and the rest would have been involved.
I have never experienced the degree of freedom we had as filmmakers in Iran to change our minds, to have the spark of an idea, and then realise it. It is the inertia of filmmaking—its resistance to change of plan, its heaviness of foot—which often sucks the life out of it. If, conversely, flexibility of approach is valued in a film culture then the time between idea and realisation is reduced.
True, it was the first time I had worked with new, ultra-portable cameras. But in the weeks since I have returned, I have come to believe that it was a human, rather than an organisational or technical quality, that made this shoot the most stimulating I have ever had. Call it optimism, or maybe commitment. When I rewatch the Kiarostami films in the retrospective, or those coming up soon on television, I will read between the lines, as it were, and look for evidence of the sort of artistic spontaneity we have just enjoyed.
