Swedish Cinema – Three Traits

The name of lngmar Bergman is as synonymous with the new cinematic directions of t he second half of
the 20th century as those of FeIlini, Antonioni, Resnais, or Godard. like them, Bergman is the product of
a rich national film tradition. The Swedish film industry, though never producing a great number of filins,
enjoys a long history. Bergman, an actor, playwright, and stage director, learnedd his film craft from Alf
Sjöberg, Sweden’s most important director in first two decades of sound production. And Sjoberg
learned his craft in the Silent Era of Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller. Bergman also learned much from
the films of Denmark’s Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Stiller and Sjöström combined the visual and poetic power of the northern landscapes with stories of
realistic passions and mystical influences—much as Bergman would do 40 years later. The three
consistent traits of the Swedish silents were: first, their use of natural imagery to evoke and convey
human passions as in Sjöström’s use of the sea in A Man There Was (1916, released 1917) and of the
mountains and fjords in The OutlaW and His Wife (1918), and Stiller’s use of the lake of ice in Sir Arne’s
Treasure (1919) and of the snow and mountains in The Story of Gösta Berlin g (1924, starring Garbo);
second, their satirical and critical condemnation of social hypocrisies and injustices, as in Sjöström’s The
Outlaw and His Wife and Stiller’s Erotikon (1920); third, also Dreyer’s great theme, the influence of
cosmic, metaphysical forces in human affairs. The eerie, ghostly carriage that comes for the tramp who
dies at precisely midnight on New Year’s Eve in Sjöström’s The Phantom Chariot (1920, released 1921) is
the ancestor of the hearse that comes for Isak Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries; Sjöström’s figure of
death is an ancestor of Death in Bergman’s The Seven the Seal. The metaphorical unity in the Swedish
film tradition is striking, for Victor Sjöström —Sweden’s first film master—played the role of the old
doctor in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.

Iranian New Wave Cinema and Abbas Kiarostami

Iranian directors are often asked by film critics what is it that makes their national cinema so different
from others? What has Iranian cinema brought to the public that others have not?

The answer is not simple because the Iranian films that most westerners have seen have many aesthetic
and emotional similarities with films shown in international festivals decades ago: Vittorio de Sica’s
“Bicycle Thieves” (1948) is quoted very often by Iranian film-makers as one of the films that most
influenced them. Italian Neo-realist cinema’s commitment to location shooting and to the use of non-
professional actors has inspired more than one Iranian director, and the work of Robert Bresson and
René Clement, who used small teams at the margins of the film industry, has spawned many offspring in
Iran. Similarly, Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (1953), with its simple anecdotes, repressed sensuality and
emphasis on gestures, embodies the Iranian film-makers’ quest for subtlety and emotional richness.
Kiarostami’s early career in advertising is similar to that of Satyajit Ray’s, whose “Pather Panchali” trilogy
(1955) depicts the collapse of traditional values whilst criticizing the social failures of a political system –
themes that Iranian film-makers are quite at home with.
And yet, despite such shared characteristics, no one can deny the existence of a specific Iranian
cinematic language that champions the poetics of everyday life and of the ordinary person in a new
style, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, feature and documentary.

But what made Iranians progress from consumers of American films to producers of their own
narratives, exported across national borders? Here is the paradox: shortly before the Islamic
revolutionary regime came to power in 1979, it encouraged the destruction of some 180 film theatres in
less than a year. Once in power it imposed strict restrictions on the importation of foreign films.
However, following the enormous and rapid social upheaval brought by the devastating Iran-Iraq war
(1980–88), the conservative religious regime needed the film-makers to document current events. It is
no accident that most of the currently known film directors started out making documentaries. Later, the
need to entertain a public hungry for cinema, forced the only state production and distribution
foundation, Farabi, to let go of its monopoly and to encourage directors to raise their own funds. This
gave directors both an independence and access to outside funding and audiences that the regime must
regret to this day.

Nevertheless, the generic context, style and roots of the country’s post-revolutionary ‘auteurs’ were
created well before the revolution, in the early Sixties and Seventies. Directors, such as the late feminist
poet Forough Farrokhzad, whose only short documentary – of a leprosy colony during the Shah’s reign –
the cult film “The House is Black” (1962), combined poetry and harsh reality with great tenderness.
Kamran Shirdel’s docu-feature, “The Night it Rained” (1967), is a classic that inspired generations of film-
makers in Iran, with its moving tale about a true event whose facts are gradually distorted and
manipulated into an almost unrecognisable form. The late Sohrab Shahid Saless’s early black and white
films, “Still Life” (1973) and “A Simple Event” (1974), were made to look like documentaries and
introduced a style that, when he exiled himself to Germany before the revolution, changed only in colour
and content, not in form. By the time the founder of the Tehran cinematheque, Farrokh Ghaffari, himself
a great film-maker, introduced these sombre films during the late Sixties, his audience was already tiring
of the dubbed American, Italian and Indian commercial films that inundated Iranian screens. Dariush
Mehrjui was one of the first to receive an international award for “The Cow” (1968), a bleak tale about
the death of a cow, made in collaboration with a dream team of collaborators. He continued his prolific
career experimenting with many genres, but his latest feature, “Bemani” (Stay Alive, 2002), is in
documentary style and pays homage to the new cinematic language by leaving his usual, urban upper-
class settings for a small village on the Iran-Iraq border that had made the headlines after a wave of
young girls committed suicide by burning themselves to death.

However, since 1970, it was Abbas Kiarostami who came to epitomise the new style and become the
ambassador for contemporary Iranian cinema. In the trilogy that began with “Where is the House of My
Friend?” (1987), he made such an impact on international audiences that the doors for emerging talent
were suddenly flung wide open. The trilogy continued with “And Life Goes On” (1992), in which
Kiarostami searched for his child actor after a terrible earthquake struck his home. In real life Kiarostami
continued to follow through the young child actor’s progress to becoming a soldier and then a family
man. This following of non-professional actors who become part of an artist’s family, where life becomes
the continuation of a film, is a path that many Iranian directors have since pursued. In Kiarostami’s
“Through the Olive Trees”, a film within a film, we witness a continuously improvised script that shows
the many directions a film can take and illustrates how simple events can change the course of a drama
at any moment, both in real life as well as in film. “Homework” (1989), made in order to understand his
own difficulties with his sons’ homework, was a way to capture life through film and to find possible
solutions, while “Close-Up” (1990), the critics’ favourite, steals the show from Makhmalbaf by making a
film about a man arrested for pretending to be Makhmalbaf whom Kiarostami then introduces to
Makhmalbaf himself: a film about the power of cinema and its effect on fantasists. His latest compilation
of short films, “Five” (2003), leads the new cinema to its zen-like extremity: one still camera; no words;
human figures replaced gradually by animals, objects, and finally total darkness apart from the reflection
of the moon on a lagoon. In “The Project”, a documentary made by his younger son Bahman Kiarostami
during Kiarostami senior’s filming of the award-winning “The Taste of Cherry” (Palme d’Or, Cannes,
1997), we glimpse Kiarostami’s directing technique and cinematic vocabulary.

The three children of Mohsen Makhmalbaf symbolise the paradoxes of life in post-revolutionary Iran.
Without formal education but impressively self-taught, these teenagers document their family and their
family’s working methods. Their director father, a former extremist Islamic militant who reveals his life in
the beautiful “A Moment of Innocence” (1996), is now one of the most outspoken critics of the
government and took his children out of school to work under the umbrella of the ‘Makhmalbaf Film
House’. His daughter, Samira Makhmalbaf, made “The Apple” at the age of 17 and later became a Cannes
Jury member at the age of 20, meanwhile women in Iran are perceived as submissive, powerless victims.
Her sister Hana Makhmalbaf, now 15, has already acted in films, published a book (“Visa for a
Moment”), made short films, and travelled to Afghanistan. To discover Samira’s charisma and frightening
intelligence, see the documentaries made by her younger brother Maysam Makhmalbaf (“How Samira
made the Blackboard”, 2002) or the one by her sister Hana (“Joy of Madness”, 2003). “The Day I became
a Woman”, the debut film of their stepmother Marziyeh Meshkini, is surely the first of many as this
family continuously works on forthcoming projects in Iran and Afghanistan.

However, Makhmalbaf’s sharp critical mind, growing ambition, financial independence and gradual
distancing from the authorities all make the Makhmalbaf Film House one of the ultimate paradoxical
products of post-revolutionary cinema. How can a country with so many restrictions produce some 70
features and 1000 shorts every year?

The growing presence of women in Iranian cinema is another paradox. In the last two decades, there has
been a higher percentage of women directors in Iran than in most countries in the West. The success and
hard work of the pioneering Rakhshan Bani-Etemad is an example that many women directors in Iran
were following much before Samira made the headlines. Bani-Etemad’s recent documentary, “Our
Times”, in which a homeless heroine stands for election, shows the strength of character and the
courage of an ordinary destitute woman who stubbornly perseveres in defending her rights. The great
actress Niki Karimi’s moving documentary, “To Have or Not to Have”, produced by Abbas Kiarostami,
portrays Iranian women’s dilemmas and hesitations about whether or not to have children, in a country
where more than half of the population is under 18 years old. The factual directness of these
documentaries raises far more awareness of human rights than do most political slogans. Women’s
presence in the film industry as film-makers and producers has encouraged many Iranian women,
whatever their social status, to take destiny into their own hands and fight for their rights, whether
through film, art or real life.

This combativeness and acceptance of life as a vehicle for art or art as a vehicle for life, is also expressed
in the stylistic approach of established directors such as Bahman Farmanara. His witty, semi-
autobiographical surrealist work, “Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine” is a courageous mirroring of
his intellectual and artistic struggle for survival in difficult times. Jafar Panahi, whose recent film
“Crimson Gold” (2003) is based on a true story that Kiarostami told him, asked his mentor to write his
script (his first feature, “The White Balloon” was also written by Kiarostami). Together they found the
lead actor: a physically strong, but schizophrenic, pizza delivery man, who created more trouble than
Panahi could sometimes handle. It was only when he considered another possible ending, without this
lead actor, that he managed to control the actor’s whims and finish the film. In contrast to this is the
experience of Abolfazl Jalili, a director rebel with a cause, whose films reveal the plight of homeless
young boys, deprived of a childhood and identity. Jalili’s filming would often be interrupted for months
when his lead actors went astray and his wife would complain of the tedium of delousing the boys.
Alhough he himself has only one son, Jalili says that he has ‘currently eight children’, illustrating the
intimate interaction between directors and their non-professional actors that is so characteristic of
Iranian cinema.

In “Djomeh” (2000), made by another of Kiarostami’s assistants, Hassan Yektapanah, the story focuses
on the plight of one of the two million young Afghan refugees in Iran without legal status. When the non-
professional Afghan actor, used in this film, was invited to the Hamburg Film Festival, and then denied re-
entry to Iran, his story became another film, “Heaven’s Path” (2002), by the architect-actor-film-maker
Mahmoud Behraznia, who lives in Germany.

After the recent ‘chain killings’ of intellectuals and the government’s inability to capture the killers,
cinema’s mood has become much darker and filled with despair. What Iran’s cinematic future may hold
can be illustrated in the work of emerging film-makers such as Alireza Amini, whose moving “Letters of
the Wind” (2002) reveals the solitude of men whose only emotional comfort comes from listening to the
voices of women secretly taped in the street. Together with Parviz Shahbazi’s “Deep Breath” (2003), an
unusual commercial success despite its dark ending, these works describe beautifully and poetically the
angst of today’s young generation in Iran.

Characteristics of Iranian low-budget auteur films

1. A script often inspired by true life stories

2. The use of real, mainly outdoor locations – censorship requires that actresses wear veils even
when portraying indoor activities, such as sharing a meal or sleeping, so, in order not to look
ridiculous, directors prefer to work outdoors where women are veiled anyway. This regulation
prevents directors from reflecting reality in intimate scenes.
3. The use of non-professional actors, which involves long preparation and improvisation.
4. Simple, aesthetic choices and subtle and austere images.
 5. A strong sense of ambiguity about what is real and what is fiction – a narrative driven less by
action or words and more by emphasis on gestures and glances that reveal character and
emotions.
6. A certain tenderness in contrast to harsh realities.
7. An atmosphere of repressed sensuality and a sense of alienation, where characters are often
alone, lonely and wandering.
8. A multi-layered language where metaphor encourages multiple interpretations.
9. A humanistic language with a simple and modest treatment and the emphasis on human values,
as opposed to the high-tech, fast action Western genres.

In these stories that often mirror the tension between modernity and tradition, what prevails is a strong
longing for justice and a lesson in survival – for the directors, the characters, and their audience.