the Iran Film Archive. After another five-year sojourn in Paris he returned again and set about directing what is generally regarded as the first artistic feature in Iranian cinema. The South of the City (1958) was a drama about denizens of poor southern Tehran, made on the streets in classic Neorealist style. The Shah’s government first allowed it to open in theaters and then, suspecting it of Communist sympathies, yanked and destroyed it.
Ghaffary persevered, however. His second and final feature, Night of the Hunchback (1963), a darkly surreal drama that suggests Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry remade by Luis Buñuel, exhibited the auteurist idiosyncrasy and stylistic adventurousness that Hoveyda was advocating in France. It was later considered one of three films of the 1960s that foreshadowed Iran’s cinematic explosion of the following decade.
The other two were made by renowned literary figures, a reminder that cinematic modernism in Iran partly reflected the ongoing influence of modernism in other forms, especially painting and the visual arts and literature. Ebrahim Golestan was already an established writer of fiction and translator of Hemingway, Faulkner and Chekhov in the 1950s when he established his own film studio, which made a number of commissioned short documentaries that were among the first Iranian films to win prizes at international festivals. His first feature, The Brick and the Mirror (1965), resembled Night of the Hunchback in adopting Neorealist techniques (shot mostly in nighttime Tehran, it was the first Iranian feature
to use direct sound) to offer a brooding vision of contemporary Iran; rejecting the conventions of Iranian commercial films of the day, it showed the influence of modernist fiction in its fragmented story about a cab driver and his wife who find an abandoned baby. Though a critical and commercial flop, its gritty realism influenced young filmmakers of the next generation.
The film of this period that gained the most lasting renown, a 21-minute documentary titled The House Is Black (1962), was produced by Golestan and directed by his protégé (and lover) Forough Farrokhzad, a young poet who’s sometimes called the most important female writer in Iranian history. After studying film and working as an editor with Golestan, Farrokhzad got her one shot at directing when he sent her and a crew to shoot a commissioned short about a leper colony in the city of Tabriz. What she did with the subject was utterly original.
Juxtaposing the physical deformities and hardships of the lepers with Biblical verses of lamentation and exaltation, the film owes its power not just to its wrenching subject and forceful presentation but also to a comprehensive and very personal vision that fuses achievements in all areas: conception, shooting, editing, text and sound. Whether it was interpreted as offering as a metaphor for life in Iran at the time, or simply for the grueling conditions of the human existence, The House Is Black unquestionably explores the expressive possibilities of filmmaking. Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf later agreed with others in seeing it as the cornerstone of a “poetic cinema” particular to Iran.
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