In 1969-70, the pioneering efforts of Ghaffary, Golestan and Farrokhzad gave way to a sudden onrush of distinctive, artistically purposeful feature films from a slew of new filmmakers, most in their 20s and 30s. The intellectual film culture that Ghaffary had tried to implant evidently had taken root; cinema was a fashionable topic and pursuit for educated urbanites who often honed their cinephilia while studying abroad, enjoying the largesse and provisional liberality of the last Shah’s increasingly shaky regime.
The “Iranian New Wave,” as this filmmaking generation was dubbed, included such talents as Dariush Mehrjui, Bahram Beyzaie, Amir Naderi, Masoud Kimiai, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Naser Taghvai, and Abbas Kiarostami. Though their accomplishments were extraordinary, it’s little wonder the world barely noted them. In the West, it was the era of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut, Godard and a generation of rising talents such as Coppola and Scorsese. Cinephiles in Europe and the U.S. scarcely needed to look to old Iran for innovative brilliance.
During the ’70s, Kiarostami made his first two features, but most of his energy was occupied running the cinema division of the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, a gov- ernment organization where he was allowed to make, as he later put it, films “about but not necessarily for” children and to supervise his filmmaker friends in doing the same. It was a little oasis of creativity, he has said, a place to learn and experiment away from both commercial and political pressures.
In another part of Tehran during the late ’70s, mean- while, Mohsen Makhmalbaf was enduring a very different sort of existence. An adolescent Islamic ter- rorist, he had been captured after an action during which he wounded a policeman. Sent to prison, he was tortured severely by the Shah’s inquisitors for four years. Like Kiarostami and other restive young artists and intellectuals, though in a much arduous way, he approached the decade’s end waiting for one thing: the end of what Iranians call “Shah’s time.”
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