Centre for Possible Studies
64 Seymour Street
London W1H 5BW
In conjunction with our residency at the Centre for Possible Studies, the Bidoun Library will present a program of two films drawn from our collaboration with the online archive UbuWeb.
The program will be introduced by Masoud Golsorkhi, editor of Tank magazine.
Bahman Maghsoudlou Ardeshir Mohasses & His Caricatures 1972
20 min
A short documentary about Ardeshir Mohasses (1938-2008) featuring rare footage of the Iranian artist in his studio in Iran before his self-exile in New York which was to last over thirty years. Mohasses’ anti-shah and anti-Islamic Republic cartoons used settings and costumes of the Qajar dynasty of 1794 to 1925 — a misdirection that fooled nobody. The film features commentary from Iranian intellectuals of the time including Houshang Taheri, Javad Mojabi, and Fereidoun Gilani whereas Mohasses, a man of few words, is noticeably mute throughout.
Kamran Shirdel The Night It Rained 1967
35min
In northern Iran, a schoolboy from a village near Gorgan is said to have discovered that the railway had been undermined and washed away by a flood. As the story goes, when he saw the approaching train, he set fire to his jacket, ran towards the train and averted a serious and fatal accident. Kamran Shirdel’s film The Night it Rained does not concentrate on the heroic deed promulgated in the newspapers, but on a caricature of social and subtle political behavior — the way in which witnesses and officials manage to insert themselves into the research into this event. Shirdel uses newspaper articles and interviews with railway employees, the governor, the chief of police, the village teacher and pupils — each of whom tell a different version of the event. In the end, they all contradict each other, while the group of possible or self-appointed heroes constantly grows. With his cinematic sleights of hand, Shirdel paints a bittersweet picture of Iranian Society in which truth, rumor, and lie can no longer be distinguished.
Upon completion the film was banned and confiscated, and Shirdel was finally expelled from the Ministry. It was released seven years later in 1974 to participate in the Third Tehran International Film Festival, where it won the GRAND PRIX by a unanimous vote, only to be banned again until after the revolution.
Seeking Locations in Palestine for the Film “The Gospel According to Matthew” (Sopralluoghi in Palestina per il film “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo”)
Pier Paolo Pasolini.
1963
52 min
In 1963, accompanied by a newsreel photographer and a Catholic priest, Piero Paolo Pasolini traveled to Palestine to investigate the possibility of filming his biblical epic The Gospel According to Matthew in its approximate historical locations. Edited by The Gospel‘s producer for potential funders and distributors, Seeking Locations in Palestine features semi-improvised commentary from Pasolini as its only soundtrack. As we travel from village to village, we listen to Pasolini’s idiosyncratic musings on the teachings of Christ and witness his increasing disappointment with the people and landscapes he sees before him. Israel, he laments, is much too modern. The Palestinians, much too wretched; it would be impossible to believe the teachings of Jesus had reached these faces. The Gospel According to Matthew was ultimately filmed in Southern Italy. Mel Gibson would use some of the same locations forty years later for The Passion of the Christ.
Bidoun and UbuWeb are pleased to present four of Shirdel’s most renowned socio-political documentaries, films that courageously and frankly revealed the darker side of Iran’s economic boom, analyzing the effects of a society flush with oil money. These films were steeped in a deep social consciousness reminiscent of the best of the Italian Neo-realist tradition, the cinema that had influenced him deeply during his studies in Italy. Shirdel’s furious documentaries and cinematic language were a bone of contention both under the Shah and following his exile, because they spoke up for the underprivileged and, in doing so, exposed and criticized the corruption of the mechanism of power. Because of the severe censorship, nearly all his films were banned and confiscated, and in the end he was expelled from The Ministry and put on the blacklist. Seven years after it was made (and censored), his The Epic of the Gorgani Village Boy (The Night It Rained!), after receiving the GRAN PRIX at The Third Tehran International Film Festival (1974), was immediately banned again and remained so (like his Nedamatgah (Women’s Prison, 1965), Qaleh (Women’s Quarter, 1966), Tehran Is the Capital of Iran (1966), and others) until after the revolution.
Still from Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1976)
Legendary Syrian documentary filmmaker and activist Omar Amiralay passed away this past Saturday at age 65 of cerebral thrombosis.
Just one week ago Amiralay was part of a group of Syrian activists and intellectuals who signed a statement in support of Tunisians and Egyptians in their struggle for justice. For 45 years Amiralay was dedicated to social and political activism in Syria and the greater Arab world through his cinema and beyond.
This past Sunday Bidoun screened a special hour-long montage for BLVCK AMERICA’S inaugural BLVCK EYE film night at the Ace Hotel in New York. Responding to popular demand, we’ve uploaded it for all to see along with some photos of the screening.
The montage is comprised of shorts and clips from materials which in some manner depict a relationship between Iran and the rest of the world: Farsi in American films, English in Iranian films, French directors commissioned to make films in Iran — even Princess Soraya Bakhtiari’s acting debut in a throwaway Antonioni film.
