Other Middle Eastern countries were more closely tied to the Third World circuits of film export and personnel flow. In the early 1970s, Syria had a robust industry, sending films to Lebanon, Kuwait, and Jordan. There was a “new Syrian cinema” of social protest, as well as the biannual Damascus Film Festival showcasing Third World products. Lebanon also had a vigorous film industry before the outbreak of civil war in 1975 forced most personnel to emigrate.
Cairo had once been the Hollywood of Arab cinema, but in the 1970s Egyptian production declined. Major director went into exile; after making The Betrayed
(1972) in Syria, Tewfik Saleh became head of the Iraqi film institute. The Egyptian industry’s output rose during the 1980s, chiefly because of hospitable Arab Gulf markets and the popularity of Egyptian films on video. Yet soon the industry fell on hard times. Video piracy ran rampant, and the government withdrew all financial assistance to producers. U. S. films conquered the market, leaving the local product to fend for itself.
While some new Egyptian directors (including women) emerged during the period, the most famous filmmaker remained the veteran Youssef Chahine. An early proponent of Egyptian President Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism, Chahine later examined Egyptian history from a critical perspective. The Sparrow (1973) explores the causes of Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war. Later, his films became at once more personal and more transnational. Alexandria, Why? (1978) intercuts events of 1942 with Hollywood films of the era; in Memory (1982), a filmmaker facing a heart operation recalls his career over thirty years. Both films are autobiographical, but Chahine joined many political filmmakers of the era in seeking a broader audience by means of more intimate dramas. “I would like to be able to communicate with all of humanity and not only with the narrow parents-children-country group.”5 Chahine continued to direct regularly into the twenty-first century; notable among his films is The Emigrant, released in 1994. He received a life achievement award at Cannes in 1997.
During the 1990s, Egyptian production fell sharply, from fifty-three films in 1993 to only sixteen in 1997. A new production company, Sho’aa (Cultural Media Company) started up, however, boosting production and allowing new young directors a chance. Directors found the “fish out of water” comedy a huge draw. Sudanese director Said Hamed made An Upper Egyptian at AUC (1998), about a provincial scholarship student attending the American University in Cairo and coping with city life. The film was the top grosser of the year, and Hamed followed it with Hammam in Amsterdam in 1999, a year in which the top nine box-office hits were all Egyptian films.
Turkish cinema came to international notice in the late 1960s with such films as Yilmaz Guney’s Umut (“Hope,” 1970; p. 536). Turkey already boasted the highest output in the region. Erotic films, comedies, historical epics, melodramas, and even Westerns drew in an audience of over 100 million per year. But production and attendance were already declining when a military contingent seized power in 1980.
The government’s oppression of suspect directors was little short of terroristic. GUney became the most visible target. A popular actor who had become a left-wing sympathizer, he fell under suspicion in the mid-1970s. When the military took power, GUney was already serving a twenty-four-year prison sentence. During his prison stay, he wrote scripts that were filmed by others. The most famous of these, Yol (The Way, 1982) follows five prisoners given a week’s release to visit their families, and its forlorn landscapes hint at the oppressiveness of contemporary Turkey (Color Plate 26.24). In 1981, GUney escaped to France, where he made his last film. The Wall
(1983) is a bitter, dispirited indictment of a prison system that oppresses men, women, and children alike. The prison wall, filmed in different sorts of light and weather, becomes an ominous presence throughout. When GUney died in 1984, the Turkish government sought to erase every trace of him. Police burned all his films and arrested anyone who possessed his photo.
Despite stifling censorship, the film industry gradually rebuilt itself, and production grew to almost 200 films. Only half of these, however, were released to theaters; the rest were destined for the increasingly powerful video market. At the same time, the government sought to attract western capital, and U. S. companies reappeared on the scene in the late 1980s. Their expanding hold on the market drove production to a mere 25 films in 1992, most made with European cofinancing.
During the 1990s, Turkey gradually liberalized, planning to become the only Asian country in the European Union. In 1993, censorship was all but abolished. At the same time, however, a recession continued to push down production to around ten films a year. The surprising local success of Yavuz Turgul’s The Bandit, which beat out Braveheart for number one at the box office in 1996, inspired new attempts at production. In 1998, Yol finally received a commercial release in Turkey. By 2000, a young generation of directors seemed to be emerging. One of these, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, used his own family as actors in the contemplative and lyrical The Town (1998) and Clouds of May (2000).
Filmmakers fell under comparable constraints in two nearby states on the Arabian Peninsula. In 1979, a revolt drove the shah of the Pahlavi dynasty out of Iran, and the Ayatollah Khomeini took over the government. While Khomeini was consolidating a fundamentalist Islamic state, his country was attacked by Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein. The war proved costly for Iran. At the ceasefire of 1988, Khomeini’s leadership was shaken and Saddam had gained stature.
Iraq’s cinema had long been inconsequential; Iraqi dialect was incomprehensible in other Middle Eastern countries, and no stars or genres were worth exporting. But as Saddam bid for leadership of the Arab community, his government launched a patriotic film program. It established a monopoly on production and began inviting Arab filmmakers to work on big-budget features. The $15 million battle epic AI-Qadissa (1981) was the most expensive film ever made in the Arab world. Directed by the Egyptian veteran Salah Abou Seif, it utilized a crew drawn from all over the Middle East. In celebrating a seventh-century Iraqi victory over Persian forces, Al-Qadissa suggests parallels to Saddam’s war with Iran. His next military venture, against the much smaller neighboring Arab country of Kuwait, led to the U. S. launching the Gulf War against Iraq. Driven out of Kuwait, Saddam resisted peace with western nations. The resulting longstanding boycott decimated the country’s filmmaking.
Iran: Before and after the Revolution Iran’s cinema, much more significant than Iraq’s, underwent more severe fluctuations. Under the shah, Tehran boasted a major film festival and a commercial industry releasing up to seventy films a year. In the early 1970s the mass-entertainment cinema was counterbalanced by the cinema motefavet (“New Iranian Cinema”), exemplified by films such as Dariush Mehrjui’s Gav (“The Cow,” 1970; 26.45). Some directors left the film workers’ union to establish the New Film Group, which received limited government funding. Mehrjui’s The Cycle (1976) and Bahman Farmanara’s Tall Shadows of the Wind (1978)
26.45 The regional realism of Gav: Hassan returns to his village, unaware that his beloved cow has died.
Were among several films criticizing social conditions, including the shah’s secret police.
After Khomeini’s 1979 revolution many filmmakers went into exile, and film production slackened. Only about a hundred features were made between 1979 and
1985. Censorship, confined largely to political topics under the shah, now also focused on sexual display and western influences. Foreign films were drastically cut and shown with dubbed commentary. Soon Khomeini’s regime drove out foreign cinema altogether.
Iran’s theocracy condemned many western traditions, but government officials quickly recognized that film could mobilize citizens to support the regime. Movies were powerful in a nation in which nearly half the population was under the age of fifteen. Khomeini’s government created a film industry that reflected his interpretation of Iranian culture and the Shi’ite Muslim tradition. The Farabi Cinema Foundation (FCF), established in 1983, offered government financial aid to producers willing to back directors’ first films. Although the war with Iraq was depleting the country’s resources, the regime encouraged a new generation of filmmakers, and production rose steadily. Even women directors entered the industry.
A Film Renaissance in Iran The Ayatollahs’ restrictive regime would seem an unlikely source of creative cinema, yet soon a series of imaginative, affecting films began to appear not only in Iranian theaters but at film festivals abroad. One reason for such apparent freedom was the Children and Young Adults’ Unit of the FCE Films for or about children were unlikely to contain political messages offensive to the government, and they received easy funding. As a result, some of the most original directors took this route, and many of the earliest films to gain international attention centered on children.
26.46 In Under the Olive Trees, tensions between local nonactors repeatedly ruin a simple scene.
The first filmmaker to gain wide acclaim was the veteran Abbas Kiarostami. His unpretentious story of a child searching for his classmate in a distant village, Where Is My Friend’s Home? (1986), brought attention to New Iranian Cinema. As a sequel, Kiarostami made And Life Goes On (1992), an autobiographical fiction film showing a film director and his son driving through the regions devastated by the 1991 earthquake, searching for the boy who had performed in the earlier film. Kiarostami uses imaginative framings to dedramatize the quake’s horror and display the determination of the survivors, as when the son pours a drink for an unseen baby in an adjacent vehicle (Color Plate 26.25).
Kiarostami completed this boxes-within-boxes trilogy in 1994 with Under the Olive Trees (aka Through the Olive Trees), a film about a movie crew camping near a small village in the earthquake region. They are apparently making And Life Goes On. Kiarostami creates a humorously maddening scene: multiple takes of the same shot break down when the young actress refuses to speak to the actor who is courting her in real life (26.46). Kiarostami went on to deal with the forbidden subject of suicide in The Taste of Cherry, the 1997 Grand Prize-winner at Cannes. His The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) takes another media professional on a contemplative, faintly comic journey into the countryside. By the early 1990s, Kiarostami was obtaining his funding from outside Iran, but his films were still subject to government censorship.
Kiarostami’s prominence drew the world’s attention to other talented Iranian filmmakers. Jafar Panahi, who had assisted on Under the Olive Trees, inspired Kiarostami to write The White Balloon (1995), which Panahi made as his first feature. Coaxing a remarkable performance out of the child lead, Panahi then cast her sister in The Mirror (1997), about a little girl who tries to make her way home from school in crowded Tehran. Along with Where Is My Friend’s Home?, such films established what the Iranians called the “child quest” genre, in which a determined child doggedly overcomes obstacles to achieve a goal. Not only were such films relatively safe fare politically, but they charmed audiences abroad.
Like Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf had been directing since the 1970s, but his international breakout film was Salaam Cinema (1994), a good-humored documentary about film lovers. He swiftly turned out many lyrical films, including Moment of Innocence (1996), like Under the Olive Trees, about the ways in which romance disrupts filmmaking; Gabbeh (1996), a mystical drama about a weaver of Persian carpets; and the rapturous The Silence (1998), centered on a blind boy who must find work. Makhmalbaf also appeared as himself in Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), which investigates a bizarre swindle: a film buff impersonated Makhmalbaf and promised to put people into movies. Kiarostami intercuts documentary footage of the culprit’s trial with staged scenes in which participants reenact the event. Makhmalbaf’s 2001 film Kandahar, a tale of Afghan oppression under the Taliban, became unintentionally timely and popular abroad after the United States began its campaign against terrorism in Afghanistan.
On the basis of his successes, Makhmalbaf established his own firm, the Makhmalbaf Film House, for which his 17-year-old daughter Samira directed The Apple (1997), using him as scriptwriter and editor. Basing her film on the true story of a couple who had never let their two 12-year-old daughters out of the house until forced to by social workers, Samira Makhmalbaf recruited the family themselves to reenact their story, which they do so with remarkable naturalness and unconcern for the camera’s presence (Color Plate 26.26). Her second feature, Blackboards (2000), used mostly nonactors to portray unemployed teachers on the roads near the Iraqi border, struggling to educate refugees too concerned with staying alive to respond. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s wife, Marziyeh Meshkini, worked as assistant director to her daughter and then took up directing herself with The Day I Became a Woman (2000), examining the situation of women in Iran through tales of three generations.
In comparison to its Middle Eastern neighbors, Iran proved notably successful in building its film industry. While in 1980, the year after the downfall of the shah, only twenty-eight features were made, by 2001 the number had risen to eighty-seven. Many nations were like Iran in providing some form of government subsidies for filmmaking, but in Iran there was one enormous advantage: American films were banned. In fact, bootleg videotapes of foreign films, mostly from Hollywood, circulated widely and clandestinely. After copies of Titanic a p-peared in Tehran, Leonardo DiCaprio’s face appeared on the fronts of magazines and of Iranian teenagers wearing knock-off T-shirts. But theatergoers were limited mostly to domestically produced fare. Most films were in popular genres like melodramas and historical pageants, and these seldom circulated to festivals.
Few countries, however, won such acclaim on the world’s film-festival circuit. While to the West Iran might seem a closed society, the Farabi Cinema Foundation monitored the international scene carefully. An English-language quarterly called Film International ranked films and directors by the number of their successes at festivals. With the FCF now coordinating all national film activities, more money was poured into production. The average film budget rose from $11,000 in 1990 to $200,000 in 1998—still, of course, absurdly low by western standards.
In 1997, Iran elected a more liberal president, Mohammed Khatemi. As a former minister of culture, he had played a role in helping filmmakers achieve some relative freedom. His desire to open Iran to a dialogue with the West was strongly opposed by more conservative officials, but Khatemi had a powerful ally in his country’s cinema.
World History
