Filmfarsi

Sampled in Ehsan Khoshbakht's Filmfarsi (2019): Syamak Yasami: Leyli and Majnoon / لیلی و مجنون  (Iran 1970). The speech bubble: "Manouchehr? Iraj? Tell me who you are!".

The Dancer of the City star Forouzan on the cover of Film va honar [Film & Art] magazine.

Actress pop singer Googoosh and Behrouz Vossoughi behind the scene of The Companion, Masoud Asadollahi, 1975

An Iranian outing, stars Marjan (left) and Nasser Malek Motie.

Fardin and Pouri Banai in a scene from Hell plus Me on the cover of Film and Art magazine.

The most versatile method actor of both filmfarsi and arthouse films, Behrouz Vossoughi now living in exile in the US. Photos and captions: Ehsan Khoshbakht.

فیلمفارسی
    IR/GB © 2019 Distorto. P+D+SC+narrator: Ehsan Khoshbakht. M: Naiel Ibarrola, Lander Macho. S: John Coshen, Rob Szeliga. ED: Niyaz Saghari, Abolfazl Talooni.
    Black and white and colour – 16:9 – HD.
    "In VHS-Scope".
    The clips are in Persian with subtitles in English, the narration is in English.
    84 min
    Festival premiere: 26 July 2019 Cinema Rediscovered (UK).
    Corona lockdown viewings.
    A private Vimeo link viewed on a 4K tv set at home in Helsinki, 7 May 2020.

AA: Ehsan Khoshbakht goes beyond all acclaimed waves of Iranian art cinema to explore a trend of popular Iranian cinema called Filmfarsi that started in 1953 and ended in 1979.

The dates are historical: the year 1953 was that of the coup financed by American and British oil companies to oust the democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh and replace him with a puppet dictator called Shah Reza Pahlavi who enforced his rule in tandem with the CIA and his secret police called SAVAK with a "history of torture which is beyond belief" (Amnesty International). 1979 was the year of the Islamic revolution.

During the bloody rule of the Shah flowered a trend of lowbrow cinema called Filmfarsi, "several letters below B". Khoshbakht explores this trend which has remained practically unknown in the Western world. Since the 1980s it has been also on the verge of falling into oblivion in Iran itself because all what is available are copies of copies of VHS tapes made in the 1970s and the 1980s of once-popular films. Improbably enough, Khoshbakht's entire film is based on these VHS tapes. There are samples from some one hundred titles.

From premises like this we might expect a series of easy (or uneasy) laughs at clumsy movies, and, indeed, an incredulous mood sets in the beginning of this strange survey. But our perspective keeps subtly changing, and our horizon keeps expanding.

The low budget circumstances, the lack of artistic pretense and the openly sensationalist bias created an ambience in which a return of the repressed could take place.

Because the producers could not afford to build sets, the films were often shot on location. Because there was no written dialogue, the lines were improvised. The Filmfarsi phenomenon turns out to be a case of what Amos Vogel called "subversive cinema". Khoshbakht's movie is an odyssey into the unconscious of the Shah's Iran.

Somehow the low definition of the surviving home video samples becomes expressive of the Quixotic nature of the quest into a lost world of dreams, nightmares and escapism. The visual quality becomes an expression of a fading memory on our "journey into lost time".

Khoshbakht's project has been compared with "opening Pandora's box" and identified as a novel approach in the archaeology of the cinema. His mission has nothing in common with fads of cult movies, B movies or golden turkeys ("so bad that they are good"). Instead, Khoshbakht's project is identical with the Henri Langlois tradition of international cinematheques to present the anti-canon, the film maudit, the aforementioned "subversive" currents.

In Finland a parallel is Peter von Bagh as a film-maker. He revelled in discoveries made outside the "film of quality" not only in his film historical compilations. He also expressed weighty arguments of cultural history with such findings. A turning-point was The Year 1952, covering the same historical moment in Finland that was the incubation period of Filmfarsi.

A rich menu of entertainment was on display in Filmfarsi: dance, song, melodrama and crime, and surprisingly frank sexuality and nudity. The uninhibited side of Iranian life was revealed. Foreign films targeted for rip-offs included West Side Story, Sabrina, I vitelloni, Gilda, Vertigo, James Bond and A bout de souffle. After the Shah had divorced Princess Soraya, she appeared in a Michelangelo Antonioni film. Darius Mehrjui, the director of the award-winning art classic The Cow, directed a James Bond spoof before that. Abbas Kiarostami created art credit title sequences for Filmfarsi. Orson Welles received Iranian funding for F for Fake and The Other Side of the Wind thanks to his collaboration with the Shah in "the 2500th anniversary celebration of the Persian empire". (Footage of which, complete with our President Kekkonen in top hat and tails, appears in Chris Marker's Le Fond de l'air est rouge).

Freeze frames were a recurrent device in tragic moments of Filmfarsi. Khoshbakht includes also key documentary shots of real Iranian tragedy such as the 1953 trial and exile of Mosaddegh. We learn that cinema was one of the first victims of the 1979 revolution. 372 martyrs died in an arson attack of Cinema Rex in Tehran showing Masoud Kimiai's The Deer (Gavaznha). The tragedy of history was superimposed with the tragedy of cinema.

I love Ehsan Khoshbakht's Filmfarsi which can be warmly recommended for programs of Iranian history and film history. It is funny and devastating, irreverent and profound, a masterpiece of the montage film. Three years ago I saw samples of Khoshbakht's Filmfarsi programme in Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato. I was not converted, but certainly a film such as Samuel Khachikian's Delhoreh (Anxiety, 1962) is a striking display of lurid pulp energy. I need to see more, for instance from Masoud Kimiai.

Filmfarsi homepage.
Ehsan Khoshbakht interview.