The Tamesis
Cinema has been a part of Iran for almost its entire history. Although the work of Ebrahim Khan Akkas Bashi no longer exists—he was Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s official photographer and captured the country’s earliest known footage with a camera acquired in Paris in 1900—his story illustrates the state’s lasting influence on his images.
In particular, Iran’s cinematic identity over the past century has been characterized by the struggle between secular and fundamentalist hegemonic forces. During the first New Wave, which took shape in the 1960s, a generation of filmmakers developed innovative ways to poetically evoke the sense of social decay prevalent under Reza Pahlavi’s rule. This work continued after Pahlavi’s exile and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) in 1979, as any promise of democratic pluralism was largely put on hold.
So what can we glean now from Iranian films and filmmakers amid a civilian uprising that threatens to topple the regime? It would be foolhardy and sometimes downright dangerous to regard any collection of films as a faithful record of Iran’s complex cultural or political history. But given the country’s seemingly innate knack for self-interrogation through image-making, Iranian cinema often produces a stirring humanism, one that condemns neocon war hawks abroad and fundamentalist elders at home.
The following six films roughly trace the turbulent period from the twilight of the Qajar dynasty to the present day.
Chess of the Wind (1976)
Mohammad Reza Aslani’s 1976 masterpiece, which was rediscovered after decades of silence (the director’s son famously stumbled upon the negatives at a flea market), places its gothic story on the limbo between the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties. This cunning behavior isn’t obvious as the film follows the plot of Madame Agdas (Fakhri Khorwash) and her maid (Shore Agdasroo) to wrest control of her mother’s estate from her boorish stepfather (Mohammed Ali Keshavarz) and his conniving nephew.
However, allusions to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution serve Aslani’s philosophy of history well, as it is not just a catalog of the past but a set of “deterministic principles.” Parts of the film were shot at Moshir ad-Dowleh House, where the 1906 Persian Constitution was drafted, a document that effectively marked the beginning of the modern era in Iranian history, although the 1921 coup that brought Reza Khan as Iran’s leader would dampen these initial steps toward democracy in subsequent years. In a sequence of washerwomen discussing the late matriarch, one of the conversations briefly mentions the draft passed in 1925. This neatly foreshadows Aslani’s ending, where his drama breaks away from the manicured dollhouse to settle on a panoramic shot of contemporary Tehran. Not just a period piece, Chess of the Wind This is a paper on historical unrest as a continuum of struggle against institutional corruption in Iran.
