Showing posts with label Essay Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Essay Film. Show all posts

Tuesday 28 February 2017

Screening of Filmfarsi (work in progress) at The Essay Film Festival


Since late 2015, I have been busy working on a documentary about Iranian pre-revolutionary mainstream cinema called Filmfarsi.

In the last 18 months or so, the film has been shaped up, shortened (from an "epic version" which ran nearly for three hours), but also "tested" during two work in progress screenings at the cinematheque of Copenhagen (played to a full house) and the Stadtkino in Basel, Switzerland.

The third sneak preview of the film will be at the Essay Film Festival in London and can be booked here.

Yusef Sayed on the film:

"Filmfarsi was the cinema of a nation with a split personality”, says filmmaker Ehsan Khoshbakht in this film-critical history of Iran under the Shah.

Khoshbakht’s found-footage essay film Filmfarsi salvages low budget thrillers and melodramas suppressed following the 1979 Islamic revolution. These films defined Iranian cinema in the 1960s and 70s, when the industry shared an equal percentage of the market with the USA. Little more than VHS rips remain.

Khoshbakht here uncovers that which was thought destroyed. A cinema of titillation, action and big emotions, which also presented a troubling mirror for the country, as Iran struggled to reconcile its religious traditions with the turbulence of modernity, and the influences of the West. There are remakes and rip-offs, even a Persian Vertigo. The often cheap, sleazy and derivative films offer an insight into Iran’s psyche.

Thursday 29 August 2013

The Essay Film - A Manifesto by Mark Cousins


In the last two years I have made three essay films – What is This Film Called Love?, A Story of Children and Film, and Here be Dragons. In the next year, I will make two more – I am Belfast and Stockholm My Love.

In making these, and watching many more – by Anand Patwardhan and Agnes Varda, for example – and after reading Philip Lopate’s book on the essay, I started to make a mental list of the elements of, and the principles behind, essay films. This list is a kind of manifesto.


1
A fiction film is a bubble. An essay film bursts it.

2
An essay film takes an idea for a walk.

3
Essay films are visual thinking.

4
Essay films reverse film production: the images come first, the script, last.

5
Filming an essay is gathering, like a carpenter gathers wood.

6
A fiction film is a car, an essay film is a bike; it can nip up an alleyway, you can feel the wind in its hair.

7
A road movie has outer movement, an essay film has inner movement.

8
An essay film is the opposite of fly on the wall.

9
An essay film can go anywhere, and should.

10
Two essay films should be made every year. Why? Because, after F for Fake, Orson Welles said this to Henry Jaglom during lunch at Ma Maison: “I could have made an essay film – two of ‘em a year, you see. On different subjects. Various variations of that form.”

11
Commentary is to the essay film, what dance is to the musical.

12
All essay films would be improved by a clip of Dietrich (see Marcel Ophuls).

13
An essay film cannot create the atmosphere of Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard;
A fiction film cannot explain that atmosphere.

14
Even Hollywood makes essay films – look at DW Griffith’s Intolerance.

15
Essay films are what Astruc dreamt of.

16
Digital had made Astruc’s dream come true.