Showing posts with label Sohrab Shahid Saless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sohrab Shahid Saless. Show all posts

Wednesday 25 October 2023

Tabi’at-e Bijan [Still Life] (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)

Still Life

Tabi'at-e Bijan (Still Life). 1974. Iran. Written and directed by Sohrab Shahid Saless. With Zadour Bonyadi, Mohammed Kani, Hedayatollah Navid. 93 min.

An elderly railway signalman is unable to understand the meaning of “retirement” when he is handed over his retirement letter. Still Life, the film that shook Iranian cinema to its core and won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, is an unforgettable, masterfully paced exercise in stillness and loneliness that doesn’t shrink from depicting exploitative tendencies within contemporary Iranian society. Shahid Saless uses the inarticulacy of his protagonist as an aesthetic strategy and finds poetry in seemingly dead moments. Made only in 11 days and shot with the painterly vision of the cinematographer Houshang Baharlou, this landmark work pushed the boundaries of cinema like no other Iranian film of the 1970s. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Wednesday 30 August 2023

Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974) reviewed by John Gillet for Sight & Sound


Perhaps Berlin’s main achievement was to reveal the progress of the young Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Sales, with A Simple Event (reviewed from last year’s Tehran Festival) in the Forum and Still Life in competition. The new film continues his preoccupation with the lives of inarticulate people—in this case, an elderly railway signalman who receives news of his retirement with utter incomprehension— developed through lengthy scenes in which the characters are simply observed going about their daily chores. Without Sales’ extraordinary control, the result could be  intolerable, but for me the film’s exact placing and timing of shots, rather like a slow symphony scored pianissimo throughout, was entirely hypnotic. 

Wednesday 18 May 2022

Iranian Films at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022

The Carriage Driver (Nosrat Karimi, 1971), shot by Houshang Baharlou (Chess of the Wind)

The forthcoming edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 25-July 3, 2022) doesn't include an individual strand for Iranian cinema, however, it'll nonetheless feature at least five dazzling Iranian films, made between 1961 and 2022, shown across 3 different strands.

The documentary section will see the Italian premiere of À vendredi, Robinson (Mitra Farahani, 2022), a dialogue between Ebrahim Golestan, a giant of Iranian cinema and literature (now only a few months shy of his 100th birthday) and Swiss-French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. This is a truly beautiful work and should prepare you for what comes next.

A Fire (Yek Atash) by Ebrahim Golestan was premiered at Venice Film Festival in 1961. We screened it in 2016 when a retrospective was dedicated to Golestan's cinema of poetry and politics. Now we have updated the faded 35mm print previously shown with a 4K restoration of the film, presented for the first time in its original Persian voice-over, spoken by a famous voice artist, Asadollah Peyman. (The 2016 screening was from an English-dubbed version.) 

Monday 2 March 2020

Four Iranian New Wave Films That You Must See

The Cow (1970)

Written for the catalogue of the 2015's edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato. The two other essential titles which were restored and shown in Bologna a few years after this were Brick & Mirror and The House Is Black.


A SIMPLE EVENT: THE BIRTH OF IRANIAN NEW WAVE CINEMA


This programme offers one way of looking at the birth of modern cinema in Iran, a development now commonly referred to as the Iranian New Wave. The films presented here (The Night It Rained, Night of the Hunchback, The Cow, A Simple Event) make up roughly one quarter of the New Wave films and were selected according to accessibility and print quality above notions of artistic merit alone.

This particular narrative concerns four filmmakers, each of whom returned home to Iran following a period spent overseas, in order to revolutionise, even if subconsciously, their national cinema. In doing so they also rebelled against a society they found apathetic and divided over matters of justice.

Monday 6 November 2017

A Simple Event (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1973)


Update: Playing at GOETHE-INSTITUT LONDON on November 9, 2017, 7 PM.

From my Iranian New Wave programme notes, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, 2015. -- EK

YEK ETTEFAGH-E SADEH
Iran, 1973 Regia: Sohrab Shahid Saless
T. int.: A Simple Event. Scen.: Sohrab Shahid Saless (uncredited), Omid Rouhani (uncredited). F.: Naghi Maasoumi. M.: Kazem Rajinia. Int.: Mohammad Zamani, Anne Mohammad Tarikhi, Habibullah Safarian, Hedayatullah Navid, Majid Baghaie. Prod.: Sazman-e Cinemaie Keshvar.

A few days in the life of a young boy living by the Caspian Sea. At school he is falling behind his classmates and almost expelled. He helps his father to fish illegally, and at home watches as his mother’s health deteriorates.

original poster

Sohrab Shahid Saless’s debut feature was made clandestinely with the budget and crew assigned to him for a short film by the government-run Sazman-e Cinemaie Keshvar, for whom he had previously made around 20, mostly uncredited shorts. The film was shot in Bandar Shah. Saless, who admired Chekov, chose the location for its “Russian-looking” atmosphere and the fact that it was at the end of the railroad – at a dead end, like the lives of his characters. Mohammad Zamani, who had never been to a cinema, plays the young boy and one can feel the weight of the world on his frail shoulders. Mysteriously quiet and empty, the film’s characters are apparently devoid of any feeling, yet still capable of making an enormous emotional impact on the audience.