Treasures from the Golestan Film Studio (1961-1974): the union that birthed Iranian cinema

They’ll never make me believe physical media is dead when packages like this exist. Specifically, I mean packages where the extras justify the price of the entire set on their own. The Golestan Film Studio was an independent studio established by Ebrahim Golestan in Shah-era Iran, one of the earliest such institutions in the country. All but one of the films in this collection predate The Cow, Darius Mehrjui’s 1969 film that’s usually cited as the starting point of the Iranian New Wave. Audiences who’ve fallen in love with later films by Iranian directors like Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, the Makhmalbafs or Jafar Panahi might therefore be attracted to this box set as an extra piece of the puzzle, an explanation of how this formally unique, remarkably confident film tradition emerged. The films collected in Radiance Films’s new Blu-Ray set Treasures from the Golestan Film Studio perform this function, and they’re also tremendously rewarding on their own terms.

Today, the most famous production of the Golestan Film Studio is one Golestan himself did not direct. More on that later, but in its heyday Golestan managed to make the studio’s two feature-length films. The first one, 1966’s Brick and Mirror, captures a pre-revolutionary Iran of jazz cafes and unveiled women. Yet it also captures a deep sense of urban anomie. Its hero, Hashem, is a taxi driver, and while he isn’t anywhere near as volatile as Travis Bickle he’s similarly alienated. One night he discovers a baby abandoned on the back seat of his car. The rest of the film is both a literal quest and an ethical one as Hashem and his girlfriend Taji try to work out what to do with it.

There’s a lot to recommend Brick and Mirror, most notably its lustrous black and white cinematography and Taji Ahmadi’s superb performance as the character who bears her name. It also suffers from letting its dialogue scenes run too long, and the symbolism can be overly opaque. In the short film A Tree Called Golestan, included in the extras here, film restorer Eshan Khoshbakht admits he still doesn’t know what the title means, and Golestan himself is surprised that Khoshbakht hasn’t worked out what the baby represents – “Of course it’s Iran!”, he exclaims, making it particularly noteworthy that Brick and Mirror positions its female lead as the child’s ultimate saviour.

Brick and Mirror is a plausible ancestor for the Iranian New Wave’s obsession with setting movies in cars (Taxi, A Taste of Cherry, Ten et al), and the other feature in the set also points to the future. Secrets of the Jinn Valley Treasure swaps Brick and Mirror‘s monochrome for glowing colour – particularly striking in this restoration – and changes the urban setting for a rural one. The landscapes are utterly breathtaking; it is hard not to wonder if Kiarostami saw this before making his own rural films like Where is the Friend’s House? and A Taste of Cherry. The film is, once again, too long to maintain the appeal of its simple comic plot about a farmer getting in over his head after discovering a haul of buried treasure. But there are unique touches, not least its odd, dissonant modernist score. The landscapes are palpably real but the cave where the hero discovers his hoard is clearly studio-built, creating a beguilingly unreal fairy-tale atmosphere. There is also a poetic opening voiceover, which is as good a bridge as any to the disc’s worth of short films contained in this set. For all the features have plenty to savour, it’s the shorts which show the Golestan Film Studio at its most adventurous.

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TREASURES FROM THE GOLESTAN FILM STUDIO

The famous short I alluded to earlier in this review is The House is Black, by Golestan’s frequent collaborator and partner Forough Farrokhzad. Farrokhzad was one of Iran’s greatest poets – the title of Kiarostami’s film The Wind Will Carry Us is a quote from her work – as well as one of its leading feminist activists. The House is Black is the only film she directed before her tragically young death in a car crash at the age of 32. It’s enough. A searing documentary about a leper camp, it begins with a slow zoom in on a disfigured face and ends with a devastatingly emotional title drop. Farrokhzad’s formal techniques are extraordinarily varied for a first-time director; some of her shots prefigure the slow cinema of later Iranian directors, but she also manages several incredibly powerful, swift montages. (One of them is timed to the squeak of a wheelbarrow’s rusty wheel, which is almost certainly a cinematic first) The camera’s refusal to turn away from the ravages of leprosy and the treatments used to give its sufferers some small relief courts charges of exploitation, and yet ultimately it transcends your misgivings. The knowledge that Farrokhzad adopted one of these children is certainly a comfort, but you don’t need to know that biographical detail. The moral core of the film is explained perfectly clearly in her eloquent, flowing voiceover: “There is no shortage of ugliness in the world, yet the world would be uglier if man closed his eyes to it.”

Farrokhzad’s genius is utterly singular, yet comparing The House is Black to Golestan’s own documentary shorts suggests she was lucky to find a collaborator so in tune with her sensibility. Another producer might have smothered her poetic style, but Golestan’s documentaries bring a touch of poetry to any subject. The earliest short in the set, 1961’s A Fire, is Golestan’s equivalent of Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, a jaw-dropping documentary about the attempts to contain and extinguish an oil well fire that raged for seventy days. As with Herzog’s film, there is an apocalyptic grandeur to the procedures. The scenes at the heart of the fire, a world devoid of all colour bar black and orange, recall the opening of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Yet as with The House is Black there’s a touching sense of life continuing through the horror. Both shorts make a point of music being played, positioning this as an outward sign of the human spirit persevering. And not just the human spirit: as the voiceover wryly notes of the inferno’s effects, “the sheep grew accustomed to it”.

A Fire also has a relationship to the outside world that would be quite unthinkable for Iranian directors after the 1979 revolution. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was put in power as a pro-Western ruler after the democratically-elected ruler Mohammed Mosaddegh was toppled by Western intelligence agencies for trying to nationalise Iran’s country’s oil industry. The ostensibly apolitical A Fire is, therefore, about an issue that could not be closer to the heart of Iranian politics at the time it was made (and arguably still is). These days it can be quite surreal watching a documentary set in Iran where one of the central figures has the none-more-American name Myron Kinley. Some of the films in Treasures from the Golestan Film Studio are drawn a bit off course by this closeness to the West. 1961’s Courtship, the shortest film in the set, was produced for a Canadian anthology film. It’s a potentially historically interesting document about arranged marriages, which is unfortunately completely spoiled by the commercial necessity to have a pair of Westerners yapping over it like sports commentators. In their other films, Golestan and Forroughzad acknowledge the presence of the outside world in more fruitful fashion.

1961’s Wave, Coral and Rock, for example, returns to the industrial subject matter of A Fire for an astonishing hymn to labour. This is still a film commissioned by Western corporations rather than a ‘pure’ poetic statement, but unlike Courtship Golestan’s film-making easily overpowers such compromises. The narrator, who sounds like a bit-part player from a John Ford film, is ill-suited to the task of delivering Golestan’s poetic voiceover, but his contribution is not so much overpowered as it is stomped to atoms by the strength of the director’s images and montages. Winches wind, cranes swing, walls are knocked down and pistons pump in an inventively-edited symphony of continual motion, the equal of anything the Soviet silent film-makers achieved. Even during their lunch breaks, the workers lift weights rather than do anything as effete as relax, although there is a charming moment where one labourer gets a fit of giggles as soon as Golestan’s camera is trained on him. It’s an exhausting film, but also a brilliant one, and one which proves Golestan belongs to the history of the global avant-garde as much as he does Iranian cinema.

Further proof of this comes in The Hills of Marlik, a film whose archaeological subject matter may have inspired Secrets of the Jinn Valley Treasure. This time, the flourishes include using still-photo animation, similar to the contemporary work of Norman McLaren and Stan Vanderbeek, to bring the ancient items to life. And what life: Golestan picks up on the bluntly sexual character of a lot of these artefacts to make probably the horniest film you could make about ancient pottery. It’s the first of a cycle of films that look at Iranian culture and history outside the Western industry documented in A Fire and Wave, Coral and Rock. These constitute his most political films, to the extent that the second two were banned in Iran.

Admittedly, in the case of the final one, the formally inventive farming documentary Harvest and Seed, it’s hard to see why. Yes, it’s a document of a hard, miserable existence, but so was The House is Black. It’s still an interesting, revealing film, with apparent documentary subjects breaking the fourth wall and delivering monologues in the manner of a similarly-aged British documentary short like Oss Oss Wee Oss. But for Golestan at his most rebellious, you have to turn to 1965’s The Crown Jewels of Iran. Commissioned by the Central Bank of Iran, it’s a history of the Iranian monarchy – which the Shah, despite his Western backing, presented himself as the legitimate continuation of – made by someone who clearly could not hold the Iranian monarchy in greater contempt.

The fast editing of The Hills of Marlik recurs here, but this time it’s speeded up to deliberately pummelling effect, a nauseating flicker-film of obscene wealth. It joins Kenneth Anger’s Mouse Heaven and Pere Portabella’s The National Prizes in that understandably small, strange canon of directors being hired to document something they clearly find repulsive. Unlike those films, it has a voiceover to hammer the message home. This is the source of the one slight slip in the set’s otherwise flawless sound and picture quality, and no wonder: the censors found Golestan’s narration so objectionable they actively destroyed the master recordings of one line. The director thus returns to duet with his younger self in this restored version, audibly older but no less committed to the cause. The big mystery is why it was the fairly innocuous final line that got destroyed, rather than the bit where Golestan dismisses the whole royal jewel collection as “pricey pebbles”, describes the history of the Iranian monarchy as “indifferent”, or baldly states “to be bedazzled by riches is the way of decadence”. Perhaps there is some specific local subtext in the last line that escaped me; whatever, it successfully closes the case that Golestan and Forroughzad are the real national treasures of Iran, rather than these “pricey pebbles”.

A great set, then, and some great extras to round it off. Golestan’s status as an independent director-writer-producer means the elements of these films were much more lovingly preserved than most Iranian films of this vintage, and we get a deleted scene from Brick and Mirror to prove it. There were still challenges in the restoration, which Khoshbakht describes in various interviews and video essays. There’s also an interview with Parviz Sayyad, who played Secrets of the Jinn Valley Treasure‘s nameless protagonist. The short films are available to watch individually, or arranged into two playlists themed around Golestan and Forroughzad respectively. The latter is a nice touch: despite Golestan being the director of A Fire and Courtship, Forroughzad contributed a lot both in front of and behind the camera, and the playlist allows you to appreciate both as steps on the way to the landmark that is The House is Black.

Most impressively, there is a whole feature-length documentary, See You Friday, Robinson, by the Iranian dissident director Mitra Farahani. This 2022 film finds Golestan in seclusion in the enormous Scottish mansion he spent the second half of his life in (money came from renting it out as a location to films like The Legend of Hell House and Oh! What a Lovely War!), in the middle of a pen-pal conversation with no less a peer than Jean-Luc Godard. Godard’s messages are not without a certain playfulness – if you ever wanted to see a Godard selfie, this film will make your wish come true – but he is as cryptic as ever, to the extent where even Golestan is vocally baffled by a lot of what he’s receiving. Both directors are deceased now, Golestan through natural causes months after his hundredth birthday, Godard by suicide one day after completing his final short “Scenarios” (of which more tomorrow). Godard is, understandably, in gloomy mood, but Golestan’s light is undimmed. The younger Farahani is actually more pessimistic, wondering “What use is it being a poet in times of distress?”, a question to which Golestan responds “Respect the term poet!” After watching this remarkable collection, you will too.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – TREASURES FROM THE
GOLESTAN FILM STUDIO