Bahram Beyzaie: An American Cinematheque Tribute

ABOUT THE SERIES:

The American Cinematheque remembers legendary Iranian filmmaker and playwright Bahram Beyzaie with a tribute highlighting many of the artist’s most important works across four decades. Often referred to as an ostād (“master”) of Persian literature and mythology, these elements have served as the fabric of his inimitable work, as inseparable from his art as they have been to Iran’s national history for thousands of years.

A leading voice of the Iranian New Wave, Beyzaie began his storytelling career as a playwright before joining fellow filmmaking pioneers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Ebrahim Golestan, Dariush Mehrjui and Amir Naderi, among others, who all felt starved for quality cinema during a time when the popularity of movies were rising in Iran. That said, the vast majority of Iranian films that were being made can be characterized as FilmFarsi productions; low-quality films identified by their low budgets, one-dimensional characters and melodramatic tropes. In an effort to lead Iranian cinema toward a more artistic and dignified future, living up to their nation’s ancient reputation of artistic excellence, Beyzaie and his peers established a new art cinema movement inspired by the New Waves that had begun to reshape the landscape of European cinema in the decade prior. Beyzaie’s cinematic career began with social realism-inspired short films “Uncle Moustache” and “Journey,” while his feature debut, DOWNPOUR, engaged with the common tropes of FilmFarsi to create a completely new kind of Iranian film, filled with romance, comedy, socio-economic intrigue and a style resembling some hybrid of Italian neorealism and French New Wave influence.

Perhaps his greatest legacy comes in the form of cultural preservation during a transitional period defined by attempts from both within and without the country’s borders, to erase and destroy Iran’s cultural history, particularly following the 1979 revolution which saw the rise of a brutal regime intent on erasing the remaining remnants of Iran’s pre-Islamic history, art and storytelling. With films like THE STRANGER AND THE FOG and BALLAD OF TARA, Beyzaie breathed new life into Iranian cinema by informing his work with more ancient components that called upon the ancestral roots of Iranian storytelling. As Iran continued to change, so did where he pointed his camera. With his 1989 masterpiece BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER, voted “Best Iranian Film of all time” in 1999 by a polling group which included over 150 Iranian film critics and professionals, Beyzaie sought to unite the Iranian people across invisible borders and various ethnic cultures within the country, following the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war and one of the most destructive periods of the country’s contemporary history, and highlighting the vitality to preserve the country’s moral values, their connection with the land and each individual’s responsibility to stand for one another’s dignity in the face of overwhelming circumstances. He continued to work prolifically until his final, reluctant departure from Iran in 2010. With films like KILLING MAD DOGS, released in 2001, Beyzaie turned his camera toward modern-day Iran, somewhat removed from the horrors of war and fallout from the revolution, now grappling with a society filled with corruption, greed and injustice.