Tuesday, October 13, 2009 – 7:30 PM Burdine 216
Persian with English subtitles.
Runtime: 131 min Black and White
Followed by a discussion with Somy Kim.
One of “Reader” critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Top 1000” from his book Essential Cinema, THE BRICK AND THE MIRROR is as fabled for being unseen in a public screening in over 35 years as for its significant thematic and technical breakthroughs. Moody realism conveys a stark poetry in this tale of a cab driver stuck with an abandoned baby in his back seat. Moral quandaries and social fears vie with eroticism when the driver and a lonely woman spend the night with the baby as the phantom facsimile of a family. The film’s finale, set in an orphanage, is a stunning, haunting piece of social realism that was to send ripples of influence through the next four decades of Iranian cinema.
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Brick and Mirror is unlike anything I have seen from Iran, for it is my introduction to Iranian cinema before the revolution. With the world’s eyes keenly focused on Iran, – politically or otherwise – there prevails a risk of drawing a monolithic portrait of the country. Watching Brick and Mirror, one can see how starkly different the two ages are and how drastic a cultural shift its citizens were subject to after 1979. Golestan’s film, more or less, also testifies the strong relation between France and Iran that prevailed during the Shah’s regime. He, evidently and interestingly, draws inspiration from both Godard and Bresson, apart from incorporating tenets from other famous schools of film-making. With complete control over every aspect of the film (writing, directing, editing and producing it by himself), Golestan churns out a film that is clearly Iranian in content, yet could pass of as one of the French New Wave movies.
Almost the whole film, both formally and script-wise, never conforms to the popular law of cause and effect. Golestan refuses to explain everything and seems to want us to not understand the city, much like Hashemi himself. Who is that crazy female at the hell-hole that Hashemi meets earlier? No answer. What is the guy, whom one might have called a charlatan earlier in the film, doing on the national channel talking about the ethics of living? No answer. Could that female, whom Hashemi sees the second night be the same lady who left the baby in his car the previous day? May be. But surely, all these aren’t merely confusing or distancing devices. Each of these scenes reveals something about the city and the era, in one way or the other. Each of them has indirectly managed to document history – cultural and cinematic. Consequently, now more than ever, it feels that these seemingly stray events are the very elements that can help us perceive better a country that has been unjustly homogenized using, what Brick and Mirror shows us, a faux identity.
Director: Ebrahim Golestan(Ebrahim Golestan (also spelt Ibrahim Golestan, Persian: ابراهیم گلستان , born 1922 in Shiraz, Iran) is an Iranian filmmaker and literary figure with a career spanning half a century. He has been living in Sussex, United Kingdom, since 1975. He is the father of Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan, and Lili Golestan,translator and owner and artistic director of the Golestan Gallery in Tehran, Iran. His grandson, Mani Haghighi, is also a film director.) Writer: Ebrahim Golestan Cast: Taji Ahmadi, Zackaria Hashemi, Parviz Fanizadeh, Manuchehr Farid, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Jamshid Mashayekhi, Akbar Meshkin, Jalal Moghadam.
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Iranians for Peace and Justice
www.utipj.com
PRESENTS
Fall Film & Lecture Series
Tuesday, 10/06/09 Waggener 101 7:30 PM
Lecture: Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh and Popular Culture by Hooman Hedayati
Tuesday, 10/13/09 Burdine 216 7:30 PM
Screening: Brick and Mirror (Khesht va Ayeneh) by Ebrahim Golestan
Followed by a discussion with Somy Kim
Tuesday, 10/20/09 Burdine 216 7:30 PM
Screening: Color of Paradise (Range Khoda) by Majid Majidi
Tuesday, 10/27/09 Burdine 216 7:30 PM
Screening: Bashu (Little Stranger) by Bahram Beizai
Tuesday, 11/03/09 Burdine 220 7:30 PM
Screening: Men at Work (Mardan Dar Karand) by Mani Haghighi
Tuesday, 11/10/09 Burdine 220 7:30 PM
Screening of The song of Sparrows (Avaze Gonjeshk-ha) by Majid Majidi
Tuesday, 11/17/09 Waggener 101 7:30 PM
Lecture: Uprising in Iran by Prof. Snehal Shingavi
Tuesday, 11/24/09 Waggener 101 7:30 PM
Lecture: Abu Muslim, the First Iranian Revolutionary after Islam by Novin Ghaffari
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