Jafar Panahi - Jafar Panahi: Interviews

Jafar Panahi: Interviews

Conversations with Filmmakers Series

Gerald Peary, General Editor

Jafar Panahi

Edited by Drew Todd

Ehsan Khoshbakht (London), Assistant Editor

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

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Copyright 2019 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Panahi, Jafar, interviewee. | Todd, Drew, 1970 editor.

Title: Jafar Panahi: interviews / edited by Drew Todd.

Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, [2019] | Series: Conversations with Filmmakers Series | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019004379 (print) | LCCN 2019013244 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496823212 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496823229 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496823236 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496823243 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496823199 (cloth) | ISBN 9781496823205 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Panahi, Jafar. | Motion picture producers and directorsIranInterviews. | LCGFT: Interviews.

Classification: LCC PN1998.3.P34522 (ebook) | LCC PN1998.3.P34522 A5 2019 (print) | DDC 791.4302/33092 [B]dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004379

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Jafar Panahi / 1994

Omid Rouhani / 1995

Film Monthly / 1995

Majid Eslami and Houshang Golmakani / 1996

Liza Bar / 1996

Ahmad Talebinejad / 1997

David Walsh / 1997

Film Monthly / 2000

David Walsh / 2000

Stephen Teo / 2001

Jafar Panahi / 2001

Richard Porton / 2003

David Walsh / 2003

Majid Eslami / 2006

Massoud Mehrabi / 2006

Maryam Maruf / 2006

Jafar Panahi / 2006

Peter Keough / 2009

Jafar Panahi / 2010

Jafar Panahi / 2010

Jafar Panahi / 2011

Tobias Grey / 2014

Vadim Rizov / 2014

Iranian Labour News Agency / 2015

Ehsan Khoshbakht and Drew Todd / 2018

A few years after its release, I started teaching The Circle (2000) in an undergraduate survey of international cinema. I hoped to find some scholarship in English that would help my students analyze this complicated, subtle Iranian film. The only sources that offered both context and analysis were interviews with the director himself. In them, Jafar Panahi spoke eloquently of the path he took to becoming a filmmaker and of how he transitioned from making movies about children to those about adults. As I taught his works made after The CircleCrimson Gold (2003), Offside (2006), and then This is Not a Film (2011)I continued assigning his interviews. (In my opinion, that quartet of successive films is as strong as youll find in any filmmakers oeuvre.) The more I read, the more I understood Panahis intentions as a filmmaker.

Even after Panahis arrest by Iranian authorities in 2010, when he was banned for twenty years from making movies and giving interviews, he has persisted in speaking outthrough an array of open letters and public statements, through his illicit films (he has made four since his 2010 arrest) and clandestine interviews (including one given exclusively for this publication). This collection of his words and thoughts frames Panahis body of work and also his struggles as an Iranian filmmaker. If the objective of Irans government has been to silence Jafar Panahi, then may this collection project his voice far and wide.

Born in 1960 in Irans northwestern province of East Azerbaijan, Jafar Panahis boyhood occurred during a significant but precarious period in Irans film history. The Iranian New Wave emerged under the shadow of the Shah in the late 1960s and early 1970s, embracing a new kind of cinematic realism. Filmmakers such as Dariush Mehrjui (The Cow, 1969) and Bahram Beyzaie (Downpour, 1972)both of whom Panahi cites as influences in a 1995 Film Monthly interviewdid not shy away from political content and formal experimentation. A young Abbas Kiarostami started his film career in the same period with the highly influential short The Bread and Alley (1970). Kiarostami would inspire a generation of Iranian filmmakers, none more so than Panahi.

In 1979, the Iranian Revolution ushered in a Shia Muslim theocracy, thus putting an end to 2,500 continuous years of Persian monarchy. With regime change, Irans first wave came to a halt. The Islamic revolutionaries perceived movies as a vestige of Western capitalism and thus inherently decadent and corrupting. (In the summer of 1978, Cinema Rex movie theater in Abadan, Iran had been burned to the ground by religious-based arsonists, killing nearly 500 patrons locked inside.) Once in power, the new Islamist regime nationalized most media and outlawed exhibition of Hollywood and Western cinema. Just as Panahi was gravitating toward a career in film, the Islamic Republic of Iran made clear that cinema would thereafter be contested and highly censored (if not, with controversial subjects, outright banned).

Even before the revolution, cinema was a source of contention for Panahi. As he discusses in his interview with Liza Bar, the local movie theater was off limits to him when he was a boy; he went anyway, against his fathers strict orders, determined to see what he had been told was not good for me. When the Iran-Iraq War commenced shortly after the revolution, he was assigned to the armys cinematography unit and then captured by Kurdish rebels, who held him captive for two months. When making short documentaries for Iranian TV in the late 1980s, he went undercover to film dangerous and illegal rituals. The Wounded Heads (1988), about the mourning practice of head slashing in Northern Iran, was banned for several years, presaging his future as one of Irans most controversial and polarizing directors.

As the catastrophic IranIraq War came to an end in the late 1980s, Irans commercial film industry was resurrected. In spite of draconian state regulations and censorship, the Second Wave thrived in the following decades, applauded by critics and enjoying festival and box office success the world over. Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf became the Second Waves most important directors. Meanwhile, Panahi was transitioning from shorts to features, which he did under the tutelage of Kiarostami, who hired him as assistant director of Through the Olive Trees (1994). In several interviews in this volume, Panahi details Kiarostamis methods, many of which became his own as a filmmaker: the synthesis of documentary and fiction; a preference for child characters and nonprofessional actors; the privileging of image over script and plot; the obsessive search for faces, locations, and shots; the hands-on director as auteur who comes up with story ideas, finds actors and locations, and even edits his own films; and an unorthodox scripting that is open-ended. (The interviews also articulate important distinctions between Panahi and his mentor.)