The following is the concise version of the article in the current issue of Bidoun (#19, Noise) which tells the incredible story behind Albert Lamorisse’s lost film:
In 1970, the Shah’s government hires Albert Lamorisse to make a documentary film about Iran using his helicopter filming technology, Helivision
Lamorisse shoots a folky, poetic, beautiful film:
The ministry rejects it stating it doesn’t adequately portray Iran’s modernizations and industrial and urban developments (it was essentially meant to be a propagandist film)
Lamorisse is called back to Iran with a list of specific locations to shoot: University students, factories, laboratories and the newly constructed Karaj dam
Lamorisse expresses fervent concern over high tension wires over the dam
The ministry provides him with the Shah’s personal helicopter pilot
The helicopter gets caught in the wires and Lamorisse and all aboard die in a crash in the dam
Lamorisse’s wife receives a sizable compensation package and with her son Pascal (star of the Red Balloon) finishes the film based on Albert’s notes
Eight years later, it is released and nominated for an Oscar, though it was barely screened and never circulated
Meanwhile, after the crash the Ministry crew retrieved the film from the dam and used the final footage shot by Lamorisse to make an absolutely beautiful 6 minute tribute film:
Born in Iran in 1928 to an Iranian father and Russian mother, Serge Rezvani is a prolific painter, novelist, poet, playwright and most notably, songwriter. Between the years 1955 and 1965, sometimes under the alias Cyrus Bassiak, Rezvani penned the music for several seminal films of the French new wave, among them Jules et Jim (Le Tourbillon, in which he makes a cameo), Pierrot le Fou and Masculin Féminin.
Rezvani has authored a translation of Khayyam’s Rubayyat as well as an anti-Shah, vaguely pro-Khomeini satirical play mocking the celebrations at Persepolis entitled “Le Camp du Drap d’Or” (Field of the Cloth of Gold) which was performed at the 1972 Festival d’Avignon.
An animated short film from The National Film Board of Canada: This animated film is based on an old Persian parable. The inhabitants of a village learn to overcome their fear of the unknown. The benefit of their new-found knowledge is demonstrated. The black-and-white images are reminiscent of German wood-cuts.
Sunday April 19th, 2009 at 4pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue, New York $8 in advance / $10 day-of-show
Moghollha (The Mongols)
Parviz Kimiavi
16mm On Video / 92 min / 1973
Included in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s list of 1000 essential films, Parviz Kimiavi’s The Mongols (1973) is a leftfield satire and sharp commentary on the expanding presence of cinema and television in Iran. The story follows a filmmaker, played by Kimiavi himself and also named Parviz, as he struggles with both his own film and a looming assignment to oversee the installation of a television relay station in the remote province of Zahedan. Imbued by his wife’s thesis work on the Mongol invasion of Iran, Parviz’s anxieties coalesce and materialize in the form of surreal visions in which the origins of cinema are acted out by the Turkomans he hired to play Mongols in his own film. Together with Parviz, we watch as the would-be gang of Mongols wander the desert in search of their director and the answers to their pressing questions about the nature of cinema, all while the forthcoming introduction of television consumes the local village and its inhabitants. Kimiavi fashions a fantastical cinematic space rife with bizarre metaphoric imagery and Godardian references to film-making in order to draw a sarcastic parallel between the Mongol invasion and the hyper-accelerated modernization of 1970s Iran.
If you live in New York, then you must come to this. No excuses. The film is brilliant and has likely never before been screened in North America, ever. Much blood and sweat was shed to bring it to you with completed subtitling. Come.
