For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the Iranian film industry was dominated by commercial films: musicals, melodramas and comedies, many of them shot in studios and aimed at urban audiences. Around the end of the 1960s a different kind of film appeared, which critics later called the New Wave.
A new kind of film
The turning point is often placed in 1969, with The Cow by Dariush Mehrjui, based on stories by the writer Gholam-Hossein Saedi. It tells of a poor villager whose beloved cow dies, and of his unravelling. It was shot on location, with non-professional faces and a bleak realism that was new in Iranian cinema. Another film of the same year, Masoud Kimiai’s Qeysar, brought a gritty urban story into a popular genre.
Earlier, in 1962, the poet Forugh Farrokhzad had made The House Is Black, a short documentary about a leprosy colony, in which she combined images, verse and voices. It is often cited as a forerunner.
The Cow (1969), directed by Dariush Mehrjui, is widely regarded as the film that started the Iranian New Wave.
Directors and ideas
Other directors followed. Bahram Beyzai, a playwright and filmmaker, made Downpour in 1972, a gentle comedy of a teacher in a poor district, with a distinct visual and literary style. Sohrab Shahid-Saless made quiet, slow-paced films such as Still Life in 1974, about the repeated routine of a railway worker. Many of these filmmakers worked with writers and poets and drew on Persian literature and theatre.
Institutions
State and semi-state institutions played a role. The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, known as Kanun, began making films for and about children in the 1960s and 1970s, and gave early work to Abbas Kiarostami. The Shiraz Arts Festival brought international and Iranian artists together.
Scholars point out that some of these films were supported by state institutions while also being critical of social conditions, a tension that shaped what could be said and how it was said.
Censorship
Films needed state approval, and some were cut, delayed or banned. Filmmakers developed ways of speaking indirectly, with allegory, silence and fable. This habit of suggestion became part of the identity of Iranian cinema.
After 1979
Many directors of the New Wave continued to work after the revolution, in Iran or abroad, and their style influenced later filmmakers. How the New Wave connected to the cinema that followed is a subject of its own.
Notes and sources
- Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 (Duke University Press, 2011).
- Films named in this article: to be checked against the films themselves and their credits before publication.
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