Tag Archives: iranian cinema

Check it out, Cinema releases, Interviews

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour

Girl
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour

Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour

Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Moshan Marno, Dominic Rains

Iran, USA 2014

100 mins

After enchanting festival audiences around the world, Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour’s acclaimed debut feature A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night finally comes to UK screens. Shot in gorgeous black and white, this Farsi-language tale about a chador-wearing skateboarding vampire drifting in the desperate world of Bad City creates a seductive, singular world out of an eclectic mix of influences that include comics, David Lynch and Italian Western music.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Amirpour at the London Film Festival in October 2014, where they discussed places of the mind, the magic of music and the loneliness of humans.

Virginie Sélavy: You’ve described your film as an Iranian vampire Western. The first two elements are fairly clear, but in what way do you see it as a Western?

Ana Lily Amirpour: I think it’s definitely the music that was such a defining characteristic. The musical spine throughout the whole film was Federale’s awesome Ennio Morricone-esque music. I think there is that slow-cooking construction that a Western does as well, but it’s more the music.

Why did you choose to shoot in America but in the Farsi language?

I don’t think a film is the real world, a film is a world of the mind of a person. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is supposedly in LA, but it’s the LA of his mind. So I think this is a dark fairy tale and it’s a place of my mind. I’m part Iranian and part American and born in England, and it’s like a soup of so many things. What’s so awesome about the film is that it doesn’t have any loyalty to the real world and it doesn’t have to. It’s like a dream, it’s just consistent to itself.

You grew up in California.

I had my period there, yeah. [laughs]

So where did you spend most of your childhood and adolescence?

I think where you have your puberty and period is a big part of it. I was in Miami before that, but I was just a kid. When I hit puberty I was in Bakersfield, in California – there’s this redneck desert, farming, malls, I was going to a mall, I wore short cowboy boots, and there’s also all the Mexican gangs, and all the Mexican girls that I was mixed up with because I was brown, the cholas, the gang girls with lipstick, they’d push me and all that [laughs].

It’s interesting that you grew up in America and that the Iranian part of your identity is a place of the mind for you.

It’s a weird thing about Iranian culture. We’re one of those cultures like Italian or Jewish, we have very strong families, aggressively imposing families, in an awesome way. So I always had my Iranian-ness in that way, my grand-mother and my aunt and everybody, and the dinners and the noises and everything. But I never had the place itself. There was a weird thing that happened when I made this film. It became this imaginary limbo. I felt like I was making my own country in a way. Here’s the rules, and here’s the citizens, and now is the place and everyone can come and visit, and if you like it, stay… Other people in the film were similar. Arash [Marandi] was in Germany, his family lived there, and Dominic [Rains] went to Texas and Sheila [Vand] was born in California, very similar to me. I think everybody liked how it was like getting to have a place that was Iranian. Because even when I went to Iran I didn’t feel like it was my country… It’s something else. But I am Iranian. What am I? [laughs]

I liked the chador for the vampire because it’s very visual, but it’s also very interesting because it is a piece of clothing that has become a symbol for the oppression of women and in your film it becomes a superhero cape.

And a brilliant disguise. No one is going to expect it from her. For me it was just because I put one on – I had one as a prop in a movie and put it on for the first time. It felt like a stingray, I instantly felt like a creature. It moves, and it’s made of a different kind of fabric, it’s very soft and it catches the wind, and it’s beautiful. And I just felt like a badass. And then I thought, this would be an Iranian vampire, this is it, it’s this girl. And the whole idea for the film started with this character. I don’t even like black in my movies. But it’s black and I just pictured it against white, and so it had to be a black and white movie. And the whole thing about whether, like you said, it’s something that symbolizes oppression for women, I think somebody who is Muslim maybe wouldn’t feel that way. You feel that way because that’s what you are bringing. I do like flipping the script, but it’s about something else. In this world, with all these people and all these countries and all these places, we come up with systems on how to exist as people, the clothes people wear, the bumper stickers on the cars, saying ‘This is who I am’, ‘This is what I believe’. But with all of us, if you start peeling it back like an onion there’s weird, weirdo, weird shit inside all of us. And if you get into the inside, and see the weird shit, usually it calls to question the system that’s on the outside, and that’s what I find interesting.

I like the fact that there’s so little dialogue in the film.

It’s weird because I noticed that I have an aversion to it, and yet I talk a lot. When I was a kid my dad called me ‘Chatterbox’, and I had that New Year’s resolution many years to talk less and listen more, and then there’s this stuff, which is really self-indulgent. I love Sergio Leone and I love David Lynch, and I feel they do similar things with the soundscape and the sound design and the music. If you really think of it as a character in itself you have to create space for it. In Once upon a Time in the West Leone was playing that music when Claudia Cardinale was coming on the train in that sequence when she arrives in town. He had that epic piece already made and he was playing it for her to move to the music, so if you make films that way you’re thinking of it like a character and you make space for it. I also love Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue, I could listen to it all the time, and Woody Allen’s films, they talk all the time, it’s a different thing, it works well, but not in my own films so far. Actors were like, ‘I want to fucking say some lines,’ because they want to talk, they don’t want to just stand there. But what you don’t realise is that the less you’re saying the more you’re saying.

THe lack of dialogue makes the film more powerful. In the case of Sheila Vand in particular, if she was talking more, she would be less menacing.

She was always such a creature. I’m very close with her. She’s hypnotic, I can just stare at her face, stare at her eyes, infinitely. And there’s a sadness and a lonely, aching dissatisfaction to her that I find extremely charming and beautiful and self-destructive. The biggest thing was that, it’s supernatural, it’s not human, and she is a human, so my only concern was, ‘you’re a creature, no matter what, at all times, in all scenes’. So we were watching cobra videos on YouTube, and they follow your hand and imitate the movement, and looking at the tension of it too because they can strike fast.

The film seems to have a very melancholy view of human relationships, and it seems to show how those two isolated characters slowly learn to trust each other. Is that what you wanted to put in the film?

That’s my favourite part, when you say stuff like that, it’s the most interesting time for me. I love what people say about the film. My relationship to my film is like my relationship to my reflection in the mirror, like how others look at you. Yeah I have loneliness, and being a person is so singular and lonely in a way, fundamentally. And also when you’re making stuff you go even more into your little mind tunnels. I think I just want magic and meaningful connections and intimacy and it’s so hard, and life can be so automated. And it’s terrifying. That’s why I love music because it’s that and it’s instantly that. And it’s really special when it happens with other people because that’s really rare. But music does give me this feeling of freedom and comfort.

For that lovely scene of the first intimate moment between Arash and The Girl, when he comes up behind her in her room as she plays a record, you chose ‘Death’ by White Lies. Why that particular song?

It’s a really great song. I heard it when I was living in Germany the year before I made the film. It has this vintage nostalgia, it’s a new song but it has this feeling of synth-pop from the 80s. It just felt like the feeling of falling in love but in an adolescent way, it has a high school love feeling, it’s this innocent John Hughes kind of feeling. That’s what they are to me, those two. Because it’s so dumb in a way to fall in love, it’s two people who have no clue who each other are, so it’s that dumb, sweet, nostalgic love.

Why the title?

It’s so weird because I made a short film that was called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, it was five minutes long, in black and white. It was after I put that chador on and I thought of that character. I thought it’d be so cool to have her in a park and some man starts following her, through the streets, into a building and then into an apartment, and then right when he enters into the apartment she turns around and eats him. I was telling Sina [Sayyah], my producer, and I was explaining ‘and there’s this girl, and she walks home alone at night’, and then I was, ‘that’s it, that’s the title’.

The secondary characters are very interesting, there is something very rich about them. This is particularly true of Atti, the prostitute, because it is hinted that there are many things in her past, and it feels like she could be the main character of another film.

I feel like that about all of them, they are all the main characters in their own films. And they all had extremely detailed back stories, every single one of them. Atti watched her mother kill her father when she was 14 years old. She has a very intense and long story that ended her the way she is. But she is also a pragmatic, sensible, tough type of hero. I feel like it’s hard to ruffle her feathers. I love the pimp so much too, he is a fetish of mine.

Why?

The character was based on Ninja from Die Antwoord, the South African rap-rave duo. I’m a huge fan and I love Ninja, and I modelled Saeed a lot after him. I knew he was going to be this scary gangster because he looks so intense, so I made Dominic watch Friends because Saeed loves the show and Russ is his favourite character, and six weeks after the shooting he was still watching Friends. It was just to bring it down and make it sweet because it’s impossible, if you look like that you’re going to be taken a certain way.

The two women characters, the Girl and Atti, seem to know more than the male characters, they seem more aware of the forces that move them, whereas the male characters seem more confused about what is happening around them.

Yeah, I would say that’s interesting. The girls are cleverer. I read one time that the men seem more open and vulnerable, and the women are more closed-up and hard to read. I think both are astute observations. I feel that they’re also lonely. It was the one common thing that they all had, stages of it becoming crusty, a loneliness that becomes so stiff it’s really difficult to change.

The soundtrack to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is available from Death Waltz.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Watch the trailer:

Check it out, Cine Lit

Cine Books on Iran, Conspiracy and Saucy British Cinema

Iran: Directory of World Cinema
Edited by Parviz Jahed
Intellect 293pp £15.95

Conspiracy Cinema: Propaganda, politics and paranoia
By David Ray Carter
Headpress 271pp £24.99

Keeping The British End Up: Four decades of saucy cinema
By Simon Sheridan
Titan Books 287pp £24.99

A rather eclectic group of books this instalment, which range from the serious to the paranoid to the smutty. Fabulous!

Parviz Jahed is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable authorial voice on Iranian cinematic matters to be added to a list which includes, among others, Ali Issari, Hamid Dabashi and Hamid Sadr. Jahed has been close to the Iranian film scene for many years and displays a deep historical knowledge from his unique vantage point as an Iranian and as a transplanted European. He has also been involved with filmmaking as his excellent documentary, Bonjour Mr Ghaffari, demonstrates. All these factors make his account of the historical and critical development of Iranian film, Iran: Directory of World Cinema, as authoritative as could be expected in this concise a book. As is the format for this series of Intellect Books (which seem to pop up like mushrooms on a very regular basis), the book consists of focused thematic essays followed by critical appraisals of key films. There can be a certain unevenness in the editorial quality, consistency and scholarly rigour of some of the titles in the series, but Jahed’s book exemplifies the best of them. He has taken on much of the essay writing himself and has turned a critical eye on many of the films – in many ways this could have been a single author work although there are some fine contributions from others, notably Saeed Aghighi’s essay, ‘The New Wave Movement 1969-1979’. Many claims have been made for New Wave and contemporary Iranian cinema as any recent university syllabus will illustrate, but what is most interesting in Jahed’s book is his overview of the lesser-known territory of early Iranian cinema through the fascinating account of Film Farsi (and the Jaheli cycles) and on to an overdue salute to the forerunners of the New Wave such as Farrokh Ghaffari and Ebrahim Golestan. All in all a fresh and intelligently pithy story of Iranian cinema.

Rimbaud called for a systematic derangement of the senses in order to capture poetic essence and authenticity – to open oneself up to a different world view. And it is a systematic derangement of all historical sense, as the Preface for Conspiracy Cinema points out, as well as logic and sometimes sanity that is called for in reading David Ray Carter’s utterly fascinating book. Little, if any, writing has been focused solely on this topic and Carter has opened up and shed light into this very dark basement of cinematic endeavour. The sheer range of these theories is breath-taking, and encountering them is to bathe in the unprovable, the illogical and the downright paranoid. All the usual conspiratorial topics are present and accounted for: the two Kennedy assassinations, the Martin Luther King assassination, Diana, the ‘extermination’ of Koresh and his followers at Waco, Elvis, 9-11, to name a few of the more familiar subjects. But these barely reach the wilder shores of HIV/AIDS conspiracy theories (Department of Defence experiments run wild, UN’s World Health Organisation administering the virus via smallpox injections in order to depopulate Africa, Soviet plots) or secret ionospheric auditory transmissions sent out by the government to alter planetary weather and chemtrails emitted by all passenger jets doctored with aluminium to reduce skin cancers in the service of insurance companies to cut down on skin cancer payouts – and these just suggest the rich but bizarre pickings to be found in Carter’s book. Having viewed hundreds of independently produced films on these and other topics, Carter organises his findings into eight themes and introduces each with a short synopsis of the facts, the official version and the conspiracy theories around them before he reviews the many films addressing each particular theme. Enough said: this book is a terrific, mesmerising and bizarre piece of weird scholarship. Un-put-down-able! Like Wilde said, ‘Beware the half-truth, you may have got hold of the wrong half’.

Finally, there is only space to sing the praises of another breath-taking piece of wonderfully weird cinematic scholarship of sorts, Simon Sheridan’s fascinating antidote to academic texts, Keeping the British End Up, in a new, revised edition. Scrupulously researched and generously illustrated within the covers of a quality Titan publication, the book recounts – in suitably cheeky prose – the, er, rise and fall of… well, you know what! Anyone with an interest in the ‘other’ British cinema, which takes us on a journey from Nudist Paradise through the Confessions series via chapters entitled ‘Comings’, ‘Doings’, ‘…Goings’ and ends with a who’s who of actors and actresses in ‘Knobs and Knockers’, will be unable to resist this book. “The ‘Wisden’ of British smut’ as Matthew Sweet accurately called it.

James B. Evans

GONE… BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
In reviewing Simon Sheridan’s book, Keeping the British End Up, in this month’s Cine Lit column it is only fitting to pay homage to an earlier account of the ruder end (oooh missus!!) of sexy and soft core British cinema once – and still? – reviled and ignored by the critical establishment, the 1992 book, Doing Rude Things: The History of the British Sex Film, 1957 -1981 by David McGillivray. Published by the little-known sun tavern fields press, this was one of the first accounts to historically describe and archive this irresistible stream of sexploitation and low-budget films, which would be screened in only the seediest of Soho’s Macintosh brigade cinemas and no, that ain’t computers we’re referring to! McGillivray lovingly recounts those halcyon and opportunistic days (many a well-known ‘proper’ thespian appeared) and introduces many primary sources in the form of interviews and quotations from those involved. Pamela Green remembers how her nudie films caused such offence to some Women’s Hour listeners that she was invited on the programme to debate them – another time indeed. McGillivray is an informed and hospitable critic when reviewing the period and the films. Illustrations are copious – and copulatory. Copies of DRT are very difficult to find and sell for exorbitant amounts online. Save this book! JBE

Check it out, Festivals

Sydney Film Festival 2011

Boxing Gym

Sydney Film Festival

8-19 June 2011, Sydney, Australia

SFF Festival website

Like many major city film festivals, Sydney’s objective is to collect what is deemed the year’s best films from around the globe and offer them to the locals, resulting in an eclectic line-up of films, but with a certain absence of a unifying identity. Just like at the London Film Festival, the venues are spread apart in a way that disperses the core of the festival, yet its spirit persists as each venue attracts an eager horde of the city’s film-going public, who queue for their next cinephilic hit. Rather than the premieres and international guests, it seems it is the keen public and their enthusiasm that keep the festival running, and my conversations waiting in line made it more than worthwhile attending, albeit regretfully only for the latter half of its schedule.

Béla Tarr’s newest, and allegedly his last, The Turin Horse (2011), retains the director’s singular style, albeit filtered into further minimalism and pathos. The story of Nietzsche’s last conscious act is its springboard: his defence of a beaten carriage horse before withdrawing into madness is adapted (or continued) into a tale of a horse, its owner and his daughter, who reside in a windswept wasteland where the harsh conditions render them immobile. The savage weather and setting are strongly reminiscent of The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928), but the film’s closest neighbour is Kaneto Shindo’s Naked Island (1960). The gruelling monotony of daily routine is captured with deliberate pace and patience in both films, where the necessary cycle of everyday survival becomes transcendent, hinting at realms beyond the human condition. In both films, small events jaunt the rotational flow, and the haunting soundtrack becomes a motif that breaks the spell of endurance for a breath of relief. Yet in The Turin Horse, the soundtrack we’ll remember is the despondent gale that traps and silences its victims under its omnipresence.

Repetition is also explored in documentary Boxing Gym (2010), where Frederick Wiseman observes the training processes of boxers of all ages, races, sizes and gender at a Texas warehouse. The aural pulses of the space, with the boxers’ concentrated breaths, floorboard squeaks and punched vibrations, provide the soundtrack for the film and resonate with the visual rhythms of the boxers’ measured movements in a constant loop. Wiseman captures the boxers’ individual exercises with his characteristically observant and distant camera, which simultaneously intimates a fully involved gaze.

Terrence Malick‘s long-awaited Tree of Life (2011) is similarly made of visual pulsations, relying on intuitions for sensorial transition between the shots rather than any sense of an anchored narrative. The Palme d’Or winner at Cannes earlier this year, the film is epic in scope but finds it difficult to balance the microscopic tale of adolescence in suburban pre-Vietnam US with the colossal enormity of the birth of the universe. The juxtaposition jars; Malick’s trademark sense of touch and his ability to evoke emotion, imbedded here in the depiction of the family, have always been meaningful and tangible, but they lose their grip when Tree of Life enters the cosmos.

Family also takes centre stage and is placed under strain in the excellent A Separation (2011), winner of the Official Jury Competition at the festival. This Iranian drama depicts the moral and legal battle between and within two families when a chain of events leads to a maid’s miscarriage and her employer is blamed. The title of the film not only refers to the divorce application that opens the film, but also to the partitioning of social classes, generations and gender, a rift caused by the central accident. Intensity reaches boiling point and our sympathies swerve between the characters as the spiral narrative unveils the malleability of truth with each new revelation.

A Separation was released on July 1 and is currently showing in UK cinemas.

The festival joined many other international contemporaries in celebrating the work of Iranian filmmakers, specifically Jafar Panahi and Mohammed Rausolof, a necessary and timely focus in light of their imprisonment and ban from exercising their professions. Heavily allegorical and resolutely political, The White Meadow (2009), directed by Rausolof and edited by Panahi, demonstrates their skills as storytellers in an environment where voices struggle to be heard. A travelling tear-collector visits different communities, who are all involved in ritual ceremonies that attempt to relieve the environmental hardships afflicting their members; for example, the most beautiful woman of one village is served as a martyr to mate with the sea in order to combat drought. The film becomes a road movie as the protagonist gathers the disowned outcasts and they journey on forward, Rausolof’s camera sinking its lens into the foggy air to capture the beauty of the landscapes.

Gesher (2010), produced by Rausolof and directed by Vahid Vakilifar, observes three workers who labour in a factory at a period of rapid industrialisation. The characters are silenced by the mechanical noises and are dwarfed by the enormity of the machinery, and such scenery is captured in long shots and long takes. Powerless individuals in overpowering situations were also found in Wang Bing’s first fiction-feature The Ditch (2010), a docu-drama about the camps where those who voiced their criticisms against Mao in the Hundred Flowers Campaign were sent. In the midst of a three-year famine, the detainees undergo an intense struggle for survival as one by one they reach exhaustion and starvation. The harrowing depiction of camp life never shies away from the gruesome details, and Wang’s camera perseveres in its realist mode of expression even when the depravity sinks beyond the imaginable.

Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s Post Mortem (2010) is a story of a lonely man who records causes of death and whose workload reaches previously unimagined heights on the day of the military coup against President Allende in 1973. Hints of civil distress suggested off-screen are forced into the on-screen narrative that meanders in the pivotal historical moment and our protagonist Mario seems silently confused at his newfound situation. Pablo Larrain’s contemplative pace never rushes the story forward despite the catastrophes that surround it and main actor Alfredo Castro, who plays the John Travolta obsessive in the director’s previous Tony Manero (2008), delivers volumes through an absence of expression.

Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) portrays another historical period, but this time, anchored in the distant West where three families journey on the Oregon trail, only to stray in the wilderness without their bearings. The camera positions itself with the women, who pace behind the male leaders to lead the group into the depths of nowhere, a unique point of view for the Western that questions masculine sovereignty. Despondence brews in the air and intensity levels rise, but such feelings are only revealed through momentary slips in the cycle of hopeless repetition and the sinking expressions that expose a gradual realisation that the odds may be against them. The epic landscape of the Western genre, which is often used to signal hope, is denied by the framing that squeezes its vastness into a 4×3 screen ratio.

A total loss of control reaches its absolute zenith in debut filmmaker Jo Sung-Hee’s imagined apocalypse End of Animal (2010), a low-budget Korean disaster film that taps into universal fears of global collapse. Although its menace deflates when it punctures its mysteries in semi-explanatory flashbacks at the end of the film, the film largely relies on a sense of disarray experienced by both audience and characters in their newfound situation of impending enigmatic doom. Jo’s storytelling is cold, introducing pregnant protagonist Soon-Yung to possible notes of redemption, only to throw her back into misanthropic despair as the camera follows her hopelessly wandering in circles as exhaustion looms.

Julian Ross