I'm hoping that the internet will bring more of those collectors into the mainstream to share their enthusiasm and knowledge of the hobby.
Maybe we'll all get lucky if they find their way here.
Now, you've piqued my curiosity about the Iranian market.
What are your favorites from there?
The Iranians are master filmmakers, and so are the Egyptians, but in completely different ways. One of the things that become clear if you spend a lot of time going back and forth between Iranian and Egyptian cinema is that one big difference is the Iranians don't do many remakes of foreign films, while the Egyptians do a lot of them. For the Egyptians, filmmaking is an international craft, while for the Iranians film seems to be almost exclusively a matter for indigenous political and cultural expression. My first favorite Iranian movies were the posters for films that were released with subtitles in the USA, which were often thought to be made in opposition to shah of Iran, but if not that then at least coded commentaries on Iranian society. An excellent example of that is Gholamhossein Saeedi's 1969 film
The Cow, which is a strange story about a villager who goes insane when he learns his cow has died, and begins to act as if he is a cow himself. Wikipedia has an article about that film which shows a poster for that film's English release, but the Iranian one is much more interesting. I have not yet been able to obtain an original Iranian poster for it in Persian, but I am confident I will sooner or later. This film was the start of what they call the Iranian "New Wave," where Iranian filmmakers began to move away from comedy, romantic melodrama and heroic tales about revered historic figures, and to go more into social and philosophical commentary. Later I developed a taste for films made based on classics of Iranian Iranian literature. The most famous of these is the 1971 Masoud Kimiai film
Dash Akol, starring Behruz Vossougi (who still lives in Iran and is on Facebook) based on a story by a great Iranian writer named Sadeq Hedayat, best known in the West for his surrealistic novel
The Blind Owl, which has been published in many languages. I don't have a poster for
Dash Akol either. It is not that
Gav and
Dash Akol are particularly rare, it is just that Iranian posters, unlike Egyptian posters, are not made in huge numbers (because egypt is the movie capital of the Arab world, its films and posters are shipped to every Arabic speaking country as well as a few others, while Iranian posters are made only for use in Iran), and the few Iranian film posters that exist are quickly hoarded by Iran's fiercely dedicated movie fans, who are very proud of their national heritage. I do believe I will eventually obtain copies of both of them. I have a lot of Iranian posters, especially for films made since the Iranian revolution. For some reason these seem to be easier to get. The best contemporary Iranian filmmaker is Asghar Farhadi, who is best known for
A Separation, which was released in the USA under that title but was originally known in Persian as
Jodai Nader az Simin [Nader's Separation from Simin]; it is a story about an Iranian couple who decide to separate for the sake of their daughter so she can go abroad to study. This is one of two films by Farhadi that won the academy award for best foreign language film. Another great contemporary Iranian director is Abbas Kiarostami, who has made several important films that have gotten international recognition. One of these, which has gotten a US release, is
A Taste of Cherry, a film about a man who is planning to commit suicide and is looking for somebody who will agree to bury him after he does it. Another less famous one by Kiarostami but my personal favorite is called
Closeup [nama-ye nazdik], a true story about a poor man who pretends to be the famous Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and gets caught and put in jail for it. Two interesting things about this film are that the man's actual trial was in the film and that Mohsen Makhmalbaf himself makes an appearance in the film when he greets his impersonator after his release from prison. This film has the best film interpretation I have seen of the expression "kicking the can down the road," but you have to see it. All these films I have mentioned are available with English subtitles. There are many, many other great ones. I have blog entries about a lot of them, which you can find by searching "iranian movie" on the blog. One of my favorites among these not-so-famous ones is a 1974 film called
Still Life [Tabi'at-e Bijan], whose poster is pictured on my blog here:
http://www.mopopoc.com/2013/10/still-life-1974.htmlI used to have its video with subtitles embedded in the blog, but the video has been blocked on copyright grounds and is no longer available. It is a story about an elderly railroad switchman who is forced to retire, and doesn't understand the significance of it when he gets the news.
