The Cinema of Ali Hatami Master of Art Film Studies
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Animating Eroded Landscapes: The Cinema of Ali Hatami By Ramin Sadegh Khanjani Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Art in Film Studies Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario ©2012 Ramin Sadegh Khanjani Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du 1+1Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-93613-9 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-93613-9 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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Canada Abstract: International scholarship on Iranian cinema has been stimulated and yet constricted by the reception of recent Iranian films at major film festivals, where a few exceptional “festival films” have ended up defining Iranian cinema as a whole. To redress the limitations of current accounts of Iranian cinema, my thesis focuses on the work of Ali Hatami, a major Iranian director whose singular style has hindered his inclusion into the critical writing on Iranian cinema. In the first chapter, case studies of two of Hatami’s films, Baba Shamal (1971) and The Love-Stricken (1991) trace the fundamentals of his style to Hatami’s fascination with Iranian traditional arts. The second chapter uses a study of Hatami’s Ghalandar (1971) to illuminate the director’s equivocal stance towards traditional conceptions of gender. Finally, in the third chapter, an examination of Haji Washington (1981) reveals a similarly equivocal tone in Hatami’s account of a historical encounter between traditional Iran and the West. Acknowledgements: I would like to tender my gratitude, in the first place, to my supervisor, Professor Charles O’Brien, who gave me the initial inspiration for this study and his constant guidance ensured my research to be on the right track. My heartfelt thanks go to Professor Aboubakar Sanogo and Professor Malini Guha, whose support immeasurably helped this project to be carried out smoothly. I should thank my good friends, David Hanley and Mark Fuller as well, who graciously spent their time assisting me with editing my writing. I am also grateful to my father for his invaluable help in providing me with every printed and visual materials I asked for and so helping this study to get off the ground. Table of Contents Introduction: Hatami, the Disqualified Auteur............................................................... 1 Chapter One- The fundamentals of Hatami’s style....................................................... 15 Chapter Two- The Imperilled Tough Guy and the Feminine Insurgence in Ghalandar{1972)................................................................................................................ 78 Chapter Three- Where West is East: Chronicle of a Disenchanted EmbraceHaji in Washington (1982)............................................................................................................ 114 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................145 Stills....................................................................................................................................150 Bibliography 158 Introduction: Hatami, the disqualified auteur The critical literature on Ali Hatami signals a contradiction plaguing studies of world cinema; having the reputation in Iran of “the most Iranian filmmaker”, Hatami has been consistently excluded from the English language scholarship on Iranian cinema. Academic writing on world cinema and national cinema is crucial in this context since it mediates access to alien film cultures like Iran’s. Academic critics, however, tend to approach world cinema in ways that confirm their own ideas. To achieve recognition, a filmmaker’s body of work must conform to all-embracing templates, which are themselves meant to underpin familiar critical positions and prejudices1. In Hatami’s case what is bewildering about this critical negligence is his status in Iran as an auteur director, a circumstance that might have made him a darling of cinematic circles abroad as well. Notwithstanding the alteration it has gone through since its inception, the concept of film authorship still maintains its popularity as a viable approach in film studies, partly because positing the name of an author as the driving force behind a film reaffirms the status of film as an art form. In the light of the notion of the author-director, which has evolved with reference to the dominantly collective model of the film industry, Hatami’s embodiment of the term is less contentious. Indeed he quite 1 Traditionally, most of these critical positions are marked by a bias to illustrate the world cinema in an oppositional stance to the dominant (Hollywood or Western) cinema, so that the former can embody a sphere of “political resistance” (Nagib, Perriam and Dudrah xix). All the same, as Dennison and Lim indicate that origins of this duality that underlies the conventional concept of world cinema could be found in a similar treatment in literature and the idea of weltlieratur introduced by Goethe in reference to works that stand distinct from western literature (2). Meanwhile Nagib and her colleagues draw our attention to the fact that this binary model, even if conceived as oppositional, possesses the potential for finding a commercial purpose and being used as a marketing brand, similar to the ways in which the brand “world music” has been exploited by the music industry (xix). 1 consciously strived to define himself as an author, as his comments bear witness to: “I believe in authorship and have always observed it” (Heydari 17). For one thing, the emergence of auteur directors was predictable in Iranian cinema, given the Iranian film industry’s dominantly artisanal mode of film production.2 This artisanal mode also enshrouded the production of films by creative art-orientated directors, enabling these filmmakers to use their personal visions as the major driving force behind their projects and therefore achieve the exemplary status of an author with respect to filmmaking. Hatami entered the fold in the late 60s in tandem with other young directors whose films infused new blood into the predominantly commercialized cinema of Iran. Like his other colleagues- whose films collectively constituted what retrospectively received the designation of the Iranian New Wave- Hatami also took the responsibility of writing his own scripts, a task that not only befitted his background in writing plays for the stage, but also brought him closer to the way in which the auteur filmmaker was originally imagined and prescribed. What is more, for many of his films Hatami also took on the position of production designer, which went a long way towards the formation of the particular style of his films, one issued, by and large, from the vision of a singular artist. Of course for the earlier part of Hatami’s career (1970-1972), we might suspect a joint authorship, since in some of those films Hatami enlisted the service of Parviz Sayyad, an actor and also a director in his own right, who was similarly The only established film company that remained active for about three decades and owned its studios was Pars Film. It was run by Esmaeel Kooshan who supervised and collaborated to the rebirth of Iranian cinema after one decade of hiatus in the late 1940s. Not so long after 1979 revolution, however his company folded. 2 influenced by Iranian art and cultural traditions.3 Additionally Sayyad created a repertory company of actors and used to bring them into projects he got involved in (including two of Hatami’s films). There is, however, not enough documentation to clarify the extent to which Sayyad added to the overall vision of Hatami’s films- he appeared in all three films he and Hatami worked together, and produced two of them