Thanks to an excellent and informative review by Godfrey Cheshire (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/chess-of-the-wind-movie-review-2021) and a subsequent chance to see the film, I now have one more item, apart from Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park, that I’ve seen too late to include on my already–published ten-best list. (And how many more revelations are still to come?) For its luminous cinematography (by Houshang Baharlou) and its remarkable score (by Sheyda Gharachedaghi) alone,Mohammad Reza Aslani’s rediscovered and restored 1976 The Chess Game of the Wind (which I insist on calling it over its meaningless release title,The Chess of the Wind) is a truly impressive movie that really packs a wallop.
And because I lack Godfrey’s knowledge about 20th century Iranian history, I tended to experience it as a sort of Gothic melodrama that seemed closer in some ways to Béla Tarr’s Almanac of Fall than to any other Iranian New Wave feature that I’ve previously seen. And even if I disagree with Cheshire on a couple of minor points (I find the camera movements more evocative of Murnau than of Ophüls, and the wonderful exterior sequences with the washerwomen closer to gossip than to Greek-chorus commentaries), his review provides all the right guideposts into the film’s wonders and dark pleasures.Read more
When I previously reprinted on this site my first Paris Journal for Film Comment, from their Fall 1971 issue, I omitted the entire opening section, largelybecause of its embarrassing misinformation(both naive and ill-informed) in detailing the background of the ongoing feud at the time between Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. But for the sake of the historical record, I’ve decided to reprint it now, along with a lengthy letter from Positif’s editorial board and my reply to it two issues later. — J.R.
Of all the gang wars waged over the past thirteen years between Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif, the latest appears to be the most extensive and the least illuminating. When Truffaut ridiculed Positif for anti- intellectualism and self-serving vanity in 1958, Cahiers‘ orientation was Catholic-conservative while its leading rival was surrealist and leftist; the former enshrined Hollywood while the latter denigrated it as imperialist. When Positif launched a lengthy counter-offensive in 1962 (amply documented in Peter Graham’s anthology, The New Wave), the terms of the equation had already begun to shift: many Cahiers critics were already beginning to veer away from their backgrounds as they became filmmakers, and Positif was starting to develop a stable of its own Hollywood auteurs, like John Huston and Jerry Lewis. Read more
From the June 9, 2006 Chicago Reader. I can happily report that Roads of Kiarostami hasappeared as an extra on the DVD of Kiarostami’s Shirin released by Cinema Guild. — J.R.
Roads of Kiarostami
*** (A must see)
Directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami
The definition of what qualifies as commercial movie fare seems to have shrunk to works that appeal to teens and preteens. Meanwhile the definition of experimental film — which traditionally has meant abstract, nonnarrative, and small-format works produced in a garret — has been expanding to address wider audiences. An ambitious DVD box set released last year, “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941,” includes lavish Busby Berkeley production numbers and juvenilia by Orson Welles. And last year’s Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival opened with a dazzling 35-millimeter short by Michelangelo Antonioni, Michelangelo Eye to Eye.
This year Onion City’s opening-night program reflects this tendency even more: it includes a video by cult horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Peter Tscherkassky’s radical reworking of footage from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in 35-millimeter and ‘Scope, Andy Warhol’s two 1966 “screen tests” with Bob Dylan, and best of all Abbas Kiarostami’s half-hour Roads of Kiarostami. Read more
