Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Iran today may be best known for two things: one of the most repressive regimes in the world and one of the most remarkable cinemas in the world. The coexistence of the two is a conundrum that perplexes many people. How does a country known for ferocious repression of dissent and artistic freedom produce some of the most impressive films in the world? What does this tell us about the relationship between autocracy and art? And how are we to understand Iran’s cinematic community, often a victim of the regime’s policies of censorship and persecution? Are Iranian films political by nature and if so, what is their politics?    If one wants to think about art and politics, Iran is a worthy starting place, particularly with the most renowned director in Iranian history, whose films were born not out of engagement, positive or negative, with politics, but out of an emancipatory rejection of politics. Abbas Kiarostami began making a name for himself in film festivals in the 1990s. Then in his fifties, the Iranian director had been making films for more than two decades, and was best known in his homeland for his experimental documentaries. If your interest in cinema went beyond the transitory thrills of film festivals, you would have known that his career predated the Iranian revolution of 1979 by many years. Kiarostami had first practiced his art in the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, a remarkable center founded in the 1960s by Farah Pahlavi, Iran’s last queen. But it was Kiarostami’s first post-1979 fiction film that helped him break out on the festival circuit — and in the process, give birth to a new Iranian cinema.    Made in 1987, Where is the Friend’s Home? had initially struggled to find a global audience. In 1988, it was shown in the Out of Competition section at the Festival des 3 Continents, a smallish affair in Nantes, dedicated to films from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A holdover from France’s tiers-mondiste flirtations of the 1960s, the festival in Nantes helped to “discover” directors from places such as Mali, Thailand, and Tunisia. In 1985 it gave its top award, the Golden Balloon, to Amir Naderi’s The Runner, the first time that a film made in the Islamic Republic of Iran received international accolades. The film told the story of Amiru, a young boy in southern coastal areas of Iran, who earns a living selling ice and shining shoes for visiting foreigners, while also learning the alphabet and going to night school, dreaming of a life beyond the Persian Gulf.    The Runner’s eschewing of a linear narrative and stark formalist imagery made it popular to European festival-goers. Edited by Bahram Beizaei, the dean of Iranian performing arts, the film features the protagonist and his teenage peers in visually unforgettable scenes: running while reciting the alphabet, shouting to drown the whizz of overhead airplanes; young boys sweating in the deadly heat of the Iranian south, made worse by the burning flames of the nearby oil fields. The fact that the film starred teenaged amateurs was not accidental. The elaborate star system of Iran’s film industry had been virtually wiped out overnight by the revolution, with many of its leading names having their careers destroyed forever, often reduced to a meager living in Los Angeles or other destinations of exile. Even before 1979, censorship had long bedeviled Iranian cinema, making most political issues off-limits. But with the puritanical zeal of the nascent Islamic Republic in place, the circle of exclusion, on and off screen, broadened significantly. Most forms of music were now banned, and women could not be portrayed without a veil (just as they had been forced to don it in real life.) How could you make a film in such conditions? Relying on teenage boys and breathtaking scenery was one way.    Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? also relied on teenage boys and breathtaking scenery. But the similarities end there. Naderi’s film was set in his native Abadan, the grand industrial port city on Iran’s southwestern border with Iraq, fabled for its sweltering heat and housing some of the largest petrochemical complexes in the world. The film’s aesthetic is correspondingly rough and austere, filled with abrupt jump cuts reminiscent of Eisenstein. Given Beizaei’s penchant for epics, the film’s visual sensibility is overwhelming to the point of being suffocating. In this sense, it also bore the marks of the 1980s, a harsh decade for Iranians who were suffering from an excruciatingly long and bloody land war with Iraq and a repressive regime that sent thousands of political dissidents to the gallows.    Where is the Friend’s Home? looks so profoundly different, it could have been made at a different planet. In fact, it was made on the other end of Iran, about a thousand kilometers to the north, in the green temperate fields of Gilan, close to the shores of the Caspian Sea. The film tells the straightforward story of a simple quest. Ahmadreza, a schoolboy, realizes that he has mistakenly taken home the homework notebook of a classmate, who will be punished if he arrives empty-handed to school the next morning. He resolves that he must return it, and to accomplish this mission of schoolboy honor he must traverse the tough rolling hills of the Gilani countryside to get to his friend’s home. There is something so poignant about the child’s quest that even thinking of the film makes me shed a few tears. At a time of war and revolution, when Iranian culture had become so brutal and cruel, Kiarostami created a film whose protagonist was not a stand-in for another ideology; he was a simple schoolboy who would defy all authority and brave forbidding terrain to shield his friend from trouble.    The film’s title was taken from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri (1907-1980), an Iranian poet and painter whose “Eastern” influences and Buddhist inclinations made him an object of derision by the literati of