This director is by no means someone that I am only
“currently” obsessed with; this is a filmmaker of whom I have been aware almost
all my life. I remember the day that he died, at the age of 52, of cancer. I
was still young, but I knew that he was a big deal in the world of Iranian
cinema. It took me a while to finally watch my first one of his films, which
was one of his last films, 1991’s Madar
(Mother). This director’s name was
Ali Hatami, he was Iran’s greatest storyteller and his legacy has been
forgotten. There are several reasons for this: his films were unquestionably
Persian, thus his works would not translate for foreign audiences. This also
means that his films are more or less lost for viewing, with one of the few
ways to see his work being on youtube, where the videos look awful and
discoloured, often lacking subtitles, again alienating viewers. Even then,
there are not enough of his films on there. I have personally seen a total of three
of his films myself (with a fourth recently found), so his work is scarce. The
truth is that Ali Hatami’s name needs to be up there with the names of Kiarostami,
Farrokhzad and Mehrjui as one of the early auteurs of Iranian cinema.
In pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, influences came
from far and wide. The French New Wave was a clear influence for many
filmmakers, something that is clearly visible in the earlier works of
Kiarostami, when he would channel the works of Truffaut in his films about
children. Others were influenced by communist cinema (Kamran Shirdel and
Santiago Alvarez were working at roughly the same time, so it is difficult to
tell who influenced who), the avant-garde and even sexploitation cinema. It is
difficult to tell who exactly influenced Hatami, though. Hatami served two
purposes for Iranian cinema: he was a storyteller and a historian. In this
sense, he served the function of Roberto Rossellini for a culture which has a
long history. His first film, 1970’s Hassan
Kachal (Hassan the Bald), the
first Persian musical, has even taken on a mythical status itself, becoming a
fairy tale of sorts, an object that every child in Iran grows up knowing. Hassan
is tricked by his mother into leaving the house, where he meets a girl and
falls in love. Just thinking of this film, which launched Parviz Sayyad’s
career (essentially, Iran’s Jerry Lewis), is making me sing some of the songs,
despite the fact that I haven’t seen the film in well over a decade; it’s as if
the film is ingrained within me somehow. I acknowledge that I mentioned that Madar was my first Hatami, but that’s
only because I never really thought of Hassan
Kachal as a Hatami film; this film is from a time before I knew what a
filmmaker was!
Soon after, after making a small number of films
which have become lost to time, or at least to me, Hatami became a
historiographer, making films about national heroes and similar figures,
including Sattar Khan, a film about the
eponymous revolutionary hero, Hajji Washington,
about Iran’s first ambassador to the United States, and Kamalolmolk, about the famed Persian painter. This shift also
happened to fall in the middle of the early parts of the Islamic revolution
that plagued Iran in the late-70s, so his works often faced censorship, just
like any other work and he had artistic freedom taken from him. His pre-revolution
films were aided by the fact that the actors could be natural, but after the
revolution, archaic rules threatened to make his films more stilted. Madar proved that this worry was
unwarranted. Telling the tale of a woman’s last days, as her children gather to
say goodbye (one of her children being a developmentally disabled man portrayed
by Akbar Abdi). Despite the fact that the siblings are dressed oddly modestly
around each other and there’s little-to-no male-female contact in the film, the
emotional honesty that Hatami infuses into his work hides all of that. If a
comparison has to be made, I would say that this is Hatami’s Tokyo Story; he is quite Ozu-esque in
style in the later parts of his career. In the end, the mother dies. It falls
on her daughter to explain to her developmentally challenged brother what has occurred.
Instead of making a big spectacle of it, the scene sees the two sitting
together, the daughter heartbroken, crying, as she slowly repeats to her
brother “madar mord” (“mother died”), which her brother understands by
responding “madar mord chon ke jan nadarad” (“mother died because she has no
life”). The film boils death down to a very basic understanding of lacking
life, minimalistic in its own beautiful way.
Madar
was immediately followed by Del-Shodegan
(The Love-Stricken), a film about the
first Persian musicians who went to France to record music on a record; the
pioneers of recorded Persian music, as it were. This film combined the poetry
of Madar with the historical
obsession of his earlier films, resulting in a Homeric epic with an incredible
score. When the deal falls through, these musicians end up trapped in France
with no way to get back home. This film may well be the one that most resonated
with me, because it took a historic event and used it to explain the situation
of a displaced individual, a Persian who suddenly winds up in a western world,
a stranger in a strange land. This is the experience of an immigrant. I have
experienced it and so have many others. Clearly, these musicians made it back;
after all, they are historical figures, but the historical element is not of as
much interest, as the people who are forced to leave behind their homes and
lives with little prior warning. Hatami was clearly a wise individual.
He made one more film after this, a film with very
little information on it. It was apparently edited from Hezardastan, his epic,
historical television series which is often named his best work (and which I
have been unable to find). Unfortunately, he died before he had a chance to
create more of these masterpieces. IMDb has sixteen credits for him as a
director. That is not my issue. My issue is that this master of the art form is
almost entirely ignored. The majority of books that I have read on Iranian
cinema do not even mention his name once. Certainly, he is a national figure,
but that should be enough, shouldn’t it? I asked Hamid Naficy earlier this year
where he believes Hatami’s place is in Iran’s cinema. He responded, and others
agreed, that he has an important place in this history, but that his films
belong in the country. Why? I say his films need to break out of the country
and be seen by everyone, so he can be recognized as the auteur that he is.
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