#4 - Treasured Colours from 1960s and 1970s Iran
This is Film! 2025 #4: Treasured Colours from 1960s and 1970s Iran
This fourth session of the public lecture series This is Film! explores Iranian cinema from the 1960s and 1970s and its rich use of colours, together with guest speaker Kaveh Askari, professor of Film Studies at the Michigan State University.
Kaveh Askari shows a programme of short films from Iran from before 1979, full of dazzling prisms, jewels, and pigments in motion. In his lecture, Kaveh discusses how these films explore colour as a complicated cinematic treasure. According to Askari, colour can dazzle the masses, it can motivate a child’s desire for education about our world, or it can figure the overwhelming nature of desire itself.
This session will be moderated by Maral Mohsenin, Director Collection & Knowledge Sharing of Eye Filmmuseum and previous Head of Programmes at the Geneva International Film Festival.
Guest
Kaveh Askari is Professor and Director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He is the author or editor of several books including Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit, which was awarded the 2023 Katherine Singer Kovács Society for Cinema and Media Studies Book Award and was longlisted for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award.
Programme
Ganjineha-ye Gohar/The Crown Jewels of Iran (Ebrahim Golestan, IR 1965, 15’)
One of the most striking uses of colour in the history of cinema in Iran, The Crown Jewels of Iran is at first entrancing in its exploration of light moving across the thousands of gemstones housed at the Central Bank of Iran. Like many of Golestan’s films, it pulls the audience in two directions. His voiceover, which led to the film being banned, contrasts the intoxicating imagery with a sharp critique of the decadence of Persian kings.
Rangha/The Colours (Abbas Kiarostami, IR 1976, 16’)
One of Kiarostami’s early educational films for the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon). The film teaches children to see the colors in the objects around them in a style that reminds us of Kiarostami’s background in the graphic arts.
Entezar/Waiting (Amir Naderi, IR 1974, 47’)
A fictional Kanoon film directed by Amir Naderi, who was known at the time primarily for his tough dramas of urban masculinity. With this film, he explores adolescent longing in vivid colour against a background of Shia mourning rituals. The minimal plot unfolds without dialog. Each day, an orphan boy gathers ice for his guardians. He is overwhelmed by his senses in every aspect of this simple task—from his fleeting glimpses of the hands that give him the ice to the prismatic colors refracted through the ice bowl itself.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2025
Length
150 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
This is Film! 2025
This is Film! Film Heritage in Practice is an annual public lecture series in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam devoted to notable projects in the fields of film restoration and film heritage, with international guest speakers and film screenings.
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