Chess of the Wind: The Glorious Miniature of an Upheaval

Aslani also collaborated as a writer with some of the foremost names in the cinema-ye motafavet. He coscripted Kamran Shirdel’s The Morning of the Fourth Day (1972), an homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and an attack on what it depicts as a mirage of progress in Iran. For Amir Naderi, he cowrote the grim and violent crime drama Tangna (1973). But it was perhaps with his contribution to the script for Kimiavi’s The Garden of Stones (1976), winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, that he felt closest to home as a collaborator, the film being imbued with the type of mysticism and poetry so dear to him, elements of which would appear in Chess of the Wind, shown in the same year.

Aslani first drafted the script for Chess of the Wind in the late sixties, and it was rejected many times. In writing it, he had an eye on the poisonous atmosphere of political rivalry in Iran, with groups and parties that, instead of coming together for the cause of justice, were busy ousting one another. Aslani believed that the failure of Chess at its premiere was, ironically, related to just this kind of narrow-minded rivalry and backstabbing.

In an interview for the 1976 Tehran festival’s daily journal, Aslani described Chess as a film that uses crime cinema as a framework for exploring particular philosophical and historical concerns that preoccupied him. One of these was the transition from feudalism to modernity in Iran, a process beset by corruption and duplicity. Set during the 1920s, the story focuses on a group of rapacious individuals—most of them referred to by their titles, such as Haji Amou (a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca), Kanizak (handmaiden), and Lady Aghdas (Little Lady)—all plotting to gain control of the house by any means.

Haji (Mohamad Ali Keshavarz), an opportunistic businessman, has become the master of the house after the death of his aristocratic wife, Old Lady. Crude and vulgar, he controls with reptilian venom. Little Lady (Fakhri Khorvash), the daughter of Old Lady from a previous marriage, loathes Haji and rightly believes he is after her inheritance. Suffering from destructive tendencies, she neurotically tears pages out of the books she reads, breaks jars used in the family’s jewelry business, and gathers weapons. She is paralyzed—a clear metaphor for her social class—and in constant need of others to push her wheelchair, an object of fascination for other members of the household, who sit on it as if they were ascending a throne.

The film is remarkably faithful to historical details, benefiting from the accuracy of art director Houri Etesam. Aslani, who had personally obtained many of the objects that appear in the film and designed some of the props, knew how to make them talk and help tell the story, as with the presence of chess and backgammon boards, symbolizing the psychological, and sometimes even fatal, machinations in which the characters are involved.

But despite its fidelity to an earlier period, Chess mostly mirrors the time in which it was made. While the narrative’s political backdrop is the dying days of the Qajar dynasty (which had ruled Iran since 1789), this portrait of the demise of feudalism resonated with the shah’s self-proclaimed White Revolution, a series of top-down reforms, aimed at modernizing Iran, that led to rapid urbanization and the creation of a new middle class, as well as—not having taken into consideration the possible adverse effects of uprooting centuries of feudal rule—unwittingly paving the way for the 1979 revolution. In the film, the upper class (Little Lady), the new middle class (Ramazan and Shaban), and the working class (Kanizak) have an equal share in the games of intrigue and deceit.

With Chess of the Wind, Aslani succeeded where Iranian society had largely failed: in finding a harmonious confluence of East and West, old and new. This can be seen in the way the film takes equal inspiration from Persian miniature and Western painting (in the luminous cinematography by Houshang Baharlou). It can be heard in the score, too, written by one of the most prolific female composers of the sixties and seventies, Sheyda Gharachedaghi, whose works combine Persian instrumentation and the influence of her Vienna conservatory background.

Music is used very sparingly throughout, falling somewhere between the two major trends of the cinema-ye motafavet—which either rejected the use of music altogether or favored theme songs and strong leit­motifs—and when it does appear, it borders on atonal. The choice of instrumentation is quite daring, especially in the murder scenes, in which Gharachedaghi introduces bass clarinet, flute, naghara (a type of drum), and a piano with thumbtacks pinned into the hammers—so that, instead of wool, a brass or tin material hits the strings. However, the ominous and eerie sound of the film is created mainly by the sheypour. This long brass instrument, heard primarily in religious contexts, features a large mouthpiece and lacks a valve to divert the air, making it capable of producing only single notes, which often sound like the howls of a wounded elephant. Gharachedaghi’s secular use of the instrument puts one in mind of Ornette Coleman visiting a holy shrine in Iran.

With a miniaturelike precision in his play with time, a shrewd political symbolism, and his authority on literary and pictorial traditions, Aslani opened a new chapter in the cinema-ye motafavet. His work of the sixties and seventies, like that of his contemporaries in the movement, was dependent solely on funding from the half dozen government institutions and companies that served as the industrial backbone of the alternative cinema in Iran—among them the company that produced Chess, one of the most interesting as well as the most accursed.