“A Fragile Film Utopia”: Talking with Ehsan Khoshbakht

In telling the story of Iran before and after the revolution, and your own life (for instance, your first visit to a movie theater), you also use a montage of archival clips from a wide variety of films, which you don’t identify on-screen. Can you talk about why you chose this approach and how you went about selecting material?

As much material as I had from those days, there were still significant gaps to fill, especially in the sections set before the revolution. Iran, in general, suffers from a lack of proper audiovisual documentation. Much of the material that I didn’t shoot or produce myself—newsreels, film clips, educational films, TV broadcasts, found footage, and home movies—is there to tell the story and to bring in every possible format of cinema and every possible mode of image-making. I wanted to create an index of anything that could be projected.

 

Many of these images—for instance, from films by John Huston, Dariush Mehrjui, and Luigi Comencini—are also deeply personal to me; they’ve marked different phases of my life.

That’s wonderful, and I love the eclectic mixture of materials. This film is partly about border-crossing: about your own experience of expatriation and exile, but also about how images cross borders and how we’re shaped by what we are able to see.

Things are, in a way, saved when they cross borders—though they can also become lost. Look at all those lost film treasures found in places like Australia and Chile. The 35 mm print of The Son of Dr. Jekyll in Ahmad’s collection (whose poster you see in Celluloid) turned out to be a unique print, because I couldn’t include that film in my 2024 Locarno retrospective dedicated to Columbia Pictures—there was no other screening material for that Freudian horror gem.

 

By the way, every poster you see in the film means that title was screened in Iran. There are almost no exceptions to that rule. And that’s very helpful, because it tells you what was shown and when (usually with some significant delay, especially before the 1960s). So certain things were preserved, and certain things were lost—such as when Ahmad made space for the canonical films of the Western world by getting rid of some Iranian films from his collection. In hindsight, that seems like his greatest mistake, as those Iranian films are now much harder to come by.

 

He did, however, hold great respect for Iranian films of the 1950s—especially Marjan (1956), the first film he ever saw and the first film directed by a woman in Iran. Ahmad had the only surviving elements of that film—essentially just a couple of reels.

You describe how you were able to watch films from Hollywood and Europe when you were growing up, in spite of various restrictions. But for me, as an American viewer, most of the Iranian films you excerpt are completely unfamiliar (Marjan, for instance, from which you include a tantalizing clip). You use a number of clips of the actor Mohammad-Ali Fardin, and dedicate the film to his memory. Can you tell us who Fardin was, and why he’s important to the film?

Iranian genre films are the lost continent of cinema. They were put in front of the firing squad twice: not only is the original material often nonexistent or in precarious condition, but ideologically, they also came under a ruthless blanket ban after the revolution. Over the years, I’ve shown some of these films that survive and are accessible—the melodramas and film noirs of the 1950s—in Bologna and also at MoMA in New York. There are some fascinating works among them, sometimes cinematically rich.

 

Now, Fardin was so popular that he was considered a genre of his own—the Fardini movie: a mix of melodrama, musical, a touch of social realism, and occasional outbursts of masculine violence à la crime cinema. He starred in Cry of Midnight, the 1961 Iranian remake of Gilda. One of his most popular films, which he also directed, King of Hearts, was remade in Israel as Nurit, and to this day, it remains one of the most-watched films in that country. He appeared in films in Italy, India, Turkey, and Lebanon—so he had some international appeal as well. Then came the revolution, and he was banned from acting.

 

His vague resemblance to Ahmad aside—and the way he could serve as a stand-in for certain episodes in Ahmad’s life—I wanted to add a new layer. (As if I didn’t already have enough layers in there.) I had two main themes in the film: memory and obsession—and most of the time, the two become one. If Celluloid Underground is an act of preserving the memory of certain people, then I needed more than just Ahmad. Ahmad was an instrument, a projectionist. I needed a piece about what he projected, what he dreamt about, what he aspired to. And that’s where Fardin came in.

“Memory and obsession” are the subject of so many of the greatest films (e.g., Vertigo—and you bring in Hitchcock through the fact that you now live in the neighborhood where he grew up in East London.) But I wanted to ask about another filmmaker whose name comes up. You recall that the first time you spoke to Ahmad, he was impressed when you brought up your love of Henry King. What drew you to King’s films, which are steeped in Americana and a particularly subtle and complex brand of nostalgia?

My early fascination with King came from a particular angle. I hadn’t seen any of the so-called Americana films; I had only seen his 1950s works, which are more cynical. In fact, I was in love with films like The Snows of Kilimanjaro, made during that phase of his career focused on American literature. In Snows, I liked the way Gregory Peck, dying alone and isolated, looks back and recounts a life of movement and mistakes. He’s a redeemable failure. It is, in a way, the story of Celluloid Underground.

It is an act of preserving memory as well as a portrait of people obsessed with preserving films; we learn that Ahmad was imprisoned and even tortured because he refused to divulge the location of his film collection. Yet, you also talk about coming to accept the idea that film is impermanent, that images too “live, and then they die.” Coincidentally, the other day I came across these two quotes, from Ozu (“the attractive thing about film is this transience, this mistlike vanishing quality”) and Naruse, talking about how films typically vanish a few weeks after release: “Perhaps this is what films should be, things that live on only in the audience’s memory or else vanish into thin air.” Is there a value in thinking about film this way, or is it a necessary response to the reality of loss and technological decay?

It’s not just film that I think about this way—it’s life itself; everything is a dress rehearsal for death. I don’t know what that nothingness means to someone like Ozu, or how it’s perceived in a culture shaped by Buddhism, but in my case, it comes from Omar Khayyam, a poet from my region. The constant noticing—to the point of obsession—of elements that remind you of your eventual demise isn’t meant to be a nihilistic bell tolling nonstop, warning you of the futility of effort. On the contrary, it’s an active encouragement to live in the moment.

From that perspective, you take what you can from films and don’t let yourself be chained to them, as Ahmad was. In that sense, maybe I’m closer to Naruse. Still, this doesn’t mean I’m unaware of the contradiction within me—the part that seems to accept that everything will vanish, and at the same time does its best to delay that vanishing.

Khayyam speaks of how we will vanish into the “screen.” (“You’ll vanish into the screen of secrets,” the film’s epigraph.) Though he lived in the twelfth century, it feels written for movie people. And the fact that in Persian the same word—pardé—is used for both the cinema screen and a curtain makes it more complex: it is something that both reveals and hides, projects and smothers.

What can you tell us about film culture in Iran today and the people who are keeping it alive?

It is as alive as ever. Like other forms of beauty that survive—and even flourish—under the shadow of fascism, it may take on a crooked look or become distorted here and there, but in essence, it remains the same. A couple of years ago, a private film club in Tehran screened Filmfarsi. I joined them on Zoom. It looked fabulous—far better than the dismal events I was putting together. The people looked calm, informed, beautiful.

 

I suppose the difference between my experience and theirs is that, for them, the question is simply cinema. But Ahmad and I wanted to measure our passion in metric terms: 35 mm, 16 mm—everything was tactile, quantifiable, and magnificently weighty.