Page 589 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| World C nema

collaborative spirit, and the making of The White Balloon was no exception.
Panahi had invaluable help from master director Abbas Kiarostami.

iranian nEw wavE CinEma
Iranian cinema became widely known to American audiences in 1997 with
the U.S. release of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh, a film that vibrates with color
and a magical carpet. Gabbeh is a life-affirming fable about a carpet that holds
the secrets and tales of lost love in rural Iran. Color becomes the visual meta-
phor for life, and his pallet is pulled from the sky, the fields and flowers, and
transfixed into the carpets of the nomadic clan he follows.
That same year Abbas Kiarostami won the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Fes-
tival for A Taste of Cherry, the enigmatic, postmodern film with an unexpected
twist that set international critics abuzz debating the film’s final scenes. But well
before that, Kiarostami launched the Iranian New Wave with his Koker trilogy,
Where Is My Friend’s House? (1987), And Life Goes On (1992), and Through
The Olive Trees (1994). Kiarostami was well known to international filmgoers
after Close-Up (1990), an extraordinary work that weaves a true story into a fea-
ture film. Combining the real with what is fiction is a narrative form that runs
through Iranian New Wave cinema.
The early films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf are woven out of his struggle against
oppression and ultimate rejection of war and violence. Drawing on his own suc-
cess, he founded the Makhmalbaf Film House to support other young Iranian
filmmakers. His wife Marzieh Meshkini learned to make films at the school and
went on to direct The Day I Became a Woman (2000), a three-part film celebrat-
ing the lives of three women of different ages.
Samira, Makhmalbaf’s eldest daughter, began watching her father make films
when she was eight years old. He let her quit Islamic high school at the age of
15, taught her filmmaking, and helped her make two award-winning features
by the time she was 21. Samira’s second film, Blackboards (2001), follows itiner-
ant schoolteachers who carry their blackboards on their backs as they hunt for
students in villages through the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan. The young di-
rector chased the fog through the mountains of Kurdistan to get the right shots,
and the result is a captivating set of vivid imagery. Working primarily with non-
professionals, Samira Makhmalbaf incorporates the many, often deadly hazards
faced by the schoolteachers into the film. The blackboards take on new roles
and become visual metaphors when used to carry heavy loads and after being
dismantled and used as splints for broken bones.

CinEma anD iTs CuLTurE

Films often serve as a catalyst for public dialogue about a whole range of is-
sues, including humanitarian concerns about justice, equality and human well
being in general. Indeed, part of the definition of cinema itself expands outward
from the making and viewing of a movie on its own, to include the “cultural
sense” made of it by audiences, writers, scholars and critics alike. One unique