Credit: Amir Naderi
Amir Naderi is on the move. I connected with the Iranian filmmaker over WhatsApp on a chilly February morning, or at least morning where I am. He’s calling me from Rome, which is the second stop on his tour through Europe teaching classes on filmmaking. In every country he visits, he tells me, he shapes the curriculum around that nation’s cinema history. It’s a pedagogical approach that aptly reflects the cosmopolitanism of a filmmaker who has shot films in the United States, Japan, and Italy, and who hopes to potentially make a film in Australia. “If I can do it,” he tells me. “If not, I keep going anyway.”
That dogged determination has defined Amir Naderi’s life, beginning with his films made in Iran, a small sample of which screened at Metrograph earlier this month. His father died before he ever knew him, and Naderi’s mother passed away when he was five years old. The odd jobs he took as a child in Abadan to make ends meet included selling ice blocks, unforgettably dramatized in his 1984 classic The Runner (Devandeh), and selling soda at a local cinema. It was there that Naderi discovered his vocation. “I knew it from the beginning [that] my dream is in there, in that screen.”
Naderi’s insatiable hunger for film led him to discover the work of auteurs he still speaks of with hushed reverence: Ford, Huston, Mizoguchi, Ophüls, and Ozu. Yet he isn’t content to simply exalt the canon as an educator. He guides his students toward filmmakers and screenwriters like Ben Hecht and Billy Wilder, whose grasp of story structure may prove instructive for them as they find their own creative voices. It’s an approach that favors discipline over a slipshod collation of footage that, Naderi argues, fuels the creative homogeneity of so much contemporary world cinema. From this approach, Naderi reasons, “I can make, I think, at least 50 directors out of the world.”
Naderi’s own output during the Iranian New Wave has assured his legend in his nation’s cinematic history, beginning with his 1974 diptych of Harmonica (Sazdahani) and Waiting (Entezar). After cutting his teeth on three features produced under the aegis of the studio system, Naderi had a moment of contemplation when making Tangsir, his large-scale adaptation of Sadeq Chubak’s 1963 novel. “One night, I was young, drunk, and in the rain, I said, ‘Amir, what do you want to do? You want to go this way? If you want to go this way, you’re not getting anything. What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to do it my way.’”
While Naderi’s preoccupation with the dignity of human perseverance is apparent in Tangsir, the formalist expressionism that characterized his subsequent features made him a darling of the international festival circuit, with The Runner a major work of Iran’s post-revolution cinema. That film was edited by Bahram Beyzaie, a legend in his own right who passed away in December and was the subject of a retrospective at Metrograph, along with Naderi. Speaking with him about their relationship, Naderi speaks primarily of a shared kinship over cinema, lasting through a conversation about Sunset Boulevard shortly before Mr. Beyzaie’s passing. With reserved but visible sorrow, Amir described Beyzaie as a “master” of language, one whose “heart and his feeling and his brain” were inextricable from his Iranian identity.
While he’s proud of his Iranian heritage, Mr. Naderi’s departure from his country stemmed from a voracious need to sate his ambitions. Having first visited New York City in the 1970s, he moved there following the 1989 release of Water Wind Dust (Ab, Bhad, Khak) and made four features, beginning with 1993’s Manhattan by Numbers. That film, which will screen at Film Forum this month as part of their Tenement Stories program, stands as an evergreen allegory of artistic struggle in the rat race of the Big Apple that nevertheless serves as a snapshot of Manhattan on the cusp of Giuliani-era gentrification.
Naderi’s New York tetralogy gradually narrows in scope, culminating in his most claustrophobic and radical feature, Sound Barrier (2005), about a deaf and mute boy trying to recover the last known recording of his late mother. If Manhattan by Numbers is a metaphor for the challenges of maintaining artistic integrity, Sound Barrier frames the archive as a volatile space for (re)constructing personal identity. In that vein, Mr. Naderi speaks with pride of his Iranian heritage but has never returned to his country. “I got too far from my past, geographically,” he told me. “But my heart is there.”
The political tumult that has shaken the nation since the uprisings last December wasn’t discussed in our call, and Mr. Naderi refuses to speak of cinema in political or didactic terms. Nevertheless, a film like Vegas: A True Story (2008) remains a prescient commentary not on Iran but of America in its unvarnished chronicle of a family convinced by the former homeowner of their property that untold riches may be buried underneath their lot. As obsession curdles into self-destruction, the family’s patriarch literally eviscerates the land, refusing to believe the truth that his squalor is ultimately the basis for a sick form of virtual gambling. In the film’s blistering vision of white American patriarchy, Vegas cuts more deeply in an America held captive today by conmen and grifters profiting from the desecration of the land.
As bleak as Naderi’s work can be in their studies of “obsession as hell,” the other side of this obsession always yields some possible form of transcendence. In his late period, the cornerstone of that transcendence can largely be found in an ascetic commitment to cinema, including 2011’s Cut and his last feature Magic Lantern (2018). Both films exhume the specters of the auteurs who expanded Naderi’s conceptions of the medium, and they serve in tandem with his overriding desire to lead by example as a mentor for succeeding generations of cineastes and storytellers.
“Cinema for me is like a religion,” he proclaims. The cosmopolitan character of his vocation defies nationalist constrictions, and ultimately gives his faith in mankind’s propensity for creativity stirring resonance in these fraught times. Without a second thought, he exclaims an unconditional truth for himself: “I’ll never give up.”
