Conversations with Mohsen Makhmalbaf

by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Hamid Dabashi

Born in Tehran in 1957, filmmaker Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf grew up in the religious and politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, and the June 1963 uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini constitutes one of his earliest memories. In 1972, Makhmalbaf formed his own urban guerrilla group and two years later attacked a police officer, for which he was arrested and jailed. He remained incarcerated until 1978, when the revolutionary wave led by Ayatollah Khomeini freed him and launched his career as a writer and self-taught filmmaker. Since then, Makhmalbaf has gone on to make such highly admired films as Gabbeh and The Silence . The three lengthy conversations collected here, between Makhmalbaf and leading Iranian film critic and scholar Hamid Dabashi, traverse the filmmaker’s experiences as a young radical, his critical stance regarding the current Islamic regime, and his fascination with films—both as product and as process. In this in-depth view of one of the most significant Middle Eastern filmmakers of our time, Makhmalbaf reflects on the relationship between cinema and violence, tolerance, and social change, as well as the political and artistic importance of the autonomy of the filmmaker.

Genres: Film

188 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2010

Reviews

[Sara Hosseini]

البته که همشو نرسیدم بخونم ولی چیزای جالبی از زبون مخملباف نقل میشه تو این کتاب. به خصوص وختایی که می خواد از خودش در برابر هجمه هایی که بهش میشه (منجمله اینکه بهش میگن هیچی از سینما نمی دونه و کار تئوریک نکرده و اینها) دفاع کنه خیلی چیزای بامزه ای میگه. مثلن اینکه همون اوایل فیلمسازیش رفته 400 تا کتاب راجع به سینما برداشته و همه رو خونده و اونموقه کل سینما (همّه ش ها، همّه ی سینما) رو یاد گرفت و بعدم این دانش رو به صورت ازلی ابدی با خودش حفظ کرد و دیگه سراغ اون کتابا نرفت. صفحات میانی کتاب به نظراتش درمورد فیلماش و دوره های فیلمسازیش اختصاص پیدا کرده که خوندنش خالی از لطف نیست. چون بایسیکل ران رو هنوز ندیدم گذاشتم فصل آخر رو بعدن بخونم.

[Gurdeep Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must for any artist.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conversations with Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of two books that the Iranian-born American scholar Hamid Dabashi has published about the Iranian director whose films have attracted a worldwide audience (the other is Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker). Though published in 2010, this volume collects interviews that Dabashi carried out with Makhmalbaf in 1996, 2001 and 2005 and then translated from Persian into English.

In general, I cannot recommend Conversations with Mohsen Makhmalbaf as essential reading for fans of the filmmaker. Makhmalbaf tends to ramble and repeat himself, and his comments about his own work don't get into the specifics of the films. SOKOUT, his 1998 feature shot in Tajikistan, goes essentially unmentioned, which is a shame since I find it one of his best films. Some of the discussion between Dabashi and Makhmalbaf needs annotation to be intelligible to Western readers -- such as their namedropping of Persian poets and the exact details of Makhmalbaf's two marriages -- but Dabashi doesn't provide any footnotes.

Still, I did learn a few facts about Makhmalbaf that might influence how I watch his films. For example, he himself was not much of a cinephile in the 1990s, and his knowledge of world cinema is drawn more from books on filmmaking than from watching classic films themselves. Therefore, searching for allusions to the canon in his productions may be pointless. Also, Makhmalbaf claims that he desires to evoke a happy ending in even his more bleak films, as the downtrodden of the world that so concern him deserve an uplifting experience. But all in all, this could have been better.