by Alonso Aguilar
This February, a three-film program of the Iranian filmmaker’s works outside of his native country premiered in London as part of the Institute of Contemporary Art’s In Focus strand.
Amir Naderi’s camera always seems to be on the outside looking in. Not physically, of course, as part of his idiosyncrasy as a filmmaker comes from the expressive manners in which he takes the medium’s materiality and toys with it for sensory arrestment. Nevertheless, the perspective from which his cinematic worlds are experienced is undoubtedly marginal. No matter the place, time, or socioeconomic milieu in which each film takes place, Naderi’s characters tend to exist in intricate webs of uphill battles and lurking futility. Their universe is tangible in its urgency, flowing from one life-depending task to another. Still, no matter the constant hardship, the Iranian filmmaker bypasses the common prestige pitfall of equating suffering to gravitas.
Naderi and his characters aren’t lured by facile nihilism. To them, subsistence is an act of defiance, bursting with dignity no matter how desperate their undertaking might seem. Their ecosystem is composed of pyrrhic victories framed by lyricism and formal inventiveness, which permeate the most ephemeral and unassuming moments of closure with an unexpected aura of jouissance and playfulness. During his most celebrated run of work, amidst the heyday of the Iranian New Wave in the 1980s, he expanded on the fabulistic tradition of Italian neorealism by embracing a stealthily oneiric logic to the extent that the affective state of the protagonists heightens how the world around them is felt.
انتظار (Waiting, 1974) is one of the Iranian director’s initial forays into perceptive fragmentation, a minimalist and dialogue-free moyen métrage where the veneer of realism collapses into itself to open the gates of primal sensation. The image’s hegemony is turned on its head, while emotion is depicted through alternative means: texture in the aforementioned film, sound in ساز دهنی (Harmonica, 1974), motion in دونده (The Runner, 1984). Simply going through Naderi’s filmography grants this cumulative effect of seeing formal motifs develop over time, reappearing in various conceptual frameworks, recontextualized and working in tandem with new aesthetic forays. This became even more prevalent once he left his native Iran in the mid-1980s, with his intrinsic cinematic curiosity traveling with him wherever he went.
As Naderi strayed further from the context in which he developed as an artist, a noticeable erosion began manifesting in his approach to narratives. The late 1970s saw many of his works play with more grounded storytelling, with experimental flourishes coming through non-fiction and essayistic works like جستجو (Search, 1980) and ب، باد، خاک (Water, Wind, Dust, 1989), respectively. Once he moved to New York City, his stylistic impulses began intertwining without a set hierarchy, hybridization that’s first showcased in the first feature of his international phase, Manhattan by Numbers (1993).
With landscape being an integral element of Naderi’s form, the stark change from the scorching sun of partially industrialized Iranian urban outskirts to the labyrinthine skyscrapers and endless concrete of Manhattan meant a readjustment still in line with the director’s recurring interests. The collision between humanity and the material world surrounding it diverted from an elemental struggle to a dissection of how the latter conditions the former in an urban environment. His portraits switched focus from painstaking resilience as a dramatic arc towards more abrasive snapshots of alienation. His characters remained on the periphery of society, but the brief moments of solace and wonder at the thrust of his Iranian period turned into something else entirely, a new rhythmic dramaturgy where unfiltered expressionism takes the reins of his films’ perceptive anchor.
Manhattan by Numbers’ protagonist is George Murphy (John Wojda), a laid-off newspaperman who has exactly 24 hours to find the money to pay his rent, otherwise, he’ll be sleeping on the streets of New York. Soon, he finds out that the friend he needs for this situation has disappeared, and so his erratic and meandering journey to the city begins. Incidents and plot in the film are minimal, the focus being on how the overwhelming cityscapes build an organically tense and nerve-wracking spiral. Tonally, Naderi’s link to popular cinema remains in place, still holding to lightness as a counterbalance to his unapologetic embrace of disorientation, something that can’t be said of further entries in his New York period.
Sound Barrier (2005) takes previous textural evocations of breathing environments to their most confrontational conclusion. Its even more stripped-down narrative hook centers on a deaf and mute boy who is looking for someone to recite an audio cassette recorded by his recently deceased mother. The experimental montage flourishes of Manhattan by Numbers takes a step further into cacophony here, with Naderi using the sensory specificity of his protagonist as an avenue for caustic intercutting of visual and aural urban debris. As in previous films of his, the lag between characters’ spatial placing and their sensorial reception of a situation is the core aesthetic concern; an opportunity to rethink how cinema is experienced, and how straightforward fragmentation opens up a world of creative audiovisual possibilities.
There’s always palpable tension in a Naderi film, and what sets apart his expatriate corpus is the total unison between the alienating circumstances around his characters within the fiction and how they crash together the cinematic medium’s material limitations and possibilities as an expressive vessel. Ultimately, this is where Naderi’s cinephilic ardor comes into the equation. His study of the art form’s historicity spearheads a lifelong commitment to exploring its malleability, of playing on its margins with the same bemusement as the masters he enthusiastically namedrops whenever his residences in Italy and Japan are mentioned.
Out of the latter tendency comes Cut (2011), perhaps Naderi’s most self-reflective work regarding the film ecosystem. Reiterating a socioeconomic dimension in his narratives, it all starts with a young man owing money he doesn’t have and needing to find a way to fulfill his deeds. In this case, the protagonist is also a filmmaker, and a cinephile at that, which immediately diverges the story from the more immediate types of displacement recurrent in Naderi’s filmography. In Cut, futility comes through a more conceptual dissociation, what many would call an anachronic value system crumbling in the face of ominous indifference. An activist against the commercialization of cinema, literally putting his body on the line, with the camera collecting every punch he’s handed before transferring it to the audience viscerally. Vignettes from cinema’s past manifest in between, almost as if they were also gasping in pain, witnessing first-hand the dying breaths of cinephilia.
The character of Shuji (Hidetoshi Nishijima) feels like the definitive Naderi protagonist in many ways, exalting obsession as a self-constructed path that coalesces solitude and adriftness, immersing the viewer in their singular worldview not through underlined emotion or character psychology, but by an unremitting and uncompromising plunge into how their environment is felt by and through them; a task that can only be achieved by actively engaging and fixating with the medium and its inner workings, even if it means upholding the banner of outcasts and outsiders. At the end of the day, that’s where the most entrancing of perspectives often lie. From the outside looking in.
Alonso Aguilar is a Costa Rican writer, critic and programmer. His writings have featured in Mubi Notebook, Bandcamp Daily, Hyperallergic, photogénie and Cinema Tropical, among other outlets.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider tipping the author and/or supporting Ultra Dogme on Patreon, Ko-fi, or Substack, so that we may continue publishing writing about film + music with love + care.