This is a summary of my first interview with Ibrahim Golestan, one of the forerunners and most influential figures of the New Wave cinema in Iran. This interview was conducted in July 2003. I have selected the main points and translated them into English. This summary contains the main points of the interview including Golestan's political background, his literary activities, his work for Iranian-British Oil Consortium, the setting up of Studio Golestan and his documentary film productions, and his cooperation with Farrokh Ghaffari in organizing the programmes of the first Film Club of Iran.

Literary Activities and Story Writing

Could you tell me something about your literary background. For example how did you get into literature?

I started writing when I was in Shiraz working on my father’s newspaper. The first story I wrote was Be Dozdi Rafteh-ha/ The Burglars in 1947. I also wrote a detective story influenced by Agatha Christie’s novels. I actually bumped into Agatha Christie in Tehran when my documentary film, ‘Hills of Marlik,’ was being screened in 1964. My first collection of stories was published in 1949 -:Azar Mah-e Akhar-e Payeez /Azar the Lost Month of Autumn. Then I wrote Shekar-e Sayeh /Hunting the Shadow in 1955 which was published in 1957. I also translated short stories and novels. The writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a friend of mine, wanted to learn more about world literary works and asked me to translate some famous short stories for him from English and French. I think I was the first one who translated some short stories of Hemingway in Iran, and Al-e Ahmad published them in a collection.

Afterwards I translated other stories by Hemingway, Faulkner and Turgenyev which were published in Keshti Shekasteh –ha/The Broken Ships. Faulkner was very important to me. The world that he creates is fascinating. The basic thing about writing a story is creating a world, creating an atmosphere. Faulkner's breadth of vision, diversity of topics and the characters he creates are just fabulous. He makes a world which incorporates both Balzac and Dostoyevsky. However, Hemingway was important to me because of his prose and style of writing. Translating Hemingway into another language is essentially difficult. He does something in the English language which is not conceivable in any other language. Just read the first chapter of Farewell to Arms which has been compared with Bach fugues. In fiction, realism has always been central to me. Nonetheless, to me, realism is what goes on in the human soul. Reality is not simply the physical movement of objects.

In The Burglars I wanted to demonstrate the terror and fear of my time. At that time, fiction was not considered serious yet, and I delved into a new experience in this story. I described the subjectivity of the people. Then I wrote another story named Dar Kham-e Raah / On the bend of the Road which was a product of those circumstances and about people who revolt against such situations.

In story writing, the viewpoint of the writer is important to me. The viewpoint of Tolstoy in War and Peace is exquisite. In a novel, it is the destiny of a human being which matters. This individual might be a communist in the prisons of Fascists or a Fascist in the jails of Communists, or a Muslim or a Shiite in the prisons of infidels, or an infidel jailed by Shiites. The thing which matters is the relation between the prisoner and the jailer and the revolt of the prisoner.

In most cases, I depend on my personal experiences in story writing and the influence of my age and the events around me, rather than being affected by writers such as Hemingway or Sartre. Maybe more than anyone else, I have been influenced by the great Persian poets such as Sadi and Khayyam, or the prose of Beyhaqi. I am not moved by Dickens. Balzac does not fascinate me. I do not like Zola. Yet this does not mean that I must evade realism. No. In my stories and films, my precise focus is on realism and my praise for Stendhal, Flaubert and Tolstoy. In literature and cinema, I follow my own ideas and the logic which grows by my side. Every work has its own particular form. I cannot accept one single pattern.

When you read Lang / Limp, the short story which I wrote 5 years before the downfall of Mosaddeq(1953), or when you read On the bend of the Road, you will realize that what is in my films can be found in those stories. The vision I had in cinema is evident in those stories. I wrote those stories according to a vision and when I ventured to make films ten years later, I just expanded that vision.

Documentary Filmmaking

Your documentary films have usually been commissioned by certain companies and institutes such as the Iran Oil Company or the Central Bank of Iran. How would you incorporate your vision and individual taste in these commissioned films, and to what extent were you allowed to have your own individual choice?

Do you know a film which was not commissioned? A film is not like a pen and paper book that you can write at home. A film requires equipment and tools. It demands input from different professions. It asks for investment. However, I have adapted all my commissions to my own taste. Look at Mowj, Marjan and Khara /Wave, Coral and Rock. This was commissioned by Shell. Yet it is obvious that nobody else’s thought lies behind it. This film does not resemble any other film made by oil companies. Making this film took intelligence. This film was commissioned by an English company whose movie managers were clever people like Stewart Blake and Arthur Elton. These people were the same people who created the National Film Board of Canada. They just wanted a good film and I gave them a good film.

Before I started my works, documentaries as such did not exist. We had the Syracuse group which produced newsreels and educational films. There was a guy named Rezaee who made good documentaries and I edited two of his films .These films are still some of the best documentaries in Iranian cinema. The first documentary about a fire in the oil wells in the South of Iran was a very important film. The other one, for which I wrote the narrative, was about the Haj.

When you were making movies, to what extent were you concerned about financial issues?

First of all, I saved up the necessary money and then I started work. If I could not make the film, then I would say to hell with it. I wanted to blow this bomb. This bomb had to be blown. I had to blow this bomb in the Iranian cinema.

I am talking about a period when there were no TV networks in Iran . In the beginning, I was making movies for the American NBC and CBC networks. When I was in Abadan, one of my friends, the representative of the INS agency, called me and asked me to make a film about the events in Abadan. I was employed by the Oil Company, and I took an 8mm camera and started the job. A year later, I bought a 16mm Bolex camera and started filming with that. Then I went to Tehran and cooperated with foreign television networks .This was in 1953 when the Shah’s coup d'etat against Mosaddeq took place. I filmed all these events and airmailed the footage abroad. Well, they were newsreels and my name didn't appear on the title. Later I was transferred to the Iran and British Oil Consortium and managed the bureau of Film and Photography. In 1957 I went south to film oil explorations. I made a documentary of all the footage I had taken, entitled Az Ghatreh Ta Darya / From a drop to the sea, my first serious documentary.

The film was favourably received by the officials of the Consortium and I won 30 rolls of 16mm film. In the same year, I was sent to Europe by the Consortium to become familiar with the work of Shell. At that time, Arthur Elton was the head of the Cinema Department of Shell. He too had made a film about Iran named Down. I tried to meet him in London but he was too busy to see me. I returned to Iran, and the Consortium sent my film to London to be developed in technicolour in the laboratory of Shell. (Shell had a huge Cinema Department and people like Bert Haanstra had made films for it). My film came back from the laboratory and Arthur Elton saw it and liked it very much. When he came to Iran, he was looking for the person who made the film. Well, my film was a special film and had a different style from the films of Haanstra. I had shot the entire film using a hand-held camera.

Everything was real. The dust in the atmosphere, people sweating and working hard impressed Elton very much. He did not want to see me in London, but once he had seen my film he came looking for me. The style of this film was very different and I had used all my five or six years experience in making newsreels. It was because of these factors that he wanted me to make another film for them. I left the Consortium and signed a contract with them independently. But I broke my leg in a car accident and I could not manage the production single-handedly. The Shell Company sent a film-maker named Allen Pendry to Iran to work with me. I wrote the script of the film and specified the shots and all the details.. Allen Pendry only assisted in the shooting stage and then returned to England, leaving me to finish editing the images and sounds in the small studio I had set up. Many people worked hard on this project; Forough Farrokhzad, Mahmood Hangwal, Solayman Minassian and his brother Herand Minassian. I started my work with my leg in plaster. I shot some parts of Mowj, Marjan and Khara under water with my leg still in a plaster cast!

The setting up of Golestan Studio

After I left the Consortium, I signed an independent contract with them to produce a documentary film about Khark island and the oil pipeline from Aghajari to Khark. According to this contract, the Consortium undertook to provide some equipment and accessories to me by instalments, and deduct these costs from my wages and the income from the film. Then I purchased a piece of land and built a studio and gradually settled my account with the Consortium.

The other film I made for the Consortium was Yek Atash / Fire which was shot by my brother Shahrokh and edited by Forough, who had never touched a film in her life before. All the people working with me were like this, they did not know anything about cinema and learnt by experience. They had not received any education in the field but were smart and talented people. Forough started her work with Studio Golestan as a secretary, although she was a very well-known published poet. Many people worked with me. Many people joined me and many left me. Among them were Feraydoon Rahnama(filmmaker), Mehdi Akhavan Saales(poet), Karim Emami(journalist and film critic), Nasser Taqwaee(filmmaker), Sohrab Sepehri(poet) and many others.

I was busy doing work I enjoyed and had always planned to do. I worked with all my might. I employed about 40 people and at the end there was only eight of us left. I was fortunate that out of some people that I had experimented with as my would-be team, I had managed to develop five. We could have been seven but two of them had other vocations and left.. They were hardworking and dedicated people. Their dedication and their enthusiasm sustained me and nurtured me. They weren't graduates of any foreign universities, but superb human beings, meek, unpretentious and active, dedicated to their work. I am not rhapsodising. I am trying to describe them as they were. Two of them are now dead (Forough Farrokhzad and Mahmood Hangval ), one of them has a laundry in London .The work we did, and the kind of dedication they showed was worth more to me than any prize I've ever won. I simply do not know, and do not care where the gold statue or the silver trays or the medals are. But I hold dear the memory of those few, those happy few.

Political Background

I was born in 1922 in Shiraz. Initially I wrote for my father’s newspaper, about almost everything. In 1941 I went to Tehran and in 1944 I started writing articles and translating books from English. I translated two Marxist books namely Dialectic by Stalin and Principles of Marxism by Lenin. It was at this time that I joined Toodeh Party( a legal communist party that was active in Iran until 1953) and I started writing articles in Mardom, the official newspaper of this party. In the beginning, I was in charge of its foreign section and then I became chief editor.

After that I went to Mazandaran (north Iran) and took charge of the Committee of Toodeh Party. But I could not tolerate some people who were working with me and I came back to Tehran and started working for the newspaper again, and became the editor. Later on, I realized that there were some scandals in the party and I figured that they are talking nonsense. It was at this time that Khalil Maleki(one of the influential political activists of that time)separated from the party and created the Socialist Community of Toodeh. I was against this fraction and although I was a member of Maleki’s group, I resigned my membership.

After that, I gave up all political activity and spent my time solely on literature and cinema. When I was in the Toodeh Party, cinema was everything to me. That period was the golden age of Hollywood cinema. It was the peak of musicals and the films of Humphrey Bogart which were made by Howard Hawks. But the stupid thing was that these guys (in Toodeh Party) cursed the Hollywood cinema in their newspaper and expected me to praise Russian films, something I would not do. Then after 1949 when I went to Abadan, I wrote articles on cinema. At that time, the films Bicycle Thieves and Henry the Fifth with Lawrence Olivier were screened, two brilliant films from world cinema. The problem was that the members of the party did not have any idea of Marxism. There were very few people who understood Marxism. These people simply knew how to demonstrate in the streets of Tehran, shout slogans, and die for Stalin's moustache. But they did not understand Marxism at all.

My understanding of Marxism was different from theirs. My understanding was a fundamental understanding which still remains with me: an essential and deep understanding of real Marxism different from that of Brezhnev or the cunning and criminal Stalin.

After returning from Mazandaran, I decided to write a novel about the political circumstances of Mazandaran following the collapse of the Toodeh Party. I summarized it and it was published in a collection of short stories called Azar, the Last Month of Autumn.

There were numerous disasters within the party. When I was in Mazandaran, I always slept with a pistol under my pillow, not because of the supporters of the monarchy and the Shah, but because of the members of the central council of the party. I feared that they would kill me because I was against all their dirty work. They were not the embodiments of an ideal. They were simply worthless selfservers with a passion and ambition for power. They were only thirsty for power and position. So I relinquished my political work and moved towards literature and cinema.

Farrokh Ghaffari and Iran’s Film Club

How did you cooperate with Ghaffari in organizing Iran’s Film Club programs?

Ghaffari has a fundamental role in Iranian cinema, as he was the one who founded Film Club in Iran, during the 50’s and arranged for artistic films to be imported from abroad and showed in the film club. In that time importing of films and showing them was not possible because of the censorship regulations and the indifference of the businessmen. On the other hand those films were not found easily in the world. It was mostly due to his efforts that the excitement and tendency towards watching and understanding the art of cinema found a focal point and became popular. There was no other way to quench the thirst for seeing the masterpieces of cinema, but the Film Club that he founded and managed. He promoted this feeling and made it progress. It was because he was Langlois’ assistant in Paris during the years of World War II. Due to his connections with the French and Italian embassy and his connection with the consortium of oil companies, Ghaffari succeeded in having regular screening of the best films of the world. Showing those films changed the conception of cinema among the Iranian spectators where as the other cinema halls only showed the Hollywood low quality films or Indian films or local trash movies.

Ghaffari also made some intelligent films. You shouldn’t skip his role in this arena. …Where are the films by Khachikian, Yasami & Majid Mohseni who were the best sellers for over 20 years? Films that were approved that much and were made the taste of people and then followed that taste, too?

I rented a cinema hall to show my films and imported excellent and valuable films, even though I knew the only possible place to show them was the nonprofit theatre of Film Club. Losing money was not important to me; in return of the fun and joy it gave me. This was the reason why some expected me to move them from my way and give them equipment to gain their dream, which was making films. But, I was not rich enough to do that. But, they thought I am.

The truth is that the equipment, the vision and the samples I gathered for another type of filmmaking in Iran led to an interest in zealous people who dreamed of making their own films. But, this was not possible, if the time and situation was not ready.