An Iranian Master of Style

Despite the strictures of government censorship, the Iranian cinema, which has a long and rich tradition, is currently flowering. The renowned Abbas Kiarostami’s “A Taste of Cherry” shared the top prize at Cannes with Shohei Imamura’s “The Eel” earlier this year, and now the UCLA Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of another bravura Iranian filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He is best known for his recent “Gabbeh,” an exquisite fable of duty and desire in a nomadic tribe.

The retrospective, which opens tonight at 7:30 with “A Moment of Innocence,” continues through Sept. 6 at the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall. Like “Gabbeh,” “A Moment of Innocence” finds the impassioned Makhmalbaf in a more contemplative, even whimsical, mood than usual.

In 1974, Makhmalbaf, now 40, as part of a protest against Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, stabbed a policeman while attempting to steal his gun and wound up in prison for the next five years. (Ironically, 20 years later that same policeman was among 5,000 people who answered the filmmaker’s ad seeking 100 actors for “Salaam Cinema” [1995], which screens Sept. 6 at 7:30 p.m.)

“A Moment of Innocence” imagines that the policeman and Makhmalbaf will jointly re-create their past encounter on film as a way of creating a meditation on the past, its meaning and its burden, and the power of imagination and its magical role in the art of film.

When the UCLA Film Archive presented its “A Decade of Iranian Cinema” in 1990, post-Islamic Revolution films had been virtually impossible to see. It opened with Makhmalbaf’s “The Peddler” (1986), which screens Friday at 7:30 p.m. and takes its title from the the final vignette in this dynamic, earthy, three-part film, which in its concerns and gritty style resembles the films of Italian Neo-Realism.

Part 1 is a pitch-dark satire in the manner of the most macabre of Italian filmmakers, the late Marco Ferreri. It concerns a couple living in a Tehran shantytown who have four severely crippled children and who, not realizing that their new baby most likely has no disability, struggle mightily to avoid keeping it. Even more bizarre is the second episode, which plays like a baroque homage to “Psycho” with its weird mother-and-son relationship.

The third part deals with the paranoia a petty crook experiences in regard to a ring of smugglers. As in Mira Nair’s “Salaam Bombay!,” you can all but smell the stench of noisy congested street life; the director’s images are dense and heady, and his exuberance overwhelms.

“The Peddler” will be followed by “Fleeing Evil From God” (1984),a brief (65-minute) religious allegory involving five bearded and robed pilgrims in a boat, which eventually takes them to an island jungle, where they discover the devil from whom they have been fleeing is not so easily eluded. Makhmalbaf’s third feature reflects the spiritual concerns that permeate his work. (Shortly after the overthrow of the shah, the filmmaker helped form the Organization for the Propagation of Islamic Thought.)

Saturday brings “Time of Love” (1990), which screens at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by “Boycott” (1985). Together they represent Makhmalbaf’s special gift in being able to let story dictate style yet remain the most personal and committed of filmmakers. (In this he brings to mind China’s protean Zhang Yimou.)

Banned in Iran for five years because of its subject, “Time of Love” was shot in a beautiful Turkish seaport city with Turkish actors. In its poetic, minimalist style and moodiness, it recalls the films of Michelangelo Antonioni.

The film is composed of three episodes of adultery involving the same actors; the shifts in casting and plot allow for some subtle social commentary. In the first episode, a lovely young wife, the blond Gazale (Shiva Gerde), who could be Morgan Fairchild’s sister, and a tall, handsome, fair-haired young shoeshine man (Aken Tunj) are carrying on an affair. The couple is observed by a nosy and outraged old man (Menderes Samamjilar), who informs Gazale’s irate husband, a stocky, swarthy cabdriver (Abdolrahman Yalmay)--with dire consequences.

The difference between dark and fair coloring becomes significant when the second episode replays the first with Tunj becoming the husband and Yalmay the lover. The third episode replays the first--but with a witty unexpected ending of considerable spiritual implications.

“Boycott” (1985) is one of Makhmalbaf’s most bravura works. He makes stunning use of all the tricks of feverish melodrama to make exciting--and bearable--an expose of the dreaded Savak in the final years of the shah’s regime.

Wistful Majid Majidi plays Valeh, an everyman involved in a state educational institute who becomes caught up in a rigid, dictatorial political terrorist group. “Boycott” begins with the panache of a slick Hollywood action thriller detailing Valeh’s capture and imprisonment. Amazingly, he escapes and leads a car chase through Tehran that rivals such sequences in “Bullitt” and “The French Connection”--only to land back in prison, thrown in with a group of Marxists determined to make him a martyr for their cause.

But Valeh undergoes a spiritual transformation, as did Makhmalbaf during his own five years in prison. “You robbed me of my faith and gave me nothing in return,” Valeh says to his former terrorist comrades. And to the Marxist leader, he says, “Imperialism and socialism are the same to a dead man.”

You can understand why Makhmalbaf considered “The Marriage of the Blessed” (1989), which screens Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., his finest film up to that time. It is a bristling, vibrant film of astonishing hallucinatory power that underlines Makhmalbaf’s formidable gifts as a seemingly natural screen story-teller of remarkable range in style and tone.

An example of Makhmalbaf at his most political, “Marriage” is a fiery protest against society’s indifference to the veterans of the Iran-Iraq War.

A newspaper photographer, Hadji (Mahmud Bigham), has been injured and suffered shell shock working as an army combat photographer on the front. The horrors he witnessed on the battlefield are compounded by memories of his experiences covering the war in Lebanon and starvation in Africa. Not remotely recovered, he is nonetheless dismissed from his hospital to recuperate at the palatial Tehran home of his photographer-fiancee, whose father is a rich businessman. Told that work is good therapy, he starts to aim his camera everywhere, discovering the kind of poverty and suffering unchanged since the fall of the shah.

Makhmalbaf’s 1989 “The Cyclist,” which follows the screening of “The Marriage of the Blessed,” is a joltingly well-told tale, with endless social, economic and political implications, about an Afghan immigrant so desperate to pay for his wife’s hospital care that he agrees to ride a bike for seven days. His marathon provokes much lucrative gambling for its promoter. (310) 206-FILM.

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The American Cinematheque’s “The Films of Sam Fuller” concludes this weekend with some of the filmmaker’s best-known pictures. However, the series continues Friday at 7:15 p.m. at Raleigh Studios’ Chaplin Theater with the seldom-seen political thriller “Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street” (1972) starring Glenn Corbett as a private eye in Germany and Christa Lang (Fuller’s wife) as a shady blond he encounters. It will be followed at 9:30 by Adam Simon’s excellent 1996 documentary on Fuller, “The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Camera,” which delves into Fuller’s life as a newspaper reporter, a soldier and a filmmaker and features Tim Robbins (the documentary’s executive producer), Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino as well as Fuller.

This film, in turn, will be followed by “Pickup on South Street” (1953), a taut thriller that reflects the Cold War hysteria of its time and stars Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Richard Kiley and an unforgettable Thelma Ritter, nominated for an Oscar for her doughty tie peddler, an innocent bystander in a brutal struggle for a vital microfilm inadvertently stolen by pickpocket Widmark.

Screening Saturday at 6:15 p.m. is “The Crimson Kimono” (1959), a film noir set in Little Tokyo and starring James Shigeta as a Japanese American policeman trying to solve the murder of a blond stripper. It remains one of the few Hollywood films ever to deal with racism toward Japanese Americans and its impact upon them.

“Kimono” will be followed by “The Big Red One” (1980), which Fuller intended to be his definitive World War II film only to see it cut by two hours. Thys Ockersen’s 1979 documentary “Sam Fuller and ‘The Big Red One,’ ” containing scenes cut from the film’s released version, will also be screening.

Journalist Bill Krohn and filmmaker Tony Bozanich will speak afterward on the possibility of restoring “The Big Red One,” which stars Lee Marvin as an Army sergeant leading his squad across North Africa and then Europe. (213) 466-FILM.