Alain Resnais, a founding figure of the French new wave, passed away on Saturday, March 1, 2014, in Paris. He was 91 years old. Resnais’s complex style consisted of innovative camera movement, long tracking shots, and the use of flashback as a way of exploring memory, particularly in such masterpieces of fractured time as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). His dominant themes of memory and forgetfulness were illuminated in his fabulous short films Guernica (1950), Night and Fog (1955), and the unforgettable lyrical documentary Toute la Memoire du Monde (1956) about the Bibliotheque Nationale. He…
Author: Bahman Maghsoudlou
While in necessary isolation, the author recalls his association with a small, interconnected group of luminaries: a cineaste, a jazz musician, a poetess and a cinematic legend Like so many others around the country and around the world, I have been spending most of my time inside in recent days, as part of our collective effort to slow and eventually halt the further spread of the terrible virus that has currently seized all of our attention. In an attempt to prevent myself from obsessing over the latest news, I threw myself into my work, attending to all that needed attending…
Naser Malek Motii, the superstar of Iranian cinema for almost three decades, passed away after a long illness in the hospital in Tehran, Iran, on May 25, 2018. He was 88 years old. He had a low voice and was reserved with his words. He was courteous and bashful, and you could read the kindness, humility and humanity in his face. He was a decent, humble, selfless man. A gentleman, without any hypocrisy, and with a manner of true sportsmanship. He was a man who always helped others, in and out of the film industry, and did his best to…
I had the privilege and honor of meeting Anthony Quinn, a legend and multidimensional artist, in the early ‘90s. I ended up working with him, learning from him and producing one film with him in the middle of that same decade. During the production of Seven Servants, this classic actor and I found much to bond over and the two of us became very close. I became a trustee of sorts for him and he offered me the opportunity to produce his next film. The regular meetings and meals I subsequently had with him, sometimes with his beloved family, resulted…
Milos Forman, the celebrated Czech filmmaker, actor, scenarist and teacher, passed away on Saturday, April 14, 2018, at Danbury Hospital, near his home in Warren, Connecticut. He was 86. His twelve feature films were nominated for 33 Academy Awards. Three of these were for Best Director, two of which received the prize: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984). Forman’s tone could be ironic, metaphoric, and allegorical, but his humane observations and subversive touch were the true key to his success. Two of his earliest productions received Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Film, a significant mark of…
Iranian film director and writer Amir Naderi’s[1] rise to prominence has not only provided him with the recognition that his powerful cinema richly deserves, but it has also helped shed light for world audiences on an almost ‘closed society.’ His success has helped open new frontiers for other Iranian film-makers inside and outside of Iran. Naderi is one of the major Iranian film-makers whose work and contributions (along with a few others)[2] to Iranian cinema in the 1970s created the magnificent fundamental basis that blossomed and flourished in the 1980s and has established itself in the 1990s as one of…