Film Mutations: Festival of Invisible Cinema XIII.

Brick and Mirror

Khesht o ayeneh, Iran, 1965., 130 min.

Brick and Mirror

Summary

Brick and Mirror is the first Iranian feature film to use direct sound (also used in several scenes in The House is Black). With the absence of music (except percussion in the intro), this broadens our sense of space extending beyond the screen. The title of the movie comes from a verse of the classic Persian poet Attar who wrote "What the old people see in the mud brick, the young see in the mirror."  The philosophical implications of the verse come to the fore in the story of a young man who finds a littlr girl in his taxi and then spends the whole night with his girlfriend discussing what to do with the child. Although at first glance, this black-and-white film resembles the work of Italian neorealism, especially in its unwavering view of street and nightlife in Tehran in the 1960s, it more closely resembles Dostoevsky and expressionism: the supporting characters periodically step out and perform anxious soliloquies, which contributes to the general elegance, which is both physical and metaphysical, external and spiritual. Golestan brings a devastating portrait of hypocritical intellectuals and various bureaucrats who preach altruism. His tragic narration, which takes place over 24 hours, shows us that Tehran is radically different from anything we saw in the second Iranian new wave. Once it finally dawns, the constant underlining of institutional failures in the midst of the bustle of Tehran during the early 1960s becomes an epic indictment of society as a whole in Iran's first modernist masterpiece.

(Jonathan Rosenbaum)

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