What a wonderful thing it is that the rarely seen 1976 Iranian gem, "Stranger and the Fog" has been restored and re-released in the US. It is truly a unique classic that demands a vastly larger audience. Having the opportunity to see it on a big screen was an exhilarating experience for me.
Few movies I've ever seen have felt as authentically mythical as this one. I don't know if it is in any way based on Persian folk-lore, but there is a primal quality to its simple yet electrifing narrative that has the feel of something timeless. It's main theme is anxiety, especially that which so often comes to us in dreams: that of being guilty of some unknown transgression that is all the more damning for being indefinable. The West has often presumed a special insight into such psychological states- anxiety has after all been discussed by such "lofty" names as Kierkegaard, Freud and Heidegger- but works such as "Stranger and the Fog" show that this condition is known at least as well in the "orient" without the pompous pretension of "discovery". (Such pretension is basically all there is to that body of "knowledge" known as Freudianism.)
For all of its sense of impending doom, "Stranger and the Fog" is a work that wows one with its aesthetic beauty. The sea-side village, designed by Iraj Raminfar, and its surrounding fauna have an almost Arcadian quality even when the many shots of figures slowly emerging from the waves convey a dread that few horror movies even aspire to. Mehrdad Fakhimi and Firooz Melekzadeh's cinematography is especially difficult to describe. I feel the unfortunate need to do so by relating it to the work of others working before and simultaneously with these artists.
"Stranger and the Fog" was made the same year as "Taxi Driver" so there was clearly no influence between the two filmmaking teams. Yet, the cinematographers for the two projects arrived at similarly unique looks. These are the two of the darkest lit films one will ever see. Both projects flirt with filmic underdevelopment as aesthetic. Fakhimi and Malekzadeh shoot many scenes as if lit by a single flame. Other shots are largely completely unlit with some dramatic light-source violating the darkness in some unexpected area of the frame. This is extreme chiaroscuro lighting as a kind of cinematic abstract-expressionism where figures and objects are suggested more than truly depicted.
One possible influence on the look of the film is the work of the great Soviet cinematographer Sergey Urusevskiy. As with Urusevskiy's work, the camera of writer-director-editor Bahram Beyzaie and his two DPs relentlessly follows its human subjects. It at times almost looks as if the performers are being shoved against the screen, their bodies flattened before us in a way that paradoxically makes their forms seem all the more three dimensional.
Beyzaie's blocking of large herds of performers is also exceptional. At times the goings in and out of the frame are reminiscent of the choreography in Parajanov's films, if comparatively more conventional. This is especially apparent in one extended sequence that I claim without any sense of hyperbole is as great a battle scene as ever executed in the history of cinema- fully comparable to the best such scenes in the works of Kurosawa or Kobayashi.
My only slight criticism of the film is that it's ending is somewhat abrupt and unsatisfying. But can one ask an artwork to come to satisfactory resolutions when the questions it poses are so undeniably elemental?
Few movies I've ever seen have felt as authentically mythical as this one. I don't know if it is in any way based on Persian folk-lore, but there is a primal quality to its simple yet electrifing narrative that has the feel of something timeless. It's main theme is anxiety, especially that which so often comes to us in dreams: that of being guilty of some unknown transgression that is all the more damning for being indefinable. The West has often presumed a special insight into such psychological states- anxiety has after all been discussed by such "lofty" names as Kierkegaard, Freud and Heidegger- but works such as "Stranger and the Fog" show that this condition is known at least as well in the "orient" without the pompous pretension of "discovery". (Such pretension is basically all there is to that body of "knowledge" known as Freudianism.)
For all of its sense of impending doom, "Stranger and the Fog" is a work that wows one with its aesthetic beauty. The sea-side village, designed by Iraj Raminfar, and its surrounding fauna have an almost Arcadian quality even when the many shots of figures slowly emerging from the waves convey a dread that few horror movies even aspire to. Mehrdad Fakhimi and Firooz Melekzadeh's cinematography is especially difficult to describe. I feel the unfortunate need to do so by relating it to the work of others working before and simultaneously with these artists.
"Stranger and the Fog" was made the same year as "Taxi Driver" so there was clearly no influence between the two filmmaking teams. Yet, the cinematographers for the two projects arrived at similarly unique looks. These are the two of the darkest lit films one will ever see. Both projects flirt with filmic underdevelopment as aesthetic. Fakhimi and Malekzadeh shoot many scenes as if lit by a single flame. Other shots are largely completely unlit with some dramatic light-source violating the darkness in some unexpected area of the frame. This is extreme chiaroscuro lighting as a kind of cinematic abstract-expressionism where figures and objects are suggested more than truly depicted.
One possible influence on the look of the film is the work of the great Soviet cinematographer Sergey Urusevskiy. As with Urusevskiy's work, the camera of writer-director-editor Bahram Beyzaie and his two DPs relentlessly follows its human subjects. It at times almost looks as if the performers are being shoved against the screen, their bodies flattened before us in a way that paradoxically makes their forms seem all the more three dimensional.
Beyzaie's blocking of large herds of performers is also exceptional. At times the goings in and out of the frame are reminiscent of the choreography in Parajanov's films, if comparatively more conventional. This is especially apparent in one extended sequence that I claim without any sense of hyperbole is as great a battle scene as ever executed in the history of cinema- fully comparable to the best such scenes in the works of Kurosawa or Kobayashi.
My only slight criticism of the film is that it's ending is somewhat abrupt and unsatisfying. But can one ask an artwork to come to satisfactory resolutions when the questions it poses are so undeniably elemental?