Cel­lu­loid Under­ground – first-look review

The tired Taran­ti­no ur-myth of the work­ing class, self-start­ing hip­ster cinephile has suf­fused mod­ern film cul­ture to the point where the direc­tor is now seen as the equiv­a­lent of a box­car fight­er who rose up and went on to nab the title. 

The sto­ry goes that QT shunned film school and learned all his moves from binge­ing through the VHS hold­ings of the video rental store for which he was the clerk. Well QT ain’t got noth­ing on Ehsan Khosh­bakht, whose own cinephile rite of pas­sage was laced with dan­ger, intrigue, insect infes­ta­tion, post-rev­o­lu­tion­ary malaise and a mys­te­ri­ous old movie col­lec­tor named Ahmad Jurghanian. 

Ahmed’s sto­ry is inex­tri­ca­bly entwined with the polit­i­cal­ly tumul­tuous sto­ry of mod­ern Iran, where, in the pre-rev­o­lu­tion­ary era a thriv­ing albeit restrict­ed film cul­ture allowed for screen­ings of west­ern movies with seg­ments sliced out to retain the moral for­ti­tude of the nation. When a film had com­plet­ed its run, it was expect­ed that the reel of cel­lu­loid would be sent to a film exe­cu­tion­er who would blud­geon it with an axe. 

Like a wily resis­tance fight­er, Ahmed saved hun­dreds of films from the chop, along­side stacks of gor­geous orig­i­nal posters, lob­by cards and oth­er mem­o­ra­bil­ia. And then, when the rev­o­lu­tion hit and didn’t lead to the lib­er­al utopia that some had expect­ed, he hoard­ed them in var­i­ous moul­der­ing base­ment apart­ments across cen­tral Tehran.

Now, Ahmed was no archivist in the tra­di­tion­al sense, and even though he had an arm­chair inter­est in film his­to­ry, Khosh­bakht sug­gests that he saw these films as more of a per­son­al trea­sure for which he had to deduce a pur­pose. Fol­low­ing a few vis­its, Khosh­bakht quick­ly became Jurghanian’s unof­fi­cial men­tor and helpmeet.

There was, of course, an inher­ent­ly polit­i­cal dimen­sion behind his choice to save these films from destruc­tion in a coun­try where own­ing phys­i­cal media was against the law. And yet, Jurghan­ian was not active­ly engag­ing in civ­il dis­obe­di­ence or bit­ing a thumb towards the régime: he mere­ly felt empow­ered by being the own­er of these rust­ed, unmarked tins full of cel­lu­loid dreams. Per­haps they stood in for the fam­i­ly he nev­er had?

Khosh­bakht for­mu­lates this sto­ry as a per­son­al reflec­tion of an era for which his feel­ings remain ambigu­ous. The joys of hav­ing these films at your fin­ger­tips is dashed by the real­i­ty that that the entrance to the cave of won­ders has been well and tru­ly blocked. 

Cel­lu­loid Under­ground is realised through a mix of evoca­tive filmed archive footage (fea­tur­ing baby Ehsan in his fire­brand uni­ver­si­ty days) and a care­ful­ly-stitched patch­work of film excerpts, pulled pri­mar­i­ly from the lit­tle-seen work by pre-rev­o­lu­tion­ary Iran­ian film­mak­ers. The moody tex­ture of the film is enhanced fur­ther by Ekke­hard Wölk’s gor­geous jazz score.

The film does leave some ques­tions unan­swered, and these range from the pure­ly prac­ti­cal (such as what hap­pened to Ahmad’s hold­ings after he died) to the emo­tion­al (such as, what was the rea­son for emo­tion­al chill­i­ness between the men). Khoshbakht’s nar­ra­tion is lyri­cal to a tee, through he rarely talks about peo­ple with the same deeply-felt poet­i­cism as he does the con­tents of those hal­lowed film cans. But that, I guess, is the point of the film.