Bogeyman,1991

Reza Abdoh (1963-1995) was an Iranian-born director and playwright known for epic and disjunctive multimedia theatrical productions that featured violent and unabashedly sexual imagery. Abdoh created several stand-alone experimental video works and one feature film, The Blind Owl (1992), in addition to the incidental video loops produced for his plays.

For more on Reza Abdoh, see “Imprisoned Airs,” a conversation with his brother, the novelist Salar Abdoh, and critic Daniel Mufson, in our Diaspora issue.

Untitled, 1975

After completing his studies in Moscow in the mid-1970s, Hamlet Hovsepian (b. 1950) returned to his home village of Ashnak, Armenia where he created a series of films, installations, and interventions full of banal and repetitive gestures. Yawning, scratching, thinking, walking in circles — these were Hovsepian’s political activisms, micro-reclamations of space as against the strictures of Soviet rule. Hovsepian continues to live and work in Ashnak, preferring painting as his post-Soviet medium.

Sekigun/PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War), 1971

Returning from the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, film theorist and director Masao Adachi [b. 1939] and Koji Wakamatsu traveled to Lebanon to collaborate with the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine… to make a radical propaganda newsreel promoting the Palestinian resistance against Israel. The purest expression of Adachi’s call for a “cinema for the revolution,” Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War interweaves footage of Palestine refugee camps, freedom fighters in training, and… imagery of city and landscapes over which plays a soundtrack of fiery speeches openly embracing armed violence and Maoist revolution as an effective means to reinvent the world order. Adachi and Wakamatsu used guerrilla methods to independently distribute and exhibit Red Army/PLFP: Declaration of World War, sending the film via the “Red Bus Film Screening Troop” throughout Europe and Palestine.

— Harvard Film Archive

Seh Mullah (Three Mullahs), 1985

Parviz Khatibi (1922-1993) was an iconoclastic Iranian intellectual whose diverse practice bridged popular entertainment and political activism. During and after the Shah’s regime, Khatibi published a satirical weekly named Haji Baba. He continued to publish the paper in exile in New York and Los Angeles.

In the realm of popular culture, he was a successful playwright; a key figure at Radio Iran, where he hosted a popular morning show; a prolific film director; and the songwriter behind many beloved pop songs.

Seh Mullah (1985) was a made-for-television musical satire, mocking the leaders of the Islamic Republic. The production combined elements of folk theater and humor with found footage and video-era special. The mullahs, played by actors in clumsy masks and fake beards, are often portrayed as singing, dancing, and being chastised by their hectoring wives. Khatibi himself appears as a diegetic narrator throughout.

Leiyla Visitations, 1959

Halim El Dabh (b. 1921) is an Egyptian-born pioneer of experimental tape music and an alumnus of the famed Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where he recorded Leiyla Visitations and other works. Leiyla Visitations is a deconstructed electronic drama which derives its text from the Arabian folk epic Layla and Majnun. It consists primarily of tape¬ manipulated instrumental and vocal sounds. Sam Shalaby wrote about El Dabh in our Rumors issue.