[KineJapan] my concern about the safety of the Iranian film archive

[reeldrew at aol.com]

    Over a year ago, I inquired here about the safety of the Syrian silent film, Taht sama'a Dimashq, in light of the victory of the collaborationist regime headed by the Western-backed terrorist leader, Al-Jolani. In spite of my inquiries, I have been unable to obtain information as to whether this rare surviving Arab silent feature has been protected.  Now we may be facing a far graver situation with respect to the preservation of the Middle Eastern cinema heritage. A fascist madman named Donald J. Trump in collaboration with the equally evil dictator of America's 51st state of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, launched an unprovoked attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, an aggression that is the mirror image of the Japanese militarists' assault on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As part of the genocidal impulse that is at the root of this aggression, many outstanding Iranian cultural sites have been damaged by the US/Israel bombers. Whether the Iranian film archive has so far been spared such damage I don't know. Following ominous threats from our Dear Leader which caused world-wide alarm, there is a fragile so-called ceasefire although brutal bombings are still occurring elsewhere in the region, especially Lebanon, and there is no guarantee that Iran will be spared future attacks.
  I tried to find out if FIAF had any concern about this situation but they did not reply to my inquiry. Not knowing who to address about this issue, I decided to raise it here. While I know from the posts on this group that people here seem to be almost exclusively focused on Japan and rarely if ever discuss Japanese cinema in relation to other cinemas, I feel it should not be considered in isolation as has so often been the case. Although modern Japan is often described as a Western country, it is, in fact, an Asian country. Considering that no Europeans are known to have visited the country until the 1540s and following a century's contact with the West Japan then closed its doors to the outside world for 200 years, it is probably the least Western country on the planet. Consequently, I feel that an appreciation of Japanese culture including its cinema should encompass all of what used to be called the Orient--China, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East all the way to Egypt at the junction of Africa, Asia and Europe. In this context, I wish there were a discussion group called KineAsia.
  Before the declaration of a ceasefire, the lunatic Trump was threatening to obliterate Iran, to wipe out its people and civilization, the country upon which he launched an unprovoked war. Regardless of the outcome of this terrifying moment, I think there should be some reflection on all the decades, indeed centuries of Asiaphobia in the West that brought us to this. Particularly with the conversion of the West to Christianity, the rise of Islam and the Crusades followed centuries later by Western exploration of the Far East, Europeans saw the world divided between Christendom and the far more advanced but "heathen" civilizations of the East with their millions of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. Inspired by Protestant fundamentalism, the United States inherited this prejudice from Europe, a deadly bias that continues to poison the minds of much of our ruling class to this day. 
  This bias is wedded to an ignorance and willful neglect of Eastern culture in the West, a neglect that extended to its cinema history as I found out to my frustration many years ago. Captivated by the handful of Japanese silents I was able to see in my youth in the 1970s (Kinugasa's A Page of Madness, Ozu's I Was Born, But. . ., Passing Fancy, A Story of Floating Weeds, Mizoguchi's Taki no Shiraito and Orizuru Osen), upon the suggestion of Joseph L Anderson I corresponded with the late Shunsui Matsuda who expressed eagerness to share silents from his remarkable collection with American classic film devotees. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a reciprocal interest on the part of the US film establishment. For years I lobbied 16mm. rental companies in the US to purchase copies of Japanese silents and film archives in this country to have a comprehensive retrospective of the Japanese silent cinema--but to no avail. The rental companies rejected my request with the claim that Japanese silents were not marketable here while the archives hemmed and hawed and essentially dismissed my suggestion. While since the dawn of the present century, a number of early Japanese films, both silent and sound, have finally become a part of mainstream film history, most pioneering film artists in China, India and Egypt as well as Latin America still largely remain neglected by the film history establishment in the West.  The standard history of world cinema developed by Iris Barry and others in the 1930s dismissed film production in Asia or the Orient (whatever you wish to call it) and Latin America as unimportant with no effort to explore or preserve the heritage of such major film-producing countries as Japan, China, India, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. This reflected both the phobia directed at Eastern civilizations as alien menaces to the West and the patronizing attitude toward Latin American countries as mere colonies of the USA and Europe with no real cultures of their own.
   Thanks to the spread of VHS and VCD technology in the 1990s and early 2000s, I was able to at least see far more of Japanese silent cinema than in all the previous years and to at last view China's classic silent films. Grateful thanks to the KineJapan members who translated for me the intertitles in Japanese silents and made it possible for me to write about them. I was also able to finally see the treasures of Latin American silent cinema and found them equally creative.
  Following the 9/11 attacks and the spreading madness  of Islamophobia, I was determined to find out as much as I could about early filmmaking in the Middle East. I was able to obtain on VHS some excellent silents from the region. I then proposed to the Pordenone Silent Film Festival that they have a retrospective of surviving silent films from the Middle East produced in Egypt and other Arab countries--Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon--as well as Iran and Turkey. I thought it would make an excellent follow-up to their retrospectives of silents from India, China and Japan. But despite my repeated requests, the result was the same as my experience in the 1970s in trying to persuade US archives to have a Japanese silent film retrospective--a basic indifference to my proposal on the part of the Pordenone people.
  I think there ought to be some reflection on the part of Americans as to why we are always at war with Asia. While unlike the conflicts that followed one can reasonably make the argument that the war with Japan was a just one, that hardly excuses the criminal, racist aspects of the conflict that have left enduring scars--the wartime internment of the Japanese-Americans, the vicious firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities and most horrific of all, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, universally recognized as a monstrous war crime by everyone except American ultra-nationalists. The peace was also scarred by such attacks on Japanese culture as the burning of a number of Japanese films by occupation forces in a bizarre attempt to promote Western "democracy" and an outrageous if short-lived attempt by the US government to convert the Japanese people to Christianity by distributing Bibles in Japan, an effort totally at odds with the spirit of the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
  None of the subsequent wars with Asia should be considered just. The US' intervention in the Korean War on behalf of the dictator it favored led to the mass murder of one fourth of the Korean population in the north and the almost total destruction of Korea's film heritage including classic silents from the 1920s that had survived the harshest years of Japanese occupation in World War II only be lost in the later conflict. As a schoolboy in the 1960s, I remember all too well the war in Vietnam and its subsequent spread to Laos and Cambodia. The widely believed rationale for the war as disseminated by government propaganda and as believed by many Americans at the time was that the Vietnamese were the proxies, not of the Soviets, but of the "Red Chinese" who had temporarily replaced the Russians as our principal Cold War enemy. What came to be known as the Domino Theory would ultimately be exposed as a lie--but not until after over 60,000 US servicemen died and millions of Indochinese perished.
  Some years after US forces fled Southeast Asia after years of fighting, the American empire relocated to Western Asia where it has remained ever since. Once again, during all these decades lie after lie has been used to justify the endless slaughter of Muslim peoples. Over and over we have been subjected to grotesque stereotypes of Eastern peoples, their culture, their religion, presenting them all as a bunch of savages. Such is our addiction to conflict with Asians that there was a hue and cry over Japan's economic success in the 1970s and 1980s as a unique menace to the US, an alarm that led to the Plaza Accords and ultimately  the bursting of Japan's economic bubble. Now many people here view with alarm China's peaceful rise as a superpower and talk darkly of a future war with the country. And lurking in the shadows is an incipient fear of another rising Asian superpower, India.
   The one thing that might have a chance of counteracting the constant Asiaphobia is education--a sustained effort to provide accurate information about Asian societies and the faiths in which they believe, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, greater familiarity with Asian arts, their literature, their music, their visual arts, their cinema. I firmly reject the notion that on this fragile planet of ours there must be a constant clash between East and West. As part of this, I strongly believe that we must work to ensure the preservation of the films produced by Eastern civilizations throughout the history of the cinema. William M. Drew 
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