Throughout the season return for a game of chess, roundtable discussions, workshops, and other free events. Find out more at: www.icaphila.org/excursus

In conjunction with our residency at the Serpentine Gallery’s Centre for Possible Studies, the Bidoun Library is presenting a program of two films drawn from our collaboration with the online archive UbuWeb this Wednesday, June 8.

The program will be introduced by Masoud Golsorkhi, editor of Tank magazine.

Wednesday June 8, 2011
7-9pm
Free!

Centre for Possible Studies
64 Seymour Street
London W1H 5BW

Bahman Maghsoudlou
Ardeshir Mohasses & His Caricatures
1972
20 min

A short documentary about Ardeshir Mohasses (1938-2008) featuring rare footage of the Iranian artist in his studio in Iran before his self-imposed exile to New York, which was to last over thirty years. Mohasses’ anti-Shah and anti-Islamic Republic cartoons used settings and costumes of the Qajar dynasty (1794 to 1925) — a misdirection that fooled no one. The film features commentary from Iranian intellectuals of the time, including Houshang Taheri, Javad Mojabi, and Fereidoun Gilani. Mohasses, a man of few words, is noticeably mute throughout.

Kamran Shirdel
The Night It Rained
1967
35min

In northern Iran, a schoolboy from a village near Gorgan is said to have discovered that the railway had been washed away by a flood. When he saw the approaching train — so the story goes — he set fire to his jacket, ran toward the train, and averted a serious and fatal accident. Kamran Shirdel’s film The Night it Rained does not concentrate on the heroic deed promulgated in the newspapers, but on a caricature of social and subtle political behavior — the way in which witnesses and officials manage to insert themselves into the events. Shirdel uses newspaper articles and interviews with railway employees, the governor, the chief of police, the village teacher and pupils — each of whom tell a different version of the event. In the end, they all contradict one another, while the group of possible or self-appointed heroes constantly grows. With his cinematic sleights of hand, Shirdel paints a bittersweet picture of an Iranian society in which truth, rumor, and lie can no longer be distinguished.