The Infinite, Omnipotent Cycle of Politics, People, and Art: Ehsan Koshbakht's Celluloid Underground

Celluloid Underground 2023

I recently had the opportunity to meet Director Ehsan Khoshbakht at a screening of his film Celluloid Underground, a documentary about his teenage friendship with an illegal film hoarder, Ahmad, in 1980s Iran under dictatorial rule. Together, they started a secret cinema showing banned Western films to the cinephiles of Tehran. While Khoshbakht moved to London in the 1990s for university, Ahmad was arrested for his illegal film collection, and hundreds of celluloid films were destroyed and burned by the authorities. The film endeavors to explore the reformation of media and its ability to take both physical and symbolic forms, constantly transitioning between the two while fleeing the iron fist of censorship.

Khoshbakht’s documentary interjects mid-narrative with an educational section about how celluloid film is created, explaining the roles of cellulose nitrate and camphor. He demonstrates how raw materials are harvested from the earth and highlights the film's flammable nature, making it clear that celluloid is precarious—both delicate and dangerous. I left the cinema and my discussion with Khoshbakht not grieving in despair over the hundreds of lost films destroyed by the authorities, but rather overcome with a sense of faith that made everything seem irrefutable and immortal. While Ahmad’s film collection and many other traces of pre-revolution Iranian cinema have been burned, the celluloid itself melts into the earth and reintegrates with nature, reforming into the raw materials necessary to make films again. It is precisely this exhibition of the cyclical nature of art—its transition from an intangible idea to a physical object, and ultimately its destruction into physical nothingness and symbolic memory—that inspired me to write this article.

We live in a world characterized by the insatiable desire to commodify our ideas: to make them physical, sell them, and then discard them. But what happens when politics engulfs art in its perpetual quest for power, as seen in the case of Ahmad’s pre-revolution film archive? Just as film critic Bradshaw posits, “Is film, like our own vulnerable human bodies, liable to decay into dusty nothingness?” Here, art takes its place in our cycle, completing the metamorphosis of physical objects into emblematic memory. When we watch films, read books, observe art, or listen to music, an inception occurs; ideas, thoughts, and feelings emerge, and memories are conceived. Just as celluloid is "composed partly of the remains of people before us," the films of future generations will embody not only the soil from which we are buried but also the thoughts that we engendered.

As long as people are thinking, wondering, hoping, and resisting, these materials will be harvested again, and films will continue to be created. No amount of censorship can confiscate our memories; no amount of destruction or ‘erasure by state powers’ can obliterate the fact that something happened or is happening. This is exhibited on our own campus, on the freshly mowed, empty grass of the Portico.

We, as humans, are evidence of all the films, culture, art, and history that came before us. Our desire to create or rebel is impervious to the destruction of politics and echoes the desires of all those who created and rebelled before us.