For God’s sake, don’t give us the title of history researcher!

Charso Press: Finally, after a long wait, the book “Censorship Report of a Film: South of Farrokh Ghaffari” written by Abbas Bharlo was published. In the midst of the Corona crisis and those forced stay-at-homes, a happy thing happened so that I had the opportunity to accompany them and more importantly, the opportunity to talk. For a long time, I thought to myself that at the time of publication, dignitaries more authoritative than me will talk and write about the values ​​of this book, but how useful and path-breaking it will be for young researchers and those interested in historiography if I can share my personal account of working with Mr. Bharlo. Share with them? Zakat was such an opportunity, a promise to myself, and now the promise of faithfulness!

Previously, I had the experience of implementing or collaborating with several research projects in different fields, but I was curious to know how a titled researcher like Bharlo works. I have to admit that the answer was very easy and of course no. Easy because the general principles of the work were the same as the basic principles of any research; Attention to detail, commitment to the truth, trying to access first-hand sources and fully complying with the rules of referring to sources. But why not? The only difference was in the level of accuracy, responsibility and perfectionism in the implementation of these principles. Easy in words and restrained in execution.

Most of my cooperation with Mr. Bharlo was related to Farrokh Ghaffari’s biography section, facilitating access to French archives and publications, and translating documents and articles needed by him. As it can be seen from the title of the book, the main subject of the book is about the movie “South of Shahr” and specifically the censorship report of this movie, but Mr. Bharlu worked for almost two years only on the biography of Farrokh Ghaffari, which was more of an introduction to the main topic. They believed that although very valuable efforts have been made in this matter, many questions still remain unanswered, narratives whose authenticity should be challenged more or cases that need to be recorded in more and more accurate details. Many times I have witnessed that after sending me a part of an interview or a reference and requesting to find its original source, they had the ability to wait for months for that source to be found or made available, as, based on the sentence “God has amazing patience” to I believe that Jed has amazing patience! And if the original source was not found or after all this patience it did not clearly confirm the desired point, they would delete a whole detailed paragraph! For a researcher, there is no greater pleasure than discovering an unseen point and sharing it, and how hard it is to pass this excitement in favor of pure truth! But in the case of Bharlu, these deletions were done easily and without any hesitation.

They recorded all the names of people and places and their pronunciation with such precision that they obsessed me and every time, in order not to make a mistake, I checked the translations and pronunciations with my wife many times. Unfortunately, most of these names were incomplete or incorrectly recorded in interviews or translations, and these mistakes made it very difficult to find sources. Mr. Bharlu was fully aware of this issue and his obsession was to correct and prevent the repetition of such mistakes. I remember that in order to find the camera model used in the movie “South of the City”, how Poirot searched all the possible French combinations from the name to Farsi registered in the archives until we found the name of the manufacturing company, and finally by comparing the archive images of the cameras produced by that company with the only After a few photos from behind the scenes of the movie, we came to the name of the camera itself.

When talking about a historical reference, Abbas Bharlo had a strange sensitivity to not refer to another book and to find the original reference and direct reference. The experience of years of historical research had taught them that even if the narration is accurate, word for word, access to the original source is necessary to reach a correct inference of the situation where the words were spoken or how a text is turned. Not only were the late Ghaffari’s own words no exception to this rule, but because most of the detailed interviews with him were conducted in his old age, Mr. Bharlu’s sensitivity was even greater on Ghaffari’s statements. It didn’t matter how much the mentioned topic played a role in the progress of the story. Suppose Ghafari had mentioned in an interview that he collaborated with Georges Sadol in preparing a book on the history of cinema, and Sadol thanked him in the introduction of the book. At a cursory glance, it seems that the main point is Ghaffari’s collaboration with Sadoul, which should perhaps be mentioned in one sentence in a sub-paragraph, but for Mr. Bharlo, confirming the quality of this collaboration was as important as the collaboration itself; Even if the discussion is about only one sentence of a sub-paragraph. The only way to confirm this quality was to access the old editions of Sadol’s 6-volume book. It was the Corona days and access to the National Library of France was limited. Desperately, I went to the city library, and to my surprise, the librarian went to the library and came back with 6 volumes of books published in the year I wanted! I read the prefaces of all the volumes and their references so that the statement “Thank you for the introduction” is removed and changed to writing an article in one of the volumes. Or another example was a several-week effort to find the original reviews that were published in French publications after the screening of the film “Night of the Hunchback” (at the French Cinematheque), and we only found illegible images of these reviews along with the translation of sentences from their text. We had access to the bulletin prepared at the time of the film screening. Please note that we are not talking about the movie “South of the City”, the main subject of the book, we are talking about several weeks of patience and trying to correctly refer to a few sentences (the correct names of the journals, the correct names of the authors, page numbers and of course the accuracy of the translation) about Another movie is Ghaffari, but Mr. Bharlu’s obsession was the same.

I remember many of these cases and examples, and I must admit that it is not easy to keep up with this level of perfectionism and accuracy, but the commitment and responsibility that Abbas Bharlo has towards the quality of his work, on the one hand, and his patience, politeness, and modesty. which accompanied every request and question was a motivation to find the most complete answer. But the main difficulty of synchronizing with Abbas Baharlu’s work commitment was not for me, but for Abbas Baharlu himself! Many times I heard that “I am reading such and such section and I close the file and that’s it” but only a few days later I heard the same sentence again about the same section and this repetition was frequent! The work of rereading, correcting and rewriting was not easy! I don’t even imagine that publication can stop the text editing process in Abbas Bharlo’s mind!

If I want to summarize my baggage from this association in a few points, I will definitely say that if I had read Nietzsche’s words, “Firm beliefs threaten the truth more than lies.” The more frequent, the more suspicious! I learned that a historian should neither be fanatical about what he knows nor intimidated by his innovations. I learned that the joy and excitement of discovering an unseen document or an unspoken point is a double-edged sword on the neck of the truth if it is not understood correctly, if it is not recorded correctly, if it is not referenced correctly. Maybe the next researcher can correct the mistake of the previous researcher by accessing that source. I learned that historical research is not an individual work but a collective work throughout history; From a finding to a new finding, from a new receipt to a new receipt. If we have always heard that cinema is the art of paying attention to details, I have heard and seen many times that historiography, according to Abbas Baharlu, is nothing but paying attention to details. In Bharlo’s mind, the correct recording of the name of a marginal character was as important as the correct narration of a phase of Ghafari’s life; Like the arrangement of the pieces of a puzzle and that too not a puzzle that has a dumb image of it in mind and now seeks to reconstruct it.

Abbas Bharlo had the ability to be freed from what he knew and patiently proceed piece by piece to build the unseen puzzle. An image close to reality and a correct road map for future pilgrims. It goes without saying that I recommend reading this book to anyone interested in the history of Iranian cinema and the history of Iran in general, but more importantly, I recommend considering the book as a benchmark. May it remind us of cultural sloppiness and noise for nothing in this day and let us remember who is the researcher of history and what does historiography mean.

These are a few lines of tribute, however incomplete, to Abbas Bharlo’s tireless efforts for years to properly record the cultural history of a country that strangely insists on its own cultural destruction.

“He is still clean and away from the contaminated area” *
* The opening and closing lines of the article are taken from the poem “Mirat” by Mehdi Akhwan Al-Talihi.

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