{"id":2200,"date":"2026-08-19T21:02:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T04:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tehranbureau.com\/?p=2200"},"modified":"2026-08-19T21:02:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T04:02:19","slug":"albert-lamorisse-the-innovator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/resanegar.com\/en\/albert-lamorisse-the-innovator\/","title":{"rendered":"Albert Lamorisse: The Innovator"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The French-Iranian Film Connection<\/a><\/em> \u2779<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Paris in 1922, Albert Lamorisse is best known for his 1956 film The Red Balloon<\/em> (Le ballon rouge<\/em>). Though only 34 minutes long and with but a few lines of dialogue, this pint-size saga of an adventurous five-and-a-half-year-old boy and the clever, frolicsome balloon that befriends him is a cinema classic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Karaj Dam (Albert and Pascal Lamorisse, 1970)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lamorisse also has a modestly scaled, marvelously achieved place in the French-Iranian Film Connection, and a tragic one. In 1970, while filming a documentary about the landscape of Iran under the auspices of the Shah\u2019s cultural ministry, he died in a helicopter crash at the age of forty-eight. A stylistic innovator, Lamorisse was a technical one as well. Assisted by a marine gyro specialist, he had designed a shock-absorbent camera rig specifically for helicopter use. The apparatus, dubbed Helivision, allowed shots with an effect as if \u201cthe camera were mounted on a perfectly solid track in the sky<\/a>,\u201d in the words of one film critic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, when he took to the sky for the final time, Lamorisse had already finished shooting the material he sought for his vision of a cinematic tone poem, a reverie on Iran\u2019s boundless physical and cultural wonders\u2014but the project\u2019s funder had brought him back for more. The film was one of a number of coproductions with Western partners Iran had launched in the late 1960s to temper its autocratic image. The fact of the partnerships was usually as much the point as what they yielded, and Lamorisse had proceeded under the assumption of creative freedom. The Shah, though, was dismayed that the rough cut he saw did not reflect the dynamic, modernizing Iran he aimed to promote. As cinema scholar Hamid Naficy describes, officials of the Ministry of Culture and Art (MCA) echoed this view, expressing<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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dissatisfaction with the film, for they apparently missed its subtle nationalist figuration and felt that although it had represented Iran lovingly, it was a predominantly pastoral and ancient representation that neither matched Iranian reality nor the state\u2019s idea of syncretic modernity. Lamorisse was recalled to film additional sequences to emphasize the country\u2019s industrialization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Upon Lamorisse\u2019<\/em>s return, among the new locations imposed on his remit, he filmed extensive handheld footage in the bowels of Tehran University\u2019<\/em>s U.S.-supplied research nuclear reactor, which had become operational in 1967. He was then urged to move on to another American construction, the Karaj Dam, 40 miles northwest of Tehran, where the MCA was eager to have him record some of his signature aerial footage\u2014the Shah had specifically lamented the lack of dams<\/a> in what he\u2019d seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As insistent as they were that Lamorisse return to Iran, the ministry had not paid for his crew to come back as well, so he was now there alone with his wife and 20-year-old son, Pascal\u2014the young boy in The Red Balloon<\/em>. Significantly, he was without his experienced helicopter pilot. An expert pilot himself, Lamorisse conveyed his concern about flying near the high-tension wires surrounding the dam, so the Shah\u2019<\/em>s personal pilot was assigned to operate the helicopter. On June 2, 1970, Lamorisse, assisted by Pascal, made the flight up to the dam, where they shot about ten minutes worth of footage before the helicopter got caught in the wires. Pascal survived<\/a>; his father and the pilot fell to their deaths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working from the notes detailing his original vision from the film, Lamorisse\u2019s Iran documentary was ultimately completed by his widow, Claude Jeanne Marie (n\u00e9e Duparc), and Pascal. It was released in 1978 as The Lovers\u2019 Wind<\/em> (Le vent des amoureux<\/em>). The Persian title, Bad-e Saba<\/em>, is particularly resonant, evoking the gentle morning breeze that carries sweethearts\u2019 secret messages to each other and the \u201cperfume of the Beloved\u2019<\/em>s tresses<\/a>,\u201d as described in the love verses of Hafez. Some might agree with Naficy\u2019s assessment that the film\u2019s dreamy, fabulistic narration is \u201coverly poetic and flowery\u201d; with its muted delivery, it\u2019s easy enough to tune out. As for Lamorisse\u2019s sumptuous, swooping, thrillingly fluid visuals, there is no sensible ground for debate\u2014the film is mesmerizing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A seven-minute-long pendant<\/a> to The Lovers\u2019 Wind<\/em> (it has been variously presented as a prologue or epilogue to the feature) was assembled by an MCA staff producer\u2014not Claude and Pascal, as some have surmised\u2014based on the footage Lamorisse shot after being called back. After an opening crawl in Persian, which asserts that ineluctable \u201cdestiny did not grant him the opportunity to finish<\/a>\u201d his film, his handheld shots from the reactor, many accelerated, play over the sound of fierce winds and eerie musical themes, creating a spectral mood. A piano dirge accompanies the final images he recorded at the dam, retrieved from the depths of its reservoir. In honor of the Frenchman\u2019s terminal devotion to immortalizing Iran on film, and tying together distant strands of the French-Iranian Film Connection, Mohsen Makhmalbaf would open his Images from the Qajar Dynasty<\/em> (1992) with a sequence from The Lovers\u2019 Wind<\/em>, dedicating the archival picture\u2014which includes more than a dozen pieces shot by Akkasbashi<\/a>\u2014to Lamorisse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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