{"id":2202,"date":"2026-08-19T21:02:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T04:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tehranbureau.com\/?p=2202"},"modified":"2026-08-19T21:02:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T04:02:19","slug":"fereydoun-hoveyda-the-provocateur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/resanegar.com\/en\/fereydoun-hoveyda-the-provocateur\/","title":{"rendered":"Fereydoun Hoveyda: The Provocateur"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The French-Iranian Film Connection<\/a><\/em> <\/em>\u277a<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cinema existed long before articulate speech appeared. Image, still or animated, goes back to the very beginnings of mankind. It preceded every other means of communication. . . . [R]eflect for a moment on prehistoric cave drawings and especially on what we know of the phenomena of nocturnal dreams and waking fantasies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The source of this expansive view of the cinematic, Fereydoun Hoveyda, led a professional life that may seem like a waking fantasy. The younger brother of Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Iran\u2019s prime minister between 1965 and 1977, Fereydoun was, among other things, a literary novelist, a science-fiction writer, a film critic, a social analyst, a screenwriter, a visual artist, co-drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and ambassador to the United Nations. Born in 1924 in Damascus, where his father headed the Iranian consulate, and subsequently raised in Beirut, he would become \u201copen to the universe<\/a>,\u201d as he put it, with friends ranging from author Sadegh Hedayat<\/a> to philosopher Raymond Aron to stage director Robert Wilson to everyone\u2019s friend, Andy Warhol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having received his education at French schools in both Syria and Lebanon, Hoveyda joined the Iranian foreign ministry and, in 1946, was assigned to the Paris embassy. There, two years later, he met the Shah and completed his doctorate in international law and economics at the Sorbonne. In 1952 he left the diplomatic corps but stayed in Paris to work for UNESCO\u2019s Department of Mass Communications, where he would spend nearly a decade and a half facilitating freedom of the press and media modernization in the developing world. It was during this period that Fereydoun Hoveyda became a core figure in the French-Iranian Film Connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoveyda was film-crazy and Paris in those years was a cinephile\u2019s paradise. \u201cThroughout the fifties, I went to the cinema almost every evening,\u201d he later said. In 1953, at the 60-seat Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise, he befriended the famed film theorist Andr\u00e9 Bazin, editor and, two years prior, cofounder of Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, along with a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of his, 21-year-old Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut. Hoveyda joined the influential journal\u2019s editorial board and, in the August\u2013September 1955 issue, published what would be the first of his many critiques in it\u2014a review of the Warner Bros. creature feature Them<\/em><\/a>, in which he praised its explicit grappling with atomic-age dread: \u201cToday, as the \u2018big\u2019 films have in large part become occasions for \u2018escapism,\u2019 it\u2019s precisely a genre intended as \u2018escapism\u2019 that drags the spectator back, a bit despite himself, to exhausting reality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Associating near daily, \u201cafternoons and evenings,\u201d with future Nouvelle Vague directors Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, \u00c9ric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard, over the rest of the decade Hoveyda was a frequent, witty contributor<\/a> to the monthly Cahiers <\/em>film diary, \u201cPetit journal intime du Cin\u00e9ma<\/a>.\u201d He wrote a multipart appraisal of the \u201cGrandeur et d\u00e9cadence du S\u00e9rial<\/a>\u201d (\u201cWhat has happened to the serial is what happens to all other cinematographic genres: as we have tried to impose strict rules on it, all poetry has disappeared, giving way to poor, dried-up skeletons comprising not even a shred of flesh\u201d) and a lengthy essay on science fiction in the time of Sputnik<\/a>; conducted an interview with acclaimed director Roberto Rossellini<\/a>, with whom he had already collaborated on the script for India: Matri Bhumi <\/em>(1959); and took on the daunting task of reviewing The 400 Blows<\/em> (Les quatre cents coups<\/em>, 1959), the feature film debut of his closest friend at the journal (\u201cLes 400 Coups<\/em> is not a masterpiece<\/a>. So much the better for Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut!\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fereydoun Hoveyda (at left, avec pipe<\/em>), appearing in a cameo in \u00c9ric Rohmer\u2019s The Sign of Leo<\/em> (Le signe du lion<\/em>, 1962), filmed June\u2013August 1959<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For a time, Hoveyda also reviewed a couple films a month for the science fiction magazine Fiction<\/em> and contributed as well to Positif<\/em>, Cahiers<\/em>\u2019 main competitor, both under the pen name F. Hoda<\/a>. (He was actually published in Positif<\/em> even before its rival: an essay on \u201cHorror and Science Fiction<\/a>\u201d in November\u2013December 1954.) He turned increasingly to novel writing in the 1960s, while continuing to write regularly for Cahiers<\/em>. At the turn of the decade, he produced two of the most important film essays ever, at a rank just below the 1954\u201357 pieces in Cahiers<\/em> and the weekly Arts<\/em> in which Truffaut denounced the middlebrow \u201ctradition of quality\u201d<\/a> in French film, proclaimed the politique des auteurs<\/em><\/a>\u2014the \u201cpolicy\u201d that the director of a film could be, should be, is<\/em>, no less an author than is the writer of a book\u2014and called on young filmmakers to make the \u201cfilm of tomorrow\u201d<\/a>: \u201ceven more personal than a novel,\u201d an \u201cexalted adventure,\u201d \u201can act of love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With \u201cLa r\u00e9ponse de Nicholas Ray<\/a>\u201d in May 1960, Hoveyda took a failed Hollywood studio film directed by a Cahiers <\/em>favorite, declared it \u201cadmirable\u201d and implicitly \u201cperfect,\u201d and proceeded to illustrate how, despite its shopworn script (\u201cParty Girl<\/em>\u2019s story is idiotic. And so?\u201d), Ray\u2019s mise-<\/a>en<\/a>-sc\u00e8ne<\/a> (more or less, his formal treatment of the narrative substance) had made something out of nothing: \u201cinventions keep raining down\u201d in \u201ca cascade of ideas.\u201d Hoveyda was both true and, to use the anachronistic term, trolling when he declared, \u201cIf one continues to find Party Girl<\/em> idiotic, then I cry, \u2018Long live the idiocy that so dazzles my eyes, fascinates my heart, and opens the kingdom of heaven to me.\u2019\u201d (Hoveyda\u2019s argument is heavenly. Party Girl <\/em>is . . . decent.) Over several years, Truffaut had issued a transformative polemic: Our heroes have control. Seize control<\/em>. Hoveyda now offered a provocative paradigm: See? With just formal control, you can turn even muck into magic<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you\u2019ve properly provoked with specifics, you\u2019re sure to be invited to write a grandly conceptual follow-up. In \u201cSunspots<\/a>\u201d (\u201cLes taches du soleil<\/a>\u201d) of August 1960, Hoveyda first takes on the value of film criticism\u2014cheekily eviscerating the daily and weekly kind that aims to \u201cpredetermine the viewer\u2019s choice,\u201d while defending Cahiers<\/em>\u2019 monthly sort that \u201cengages in a dialogue\u201d about works already seen. Then, invoking his Ray blast, he declares, \u201cWhen I assert that everything is expressed on the screen through the mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, I in no way contest the existence and importance of the subject matter.\u201d He proceeds: \u201cI simply want to call to mind that the property of a great auteur is precisely knowing how to metamorphose through his technique the most idiotic plot.\u201d The sentence\u2019s modest preamble barely disguises that \u201cthe<\/em> property\u201d makes a claim even more radical than his previous one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoveyda\u2019s other major pieces in the 1960s included two more interviews with Rossellini and the first extensive consideration of the new cin\u00e9ma<\/em> verit\u00e9 <\/em>movement<\/a>. Among his reviews, one of the most pointed came under his sometime Cahiers<\/em> pen name, Fred Carson\u2014a drubbing of the big-budget, bien-pensant<\/em> anti\u2013atomic bomb drama On the Beach<\/em> and its baldly stereotypical characters: \u201cOne swiftly begins to hope for their annihilation. Alas! It\u2019s a very long wait.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoveyda, by this point, was more willing than any of his Cahiers<\/em> comrades to fully commit to a taste for pop cinema: not only did he cite Party Girl <\/em>as one of the three best films of 1960<\/a>, he gave sole pride of place to Mario Bava\u2019s goth-horror Black Sunday <\/em>in 1961<\/a> and sat not one but two Jerry Lewis films atop his 1963 ten best list<\/a>. Of the 27 other critics who ranked their Cahiers<\/em> lists, just three had The Nutty Professor<\/em> in their top three; among the total of 41, just one other named The Errand Boy<\/em> at all. Yes, French aesthetes\u2019 fabled love for the man they dubbed the King of Crazy leans in part on an Iranian\u2019s self-assurance. His last signed item for Cahiers<\/em> during the era appeared in August\u2013September 1964, a review of director John Huston\u2019s Freud, the Secret Passion<\/em><\/a>: \u201c[The hero], denied all possibility of poetry, is suddenly revealed as a poet. This last aspect of the film undoubtedly explains the resistance of many spectators and critics. In this era of numbness, one doesn\u2019t like to have one\u2019s inner comfort disturbed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1966, with his brother having recently assumed the premiership, Hoveyda left France for Iran; he rejoined the foreign ministry, serving as an undersecretary. He was appointed UN ambassador in 1971, a position he held until the end of Pahlavi rule. In his 1980 account The Fall of the Shah <\/em>(La chute du Shah<\/em>)\u2014first published in Paris, like a dozen other of his books\u2014Hoveyda excoriated the corruption of the monarch and his kin, stating further that \u201cthe example of the royal family was a source of contamination which infected every level of society.\u201d Few would contest the breadth of that \u201ccontamination,\u201d though the story in Hamid Naficy\u2019s magisterial Social History of Iranian Cinema<\/em><\/a> that Hoveyda himself once summoned agents of SAVAK, the Shah\u2019s notorious security service, to haul away a filmmaker over a political spat is thinly attributed and deviates widely at least once from verifiable fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fereydoun Hoveyda (at left, with pipe) visiting a women\u2019s literacy class in 1974<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Following the Revolution, and the grisly execution of his brother<\/a> after a sham trial<\/a>, Hoveyda settled in the United States. Though he focused mainly on international affairs as an author and policy consultant, six years before his death in 2006, he produced his lone book to focus on film: The Hidden Meaning of Mass Communications: Cinema, Books, and Television in the Age of Computers. <\/em>While he laments how many of his Cahiers<\/em> colleagues who became filmmakers lost their artistic edge over time (or in the case of Godard, \u201cturned to \u2018political\u2019 cinema devoid of any artistic value whatsoever<\/a>\u201d) and how contemporary directors are becoming \u201cmere technicians,\u201d he concludes with a startlingly optimistic vision of the next \u201cfilm of tomorrow,\u201d even as he exemplifies the humility of an intellectual ever mindful of what tools he is working with:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember what the great film director Luis Bu\u00f1uel once told our group of \u201ccultists\u201d and \u201cfilm fans\u201d at Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, Positif<\/em>, and other magazines in the 1950s during a visit to Paris. He said that we will reach the peak of filmmaking <\/em>when we will be able to sit in a room, switch off the lights and project on a wall, directly from our brains and through our eyes, the stories that we conceive in our heads!<\/p>

I am sure that, one day, technology will develop the revolutionary means to accomplish such a feat. Then film would become completely personal and reach the \u201cessence\u201d of auteurism. Then, everyone would be an auteur in the sense of the reviews my friends and I were writing in the \u201950s and \u201960s.<\/p>

Then image would finally supersede word.<\/p>

Or would it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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