Celluloid Underground review – love letter to a lifelong passion for film and illicit treasure trove
The passion of cinephilia is the subject of this absorbing personal essay movie from Iranian critic and film historian Ehsan Khoshbakht, now co-director of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, who narrates the film in a style that reminded me a little of Mark Cousins and also perhaps Werner Herzog.
Khoshbakht grew up in post-revolutionary Iran where he developed a love of movies and of moving images generally, even the sternly meagre output on national TV. I laughed out loud at Khoshbakht’s entranced description of the TV’s humble colour test card: “As exciting as an MGM musical!” Khoshbakht (daringly) started a film club as a teenager, digitally projecting foreign movies videotaped from TV. He got into serious trouble for showing the Iranian classic The Cow by director Dariush Mehrjui, an anti-government protestor who was murdered last year (and sadly not included in the Oscars in memoriam section).
But even more importantly, Khoshbakht got to know an extraordinary man called Ahmad Jorghanian, a dedicated rescuer of 35mm films and posters whom this film honours as the “Iranian Henri Langlois”; that is, Iran’s unofficial equivalent of the celebrated French archivist and preservationist, hero of the 60s French New Wave. But unlike Jorghanian, Langlois was never arrested and tortured for his westernised film collection.
Jorghanian spent decades hoarding cans of film in his chaotic apartment and in cramped basements and hiding places all over Tehran, buying them from the warehouses and junk shops into which they had been dumped after being confiscated. Khoshbakht was able to project at least some of this illicit treasure trove on a samizdat basis, using borrowed projection facilities, and is ecstatic seeing these movies come to life once more.
In exile in London, Khoshbakht hears about the death of his old friend, and ponders the fate of Jorghanian’s collection: is film, like our own vulnerable human bodies, liable to decay into dusty nothingness? Historians will still protect what material they can, and protect the cinephilic language and culture that allows these films to be appreciated.
• Celluloid Underground is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 28 March
all? To answer this question, it helps to think about what it means to remember in the first place.
For more than 25 years, I have studied how we are able to recall past events, an ability known as “episodic memory”. Endel Tulving, the pioneering cognitive psychologist who coined the term, described episodic memory as the uniquely human capability for “mental time travel, roaming at will over what has happened as readily as over what might happen, independently of the physical laws that govern the universe”.
I first read this description of mental time travel when I was a graduate student, and I was deeply sceptical. Now, with the wisdom of age (something I will come back to later), I understand what he meant. When you recall a rich episodic memory, there is a palpable feeling of being transported back to a point in your past, a specific time and place. For instance, the smell of freshly baked pastries might remind you of having breakfast with your grandmother, or a song by the Stone Roses might conjure up your first kiss. Findings from my lab and others have shown that, at the moment of remembering, the brain appears to revert a bit to the state that it was in at the time, enabling us to relive these past experiences. This is why, if you have misplaced your keys, it can be helpful to put yourself, mentally, into the context where you last saw them. Getting in touch with the sights, sounds and thoughts from an earlier time period can be an effective way of accessing those memories.
Mental time travel isn’t just about reflecting on the past; it also orients us in the present. Consider what happens when you wake up, jet-lagged and confused, in a hotel room. After a second spent recapping the recent past, you can reassure yourself that you’re there on holiday, and then go back to sleep. People with Alzheimer’s disease cannot use episodic memory as a lifeline, and, as such, may feel frighteningly disoriented, floating in space and time.
Crucially, Tulving also proposed that mental time travel allows us to consider what might be coming round the corner. He came to this conclusion, in part, from getting to know Kent Cochrane, who had profound amnesia after a motorcycle accident. Surprisingly, in addition to his severe episodic memory deficits, Cochrane was also unable to contemplate the future. Tulving’s ideas have been substantiated by further research. In the UK, Demis Hassabis (who went on to co-found the AI company DeepMind) and Eleanor Maguire published studies of patients with an impoverished ability to imagine events, and others reported a stunning degree of overlap in the brain networks that are active during remembering and during imagining the future. Further studies have shown that episodic memory can allow us to construct alternative realities, to consider what might have happened if we’d made different choices in the past.
On average, episodic memory gets worse as we get older, and that is due, at least in part, to the strange developmental trajectory of the prefrontal cortex – an area of the brain that helps support episodic memory. In humans, the prefrontal cortex continues to develop throughout childhood and adolescence, only reaching maturity in young adults. Then it begins to decline in function, starting as early as your 30s (depressing, I know). Consequently, ageing is a bit like having a dysfunctional time machine that frequently sends us to the wrong place. For many years, I pondered why it is that the full extent of mental time travel is only available to young adults, with the rest of our lifespan spent making do with a suboptimal episodic memory.
But what is “optimal”, anyway? Perhaps episodic memory is functioning exactly as it should through our lifetime. Consider that for much of human history young adults would have needed to care and provide for their children. At this age, they would require a more focused episodic memory to keep track of the most current information about foraging or hunting sites, to differentiate between allies and rivals, and so on. Elders, in contrast, have traditionally played a different role, guiding and giving advice to younger generations. During this period, forming new episodic memories is less important than passing on the wisdom accrued from existing ones.
So, the next time you find yourself wondering “Why am I so forgetful?” perhaps you can take some comfort from the idea that your brain is probably doing just what it evolved to do.
• Professor Charan Ranganath is the author of Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us (Faber). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Further reading
Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting by Lisa Genova (Atlantic, £10.99)
The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory by Dr Julia Shaw (Cornerstone, £10.99)
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Prof Anil Seth (Faber, £10.99)
Ageing is a bit like having a dysfunctional time machine that sends us to the wrong place
tion model also locks music behind a paywall: it’s a sad, cynical world in which you discover something you love but can’t share.
There is a better way for listeners to directly invest in an artist’s work and gain access to exclusive fan communities without walling off access to that music. The term “blockchain” has dropped out of the public consciousness since the calming of the NFT frenzy of the early 2020s. But the technology – essentially data hosting by verified authors – offers a simple solution for fans wanting to demonstrate their investment in a musician’s work. I have been working on a platform called Supercollector, where the model is $10 a track. While that may sound expensive, it essentially sells fans a one-off verification that could allow them to participate in any wider ecosystem I might create, like entry to a web community along the lines of Blake’s “chat section”. It also affirms the desires of hardcore fans to be seen as “first” to support an artist, with publicly verified dated collections and an open record of the fact that they spent money on the music. While the artist doesn’t earn as regularly as they would with a monthly subscription, it instils a behaviour of valuing music, rather than renting access to a churn of content produced to obligation. It is one of many possible solutions – along with buying tickets and merch or using Bandcamp Fridays, when the audio distribution platform waives its fees and you buy direct from artists – though the specific platforms and products are secondary to the value of music itself. Regardless of my misgivings about Blake’s idea, he has at least opened up the conversation. Rather than take the fight to cloistered subscription cells, it’s one that requires solidarity between musicians – and fans.
• Tom Vek is co-founder of Supercollector, a platform enabling artists to sell decentralised blockchain verified release. Vek’s new single, Say/ Nothing Bad, is released on 28 March. Details at tomvek.com