The Runner: Cycles and Circles of Desire

The majority of Naderi’s early films contain autobiographical touches. His first act of confession, however, was in the script he cowrote for the poignant and touching Experience (1973), directed by Abbas Kiarostami, which provides a glimpse into Naderi’s adolescent years.

Orphaned at the age of six, Naderi was raised by his aunt in Abadan. This city, and the South more broadly, define his Iranian films, in particular The Runner. Like Marcel Pagnol in France and Francesco Rosi in Italy, Naderi is a southern filmmaker. The South, with its sun-drenched, colorful landscapes, was an inspiration but also a curse. The oil city of Abadan was a place of contradictions where local people had very little, or no, share of the wealth produced in 
the region. Thanks to its refineries, and the continuous presence of Western companies from 1909 on, Abadan was a multicultural city. It was also a cinephile’s heaven, where films were often released at the same time as in the major European capitals. However, given the system of segregation between Western workers and locals, not every cinema was accessible to the young Naderi. His great early classic Harmonica (1973) features another Amiro. The shiny Japanese harmonica he is in love with is a surrogate for Naderi’s childhood infatuation with a Western artifact: cinema. This passion brings Amiro pain, humiliation, and even enslavement, but he eventually learns to break free.

Naderi’s films often have repetitive, circular structures, and deal with characters trying to break away from one cycle into another. The cycle that Amiro finds himself in is that of waste.

As an orphan, Amiro lives on the garbage he collects from a waste dump. He also sells iced water, shines shoes, and collects empty bottles that are thrown into the sea from passing ships. Symbols of wealth are everywhere, but the goods have already been consumed by others. In a region where oil refineries have brought prosperity, Amiro’s portion is a rusty oil drum in which he washes his shirt. He lives in an abandoned ship, beached on the shore.

Starting with his film The Search, which features a harrowing scene of the waste site outside Tehran where bodies of murdered anti-shah protesters had allegedly been dumped, images of refuse have been crucial to Naderi. In The Runner, garbage functions as both a reality and an allegory of a dismal world. To allude literally to the inequality and poverty that the revolution had falsely promised to eradicate was a censorship-sensitive subject, preemptively forcing Naderi to make a subtle compromise: the film is set in the near past, probably before the revolution. Certain situations and signs, the drunken sailor and the 1970s magazines on the newsstand, could have existed only then. Even the names of the cinemas appearing 
on the billboards—Taj, Metropol, and Rex—are all prerevolutionary.

Because of that timelessness, there’s no reference to the war in the region between Iran and Iraq, one of the longest and deadliest of the twentieth century, lasting from 1980 to 1988 and costing more than a million lives. The closest The Runner comes to referencing this devastating conflict is the brief, unforgettable shot in which Amiro gazes at a one-legged young man. The omission, however, adds to the intensity of the film as it internalizes the experience of war. It’s charged with the sense of a struggle for survival even though the threat is not explicit.

As Abadan was being heavily bombed, The Runner was shot in ten different locations across the South. Given the challenging circumstances, the consistency that cinematographer Firouz Malekzadeh maintains is staggering. His work is incredibly rich in its use of pans and tracking shots, and in the restlessness that it shares with Amiro. The Runner is also a film that knows how to frame unattainable or illusory desires. Fascinatingly, the Hitchcockian technique of zooming in while pulling back the camera, as seen in Vertigo, finds new meaning in the breathtaking running sequence in which the camera fixes on a piece of slowly melting ice against the backdrop of the raging oil-field fires, to splendid effect. The flames also serve as a metaphor for the conflagration of war.

It is a little-known fact that Naderi and Malekzadeh had attempted to make The Runner before the revolution. What is even less well-known is that the result of their endeavor, tentatively titled The Winner—a work print with no sound—has recently been discovered, shedding new light on The Runner.

In the twenty-minute The Winner, what are now recognizable as visual sketches for The Runner take shape, though their narrative function will be totally transformed in the later film. The sketches include kids running through the debris of oil fields, the appearance of a white ship, bottle-collecting, a cyclist being chased through an oil-pipe depot, and a race for a trophy that, in this early version, is a watermelon rather than ice. However, The Winner doesn’t have a central character, instead focusing evenhandedly on a gang of kids. It is a film clearly for children, whereas The Runner is a film that features children but was made for adult audiences. The Winner lacks many elements that made The Runner a triumph: for one, Madjid Niroumand, giving one of the finest child performances in the history of cinema. But mainly, the glorious editing of Bahram Beyzaie.

Naderi had a most idiosyncratic working method when it came to editing his films. He was in the habit of entrusting this crucial stage to a fellow filmmaker (instead of an editor)—and, more important, a filmmaker whose style contrasted with his own. Harmonica was edited by the New Wave director Sohrab Shahid Saless, whose films are exercises in stillness, while Waiting was cut by the documentarian Shirdel, known for his neorealist approach. Beyzaie, recognized in the 1970s for his dazzling formalism and his interest in myths, introduced symbolic and rhythmic cutting to The Runner. He not only creates scenes of impeccable suspense but also adds new layers through a sustained interplay between stasis and motion, silence and exclamation. With the help of Beyzaie, the film’s break from the cycle of waste to the cycle of motion is magnificently realized.

Naderi’s films are filled with images of trains, ships, and airplanes. Like existential tramps, his characters are often seen jumping onto passing vehicles, getting bruised and battered. The hero of Goodbye Friend dies on a railroad track. In an astonishing montage of movement toward the end of The Runner, we see Amiro clambering onto a passing train and climbing a heap of train-yard gravel in one of the games he plays. His desire for movement is so strong that he would rather use up the few coins he earns by putting them on the rails and watching a train flatten them.

On the other hand, the fear of immobility is reflected in the shots of Amiro staring at the disabled man or at an old couple crossing a busy road with great difficulty. Naderi’s antipathy to stillness was so great that he always added three dots to the end of the titles of his films. The original title of The Runner is Davandeh . . ., that of The Search is Jostoju . . ., and so on, as if even the titles refuse to be contained.

The Runner’s radical simplicity, bordering on abstraction, is Naderi’s trademark; his films often home in on a particular idea through formal repetition. Obsessive impulses might consume a character, but they also shape the film. When Amiro buys a dead light bulb (he doesn’t have electricity anyway), it is not a Beckettian situation—the object is the embodiment of a secondary desire: first motion, then light. Combining light and movement, The Runner is cinema.

No wonder the film is crammed with acknowledgments of the masters whom Naderi reveres. The light bulb can be taken as an equivalent of the wooden propeller that David Hemmings buys in Blow-Up, whose director, Michelangelo Antonioni, Naderi hugely admires. The bulb and the propeller have been emptied of meaning in their disconnection from adjacent parts; they are without function. Similarly, when Amiro throws a piece of ice that he has fiercely fought for into the air, it mirrors the moment when Hemmings disinterestedly casts aside the fragment of an electric guitar that he has grabbed during a concert.

There are more explicit references, too, for example, when Naderi pays tribute to his cinema idols by arranging film magazines with covers spotlighting John Ford, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin, and Nicholas Ray on a newsstand. Right below that rack is one filled with aviation magazines. The faces of the old masters don’t interest Amiro. It is the colorful images of the planes that do. To discover cinema, Amiro first needs a flight of imagination, and to achieve that, he needs to learn the alphabet. As he learns to read, Amiro’s raging howls become harmonized letters that soon form a language. Now his gaze shifts from the wide-open spaces directly into the camera. His yearning to learn is shattering.

Suddenly, a passenger airplane appears on the illusory horizon. Amiro screams out the thirty-two letters of the Persian alphabet in ten seconds. He has graduated; he is liberated from his environment, from skid row, war, poverty. Even if still on the ground, Amir/Amiro is already on that plane taking off for New York, where the second phase of his indefatigable career began. From that point on, Naderi has run all the way.