Chess of the Wind / Muna moto
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Synopsis
Chess of the Wind
Lost for decades after screening at the 1976 Tehran International Film Festival, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country’s prerevolutionary New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, Chess of the Wind unfolds inside an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the potential heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently deceased matriarch’s estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely restrained mood piece that erupts into a subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.
Muna moto
Director Dikongué-Pipa forged a new African cinematic language with Muna moto, a delicate love story with profound emotional resonance. In a close-knit village in Cameroon, the rigid customs governing courtship and marriage mean that a deeply in love betrothed couple (David Endéné and Arlette Din Belle) can be torn apart by the lack of a dowry and by another man’s claiming of the young woman as his own wife—a rupture that sets the stage for a clash between a patriarchal society and a modern generation’s determination to chart its own course. Luminous black-and-white cinematography and stylistic flourishes yield images of haunting power in this potent depiction, told via flashback, of the challenges of postcolonialism and the devastating consequences of a community’s refusal to deviate from tradition.
Picture 9/10
For the second group of films in their fourth World Cinema Project box set, The Criterion Collection presents Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind and Dikongué-Pipa’s Muna Moto. Both are sourced from 4K restorations and presented with 1080p/24hz high-definition encodes on the same dual-layer Blu-ray disc, Chess of the Wind in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and Muna Moto in 1.37:1. Each film also appears in standard-definition on individual dual-layer DVDs, Chess of the Wind’s presentation enhanced for widescreen televisions.
Both restorations end up coming out looking extraordinary (in most aspects) due to the fact the restoration teams behind the projects (the Film Foundation partnered with Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée for Chess and then with L’Immagine Ritrovata for Muna Moto) had access to the 35mm original negatives for both films, with a 35mm duplicate negative filling in where needed for Muna Moto. Of the two restorations I found Muna Moto the most striking, the clarity and level of detail present simply astonishing at times. Contrast is wide for the black-and-white image leading to rich blacks, sharp whites (without blooming) and extensive range in the grayscale. Shadows look absolutely remarkable.
The restoration work has also be incredibly extensive, damage being almost non-existent, a few scratches and marks about all that remains. The image is consistently sharp and highly detailed, though some long shots can maybe look a little blurry, which appears to be inherent to the photography. There can be slight shifts in the image from shot to shot, maybe because the alternate source is being used, but it’s not all that noticeable and the image as a whole is incredibly stable.
It’s a sharp presentation, one of the stronger looking ones I’ve come across in the World Cinema series so far, but Chess of the Wind’s may be the more impressive of the two if only due to its history. The film sounds to have only screened a handful of times in Tehran back in 1976 before being met with backlash, possibly pushed by the more extremist factions in Iran who may have also worked to sabotage the screenings (according to Aslani the film was screened with the reels out of order a few times despite him correcting it each time). After the 1979 revolution the film was said to have “gone missing” (whoops!) by the new government and the film was considered lost, terrible looking VHS copies of a heavily edited version eventually surfacing. Then, in 2014, film cans were discovered in what sounds to have been a flea market or antique shop by Aslani's son, and it turned out they were, of all things, the original negatives for the film! The film was then picked up to be restored (after the elements were shipped to a safe location), with the director and his daughter overseeing things, including the colour grading.
I can only imagine the journey the negatives have been on for nearly 40 years, and during that time it’s all but certain they were not stored properly. Yet somehow the materials have held up well through the decades and the end results have turned out extraordinary. The image is incredibly clean, barely a knick or flaw appearing anywhere. The picture even manages to come out looking sharp, fine details and textures popping off of the screen. It’s so shocking, all things considered, how wonderful this looks and it is simply dumb luck that the worst thing that appears to have happened to the original elements is that the colours had faded (based on comparisons found within a supplement on the disc).
With that said it leads me to the one area I’m unsure on and that is the film’s colour grading. It has the heavy yellow/green tint that you’d expect from restoration houses like Ritrovata, and that makes it a bit hard to get past. Still, when considering the film’s colour palette and one sequence near the end, it’s very much possible the grading has turned out to be correct. The film is made up heavily of beiges, browns, oranges, yellows, and such, with blues being a very rare commodity (some violets and purples that pop up on the other hand end up being quite striking). There is then a sequence near the end that is tinted orange, apparently as a callback to silent films, adding a very sinister vibe to the sequence. The orange tint ends up complimenting the look for the rest of the film, making the transition feel rather natural. Further adding to things is how comparisons to the VHS clips featured in a supplement on the disc show a similar grading, though I can't attest as to how reliable that actually would. Even if the colours here are closer to what is intended it can still be hard to get past how green it can look at times, and the blacks do look to have been flattened a bit from it leading to limitations in the shadows here and there. In the notes and elsewhere it’s mentioned that the colours were corrected for this release, but they may be specifically referring to the orange tint being added to that one sequence, the sequence sounding to have been presented without the tint on the VHS that was available.
As to the encodes they’re both fine but they have room for improvement. Grain is present and rendered well enough in both films even if I found it could look a little noisier in some of the darker scenes in Chess of the Wind, particularly the orange-tinted scene near the end. Muna Moto’s encode comes out looking cleaner in comparison and on my television screen I couldn’t find much to fault it with.
Minor concerns aside both presentations come out looking remarkable after what has clearly been a lot of work going into them.
(As with the previous group of films in the set I sampled the DVDs. They both offer up solid standard-def versions of each film, Muna Moto’s black and white photography still managing to look strong. The limitations again appear to simply come down to the format: weak compression, limited gray scale and colours, and so on.)
Chess of the Wind (1976): 8/10 Muna moto (1975): 9/10
Audio 6/10
Each film comes with a lossless PCM 1.0 monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray and with a Dolby Digital one on the DVDs. Neither can be called “dynamic,” range limited with voices sounding a little flat. But damage isn’t an issue and it doesn’t sound as though any excessive filtering has been applied.
Extras 5/10
As with most titles in the World Cinema Project series supplements are few. Each film receives a new introduction featuring Martin Scorsese, who talks about each film for a few minutes before getting into detail about the restorations. Muna Moto then comes with an 18-minute piece featuring interviews with director Dikongué-Pipa and film historian Férid Boughedir. Boughedir talks about the film’s significance and importance with some admiration towards its narrative structure while Dikongué-Pipa talks about the inspirations behind the film and the filmmakers that most influenced him, Buñuel being a significant one. He ends up also touching on music within the film and even shares photos from the set.
Chess of the Wind receives a much meatier feature, a new 53-minute documentary entitled The Majnoun and the Wind made by Aslani’s daughter Gita Aslani Shahrestani and featuring her father and handful of members from the cast and crew (primarily through Zoom calls) that includes the two leads, Fakhri Khorvash and Shohreh Aghdashlou. It’s an incredibly comprehensive feature that covers the film’s production thoroughly during its first half before getting into the issues it faced once it was sort of released, Aslani explaining how (and why) he thinks the film was intentionally sabotaged during a few of its screenings. The last portion proves the most interesting where the documentary gets into the film’s rediscovery and its lengthy restoration, which was impacted by the COVID lockdowns. They touch on the colours and such here as well, providing some before-and-after comparisons between the negative and the finished product, footage from the VHS even showing up.
I was a little saddened that Chess of the Wind didn’t receive its own release as I think a stacked edition could have easily been made. At the very least, the documentary around it is one of the more comprehensive supplements I’ve come across in the series so far.
Closing
Though I may catch myself questioning the colour grading for Chess of the Wind there’s no denying that the restorations for both films are outstanding.
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