Friday, May 27 at 1pm

Saturday, May 28 at 1pm

Sunday, May 29 at 1pm

Monday, May 30 at 1pm

Guggenheim Museum

New Media Theater

1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128

Free with museum admission (Adults $15, Students/Seniors $10)

Part of Hello Guggenheim: Film and Video Curated by Bidoun Projects

Salam Cinema

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1995, 75 mins

As an indication of Makhmalbaf’s popularity in Iran by the early 1990s, his open casting call for Salam Cinema yielded several thousand applicants, a virtual riot that we see at the beginning of the film—a non-narrative documentary chronicling some of these auditions. Here, Makhmalbaf’s role as provocateur is only incidentally aimed at the audience; it’s mainly directed at the hapless applicants whom he mercilessly bullies, taunts, and plays with. Makhmalbaf’s sadistic and authoritarian mind games—such as pitting friends and relatives against one another (“The one that cries the fastest knows the most about love”)—carry a clear message about the social power of cinema and the problematic nature of authorship. But whether it’s a useful lesson or a callous excuse for exploitation is a question he seems to leave deliberately open. When one brutalized teenage girl throws one of his testy questions back at him (“Would you rather be an artist or a humane person?”) he refuses to answer. “It’s the camera that’s so cruel,” he later claims… without much conviction. Salam Cinema is a raw antagonization of truth and power.