INTRODUCTION
Ana lily Amirpour is an eclectic marvel. Her
films are a beautifully amalgamated blend of genres, styles, and aesthetics. As
a director, Amirpour is consistently unconventional. Her filmography views like
a tasting menu of the filmmaking process: traditional television, music videos,
an
iphone excavation turned soon-to-be published scrap book,
and of course movies. Amirpour embodies what
one interviewer called “gnostic”: esoteric knowledge
(typically) of the mystical variety. Amirpour embraces “the other” and pushes
against the structures and systems in which we live, making her (criminally
few) films, ripe for sociological analysis. Thus, Ana Lilly Amirpour is the next
selection in my director deep dives on the blog. As
with my previous
subjects,
I will be covering all of Amirpour’s three feature-length pictures, along with any
future projects in perpetuity, with the possibility of an essay on her important short form work.[1]
BRIEF BACKGROUND
A
first generation Iranian American, Ana lily Amirpour’s family fled the Iranian revolution;
first settling in England, where she was born in 1976, and then to Florida
before finally settling in Bakersfield, California. After studying biology for
a hot second, Amirpour got her bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State
University in painting and sculpting; before moving on to the master’s program
in screenwriting from UCLA.
Amirpour’s first love of US pop culture came from the culture shock she experienced when moving to the US. Like many immigrants, she learned about the American culture through the media content that she consumed. Interested and (possibly) obsessed, Amirpour devoured the American media diet of the 1980’s, reveling in the work of Madonna and Michael Jackson. The consumption of content soon transitioned into production as she took her dad’s camera and recreated commercials and made new ones. Her first film, when she was 12 was a 7 min short about a sleepover that resulted in a bloody massacre. Amirpour admits that this film has no plot, it was just a sequence of the killer going room to room murdering the occupants with a knife. Regardless of quality, Amirpour was hooked stating: “Making films is just a way to subsidize my being a madman…I don’t think I could do anything else. Cinema is such a powerful tool- its’s limitless you surrender to it.” This release has led to the writing, producing, and directing of three wonderful, absurdist and bizarrely poignant films of the last ten years.
Amirpour’s
debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night in 2014, was an indie
darling and a trumpet heralding the arrival of an avant-garde auteur. The
radical spirit of this freshman film lives on in our collective consciousness. Fueled by her love of Sergio Leone films, this
Ennio Morricone infused Nosferatu homage was widely lauded as the “vampire
Spaghetti western”; a blend of genres that has become the foundation for one of the most
interesting indies of 2023.
Amirpour followed this up in 2016 with
The Bad Batch, a dystopian neon infused tale of cannibals, drifters, and
cults. Continuing her juxtaposing of genres, Amirpour describes the film as Mad
Max meets Pretty in Pink. The title of Amirpour’s criminally
underrated sophomore film has been appropriated by Disney and Star Wars,
further obscuring the film into irrelevancy. However, being nominated for the Golden
Lion and winning the special jury Prize at the Venice Film festival, undermines
the negative critical reception and the perceived lack of the film’s cultural
value at large. Indeed, the film would indirectly inspire other female centered,
post- apocalyptic stories to be told, such as 2017’s Revenge to much
greater success.
Amirpour’s
latest film,[2]
released in the US in 2022, is Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, takes the typical
“escaped inmate from a secret government facility” storyline and inverts the
characters you are designed to trust (or not) based upon tropes of the genre. Premiering
at Venice in 2021, this was Amirpour’s last film shot before the COVID lockdown,
which dragged postproduction and effected the marketing of the film. Critically,
the film has yet to reach the heights of Amirpour’s debut, but the stylish neon
psycho punk aesthetic, has fortunately resonated with enough people for it to
get a wider distribution through Saban Films, with some people calling it: existentialist
art and a
killer supernatural, picaresque journey film.
In
terms of preparation, when she starts a new project, Amirpour sequesters herself
in a Las Vegas hotel (her favorite being Encore) until she has a script. Because
Amirpour is also more focused on the visual language of the film, given the
medium, rather than the dialogue, most of her films focus on framing, shot
composition and color. Amirpour believes that film is the socially magical
force that allows people to experience greater human connection. In
that same interview mentioned above, Amirpour discusses the delicious
dissonance between a performer and the audience; seeing something “funny and
mundane” about the fact that people can have their minds collectively blown
over witnessing the execution of a magic trick, while the magician, who knows
the secrets, is going to have a cheeseburger after the show. This is banality
of art to its creator.
Unfortunately,
Amirpour’s films have not
been friendly with the overall box office. A Girl Walks Home Alone at
Night made $628,000 on a $57,000 budget. The follow-up, The Bad Batch, only
made $201,890 on a budget of 6 million; and while the budget for Mona Lisa and
The Blood Moon is not currently known, nor the domestic box office, it only
made 149,304 internationally (mainly South Korea) based on the popularity of
the film’s star, Jun Jong-seo. There is
an amount of scrappy struggle to every one of Amirpour’s films as the
characters reflect the tribulations of their author. This makes Amirpour films
a unique and different experience; like “conversing” with a magic eight ball,
you are unsure what you are going to get next.
PRIMING THE THEMES
Amirpour’s influences are
as varied as her films. In addition to the collaboration between Sergio Leone
and Ennio Morricone for her first film, her later two films have influences of David
Lynch, Coppola, and Zemeckis. Additionally, since all her films have included a
main female protagonist, most of her films are projected to be Feminist. While
that influence is easy to make considering the trajectory of each of her main
characters through the films, Amirpour moves away from strict labels as she
does not want her films to only be perceived through a singular lens. She
regularly tells stories about “outcasts that do not fit into the conventions of
a “system” saying that “…being
an Outsider means that you’re an individual, and fully aware of it.”. Therefore, much of the upcoming analysis will
be mining the work of feminist and typical post modern “systems” scholars to make
Amirpour’s work shine greater with an unparalleled vibrancy.
Additionally, all her films are also clearly motivated through a specific migratory narrative. The films’ resonance being captured and internalized by a wider audience, is more a product of the consistency of US xenophobic immigration policies that create solidarity around the collective trauma of the immigrant experience. Much of this will be explored in the forthcoming essays, as well as looking at oppressive governments, the creation of found families, and the desire of freedom. To that end, I’ll most likely be looking at immigrant experiences, and touch on the hypocrisy of how the United States, notable a country of (genocidal) immigrants ourselves, historically hate immigrants.
CONCLUSION
Sadly, Amirpour has not made
a lot of films. While many of those reasons will be explored through this
retrospective, we should be grateful and embrace what we got: A trilogy of
unconnected, weird, daring, and vibrant films that exist on the fringes, push
the boundaries of convention through a demand to witness it’s spectacle, and engage
with challenging subject matter. Amirpour’s films show us the value of filmmaking
as an artform. The scope of her vision and her willingness to play in the moral
gray, while keeping her films bright with a lively musicality shows the versatility
of film as a medium. Without directors like Ana lily Amirpour, all our films
would be bland, tasteless cookie cutter products of over-tilled corporately controlled
IP, that is too busy promoting the tie-in to the film, that they forgot to give
the movie a soul in the first place.
