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Along the Wind in the Solitude of the Desert
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ALONG THE WIND IN THE SOLITUDE OF THE DESERT
Written by: Manouchehr Tayyab
INTRODUCTION
About the past thirty to forty years that, for production of various documentary films or for scientific and cultural programs, I have been traveling throughout Iran, it so happened that time and again I passed through or around the Central Desert. Interestingly enough, each time I was perplexed by the same questions: What kind of land was this? Why Iranians had little to do with this vast space? Of course for Iranians the Desert has been, and is, a place bereft of any profit. Then why should one care to go there?
In those days if you saw any non-desert man who, as some would say, was pacing the Desert, he must have been either a governmental employee who was forced to go there, or a teacher, or a physician, who, provoked by his own conscience, was in the Desert to teach a child or to take care of a patient. And if, out of curiosity, you were out there for some times, eventually you might have come across some one who wanted to know who you were, where you had come from, and what you were looking for? Of course, this one was not included among those who really believed that you had found some treasures underneath that world of clay and salt and asked for their share.
In any case, I do not know what happened that I was attracted to the Desert. There are thousands of reasons for love or none at all. But whether or not for any reason, it became one of my burning wishes to understand this vast isolated land.
From the outset of my familiarity with the Desert, a land comprising one third of the total surface of the country and, as Sir Percy Sykes calls it, "the dead heart of the Iranian soil," I began to, albeit sporadically, study various aspects of the Desert with many experts. Architecture, development of towns, inhabitants' life style, labor and farming, and the remains of pre-historical monuments such as the ones in "Sialk" and "Hesaar" and other locations included parts of my studies. The existing literature such as writings and travel logs of Naser Khosrow, Ibn Hauqal, Marco Polo, Hamd Allah Mostowfi, Atamalek-e Joveyni, Josepha Barbaro and others came to be the focus of my approach which helped me in my documentary films and my college teachings. But my serious studies regarding the Desert began when I became familiar with the writings of the Swedish scholar Sven Hedin, the Russian Khanikoff and especially the Austrian Dr. Alfonse Gabriel who had traveled all over Iran. Although all these works conveyed detailed information regarding the Desert, it was Dr. Gabriel's beautiful and unforgettable work that, more than anything else, provoked my curiosity, and attracted me to that land. I had the opportunity to study his works at the Vienna National Library for about three years.
To make a long story short, these works had such an impression on me that in one of the cold Vienna nights, when everywhere was covered with snow and one could see only some yellowish glimpses of the lights in the adjacent park, I made my final decision. I decided to follow the steps of these great "scholars of the Desert" and, based on the information I had collected, to go to the exciting and, sometimes, dreadful far distances of this vast land. This, of course, was only the beginning. In April of the same year, 1988, I left my family and came to Iran so that, God willing, sixty years after Gabriel, to go on a journey on other unknown paths in the vast Iranian Central Desert.
In Tehran I encouraged several friends to go with me and they obliged. Our journeys took eight to nine years. Each year I came to Iran and spent
several months in the Desert. What Gabriel had said totally applied to me. He once wrote: "The Desert would not let go of the one who is captivated by its spell."
Especially when you should pass through Rig-e-Jen (pebble of jinni). This Rige-Jen is one of the most interesting places in the world. It is located close to the town of Jandagh with a size of hundred by thirty square kilometers. This is one of the biggest reservoirs of moving sands. Sometimes ditches, fifty to sixty meters deep, are found which are full of large black scorpions and poisonous camel-snakes laying down underneath of damp soft sands crawling out in the cool air of the night. We have shown one of these camel-snakes, called vipers by the natives, in our film. They are called camel-snakes because if they bite a camel, poor animal will be wasted in minutes.
The result of our trips before the production of "Along the Wind in the Solitude of the Desert" was thousands of photographs, slides, and notes that I had prepared for the compilation of a book. The idea for a film, maybe several films, about the Desert was planted in my mind for years and I was looking for an opportunity to materialize it.
The proposal of "Along the Wind in the Solitude of the Desert" and an album full of photographs were in the possession of the Farabi Cinema Foundation for a few years without producing any result in making the film. However, it was at the Channel 1's Production Office of SIMA network, a place that I could never have dreamt of, that the production of the film was conceived.
Two of the then directors of the network, who had aimed at serious documentary making, had seen my project and, having some good faith in my work, had asked for me. At the time I was in Vienna and constant phone calls of a common friend, Mr. Mohammad Mirsoltani, paved the way for the work.
Within three months and during the cold Vienna nights, with the memory of the heat of the Desert in my mind, I prepared the scenario for the film and sent it to Tehran. The work was to begin in April of 1996.
After coming back to Tehran along with the director of photography, Mr. Hassan Yazdani, for a few days we reviewed the project. We surveyed various roads on the map and looked at different slides. To make sure he would not make a thoughtless commitment, I numerated the difficulties of the travel and work. But Mr. Yazdani seemed resolved to leave his family for a while and sometimes he seemed even more prepared than myself. After several meetings Mr. Yazdani was ready to put together a group of people befitting the journey. We were in need of a group of people who, in addition to having the necessary expertise, would be able to travel. They especially should have been capable of traveling in the Desert, a place where the heat of 50 C. and dry weather are overwhelming, a place that if you are lost only God knows what would happen to you, where you cannot escape snakes and crawling animals, where when it rains, in half an hour the whole earth becomes like a gluey dough which makes movement impossible, where the body of the camera gets so hot that your hand sticks to it, this is a place that sand storm might take you, your camera and tripod together. In a word we needed not only experts but also brave men!
After a reviewing trip around the Desert, accompanied by our production manager, and the assistant director, finally, everything was ready and the group took the leap into the dark!
Translated from Farsi to English by Hassan Tehranchian
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