In 'No Bears', a banned filmmaker takes bold aim at Iranian society

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, in for Terry Gross. Russell Banks, the author whose bestselling books include "Affliction," "Continental Drift" and "The Sweet Hereafter," died of cancer Sunday. He was 82 years old. Banks was born in 1940 and grew up in Barnstead, N.H. In the early 1960s, he was a pipefitter working for his father, who, like his father before him, was a plumber. But Banks' father also was an alcoholic and abusive, memories the son dealt with by becoming a writer and examining them in such novels as "Affliction." A movie version of that novel won an Oscar for actor James Coburn. And the film version of Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter" won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His novels "Continental Drift" and "Cloudsplitter" about the abolitionist John Brown were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Russell Banks taught writing at Princeton University.

Terry Gross interviewed him in 1989 when he had just published "Affliction." That novel asks if it's possible to break the chain of male violence. It's narrated by a character named Rolfe Whitehouse, who tells the story of how his brother Wade turned into a man even more violent than their father.

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TERRY GROSS: I'd like you to do a reading from "Affliction," and this is a scene in which the father who beats his wife and his children is confronting his son. And the son has to figure out what to do. And this is the older son in the book, Wade.

RUSSELL BANKS: Yeah, Wade. Wade is the protagonist, really, of the novel. And we're dealing with him as an adult, for the most part, for two weeks in his life, really. But this scene - and it takes place when he's about 16 years old. And it's really his - part of his essential childhood. His father has - he's tried to confront his father in the middle of a quarrel between his father and mother. And the father says (reading) you're telling me - you are trying to tell me what I'm supposed to be afraid of? You think I'm afraid of you? He showed his large teeth and made a quick move toward Wade. And when Wade jumped, he stopped and folded his arms over his chest and laughed. Jesus H. Christ, he said, what a candy ass.

Without thinking it, Wade reached behind him into the dish rack, and his hand wrapped itself, as if of its own volition, around the handle of the skillet - heavy, black, cast iron. And he lifted it free of the rack and swung it around in front of him. The sound of his heart pounded in his ears like a hammer against steel. And he heard his voice, high and thin in the distance, say to his father, if you touch her or me or any of us again, I'll kill you. His father quietly said, Jesus. He sounded like a man who had just broken a shoelace. I mean it. I'll kill you. He lifted the skillet in his right hand and held it out and just off his shoulder, like a Ping-Pong paddle. And he suddenly felt ridiculous.

Without hesitation, Pop walked quickly around the table, came up to his son and punched him straight in the face, sending the boy careening back against the counter and the skillet to the floor. Grabbing him by his shirt front, Pop hauled the boy back in front of him and punched him a second time and a third. A fourth blow caught him square in the forehead and propelled him along the counter to the corner of the room where he stood with his hands covering his face. Come on, his father said, and he advanced on him again. Come on, fight back like a man. Come on, little boy. Let's see what you're made of.

Wade yanked his hands away and thrust his face open-eyed at his father and cried, I'm not made of what you're made of. And Pop hit him again, slamming Wade's head back against the wall. Wade covered his face with his hands once more, and he began to cry. Pop turned away in disgust. You sure ain't, he said. And he walked over to the door, where he turned back to Wade and said, next time you start telling your father what to do and what not to do, make damn sure you can back it up, buddy boy. Then he went out, slamming the door behind him. Wade let himself slide slowly down to the floor, where he sat with his arm - with his legs straight out, his head slumped on one shoulder, his arms flopped across his lap - a marionette with its strings cut.

GROSS: Wow. That's a terrific scene. You know, the two brothers in this book, one of them, Wade, who is in the scene that you just read, decided to fight back at some point. Whereas his other brother, his younger brother, Ralph (ph), learns to hang his head in shame and back away, something he learned from his mother.

BANKS: Right.

GROSS: When you were growing up in a family with an abusive father, did that seem like the two alternatives, to hang your head in shame and back away or to learn how to fight back?

BANKS: Yeah. I think that - yeah, for a boy, that's certainly the two alternatives because you can imagine and you internalize early - and then later put into action - that fantasy of revenge, of fighting back. And Wade's taken that route despite its destructiveness in his life. And then - or you can run. You can be the denier in a sense. You can cut yourself off from others and remove yourself from family or community and all forms of intimacy, more like Ralph, the narrator of the book.

GROSS: Which did you do?

BANKS: Well, in a sense, I did both, I think, at different stages of my life. When I was very young - I mean, when I was in my late teens, early 20s and so on - I was one of those turbulent, violent young men, always on the edge of exploding and, oftentimes, actually exploding - a barroom brawl - or kind of person that society has kind of mixed feelings about. On the one hand, he's often attractive and the hero of a lot of films and television specials and so forth. On the other hand, he's a repugnant and chaotic individual. And then later, I think I went through a period of my life where I was distanced and detached and protected myself and protected others through that.

GROSS: Is the scene that you just read a scene from personal experience?

BANKS: Well, to some degree. In terms of the boy wanting to defend his mother and understanding his role in the family as that, that was certainly something that I experienced emotionally and situationally, not necessarily at the same age or exactly the same circumstances - and then failing to be a man, as it were, in those terms that the father was defining, to rise to that occasion, failing to become that person. So that's - yeah, that's, I mean - in a way, that's the essence of that scene, is it's a challenge that's thrown down. Be a man. And to be a man, he's got to fight him and not be a victim, not just be beaten by him.

GROSS: Ralph, the brother who withdraws...

BANKS: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Says at one point, I became a careful adult. It may have been a high price to pay, never having been carefree, but at least I avoided being afflicted by the man's violence. But he kind of comes to realize that there's other kinds of affliction from this violence, too...

BANKS: That's right.

GROSS: ...Which is the knowledge that you're withdrawing from life to protect yourself.

BANKS: That's right.

GROSS: And I was wondering at what point you started to realize that and also to fear this kind of deeper affliction, that it's something that you would carry, that in a way, someone who came from an abusive family might be something of a time bomb themselves.

BANKS: Well, yeah, Ralph is sort of whistling in the dark there in the passage you quoted. And part of his telling of the story is a way of his realizing that he is whistling in the dark so that the last lines of the book, in a way, are his gradual admission that he's still locked in in some way. And that's certainly the first step toward perhaps release from the situation.

My own case - it's hard to say. This is a process and a lifelong one. I've been writing about these kind of men and boys for most of my career in one way or the other, most of the time - and I think less so now - indirectly and obliquely. But as my own emotional life has become a little bit less tangled and turbulent and conflicted, I've been able, as a writer, to approach the characters and the world that they live in more directly. I mean, as a novelist, I have access to certain tools and strategies, I guess, for lack of a better word, that perhaps a person normally doesn't have just because, for instance, memory is a crucial novelist tool that has to be cultivated and preserved. And so I'm forced again and again through that to go back to my own childhood.

BIANCULLI: Russell Banks speaking to Terry Gross in 1989. After a break, we'll hear another of their conversations from 1995. This is FRESH AIR.

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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we're remembering author Russell Banks, who died last Sunday at age 82. He's the author of such acclaimed novels as "Continental Drift," "Affliction" and "The Sweet Hereafter," all of which were adapted into Hollywood movies. Terry Gross spoke to Russell Banks again in 1995, when he had just written another book called "Rule Of The Bone." The narrator of that book is a 14-year-old named Chappie, from upstate New York, who wears a nose ring and a mohawk. He steals from his parents to finance his dope habit, gets kicked out of the house, becomes homeless and sets off on a low-life adventure. Banks began that conversation with Terry with a reading from "Rule Of The Bone."

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BANKS: (Reading) Anyhow, my life got interesting, you might say, the summer I turned 14 and was heavy into weed, but I didn't have any money to buy it with, so I started looking around the house all the time for things I could sell, but there wasn't much. My mother, who was still like my best friend then and my stepfather, Ken, had this decent house that my mother had got in the divorce from my real father about 10 years ago. And about that, she just says she got a mortgage, not a house. And about him, she doesn't say much at all, although my grandmother does. My mom and Ken both had these cheesy jobs and didn't own anything you could rob, at least not without them noticing right away it was gone. Ken worked as a maintenance man out at the air base, which is like being a janitor, only he said he was a building services technician. And my mom was a bookkeeper at the clinic, which is also a nothing job, looking at a computer screen all day and punching numbers into it.

It actually started with me roaming around the house after school looking for something that wasn't boring, porn books or videos maybe or condoms - anything. Plus - who knows? - they might have their own little stash of weed. My mom and especially Ken were seriously into alcohol then, but maybe they weren't as uptight as they seem, I'm thinking. Anything is possible. The house was small - four rooms and a bathroom - a mobile home on cinder blocks, like a regular house, only without a basement or garage and no attic. And I lived there with my mom and my real dad from the time I was 3 until he left, which happened when I was 5, and after that, with my mom and Ken, who legally adopted me and became my stepfather up until now. So I knew the place like I knew the inside of my mouth.

GROSS: Russell Banks, thanks for reading that. You have some things in common with the character in your book. Your father was abusive. You were a rebellious teenager. But you were rebellious, I don't know, 30 some odd years ago. Were there mysteries that this character had for you that were partly maybe because of the times, because he's rebelling in the 1990s, and there are some things from what he might get tattooed to what he might be listening to, to how he's going to act out his rebellious feelings, you know, that would be different from yours?

BANKS: Oh, yeah, sure. The main thing, I think probably the most obvious thing, is drugs. When I was 16, I stole a car and ran across the country and disappeared for three months and, you know, did some of the destructive and angry things that the Bone does and that a lot of kids do. But there wasn't the danger. I couldn't step into the world of drugs that easily and that quickly. I would have had to have really worked hard to do that. And this was, you know, in the late '50s.

GROSS: Your father, who was abusive, left your family when you were 12. So while he was part of the family, he was always bigger than you, probably a lot bigger than you. You were a kid. Did you ever confront him as a man?

BANKS: Oh, yeah. We made our peace, actually. I went back and dealt with my father very closely. I even worked alongside him. He was a plumber, and I became a plumber and worked with him and even lived in his house for a period, too, when I was in my 20s and became never really affectionate but close, if that's possible. And it certainly was how I experienced it. We were close. I was very involved with him right up to the end of his life. He died in 1979 at 63, when I was in my 30s. And so, yeah, we dealt. I never, I think, had that kind of vengeful clarification with him. But I didn't really need it or want it by the time I was in my 20s.

GROSS: There's something that I think I might have asked you about once before, but it still really interests me. You once said that your father felt that, you know, moving up in life was a betrayal, that it was somehow a rebuke of the life that he had led.

BANKS: Yeah.

GROSS: And unless you were just doing some wheeler-dealer thing and finagling something...

BANKS: Yes.

GROSS: ...In which case that was fine. What do you think is the difference between the impulse to sacrifice for the children so the children can have more than you do and the impulse to feel, well, why should they have more than me - what's good enough for me is going to be good enough for them?

BANKS: Well, I think it's a difference in believing in the American dream and no longer believing in the American dream, that if one generation sacrifices itself, the next - for the next generation, then that next generation will profit from it and move up in society and be empowered in such a way as to make it even better for the third generation. It's that three-generations syndrome. And many Americans have not - after having been here for a long time - African Americans and white Americans, too, who have gone through eight, 10, 15 generations in America don't find that that model, that dream, doesn't describe their experience. And I think they grow bitter and mistrustful, profoundly mistrustful of anybody who separates themself from them by moving up, you know, and so forth. They've - it isn't that they just accept their fate. It's that they feel there is no realistic alternative. And if you're advancing yourself in society, you're rejecting them. It's a way of disconnecting yourself from them.

GROSS: So tell me more about why you think your father felt that, you know, if one of his kids moved up, it was somehow a betrayal?

BANKS: Well, it probably - since he didn't feel he was sacrificing in his youth - my father's a very bright man, a very gifted man in many ways, who - he's a child of the Depression and went to work in this - when he was 16 and dropped out of school and worked with his hands his entire life. And he was bitter about that, I think, and didn't feel as though that was - he was sacrificing anything. So he was, in some ways, not connected to his own children, the next generation, to their future. And so by having that sense of disconnectedness, if I didn't live his life exactly, more or less the same, I challenged and humiliated him for that. It wasn't as though, you know, by my living a different kind of life, I validated and justified a sacrifice on his part.

GROSS: Do you think that held you back for a long time?

BANKS: I think it injured my sense of self-esteem and made me feel, for a long time, essentially inadequate and incapable of achieving. I wasn't raised to believe that, really, that anything was possible for me and that my parents were sacrificing in order to advance me in the world. So, yeah, I think that there was a bit of a disability there. But on the other hand, it made me, in a way, more the master of my own fate, too. I didn't owe anything to anybody backwards in time, you know? Whatever I got, one way or the other, I got it myself.

GROSS: Was there a teacher who helped kind of counteract that sense of advancement as betrayal, who...

BANKS: Yeah. Early on, in my early 20s, I had the great, good fortune to run into the novelist Nelson Algren when he was in his late 40s and I was in my early 20s. And it was purely, you know, fortuitous. And he read some of the stories, and I was - that I was then writing. And I was working as a pipefitter actually in Concord, N.H., at that time and had gone up to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference 'cause I admired his work and I saw his name on an advertisement and had taken a week off work and drove up to Vermont to be a participant in this conference.

And he - this was another case of a guy who was glad I had a driver's license who'd befriend me because Algren, like a lot of American novelists of the open road, didn't have a driver's license, like Jack Kerouac, and needed me to drive him around. So - which I happily did. But he was a little larger than that and had a greater sense of his own responsibility and power than that and became a kind of a mentor and model, in some ways, for me in very important ways when I was a young writer that lasted. And they last even to today. I mean, I'll still sometimes find myself saying, well, I wonder what Nelson would do. What would he say here? What would he - how would he handle this situation?

GROSS: Did he help you figure out that you could use the stuff of your life as the subject of fiction?

BANKS: Yeah, absolutely - that you could bear witness and that bearing witness was important and at the center of American literature, really - I mean, going back to Whitman.

BIANCULLI: Russell Banks speaking to Terry Gross in 1995. The author of "Continental Drift," "Affliction" and "The Sweet Hereafter" died last Sunday at age 82. After a break, we revisit an interview with photographer Larry Sultan, whose pictures are the inspiration for a new Broadway show. Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the novel "Sam" by Allegra Goodman. And film critic Justin Chang reviews "No Bears," one of his favorite movies from last year. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University in New Jersey, in for Terry Gross. Allegra Goodman says that her new novel, called "Sam," was inspired by her daughter, who, when she was little, was constantly in motion. Goodman wondered what happens to that reckless energy in girls as they grow up. Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, has a review of "Sam."

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: The last couple of years have taught us all to be cautious about our New Year's expectations. But any year that begins with the publication of a new novel by Allegra Goodman promises - just promises - to be starting off right. In her over 30-year career, Goodman has distinguished herself as a crack literary cartographer, a scrupulous mapper of closed worlds. For instance, her 2006 novel, "Intuition," transported readers deep into the politics and personal rivalries of an elite cancer research lab. "Kaaterskill Falls," which came out in 1998 and was a finalist for the National Book Award, was set in the Orthodox Jewish summer community that gave the novel its title.

In contrast, the subject of her latest novel, a coming-of-age story called "Sam," may at first seem overly familiar. Goodman herself says in an introductory letter to her readers that she feared this novel might seem small and simple. It does, but mundane as the world may be that "Sam" depicts, it's also tightly circumscribed by class and culture. In its own way, the working-class world of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is just as tough to exit as some of the other worlds that Goodman has charted.

The novel follows a white working-class girl named Sam from the ages of 7 to about 19. Her household consists of her loving, chronically exhausted young single mother, Courtney, and her younger half-brother, Noah, who has behavioral issues. Sam's dad, Mitchell, is a sweet magician, musician and addict who erratically appears and disappears throughout much of her girlhood. During one of the early periods when he's still in town, Mitchell takes Sam to a rock climbing gym. Hurling herself against a wall of fabricated boulders and cracks and trying to scrabble her way to the top becomes Sam's passion. It's also the novel's implicit metaphor for how hard it will be for Sam to haul herself up to a secure perch above her mom's grinding life of multiple low-wage jobs.

Goodman tells this story in third person through Sam's point of view, which means the earliest chapters sweep us through events with a 7-year-old's bouncy eagerness and elementary vocabulary. That style matures as Sam does, and her personality changes, becoming more reined in by disappointment and a core sense of unworthiness sparked by Mitchell's abandonment. By the time Sam enters her big public high school where she feels like a molecule, she's shut down, even temporarily giving up climbing. Sam's mom, Courtney, keeps urging her to make plans. She's naturally good at math, so why doesn't she aim for community college where she might earn a degree in accounting? But Sam shrugs off these pep talks. She subconsciously resigns herself to the fact that her after-school and summer jobs at the coffee shop and the dollar store and the pizza place will congeal into her adult life.

"Sam" is a rare kind of literary novel, a novel about a process. Here it's the process of climbing and falling, giving up, and in Sam's case, ultimately rousing herself to risk wanting more. The pleasure of this book is experiencing how the shifts in mood take place over time, realistically. But that slow pacing of the novel also makes it difficult to quote. Maybe this snippet of conversation will give you a sense of its rhythms. In this scene, Sam has unexpectedly passed her driving test, and so she and her mom Courtney and brother Noah are celebrating by spreading a sheet on the couch and eating buttered popcorn and watching the Bruins on TV.

(Reading) Kids, here's what I want you to remember, Courtney says. You don't give up, and you will get somewhere. Nobody is listening because the score is tied. You've got to have goals, like... College, Sam and Noah intone, eyes on the TV. They're glad when the phone starts ringing, and Courtney takes it in the bedroom. At first, it's quiet. Then Sam can hear her mom half-pleading, half-shouting. By the time Courtney returns, the game is over. She sinks down on the couch and tells them Grandma had a fall. Courtney has to drive out tomorrow and stay for a few days to help her.

The weariness, the sense of inevitability is palpable. Goodman doesn't disparage the realities that can keep people stuck in place, but she also celebrates the mysterious impulse that can sometimes, as in Sam's case, prompt someone to resist the pull of gravity and find her own footholds beyond the known world.

BIANCULLI: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Sam," the new novel by Allegra Goodman. Coming up, we hear about a 1989 family photo exhibit that is now the basis of a new Broadway show. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. "Pictures From Home" is a new show previewing on Broadway today starring Nathan Lane, Danny Burstein and Zoe Wanamaker. It's based on a 1992 photo memoir by the late photographer Larry Sultan about his childhood in the postwar baby-boom generation in Southern California. Before it was a book, it was an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Terry Gross spoke to Larry Sultan in 1989 when his exhibit was on display. Sultan mixed then-recent photos of his parents with snapshots taken in the 1950s and early '60s. By combining recent and old photos, Sultan reassessed his family history and examined his parents' pursuit of the American dream.

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TERRY GROSS: Well, for your project "Pictures From Home," you not only took a lot of new pictures of your parents and their house, but you used a lot of old family photos. So this required you going back and looking at lots of old pictures of your family. Did you find in a lot of the old photos that there was an almost ritualistic quality - pictures taken at parties, at vacations, at certain points in one's life when one is supposed to take pictures?

LARRY SULTAN: Yes. But I think - you know, I think you're right. They were not only ritualistic; I saw them as mythic pictures. And they weren't family snapshots. They were movies, and they were 8 mm films that began in 1942 and, I think, spanned 20 years. And I remember looking at these films and not only seeing them from a biographical point of view - like, oh, this was me when I was, you know, 3 or 5 or 7 - but taking them out of that personal context and seeing them as these incredible myths of - almost an epic of an American family moving from back East to the promise of the new life in the West. And when I took particular stills from those films, I think that mythic quality was even further enhanced. And so they're not only biographical; I see them as cultural artifacts as well.

GROSS: Can you tell me about the range of emotions that you experienced looking back at pictures of your parents when they were young?

SULTAN: Hmm. Boy, that's interesting because there's this phenomena where there's a double vision. All photographs, in a sense, are historical because the moment is gone. And so here I am looking at people who are actually younger than me and seeing that they had a life outside of me. You know, they're not only my parents; they had this independent existence, which is a fairly frightening notion. And it leads you to all kinds of speculation that one doesn't want to get into, you know, about their intimate life.

And so that was an interesting thing, to see them independently and then to also see, I think, the melancholy I felt around the aging process, how, certainly, the vitality of my parents and - I mean, it's inevitable. The body changes, and it's not a sad phenomena as much as it is an opportunity to watch this transformation of the body through time.

GROSS: Now, in addition to old photographs, you also have some old documents in your piece - letters, for instance, welcoming your father into the Eversharp family when he started to sell razor blades. Why did you include some of these old documents, old business letters and things like that? And where did you find them?

SULTAN: Well, it was very important to include those because what I felt I was doing and, I think, what I've done is try to create a pattern of public life and private life, of family and business, of success and perhaps conflict within the family. And so my father's business documents, to me, they not only document his career; I think they really, in a way, indicate a time.

I mean, welcome to the Eversharp family, and you're a team player. And I mean, it was this sense of the '50s that was so full of that optimism and so full of that hope, that one would enter a family and be taken care of and be part of a team and be a team player and believe in the product and blah, blah, blah, you know? It goes on. And it's a phenomenal record not only of that specific event in his life, but, I think, of a time that's no longer available to us. So that's interesting to me - about how you can document a time through a very biographical, personal point of departure.

GROSS: Now, you've had to take a lot of new photos of your parents for your project. Your parents, I'm sure, are used to smiling for photographs. And you tried to get candid shots. I think you, in fact, told them not to smile. What were their reactions to the kinds of photographs that you wanted?

SULTAN: Well, you know, I became a real pain. I worked on this for seven years, and I really strained my parents' generosity. In the beginning, I think it was - you know, I would follow them around. In fact, I went on vacation with them to Hawaii and photographed them. And then, as they got more and more accustomed to me being around, I'd follow them into their bedroom. And after a while, they - in terms of the daily photographs in which they weren't necessarily conscious or posing - although there's always somewhat of a pose - that was fine.

I think the problem really occurred when I would - when we would set up a photograph. And some of the photographs were staged, and there was always this dilemma. My father has a standard, I think, successful businessman pose that he's been practicing for years, you know, this kind of steely-looked and, you know - look-them-in-the-eye and rigid body. And in fact, I think he'd cock his head looking off to the left into the future.

And that's not what I wanted, and there was quite a disagreement about that. And in fact, part of the book is his response to my photographs and his response to the way I photograph and the way I represent him, which I think is a real crucial part of this work because I have no - I wouldn't presume that I'm telling the truth. I'm telling my version of the truth, but it's not the objective version. There is no objective version.

GROSS: Your father said to you that he doesn't like what you call introspection. When he sees one of those photos, he says, for the most part, that's not me I recognize in those photos.

SULTAN: Yeah, I think it's, you know, how we know ourselves. We have this repertoire of selves, I think. And I guess Roland Barthes calls it a repertoire of selves. And I see my father - yeah, well, the side of my father that interests me the most is that vulnerable, introspective side. Now, that's not a side that comes out very often. And it's certainly not a side that one shows to the public. And perhaps to be fair, there is somewhat of a lost look in one of those photographs. And that was important to me. And maybe I'm being accurate to my point of view and not so accurate to him. So he could be right.

GROSS: Do you...

SULTAN: Maybe that isn't him he recognizes. Maybe that's more me.

GROSS: Did you say a lost look?

SULTAN: Yes, a look that has a taste of melancholy to it.

GROSS: Let me describe a photo that I think is exactly that, or at least that's how I read it. And it's a photo of your father all dressed up in a dinner jacket, and it looks like he's probably on the way out. But he's sitting on the bed, just kind of looking off in this dinner jacket. And to me, it reads - all dressed up for a kind of letdown.

SULTAN: Yeah, he...

GROSS: I really like that photo a lot.

SULTAN: Yeah, he hates it.

GROSS: Oh, really?

SULTAN: He absolutely hates it.

GROSS: OK. How come?

SULTAN: Well, because he says that - he created the analogy that it was like having - doing a film, and the actors are taking a break, and that's when you photograph them. And we were actually - I asked him to get dressed up. And we were doing a - he was writing on the wall for me, kind of a mock Dale Carnegie program. And he sat down on the bed just to rest. And you're right - it is all dressed up with nowhere to go in my mind. And that's an ideological photograph. It relates in my point of view to, I think, memory and one looking back on their life. Maybe most of the challenges have been in the past, at least in terms of one's business life. And so, yeah, it's taken out of context. It's a fiction.

GROSS: I want to quote something that you write toward the end here. You say, (reading) behind all the peering, the good pictures, the rows of film and the anxiety of my project is the wish to take photography, literally, to stop time. I want my parents to live forever.

I think that's beautiful.

SULTAN: Thank you. Thank you. There was something that happened to me in the middle of this project that I think was very significant. And, you know, when I begin work, I have really no idea where I'm going to go. But I need to think that I know where I'm going to go. And so I invent all these notions that what I'm doing is sociological or whatever. And in the middle of this project, I had a photograph that I had made that was particularly moving to me. It was a close-up of my father as he was sleeping on a couch, taking a nap in Palm Springs. And I looked at the picture on my desk, and it struck me that there's a chance that this picture will outlive my father, that I'll be looking at this picture one day when perhaps he's not here.

And it really changed my whole notion of what I was doing. I moved from the sociological, dropped way down to the sense that I was making pictures that came from, I think, a need to not only understand my parents but to let them go in a certain fashion, almost like an adolescent lets things go. I'm a late bloomer in that sense. So from that, of course, you know, photography does stop time. And it's a very - it's an exterior form of memory. This existed. I mean, that's its greatest truth is to leave a trace of what has been.

BIANCULLI: Photographer Larry Sultan speaking with Terry Gross in 1989. He died in 2009. "Pictures From Home," written by playwright Sharr White, is based on Sultan's memoir and previews on Broadway today.

Coming up, Justin Chang reviews one of his top films of 2022, the Iranian film "No Bears," which is now in theaters. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Last year, the Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi, a longtime critic of his country's government, was arrested and imprisoned just a few months before his new movie, "No Bears," premiered at film festivals. Set in a small town, the movie stars Panahi as a fictionalized version of himself. "No Bears" topped the list of our film critic Justin Chang's best films of 2022. It's now arrived in theaters. Here is his review.

JUSTIN CHANG, BYLINE: Jafar Panahi is one of the world's great filmmakers and certainly one of the bravest. He emerged in the mid-'90s and early 2000s with dramas like "The Circle" and "Crimson Gold," which took bold aim at class and gender divisions in contemporary Iranian society. In 2010, the authorities charged him with making anti-government propaganda, forbade him to leave the country and sentenced him to a 20-year filmmaking ban. But Panahi proved resourceful enough to defy that ban. He's since shot five features, many of them in secret. Because of these restrictions, his movies have turned increasingly inward, becoming more personal, more ruminative. He often stars in them himself, playing a good-natured but embattled director, also named Jafar Panahi, and reflecting on his difficult circumstances.

Those circumstances have only gotten worse since last summer, when Panahi was arrested and began serving a six-year prison sentence. And so his latest movie, "No Bears," completed not long before his arrest, is likely to be his last cinematic dispatch for a while. It's a brilliant movie, an intricate and layered drama that somehow manages to be funny, angry, playful and despairing by turns. Panahi is as incisive a social critic as ever. And here, he targets the misogyny and religious fundamentalism that holds sway across Iran, issues that led to the violent unrest currently gripping the country. But Panahi has also made a powerful and deeply pessimistic statement about the nature of cinema itself. The movies may be capable of magic, but here, he reminds us, they also have their limitations.

Most of "No Bears" unfolds in a remote Iranian village where Panahi, or rather a fictional version of Panahi, has come to stay for several days. He's directing a movie that's being shot close by, just across the border in Turkey. But because he can't leave Iran, he has to do everything remotely - not an easy feat, given the area's spotty Wi-Fi. One day, he spends some time exploring the village and randomly snapping pictures - a seemingly innocuous activity that will come back to haunt him. Sometime later, a few villagers will approach him and ask to see his photos, which they suspect contain incriminating evidence of a love affair between a young woman and a young man who isn't her fiance. Panahi denies having taken such a photo, and the story is ambiguous as to whether or not he really did. It doesn't even matter since the villagers are so convinced of the couple's guilt that they try to badger Panahi into submission. A kind of tense, chilling comedy ensues as the villagers' polite smiles and obsequious manners melt away and reveal their underlying hostility.

At the same time, the real Panahi doesn't treat the fictional Panahi as some kind of innocent. Sympathetic though he may be, the character can be somewhat clueless and entitled in his dealings with others. And he tends to get stuck in problems of his own making. One example is the movie he's directing - a kind of docu-fiction hybrid about a Turkish couple trying to flee local unrest using false passports. Telling that story becomes its own complicated ethical minefield as the director, eager to depict a harrowing situation as realistically as possible, risks endangering and selling out his subjects. And so Panahi, not for the first time during his post-ban phase, ponders the moral complications of his craft. Yes, photos and films can bring the truth to light. But don't they also frequently distort it? Is it possible to tell someone's story without exploiting or falsifying it? Even Steven Spielberg, a filmmaker whose circumstances are radically different from Panahi's, asked similar questions in his recent semi-autobiographical drama, "The Fabelmans."

But with "No Bears," Panahi has made a much more idiosyncratic kind of self-portrait. He places himself in a hypothetical scenario and asks how he would respond. He seems to conclude that whatever his response might be, it would be crushingly inadequate. The movie's title refers to a local superstition in which the threat of bears outside the village is used to keep people from straying too far away. There are no bears, someone reassures Panahi at one point. But that doesn't mean that threats don't exist or that violence isn't real. Even as Panahi weighs his dilemma, "No Bears" moves inevitably toward tragedy, one that's all the more devastating when you consider what might happen to this great filmmaker and the country that he clearly loves. Panahi may well wonder what movies are good for, but "No Bears" left me longing to see him make another.

BIANCULLI: Justin Chang is the film critic at the LA Times. He reviewed "No Bears," the new film by Jafar Panahi.

On Monday's show, for Martin Luther King Day, a journey through the South to understand the soul of a nation. Imani Perry, a native of Birmingham who teaches African American studies at Princeton, visits cities, small towns and historic sites below the Mason-Dixon Line. She reflects on the region's history and traces the steps of an enslaved ancestor. Her book is called "South To America." I hope you can join us.

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BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Al Banks. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. For Terry Gross, I'm David Bianculli.

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