Eli Eshaghpour’s Artist Statement
As religious minorities in Iran, many Persian Jews immigrated to the U.S. around the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran’s last fifty years or so are a testament to the randomness of history and its subsequent effects on individuals’ experiences, memories, and self-perceptions. We tend to focus on the interrelated events and unique circumstances that coalesce into the famous moments we remember. We point out critical crises in time that stand as turning points for our futures, but maybe these futures are inevitable regardless of how they play out. In 1970 – almost ten years before the Revolution – my grandmother and her immediate family left Tehran for Jersey City. At that point the Shah seemed invincible – his oil-rich regime was backed by the American and Israeli militaries, his economy attracted capital from the world’s leading corporations, and Iranians lived with relative freedom and prosperity under his globalist monarchy. Things changed very quickly though, for the Shah, Iran, and my family.
Last summer I interviewed my grandmother, my uncle, and a distant cousin whom I had never met. Each relative was born in a distinct political climate in Tehran. The interviews were conversational with my own planned questions interspersed throughout. I set aside excerpts that felt most reflective of each’s upbringings, attitudes, and views. I sorted through footage of Iran from the Shah’s reign, the Islamic Revolution, Khomeini’s rise to power, and the Hostage Crisis. After building a library of video clips and threading together the interviews, I started to see a storyline develop.
There is an element of chance in how I create the video, because it is difficult to predict what clips and audio might work together until I start testing the possibilities. Each action in the editing process informs the next, until all the interviews and footage fall into place. Like a collage, they interact to create new associative meanings. Through this process of analyzing, synthesizing, and editing my family’s intergenerational memories, I have threaded my own contemporary perspectives into my family’s oral history. With that in mind, it is important to remember that I could have made several different videos with the same stories and history.