A Profile of Amir NaderiSalon on Naderi
24 frames per second
A Review
Very little info on IMDb
A minor masterpiece overlooked at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, Marathon asks viewers to unlearn what they already know about New York, and more generally, what they think they know about living in an urban jungle. This savage tone poem, shot in black and white and on a mix of video and film, is only nominally a fictional movie: its main characters are the sounds of the city arranged and layered in such a way as to render them almost unrecognizable. Chthonic subway roars compete with celestial jet engine blasts, all set against the white noise of a midtown traffic jam. If Marathon comes closer than any recent film to creating the definitive soundtrack of the city, its point of view is unabashedly personal. Iranian-born, New York-based director Amir Naderi has crafted an aural reverie that could only come from someone both familiar and foreign to his surroundings. His hyper-vigilance endows this decrepit megalopolis with a near protean newness.
The actual story, such as it is, centers on Gretchen (Sara Paul), a single white female who lives alone and, as far as we can gather, has no friends, job, or social life. Her only link to the outside world is the stream of voicemail messages left by her mother - a disembodied voice that serves more as cold narration than as a voice of reason to her isolated daughter. A crossword puzzle addict, Gretchen wants to beat her personal record of 77 puzzles in one day, and the movie follows her on her 24-hour "marathon" as she seeks out noisy places to aid her concentration. The subway is her favorite - its maze of interconnected lines suggesting a real life crossword.
[...]
This is the third time Naderi has rendered his adopted city in abstract terms. Both Manhattan by Numbers (1992) and A,B,C...Manhattan (1997) were praised for their unconventional takes on a familiar landscape (or rather, soundscape), and together with Marathon, form a trilogy of urban dissonance. If Marathon seems more schematic than its predecessors, or seems to flirt too often with avant-docu pretension, it may be because Naderi has willfully distilled his subjects to their barest essentials.
I've seen all of Naderi's movies; the two he made in Iran are powerful, almost single-minded ( I mean: you have a simple concept that grows and grows ) , very far from everything else I've seen from that country (they're more like Tsukamoto than DeSica).
His two american movies are even stranger, still narrated with very very strong visual clout; they're stories of newyorkers who risk being dragged down and disappearing in their immense and now alien city; I always thought they're the movies Paul Auster dreams to make.This is the last of his movies, maybe not the best one to get started, yet the only one available on DVD anywhere, as far as I know.
Trivia: he asked the only actress so much that in the end she didn't speak to him any more: there's is a scene that lasts for 18 painfully choreographed minutes (because Naderi wanted her to look physically exhausted), and they did it over and over again for a month...
Anyway, this is surely both experimental and rarito... try it...
Specs:
Runtime: 01:15:35
Size: 700MB
Video format: PAL
FPS: 25
Size: 510 x 276
Video bitrate (kbps): 1099
Video codec: ffmpeg
AF6 codec: mpeg4
2-pass-encoded: yes
Audio codec: ac3
Channels: 2
Sample rate: 48000
Audio bitrate (kbps): 192
Language: English
Subtitles: Italian hardcoded (but probably there's no more than 5 minutes of talking in the whole movie, so...)
Amir Naderi - Marathon - DVDRip - AC3 - Eng - Hardcoded Ita Subs.ogm 
