Funhouse Noir: Escapist Expressionism in Samuel Khachikian’s Delirium

This essay begins with a discussion of critiques the films of Armenian-Iranian director Samuel Khachikian’s films as being removed from Iranian daily life by focusing on the film Delirium (1965) as a box-office and critical failure that resulted in Khachikian’s departure from making crime films for a decade. The essay then moves towards a discussion of the critical acclaim of the film that Khachikian produced the previous year, Strike (1964), and finds that the film owed much of its popularity with critics to the realistic social world of characters involved in crime. The essay argues that, despite its putative failure and the fact that it takes place in a realm far removed from reality with a convoluted plot and a quasi-Gothic setting, Delirium as an exemplar of a larger anti-realist tendency running through Khachikian’s career that both creatively redeploys themes from American film noir and borrows from German Expressionist cinema.