Iranian Cinema in a Global Context

Policy, Politics, and Form

Peter Decherney, Blake Atwood, Peter Decherney, Blake Atwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317675198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Iranian films have been the subject of much critical and scholarly attention over the past several decades, and Iranian filmmakers are mainstays of international film festivals. Yet most of the attention has been focused on a small segment of Iranian film production: auteurist art cinema. Iranian Cinema in a Global Context, on the other hand, takes account of the wide range of Iranian cinema, from popular youth films to low budget underground films. The volume also reassesses the global circulation of Iranian art cinema, looking at its reception at international festivals, in university curricula, and at the Academy Awards. A final theme of the volume explores the intersection between politics and film, with essays on post-Khatami reform influences, representations of ineffective drug policies, and the representation of Jewish characters in Iranian film. Taken together, the essays in this volume present a new definition of the field of Iranian film studies, one that engages global media flows, transmedia interaction, and a heterogeneous Iranian national cinema.

1 Introduction

Blake Atwood and Peter Decherney

DOI: 10.4324/9781315771373-1

Global flows of information, technology, and people have defined Iranian cinema since its inception in the early 20th century. The first moving images captured of and by an Iranian, the early camerawork by court photographer Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi, took place during Mozzafar al-Din Shah’s diplomatic trip to Belgium in 1900. The French Catholic Missionary opened the first cinema in Iran the same year, and the first Persian-language talkie film, Dokhtar-e Lor [The Lor Girl] (1933), primarily took place in Iran but was shot in India and featured a cast of expatriate Iranians who lived there. To study Iranian cinema, therefore, is to understand its global context. This book attempts to conceive of a contemporary Iranian cinema that is just as transnational as its origins. Iranian Cinema in a Global Context, the first anthology of essays on Iran in over a decade, both reassesses the global reception of Iranian film over the past few decades and investigates a range of film movements that have emerged more recently.

The globalism that has marked Iranian cinema over the course of the last century demands a uniquely interdisciplinary methodology, and it asks us to move beyond just close readings of films and also to attend to modes of circulation and exhibition, reception, industry, and policy. The scholars assembled in this anthology, therefore, come from a range of disciplinary, professional, and national backgrounds, including several anthropologists, a sociologist, a political scientist, a naval instructor, and a festival programmer, in addition to film scholars. Their approaches and the language they use vary considerably, but each essay captures a unique perspective on the complex institution of Iranian cinema. Iranian Cinema in a Global Context addresses the relations of film to spaces of exhibition, to social issues like drug addiction, and to the politics of reform. Ultimately the unique global quality of Iranian cinema begins to emerge through the diversity of perspectives and methodologies present in this book.

In order to accommodate the interdisciplinary contributions, we have divided the book into two main parts. The first section, “Essays,” features traditional argument-based essays that lay out scholars’ research and analysis, while a second section, “Short Takes,” comprises more narrowly focused pieces that either draw on the author’s personal and professional experience or focus on new lines of inquiry. Several of the essays in the “Short Takes” section shed new light on the exhibition of Iranian films, particularly at film festivals, which have been central for the global exposure of Iranian films. By exploring the process by which Iranian cinema joined the ranks of a global aesthetic through film festivals, we can identify the points at which localized knowledge has been sacrificed in the name of a global cultural sphere. These moments ultimately shape the questions that animate the research presented in this book.

Documentary theorist Bill Nichols was one of the first scholars to comment on the cultural exchange that followed the proliferation of Iranian films at international festivals. In 1994, he published a landmark article, “Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit,” in which he examines festival-goers’ experience of discovering “new cinemas.” Using Iranian cinema as an his example, he likens film festival audiences to “tourists,” who are encouraged to “submerge” themselves in “strange worlds,” in which they listen to “unfamiliar languages” and observe “unusual styles.”¹ This act of submersion, Nichols argues, initiates a process of “recovering the strange as familiar”² and enables an “ephemeral moment in which an imaginary coherence renders Iranian cinema no longer mysterious but still less than fully known.”³ Nichols’s scheme, and in particular his alignment of the filmgoer and the tourist, captures the extent to which Iranian cinema, both its films and its transnational circulation, encourages cross-cultural encounters. Watching films from another culture, we engage “insights or lessons about different cultures”⁴ as we seek participation in a “global but far from homogenous” cultural sphere.⁵

The aptness of Nichols’s framework rests on the fact that the filmgoer-tourist, despite his best efforts to achieve a deeper understanding of things, is perpetually an outsider, a foreigner, whose experiences and impressions might be more a reflection of his own position in the world than the imaginary nation that he temporarily occupies. The “partial knowledge” that we attain is “of our own making.”⁶ Nichols argues that the inclusion of Iranian cinema into the international film festival circuit, thereby, necessitates the absorption of localized knowledge into a broader global aesthetic. In a statement that is both a warning and a call, he writes, “Hovering like a specter, at the boundaries of the festival experience, are those deep structures and thick descriptions that might restore a sense of the particular and local to what we have now recruited to the realm of the global.”⁷

In the twenty years since Nichols published his article, a substantial amount of scholarship on Iranian cinema has answered his call, and this body of critical work has provided “thick descriptions” that have begun the process of restoring the local and the particular to our global understanding of Iranian cinema. Iranian Cinema in a Global Context participates in this effort and joins the local and the global by bringing together essays written by an international group of scholars, who either uncover the diversity of localized knowledge about Iranian cinema or shed light on the mechanics of the institutions that participate in promoting this national cinema to the ranks of global culture.

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed an explosion of scholarship on Iranian cinema, and the debates and questions that came out of that critical body are still haunted by the specter that Nichols identified: the deep tension between local and global institutions and how this tension shapes our understanding of national cinema. The question of modernity, which encapsulates this tension by touching on issues of colonialism, globalization, and westernization, has been central to recent studies on Iranian cinema. While scholars like Hamid Dabashi and Hamid Naficy generally agree that Iranian cinema has, since its inception, been intimately tied to the process of modernity in Iran, there has been less consensus about the precise nature of this relationship and what the history of cinema tells us about Iranian modernity.

In Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (2001), Dabashi argues that the story of Iranian cinema reveals the “record of” the “failure” of Iranian modernity as much as it represents a “wish list for its successes.”⁸ He locates the origins of Iranian cinema in the year 1900, when two events shaped the course of film in Iran: the first moving images where shot by Akkasbashi during Mozzafar al-Din Shah’s visit to Belgium, and the French Catholic mission opened the public Soleil Cinema in Tabriz.⁹ Dabashi draws on these two events to demonstrate that Iranian cinema, in both its production and viewership, and by extension modernity, was conceived as an “extended arm of colonialism.”¹⁰ The paradoxical relationship between the aims of modernity, in particular individual subjectivity and colonialism, doomed the project of Iranian modernity from the beginning. Dabashi claims that cinema, despite the fact that it was a component of modernity/colonialism, nevertheless has “succeeded in resubjecting the Iranian self where the project of modernity has failed”¹¹ by occupying the social (especially religious and ethnic) periphery and by providing a space for resistance.

Hamid Naficy, too, sees Iranian cinema as a historical site for the “ferocious struggle” between intellectuals and modernity, a place where Iranians “resisted, rejected, accommodated, and … adapted” the major tenants of European modernity.¹² Naficy, though, is less concerned with the failures and successes of modernity than with the negotiations about modernity that have taken place vis-à-vis cinema. In his four-volume work, The Social History of Iranian Cinema (2011–2012), he provides the most detailed history of Iranian cinema that we have to date. Reading it against major moments in Iran’s political history, as well theoretical and aesthetic trends in international cinema, Naficy sets the four major periods that determine Iranian cinema: the Artisanal Era (1987–1941), the Industrializing Years (1941–1978),¹³ the Islamicate Period (1978–1984),¹⁴ and the Globalizing Era (1984–2010).¹⁵ He identifies these historical periods in order to demonstrate that modernity in Iran was not a “preplanned Western project imposed … from outside” but rather “overdetermined by … microphysical forces and dispositions.”¹⁶ In this scheme, the “failures” of modernity that Dabashi observes within and through Iranian cinema become constitutive of an entirely new modernity, one that diverges from European modernity.¹⁷

Despite their divergent approaches to modernity, Dabashi’s and Naficy’s works share an interest in contextualizing and historicizing Iranian cinema, and they restructure our access to it by tracing long histories that account for local movements and global trends. Hamid Reza Sadr similarly examines the history of Iranian cinema throughout the twentieth century in Iranian Cinema: A Political History (2006), which seeks “to provide a comprehensive analysis of Iranian film and to challenge the marginalisation of political issues within it….”¹⁸ His discussion, which he organizes by decade, not only provides a general history of Iranian cinema but also brings to the fore critical questions about the role of politics in the film industry in Iran. Three questions about the relationship between politics and Iranian cinema have been especially urgent in recent scholarship. First, what role does the government, and in particular the Islamic Republic (i.e. post-1979), play in the production of films? Should we view Iranian films as “national allegories,” as Fredric Jameson claims of all third world cultural production? And third, how is political meaning negotiated through acts of viewing? These questions identify three potential modes of political meaning in Iranian cinema: industry, text, and viewership.

While government interference in Iranian cinema, especially censorship, has existed since it was industrialized in the mid-twentieth century, the Revolution of 1978–1979, and in particular Ayatollah Khomeini’s public statement that cinema might be used to “educate the people,”¹⁹ reset the terms of the relationship between the government and film. Hamid Naficy was the first scholar to tackle this new relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and cinema. In several works over the last fifteen years, he has demonstrated that the shift from Pahlavi-era (pre-Revolution) cinema to the Islamicate cinema under the Islamic Republic (post-Revolution) represented a gradual process, not a sudden change like the political and social upheaval of the Revolution itself.²⁰ The process included a period of purification between 1978 and 1982, during which movie theaters were destroyed or renamed, foreign imports were limited, and local productions from before the Revolution were heavily edited—often film was inked, cut, or retitled.²¹ This purification process cleared way for the negotiation of a new Islamic cinema. In 1982 the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance was charged with regulating the film industry, and this move consolidated a number of efforts to oversee cinema in Iran. While government involvement in the film industry has ranged from training programs for directors, subsidies, and equipment,²² censorship remains the most cogent symptom of the Islamic Republic’s investment in cinema and the primary means through which scholars have examined the tense relationship between film and politics in Iran.

Hamid Naficy highlights the subjectivity of the categories that warrant censorship in the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance’s schema, which include insulting Islam, encouraging moral corruption, and “lowering the taste of the audience by means of poor production and artistic value.”²³ Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad complicates the picture of censorship even further by destabilizing a “monolithic” view of state control, demonstrating that the process of censorship comprises a series of negotiations, both explicit and implicit. Further, because the categories that Naficy outlines are so broad and because the terms of censorship have never been codified legally, censorship—or “inspection” as the Islamic Republic often calls it—is susceptible to shifts in the political climate and to individual preferences.²⁴ The unpredictability of censorship and, by extension, the instability of the relationship between politics and film inevitably affects film aesthetics. While Ali Reza Haghighi claims that there is no overt “political cinema” in Iran—films that either directly represent or critique the government²⁵—the political system, through regulation and subsidies, does directly impact the language of cinema in Iran.

Attending directly to this relationship, Negar Mottahedeh in Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2008) explores the ways in which regulations on the film industry, like censorship, refashion film narrative in the Isl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Essays
• PART II Short Takes
• Contributors
• Index