Chapter 1 touched upon the importance that Iranian cosmopolitans in the 1910s and early 1920s attached to cinema as a medium for the moral edification of the public in the service of national advancement, despite the absence of a centralised cinema institution. The praising of cinema’s didactic potential in the education of children and enlightenment of society, as indicated in newspaper articles and film announcements from the late 1920s to mid-1930s, attests to a more formal approval of cinema as a pedagogical medium in this era. Just as print had transferred singular authority of individuals to texts, in the absence of a state-sponsored cinema institution, the authority of individuals was transferred to heterogeneous cinema in the early twentieth century, thus occasioning democratic imaginings in late Qajar Iran (also manifested in the Constitutional Revolution and social movements of this era). As this chapter will demonstrate, with the coming of the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–1979) and the solidification of an ideological nationalism, cinema was taken over by statist nationalism and became increasingly regulated and controlled by the state.

With the emergence of new communication technologies, social spaces, novel practices, domestic conflicts, revolution and international wars in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the space of experience in Iran was constantly transforming. During this “new time,” cinema propelled a horizon of expectation, and in fact, a wide range of possibilities and futures for cinema audiences. Through cinema, actions in the present were informed by the past, and motivated by future expectations. As documents from the first two and a half decades of the twentieth century reveal, Iranian movie theatres predominantly featured international motion pictures in their programs, as no Persian-language short or feature film had yet been produced. Keeping in mind the “reflexive” quality of cinema that provided a cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity and modernisation were registered and articulated, one could extrapolate that the “aesthetic and sensorial” dimensions of cinema, processed through the act of spectatorship, inspired attitudes for the articulation and negotiation of national imaginations. The international moving pictures screened in Iran evoked a futural prospect of what Iran could and ought to be – a temporalisation of historical time on screen and in cinema space that characterised modernity in the early twentieth century. Much of the literature on early cinema in Iran has attended, in a rather dismissive tone, to the inundation of Iranian cinemas with international films, cinematic colonisation and henceforth the non-existence of an Iranian cinema industry; very little has been expressed in terms of the cinema culture that such cinematic events engraved in the Iranian imaginaries and cinematic visions. Through a genealogical investigation of cinematic activities during that era, this chapter argues for the shaping of a cinema culture that, relating to conditions of Iranian modernity, functioned to embody the global cosmos in its vernacular morphogenesis – a trait that came to bear upon Iranian cinema in various forms in the following decades.

The Iranian popular film industry that emerged in the late 1940s and boomed in the 1950s has been almost fully dismissed in both pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary literature on Iranian cinema. Viewed as “immoral,” “vulgar” and “imitative” of Hollywood, Indian and Egyptian films, the national products of this industry came under heavy criticism in the 1950s, and eventually came to be derogatively categorised as “Film-Farsi” or “Persian-Films.” In the nationalist cinematic discourse that called for a serious, philosophical or art-house cinema that was befitting of a futural Iran, there was no place for hotchpotch “Film-Farsi” productions. In the post-revolutionary literature, “Film-Farsi” is also regarded as a debased, cheap and obscene industry, and remains maligned in official and most unofficial milieus. In a move to distance the “moral” cinema of post-revolutionary Iran from that of its predecessor, “Film-Farsi” cinema has been almost fully overlooked, if not incriminated. This chapter will aim to discuss in detail the often-unnoticed aspects of this industry, namely, its internal conflicts, social implications, cosmopolitan aspirations and general reception.

“Although more than half a century has passed since its propagation,” ʻAlī Assadī, a scholar and writer, concluded in a mid-1970s issue of Culture and Life magazine, “Iranian cinema has not yet reached a stage of self-actualisation.” “In other words,” Assadī continued, “Persian film has not yet developed its own identity.” The relation of Iranian films to the society, national culture and its values and traditions, the author believed, was yet “insufficient” and “superficial.” The future of Persian cinema, Assadī stated, depended on its evolution. The future of the cinema that Assadī spoke of in the pre-revolutionary era has not only achieved a self-actualisation in the post-revolutionary era, but it has gained widespread international recognition in festivals and academia – to an extent that it has been called a “true ‘world cinema.’” Based on a report by the Iranian Farabi Cinema Foundation in 2004, the number of short and feature-length Iranian films screened in international film festivals grew from “88 appearances in 1989 to 980 in 2000.” Regarded as “Iranian New Wave” cinema (sīnamā-ye mawj-e naw), or “New Cinema” (sīnamā-ye naw), this post-revolutionary project has been distinguished from what was – and still is – perceived as the “degraded” (fāsid) industry of the pre-revolutionary era in much of the extant literature on the history of Iranian cinema.

“Our age is a martyred age” (sinn-i mā sinn-i shahīd shudah īst), claimed Masʻūd Kīmīyāyī, a prominent pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker in an interview in 1978; “[v]ery soon, those which we knew, recognised and had aged with, were swept away and were instead replaced by dance, car brands and jeans … we were the ones most affected by moving from [houses with large] backyards to apartment buildings.” Although popular cinema drew on the quotidian of Iranian life, its “entertaining” cinematic form was disapproved by many. Objections to “Film-Farsi,” which gave rise to a cinematic horizon of expectation, paved the way for the emergence of an artistic counter-culture. By the late 1950s, there was a nostalgic consensus among many filmmakers to record on celluloid a “real” image of Iran; to resuscitate the disappearing cultural norms and social relations in a rapidly changing society, also observed by Kīmīyāyī above, in a social realist cinematic language. The attempts of a group of internationally educated filmmakers to create a visual repository of the changing conditions of the country facilitated the engendering of a cinematic movement in the late 1950s that was socially and politically charged – a cinematic revolution that presaged the political Revolution of 1979.

The book at hand is a study of Iran’s experience of modernity through cinema from its inception in Iran in the early 1900s to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iranian modernity in the early twentieth century was inadvertently tied to socio-cultural and political conditions that evoked cosmopolitan practices and experiences – conditions that cinema, as a modern technology and space that allowed for the interaction of cultures and transformation of identities, intensified and transfigured in the decades that followed. As a history of cinematic modernity, then, this book offers a promising way to link cosmopolitanism to the ethos of modernity in Iran. “Cinematic modernity” is a term that I use to denote the kind of modernity that was shaped by the technology of cinema, the space that it fostered and the visual content that it projected. It is also used to highlight the societal transformations that allowed for cinema’s transfiguration (both in its filmic content and spatial form), and the imaginations that cinema’s morphogenesis conjured from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1970s.

The aspirations of filmmakers, critics, intellectuals and cinema enthusiasts for the creation of a sovereign cinema, as discussed in Chapter 2, were re-enacted in the form of a sustained commercial cinema industry that commenced its feature film productions in the late 1940s. After the production of the first few Persian-language films before World War II, Iranian feature film production came to a halt for almost a decade. The reasons for this drought have been attributed to many factors arising from the political and economic conditions of the time. Contrary to popular belief, the hiatus in film production did not mark a suspension of cinematic activities. The absence of feature film production created a vacuum that enabled the influx of international films to Iran, the making of documentary films, the establishment of alternative cinematic activities such as dubbing foreign language films, the bolstering of a consumerist culture linked to the circulation of local and global cinema and theatre stars, and the professionalisation of cosmopolitan actors and film critics, all of which laid the foundation for the establishment of a new industry. Toward the end of the 1940s, cinema and stage actors, critics and film directors who had engaged global cinema trends in one way or another participated in the production of the first post–World War II Persian-language commercial films.