A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010

by Hamid Naficy

Overview

Hamid Naficy is one of the world's leading authorities on Iranian film, and A Social History of Iranian Cinema is his magnum opus. Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, it explains Iran's peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran. This comprehensive social history unfolds across four volumes, each of which can be appreciated on its own.

The extraordinary efflorescence in Iranian film, TV, and the new media since the consolidation of the Islamic Revolution animates Volume 4. During this time, documentary films proliferated. Many filmmakers took as their subject the revolution and the bloody eight-year war with Iraq; others critiqued postrevolution society. The strong presence of women on screen and behind the camera led to a dynamic women's cinema. A dissident art-house cinema--involving some of the best Pahlavi-era new-wave directors and a younger generation of innovative postrevolution directors--placed Iranian cinema on the map of world cinemas, bringing prestige to Iranians at home and abroad. A struggle over cinema, media, culture, and, ultimately, the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, emerged and intensified. The media became a contested site of public diplomacy as the Islamic Republic regime as well as foreign governments antagonistic to it sought to harness Iranian popular culture and media toward their own ends, within and outside of Iran. The broad international circulation of films made in Iran and its diaspora, the vast dispersion of media-savvy filmmakers abroad, and new filmmaking and communication technologies helped to globalize Iranian cinema.

A Social History of Iranian Cinema
Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941
Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941-1978
Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978-1984
Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822348788
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/06/2012
Series:	Social History of Iranian Cinema (Paperback) , #4
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	666
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Hamid Naficy is Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University. He is the author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, and (in Persian) Film-e Mostanad, a two-volume history of nonfiction cinema around the world. Naficy helped to launch ongoing annual Iranian film festivals in Los Angeles and Houston.

Read an Excerpt

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF IRANIAN CINEMA

Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010

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By Hamid Naficy

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4878-8

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Chapter One

THE RESURGENCE OF NONFICTION CINEMA

Postrevolutionary Documentaries and Fiction War Films

In the decades since the revolution, nonfiction cinema underwent fundamental transformations, creating several new genres, though structural continuities in infrastructure did exist. Postrevolutionary fiction cinema benefited from the continuity of technical personnel and the reinstatement of new-wave directors; postrevolutionary documentary cinema did not rely so much on experienced directors for its revival. Some documentarists had left the country: Ebrahim Golestan, Reza Allamehzadeh, Barbod Taheri, Parviz Kimiavi, and Manuchehr Tayyab (some later returned, such as Kimiavi and Tayyab). Those who stayed, such as Kamran Shirdel and Mohammad Tahaminejad, continued to make films for government agencies, major industries, and civic associations but many of their films— almost all of Tahaminejad's— were banned. The resurgence of the documentary awaited new filmmakers, including women, and a generational change in the 1990s. Surprisingly, this resurgence was driven by three fiction filmmakers whose stylistic innovations in their documentaries proved influential across both cinemas. These were Abbas Kiarostami's Problem, First Case ... Second Case (Qazziyeh Shekl-e Avval ... Shekl-e Dovvom, 1979), Kianush Ayyari's Summer 1979 in Today's Tehran: First Timers (Tabestan-e 1358 dar Tehran-e Emruz: Tazeh Nafasha, 1979), and Amir Naderi's First Search (Jostoju-ye Yek, 1980). Ayyari's film is an important historical film as it presents documentary footage of the immediate postrevolution period when there was much fluidity and freedom, with street vendors displaying rows of books and pamphlets, young stand-up comics accurately mimicking prerevolution entertainers (Fereydoun Farrokhzad) or political leaders (the Shah) for a large and delighted audience, a sign outside a movie house asking customers not to bring weapons inside, people arguing about politics in the streets or lecturing the passersby, and unveiled women strolling and carrying out their business freely in public places. The other two films also contain valuable and historical documentary footage of the early postrevolution period mixed in with fictional elements. They inaugurated in the postrevolution era the mixing of fictional and nonfictional elements, began during the Pahlavi era, which became a hallmark of the art-house films. Iranians in the diaspora turned to documentaries with a vengeance, producing scores of films, often focusing on their traumas of displacement and dramas of identity deformation, both personal and national.

Both new and reinstated nonfiction filmmakers made many films supported by state-run institutions. These included the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) and its subsidiaries—the Young People's Cinema Society, the Center for the Development of Documentary and Experimental Films, and the Farabi Cinema Foundation (FCF)—as well as the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (CIDCYA) and the Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic (VVIR, aka IRIB). Major heavy industries, such as steel, automobile, oil, and gas, commissioned documentaries, as did the newly created Kish Island and Qeshm Island "free-trade zones" in the Persian Gulf, which turned to documentaries to promote tourism. Many of these big industries were either wholly or partially state-owned, increasing the government's stake in, and control of, the documentary cinema. Independent documentarists, such as Khosrow Sinai, Ebrahim Mokhtari, Orod Attapour, Mahvash Sheik holeslami, Pirooz Kalantari, Kamran Shirdel, Mohammad Tahaminejad, Farideh Shafai, Ramtin Lavafipour, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Mohammad Shirvani, Hosain Torabi, Mehr dad Oskouei, and Rakhshan Banietemad worked freelance for both public and private organizations. But documentary cinema remained part of the state ideological apparatuses: funded primarily by the state and the big industries under state control, it also relied on television networks (now eight, all state-owned and state-operated) to censor and screen its products. Nongovernmental and nonfestival outlets for documentary screening were few and small. The international circulation of documentaries lagged behind that of fiction, but it grew in the 2000s.

Most of the top Pahlavi-period documentaries gained fame not because they were shown widely but often precisely because they were not screened at all, or if so only at film festivals, university cine-clubs, and foreign governments' cultural societies. Inaccessibility and censorship conferred value. Sometimes the restrictions were due to the film's critical intelligence, but not always. In the period of the Islamic Republic, the problem of inaccessibility was addressed by more than doubling of Persian-language television channels, which in the 1980s showed many nonfiction programs about the social turmoil of revolution and the devastating war with Iraq. Censorship, however, remained both a problem and a criterion for conferring value. As a form of constraint, censorship also encouraged creativity and innovation in theme, style, and narrative form.

In the IRI'S first decade, the eight-year war with Iraq propelled the documentary into a major form, buttressed by the heavy investment of resources, personnel, broadcast time, and exhibition space by key state institutions, such as the VVIR, the MCIG, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Many of these films were more ideological and amateurish than artistic and professional. Documentary productions gained a measure of prestige, institutional vigor, heightened quality, thematic diversity, and increased output in the 1990s. The cultural openness brought on by the election in 1997 of Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami as the president, initiating the reform era, allowed documentary filmmakers to emerge from war wariness and dystopic inertia by producing critical and innovative films. Pivotal was also the establishment in 1997 of the Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers (ISDF, Anjoman Mostanad Sazane Sinema-ye Iran), a professional organization within the House of Cinema. Until that time, two dozen professional unions and societies had been registered at the House of Cinema, which worked to support professionals in the fiction-film industry. Those making documentaries and animated films had been left out. The ISDF was the first society that pushed for the recognition of the rights of documentary filmmakers, not only those working in the public sector but also those in the commercial and independent sectors. The society maintained an informative website. It organized domestic film festivals (including the Week of Iranian Documentary Cinema), and placed domestic documentaries in international film festivals. Its membership grew from 41 to 115 by 2005. Another association that helped professionalize the documentary industry was the Association of Iranian Documentary Film Producers (AIDFP, Anjoman-e Tahiyeh Konandegan-e Sinema-ye Mostanad-e Iran). Created in 2000, its initial website stated that it aimed to "promote the business and art of documentary film production in a country where the cultural, social and political landscape had experienced one of the most overwhelming challenges of the last millennium." The hardening of the political atmosphere seems to have caused the AIDFP to refine its own characterization, for its constitution in 2011 stated that AIDFP is "a professional, nonprofit, nongovernmental entity that includes producers of film and television documentaries and operates under the laws of the Islamic Republic under the supervision of the House of Cinema. This Association does not belong to any political group, organization or party." Nevertheless, the AIDFP'S mission remained the promotion and expansion of the documentary film industry at home and abroad, participation in devising appropriate cultural and financial policies governing the documentary field, raising the quality and quantity of documentary productions, and protecting the material and moral rights of its members. The AIDFP held regular meetings, screened key foreign and Iranian documentaries, published a newsletter, and promoted and lobbied for the documentary cinema. To promote the education of its members, its website carried a bibliography of the documentary books that have been translated and published. It is likely that the creation of these two professional entities bolstered the documentary field and increased publication of books on the documentary.

Nonfiction cinema required serious government attention: this was indicated by the fact that in 2002 the MCIG issued its first official pamphlet, like similar booklets for fiction cinema earlier, which spelled out the dos and don'ts governing documentary filmmaking.

Local, regional, national, and international documentary festivals occurred not only in Tehran but also in other places, including on Kish Island. The technological revolution of the early twenty-first century enabled a vital documentary cinema, as well as a new generation of young cinephiles. The ready availability of inexpensive but high-quality production and editing equipment, such as Hi8 and digital cameras, and sophisticated desktop and laptop editing software both enhanced the quality of the films and encouraged bolder formal and thematic approaches to the documentary. The emergence of cell-phone cameras enhanced the spontaneity, mobility, and grittiness of documentaries, adding a haptic aura to them. Explosive personal and political issues, such as an increasing tendency toward the values of liberal democracy, secular modernity, and individualism, entered the purview of documentarists. As such, documentary cinema became a key purveyor and embodiment of modernism's individuality. The emergence of the Internet, with its vast resources of information and connectivity as well as its gargantuan capacity for the posting, linking, exhibiting, distributing, archiving, marketing, blogging, uploading, downloading, and streaming of audiovisual materials opened hitherto unthinkable possibilities, expanding documentarists' horizons far beyond domestic and niche markets. Despite government attempts to limit the use of the Internet, particularly during the retrenchment era of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, Iranians of all kinds flocked to it, making Iran one of the most connected countries in the region. Iranian blogs also proliferated, some of them dealing with cinema.

Like fiction cinema, documentary cinema became transnational. It took two forms: extraterritorial documentaries, filming outside the country by Iran-based filmmakers, particularly in the Middle East; and accented documentaries, production, coproduction, and exhibition of documentaries by Iranians in the diaspora. European broadcast, cable, and satellite television outlets were particularly receptive to both the coproduction and exhibition of documentaries, opening a vast potential resource to frustrated domestic filmmakers. The emerging Persian-language satellite TV channels operated by European and American governments, such as the BBC Persian Service and the Voice of America's Persian News Network, offered further production and exhibition venues for Iranian documentarists inside Iran or outside. Foreign film festivals, particularly those in Europe and North America, at first showed Iranian fiction cinema and ignored documentaries. Yet several apparently contradictory factors helped internationalize the Iranian documentaries. The regular release of successful fiction movies raised foreign interest in Iranian society at large, which documentaries could satisfy. On the other hand, as Iranian fiction movies became somewhat repetitive, formulaic, and formalistic they began to lose their luster, making room for documentaries. The irony is that fiction cinema owed some of its luster to its nonfictional sources (see Kiarostami's letter to Shirdel later in this chapter). At the same time, documentaries, particularly social-problem films, underground films, and Internet films bent on exposing the underbelly of the Islamic Republic and on critiquing its treatment of women, homosexuals, ethnoreligious minorities, and dissidents countered the art cinema's nonpolitical, aestheticized, and humanistic representations. Finally, documentaries entered the smaller but powerful international academic, museum, gallery, and cultural boutique markets. No doubt, this expansion into foreign markets will affect what documentaries will be made, as it did with fiction films, and it is likely to bring with it diverse charges of distorting Iranian reality, the peddling of exoticism to the first world, the washing of internal dirty laundry in full view of the international public, the undermining of the Islamist regime and aiding opposition, and the whitewashing of the Islamist regime's crimes.

In the 2000s, documentaries dealt unflinchingly with violations of individual rights, gender inequality, curbs on freedom of speech, manipulated elections, drug smuggling and addiction, torture, unemployment, housing problems, and political violence, as well as with explosive personal and even sexual issues, such as prostitution and violence against women. They did so not indirectly, as fiction cinema tended to do, but directly, boldly, and critically, resulting in a complex typology of forms. News films and amateur films of the revolution, compilation and historical documentaries about the revolution, sectarian films by antigovernment groups and ethnoreligious minorities, biographical documentaries, underground documentaries, accented documentaries by Iranians in the diaspora, documentaries on the eight-year war with Iraq, wartime city films, electoral campaign documentaries, social protest documentaries, ethnographic films, arts and crafts documentaries (including those about film), student documentaries, and Internet films are some of the types of documentaries identified and discussed in this and other chapters in this volume. Their high quantity and the professionalization of the documentary through its civic society formations helped build a documentary film culture with its own literature and publications, including informative websites.

The Sacred Defense War Movies

The war with Iraq, officially dubbed the "sacred defense war" or the "Iraqi-imposed war," produced the "sacred defense cinema" (sinema-ye defa'-e moqaddas) or the "imposed war cinema" (sinema-ye jang-e tahmili). War documentaries and feature fiction war movies are covered here.

Iraq officially invaded Iran in September 1980, an event that was charged with powerful historical and religious symbolisms from the early Islamic era, with crucial repercussions for Iranian and Iraqi national and religious identities. 8 Iranian Shiites trace their primordial moment of identity back to the murder of Imam Hosain in Karbala, Iraq, at the hands of Sunni Arab caliphs in the seventh century. The war between Shiite-dominated Iran and Sunnirun Iraq paralleled this story in ways that the Iranian government— as well as filmmakers— used, or abused, fully. Although the war could have ended in mid 1982 when Iraqi forces retreated from their last stronghold inside Iran, the Islamic Republic leadership did not agree; considering the war a blessing and an opportunity to consolidate their control over the postrevolution society, they pursued the war relentlessly, resulting in massive destruction, loss of life, and trauma. War documentaries and fiction war movies both stereotyped Iraqi soldiers, but they did not use the anti-Arab racism typical of Pahlavi-period films; they saved their venom for Saddam Hussein. The literature of the immediate postrevolutionary period exhibited a similar tendency (Karimi-Hakkak 1983:174). The motive may have been the possibility of pan-Islamic reconciliation— something that the subsequent U.S.-led invasion and the toppling of Hussein and the occupation of Iraq destroyed. But all the war films contained trauma narratives about the losses and destructions of war and of childhood, loved ones, homes, hometowns, and homeland. The compulsion to repeat in these films is commensurate with the depth of the loss and its repression.

At the same time, by featuring the technology, machinery, planning, strategies, and tactics of war, the sheer destructiveness of war machinery and firepower, and the speed, noise, disruption, and movement characteristic of battle fields, the war movies— documentary and fictional alike— inscribed and projected modernity and its attributes. By focusing on the psychology of individual soldiers, martyrs, and the wounded, and their families, they inscribed and encouraged modern subjectivities, even if in some cases these were configured as collective or sacred subjectivities. Finally, war modernized and enhanced the film industry's capacities for specialized cinematography (aerial and underwater filming), for mise-en-scène (war-related set design, props, décor), and for creating special effects (demolition and explosion). The construction of the Sacred War Movie Town near Tehran further facilitated war-related filming (Jahed 2010).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A SOCIAL HISTORY OF IRANIAN CINEMA by Hamid Naficy Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xv

Organization of the Volumes xxi

A Word about Illustrations xxvii

Abbreviations xxix

1 The Resurgence of Nonfiction Cinema: Postrevolutionary Documentaries and Fiction War Films 1

2 Under Cover, on Screen: Women's Representation and Women's Cinema 93

3 All Certainties Melt into Thin Air: Art-House Cinema, a "Postal" Cinema 175

4 Emergent Contestatory Films, Media Culture, and Public Diplomacy 269

5 Iranian, but with a Different Accent: A Cinema of Displacement or a Displaced Cinema? 369

Appendix A Iranian Films in Distribution (c. 2005) 513

Appendix B Film House of Iran's Film Collection 517

Appendix C International Film and Video Center Iranian Film Collection 520

Notes 523

Bibliography 559

Index 591

Editorial Reviews

[A]n important intervention in Iranian film studies. Naficy has conducted significant research for them while providing new insights on and revisions of his earlier writings.

Iranian Studies - Pedram Partovi

The major strength of the book lies in a vast array of information and examples with a picturesque description of life and society in Iran and cinema that has found numerous platforms all over the world. The scrupulousness with which these histories unfold and develop, coupled with the author’s profound understanding of the milieu, and its media and film, makes this book a must read for anyone interested in contemporary Iran and its extraordinary cinema.

Media International Australia - Arezou Zalipour

The four volumes of A Social History of Iranian Cinema constitute a landmark achievement. . . . For students of Iranian cinema, I can think of no better place to begin than these four volumes. The sheer expansiveness of Naficy’s project is a testimony to the untold narratives, theoretical paradigms, and concepts waiting to be found in the ongoing history of Iranian cinema.

International Journal of Middle East Studies - Sara Saljoughi

"A Social History of Iranian Cinema is an extraordinary achievement, a scholarly, detailed work in which a massive amount of material is handled with the lightest touch. Yet it is Hamid Naficy's personal experience and investment that give this project a particular distinction. Only a skilled historian, one who is on the inside of his story, could convey so vividly the symbolic significance of cinema for twentieth-century Iran and its deep intertwining with national culture and politics."—Laura Mulvey, author of Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image


"Hamid Naficy is already established as the doyen of historians, as well as critics, of Iranian cinema. Based on his deep understanding of modern Iranian political and social history, this detailed critical study of cinema in Iran since its debut more than a century ago is his crowning achievement. To say that it is a must-read for virtually all concerned with modern Iranian history, and not just cinema and the arts, is to state the obvious."—Homa Katouzian, author of The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran


"Hamid Naficy seamlessly brings together a century of Iran's cinematic history, marking its technological advancements and varying genres and storytelling techniques, and perceptively addressing its sociopolitical impact on the formation of Iran's national identity. A Social History of Iranian Cinema is essential reading not only for the cinephile interested in Iran's unique and rich cinematic history but also for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the cataclysmic events and metamorphoses that have shaped Iran, from the pivotal Constitutional Revolution that ushered in the twentieth century, through the Islamic Revolution, and into the twenty-first century."—Shirin Neshat, visual artist, filmmaker, and director of the film Women Without Men


"This magisterial four-volume study of Iranian cinema will be the defining work on the topic for a long time to come. Situating film within its sociopolitical context, Hamid Naficy covers the period leading up to the Constitutional Revolution and continues after the Islamic Revolution, examining questions about modernity, globalization, Islam, and feminism along the way. A Social History of Iranian Cinema is a guide for our thinking about cinema and society and the ways that the creative expression of film should be examined as part of a wider engagement with social issues."—Annabelle Sreberny, coauthor of Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran

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