A Social Introduction to Iranian Cinema (Part 1)

[This is a rough transcript of a presentation I gave on September 19, 2012 before a showing of the film A Separation (2011) at Missouri State University. Thanks to everyone who was present and participated in the conversation afterward.]

I want to begin with a few remarks on the history of Iranian cinema, before turning, perhaps somewhat more speculatively, to the meaning of “the image” in this context. But it behooves me to start with this massive qualification: The history of cinema in Iran is inextricably intertwined with the political and social history of Iran and is therefore much more complex than these few brief remarks will be able to show. I say this not, I hope, to undercut my own presentation, but to invigorate you all toward engaging with this film by committing further research of a kind that I am, unfortunately, unable to share with you all in the small amount of time that I have given myself. With this caveat out of the way, I will begin as close to the beginning as I can.

The earliest films in Iran date to the beginning 20th century, with several documentaries and short subjects appearing before Iran’s first feature-length film was made in 1930, with production accelerating to the extent that by the 1960s it was already possible to speak of a significant film culture in Iran. The official attitude of the regime of the Western-backed Shah was one of cautious ambivalence, championing pictures that portrayed a modern, progressive, and prosperous Iran, while suppressing those that exposed economic or social injustice. Though there was an official system of rules and regulations and the subject matter of films was closely moderated by censors, censorship seems to have been irregularly and inconsistently enforced, and when it was, it usually pertained to the political interests of the flagging regime rather than to moral or religious issues. Religious clerics, for their part, largely ignored the medium or expressed pious distaste for it, while the most conservative members of society tended to avoid movie houses.

By the 1960s and early 70s, two main film traditions had become dominant. One was the galvanic “pop-cinema,” which typically consisted of highly sexualized films, full of generic clichés and inept plagiarism, which reveled in the glitz and glamor of bourgeois urbanites while ignoring the poverty in which the vast majority of Iranians lived.

The popular success of such films was generally transient and was probably more due to the novelty of the medium rather than any artistic or cultural value to be found therein; now these films have all been more or less forgotten, some of them deliberately lost, many of them chopped to pieces by later censors, who assure us, perhaps correctly, that their removal from circulation constitutes “no great loss.” The other film tradition of lasting significance for contemporary study stands in stark contrast to the excesses of these genre films, and they include films that one is much more likely to hear about and see today. They were less tolerated by the regime, which actively discouraged and, at times, censured the young filmmakers working in this tradition. The reaction of the Shah’s regime should come as no surprise: These films were typically shot in the mode of social realism and utilized cinema as a medium through which artists could commit social critique. These films, which have been grouped by later scholars as forming the “Iranian new wave,” often achieved considerable popular success and laid the foundations for Iranian cinema after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Still from Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Salaam Cinema (1995)

Tehran, 8 March 1978

Films like The Cow, released in 1969, focused on the disenfranchised who, in the unchecked advance of global capitalism and the regime’s own disastrous race toward modernization (toward “Westernization”), were abandoned by society, maligned by the new bourgeoisie, and oppressed by those in power. It may come as a surprise—but, then again, it may not—that Ayatollah Khomeini, within a year of his ascent to the spiritual head of the new Iran, would single out this film, The Cow, which was banned under the ousted Shah, as an example of “Islamic cinema.” When we consider the relation of the revolutionaries to the cinema—and remind ourselves that between 135 and 180 cinemas were destroyed or forcibly closed in the 79 uprising as symbols of moral decadence and the elite’s simpering tolerance for Western culture—Khomeini’s articulation, or rather appropriation, of The Cow as a prototype for an authentic Islamic cinema is a profound reinterpretation of the destructive energy of the 1979 revolution, one that reoriented Iranian cinema and ushered in an entire new ethical vocabulary in which films were made.