A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941.

Ascarate, Richard John

A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941.

Hamid Naficy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4775-0; lxiv + 388 pp.

Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941-1978.

Hamid Naficy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4774-3; xxv + 525 pp.

Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978-1984.

Hamid Naficy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4877-1; xxx + 255 pp.

Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010.

Hamid Naficy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4878-8; xxv + 631 pp.

For decades, the prevailing images of Iran have consisted of blindfolded American hostages, fist-pumping mobs burning American flags, and finger-wagging ayatollahs calling for death to the "Great Satan." Of late, footage of centrifuges spinning uranium to apocalyptic purity have complemented the montage. But all the while, other visions of Iran, cinematic ones, have struggled for international exposure, contending--at times, unsuccessfully--with censorship, war, and indifference. Hundreds of Iranian actors, writers, directors and cameramen have given their lives so that their films might be screened at international festivals, purchased in small markets run by far-flung compatriots in exile, and downloaded from the Internet. The works of these professionals have been revelatory, controversial, inspiring, often beautiful, and above all, diverse. In A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Hamid Naficy surveys over a century of moving images from his native land and its diaspora, placing each film in its social, political, historic, religious, and aesthetic contexts with the love and meticulousness of a master jeweler setting precious stones.

The first volume opens with a disarming preface--appropriately entitled, "How It All Began"--that delineates the author's personal, lifelong interest in all things cinematic. Naficy describes his massive study as a "cultural autobiography about [his] contentious love affair--and that of other Iranians--with cinema, Iran, and the West" (xxix). The reader quickly sees why. As a child, Naficy roamed the historic streets of Isfahan with a Kodak Brownie camera, later capturing family outings with a 35mm Agfa camera procured from (then) West Germany by the father of a blind friend. When not omnivorously taking in Hollywood and Soviet feature films at local theaters, he learned to build his own projector from scratch. At nine years of age he wrote critiques of U.S. government documentaries. Illustrated with family photos, freehand portraits on school notepaper, and even an image of the teenage Naficy assuming a movie-star pose, complete with pompadour and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. pencil moustache, these recollections lend a Barthean tone that resonates wistfully throughout the hundreds of pages and three volumes that follow.

Iranian cinema, Naficy observes, began with the screening of an actuality in 1900 (in Belgium) by the court photographer to the Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, fifth king of Persia, during a European excursion. Qajar era cinema, which lasted until the dynasty's overthrow in 1925, was, the author relates, a "cottage industry driven by a few importers and exhibitors, with ad hoc sponsorship by the royal court, the local elite, or the great powers," without support from an "enabling infrastructure in the form of studios, labs, acting schools, and chain cinemas" (30). As a result, early Iranian cinema was largely artisanal. That is, one and the same man (Iranian cinema in the beginning was almost exclusively a male affair) frequently served as writer, actor, producer, director, distributor, and promoter. When this staffing arrangement proved inadequate, a filmmaker hired family members.

Iranian spectators in these early days enjoyed countless imported French, British, German, American, and Russian trick films, primitive narratives, and actualities. Not until 1929, when Ovanes Ohanians screened Iran's first feature film, could they "narrate their individual stories or express their cultural and national aspirations in the new medium" (72). Thus, Naficy argues, Iranians saw themselves at first through the ideological distortions of Western lenses, which--along with Muslim religious objections to certain forms of representation, particularly involving females--would have implications for the development of Iranian cinema to this day.

The author also draws a fascinating, frequently entertaining, picture of early Iranian spectator practices. Audiences, for example, were segregated by gender. A translator stood next to the screen, narrating, explaining, and dramatically embellishing the projected action in the appropriate tone and local dialect. Hardly passive, spectators directed comments and criticisms freely and loudly toward the onscreen actors. They also smoked, ate, drank, and occasionally relieved themselves in the cinema, until years of socialization habituated them to less effusive behaviors.

Naficy closes the volume with a discussion of the first Iranian sound film, The Lor Girl, or Yesterday's Iran and Today's Iran (Dokhtar-e Lor, ya Iran-e Diruz va Iran-e Emruz, Ardeshir Irani, 1934), and of the emerging cinematic and social phenomenon known as the "dandy." Though shot in India by a man who also directed that nation's first Urdu talkie, the Persian-language Lor Girl, replete with song-and-dance numbers, "inscribed not only the national language ... but also national dances, music, rhythm, and poetry-all of them intimate means of constructing and maintain personal and national identities" (236). Meanwhile, writers, actors, and directors who fashioned themselves dandies--a colorful, impeccably dressed, gender-ambiguous Western import--complicated this process of identity construction by signaling "both admiration for and ambivalence about the West and the rest" (277).

The second volume covers the second Pahlavi period (Mohammad Reza Shah, 1941-1979), during which the state industrialized cinema and television production and Iranian films came of their own in international film festivals. Naficy recounts how nepotism and cronyism thrived as regulations required filmmakers to meet stringent governmental script, casting, and thematic guidelines. The Cold War between the Allied powers and the Soviet Union also exerted a powerful influence on the Iranian national cinema. The author devotes several pages to the intriguing story of Nilla Cram Cook (1910-1982), an American convert to Islam, one-time Gandhi disciple, polyglot (who knew Persian, Hindi, Sanskrit, modern Greek, Turkish, and Italian), and ballet mistress who became head of the Iranian Ministry of Interior's Department of Theaters. The position gave Cook vast censorship authority over Iranian arts, and also enabled her to advance Allied cultural, political, and economic interests, including her own. For example, she owned the rights to more than four-dozen Disney movies, which she planned to screen throughout Iran in nontheatrical venues used primarily for educational films, such as Surgery of Chest Diseases and newsreels of the Potsdam Conference. Over time, the Western propaganda campaign seems to have worked: Naficy reveals that in 1974, Days of Our Lives, Marcus Welby, and Colombo were among the most popular series on Iranian television (69).

Despite intrusive foreign governments and internal censorship, Iranian documentarians found ways to depict native realities and criticize social conditions. Poet Forugh Farrokhzad, for instance, provided a touching portrait of Babadaghi Leper Colony residents in The House Is Black (Khaneh Siah Ast, 1961). But by refusing to praise the colony's state sponsor or adopt the state's sanctioned style for nonfiction works, she transformed her film into a subversive critique (82). Farrokhzad's contemporary, Kamran Shirdel, turned to film while studying architecture and urban planning in Rome. His Fortress: The Red Light District (Qaleh, 1967-1980) documented the plight of young prostitutes in Tehran. Shirdel's ironic editing technique-juxtaposing sound and images of a teacher dictating socialist platitudes with candid interviews of tearful prostitutes lamenting their hopeless straits-caused the film to be banned until after the second revolution (121).

For spectators seeking more escapist fare, however, B-grade feature films, or filmfarsi, emerged in the form of "stewpot films" and luti, or "tough-guy," films. The former began with Siamak Yasami's Qarun's Treasure (Ganj-e Qarun, 1965), "in which two male buddies avidly devour lamb-and-potato stew, abgusht, the traditional lower-class meal, while singing a happy, humorous, and danceable tune" (197). The film's wide distribution and great popularity, Naficy argues, helped consolidate generic and thematic conventions of Iranian melodramas in general and of the stewpot genre in particular. Tough-guy films, on the other hand, distinguishable by ubiquitous black fedoras or scimitars in movie posters, told darker stories of masculine dominance, revenge, and misogyny. The genre's most celebrated exponent, Qaisar (Masud Kimiai, 1969), depicts the story of a modern tough (longtime actor and director Naser Malekmotti) who kills the three brothers responsible for his sister's rape and suicide and his own brother's murder. Naficy provides a bravura analysis of several aspects of the film, from the title sequence calligraphy and background images (which link modern toughs to ancient heroes of Persian mythology) to the manner in which Qaisar traps and kills each brother "separately, dramatically, and in locations that are emblematic of the country's encroaching modernization" (297). Though thematically and emotionally diverse, stewpot and tough-guy films gave rise to an Iranian star system, as well as to imitations, parodies, and tie-in merchandising both within Iran and among its international diaspora. The volume concludes with discussions of Iranian new wave, dissident, and exile cinemas.

The third volume, the slimmest, covers the so-called Islamicate Period, which began in 1978, toward the end of the second Pahlavi regime (Mohammad Reza Shah, 1941-79), and lasted until 1984, shortly after the revolutionary government laid down regulations that allowed authorities to infiltrate all aspects of cinema production. Naficy makes a very fine distinction between "Islamic cinema," which concerns the tenets, character, and stories of Islam, and "Islamicate cinema," which is simply cinema "made in a predominantly Muslim country, such as Iran" (8). Nevertheless, the products and processes of the latter cinema had to advance the agenda of the Islamic Republic authorities, which was to purify Iranian cinema of foreign, modern, Western, and Arabic elements. To do so, the ruling mullahs established an intricate system of rules and regulations about things such as which themes were appropriate for film; when, where, and how often a film could be screened; how revealing a woman's image could be on screen and in advertisements; and which actors had the requisite political and religious sanction to perform.

Naficy opens this volume with an account of the Rex Cinema fire, when one August night in 1978 four arsonists used jet fuel to ignite the Abadan movie theater, burning alive at least half of the 700 spectators in attendance. Recriminations for the deed flew from the still-exiled but rising Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as well as from the still resident but tottering Shah. Leaflets distributed by opposition groups called for further destruction of Western symbols of decadence: movie theaters, banks, liquor stores, discos. But, as the author explains, "it was the massive scale of the Rex Cinema crime ... that transformed the destruction of cinemas into a key symbolic act against the Shah, during whose reign, as Ayatollah Khomeini claimed, Western sex and violence had turned the movies into an imperialist technology to 'spray poison,' corrupting people's minds and values" (4). The Shah abdicated in January 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran the next month, and the second major revolution in that country began.

Filmmakers and media personnel with ties to the Pahlavi government were frequently executed outright, as were producers of films the Islamic government deemed pornographic, not in the Western sense of the term, but inasmuch as they merely depicted female nudity or sexual situations. Torture, stonings, and lashings of actors and directors were not uncommon. Naficy chronicles how one twenty-six year old film student, arrested for alleged association with a politically objectionable group, spit in the face of her interrogator, sealing her fate. She was raped prior to execution so as to preclude guaranteed entrance to heaven as a virgin. As a final insult, authorities demanded her parents pay the cost of the bullet that killed her (38).

Despite such dark beginnings, Iranian cinema during this period somehow continued--in a manner, thrived--among and beyond the interstices of violence, surveillance, and censorship. As the author relates, filmmakers first turned their attention to documenting the anti-Shah uprising, shooting footage guerrilla-style, often under fire. A collegial group, they exchanged clips to complete one another's documentaries and video reports. One enterprising filmmaker, Khosrow Haritash, even "used the revolutionary demonstrations and activism as background for his features: he placed actors into crowds of anti-Shah demonstrators and filmed them as part of his fiction movies" (57). Readers may already be familiar with the work of at least one Iranian documentarian, Kamran Shirdel, who filmed the American hostages in the U.S. embassy during the 1979 "Christmas party."

Naficy goes on to examine exilic cinemas. Large concentrations of Iranians seeking refuge from the Khomeini regime, particularly in Los Angeles, provided the markets and technology for Iranian film, television, and other media to survive and challenge the "monopolistic tendencies of the Islamic Republic's state-run broadcast media" (83). Nevertheless, once the regime had consolidated power, instituting a purely theocratic form of government, cinema became an effective means to inculcate Islamicate values. At times, state control over film production created surreal situations. In Shower of Blood (Khunbaresh, 1980), a fictional recreation of a 1978 massacre by Savak, the Shah's secret police force, Amir Qavidel engaged soldiers and civilians present at the original event to play themselves in the film. He also gained the release of those imprisoned for their parts in the uprising just long enough for them to play themselves. Afterwards, they were returned to their cells (132).

The last volume examines the globalizing era of Iranian cinema, from the mid-1980s to 2010. These were transformative years politically and technologically. Hardly had the fires of the second revolution died down when Iraq, hoping to forestall a similar insurgency within its borders and to become the preeminent power in the Middle East, invaded Iran. The ensuing war lasted eight years, cost over a million lives, and gained nothing for either side. By then, developments in video and digital technology enabled single camera operators to record interviews and document events, edit their documentary footage, and disseminate it to far wider audiences than ever before. As Naficy observes, "technology democratized the documentary field" (51). It also enabled Iranians in general to question their government's legitimacy and Iranian women in particular to represent themselves on a global scale.

Naficy provides an extensive discussion on women in Iranian cinema, not merely as actors but as writers and directors. He also gives special attention to the veil and the female gaze in Iranian film and television, reporting on different strategies women filmmakers used not merely to subvert censorship rules but to critique Islamic gender norms. Manijeh Hekmat, for example, in Daughters of the Sun (Dokhtaran-e Khorshid, 2000), depicts the story of a young girl whose father sends her away to another village so as to earn money as a weaver. For her to travel alone and work, she must pass herself off as a boy, which her father achieves by shaving her head. Hekmat shows the protagonist's long hair, but only as her shorn locks fall to the ground. This masculine coiffure enables her to appear unveiled amidst her diegesis and to gaze directly at her extradiegetic spectators (131).

The author also examines many of the post-revolution movements in cinema that broke out of a "closed doctrinal milieu toward more expansive thematic and stylistic horizons" (176). Such films exhibited varying degrees of self-reflexivity, realism, metarealism, and humanism, all of which reflected growing dissatisfaction, both within Iran and among the Iranian diaspora, with the increasingly "belligerent rhetoric and the violent politics of the Islamist government" (208). The discussion, following the period's advances in technology, understandably begins to fragment. Thus, Naficy analyzes the advent of U.S.-developed videogames that simulate military and intelligence operations in Iran, creating a "closed financial and ideological circuit between the playing public, the state, and the private sector" (292). He then examines the proliferation of Internet videos and clips by opposition groups and individuals attempting to "create an alternative nongovernmental mediascape to publicize their own activities and grievances, to organize their protests, and to pressure and punish the regime" (350). Finally, he considers the multitude of Iranian accented films, videos, and visual productions in circulation, as heterogeneous in form, style, and theme as their diasporic progenitors, all of whom differ in "terms of social and class affiliation, profession, politics, ethnicity, religion, gender, and generation" (373).

Given the history and current status of U.S.-Iranian relations, Naficy's study is exemplary in its impartiality, containing none of the polemical digressions that often mar scholarly writing. Though not purporting to offer a work of film analysis, Naficy proves himself adept on many occasions at unpacking a scene, a sound, or a gesture for its wider implications, invoking Lacan, Deleuze, Gramsci, Derrida, Benjamin, Zizek, and Foucault, inter alia, without allowing them to obtrude. He writes lucidly--at times, when contemplating the loss of Iranian life and cinematic art to political ideologies, wistfully. During the three decades spent writing and researching these volumes, as well as organizing countless film festivals, the author has interviewed or corresponded with seemingly every one of the hundreds of film professionals whom he cites. For breadth, depth, and intimacy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema is a study few scholars of any national cinema could emulate. It will not soon be surpassed.