A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941 9780822393009

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A Social History of Iranian Cinema volume 1

Hamid Naficy

a soci a l his t ory of ir a ni a n cinem a Volume 1 The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 Duke University Press  Durham and London  2011

© 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed and typeset in Scala by Julie Allred, BW&A Books, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the School of Communication at Northwestern University, Northwestern University in Qatar, and the School of Humanities at Rice University, which provided funds toward the production of this book.

To my parents, who instilled in me the love and pleasure of knowledge and arts To my country of birth, Iran, and its extraordinary culture and history To my adopted country, the United States, and its cherished democratic ideals

con t en t s

List of Illustrations, ix Acknowledgments, xiii Organization of the Volumes, xxi A Word about Illustrations, xxvii

Preface: How It All Began, xxix Introduction: National Cinema, Modernity, and Iranian National Identity, 1

1 Artisanal Silent Cinema in the Qajar Period, 27



2 Ideological and Spectatorial Formations, 71



3  State Formation and Nonfiction Cinema: Syncretic Westernization during the First Pahlavi Period, 141



4  A Transitional Cinema: The Feature Film Industry and Sound Cinema, 197



5  Modernity’s Ambivalent Subjectivity: Dandies and the Dandy Movie Genre, 277

Notes, 309 Bibliography, 343 Index, 371

il lus t r at ions

1–12  Author’s freehand portrait drawings, 1980s–1990s. Collection of the author 1 The American historian Barbara Metcalf, xxxi 2 The Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, xxxi 3 The French cultural critic Jean-François Lyotard, xxxi 4 The Iranian-British social critic Homa Katouzian, xxxii 5 The Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida, xxxii 6 The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, xxxii 7 The Iranian American women’s studies scholar Nayereh Tohidi, xxxiii 8 The American anthropologist Paul Rabinow, xxxiii 9 The British filmmaker and film scholar Peter Wollen, xxxiii 10 Author’s self-portrait, xxxiv 11 The Ethiopian American film scholar Teshome H. Gabriel, xxxiv 12 The American film historian Tom Gunning, xxxiv 13 Building a 35mm film projector, xxxvi 14 Author’s dandiacal photograph, xl 15 Author’s contribution at the age of fourteen to the Neda-ye Elm family magazine, xli 16 Author’s early film criticism, xlvii 17 Frame enlargement from author’s abstract video, Blacktop, l 18 Frame enlargement of author’s computer-video generated mfa film, Salamander Syncope, li 19 A poster for the first public screening of Salamander Syncope at ucla, li 20 Cover of the catalogue for the A Decade of Iranian Cinema, 1980–1990 film festival, lvi

21 The Los Angeles Persian-language morning paper, Sobh-Emruz (30 March 1990), lviii 22 The Los Angeles Persian-language evening paper, Asr-e Emruz (29 March 1990), lviii 23 Page one of a petition signed by hundreds of spectators, lx 24 Lumière’s giant cinematograph screen, 42 25 Tekkiyeh Dowlat (State Amphitheater) in Tehran during a performance, 43 26 The court photographer Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh, 44 27 Mozaffar al-Din Shah throws flowers to women in Sani al-Saltaneh’s [Carnival of Flowers] film, 45 28 Mozaffar al-Din Shah and his entourage gazing at the camera, 45 29 [Mozaffar al-Din Shah Looking through a Telescope], filmed by Sani al-Saltaneh, 48 30 The Soleil Cinema Theater in disrepair, 52 31 Alék Saguinian’s letterhead bearing his name as well as Soleil Cinema’s logo, 53 32 Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov in old age, 64 33 An elegant calligraphic signature seal bearing Ivanov’s nickname “Rusi Khan,” 64 34 Khanbabakhan Motazedi watering his home garden, 69 35 Mozaffar al-Din Shah mesmerized by the “serpent eye” of Sani al-Saltaneh’s camera filming him, 80 36 Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh in his nineties, 86 37 Iranian selfing at the expense of the Arab Other, in [Argument with an Arab], 98 38 The ethnography of film reception in the late 1920s, Jafar Tejaratchi’s painting, 116 39 Precinema entertainment, a peepshow or shahr-e farang, 120 40 The Grand Hotel in Tehran, 129 41a and 41b  Two frames from Sani al-Saltaneh’s actuality [Women Entering the Shah Abd al-Azim Train], 136 42 Syncretic Westernization in men’s fashion, in Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, 145 43 Cinematic unveiling predating the official Pahlavi sartorial reform, in Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, 151 44 Tehran’s gender-segregated horse-drawn tramway, Cheragh Gaz Street, 160 45 Map of the route American explorers took from Turkey to Iran to “discover” the Bakhtiari tribe, in Grass, by Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison, 163 46 The Baba Ahmadi tribe and thousands of animals zigzag up the formidable Zardeh Kuh in Grass, by Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison, 163

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47 The chief of the Baba Ahmadi tribe, Haidar Khan, and his son enjoy the tribe’s arrival into the “land of grass” after their arduous trek, in Grass, by Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison, 164 48 Certificate testifying that the three American explorers were the first to cross the Zardeh Kuh with the tribe in forty-six days, from Grass, by Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison, 164 49 The certificate of honor that President Jimmy Carter bestowed on Ernest Schoedsack, 165 50 An elderly Khanbabakhan Motazedi at home with his 16mm handheld camera and portable film projector, 191 51 Early cinematic self-reflexivity and directorial self-inscription, in Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, 214 52 Haji examines with curiosity the breast of a mannequin wearing Western fashion, 214 53a and 53b  The transformative power of cinematic self-representation, 215 54a, 54b, and 54c  Cinematic analogy by means of overlapping dissolves, 218 55 Ebrahim Moradi filming a scene of his feature film The Capricious Lover, 222 56 Jafar (Abdolhosain Sepanta) sings a ballad by the tree in The Lor Girl, 234 57 Golnar (Ruhangiz Saminezhad), the first café girl in a sound movie, from The Lor Girl, 235 58 The poster for The Lor Girl, 238 59 Cinematic desire expressed by means of superimposition, from Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, 272 60 A father-daughter sexual game, from Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, 272 61 Cinematic nationalism based on feminism and anti-Arabism, from The Lor Girl, 274 62–63  Filmmakers as dandies, 280 62 Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh, 280 63 Ardeshir Khan Patmagerian, 280 64 Hasan Moqaddam, 285 65 Diegetic dandies, in Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, 290 66 Heterotopic sites of dandyism, Café Naderi, 292 67 A dandy named Mahmud (Behrouz Vossoughi), in Shapur Qarib’s The American Mamal, 298 68 A female dandy, Nasrin (Googoosh), falls for the American Mamal, in The American Mamal, 299 69 The poster for The American Mamal, 300 70 The poster for Ali Hatami’s Haji Washington, 307

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ack now l edgmen t s

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uring the three decades spent researching and writing this book, I accrued debts to many people who helped me in various ways big and small, which are briefly acknowledged here. First of all I thank all the film directors, producers, camerapersons, actors, critics, and television producers who supplied me with copies of their films, videos, and biographies, and sometimes with stills of their films. Many of them also granted me interviews, in person or by telephone, mail, e-mail, and even tape recording. Underscoring the globalization and diasporization of Iranians—including mediamakers—these interviews spanned the globe, from Iran to various European countries, and from New Zealand to the United States. And underscoring the duration of the project, they extended in time from the mid-1970s to the late 2000s. The interviewees and filmmakers were Abbas (Abbas Attar), Nader Afshar Naderi, Jamsheed Akrami, Mohammad Reza Allamehzadeh, Farshad Aminian, Amir Amirani, Taghi Amirani, Jahanshah Ardalan, Shoja Azari, Fuad Badie, Ramin Bahrani, Bahram Baizai, Rakhshan Banietemad, Manuchehr Bibian, Arlene Dallalfar, Mahmud Dorudian, Ghasem Ebrahimian, Esmail Emami, Tanaz Eshaghian, Shirin Etessam, Anna Fahr, Golshifteh Farahani, Shahriar Farah­vashi, Simin Farkhondeh, Bahman Farmanara, Aryana Farshad, Jalal Fatemi, Tina Gharavi, Ali Ghelichi, Ebrahim Golestan, Shahla Haeri, Mohammad Reza Haeri, Khosrow Haritash, Melissa Hibbard, Mohammad Ali Issari, Erica Jordan, Pirooz Kalantari, Shahram Karimi, Maryam Kashani, Mehrdad Kashani, Maryam Keshavarz, Laleh Khadivi, Hossein Khandan, Fakhri Khorvash, Abbas Kiarostami, Bahman Kiarostami, Masud Kimiai, Parviz Kimiavi, Kim Longinotto, Bahman Maghsoudlou, Moslem Mansouri,

Dariush Mehrjui, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Bahman Mofid, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Behnaz A. Mirzai, Ebrahim Mokhtari, Ali Mortazavi, Manuchehr Moshiri, Fatemeh Motamed Aria, Marva Nabili, Amir Naderi, Shirin Neshat, Asadollah Niknejad, Sara Nodjumi, Annette Mari Olsen, Mehrdad Oskoui, Soudabeh Oskui-Babcock, Faramarz Otan, Katia Forbert Petersen, Rafigh Pooya, Ghazel Radpay, Hamid Rahmanian, Hosain Rajaiyan, Neda Razavipour, Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri, Robert Safarian, Fereydoun Safizadeh, Mehrnaz SaeedVafa, Marjan Safinia, Bigan Saliani, Mohammad Shahba, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Mahvash Sheikholeslami, Amir Shervan, Kam­ran Shirdel, Khosrow Sinai, Manuchehr Tabari, Nasrin Tabatabai, Mitra Tabrizian, Parisa Taghi­ zadeh, Mohammad Tahaminejad, Barbod Taheri, Hosain Taheridoust, Mohammad Tehrani, Susumo Tokomo, Shahin Yazdani, Abbas Yousefpour, and Caveh Zahedi. Each volume’s bibliography provides details of the interviews. I interviewed several cinema and television administrators in Iran during the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods to gain insight into official procedures and perspectives. Those interviewed included Gholamhosain Alaq­ eh­­ band, Mohammad Beheshti, Mohammad Hasan Khoshnevis, Kambiz Mahmoudi, and Alireza Shojanoori. To gain insight into the movies’ sociohistorical contexts of production and reception I interviewed spectators, witnesses, relatives, and scholars. These included Mehrdad Amanat, Zia Ashraf Nasr, Hamid Khan Bakhtiari, Cosroe Chaqueri, Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh, Houshang Golmakani, Faezeh Golshan, Jalal Golshan, Shusha Guppy, Ahmet Gurata, Latifeh Haghighi, Jafar Hakimzadeh, Amir Hassanpour, Badi’eh Misaqiyeh (Eshraghian), Reza Nafisi (my uncle), Parviz Navi, Alaviyeh Okhovat (my grandmother), Batul Okhovat (my mother), Amir Bahman Samsam, Emmanuel Sevrugian, and Ali Shakeri. The Foundation for Iranian Studies in Washington kindly supplied me with transcripts of interviews with major cinema, television, and culture industry leaders of the Pahlavi era, including transcripts of lengthy interviews with Farrokh Gaffary, Shahrokh Golestan, Kambiz Mahmoudi, Mohammad Naficy, Arby Ovanessian, and Mehrdad Pahlbod. Likewise, the Boroumand Foundation in Washington, which documents human rights violations in Iran, provided me with newspaper clippings on the Rex Cinema fire in Abadan and political persecutions in Iran. Poori Soltani, a senior research librarian at the National Library of Iran, graciously supplied me with data on film periodicals. Hosain Tousi, the director general of mcig’s Research and Cinematic Relations immediately after the revolution, provided me with the early, unpublished regulations and guidelines governing film review and censorship under the Islamic Republic. xiv

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Hasan Khoshnevis, director of the National Film Archive of Iran, facilitated my research and film viewing at the archive in Tehran and sat for interviews with me. I also benefited from discussions with other colleagues at the national film archive, namely Gholam Haidari, Fereydoun Khameneipour, and Ladan Taheri. To examine nonfiction films about Iran, I visited the United States National Archives and Records Services and the Library of Congress’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, both in Washington, to examine records of usia/usis films and other documentaries. A visit to the Defense Audiovisual Agency at Norton Air Force Base, San Bernardino, California, produced information on military newsreels and raw footage shot by U.S. military units inside Iran after the Second World War. The ucla Film and Television Archive helped me with information on Hearst News and Hearst Metrotone News newsreels. A visit to the University of South Carolina helped with materials on the following newsreels about Iran: Fox News, Fox Movietone, Paramount News, Pathé News, Universal Newsreel, UPITN, Visnews, and Pathé Sound News. The British National Film Archives and the British Film Institute in London were helpful on various newsreels and documentaries on Iran. I also visited the British Public Records Office to examine the files of the British Council’s cultural activities in Iran. In the United States I obtained the Confidential United States Central Files on Iran’s Internal Affairs and the Foreign Affairs Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Iran for the Second World War and the Cold War through microfilm and Internet research. These British and American diplomatic files are rich in documents relating to Iran’s sociopolitical and cultural conditions, if one persists long enough in sifting through thousands of pages of unrelated materials. They proved invaluable in my charting the rivalry among the former allies after the Second World War to influence the hearts and minds of Iranians through cinema. At the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen, the archivist Mikael Braae helped me with screening and translating the railway film Iran, the New Persia. Another archivist, Palle Bøgelund Petterson, supplied additional printed information and films. Professor I. B. Bondebjerg, head of the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, facilitated my visit and research in the Danish capital. In Washington I was able to examine the collection of Antoin Sevruguin’s photographs at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery thanks to Massumeh Farhad, the chief curator and the curator of Islamic art. In Heidelberg I interviewed Sevruguin’s grandson, Emmanuel Sevrugian, for further insight into his grandfather’s photographic and filmic ac kno wled gments

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career. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, I examined the M. Eleanor Fitzgerald Papers for materials on Nilla Cram Cook, with assistance from the archivist Christel Maass. Finally, I visited the Brigham Young University Archives to examine Merian C. Cooper’s papers on Grass and King Kong, and I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York to view the original blackand-white and tinted versions of Grass, as well as footage shot for its remake. I gained further information about films on Iran by corresponding with the Imperial War Museum in London (for wartime newsreels), the Scottish Film Archive and the British Petroleum Company Limited (for oil films), the United Nations Visual Material Library (for un films on Iran), the Sherman Grinberg Film Library (for various newsreels), the John E. Allen Inc. Film Library (for Kinogram and Telenews newsreels), and the Abraham F. Rad Contemporary Jewish Film Archive in Jerusalem. For television newscasts and documentaries on Iran, I visited and corresponded with various television archives, including the abc News Television Archive, the cbs News Film/Tape Documentary Archive, the nbc News Television Archive, the pbs News Tape Archive, the bbc News Television Archive, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the ctv Television Network (Canada), and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive in Nashville. Abazar Sepehri, head Middle Eastern librarian at the University of Texas, Austin, helped me many times to track down Persian-language sources and articles. Likewise, Jet Prendeville, the art and architecture librarian at Rice University, assisted me in tracking down English and foreign-language film sources. Academic colleagues in various disciplines in the United States were very helpful. Paula Amad and Peter Bloom provided me with copies of the film Yellow Cruise and with relevant materials on it; Jennifer Fey commented on my paper on Rakhshan Banietemad, as did Janet Afary on the chapters on Reza Shah and the preface, Marianne Hopmann on my discussion of the oral tradition, and Majid Naficy on parts of chapter 6 (vol. 2) and the preface (vol. 1). George Marcus, Chuck Kleinhans, Mehdy Naficy, Nahal Naficy, Azar Nafisi, and Mohammad Nafissi commented on the preface. Philip Lutgendorf shared with me his unpublished paper on Indian cinema, and Natasa Durovicova shared her articles on sound and dubbing. Camron Michael Amin provided information on U.S. government files on Iran, and Amir Hassanpour provided information on Kurdish cinema and satellite television. Jalil Doostkhah helped with the names of the Isfahan circle of intellectuals. Mehrnaz SaeedVafa was extremely helpful throughout my research, supplying me with films

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and assisting me in tracking down information on Iranian cinema and filmmakers. Colleagues in Iran were also very helpful. Houshang Golmakani, editor in chief of Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film, made sure that I received issues of the journal, sent me stills that I requested, and assisted with other inquiries. Mohammad Atebbai of Iranian Independents put several documentaries at my disposal. The documentarian Pirooz Kalantari was conscientious and generous in supplying me with documents, books, films, photographs, and other research materials from Iran, far beyond his own works. Shahin Kharazmi of Tehran’s Industrial Management Institute supplied me with data on media uses and audience demography in Iran. Esmail Emami facilitated my meeting with members of the Iranian Society of Documentary Filmmakers in Tehran. Mohammad Tahaminejad and Homayun Emami also helped with information on documentary cinema. Elsewhere, the art curator Rose Issa in London shared with me videos and posters of Iranian movies. The journalist Homa Sarshar and the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History in Los Angeles kindly supplied me with a copy of the film A Mother for Shamsi. Mehdi Zamani facilitated my interview in Los Angeles with the actor Bahman Mofid, while Mohammad Ali Yazdi did the same for my interview with Sohrab Shahid Saless. The photographer and artist Soody Sharifi kindly put at my disposal her photograph of the “movie set.” Sima Shakhsari of the University of California, Berkeley, helped to identify Iranian blogs and movie blogs. Debra Zimmerman of Women Make Movies made Iranian films available for my viewing, as did Barbara Scharess, the director of programming at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center. I helped launch two long-lasting annual film festivals at universities in the United States. I worked with Geoffrey Gilmore in 1990, then of the ucla Film and Television Archive, to curate one of the first and longest-running festivals of Iranian cinema in the United States. In Houston I worked with Marian Luntz, the film curator of the Museum of Fine Art, and Charles Dove, cinema director at Rice University, to organize an annual festival of Iranian films there. Programming and curating these festivals, which still continue, provided me with important venues and opportunities for further research, film viewing, interviews with filmmakers, and the promotion of Iranian cinema. At Rice University my research assistant Danny Stuyck and the visual resource assistant Kathleen Hamilton scanned still images for the book. Michael Dyrby Jensen translated a Danish text for me. The anthropology doctoral student Nahal Naficy was a valuable, resourceful, and cheerful help as my primary bilingual research assistant. She wrote the draft of the caption on

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Sharifi’s “movie set” artwork (chapter 4, vol. 2). At Northwestern University my research assistants Neha Kamdar, Daniel Bashara, John Nicolau, Jason Roberts, and Racquel Gates helped with the book’s images and bibliography. The research phases of the book were funded in large part by summer research grants that I received from the deans of humanities at Rice University, Gayle Stokes and Gary Wihl, which allowed me to take research trips and to visit archives in various countries, as well as to write. The Art History Department’s Segal Fund at Rice University paid for my research assistants and equipment. A travel-to-collection grant from ucla’s Von Gruenbaum Center for Middle East Studies made possible my research visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The writing phase of the book was primarily funded by major national grants from the National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship (neh05020401) and the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for Humanities International and Area Studies Fellowship (r14820–363000, neh fa-51979, osr 05020401), which Rice University matched, thus allowing me to spend the academic year 2004–5 entirely on writing the bulk of the manuscript. Gary Wihl also kindly provided subvention funds for the publication of this multivolume book, as did Barbara O’Keefe, Northwestern University’s dean of the School of Communication. Northwestern University in Qatar also contributed. I thank all these institutions and individuals for their generous assistance. My editor Ann Klefstad went through the manuscript as usual with a finetoothed comb, helping to sculpt the text. Ken Wissoker, editorial director at Duke University Press, was a delight to work with; he guided the project with openness, patience, wisdom, and élan. A project as extensive as this naturally involves not only professional colleagues but also family and friends in various witting and unwitting capacities. My siblings—Naficeh, Nahid, Nasrin, Nooshin, Mehdy, and Majid—all helped in one way or another with research, information gathering, and the mailing of films and other materials for the book. I interviewed my mother and my paternal grandmother about their social lives and experiences with cinema. I learned to appreciate Iranian popular culture, perhaps initially from the joyful and lilting manner in which my mother sang the popular songs of her youth, songs that her strict Muslim parents had forbidden to her. My father’s research-mindedness and intellectual curiosity, which turned our childhood outings into lessons in local botany and medical anthropology, became a model for my commitment to academic research and education. Durxviii

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ing my research travels many family members and friends in various places provided me with a home away from home: Mehdy Naficy and Fariba JafarShaghaghi in Heidelberg; Mohammad Nafissi and Georgiana Parry-Crooke in London; Fatemeh Ebtehaj and Hamid Hakimzadeh in London; Azar Nafisi and Bijan Naderi in Washington; Nastaran and Vahid Naficy in Tehran; and Paul and Helen Edwards in Helena, Montana. Montana’s majestic and enduring natural world offered an implacable contrast against which human history, particularly one as recent and as marred with moral and political ambiguities as that of the cinema and entertainment fields, found its proper perspective. This book has been with me for so long that it feels like a third child, older than my two biological children, Cameron and Shayda, both of whom are now thriving, idealistic young people close to the age at which I unknowingly began this project. My life partner Carol (Kelly) Edwards has been with me every step of the way, through thick and thin, in Iran, in the United States, and in many other places in between. All three have been unconditionally supportive of my life choices, my career and its demands, including this book project (Kelly scanned many of the stills). I hope that I have, in the end, been deserving of their respect, love, and trust.

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orga niz at ion of t he volumes

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he book is divided into four volumes, covering the social history of over a century of Iranian cinema, from around 1897 to about 2010. The history of Iranian society and the cinema it produced in this period is bookended by two revolutions: the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution, which brought in a constitutional monarchy, and the 1978–79 Islamic Revolution, which installed a republican theocratic state. While the impact of the first revolution on cinema and film culture was apparently limited and inchoate, the latter revolution profoundly affected them, resulting in their unprecedented efflorescence. As a work of social history and theory, these volumes deal not only with such chronological developments in society and in the film industry but also with the synchronic contexts, formations, dispositions, and maneuvers that overdetermined modernity in Iran and a dynamically evolving film industry and its unique products. I locate the film industry and its mode of production, narratives, aesthetics, and generic forms in the interplay of deeply rooted Iranian performative and visual arts and what was imported, adopted, adapted, translated, mistranslated, and hybridized from the West. The interplay between Iranian and Islamic philosophies and aesthetics complicated and channeled cinema, particularly that involving women, in ways unique to Iran, which are discussed throughout the volumes. Likewise, the contribution of Iranian ethnoreligious minorities, both widespread and profound, gave Iranian cinema additional specificity. The volumes also situate Iranian cinema at the intersection of state-driven authoritarian modernization, nationalist and Islamist politics, and geopolitics during its tumultuous century, charting the manner in which local, national, regional, and international powers competed for ascendancy in Iran, affect-

ing what Iranians saw on screens, what they produced, and the technologies they adopted. The logic of dividing the work into four volumes is driven by both sociopolitical developments and the evolution of the film industry. While these volumes are autonomous, each contributes to the understanding and appreciation of the others, as certain theoretical, stylistic, industrial, commercial, cultural, religious, sociopolitical, biographical, authorial, and governmental elements form lines of inquiry pursued throughout, gathering momentum and weight. Each volume has a table of contents, a bibliography, an index, and when needed appendices.

Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 This volume offers a theory linking Iranian modernity and national identity with the emergence of an inchoate artisanal cinema and with an othered cinematic subjectivity. Qajar-era cinema consisted of the exhibition of foreign actualities and narratives and the production of a limited number of domestic actualities and comic skits by pioneer exhibitors and producers, all of whom are featured. The image of women on the screens and the presence of women as spectators in movie houses proved controversial, resulting in the first act of film censorship. Borrowing from the curtain reciting tradition, live movie translators (dilmaj) helped increase narrative comprehension and the enjoyment of Western movies. Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty in 1925 and ruled until 1941. During his rule, the first Pahlavi period, the state implemented an authoritarian syncretic Westernization program that attempted to modernize and secularize the multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic Iranians into a homogenous modern nation. Cinematic representations of a fast modernizing Iran in documentaries and fiction movies were encouraged, photography and movie production were tightly controlled, movie houses were regulated, and perceived affronts to Iran in Western documentaries were taken seriously. The veil was outlawed and dandies flourished. All these developments receive extensive coverage in this volume. Despite efforts to centralize and control cinema, film production proved marginal to state formation and remained artisanal. Only one silent feature film was produced domestically, while all sound features were produced by an Iranian expatriate in India. This latter fact and others discussed in the volume show Iranian cinema’s trans­ national nature from the start. xxii

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Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 During the second Pahlavi period (Mohammad Reza Shah, 1941–79), cinema flourished and became industrialized, producing at its height over ninety films a year. The state was instrumental in building the infrastructures of the cinema and television industries, and it instituted a vast apparatus of censorship and patronage. During the Second World War and its aftermath, the three major Allied powers—the United Kingdom, the United States, and the ussr—competed with each other to control what Iranians saw on movie screens. One chapter examines this fascinating history. In the subsequent decades, two major parallel cinemas emerged: the commercial filmfarsi movies, popular with average spectators, forming the bulk of the output, and a smaller but influential cinema of dissent, the new-wave cinema. The commercial filmfarsi movies, exemplified by the stewpot and tough-guy genres discussed extensively in two chapters, were for entertainment purposes and drew their power and charm from their stars and their rootedness in Iranian traditions, which were juxtaposed favorably and often comically or melodramatically with modern Western traditions. A dynamic nonfiction cinema evolved, which receives a chapter. Ironically, the state both funded and censored much of the new-wave cinema, which grew bolder in its criticism and impact as Pahlavi authoritarianism consolidated. The new-wave films, produced by the collaboration of Westernized filmmakers with modernist dissident writers, did well in international film festivals, starting the globalization of Iranian cinema. The impending revolution could retrospectively be read in the fear-driven narratives of the new-wave films and in the various cultural struggles around official culture and arts festivals, the censorship of films, religious sermons on audiocassettes, poetry reading nights, television trials and confessions, and underground filming, all of which I discuss at length.

Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 Identified toward the end of the Shah’s rule as one of the agents of moral corruption in the country, movies and movie houses became targets of a rising anti-Shah movement, resulting in the destruction of a third of all movie houses nationwide. This volume charts both such revolutionary destruction and the subsequent rebuilding and evolution of the film and media industries. Many above-the-line personnel in these industries found themselves org a n izatio n o f the vo lumes

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sidelined, banned, arrested, deprived of property, or exiled. The star system, a major attraction of filmfarsi cinema, was thus dismantled. Movies were banned, cut, redubbed, and painted over to remove offending features. After such iconoclastic destructions and purification the new Islamic regime undertook a wide-ranging effort to institutionalize a new film industry whose values would be commensurate with the newly formulated Islamicate values. The first rules and regulations governing film production and exhibition were adopted in 1982. Like the second Pahlavi regime, the ayatollahs’ regime put into place a strong, centralized, and draconian system of state regulation and patronage to encourage politically correct movies. The import of foreign movies oscillated but was eventually banned, leaving the field open for a new domestic cinema. The long war with Iraq, the gendered segregation of space, and the imposition of the veil on women encouraged certain ideological and aesthetic trends. Foremost was the reconceptualization of cinema from a despised agent of corruption and othering to an agent of nation building and selfing. However, the resulting Islamicate cinema and culture were neither homogeneous nor static. They evolved with considerable personal, institutional, and ideological struggles.

Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 The revolutionary experience, the bloody eight-year war with Iraq, and the perceived Western cultural invasion of Iran all encouraged soul searching, national epistemophilia, and a desire for self-representation, resulting in an array of documentary films and film forms about the revolution, war, and the various social ills and inequalities that accumulated under the Islamist regime. The state-run television and fiction film industries, too, funded and supported filmmakers committed to Islam who made powerful “imposed war” movies in which sacred subjectivity replaced modernist subjectivity. Women’s presence both on camera and behind the camera increased significantly in all genres and types of films, in both the television and movie industries, leading to a veritable “women’s cinema.” The veil evolved from a repressive social institution to a dynamic social practice and critical aesthetics. A deepening sociopolitical and cultural struggle over cinema, media, and culture, and ultimately the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, emerged in the country. This was reflected in, and shaped by, a new form of public diplomacy, chiefly between Iran and the United States, during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, which intensified under his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. xxiv

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In a new “cultural turn” the antagonistic governments began to recruit all sorts of mutual domestic, diasporic, and international film, television, radio, and Internet media and formations to serve this diplomacy, sometimes with dire consequences for the participants. Foreign and exile videos and satellite televisions were officially banned, but enforcement was chaotic, encouraging a thriving culture of resistance that continues to date. With the rise of opposition to the Islamic Republic regime a dissident Internet cinema emerged. The postrevolution era bred its own dissident art-house parallel cinema, involving some of the best Pahlavi-era new-wave directors and a new crop of innovative postrevolution directors, placing Iranian cinema on the map of the vital world cinemas. They brought self-respect and prestige for Iranians at home and abroad. The displacement, dispersion, and exile of a massive number of Iranians, many in the visual and performing arts and cinema and television, resulted in new formations in Iran’s social history and cinematic history—a diasporic formation of people with a complex subjectivity and an “accented cinema,” made by first-generation émigrés and their second- and third-­generation descendants. Both the wide circulation of Iran-made films and those Iranians made in the diaspora, as well as the vast diasporic dispersion of Iranians, helped globalize Iranian cinema. Each of these developments is discussed in its own chapter.

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 have used several types of illustration here, each providing supplementary or complementary material to the text. Production stills show something of the behind-the-scenes process. Frame enlargements, taken directly from films or videos, offer visuals for textual analyses of the films’ aesthetic and generic systems. Posters offer not only an encapsulated rendition of the film by artists other than filmmakers but also showcase the art of poster design and production, which form important components of the movies’ publicity, exhibition, and reception. Like the movies themselves, this art also evolved over time, an evolution discernable in the posters included in the present volumes. Cartoons and other material objects about cinema demonstrate the wider circulation of things filmic among Iranians. The flyers announcing film screenings and cultural and political events featuring screenings served as important vehicles in exile for advertising, political agitprop, and film exhibition immediately after the 1978–79 revolution. They provide a good sense of the films, of the political culture of the time, and of the sponsoring groups. Finally, the many tables in the book offer other forms of data for the analysis of the films’ cultural contexts, such as audience demography, production output, film export and import, organizations involved in production, and the regulations concerning censorship and banning of movies. Because of the diversity of sources and the deterioration of some films and videos, the quality of the pictorial illustrations varies.

pr eface How It All Began

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istory is written by individuals who have their own personal and intellectual histories and perspectives. This preface is a history of my engagement with the subject of Iranian cinema and its place in the world. It is not my autobiography or my family’s history, but a cultural autobiography about my contentious love affair—and that of other Iranians—with cinema, Iran, and the West. As such it offers a microcosmic perspective on Iranian culture and society during the second Pahlavi period and its transition to the Islamic Republic. I watched Western movies, made films, and taught and wrote about cinema. My affair with cinema began early with a fascination with photography and translations of Western novels, adapted to the screen. Like all love affairs it had moments of disillusionment, misunderstanding, hostility, and betrayal.

Taking Photographs I was born in the historic and magnificent city of Isfahan, and I roamed the place with my father’s Kodak Brownie box camera. I remember the small color image of the viewfinder and its sharp contrast with the resultant blackand-white photos. That image was as vivid as a dream, like the single 35mm color frames of American movies, which I used to purchase from street hawkers in my hometown. I acquired my own camera as a gift from our neighbor, Heshmatollah

­ ehesh on Jahan Nama Street, near Darvazeh Dowlat. He had three children: D The eldest, Keyvan, was blind. One fine, sunny, wintry day the haunting music coming from Dehesh’s household attracted me, and I went up to our rooftop to investigate. From there I could see Dehesh’s yard paved with brick, in the center of which sat a raised, oblong pool. Four garden plots separated the pool from the paved yard, and four thirsty tongues of the yard reached between those plots and rested on the side of the pool. It was a cold day, and the white mulberry trees in the garden were bare. To my amazement I observed that it was Keyvan who was playing this beautiful tune on his violin as he walked around the pool casting his shadow on the gently rippling water. Keyvan’s father took him to West Germany for treatment, where he stayed. His father returned, however, and brought me a present—a 35mm Agfa camera. I was thrilled and grateful. Five decades later, I am struck by this irony: gaining a second sight with the camera at the age of thirteen or fourteen thanks to a sightless boy. Using this camera I documented bicycle outings with my family and excursions with school friends to the countryside—Kuleh Parcheh, Abshar, Chiriun, Kuh Donbeh, Atashgah, and Bagh Abrisham. I felt lonely most of the time in those days, and taking pictures helped cement our relationships, as for weeks afterward we traded and copied photographs. In a fatalist society, pictures were proof of our existence, shoring us up against the vagaries of time and history. My current interest in documentation must have begun then. I assiduously took pictures of my two favorite subjects: the very young and the very old. I thought that children needed documentation to celebrate their arrival into the world (and besides, they were very cute), while the elders needed to prove their existence before departing into the netherworld. But I went beyond simply taking photographs, mostly in our new house on Jahan Nama Street, which since then has been torn down and rebuilt in honor of my father as “Doctor Naficy’s Clinic.” I asked the elder family members whose pictures I took to write some words of wisdom for me in an “advice notebook.” Following the custom of gender segregation, I had two notebooks: one for women and one for men. Looking over these books now, I see the Islamic, moralistic, and modernist ideologies of the authors shine through the variety of elegant handwritings (good penmanship was valued then), colors of ink, and length. (Uncle Alinaqi’s moralistic advice, for example, is thirty pages long and in green ink, while my dad’s advice, written in 1961, is ninety-seven pages in blue ink, ending with the French adage “La fonction fait l’organ,” form follows function.) xxx

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The usual mise-en-scène of my family portraits is a single individual in the center, standing near a tree in our backyard, or seated on a sun-drenched balcony. Expressions in these medium shots are generally serious, composed, and the subjects are looking directly, sometimes with a hint of a smile, at me behind the camera. This aesthetics of portraiture somehow migrated into the hundreds of freehand drawings that I have made over the years of public intellectuals and cultural critics (figures 1–12). The modernist belief in individuals’ uniqueness, subjectivity, and agency informing this aesthetic is also inscribed in the portraits of filmmakers strewn throughout the book.

Figures 1–12  Author’s freehand portrait drawings, 1980s–1990s. Collection of the author clockwise from top left: 1  The American historian Barbara Metcalf 2  The Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis 3  The French cultural critic Jean-François Lyotard

clockwise from top left: 4  The Iranian-British social critic Homa Katouzian 5  The Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida 6  The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas

clockwise from top left: 7  The Iranian American women’s studies scholar Nayereh Tohidi 8  The American anthropologist Paul Rabinow 9  The British filmmaker and film scholar Peter Wollen

clockwise from top left: 10  Author’s self-portrait 11  The Ethiopian American film scholar Teshome H. Gabriel 12  The American film historian Tom Gunning

Elder Muslim women objected to being photographed unveiled; some even objected to being photographed altogether. It is true that I was mahram (related) and thus halal (permitted) to them, and they did not have to wear the veil for me, but the technicians who developed the pictures in the photo shops were not.1 I resolved this dilemma by taking candid shots without veils or taking posed photos with veils. Clearly, technology was intruding into the gendered domestic space: it was making the sacred profane and the private public.

Building a Film Projector Chaharbagh Avenue was Isfahan’s Champs-Élysées: ancient, beautiful, soulful, and lined with tall sycamores and modern shops, including most of the city’s movie houses. Street vendors there sold short strips of movies, single movie frames, movie posters, printed lyrics of pop songs, lottery tickets, cigarettes, and candy. The film frames I bought there as a young boy typically showed Tarzan or handsome and beautiful movie stars. At night, I would go to one of the unoccupied rooms in our huge three-story house, shine a little black flashlight onto each frame, and watch the projected color images on the wall. I also found other creative uses for these film frames: Sometimes I folded a frame over itself so that when pressed on one side it produced a loud click. In a small way I had appropriated a Western commodity as raw material to make a native product, reversing the usual economic relationship. I enjoyed squeezing my clicker over and over to annoy my mother, who would shoo me away. A little later, I built a wooden light-box with a window in its top. Inside, I placed a light bulb, a reflector, and a roll of cartoon images, which I had cut out and pasted together from the children’s magazine Kayhan-e Bacheh­ha (Children’s Kayhan), the subscription to which I had won in a contest. By cranking the handles on the outside of the box, I could view the cartoon strip as it passed in front of the window. I added a lens to the window and was able to project the cartoon images on the wall (ignoring the reversed writing), creating my first film show for my family. In an entrepreneurial move, I think I even charged them admission. I continued to improve the system. Since the children’s magazine was a monthly, I soon ran out of cartoons, and my uncles and I had to draw by hand our own cartoon strips for the primitive projector. I still remember the exuberant comments and the oohs and aahs of the family audience during these shows. My uncles Reza and Hosain Nafisi, who also built a hand-cranked cartoon projector in the mid-1950s, solved the problem of the reversed projection of the alphabets by reading the dialogue aloud to the ho w it all began

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spectators like curtain reciters and movie-house translators, discussed extensively here (Naficy 2007b). The filmmaker Asadollah Niknejad, who emigrated to the United States, told me that he had been fascinated with the idea of building a projector in his youth and, indeed, had manufactured a 35mm model, which he said still works. He showed me a picture of himself as a young boy with it. My distant cousin, Alireza, who later became a physician and married my sister Nasrin, built a rather elaborate 35mm film projector with his friend Homayun Shahriari when they were in high school (figure 13). As he told me in a telephone interview from Isfahan, building the projector was a summer project, which the two friends embarked on for several reasons germane to Iranian film history: going to the movies involved frustrating interruptions in the 1950s, as the screenings in commercial cinemas were frequently cut and even cancelled because of loss of electricity. The spectators could reenter the cinemas later when electricity was restored by showing their ticket stubs. “To see a movie in full,” said Alireza Naficy, “sometimes, we would have to return to the movie house several times, a very frustrating experience” (Naficy 2006c). In addition, moviegoing was a morally corrupting and physically dangerous experience, as sexual predators preyed on their young victims inside and outside these establishments. Seeing the movies at home, therefore, was an attractive and safe alternative; yet few people could afford the cost of purchasing portable projectors and renting movies. This made constructing homemade movie projectors both a viable and a challenging solution, particularly for scientific and modern-minded youths.

13  Building a 35mm film projector. My cousin, Alireza Naficy, eighteen years old (left), and his classmate, Homayun Shahriari (right), with the 35mm projector they built in 1955 in the backyard of Shahriai’s house in Isfahan. Still courtesy of Alireza Naficy

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Electrical service stoppages were not the only source of movie interruption. Because of inferior projectors and old “junk” film prints, discussed in these pages, movies often broke during projection, causing projectionists to cut off strips of films when resplicing. The availability of these film strips, which the street vendors sold by the meter or frame on Chaharbagh Avenue in Isfahan and in other major cities, was an enticement to young modernists and inventors. Likewise, Point Four film projectionists of the United States Information Agency (usia), who drove into schools and other public places in their mobile film units and showed films on their portable 16mm projectors, provided an up-close model of a projector for interested youths. Yet much creativity and perseverance was needed to build a homemade projector, given the limited technical knowledge, equipment, and resources. “To begin with,” Alireza Naficy told me, “to build our projector we copied the pictures of a film projector we had seen in a magazine, as well as the actual Point Four projectors we had seen. We had no real blueprint for it. It was all based on visual cognition.” Like the pioneers of cinema, they built their equipment in an artisanal fashion with whatever was available or adaptable. The projector’s body was made with planks of wood obtained from crates. For the lens, they adapted an ordinary magnifier, which they installed inside a tube; for the claw mechanism that pulled the film using sprocket holes, they drove nails into a wooden spool they obtained from a textile mill; for the motor to drive the projector, they cannibalized an electric fan they had purchased for the purpose; and for the belt connecting the motor to the claw mechanism, they waxed some twine. After all this, they discovered their projector’s Achilles’ heel: they needed a shutter and an intermittent movement mechanism to hold each frame still for a fraction of a second in front of the lens. This proved an insurmountable ordeal and, anyway, by then the summer vacation had ended, and Shahriari’s parents wanted some results for their investment. Most early cinema pioneers in Iran suffered such constraints and impediments and invented their own artisanal, ad hoc solutions. The two entrepreneurs, Alireza and Homayun, were forced to stage not a film performance but a slideshow, so to speak, as they projected each frame of the filmstrips they had bought, one frame at a time. They invited a large group of spectators, consisting of Shahriari’s extended family members from the small town of Najafabad nearby. “They loved what they saw. Most of them were villagers, and they seemed to be more fascinated by the technology of projection than by the images themselves—the projector’s turning reels, its noise, its light—as though the machine was magically materializing the images by itself.” ho w it all began

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That building a film projector formed part of a larger techno-scientific modernization is borne out by the vials of chemicals on the table in front of their projector in figure 13, where the two budding scientists are pouring some chemical into a container with an eyedropper (Shahriari would later become an electronics engineer and Naficy a virologist). The map of Iran tacked to the wall indexes the national aspiration associated with modernity. Around the same time, following the instructions and diagrams in ­Kayhan-e Bachehha, I built with great expectations a radio set that required an earphone for listening. I scoured Isfahan’s electrical shops, but the more I sought the less I found. The only thing I came up with was an old headset from the Second World War, which did not work. Crushed, I gave up that project, still tasting the disappointment half a century later. Taking photographs, building a projector for paper film rolls, and making an amateur radio were precursors to building a film projector, which seemed to be both a dream and a challenge for many enterprising and modernist young boys. The difficulties of these projects pointed to the underdevelopment of technical knowledge and infrastructure in Iran that dogged not only the amateur world but also the field of professional film, keeping it an artisanal cottage industry for decades.

Watching Literature-Based Movies The relationship between modernist and Western literature and cinema was reciprocal, for viewing the adaptations validated both the original novel and the experience of the cinema. They both vividly represented the Western Other with whom I had to come to terms. I spent the summer of 1960 reading all the great novels that I could get my hands on. I read more than thirty of them and saw many film adaptations. Yul Brynner and Maria Schell brought to life the tumultuous but difficult text of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Kara­ mazov (1958) in Richard Brooks’s screen adaptation. Impressed, after the film I noted in a letter to my uncle Reza, dated 28 Farvardin 1339 (17 April 1960), “The performances were magnificent.” On a warm May night, I took my Agfa camera to Mayak Cinema, which was showing Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1956), directed by King Vidor. I wanted to take color slides of the film. Unsure of how the ushers and spectators would react, I hid the camera under my jacket. During close-ups of Pierre and Natasha (Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn), I discreetly took timed pictures, holding my breath to steady my hands. Captivated by the great novel, I xxxviii

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had spent weeks reading and annotating it—noting in my diary, with a combination of awe and arrogance, “the breadth and the style of the book is utterly amazing. I am trying to understand it as fully as possible because it is worth it” (22 Ordibehesht 1339 / 12 May 1960). Holding the color slides of Hepburn’s enchanting face to the light felt like holding a piece of a dream, a condensed image of Russia and America. At night, I sometimes put myself to sleep by going over the scenes of recent movies. That night, after returning home from War and Peace, as I was falling asleep I recalled scenes from Les Misérables (1956), directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois, based on Victor Hugo’s novel, and starring the great Jean Gabin. I wrote my uncle Reza about this film and collected newspaper accounts of it. Two summers earlier I had been with my family in Khunsar, a cool, mountainous region, reading Les Misérables during long afternoons. Everyone took a one- or two-hour nap. All was silent but for the quiet murmuring of the brook nearby. I would lie down on my back and voraciously consume the Hugo tale, often crying at the trials of Cozette, Marius, and Jean Valjean. I filled half a notebook with quotations from the book. The memories of reading the novels and watching their movie adaptations affected my dreaming. During waking hours, these filmic recollections enlivened my otherwise drab and lonely existence. I noted in my diary, “In my life these memories and dreams are all that I have to be satisfied with” (22 Ordibehesht 1339 / 12 May 1960). I was being hailed by the world the foreign dream factories were offering. The Russian film that affected me the most was Mikhail Kalatozov’s romantic war movie, The Cranes Are Flying (1957). The heroism of the Russian people and the lost romance of the protagonists moved me, infatuated as I was at the time with leftist politics and classic Russian novels. The film’s war scenes and the haunting face of the lead actress, Tatyana Samoilova, remained forever etched on my mind. Now, more than a half a century later, reading over the plot summary from my diary of that year, I am struck by the image of the cranes flying in the sky, cranes Tatyana watched to remember her lost love, Boris, killed in the war. When I remember that image now, I am reminded of my own loss—my country, lost to exile. Such is the power of symmetry, of cinematic memory.

Creating a Private Family Republic of Letters Of course, I read more than just the literature that had been turned into movies. In fact, the literature that attracted me increasingly as I entered high ho w it all began

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14  In a dandy move, the author wearing a “Duglasi mustache” and coiffed hair strikes a movie-star pose. Collection of the author

school was socially conscious novels and leftist social criticism, many of which were either officially or unofficially banned. Jack London’s The Iron Heel, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, all in Persian translation, and Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi (Westernstruckness) were among these, which I borrowed from a friend, Naser Motii, the Sa’di High School librarian (these banned books were not supposed to circulate), bought under the table from a sympathetic bookseller, or exchanged secretly with friends in alleys. These simple acts of reading turned us into criminals. We played flâneur on Chaharbagh Avenue or along the Zayandeh River’s breezy boulevards, visiting bookshops and hanging out at cafés, all the while discussing politics and literature. Some of us dressed as Westernized dandies ( fokoli) and were photographed in movie star poses (figure 14). Having been raised in a devout but enlightened and open-minded Muslim family (followers of the progressive Sheikhi school of Shiism), we saw no contradiction between participating in Shiite sermons and passion plays (taziyeh) or between reading Russian and Soviet literature about peasants and workers and sporting Western fashions and going to Western movies. We were becoming modern through our personal syncretism, much as the nation was becoming modern through state-sanctioned syncretic Westernization. A key source of intellectual nourishment was my Naficy/Okhovat paternal and maternal family culture and its institutions.2 Although not explicitly oppositional politically, these men and women served to create an alternate universe, a familial republic of letters, for the children, which made us indexl

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15  My contribution at age fourteen to the Neda-ye Elm family magazine (vol. 3, no. 63, 30 Shahrivar 1337/21 September 1958), is a curious article on “metaposcopy,” which analyzes the relationship of the placement of moles on a human face to the owner’s character and destiny. Collection of the author

pendent from both mainstream politics and Shiite religion and helped both nurture us intellectually and emotionally and protect us morally and politically from the society at large. And the family was large enough to be self-sufficient socially and culturally. The culture it produced consisted of a three-thousandvolume children’s lending library, handwritten magazines composed and illustrated by children, and plays and art exhibitions that children organized. We named the library Ibn Sina Library in honor of the great Persian physician and scientist Ali Abu Sina (980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna. One of our family magazines was Neda-ye Elm (Call of Science), to which I contributed (figure 15). This republic of letters was an inchoate civil society institution of the type considered necessary for ushering in modernity, one rooted both in traditional kinship and in modern individualist structures. Such informal familial institution building formed a mode of resistance in the face of oppression from both the state and the tradition. And it foreshadowed the “cinematic family mode of production” that emerged later, particularly during ho w it all began

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the Islamic Republic period. This modernist republic also involved engaging in what Foucault called “technologies of the self,” a set of practices by which subjects monitor and constitute themselves discursively (1988). Most family members kept journals, composed poetry, wrote letters of which they kept copies, and penned short stories. By so doing they reflected on themselves and constructed their position in the world. Although these compositions were private, on many occasions the writers read excerpts or the full texts of these works to family members. In this manner modern subjectivity and individuality were shaped and regulated in the fields of power—­vis-à-vis family, state, and society. As I entered high school, the family circle proved insufficient. In the late 1950s, I branched out by joining the Saeb Literary Society in Isfahan, which in those days witnessed the rise of leftist and modernist intellectuals, like me, against the old-fashioned traditionalist members. Literary societies are important civil institutions with deep roots in modern Iranian history. Most were oppositional and spurred modernist literature and art. Saeb society members attended meetings in a room in the garden of the tomb of the famed poet Saeb Isfahani and went to the countryside to read and interpret modern poetry and literary works all day, with breaks for lunch, play, and literary gossip. Older members like Jalil Doostkhah and Hushang Golshiri took the lead and mentored the younger ones. Some of the Saeb members and their allies later created another literary circle, which published the Jong-e Isfahan literary magazine, whose members became well-known writers, novelists, poets, scholars, translators, and screen writers on the national scene and still later, in the diaspora, created influential literary, cultural, and cinematic societies, periodicals, and venues.3 In one of the society’s public night sessions, I read a polemical rant against a famous traditional town poet (I think it was Shakib-e Isfahani) all the while trembling with fear of being arrested by the Savak (secret police). Some members used the cover of the literary society for antigovernment political activities, meeting with friends in each others’ homes, which in 1961 led to the arrest of the Group of 92 Teachers (Goruh-e 92 Moallem), charged with being Communist or Tudeh Party members. The arrest of the group dissolved the Saeb Literary Society. Had I not gone abroad for higher education I might have been arrested as well. As we entered the 1960s, the fear of secret police surveillance, even for harmless intellectual pursuits, became pervasive, making our social life oppressive, pushing us back into less public gatherings, trusted family circles, or exile. Our anxieties found wide currency in modernist poetry and were inscribed graphically in the dissident new-wave films of the 1960s and 1970s. xlii

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Going to the Movies and Religious Sermons in Isfahan While engaged in these cultural and literary endeavors, I also attended the movies with a different set of friends and family members. My first recollection of watching films dates back to the early 1950s when I was younger than eight. I remember being extremely anxious watching a particular scene involving voyeurism through a high window, the specifics of which I do not now recall. All I remember is intense emotion, anxiety, and suspense. I clutched my father for safety. My uncle Reza, who is only a few years older than me, also remembers that at ten, while watching Tarzan, he felt extremely frightened of the possibility of the lions charging and devouring him (Naficy 1986). As far as the movie house itself is concerned, my first recollection is of a long, narrow, place almost resembling a tunnel, with a high ceiling, filled with people, smoke, and noise. This was a modest commercial cinema that, I think, was called Metropole Cinema, located near our house on Lower Chaharbagh Avenue (it later became a shopping plaza). Before a film began and during intermissions, amid the clamor of the young male spectators (I do not remember any women), a voice could be heard above the general hubbub, calling: “Coca, Fanta, cigarettes, nuts, snacks.” It came from a young, disheveled boy carrying a wooden tray hung from his neck. On it he carried bottles of soft drinks (recently introduced in Iran), lemonade, cigarettes, and ajil— an assortment of lightly salted watermelon, melon, and pumpkin seeds and nuts. Spectators talked to the screen, commenting on the action or addressing the characters. As my uncle Reza recalled, when Tarzan was screened, every few minutes a Persian-language intertitle interrupted the film, and literate spectators read the titles out loud for the benefit of those who could not read (Naficy 2007b). Despite the advent of sound, spectators continued to talk back. They would not hesitate to tell the actors what they should do next: “Oh, watch out, he is behind you,” “Yeah, punch him hard, in the stomach, hit him, hit him!” During the screening of Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), when Victor Mature as Samson stood in the doorway to push the pillars apart and destroy the temple, the spectators urged him on and applauded him wildly. I still remember the outstretched arms waving in the eerie, blue light of the projector in the smoke-filled hall. In the early decades, since most cinemas had only one film projector, a movie was never shown in its entirety without several intermissions, needed to change the reels. During the first intermission, spectators would noisily migrate from row to row to sit near their friends or in better seats. In the ho w it all began

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movie houses that allowed women, these were separated from the men by a curtain or a divider erected in the middle. Even lacking an official barrier, women usually sat on one side and men on the other. Both the religious and some secular elites opposed moviegoing on religious and moral grounds. The penalty for intransigence varied. For example, in 1951, my then teenage uncles Reza and Hosain, who were under the guardianship of their older brother Karim, received beatings from him for going to the movies. I remember Karim punishing Hosain on an otherwise beautiful autumn afternoon under the grape arbor of my paternal grandmother’s house. He was lashing Hosain with a long, lean branch of the plum tree, which he had earlier soaked in the yard pool. Reza, too, says that one night returning home late from a movie, he and Hosain felt a shadow move among the trees outside their home. They were spooked until they heard a hesitant voice asking if it was them (their neighborhood, Pa Qal’eh, had no electricity yet). They immediately recognized the voice of their brother, who was lurking in the shadows with his limber switch in hand. It was too late for a beating that night, but its inevitability made them toss and turn all night. The next day, they received their due punishment. To avoid these violent episodes, Hosain often lied about his whereabouts, sometimes stating he had been to a religious sermon (rowzeh) instead of the movies. As will be seen in these pages, movies and mosque did not always stand in opposition to each other, as many functional parallels existed between them, something both traditionalists and modernists exploited. Even my father, who was a modernist Muslim physician and liberal in his attitudes toward modernity and Western institutions (he wore a bowtie in his youth and received his heart specialization from Harvard), distrusted cinema enough in the 1950s to hesitate permitting me to enroll in an Isfahan cinema club, which primarily showed foreign movies. He worried not about cinema as such, for he used to take me to the movies himself; rather, he worried about what transpired at public movie houses: pederast males were said to stalk their young prey and prostitutes to trade their wares. I was perhaps fifteen years old then, and when he finally acquiesced to my attending the club screenings by myself, he would later ask me to describe to him both the movie plots and the lessons I had learned from them.4 My mother, who is more religious and had abandoned her education after completing elementary school due to Reza Shah’s forced unveiling, had never seen a movie until I was able to persuade her to go with me to DeMille’s biblical yarn The Ten Commandments (1956). She agreed to see her first movie precisely because it was about a religious story, showing the complex relationxliv

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ship of religious people with cinema. Hailed by the movies myself, I, in turn, completed the interpellative chain and hailed my mother. The safety derived from anonymity turned the movie houses into sites both for resisting the state’s official politics, such as refusing to stand up for the national anthem film containing images of the Shah, and for violating cultural and religious taboos against moviegoing. Young people not permitted to walk the streets together or to meet openly in cafés found the cinemas conducive to experiencing charged moments of privacy, intimacy, and eroticism. No kissing or even petting was necessary to make the movie house electrifying: mere privacy, anonymity, and holding hands were sufficient. I remember watching in rapture Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) with my girlfriend Zhina in the Moulin Rouge Cinema in the Armenian district of Jolfa. The resonance between the love that Warren Beatty’s and Natalie Wood’s characters felt and the passion that Zhina and I had was gripping. As a child, I attended not only movies but also rowzeh, often with my parents, where we sat on carpets on our haunches in gender-segregated groups for hours, listening to sermons and lamentations, watching the chest-­beating, forehead- and thigh-slapping, and weeping of adults. Family members attended a weekly rotating reading circle in which they read and interpreted key Sheikhi religious texts. An old preacher, Molla Jafar, visited our home weekly to deliver a short private sermon. In addition, I also attended intensely dramatic Shiite performances, such as taziyeh passion plays and Muharram processions, where throngs of young boys and men beat their chests, daubed mud over their heads, flagellated their backs with chains, or cut their heads with knives, blood streaming down their faces and chests, reddening the white shroud of martyrdom they wore—all designed to demonstrate their complete identification with, and love for, the Shiite martyrs. Curtain reciters (pardeh khan) interpreted religious or heroic paintings on large canvas curtains, particularly in Isfahan’s ancient Takht-e Pulad Cemetery, where I stood among crowds of men and boys to watch them work their magic.

Viewing usia Films at Nemuneh Elementary School I watched politically motivated American nonfiction films as well as Holly­ wood products. The former were part of the U.S. government’s anticommunist Cold War project, extensively discussed in the present book. As an ele­mentary school student in an experimental “model school” (Dabestan-e Nemuneh), planned and funded by the Point 4 Program of the United States ho w it all began

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Information Agency (usia), I was exposed to many of these films on a regular basis. Every Thursday afternoon (the day before the weekend), a green mobile film unit—a Jeep station wagon—would drive into our schoolyard. A young Iranian wearing a gray suit and tie, the driver who doubled as the projectionist, would emerge to set up his portable screen and 16mm Bell & Howell projector in our assembly hall. Powered by the generator inside the Jeep, the ­projector opened a new world to us (and to the Sa’di High School next door). As an American-funded institution, my elementary school had many modern and democratic amenities, including an open-stack library and a student-run, wall-mounted newspaper, which my classmate Ahmad Baizavi illustrated. It also took films seriously enough for our teacher to require us to review them in writing. All these student-centered activities were modernist and revolutionary for us in the stilted and authoritarian educational system of 1950s Iran, in the same way that the mere screening of films at Aqdassieh School half a century earlier, described in this book, had been revolutionary to Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh in the 1900s. I still have a notebook of sixteen of my 1953–54 reviews, written in the third grade (at age nine). The films were mostly shot in Iran by the Syracuse Team that the usia had assembled and dealt with improving health, hygiene, and agricultural practices. A few films about American practices had been filmed in the United States. With one exception, all were documentaries.5 My reviews indicate that each film about Iran concerned a specific problem, such as tuberculosis or dysentery, which was demonstrably manageable and curable. A disease temporarily disturbed the world of a village or a family, but soon stability and calm were restored by, for instance, Western-trained doctors with downright positivist names, such as Doctor Optimist (Khoshbin) and Doctor Good Omen (Khoshqadam).6 Each of my reviews begins with a title closely resembling the actual film title and ends with a large “The End” (payan). The teacher’s brief comments appear at the bottom of a few of my reviews, in fact strict plot summaries (figure 16). The absence of personal opinion on my part may be interpreted in different ways: I was a child, too inexperienced and shy to express critical judgment about movies in writing; or I was applying a subconscious strategy of resistance, a refusal to make the 180-degree interpellative turn to become the subject of the Western Other. In Jean Baudrillard’s words, this was a form of “refusal by over-acceptance” (1985:588). Yet my friends and I loved American fiction movies and fetishized their stars, imitated their style, and took delight in mimicking their names with exaggerated flourish. In addition, we regarded the movie houses as both symxlvi

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16: Author’s early film criticism. A page from my film criticism notebook containing reviews of sixteen usia documentaries, written at age nine (1953–54). The page on the right shows the end of one review, marked by “the end” in large letters like the ending credit of Iranian movies, next to the teacher’s comment “Good.” The left page shows my review of the film Cleanliness Results in Health (Pakizegi Mojeb-e Tandorosti Ast).

bols and indexes of modernization and as sites for secular conversion, rivaling the mosque. As an oppositional teenager, I lauded the weakening of all centralized authorities, be it the state, the party, or the mosque. In letters to friends and relatives I announced with pride the openings of new movie houses in Isfahan. A letter to my uncle Reza, dated 11 Bahman 1339 (31 Janu­ ary 1961), notes: “Recently a new movie house has opened in Jolfa. Called Moulin Rouge Cinema, it is better and more luxurious than the other cinemas in Isfahan. It is showing Richard Fleischer’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954) for its opening night fare.” I continued, “There is also another one under construction, Asia Cinema, which has a small hall, but it is very nice, and finally there is a third one near the Zayandeh River, Sahel Cinema, which is to be a three-story movie palace, more luxurious than Tehran theaters.” ho w it all began

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Of course, not everyone considered movie houses sites of secular modernity; many thought them dens of moral iniquity, state indoctrination, and Western domination. These sentiments would fester and come to a boil several decades later, resulting in the widespread destruction of the movie houses during the 1978–79 revolution.

Making Films in the United States and in Iran My long-term relationship with the West, mediated at great length and long distance by means of photography, radio, literature, and film, finally became firsthand. After high school, I went to Lancaster, England, to continue my studies. Friday night cinemagoing in one of the town’s two movie houses provided me with a home away from home, helping me practice my English comprehension and heal the epistemic violence and loneliness of my exile (Naficy 2003). Basil Dearden’s gripping movie The Mind Benders (1962), starring Dirk Bogarde, became a metaphor of my life as a foreigner. Here I was, an eighteen-year-old boy who had never flown in an airplane and had never ventured out of my country alone. Now, in a single stroke I was severed from the warmth of family and country and planted abroad—a single, solitary seedling, adrift in a foreign land, surrounded by a reserved people and an unfamiliar language and culture. The experience of it all numbed me, much as it did the film’s protagonist, Dr. Henry Longman, a scientist who undergoes experiments in a water tank to determine the effects of total isolation on his psyche. The absence of input makes him vulnerable to indoctrination and psychosis. I considered the film significant enough to write about it in my journal (dated 5 May 1963), ending my entry with this question: “Is it possible for humans to tolerate total isolation?” Soon, I moved to the United States to begin my formal studies in film and television. Barely a month after arriving in Los Angeles, a sense of desolation and rage took me over, pushing me toward Stephen Crane’s horrific poetry and Jean-Paul Sartre’s humanist and existentialist philosophy. I copied many of Crane’s poems and passages from Sartre’s Nausea in my journal. On 26 April 1964, for example, I filled an entire page with the word nausea, repeated over and over, in a fashion chillingly reminiscent of Jack Torrance’s possessed writing of pages of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Last night, reading over these diary pages for the first time in many years, the hair rose on the back of my neck. And tonight, while screening the film to students in my film authorship seminar, I xlviii

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realized the similarity between my exilic panic then, in my dorm room in the University of Southern California’s (usc) Trojan Hall, and Jack’s unhinging in the isolation of the Overlook Hotel in the movie. At the time, I began to take photographs to stem the tide of exilic torrents. Indeed, photography became a way of fixing, knowing, and objectifying both the Western Other and myself. Uncannily echoing the infatuation with an all-seeing camera that Dziga Vertov had theorized in the 1920s (before I had read him), I wrote in my diary on 8 February 1964: “My body takes pictures of the outside world. Each inch of my body has become a camera to absorb the world. I work with all my seven, eight, ten senses!” Up to this point, I had been a consumer of the movies—with the exception of my childhood experiments with the primitive cartoon-strip projector. After graduating from usc and entering ucla’s mfa program in film and television production I began to study and make films professionally. The self-othering trajectory, begun long ago with photography and film spectatorship in Iran, was now being reversed from a position of exile. The distance that had once separated me from the diegetic world of the United States and that had made that world all the more alluring dissolved with my transplantation to Los Angeles. The “elsewhere” was now “here.” Me, myself, I, he—all of me—were now here in the West at once, with no media-created distance separating us. But unity, wholeness, and ease proved elusive because of the ruptures of exile and modernity—and, besides, a switch was taking place. Another elsewhere, another Other, was now looming large, making me ill at ease again. I am speaking of home, against which I had begun to define myself anew. With one exception, all the films and videos I made at ucla were psychological, surreal, abstract, and dystopic, expressing the various anxieties, disruptions, and displacements of modernity and exile I was experiencing— and was later to theorize. Blacktop (1970) is an abstract eight-minute video in which the sounds of my emphatic footsteps walking on a sidewalk and a car engine trying to start up accompany the images, which consist of a variety of abstract images (figure 17). The film ends when the footsteps stop, a car door slams, and the image cuts from abstract visuals to a desolate reddish-brown cityscape (in fact an extreme close-up of the inside of a rotting tree trunk). Piano Player (1969) is a surrealistic dramedy based on a Donald Barthelme short story about a couple’s postmodern angst, in which my housemate from the Ellis Island Commune, Kendra Lince, starred (wearing football shoulder pads and a cast for a real-life broken arm). To intensify the alienating effect, I incorporated one of Franz Kafka’s parables into Barthelme’s tale. REM (Rapid Eye Movement, 1969) is an original surreal video largely conceived while ho w it all began

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dreaming: A young man and woman are on a quest in a desolate land (resembling Iran). The paucity of their relationship reflects the futility of this quest. Dialogue during the thirty-minute video consists only of the appropriately inflected repetition of a single word, toilet, which at one point builds into a staccato symphony. In one scene, the pair is on all fours in tattered clothing, circling each other like two beasts and viciously barking out the two-­syllable word at each other. At the film’s end, in a self-reflexive scene, the young man in a dry creek-bed finds a small black-and-white television set, which is showing an image of him discovering the set. The image on the tv shows a whole brain placed outside a skull on a table. A hand (my own) reaches into the frame and proceeds to mash and knead the brain like dough. Whatever the impetus—and interpretations—for these dissociative images, cinematic othering and selfing would become a major academic concern of mine in the years to come (Naficy 2000b). The exception was Ellis Island (1969), a video documentary I made with the newly released Sony Porta Pack video camera—perhaps one of the first such documentaries. It focused on the commune named in the film’s title in which I lived for several years with other radical hippies, counterculture students, foreign students, artists, musicians, and members of the Students for a Democratic Society (sds). The video documented a moment of crisis in the life of the commune: the candid disillusionment of many members with their collective life.7 In my mfa thesis project, Salamander Syncope (1971), I pushed the abstraction and experimentation further to produce a twenty-four-minute animated video about the origin of life on “spaceship earth,” whose images and four-channel soundtrack were computer-generated in the days when digital computers primarily served as accounting and mathematical tools and analogue computers were used for television commercials (figures 18 and 19). 8

17  Frame enlargement from my abstract video, Blacktop

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As I noted in the abstract of my ucla thesis, the purpose of the project was to “explore the capabilities of computer and videotape technologies as tools for generating visual designs, and to develop proper techniques and methodologies by which the fusion of these two media can best be controlled and directed toward the expression of a specific notion, i.e., the invocation of molecular memory.” What was being remembered, it seems, was a rebirth, my rebirth as a new subject in exile.

18  Frame enlargement of my computer-video generated mfa film, Salamander Syncope 19  A poster for the first public screening of Salamander Syncope at ucla. Collection of the author

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After obtaining my master of fine art, I made films and programs for Theta Cable television (later Group w tv) in Los Angeles (1972–73), for the Free University of Iran (1973–78), and for ucla’s Instructional Media Services (1980– 85). These sensitized me to the processes of funding, preproduction, production, postproduction, exhibition, and broadcast of films and television and their impact on society and on what ends up on the screen. They affected my research methodologies and scholarship, including those for this book, as I conducted many interviews with filmmakers and industry people about their biographies, production and exhibition practices, and the limitations and censorship of their works. I engaged in participant observation of filming and paid attention to the demography and ethnography of spectators and to their opinions. In the present book, films are not regarded as autonomous art objects or just commercial products but as works resulting from complex social, political, industrial, cultural, and authorial processes of signification, production, consumption, and negotiation that are individual and collective as well as national and transnational.

Disintegration and the Reemergence of the Family Republic of Letters For several years in the 1970s, I returned to Iran to assist with creating the new multimedia Free University of Iran. As the director of its Broadcast and Media Center, I also served as the executive producer of a series of groundbreaking documentaries on what I called the country’s “indigenous technologies,” such as The Qanat Irrigation Tradition in Iran (Sonnat-e Qanat dar Iran, 1977) and The Pigeon Towers (Kabutarkhan, 1978). These were never broadcast, for the oncoming revolution disrupted everything. The private family republic of letters was gradually ravaged by the state, first under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and then under the ayatollahs, resulting in the secret police’s arrest of scores of members, the execution of nearly a dozen, the imprisonment of many more, and the dispersal of many others to foreign lands. The political and ideological divisions within the family further exacerbated the actions of the repressive states. This politicization of the family intellectuals and cultural producers and the terrible toll it took was emblematic of the whole country. My much younger brother Said was arrested in 1973 along with my uncle Mohammad Naficy, the former editor of Call of Science, and my cousin Ali Naficy. They were tortured and imprisoned for two, four, and five years, respectively. When Said and others were arrested lii

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because of antigovernment activities, including the distribution of leaflets, my parents immediately threw their manual Olympia typewriter, which he may have used to write the leaflets, into a well in the yard that supplied the water to the pool. This was to avoid its discovery by the secret police, Savak, and marked the beginning of the family republic of culture’s dismantling. Soon, in another tragic but necessary step, the family broke up the Ibn Sina Library by dividing the books thematically among a half a dozen members’ homes and gardens, where they were dispersed in closets, backrooms, and basements. The final nail in the coffin of the library came when one night I and Nooshin, my youngest sister whose cute baby pictures I had taken only a few years before, fearing that the Ibn Sina patrons’ ledger may incriminate the family, wrapped it in layers of plastic for safekeeping and buried it deep under a plum tree in the yard in our Bagh Jennat house. The familial purge took private turns as well. I burned a suitcase full of letters that I had written to my parents during the many years I had spent abroad, brokenhearted at the loss. I even destroyed pages from my own diaries in which I had discussed the Saeb Society events and other politically sensitive issues or mentioned the names of leftist friends and relatives. In authoritarian societies the worst kind of censorship is the self-censorship that authors engage in to preempt official censorship.9 In the 1970s I visited my brother Said in the Qasr Prison in Tehran on many Thursday afternoons during official visiting hours, taking to him fruit, nuts, sweets, money, and clothes. Sometimes, I would coordinate my visits with those of my uncle Hasan Naficy and my cousin Jafar Naficy, who visited their respective brothers, Mohammad and Ali, in the same political prisoners’ ward. We were able then to see all three relatives together; in a bizarre ritual we shouted to them across the prison bars over the chaotic voices of a dozen other visitors meeting their relatives, exchanging information and pleasantries often in coded language. Their imprisonment caused trouble for their close relatives. One day, the chancellor of my university, Abdolrahim Ahmadi, a former leftist intellectual and a co-translator of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (with Shahrokh Meskoob), which had been banned years ago, called me into his office. He showed me a terse letter from the Savak addressed to him, forbidding my promotion within the university structure beyond middle management (I was at the time already occupying such a position as an associate professor and the director of the Broadcast and Media Center). He asked what I had done to deserve such special attention. I confided in him and told him for the first time of the arrests of my brother, uncle, and cousin. I also noted that I had boycotted all the mandatory meetings of the single Resurho w it all began

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gence (Rastakhiz) Party, which the Shah had created in the mid-1970s. He understood the situation, and we never discussed the matter again. It is ironic that such a warning against me was issued during the years in which university officers, myself included, were required to attend the annual official Noruz Salaam (New Year’s audience) before the Shah, where he shook hands with us and asked questions about our university’s progress. All three of our prisoners were released with the 1978–79 revolution, only to be executed, disappear, and go underground, respectively, during the early Islamic Republic era. I was on a yearlong sabbatical in the United States in 1978 when the revolution toppled the Pahlavi regime. Although at first we cele­brated the revolution for its emancipatory potential, soon the new Islamic regime’s theocratic and authoritarian intolerance and violence erased the gains. Some family members went into exile voluntarily; others illegally as refugees. Those who were abroad, like me, stayed put, forming an emerging diaspora. Tragically, during the reign of terror that followed, eleven family members were executed and many other lives and professions were derailed.10 Demonstrating the still patriarchal family structure in Iran, my three brothers and I went abroad for higher education, while my four sisters, married and with children, stayed home. Despite the centripetal forces at work, the family culture of resistance proved resilient. It survived by shape-shifting, evolving, and regenerating with each succeeding generation, thanks to my sisters and their offspring. In the thirty years since then, the third- and fourth-generation children have written and performed plays and put on art exhibitions and photographic shows in the family homes. An editorial board consisting of eight children produced a handwritten and illustrated monthly magazine, Science/Knowledge (Elm), which like its predecessor, Call of Science, had varied departments. However, as Nahal Naficy, one of the youngest members involved in the project, told me, these editors added a new, sophisticated feature: extensively researched special issues. One of these was devoted to Zoroastrianism, and its preparation involved a group field trip to the seat of the religion in Yazd to conduct interviews there and to study the sacred text, the Avesta. The production process also became more collective and more regularized than its predecessor’s, consisting of regular monthly or bimonthly editorial meetings at a member’s home, sleepovers, and group writing and illustrating sessions (Naficy 2007c). Soon the production process was modernized by using typewriters and computers and by introducing new graphic features. As did the Pahlavi-era generation’s magazines, the Islamic Republic period’s Science/Knowledge served as the catalyst for other family-centered cultural, educational, and artistic enliv

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gagements. An annual exhibition of the family’s arts and crafts was given at the end of summer 1985: a big affair to which the adults contributed not only their presence but also refreshments. “All this happened during the war with Iraq and political repression when the country was devastated,” said Nahal. “And this is how our family enriched itself and survived the trauma; but I also remember that there were a lot of concerns about our safety because we would be out during bombings, we would come home late, we risked being arrested by Komiteh (revolutionary committee), even though what we did never had political content; we were very careful about that” (Naficy 2007c). Two chief editors of Science/Knowledge, Nastaran and Vahid, became fast friends and later married. Everyone called them an “Elm couple,” referring to the Persian title of the magazine. With the graduation from high school of some of the activists in this family republic of letters, the production of the magazine gradually ground to a halt. Yet soon two new venues replaced it. One was the creation in 1991 of a nonprofit institution for the middle-aged and elderly, one of the first in the country. Called Rangin Kaman-e Sepid (White Rainbow), the institution transmogrified the informal family circle into a formal, registered civil society institution with its own offices and employees that catered to non-family members. The nucleus was the partial reconstitution of the Ibn Sina Library (its children’s sections), with additional cultural and performance projects, which catered to the needs of multiple generations, particularly the elders. The activities included putting on plays, publishing a monthly magazine called Sepidar (Aspen), and holding art classes, art exhibitions, yoga classes, and diary-writing classes. The institution not only provides artistic and creative outlets for its elderly members, such as my mother in her eighties who takes yoga and painting classes, but also links the generations by mixing youngsters with the elders in various activities, such as in storytelling programs. The other venue was the Internet blogs and Web pages, which are widely written and read by family members, particularly the third- and fourth-generation children. While Rangin Kaman-e Sepid expanded the circle to include others outside the family, the Internet transformed the actual face-to-face republic into a virtual global collectivity, which reaches far beyond the immediate family and the city of Isfahan to link nuclear and extended family members with others both inside the country and outside, in the global diaspora. Both institutions are indexes of the evolving globalization and modernity of Iranians, including the filmmakers discussed in these pages, something that propelled them beyond both kinship and nation.

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The Organization of Iranian Film Festivals and Their Politics Film festivals offer prime sites for intensified national and transnational trans­ lation and mistranslation, as well as for hailing (interpellation) and haggling (counterinterpellation) over identity and representation. I came to understand these relations intimately when in 1990, while writing my PhD dissertation on Iranian exile culture and television, I curated a festival of Iranian films in the United States at ucla (figure 20). A Decade of Iranian Cinema, 1980– 1990, featured more than twenty postrevolutionary films. During the decade under examination, the anti-Iranian politics and policies of the United States and the Islamic Republic’s hostility toward both the U.S. government and Iranian exiles had discouraged the importation of postrevolutionary films. This cinema was thus unavailable in the United States, even though Iranian films had begun to receive praise at international festivals elsewhere. The ucla event and the ensuing controversy helped change this situation. Some exiles—rightist and leftist media producers, journalists, filmmakers, and actors—alleged that the event would whitewash the Islamist government’s crimes and human rights violations. The filmmaker, theater direc-

20  Cover of the catalogue for the A Decade of Iranian Cinema, 1980– 1990 film festival, ucla, MarchApril 1990. Collection of the author

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tor, and actor Parviz Sayyad was particularly vitriolic and relentless on the issue. For years he accused in person, in writing, and on his television shows the festival organizers of being the pro-government “cultural militia in exile” (Sayyad 1996:55) and “celebrators of fascism” (57). In the macabre fantasies of some exiles, the Islamic regime had given us a “Dracula kiss,” to use Nahal Naficy’s apt terminology (2009), and we had become its undead agents. Sayyad and more than a dozen well-known filmmakers and actors, in a public letter titled “No More ‘Cultural’ Iran-Contra,” called for a total boycott of this and other Iranian film festivals abroad.11 Seventeen of them protested outside ucla’s Melnitz Theater (Lo 1990). Other opposition groups (monarchists, the Young Iranian Movement, and Iran’s National Resistance Front) also joined the chorus of condemnations, some writing protest letters to the ucla chancellor. The anti–Islamic Republic exile media fanned the fire by creating a panic about an imminent takeover of Los Angeles by the Islamists. The Persian-language morning daily of Los Angeles, Sobh-e Iran (Iran’s Morning), edited by Naser Enqeta, printed a boycott call with the headline, “The Islamic Republic Film Festival in Los Angeles.” Quoting the boycott letter, it characterized the festival as a “cultural Iran-Contra affair,” referring to the Reagan-era “Iran-Contra Affair” during which the U.S. government had clandestinely supplied arms to Iran through Israel, giving this income to the “Contra” forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (figure 21). Likewise, Parviz Qazisaid, the editor of Asr-e Emruz (This Evening), headlined his editorial, “Los Angeles under Siege by the Hezbollahis [supporters of the Party of God]” (figure 22). In addition to these newspapers, which ran daily articles during the ten-day festival, weekly periodicals, such as Javanan (The Youth), Ayandegan (The Future Times), and Iran News, as well as Radio ­Seda-ye Iran (Voice of Iran Radio), Radio Omid (Hope Radio), and various television programs such as Sayyad’s Parsian tv (Persian tv ), Ali Limonadi’s Iranian tv, Nader Rafii’s Midnight Show, and Manuchehr Bibian’s Jam-e Jam tv (Cup of Jamshid tv ), contributed to the debate by featuring antifestival speakers, and sometimes festival proponents. Several exile television producers, who openly supported the festival, were criticized by the opposing factions and embraced by others.12 Although largely one-sided, the media debate about the festival was healthy, as it opened up a space for Iranians to exercise their newly acquired democratic rights of free speech, expression, and assembly, and to hear diverse views on controversial cultural issues, such as the exchange of artistic and cinematic works with the homeland. However, the personal charges against me were very painful, as I knew most of the film industry boycotters ho w it all began

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21  The Los Angeles Persian-language morning paper, Sobh-Emruz (This Morning) (30 March 1990), characterizes the ucla film festival as a “cultural Iran-Contra affair.” Collection of the author 22  The Los Angeles Persian-language evening paper, Asr-e Emruz (This Evening) (29 March 1990), declares that Los Angeles is “Under Siege by Iranian Hezbollah.” Collection of the author

personally and had even promoted their films at other ucla and Los Angeles events. I had also persistently critiqued the Islamic Republic in print, in academic lectures, and in media interviews for its intolerant cultural policies and its oppression of women, minorities, intellectuals, and filmmakers. I felt betrayed by the critics and unfairly attacked. During the previous weeks, I had viewed some forty-four feature movies and a dozen short films from Iran and had selected twenty-five of them for the festival. In no way did the festival promote the regime. If anything, it celebrated Iranian filmmakers’ ability to make world-class films under stringent censorship and adverse conditions. We showcased the “old-timers” (veteran new-wave filmmakers who had begun their careers under the Pahlavi regime and had continued on successfully after its demise, such as Abbas Kiarostami, Bahram Baizai, Amir Naderi, Naser Taqvai, and Dariush Mehrjui) as well as the “newcomers” (artcinema filmmakers who had emerged under the Islamist regime, such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Banietemad, Said Ebrahimifar, and Abolfazl Jalili). For the first time, two films by a female director were screened. None of the films was supportive of the Islamist regime or of its politics; in fact, almost all of them were implicitly critical either of the prerevolutionary or the postrevolutionary societies. Most remarkably, the films totally erased the ruling clerics in their narratives. Bill Nichols, who years later reviewed a dozen Iranian movies at a festival, came to a similar conclusion: “Absent are explicit references to religion and the state. Common Western stereotypes of fanaticism and zealotry are neither confirmed nor subverted. They are simply absent, of no local concern” (1994:21). This absence could be read as the filmmakers’ resistance to the clerical regime. The ucla Film and Television Archive published an illustrated booklet with my introductory essay and detailed film notes. Two veteran auteur directors were also invited: Kiarostami and Mehrjui. The atmosphere outside the theater was festive but tense, with well-known exile entertainers holding up placards. Kiarostami walked up to one of them (I think it was Sayyad) and slyly offered to take his place in the protest line to free him to go inside to see the films that he was objecting to, sight unseen. He did not accept, although one protester, the actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, later told me that she had attended some of the screenings and liked what she saw. The spectators’ reception of the festival and the films validated our effort at the archive. Spectators flocked to the Melnitz from around the country—New York, Washington, and Houston—and at times stood in line for more than eight hours for tickets. Almost all screenings sold out. Unable to get in because of a lack of seats, first 191 people and later 259 additional people signed ho w it all began

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23  Page one of the petition signed by hundreds of spectators unable to get in due to a lack of seats, who requested that all films of the ucla festival be repeated. Collection of the author

petitions requesting the repetition of the entire festival (figure 23). Others wrote letters to the university and to me personally expressing their gratitude for this window we had opened to Iran. What Kiarostami and Mehrjui told the excited spectators in the theater gave an understanding about the intense ideological battles over cinema raging inside Iran. It became clear to them that filmmakers there were no pawns of the government, nor were they collaborators in its ideological projects, as some protesters charged. The vehemence of those who opposed the festival suggested that the debate was as much about exilic politics as about the Iranian government’s politics. Many exiles’ careers had languished or been derailed by the revolution and by exile; those of their counterparts were flourishing at home, even under heavy censorship. Protesting producers and entertainers wanted to mainlx

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tain the comforting psychological barriers formed by their media monopoly, which had created fetishized and frozen representations of a ruined Iran under the mullahs. The intense involvement of the spectators, many of them in tears, showed that the films had succeeded in breaking through those barriers, unleashing the threat that had been kept in check—that of the homeland unfettered by repressions and distortions of exilic politics. Peter Bloom’s account of the “emotionally charged” festival that caused the spectators to contemplate the hitherto unthinkable—the possibility of reconciliation, even ­return—­attested to such a breakthrough (1990:95). The festival created an image of Iran as a complex and vital culture and society, not ones totally silenced, subjugated, or ruined by the medieval ruling mullahs, as the festival opponents claimed. The government’s repressiveness was a given. What was interesting was that filmmakers, audiences, and government film bureaucrats in Iran, through various haggling strategies, institutions, procedures, and regulations, had found ways of creating a dynamic film industry and an expressive cinema under clerical oppression. To the extent that this festival showed that neither Islamic Iran nor the Iranian exiles were monolithic, it produced a more realistic and nuanced representation of Iranian cultural dynamics on both sides of the exilic divide. These counterhegemonic functions of the individual films and of the festival as a whole—­ repeated over many subsequent festivals I organized—more than made up for the pain that the orchestrated misinformation and attacks of the politicized exiles had caused me personally. In addition, this tumultuous experience, which occurred during the final term of my PhD degree, helped deepen my understanding of the particular dynamics of cultural productions and national identity formation in exile, and it informed the dissertation and the book based on it.

Writing about Cinema and Its Politics: The Germ of the Current Book The present book has been in various stages of research and writing since the mid-1970s. Between 1973 and 1978, while teaching in Iran’s nirt College of Cinema and Television, I wrote a two-volume textbook on the history and aesthetics of documentary cinema, printed in the year of the revolution (Naficy 1978a, 1978b), in which I developed a history and taxonomy for Iranian documentary film in the context of world film history. The work done for that project proved useful here, forming a backbone of the Pahlavi-era documentary ho w it all began

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chapter, although I expanded it considerably with new research. Stranded in Los Angeles after the revolution, I for several years combined making educational films and medical television programs with academic research and writing about cinema. But it proved impossible to do both well, so I shifted my focus from film production to critical studies of film and media. The revo­ lution and diaspora, as well as the ugly Western representation of Iran following the hostage crisis, called for a concentration of human efforts, not for their dispersal. A kind of epistemophilia set in, an intense passion for knowing and discovering both the personal and the national causes, circumstances, and consequences of the revolution and the expulsion from the homeland. American mediawork about Iran—images of the blindfolded hostages, portrayals of the “barbarian nation” that had kidnapped them—pushed me toward excavating the history of Western media’s representations of Iran in the twentieth century. This five-year effort resulted in an annotated filmography (Naficy 1984f), an important source of information for the current book. Simultaneously, the transformations at home motivated me to dig into the history of cinema inside Iran, some of which was driven by Iranians’ responses to Western films about Iran in earlier decades. My first articles on the history of fiction and nonfiction cinemas were published in the year of the revolution and soon after (Naficy 1979a, 1981b), placing seeds in a fertile soil, which generated many intermediary publications, interviews, screenings, film festivals, conference papers, and research visits to film and paper archives in Iran, Britain, Denmark, and the United States, culminating in the current book. There were also personal dimensions to this epistemophilia. My mfa film projects, rem and Salamander Syncope, embodied some of the primary responses of the exiles to deterritorialization: trauma, coma, paralysis, fragmentation, and dreamlike dissociation. I began to deal consciously with these only when I centered my PhD dissertation on theorizing and exploring Iranian exile culture and media (Naficy 1990). Curating the film festival at ucla (now in its eighteenth year) deepened my theorization of exilic and émigré cultural and cinematic politics. This long-term concentration, resulting in several books (Naficy 1993a, 1999b, 2001), provided means to conceptualize in the current book the pivotal historical roles of Iranian ethnoreligious minorities and foreign émigrés in forming Iran’s national cinema, and of the Iranian postrevolution exiles and diasporas in constructing alternative and hybridized transnational cultures and identities by means of film and media. Exile is a peculiarly anxious space in which one simultaneously benefits from surplus lxii

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and overlap and deep down suffers from feelings of lack and inadequacy. The state of being “more than” is always haunted by that of being “less than” or “not quite.” Looking back at the past four decades, it seems clear that making, teaching, curating, and writing about films, cinema, television, and exile gave me an understanding of and helped express my own agonized and agonistic life both at home (wherever that is) and in the world. These modernist acts of ­selfing—self-definition, self-expression, and self-fashioning—partly a gift of cinema and partly of exile, helped me attenuate and counter years of spectatorial passivity, self-othering, and hailing. They helped me come into individuality and self-representation and to become whole. One of the theses of this book is that selfing, self-othering, and self-­ representation involving film and media are simultaneously national and sociopolitical and profoundly personal and psychological, particularly for those who cross national boundaries. Several events drove home this thesis for me. One was the film festival, which brought to the fore for me, as a migrating subject, both the privileges of hybridity and its liabilities. Bilingualism, biculturalism, binationalism, and interstitial self-fashioning are gains; rootlessness, inauthenticity, partiality, liminality, suspension, and suspicion are specters of loss. Scholars and filmmakers in exile are faced with a crucial ethi­ cal dilemma: how to stay independent, whole, and true to their own historical conditions, materials, fields of study, and professions and not be swayed by the forces of nation-states, social formations, and political movements that want to politicize, instrumentalize, and recruit them to their causes. This is particularly the case in today’s phase of globalization and antagonism between an Islamist Iran and a simultaneously neoliberal and neoconservative United States, when the Iranian government seeks to muzzle and channel independent Iranian scholars and filmmakers not only at home but also in diaspora and when the U.S. government seeks to gain relevant cultural information from binational insiders, including scholars and filmmakers, about a country with which it has no manifest diplomatic relations and when binational exiles and émigrés themselves are pulled between their own conflicting roots and routes. In the course of the new antagonistic “public diplomacy” engaged in by both Iranian and American governments, and discussed at length in this book, the political pressures have intensified on independent scholars and filmmakers who cross national boundaries and work in the “inter” spaces (interstitial, interethnic, intercultural, interracial, intergenerational, and international) and in the “trans” spaces (transitional, translational, and transnational) of national cinemas (Naficy 2007d). The Iranian ho w it all began

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government launches such anti-Western and antisecular intellectual campaigns as “cultural invasion” campaigns; it produces television shows such as Identity (Hoviyat) and Armageddon: The Army of Shadows (Armagedon: ­Artesh-e Sayehha) to intimidate or co-opt its internal and external enemies; it urges film scholars, including me in an interrogation, not to publish our works in respected exile publications such as Encyclopaedia Iranica; and it arrests and imprisons activists, scholars, bloggers, journalists, and filmmakers on suspicious and trumped-up charges of spying for the West or conspiring to foment a “velvet revolution.”13 The U.S. government and military, on the other hand, have taken a “cultural turn” in recent years to destabilize the Islamic Republic by means of congressionally funded $75 million “democratization” efforts and to better instrumentalize cultural knowledge from Iran and Islamic countries in service to diplomatic and military operations. The government has funded anti–Islamic Republic U.S. broadcast stations, such as Voice of America and Radio Farda, and dissident Iranian exile tv and radio stations. It has sought insider cultural knowledge from area studies social scientists and has arranged “strategic listening” sessions with film scholars, including myself, to learn how to read and listen to Iranian movies for clues about Iranian public sentiments. The U.S. military has not only embedded journalists but also recruited and embedded anthropologists with the troops at brigade and division levels in Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent the commanders from “misreading local actions and—potentially violent—situations” (Beeman 2008). It has also employed psychologists and psychiatrists in various detention centers, including in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, as “consultants to coercive interrogations” (Summers 2007). Both practices have come under heavy fire by the respective professional associations. In short, the freedom for socially conscientious film and media scholars, historians, critics, and makers to be productive academically and artistically and to remain honest, autonomous, dispassionate, and socially active and relevant in these contested globalized social and cultural intertimes and interspaces has become highly contingent ethically. Old certainties have vanished into thin air.

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For in and out, above, about, below, ’Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show Played in a Box whose Candle is the Sun, Round which we Phantom figures come and go. [In charkh O’ falak keh ma dar an hayranim Fanus-e Khial az an mesali danim Khorshid cheraghdan o ‘alam fanus Ma chon sovarim kandaru heiranim.] —Omar Khayyam

in t roduc t ion National Cinema, Modernity, and Iranian National Identity

V

ision, visuality, and theatricality have a long history in Iranian culture and arts and in the works of visionary philosophers and poets, like the great eleventh-century mathematician, astronomer, and poet Omar Khayyam. His quatrain above uses a predecessor of the zoetrope, or magic lantern, as an analogy for the ephemeral human presence on an earth that revolves around the sun. Cinema, too, has a long history in Iran, one more political than philo­ sophical. The medium served as both a metaphor and an embodiment of modernity. From its introduction in 1900, the cinema favored nationalism, cultural modernity, and Westernization (for the present study, modernity and Westernization are treated as similar but not as identical, allowing for alternative, non-Western modernities to exist). Westernization intensified during the nineteenth century and became part of Iranians’ political unconscious by

what Michel Foucault has described as a “network of relations” that in constant tension fosters modernity (1979:26). This study situates Iranian cinema within these ad hoc networks of power and knowledge relations whose dynamic intermingling at microphysical levels gave it its distinct characteristics. So this is not just a textual study of Iranian cinema featuring close readings of specific film texts; or an auteurist study of great masters; or a historical look at precedents and trajectories. The current work engages film texts, film authors, and film history and theory, but in the context of the microphysics of both national cinema and modernity. Not all these formations and components coexisted simultaneously or contributed equally to the emergence of modernity and a national cinema. Nevertheless, two formations—the Iranian state and the Hollywood cinema ­machine—set the terms of the struggle and tended to act hegemonically. But networks of forces, dispositions, maneuvers, tactics, and techniques mobilized by the film industry and its individual filmmakers, spectators, and internal and external social forces allowed filmmakers to both use and go beyond the Iranian state and the Hollywood system to create other moments of partial hegemony, which were temporary but nevertheless sufficiently real. The development of indigenous genres, such as dandy movies, stewpot movies, tough-guy films, War films, and Internet films, as well as the auteurist new-wave cinema during the Pahlavi period and the art cinema and women’s cinema during the Islamic Republic period are examples of such moments of partial hegemony. By thus contextualizing it, the book argues that Iranian cinema (and Iranian modernity) was not a preplanned Western project imposed on or (to use a favorite term of some Iranian intellectuals) “injected” from outside or from above. Rather, cinema (and modernity) was overdetermined in complicated ways by these microphysical forces and dispositions. Modernity was not a linear or preordained process; it meandered and insinuated itself sometimes in a circuitous and contradictory fashion: Iranians resisted, rejected, accommodated, and selectively adapted and celebrated modernity and its features. Much to and fro, even circularity, characterized this process. Iranian cinema also constituted no “contract” with which the West and the Hollywood film industry—or the Iranian government, commercial entrepreneurs, and the elite—either effectuated or regulated the ideological conquest or “corruption” of Iran. Nor was it a “privilege” that these entities possessed alone. Rather, cinema was a site of unequal but perpetual ferocious struggle. Yet there was a historical trajectory and evolution to the play of these forces. If during the Qajar and early Pahlavi periods the flow occurred into Iran from 2

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the West, in the 1970s with the new-wave films and in the 1980s with the artcinema films it became a two-way exchange of cinematic relations (Naficy 2002a). Although these exchange relations were strongest with Western cine­ mas, they also included key regional cinemas of the Middle East (Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq), Southeast Asia (India) and North Africa (Egypt). In a way, the history of Iranian cinema is the history of cinematic exchange relations with the world. At the same time, immigrants into Iran, Iranian émigrés abroad, and Iranian ethnoreligious minorities brought with them both universality and particularities that shaped Iranian cinema. As such, this study considers Iranian cinema as simultaneously local, national, transnational, and inter­ ethnic. It goes beyond a purely structuralist conception of modernism driven by a binary construction of self and Other and East and West, to embrace post­ colonial and postmodern conceptions: multilateralism, interstitiality, relationality, and intersectionality.

Problematizing National Cinema Theory The study of national cinemas used to focus on the textual analysis of a group of movies, often art-house films, produced within the geographic boundaries of nation-states. Yet since the mid-1980s, ethnic wars and the emergence of social revolutions (such as the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution), religious fundamentalisms including Islamism, and environmental and economic degradations have caused massive displacements and dispersions of populations within and across borders. The rise of global, capitalist economies, the changes in Western immigration policies, the fear of ascendant global terrorism, and the unprecedented technological developments and consolidation in computer, media, entertainment, and security industries have caused deep ruptures in social and national fabrics. All these developments have thrown into question any static and totalizing notions of what constitutes a nation. Since the mid-1980s, ideas about how nations are invented and defined by acts of imagination and mediation, representation and counterrepresentation, and by selective remembering and repressing in mass media and pop culture have further destabilized coherent conceptions of nation and national identity (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Smith 1991; Hutchinson 1994; Rosen 2001). Likewise, the concept of national cinema has undergone radical modification. Indeed, because of the constructedness of nations—their historical variability, contingency, and cultural hybridity—Stephen Crofts has proposed the intr o d uc tio n

3

concept of a “nation-state cinema,” instead of a “national cinema” (2000). The American studio system and the Hollywood cinema, against which all other national cinemas have been defined, themselves underwent major changes in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, which made capitalism and private enterprise global and ensured their hegemony by creating two global institutions dominated by the United States, the International Monetary Fund (imf) and the World Bank. Classic Hollywood industrial production faded away, giving way to the so-called New Hollywood cinema’s postindustrial mode. Here, the global acquisition, distribution, and marketing of films and related merchandise and services form the heart of the business. This change entailed both a vast vertical integration and a widening horizontal integration worldwide, one involving massive corporate mergers (Schatz 1993; Miller et al. 2001). Movie production and distribution, broadcast television, cable television, “foreign” television, satellite television, video distribution, radio broadcasting, film library acquisition, books, music, video games, publication and distribution of periodicals, Internet services, theme parks, sports teams, and merchandising and retailing of movie-related items could all be handled by a single entity. Undergirded by worldwide privatization, synergistic convergence and diversification, deregulation, and digitization, this post–Cold War trend resulted in nearly a dozen globalized “colossal conglomerates,” primarily in the United States and in Europe, that worked like cartels to maintain their dominance of world cultural agendas, narratives, and markets (Stille 1995). In this process, American cinema and media conglomerates, whose global rhizomatic networks trounced, absorbed, coopted, overshadowed, or deeply influenced most of the national cinemas of the world, remained triumphant. They also dominated most of the world’s cinema screens, garnering a staggeringly high percentage in the 1990s of the European Union’s box office (77.4 percent) and the British box office (89 percent) (Hill 1994:59). This deep penetration made it possible for Jeffrey Berg, the chairman and ceo of International Creative Management, to state, “Holly­ wood has no address” (Berg 2006). It is therefore possible to claim that all national cinemas, including that of Iran, are at once both national and (partly) American. The dominance of American cinema’s total asymmetry is demonstrated by the fact that currently Hollywood movies account for 85 percent of the movie tickets sold internationally, while only 1 percent of the movies screened in the United States originate outside the country (Riding 2005). The status of movies and their spectators, too, underwent a major shift in the twentieth century. In the classical studio era, average films were autonomous ninety-minute products made by industrial movie studios, screened ac4

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cording to predetermined schedules to groups of people gathered in darkened movie theaters. In this postindustrial era, on the other hand, movies have become intertextual products, franchises, or software, nourishing the insatiable appetite of the colossal multimedia conglomerates—from video games to blockbuster movies, from comic books to tv series, and from soundtracks to theme parks. By the early twenty-first century, the world was witnessing the emergence of a fourth screen: there were movie screens, television screens, computer screens, and smart-phone screens. The length of the movies also changed, varying drastically, from many hours, such as Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour film, Shoah (1985), to so-called short shorts, films only a few minutes long, such as those posted to YouTube and other social networking Websites. Spectators, now more properly called “consumers,” watch these products on television sets, computer screens, mobile handsets like iPad, and cell phones at home, at work, in cars, or on giant movie screens in bars, movie houses and other public places. They could watch them alone or in groups according to predetermined schedules set by distributors, exhibitors, broadcasters, and podcasters, or they could watch them according to their own wishes, by using video players, video-on-demand services, Internet download services, or video-sharing Websites. The act of watching has also changed from a passive viewing of the movie screens to a more engaged interaction. It has gone from a meandering grazing across channels to a distracted, glance-driven televisual viewing to synesthetic and interactive relationships with electronic screens and their worlds and avatars. Furthermore, viewers and consumers are no longer shoe-horned into a single typical and general profile or into a few homogeneous demographic blocs. Rather, they are regarded as multiple, diverse, and fragmented groups, distinguished by their media, venues, and habits of consumption and by their socioeconomic characteristics of ethnicity, race, gender, class, generation, taste culture, sexual preference, and religious, political, and national affiliations. This plurality, diversity, and fragmentation of the media and of audiences undergird the structural integration and accumulation of capital by the postindustrial entertainment conglomerates. Plurality, diversity, and segmentation are not only characteristics of the postindustrial media and their audiences but also of filmmakers’ practices, influencing their choices of stories and their manners of telling them. As Thomas Schatz observed, if the vertical integration of classical Hollywood ensured a closed industrial system and coherent narratives, the vertical and horizontal integration of the New Hollywood favored texts that are strategically “open” to multiple readings and multimedia and consumer-industry reiteraintr o d uc tio n

5

tion (1993:34). This openness resulted in a plethora of derivative and reiterative productions consisting of sequels, prequels, remakes, spinoffs, knockoffs, revivals, and made-for-tv films, as well as serialized, colorized, restored, preserved, and director’s-cut versions. Many of these globalizing transformations engulfed not only American cinema but also the cinemas of other regions and nations. During the decolonizing, countercultural, and anti–Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, a regional Latin American cinema of resistance—the Third Cinema—was envisaged in contradistinction both to Hollywood-style commercial cinema (first cinema) and to European-style art cinema (second cinema) (Solanas and Getino 1997). Radical alternative cinemas, such as Third Cinema, the “cinema of hunger,” and “imperfect cinema,” were inspired by, and drew on, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Italian neorealist film aesthetics, British social documentary style, and Marxist analysis. Many of these developments declared their presence forcefully, often in the form of political manifestos (see Martin 1997a; Gabriel 1982). Their impact, however, went well beyond Latin America. It continues to reverberate today in the aesthetics of some national cinemas and film authors, including those of Iran. By the 1980s, the Latin American regional cinema of resistance had become the New Latin America Cinema (Martin 1997a, 1997b; Burton 1990; King 1990; Pick 1993; King, López, and Alvarado 1993). At the same time, many European governments and transnational television and media agencies attempted through protectionism and subsidies to limit Hollywood’s impact, to strengthen their national cinemas, and to create a pan-European, postnational cinema and television (Sorlin 1991; Drummond, Patterson, and Willis 1993; Petrie 1992; Lev 1993; Vincendeau 1996; Sinclair, Jacka, and Cunningham 1996; Forbes and Street 2000). Alternative European film such as Dogma also emerged, which cut across national cinema boundaries (Hjort 2005, Hjort and MacKenzie 2003). Yet both the Latin American and European regional, postnational, and transnational cinemas became highly contested categories as reawakened nationalism, massive immigrations, and contentious identity politics, as well as new scholarship and film practices, resulted in the formulation of a variety of national, subnational, and transnational ethnic, diasporic, and exilic cinemas. These ranged from “black” film and video collectives in the United Kingdom to beur films made by North African and Arabs in France and from Asian American, Chicano/a, and African diaspora cinemas in the United States to various exilic and diasporic cinemas worldwide, something I have called “accented cinema” (These and Ambrosi 1991; Noriega 1992; Diawara 1993; Newman 1993; Pick 1993; Dowmunt 1993; Goldberg 1993; Mercer 1994; Martin 6

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1995; Gillespie 1995; Noriega 1996; Sherzer 1996; Foster 1997; Konstantarakos 2000; Naficy 2001; Feng 2002a, 2002b; Tarr 2005). Iranian émigré filmmakers, among the most active accented filmmakers worldwide, produced a lively and extensive deterritorialized cinema and television outside Iran (Naficy 1993a, 2001, 2002c). These filmmakers took influences from multiple sources: the national cinemas of their homeland Iran, their countries of residence, and transnational film movements. Responding to growing international movie markets and to national import restrictions, Hollywood studios adopted a new strategy. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, they began to engage in what is called “locallanguage productions” for major world markets such as India, China, Brazil, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Mexico. For example, Warner Bros. produced or coproduced thirty foreign-language films for these markets, while Sony produced or coproduced twenty-seven such films. Sony made eight in China, four in Hong Kong and Taiwan, fourteen in the United Kingdom and Europe, and one in Mexico (Holson 2006). These social and technological transformations mean that national cinemas can no longer be limited to what national subjects produce within the borders of nation-states, or to that which is produced in contradistinction to the dominant global cinema, Hollywood cinema.

Defining Iranian National Cinema and Modernity Iran has maintained its core territorial and linguistic integrity and its basic ethnic, religious, and cultural composition for many centuries, despite wars, invasions, conquests, and internal evolutions and revolutions, and contemporary Iranians maintain an active relationship with their long history and artistic traditions. Daily invocations of the distant past and recitations of ancient proverbs, aphorisms, and poetry make the copresence of past and present an attribute both of Iranian nationalism and of modernity. This continuity, driven primarily by that of the Persian language (Farsi), literature, and poetry— what Michael Axworthy rightfully calls an “empire of the mind” (2008)—has proved key to softening the blows of various historical ruptures, including those of modernity. Iranian national cinema, too, is partly constituted by the cognitive map and the copresence of past and present in the consciousness of filmmakers and spectators. Because such factors of cultural continuity as the Persian language and Iranian cultural, mythological, historical, religious, literary, artistic, and performance traditions have undergirded Iranian cinema intr o d uc tio n

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from its inception, one can speak of it as a national cinema, or a nation-state cinema. Nevertheless, this book is highly sensitive to, and problematizes, both the coherence and inherited aspects and the heterogeneity and constructedness of the two concepts of Iranian nation and Iranian national cinema. National cinemas may be distinguished from one another based on seven key characteristics or formations: sociopolitical, industrial, cultural, ideological, spectatorial, textual, and authorial.1 As a temporal concept, modernity can be said to have started in Europe in the seventeenth century and lasted through the first half of the twentieth century. Today, we live in late modernity, which some prefer to call the postmodern period. Geographically, modernity was not confined to Europe, for it extended to the New World and the Old World. As a result, the larger world has existed in a state of asynchronous, asymmetrical, and partial modernity, even during the current globalization with its compelling synchronizing tendencies and totalizing structuration. Furthermore, recent scholarship has theorized not a single monolithic, Eurocentric modernity, but alternative modernities inflected by local traditions, which tend to destabilize the universalist ethos of modernity, pluralize the experience of modernity, and situate modernity historically, geographically, and culturally (Gilroy 1993; Shohat and Stam 1994; Bhabha 1994; Wilson and Dissanayake 1996; Appadurai 1996; Mirsepassi 2000; Gaonkar 2001). Modernity came to Iran, part of the Old World, in the early nineteenth century, with the first programmatic travels of Iranians to Europe for education, military training, and business. It took an Iranian form with the Constitutional Revolution in the 1900s, which itself evolved with the rise of the Pahlavi state in the 1920s and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in the 1980s (Shadman 1948/1326; Al-e Ahmad 1961/1340; Naraqi 1974/1353; Shayegan 1992, 1977/2536; Dabashi 1993; Boroujerdi 1996; Gheissari 1998; Vahdat 2002; Nabavi 2003b; Jahanbegloo 2004; Milani 2004; Kamrava 2008). There are many components to modernity; the salient ones for this work are six: modernization and Westernization, rationality and rationalization, sociological disruption and displacement, mobility and circulation, individualism and humanism, and sensory complexity and intensity.2 These components of modernity were necessary for cinema’s emergence and institutionalization. In turn, all formations of national cinema mentioned above were involved in ushering in and overdetermining modernity in Iran. Modernity has been associated with cinema from the beginning, and much has been written about cinema as both a component and an expression of modernity (Kraus 1985; Huyssen 1986; Baker 1987; Berman 1988; Teitelbaum 1992; Orr 1993; Friedberg 1993; Charney and Schwartz 1995; Hansen 1999; Brans8

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ton 2000; Orr and Taxidou 2001; Lau 2003; Stewart 2005; Shaw and Dennison 2005; Pomerance 2006; Gunning 2006; Shaka 2004; Whissel 2008). In what follows I offer a schematic presentation of the combined salient features both of national cinema and of modernity as they cross-fertilized one another in the Iranian context. Modernity affected the film industry structurally by modernizing its mode of production and reception. It affected the movies textually by inscribing modernity as content and style, and as sensorium. Finally, it transformed filmmakers and spectators by turning them into modern individual subjects whose wishes and desires it manipulated and fulfilled.

The Sociopolitical Formation of Cinema and Modernization Iran is a multiethnic, multilingual, tribally based country with a current population of nearly 70 million people, whose politics in the twentieth century underwent vast upheavals with national and international repercussions. Two major revolutions bookended this period. One was the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, which ushered in a form of parliamentary monarchy and modernity, during which the first lasting public cinemas and artisanal filmmaking surfaced. The other was the 1978–79 revolution, which installed the Islamic Republic, a sort of parliamentary theocracy that at first seemed to be antagonistic to cinema and modernity but that ultimately championed Iranian filmmaking to wide international recognition. Between these two points, three regime changes occurred. The Qajar dynasty, which had ruled Iran since 1796 as an absolute monarchy, and ineffectually since the Constitutional Revolution, was replaced in 1925 by the Pahlavi dynasty, whose two modernist shahs ruled over the parliamentary monarchy with autocratic zeal (constituting the first and second Pahlavi periods) until the authoritarian Islamic regime took over in 1979. I have chosen to present the sociopolitical formation of Iranian cinema in four chronological volumes that coincide with these transformative regime changes. This periodization allows us to account for both the ruptures and anomalies and the continuities and regularities of film industry practices, structures, products, and personnel. Each volume is, in turn, divided into multiple chapters that deal with various aspects of the seven formations that shaped both Iranian national cinema and modernity. From a film industry viewpoint, a major structural shift occurred in the mid-twentieth century, which could provide another principle of division for the historiography of Iranian cinema. In the Qajar and the first Pahlavi peintr o d uc tio n

9

riods, during the entire silent and early sound eras, the premodern artisanal mode of production ruled; in the second Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic periods, a modern hybridized mode of production emerged. The ideal division for the book would have been this industrial and structural division. Yet because that division would have produced very uneven volumes in terms of size, I chose the segmentation by chronology. Thus volume 1 deals with the artisanal Qajar and first Pahlavi eras’ silent and sound cinemas, volume 2 with the second Pahlavi era’s popular and new-wave cinemas, which were increasingly modernized and industrialized, volume 3 with the massive transformation of the film industry after the Islamic Revolution, and volume 4 with the revival of cinema as a major ideological state apparatus and art form under the Islamic Republic. Modernization consisted of the emergence of mature capitalism, organized entrepreneurial investment, centralized and industrialized manufacturing, free market competition, and extensive import and export across national borders. The rise of nationalism and nation-states with systematized legal systems and institutions, as well as rapid and massive population growth, urbani­ zation, and migration were other features of modernization. Modernization also involved the explosive growth of means of transportation, communication, entertainment, and consumption. The shift from local, family-oriented, and artisanal workshops, producing goods for necessary consumption, to national, labor-intensive factories manufacturing goods for surplus consumption also characterized modernization. Some inchoate forms of moderni­ zation emerged during the Qajar era (urbanization, population displacement, travel abroad, and the press). Yet only in the Pahlavi periods did modernization become widespread and take root. Many of the Pahlavi periods’ reforms were congruent with this description of modernization—from the development of a nationalist ideology to that of a standing army, from the creation of a nationwide rail system to the introduction of broadcasting, from massive urbanism to industrial production, and from sartorial reforms to widespread consumerism. Each of the three periods was marked by increased modernization through which the state became stronger, more centralized, and more authoritarian. Its role in shaping both the nationalist consciousness and national cinema also became more pronounced and complex. In the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods, the state had a determining function both through the institutionalization and subvention of cinema and through intervention into and censorship of the medium. The industrial and technological formation, enabling the production of films that satisfied the needs and desires of a pay10

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ing national mass public, clearly depended on the structural transformations of modernization. Both modernization and Westernization in the society at large and industrial and technological formations in cinema emerged gradually, feeding one another. Thematically, both commercial cinema and art cinema dealt with the process of modernization. Many movies were set in urban centers peopled with poor migrants from villages. Interestingly, this same group of migrants also made up a good portion of the movies’ spectators.

The Technological Formation of Cinema and Industrial Rationalization Sociopolitical transformations did not constitute the only forces in national cinema formations. Entrepreneurs and middlemen; importers and exporters; film pioneers, artisans, and freelance tinkerers; as well as modernists of all sorts played significant roles. The interaction between the state and private enterprise led to a unique kind of Iranian film production. This book identifies and theorizes the mode of production, import and export, distribution, exhibition, and consumption (shortened to “mode of production”) as a chief engine of Iranian cinema, which underwent rationalization as it modernized. The epitome of both rational thinking and industrial rationalization in cinema is the classic American studio system, with its specialization of labor, central control, mass production, and the standardization and variation of products. During the Qajar period, cinema’s production mode remained entirely artisanal, driven by multifunctional entrepreneurial middlemen and modernists, ethnic minorities who, supported by the court and the elites, imported films, film equipment, and other Western technologies. The film industry was really a cottage industry, limited to importing and exhibiting foreign films and to producing and exhibiting locally made nonfiction films, chiefly actualities and newsreels. Unlike the Hollywood system, Iranian cinema did not model itself after the Ford automobile factory where Taylorist assembly-line operations ruled. Instead, it followed the workflow in traditional local artisans’ workshops, where master craftsmen and apprentices thrived. Its mode of production was primarily artisanal, not industrial. The first Pahlavi period, under the strong and autocratic leadership of Reza Shah, saw the production of the first fiction sound movies both in the country and by an expatriate Iranian in India. The volume of fiction film production in this period remained very low (only nine movies were made), but that of pro-government documentaries and newsreels intr o d uc tio n

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was higher. Although the cinematic mode of production remained basically artisanal, certain inchoate industrial practices, such as rudimentary film studios, film training schools, and film laboratories, emerged. During the second Pahlavi period under Mohammad Reza Shah, true to form for a society in rapid transition to modernity, the mode of production became hybridized, simultaneously exhibiting characteristics both of artisanal and of modern, industrialized production. This hybridity paralleled the mode of economic production in the society at large, which tended toward assembling products made or designed in the West. During this time, an advertising-driven star system developed and popular movies became commodities, feeding the dynamic pop-culture and entertainment industries that cross-­ fertilized each other, including through movies, music, radio, television, and the press. A smaller, state-supported, parallel cinema called the new wave also emerged whose products garnered respect both nationally and internationally. Because of the iconoclastic destruction of cinematic infrastructures during the anti-Shah revolution of 1978–79 and the Islamist regime’s “purification” of the industry of undesirable elements and practices, it took several years for cinema and the film industry to recover. When it did, the state resurfaced in a determining role. The state monopoly of television became an important source of war images and war movies, for example. In time, however, the private sector reemerged as a contender in cinema, and the outflow of films to the world brought not only international recognition but also, for the first time, substantial extraterritorial income to the directors of art cinema. This third source of income made these directors somewhat independent of the Iranian government and the domestic private sector—again, a new phenomenon in Iranian cinema. Thematically, the movies treated the technological and industrial formations in the world as both alluring and alienating, for according to Iranian movies, these turned people either into inauthentic and unhappy subjects or into happy-go-lucky, shallow Westernized dandies. Nostalgia for an Iranian or Islamic spirituality, for mysticism, and for authenticity drove the narratives of both popular cinema movies and the art-cinema films before and after the revolution of 1978–79.

The Cultural Formation of Cinema and Disruption With modernity and modernization came sociocultural mobility, disruption of traditions, sensory overload, and anomie. Indeed, as Marshall Berman 12

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noted, to be modern was “to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration” (1988:345). The traditional, rooted categories of belonging, village, tribe, and extended family, as well as of work, such as family apprenticeship and lifelong employment in artisanal workshops, were disrupted. In their place rose displacement, migration, and alienated labor in cities. The gradual shift from feudal relations to urban capitalism contributed to these disruptions. The desire for higher education and the rising expectations of the educated drove emigration into the cities both at home and abroad. These forms of capital, social, and physical mobility were undergirded by modern roads and transportation systems and by mass media and advertising—all of which developed on a large scale under the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic. Mobility and circulation shrunk space and accelerated time, resulting in psychological compression and capital accumulation. Time, temporality, continuity, and discontinuity became experiential, psychological, philosophical, and technological, and commercial categories and cinema began to participate in the structuring of these categories in capitalist modernity (Doane 2002). In addition to these forms of mobility and discontinuity, the rise of skepticism, rationality, and secularism created religious uncertainty, philosophical reflexivity, and self-doubt—both at personal and national levels. Throughout the over one century that is under investigation here, Shiite Islam was the official religion of the country, written into the constitutions that resulted from both the 1905–11 and the 1978–79 revolutions. Both the official and the vernacular versions of Shiite Islam were generally antagonistic to cinema, hampering the institutionalization of the film industry and discouraging the practice of moviegoing. While religious minorities faced continual prejudice and periodic pogroms, they nonetheless thrived, especially in cinema. Particularly those entrepreneurs with deep historical roots, transnational connections, and business and foreign-language skills, such as Armenians and Jews, flourished, contributing greatly to the film industry’s formation and transformation. Their contributions, however, were not based on religious but on professional and commercial grounds. As a result, Iranian cinema throughout its history remained a secular if moralistic one. The disproportionate influence of ethnic and religious minorities on cinema is complex and undeniable, but it is understudied and undertheorized, a situation that I have tried to rectify. In today’s globalized media environment, Iranian national cinema, like all national cinemas, must include not only what Iranians and Iranian sub­ national and ethnoreligious minorities create within the country but also what Iranian nationals, exiles, expatriates, transnationals, and émigrés produce in intr o d uc tio n

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diaspora. In addition, national cinema involves not only Iranians’ movie production but also their movie reception and their exchange relations with other cinemas. It is this nexus of relationships that constitutes national cinema for the purpose of this study. Centrally, modernity gendered all personal, social, and cultural spheres and their artistic expressions. As Afsaneh Najmabadi shows, in the Qajar era male-to-male homosociality and sexuality were the order of the day, an order gradually reversed as backward and unnatural because of two traumatic experiences. One involved Iranian travelers’ disturbing encounters with modern gender relations in Europe, particularly the sight of clean-shaven young men—resembling the pubescent men with faint mustaches (amard, ghelman) with whom they had friendly and sexual relations in Iran—mixing freely with coquettish, unveiled, and unrelated women in public places. The other involved the disdainful accounts of European travelers to Iran who interpreted Iranian homosocial relations only in terms of deviancy. To counter the sense of inferiority, by the turn of the twentieth century—coinciding with the birth of cinema—Iranian modernist discourse had “marked heterosexuality as natural and homosexuality as unnatural. Yet the unnatural at once built its own home as a masquerade of the natural” (2005:39). The telltale sign of this masquerade was the faint suggestion of a mustache that many women grew well into the twentieth century. Yet soon modernity’s total association with heterosexuality required the eradication of the masquerade and the closeting of homosocial and homosexual desires and practices. These desires and acts were henceforth blamed on the unavailability of women due to their veiling and segregation. Since no repression is hermetic or permanent, however, the expression of these denigrated practices bubbled to the surface in various disguised, displaced, and excessive forms, affecting individual subjectivity and national identity (ideological formation), cinemas and cinemagoing (spectatorial formation), film stories, plots, and characters (textual formations), and film production (authorial formation). The excess and inappropriateness that escaped the heteronormalization of modernity found its expression in several liminal social figures and film characters that were marked by excess and inappropriateness of gender, sexuality, and identity, such as the lascivious haji, the Westernized dandy (male and female), and the luti tough guy, who were either not sufficiently manly or too much so, not sufficiently feminine or too effeminate, or either not sufficiently or too Western or native. The real drama lay in watching how these hybridized figures negotiated premodernity and homosociality, on the one hand, and modernity and heterosociality, on the other. Because each of these characters carried the wounds and fears of repressed 14

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and conflicting desires, they often appeared in filmic comedy. Several chapters in the current work deal with these characters and the issues they brought to the surface. The first apparent instance of film censorship occurred in 1904 by a leading cleric, Shaikh Fazlollah Nuri, over the screening of films showing unveiled Western women. Much controversy and social hailing and haggling ensued during the Qajar and the first Pahlavi periods to bring women into the public sphere as citizens and spectators and onto public screens as actors and directors. While women were fully accepted as spectators and actors during the second Pahlavi period, they ironically only came to their own as film directors during the Islamic Republic period, when women faced the suppression of their rights and the imposition of the veil. During the second Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic periods, a dynamic film culture evolved consisting of film periodicals, film reviews, the publication and translation of books about cinema, university film classes and degrees, independent film clubs, and numerous film festivals. As Miriam Bratu Hansen has rightly observed, cinema was not only constitutive of modernity and of its disruptions but also, and most important, “the single most inclusive, cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted and negotiated” (1999:68). Cinema also formed part of the new connective tissue and the structure of mobility and circulation that bound the people of the world. As commodities, films traveled the globe, feeding the circulation and accumulation of capital and ideas, as well as national identities and representations. Iranian movies inscribed disruption and mobility in their narratives in the form of village-versus-city stories, social mobility themes, foreign bride and foreign travel movies, and the dandy genre. Both melodrama feature movies and social problem documentaries examined the pleasures and freedoms as well as the pains and costs of modernity and urbanity. Significantly, the narratives of many of the features were driven by a nostalgia for the stable categories and rooted times and places before modernity’s commencement.

The Ideological Formation of Cinema and the Politics of Representation in Mediawork Movies are important causes, effects, and instruments of modernity. Every movie is at once an individual expression and a collective one. As a result, movies are potent currency in ideological battles, affecting both modern inintr o d uc tio n

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dividual subjectivities and collective national identities. The politics of Iranian modernity has always involved the politics of filmic perception, representation, and counterrepresentation. As theorized in chapter 3, Iranians’ first contact with Western mediawork—consisting of the combined operations of media and conscious-shaping industries, including the movies—during the Qajar period provided initial instances in which both individual psychological self-consciousness and doubt and collective national consciousness and ambivalence surfaced among the viewing public. From then on, Westernized Iranians, educated elites, government officials, and clerics saw their images distorted in the mirrors of foreign movies. European and American movies and television circulated representations of Iran that tended to be Orientalist and stereotypical. During the century of cinema’s existence, these representations changed from quaintly underdeveloped to ethnographically exotic and from geopolitically modern to Islamically backward and violent, often in service to Western governments and corporations (Naficy 1995, 1984f). Iranians, in turn, often sought to define and project themselves by means of the cinema, either according or in contradistinction to these othering Western mediaworks. Historically, as Mohamad TavakoliTarghi shows (2001), as much as the West needed to construct its own identity by positing an Orientalist Eastern Other, Iranians needed the West for their own self-awareness, self-representation, and self-fashioning. The West, in Stuart Hall’s words, needed “the Rest” (non-Western societies and its own internal others) to come into its own and to declare itself the pinnacle of human achievement and history (1996). To fashion themselves as modern, Iranians thus needed to create their own Occidental stereotypes of the West. In the realm of cinema, this happened particularly in foreign bride movies, foreign travel movies, and in dandy films. Many Iranian critics blamed Western movies for the disruptions of modernity. Some considered them a contagion and the vanguard both of Western cultural imperialism and of the country’s moral corruption. Some took offense at the movies’ representations, others reacted defensively and sought to counter them by public criticism, and officials protested against them diplomatically, censored them, and funded the production of self-serving counterrepresentations. As discussed in later chapters, these defensive strategies provide instances for Frantz Fanon’s and Teshome Gabriel’s theorizations of the roles of cinema and the media in creating a “national culture” for the oppressed and for developing nations (Fanon 1963; Gabriel 1989). Overall, in their cultural politics of identity, a majority of the filmmakers (as well as the elite, government officials, and the Pahlavi shahs) took an es16

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sentialist turn. They sought Iranian identity in a homogenous, preexisting, authentic, and essential collectivity before the disruptions both of Muslim Arab invasion in the seventh century and of modernity since the eighteenth century. On the other hand, Islamic filmmakers in the Islamic Republic invoked the inaugural period of Islam and Shiism as the originary moment of identity. These essentialist approaches imposed, in the words of Hall, an “imaginary coherence” on the disrupted historical experiences and identities of Iranians, positing an ancient treasured collective to be discovered and revived (1994:394). Only gradually, toward the end of the twentieth century, would an approach emerge that was focused less on being than on becoming. Through social conflict and exile the best Iranian filmmakers and intellectuals came to the view that a coherent, essentialized culture and identity transcending time were not tenable. Rather, Iranian identity was subject to the continuous play of history and power relations. As a result, if cinema initially constituted a source of self-othering for Iranians, making them see themselves through the eyes of the others, it changed gradually with the industrialization of cinema and the production of domestic and exilic films to become an agent of selfing and of modernity. By becoming subjects of the movies—as spectators, diegetic characters, and makers of films—Iranians also became subjects in and agents of world history and modernity. National cinemas are not only what is produced; they are also what is seen on national screens. That is why this study takes into consideration the hitherto understudied impact of foreign films exhibited not only by commercial agents but also by foreign governments’ cultural attachés, television networks, religious missionaries, oil companies, art historians, ethnographers, and freelance documentarians, travelers, and journalists. The book also looks at the consequences of entering Iranian movies in international film festivals and of exporting them to foreign countries. All these types and venues of exhibition would profoundly affect audiences (spectatorial formation) and future filmmakers (authorial formation).

The Spectatorial Formation of Cinema and Individualism Much of the controversy surrounding cinema concerned not only content but also viewing context. During the early Qajar period, film exhibition was private, limited to the royal court, upper-class homes, and elite parties. Soon, however, it became public in Christian missionary schools, in modern hotels, intr o d uc tio n

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and in theaters, which brought with them film censorship. Female spectators in public cinemas were controversial. Religious leaders disapproved, but film exhibitors bent on increasing their box-office revenues employed a variety of strategies to attract women. During the Pahlavi period, particularly the second Pahlavi Shah, because of the interests both the Iranian and foreign governments had in ideological inculcation, audiences were sought not only in commercial movie houses but also in noncommercial venues such as public auditoriums, foreign embassies, foreign cultural societies, primary schools, independent film clubs, universities, and military barracks. Portable screens were brought to villages throughout the nation. Film reception involved many fascinating translational, hailing, and counterhailing practices that facilitated or complicated film intelligibility and spectatorial subjectivity. Live film translators (dilmaj) described, explained, interpreted, or performed aspects of the movies for spectators, most of whom initially could not read the intertitles of silent films or the subtitles of the sound movies. The widespread dubbing of foreign movies served a similar function, with fascinating consequences for cultural and political accommodations to make the films intelligible and culturally acceptable, including censorship. The emergence of a Pahlavi-era middle class expanded leisure activities such as moviegoing, and the massive influx of villagers to urban centers because of modernization increased the audience for commercial cinemas. During the anti-Shah revolution in 1978–79, movie houses (along with banks and liquor stores) became targets of mob wrath because they symbolized corrupting Western cultural imperialism. Over a third of the movie houses were destroyed, and in one exceptional, criminal, and dastardly instance, nearly four hundred spectators were burnt to death in a fire set deliberately by Islamist arsonists in the Rex Cinema in Abadan. Under the Islamic Republic, moviegoing (particularly for women) was again contested. Soon, however, mixed-gender spectatorship in commercial cinemas resumed, thanks to the “purification” of the film industry and the reimposition of the veil. Home viewing on clandestine video and satellite television also recommenced, turning homes into private film festivals. I analyze these spectatorial trends in light of statistics and audience ethnography throughout the present book. Modernity placed individuals at the center of the universe, decentering God and religion and eroding the divinely determined hierarchical collective. Humanism regarded people as sovereign, autonomous individuals with internal subjectivities and desires who are largely the architects of their own destinies. This idea drove the emergence of democratic systems, individual rights, private property, and meritocracy. Descent relations (tribe, family, and com18

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munity) became less important than consent relations driven by individual choice and contract. Individuals became potentially the owners of their own labor. Professional and “objective” relations with coworkers, guided by laws and protected by collective bargaining and union representation, gradually came to the fore. Traditionalists and religious leaders, including Nuri in the early 1900s, fought the encroachment of humanism into Iranian consciousness. As a result, the move from theocracy and collectivism toward humanism and individualism proved difficult and uneven for most of the century. Iranian society and its individual citizens lived in a state of asynchronous duality, shuttling between premodern collectivism and modern individualism. Jonathan Friedman observes that modernism is not a fixed entity but “a continuous process of accumulation of self” (1988:448). Ideally, modern individuals are never complete or finished but palimpsestically becoming. And this is true both of spectators and filmmakers. With the gradual entrenchment of modernity, the notion of film viewers evolved. A collective “audience” became an individually addressed “spectator,” construed to be “a singular, unified but potentially universal category.” This shift facilitated the interpellation of spectators as a classless mass audience (Hansen 1991:84–85). With modernization and the industrialization of leisure, spectators became “consumers.” Modern, often secular public places of entertainment, such as hotels, cafés, parks, and malls, where movies and related consumer goods were offered, became hubs of modernity and consumption. People could see and be seen, and loitering and spectating became an important pastime. For the first time, the relation between cinema and consumerism is theorized in this book for the Iranian context. Intimately tied to modernization and the resultant spatial compression and temporal acceleration is the intensification of the experience of urban living. The noise of traffic and manufacturing, the acceleration of transport and communication, and the visual and aural clutter of signs and media created a complex, intense experience—the shock of modernity. As Lucy Fischer shows, electrification, electric illumination, and urbanization were intimately tied together and to the shock of modernity and cinema (2006). The ceaseless change brought on by modernity increased sensory complexity. Modernity has been a chief reorganizer of the human sensorium and of the mass production of senses. Travel diaries testify that movement, speed, clamor, and brightness destabilized and overloaded some Iranians in Europe, where they found full modernity rather than inchoate elements of it. Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, on his third trip to Europe, which began in March 1889, records remarkable testimonials of this overload. On the train to Kasintr o d uc tio n

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sel, Germany, he writes, “This train travels very fast and gives one vertigo, resulting in one falling to the ground. A person cannot stick out his head from the window. This is the busiest heart of Europe [bohbuheh-ye farangestan]” (1990/1369:237). While visiting an electric power plant, what he finds most interesting are the turning wheels and moving machinery, the electrically lit panorama, and the shiny electric lights that are so “bright as to hurt the eyes” (235–36). He complains of incessant noise at night, disturbing his sleep: “I must try to sleep during all the noises from wagons, gun carriages, horsedrawn carts, dogs, horns, and hubbub. These noises persist until four hours past midnight. Then they go silent, may God keep them silent forever. I don’t know when these people sleep” (241). In Iran, as modernity took root, some cosmopolitan dandies, tough guys, and flâneurs roaming the streets in search of the new sought speed, movement, noise, and brightness; in the process they created new social relations that exceeded family and workplace relations. Others condemned these, and sought refuge in rooted philosophies and places. Still others focused on the pathologies that speed, movement, and the “machine age” were inflicting on peoples’ bodies and psychic lives (Schayegh 2005). Cinema engages in what Hansen calls “the mass production of senses,” both by its sensational effects and by the emotions they inspire. But as she notes, the cinema went beyond the mass production of the senses, providing “an aesthetic horizon for the experience of industrial mass society” (1999:69). Even silent films reorganized the sensorium: a silent, gray representation of the noisy, colored world seemed most peculiar. In his account of his first film viewing in 1896 at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair, Maxim Gorky eloquently expresses this sensorial reorganization: “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If only you knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life, but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre” (quoted in Leyda 1983:407). Technological improvements in production and exhibition intensified the experience of film. Genres such as musicals and spectaculars intensified the phenomenological experiences of moviegoing and expanded ­spectatorship —with Abdolhosain Sepanta and Ardeshir Irani’s The Lor Girl (Dokhtar-e Lor, 1934) being the first Persian-language example. An extensive menu of snacks and refreshments in the cinemas, including hot food, compounded sensations, enhancing synesthesia. In the ethnographic descriptions of film 20

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spectatorship during each film period, I examine all these dimensions of moviegoing. Film not only recorded movement and speed but also produced the sensation of speed by particular ways of framing, filming, and editing. The rate of editing fluctuated during the twentieth century, but as Barry Salt reports, the average shot length (asl) of films steadily decreased, which means shots became shorter, driving up the cutting rate. By the end of the silent period, the asl had gone down to 4.8 seconds for American and to 6.6 seconds for European movies (1992:174). The introduction of sound inflated the asl, but then it again decreased progressively, so that by the mid-1970s it had reached 6 seconds, with an asl of four seconds or less “now fairly common” (283). Such an increasing rate of cutting, which would jump far higher in exciting scenes, along with the enlargement of image size and the closer photography of subjects served to enhance the sensation of movement and speed while watching films, thereby consolidating modernity’s sensorial reorganization. Such speed and dynamism facilitated the narrative flow and comprehension obtained by the gradual development of the conventions of the invisible style. Tom Gunning rightly calls this the “dialectical structure of shock and flow” (2006). The conflicts that individualism and humanistic values brought about in a traditional, patriarchal, and religiously dominated society became the subjects of many popular movies and art-house films. Melodramas focused on family tensions, arranged marriages, generational conflicts, and class divisions, and popular films dealt with themes of modernity, modernization, and displacement. The tensions of individuality and collectivity became increasingly condensed in the presence of the stranger, the outsider, the foreigner, the alienated, the dandy, and the disabled. Georg Simmel identified the encounter with the stranger in the metropolis as a key feature of modernity (1971).

The Textual Formation of Cinema and Oral Tradition Iranian cinema’s hybrid mode of production, with its vestiges of artisanal multifunctionality, spontaneity, and improvisation, inflected the textual practices of popular filmmakers in fascinating ways that are theorized in these pages. Iranian oral traditions, popular romances, folktales, modernist literature and poetry, and a rich tradition of visual, musical, and performing arts also served as sources for film texts. intr o d uc tio n

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Despite the fast-paced surface adoptions of modernity and Westernization, which were all too visible in the emergence of tall buildings and trafficchoked streets, the social and psychic transition from premodernity to modernity happened gradually. Iranian aesthetics retained peculiar features of collectivism and of oral traditions, as well as, strikingly, a certain classicism and conservatism. As Michael Hillman has aptly noted, one of the keys to Persian aesthetics is its “enduring classicism, exhibited through the adherence to convention in terms of subject and manner of treatment and through the emphasis on generalized, typical, almost impersonal experiences as opposed to romantic or modernist lyric statements that emphasize individuality, reality, subjectivity, and uniqueness” (1990:72). Typecasting in miniature paintings and movies bore this out. In the latter, this became evident in binary types, such as whores and hurries (angelic women) for women and tough guys and dandies for men, characters without subjectivity and individuality simply performing their fate or their type. Typicality was also encouraged by a typecasting star system, which in turn influenced styles of filming and acting, resulting in the persistence of frontal shots and of actors performing in tableaus for a collectively constructed audience. Iranian oral traditions, the Shiite religious performances of taziyeh, curtain-reciting and other vernacular theatrical performances, and the artisanal production mode contributed further “collective” features to cinema, leading to narratives with temporal and spatial discontinuities, visual chaos, autonomous song-and-dance segments unrelated to plots, oratorial dialogues, and didactic and moralistic stories. The pleasure derived from these film narratives was therefore more ethical or didactic, than visual or sensorial, compared to that theorized for Western movies. Yet film also introduced the radical and destabilizing force of motion, which, as Gunning notes, undermined “centuries of practice in which the tableau signified a static composition, a frozen moment, if not utterly an image of repose. An image in motion reintroduced temporal transformation into the field of visual representation, not simply implying it (as did the contorted figures of baroque art [or for that matter as did the contorted figures in Persian miniatures and curtain-reciting paintings]), but allowing it to unfold” (2006:300). The juxtaposition of Iranian classicism (static or contorted tableaus) and Western modernity’s mobility and speed gave the Iranian films their textual specificity and uniqueness. During the Pahlavis and Islamic Republic periods, both fiction films and documentaries proliferated, the latter thanks to massive government subvention and intervention, resulting in many high-quality, counterhegemonic 22

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films and several film types and movements. The most influential was an official pro-Shah and pro-Westernization documentary style, institutionalized in the 1950s thanks to copious film production and screenings in Iran by the United States Information Agency (usia). Later, the anti-Shah revolution and the subsequent eight-year war with Iraq also brought another official documentary film style, which concentrated on covering the war front and on extolling Islamist ideals and Islamicate values, among them acts of martyrdom and self-sacrifice. However, because of their commitment to representing “reality” and the material world, the documentaries used far fewer classic conservative features than the fiction movies did. Animated films, particularly those produced by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (cidcya), are also notable culturally and artistically. Modernism as a style entered both documentary and fiction films, often as a discontinuity of time, space, and causality, as self-reflexivity (incorporating the filming process into the narrative), self-inscription (of the director), and skepticism concerning its own ontology. The earliest modernist fiction film is Ovanes Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa, Aktor-e Sinema, 1933), while the most notable early modernist documentary is Kamran Shirdel’s The Night It Rained . . . or the Epic of a Gorgan Village Boy (Unshab keh Barun Umad . . . Ya Hamaseh-ye Rustazadeh-ye Gorgani, 1967).

The Authorial Formation of Cinema and Social Commitment Less analyzed in the formation of national cinemas are the roles of individuals in the larger national enterprise. Modern individuals are significant agents in the formation of their own identities, as well as in the particularity of each national cinema. Whether they were pioneer artisans who introduced cinema, ethnic middlemen and entrepreneurs who facilitated cinema’s growth, commercial producers who created an industry, hybridized dandies who negotiated native and foreign cultures, or auteurist filmmakers who elevated the medium, individuals served significant and signifying functions. Many Qajar-era film pioneers were self-made and multifunctional artisanal entrepreneurs with mobile, layered identities. Even when the industrialized hybrid production mode began its ascendance, individual film entrepreneurs continued to play a major role. Because rooted categories of identity dwindled in the face of individuality, particularly during the Pahlavi period, auteur directors emerged. Because of discrimination, which closed off some of the legitimate businesses to religious minorities and immigrants, members of these groups intr o d uc tio n

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found the fields of entertainment, including cinema, reviled by the Muslim majority, both receptive and fertile to their contribution. During the Islamic Republic, on the other hand, when economic and social uncertainties, labor costs, and censorship increased, when the Western embargo of Iran reduced exchanges, and when the Islamists fanned exclusivist politics and interethnic hostility, some aspects of collective, family-­oriented filmmaking resurfaced, both to save money and to ensure control and security. Dariush Mehrjui, Bahram Baizai, Rakhshan Banietemad, Abbas Kiar­ o­stami, Kumars Purahmad, and the Makhmalbaf family were among the filmmakers who employed family members as crew or cast. A new form of collective production, the “family production mode,” may be theorized for the postrevolution movies. In the latter periods, the film industry developed professional and labor unions to protect, represent, and sometimes suppress the interests of their members both in the marketplace and with the government. Directing films, like watching them, is an inherently modernizing activity, involving industrialization, rationalization, disruption, gender reconfiguration, dynamism, sensory overload, representation, and individuality. The dynamism and sensory engagement of cinema is particularly addictive. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s explanation is to the point: “I love filmmaking because there is motion in it. I couldn’t go to a certain location and work in the same place every day. My entire life is caught up in motion and constant change” (quoted in Dabashi 2001:195). During the two most active periods of cinema, when hybrid industrialization ruled, two parallel cinemas became dominant. Popular cinema captured the box office, while state-supported art cinema captured the imagination and political discourse of the public. Critics wrote off the commercial filmmakers as crass entertainers while expecting the art-cinema directors to act as “politically committed” (motoaahed) or “religiously committed”(motoddayen) public intellectuals and members of the loyal opposition. This public expectation of commitment torqued Iranian authorial cinema in specific ways (literature too). It forced auteur directors to make films in which the stories of private individuals were almost always read as the stories of the public, for each film served as a “national allegory” (Jameson 1986). Despite Jameson’s gross generalization in this essay, and Aijaz Ahmad’s astute critique of it (1994), it remains true that the relation between the libidinal and the political, at least in Iranian intellectual literature and cinema, was such that libidinal investment was encoded by filmmakers and decoded by spectators, primarily in political and social terms. In the modern West, on the other hand, the private and public worlds—in both lives and works—are kept apart by a seemingly 24

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unbridgeable divide. Iranians were still in transition from premodern collective identity and had not yet fully achieved individualized modern subjectivity. But the best auteurs adopted attributes of the Third Cinema: historically conscious, politically engaged, socially relevant, and artistically critical (Willemen 1989). The majority acted less as independent public intellectuals than as mouthpieces for political causes. Furthermore, like many third world intellectuals and artists, Iranian art-cinema authors occupied a unique social position. As Roy Armes described it, these intellectuals and artists were “often at odds with the ruling members of the elite to which they belong[ed] by virtue of their education”; yet they felt “equally cut off from the mass of the people” by the literary forms and cinematic language they employed (1987:24). As a result, they remained in a tenuous position vis-à-vis both the state, which they opposed, and the public, which they wished to represent but from which they stood apart. The filmmakers’ biographies and upbringing often prove influential in their choice of topics, their generic preferences, and the film styles they employ, as well as in their business practices, politics of identity, and public status, particularly in authoritarian states like Iran, where every film acquires a political aura and meaning, even if it does not concern politics per se. I deal with many of the key filmmakers’ authorial histories, social functions, textual strategies, business practices, and individual struggles to come into representation and political agency during all three periods under discussion here.

Thus historicized, contextualized, and theorized, Iranian cinema will be seen as simultaneously subnational, national, transnational, and international. It will emerge as a dynamic organism, a network of relations, in diachronical dialogue with the Iranian past and present while projecting a vision of the future. At the same time, it will be seen in a synchronic dialogue with the peoples, cultures, and cinemas of the world, from which it borrows and to which it contributes. Thus it simultaneously constitutes an Iranian cinema and a cinema of the Other. These diachronic, synchronic, and transverse dialogic relationships make Iranian cinema both reflect modernity and act as an agent of modernity and of national identity.

intr o d uc tio n

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1 a r t is a na l sil en t cinem a in t he qaja r per iod

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he first known actuality film by an Iranian was filmed in 1900, not in Iran but in Belgium, by the Qajar court photographer Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh, who had accompanied Mozaffar al-Din Shah on his European trip. The French Catholic mission opened the first public cinema, Soleil Cinema, the same year in the city of Tabriz; it was later operated by an Armenian Iranian, Alek Saguinian. The first commercial movie house, Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema, operated by the ardent constitutionalist Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi Tehrani, opened its doors to the public in late 1904, showing comedies, trick films, and newsreels of the Transvaal war in South Africa. Yet this cinema was apparently banned by the leading Muslim cleric Shaikh Fazlollah Nuri and shut down by the Shah within a month. These brief tales of origin already evidence the microphysics of maneuvers and relations between Iran and the West and among Iranians themselves that helped bring cinema and modernity to Iran. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, the first democratic revolution in the Middle East, replaced despotic monarchy with parliamentary monarchy: the Qajar dynasty ended, while modernity and Westernization movements emerged reenergized. The new constitution, the division of government into separate legislative, judicial, and executive bodies, and many laws were adapted from Europe, particularly from Belgium. Likewise, from the

mid-nineteenth century onward, the education, postal, and banking systems; the technologies of telegraphy, telephony, and electric lighting; the mass media of printing, journalism, photography, and sound recording; and new literary, theatrical, and musical forms were all imported or adapted, ad hoc, from European, Russian, or American models. Cinema was only the latest in this long list of elements of Westernization in Iran. Travel abroad for business, education, military training, pilgrimage, and pleasure or for political exile further widened people’s horizons and drove Iranians’ critical self-awareness as individuals and as national subjects, creating important preconditions of modernity. Although not colonized, Iran was integrated into the neocolonial and capitalist Western economies. This integration was aided by the bitter rivalry between the great powers of Czarist Russia and imperial Britain who vied with each other to either force or fascinate Iran into their own “sphere of influence.”1 It was also facilitated by the actions of various Qajar shahs and political leaders who incurred huge national loans or mortgaged Iran’s resources (e.g., minerals, oil, tobacco, and customs duties) to foreign powers to finance expensive and sometimes dubious national and personal projects. These multiple contacts made Iranians painfully aware both of the achievements and dynamism of the great powers and of their own shortcomings and low international standing, putting them ill at ease. In fact, many Iranians thought they were suffering from a dis-ease—socioeconomic backwardness, self-doubt, and apathy—whose cure was thought to be the adoption of modernization, individualism, and nationalism, in short, modernity. Modernization and its disruptions brought about urbanism, a modern intelligentsia, and a middle class, from which the pioneers of cinema and film’s spectators emerged. A new modern national identity grew, to which cinema and other mass media contributed, and a widespread social discontent spread, which cinema would reflect and shape. The Constitutional Revolution mobilized middle-class bazaar merchants, reformist Shiite clerics, and secular intellectuals to work together for modernization and sociopolitical reform (Keddie 1981). Given this neocolonial background and Iranian psychology and mythology, it seems little wonder that from the beginning Iranian nationalism was driven more by a search for justice than for rights. As a result, most twentieth-century oppositional movements and intellectual criticism, including cinematic critiques, also tended to revolve around issues of social justice rather than of human rights. Like other major recent reform movements in Iran, the Constitutional Revolution was chiefly urban and aided by the media. If the earlier anti-British and anti28

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Shah tobacco protest movement (1890–91) was facilitated by the telegraph, and the later Islamic Revolution (1978–79) by the conjoining of the telephone and audiocassette recordings, the Constitutional Revolution’s cause was energized by newspaper reporting—fed by telegraphic dispatches from r­ eporters —and by photography. Having studied the West, constitutionalists became convinced that the solution to Iranian backwardness was “to break the three chains of royal despotism, clerical dogmatism, and foreign imperialism. They abhorred the first as the inevitable enemy of liberty, equality, and fraternity; the second as the natural opponent of rational and scientific thought; and the third as the insatiable exploiter of small countries such as Iran” (Abrahamian 1982:62). It was during the constitutional upheavals that the phrase nation of Iran was for the first time uttered in the streets of Tehran (82). It was also the first time that this entity was imagined as a secular one (mellat), one consisting of people with diverse languages and religions equal before human laws. These human-centered conceptions of individual subjectivity and national identity were opposed to traditional ideas of religious community (ummat), in which believers were equal before divine law and its unelected interpreters and enforcers.2 Many of the imported institutions, technologies, media, and literary forms proved instrumental to the emerging revolution. Qajar-era newspapers, photographs, and telegraphs linked Iranians domestically across many cities and internationally across national boundaries, consolidating not only an Iranian national imaginary but also an Iranian form of nationalism and a social reform movement.3 Newspapers bound the multicommunal, multilingual, multi­ethnic, and multireligious Iranian populations together both inside the country and in the diaspora—in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, India, and Europe. They disseminated new ideas about democracy, justice, the rule of law, individual rights, private property, freedom of the press, and women’s equality, as well as news of revolutionary activities at home. They introduced new journalistic and literary forms such as satirical commentary, political poetry, the translation of European plays, and the written use of colloquial language (Arianpur 1988/1367). Photographers such as Antoin Sevruguin documented key events and personalities of the Constitutional Revolution. These photos spread the news in newspapers and on postcards, in turn helping to shape the events themselves. Like newspapers and photographs, the telegraph spread the news of revolutionary activities to the nation and the world, facilitating Iranian nationalism and modernity. This technology also became an instrument through which the new shahs and Iranian government attempted to exert their power in rea r tisanal silent c inema

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gions long out of the central government’s effective reach. The British government, too, which maintained a parallel telegraph system in Iran, employed it to integrate the empire and to influence Iran’s internal affairs (Rubin 1999). In its twin journalistic and administrative functions, the Iranian telegraph served to consolidate the ideas both of nation and of nationalism. Because some of the most progressive and influential Iranian newspapers were published in exile, the modern concept of nation was from the start extraterritorial, encompassing Iranians both inside and outside the country.4 And since a majority of the exile press published in Persian, linguistic nationalism and print capitalism also became attributes of modern Iranian nationalism early on. The idea of the nation acquired a discursive and “imagined” dimension (Anderson 1983) and a diasporic character. Although film was perhaps too new for Iranians to document the Constitutional Revolution (no evidence of such documentation exists), it had a profound psychic impact on the ideological and subjective formation of those privileged enough to view movies early in this period.

The Artisanal Mode of Production and Exhibition: A Cottage Film Industry In May 1897, less than two years after the first public exhibition of film in Paris, Iran’s first commercial film exhibitor, Sani al-Saltaneh, viewed films in Britain; he documented doing so in his travel diary. Three years later, Tehrani filmed actualities in Europe and Iran. Qajar period cinema therefore runs from 1897 to 1925, when the Pahlavi dynasty replaced the Qajar dynasty. The cinema that emerged cannot be termed “Qajar cinema,” for it did not benefit from any enabling film infrastructure in the form of studios, labs, acting schools, and chain cinemas or from legal and financial protections such as favorable taxes, loans, or tariffs. It was an artisanal cottage industry driven by a few importers and exhibitors, with ad hoc sponsorship by the royal court, the local elite, or the great powers. Later, several wily commercial film importers, exhibitors, and cameramen emerged who relied on market forces to film and attract spectators. The lion’s share of film activities took place in Tehran, but other major cities were also involved, at least in film exhibition. This precapitalist artisanal mode characterized cinema during the entire Qajar period and extended to the mid-1950s, despite emerging industrialization. In any study of national cinemas, not only the dominant mode of production in a given society but also the predecessor and parallel arts and their pro30

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duction modes constitute important topics. Traditional art and craft ateliers offered a ready model for filmmakers during the Qajar era (Ekhtiar 1998): producers were jacks-of-all-trades in a hierarchical master-apprentice system. Further, the patronage system under which many of the great works of the Iranian visual arts, literature, architecture, classical music, and performing arts were created was still in play during the Qajar years. These must have driven the notion of cinema as a cognate practice. The rivalry between the great powers and the encroachment of capitalism and modernism encouraged opportunistic and individualized film practices among film-­industry personnel, which contributed additional dimensions to the artisanal production mode. What Homa Katouzian called the “arbitrary rule theory” of Iranian governance may have been an additional impetus for this mode of production. According to him, arbitrary rule results in a short-term “rickety” society (kolangi). It manifests in lacks in acquisition, accumulation, and preservation; improvisation and volatile changes (where every change is possible in the short run but little lasting change exists); chaos alternating with arbitrary rule; multiple power centers; and no framework for legitimacy other than the rulers. There is “unaccountability of the state and ungovernability of the society” (2003a:xi). This theory could account for the artisanal, improvisational, and unstable characteristics of the film industry, making it a truly “rickety cinema.” Finally, in each society and epoch, cinematic modes of production tend to follow the dominant production modes. During the Qajar period, this was artisanal and workshop production. Many of the characteristics of the artisanal production mode for the movies were also present in newspaper and magazine publishing.5 This premodern state comes to graphic expression in the first comprehensive book on Iran’s economic system (1917) by Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh (also spelled Djamalzadeh), in which he lamented, “Unfortunately, it must be admitted that those who say that we are dependent on foreigners from the paper on which the Quran, our heavenly book, is printed to the cotton shroud in which we wrap our dead, are telling the truth” (1983/1362:15). He elaborated further: “Industrial manufacturing in the sense understood in Europe exists only in two or three electric power plants in Tehran, Rasht, Tabriz, and Mashhad and in one gas plant in Tehran. . . . Nevertheless, almost every town and village possesses certain decent industrial capabilities. Everywhere there are a few master craftsmen and workshops, which have been producing with utmost expertise and artistry certain products” (77). During the Qajar era, Iran’s entry into the world economic sysa r tisanal silent c inema

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tem threatened these traditions of domestic production. Foreign competition devastated domestic industries (except carpet making and handicrafts) and turned Iran into chiefly a supplier of raw material to Western industries and a net importer of manufactured goods.6 Despite this devastation, the model of workshop manufacturing and artisanal production remained in effect for decades,7 even in the nascent film business. Despite the relative paucity of local fiction film during the Qajar period, the importation, exhibition, production, and consumption of film, as well as the social production of gendered audiences in a transitional society, proved complex and fascinating; artisanal modes did mobilize a variety of tactics, techniques, and relations. 1. Multifunctionality. The Qajar-period cinema’s film artisans were characteristically multifunctional master craftsmen: photographers, cameramen, editors, screen translators, producers, importers, distributors, and exhibitors. Sani al-Saltaneh and Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov were both court photographers and cinematographers (Sani al-Saltaneh was also an accomplished printer). Both also filmed actualities, imported foreign films, and exhibited them, one in private circles, the other in both private and public cinemas. Tehrani both imported and exhibited films, Ardashes Badmagerian imported and exhibited films and provided on-site live translations during screenings, while Ali Vakili imported, exhibited, and distributed movies. Khanbabakhan Motazedi filmed actualities, processed them in his makeshift home laboratory, spliced them into film programs and newsreels for exhibition in his own and others’ theaters, and later on he filmed and inserted Persian-language intertitles into foreign movies. In short, many early film entrepreneurs ran one-man, horizontally and vertically integrated artisanal film workshops, precursors to studios. 2. Liminal Middleman Function. Film pioneers were liminal middlemen, negotiating between a traditional premodern Iran and a modernizing West, importing films, as well as projectors, cameras, gramophones, bicycles, X-ray machines, and other Western technologies. Their class capital undergirded their liminal positioning (all came from the middle and upper classes). Some were attached to the Qajar court by marriage (e.g., Sani al-Saltaneh) or by sponsorship (e.g., Ivanov). Most were secular and liberal, favoring modernity and political reform (e.g., Sani al-Saltaneh and Tehrani). Most were educated abroad, primarily in Europe (e.g., Sani al-Saltaneh and Motazedi) and Russia (e.g., Ivanov and Ovanes Ohanians). 32

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3. Multiculturalism, Multinationalism, and Interethnicity. Iranian people have always been mobile and nomadic, migrating within the country and across borders. Poverty at home and employment opportunities abroad, particularly in the Caucasus and the Russian Empire, caused massive to-and-fro movements of workers north and south. Between 1900 and 1913, 1,765,334 Iranians moved to Russia in search of work, while 1,411,951 eventually returned, leaving 353,383 persons as permanent residents there (Chaqueri 2001:81–82). This movement of people across borders entailed movements of ideas, technology, and know-how. Many film pioneers were immigrants or came from émigré families that tended to be multicultural and interethnic. They often had access to multiple cultures, particularly European and Russian (e.g., Ivanov, Ohanians, Arnold Jacobson, and Georges Esmailiov). 8 Armenians (e.g., Bad­magerian and Ohanians), Baha’is (e.g., Sani al-Saltaneh’s father), and Jews (e.g., Jacobson) were strongly represented. During the 1900s, Armenians owned or managed three of the first four movie theaters in Tabriz (Zoka 1997/1376:111–12). These ethnoreligious minorities formed part of the new cosmopolitan and modernizing strata protected by the new constitution. Religious laws had previously discriminated against religious minorities. Armenians, Jews, and Zoroastrians were now recognized as followers of official minority religions (receiving representation in the Majles, the Iranian parliament), even though they still sometimes faced harassment. Yet most Muslims considered Baha’ism, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, heretical and routinely condemned and sometimes violently dealt with its adherents. Such exclusion or prejudice facilitated these minorities’ middleman functions, but not without cost. Their tenuous status prevented them from engaging in legitimate and respectable businesses; entertainment, the making and selling of alcohol and jewelry, and money lending became their recourses, as Muslims considered these fields of employment unsavory. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Armenians and Jews also served as street sweepers, human-waste haulers, dancers, singers, musicians, and film industry personnel.9 As Montesquieu put it in the early 1700s in his Persian Letters: “The adherents of a tolerated minority religion normally make themselves more useful to their country than the adherents of the dominant religion, because they are disqualified from high office and can distinguish themselves only by having money and possession; they are therefore likely to work in order to acquire those things, and will undertake the more ungrateful social functions” (1973:165). Centuries of Armenian and Jewish engagement in East-West business relations and these groups’ consequent cosmopolitanism enabled them to develop the exa r tisanal silent c inema

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pertise and affiliations to bring cinema to Iran and to maintain their hold on the industry for years to come. Neal Gabler among others has demonstrated the same process for the Jews who pioneered and dominated the Hollywood studio system in the United States (1988). Despite constitutional protections during the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, ethnoreligious minorities experienced second-class citizenship and its consequences, although the second Pahlavi period proved the most tolerant era for them. On the other hand, the ethno­ religious apartheid system that the Islamic Republic put into place in the 1980s eroded much of these minorities’ gains, violated their rights and lives, and drove many into exile.10 4. Hybrid Self-fashioning. To minimize the cost of difference, film pioneers engaged in various strategies of hybrid self-fashioning, contingent and opportunistic practices, double consciousness, identity politics, and masquerade. These performative strategies may have helped create the association of the cinema and entertainment industries with unethical behavior and loose morality. In addition, the majority population seemed to regard multiple identities as a sign of inauthenticity, religious syncretism, and divided loyalties. As a result, ironically and tragically, the minorities’ engagement in unsavory but necessary businesses gave the majority Muslims excuses for daily acts of discrimination and periodic violence and pogroms against them, particularly against Jews and Baha’is. The passage of inhumane and draconian rules severely limited these minorities’ choices concerning their place of residence, profession, clothing, and conduct, including even the type of gaze and voice they were to use in public (Nateq 1996:125–26).11 Even Zoroastrians faced harassment in Yazd and Kerman, as they were not allowed to wear the clothing and hats that Muslims did, were prohibited from touching any food while shopping in the market, could not ride donkeys or horses, were not allowed to walk barefoot on wet pavements, were prohibited from touching Muslims, and were forced to carry a large handkerchief (the famous Yazdi handkerchiefs) to sit on, so as not to pollute Muslim carpets (Shahrokh and Writer 1994:33). Such exclusivist customs prevented minorities from passing, as their garments and other marked features distinguished them. Engaging in the politics and poetics of passing and hybrid self-fashioning thus came with significant risks. Passing and hybrid self-fashioning had another negative consequence: it can be difficult to determine the name, nationality, story, and ethnoreligious affiliation of some of the pioneers of cinema. Yet no history or theorization of Iranian cinema and entertainment industries is complete without attention 34

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to such factors, which shaped the filmmakers of the Qajar and early Pahlavi periods. 5. Interstitiality. Emphasizing the liminal and multicultural nature of artisanal production modes allows us to move away from the modernist bipolar views of self versus the Other, the East versus the West, and the colonized versus the colonizer and to move toward a late modernist multipolar optic of interstitiality and multiplicity. Interstitiality, theorized in my earlier work on “accented cinema,” is not only a way of looking at the world but also a practice involving filmmakers operating in the cracks and fissures of both social formations and the film industry and benefiting from the anomalies of the dominant system (Naficy 2001:46–56). Power and its exercise are not bipolar but multipolar and dispersed. 6. Improvisation. Improvisation and interstitiality enable each other. Iranian movie pioneers improvised takes on foreign models with homegrown procedures. Such improvisations were flexible and spontaneous yet they suffered from amateurism and distracted attention. Film people thus tended to have low expectations and small achievements. Improvisation was procedural and endemic. As will be seen in later chapters, it was broadly represented in Iranian cultural life and the arts, and it left its trace in all phases of filmmaking. Homegrown technologies for film processing, filming, sound recording, editing, and projecting were improvised. Mohsen Badie, a creative engineer and the head of the Badie Film Studio, built much of his own sound recording and 35mm film-printing equipment. He also operated the camera and sometimes used his own home as a studio. Foreign equipment was scarce and expensive. Improvisation was needed in talent and employee relations because the legal system proved unreliable—a feature of “rickety” society. As the movie star Behrouz Vossoughi noted well into the second Pahlavi period, contracts in the industry could not be legally guaranteed: “If a conflict arose between two sides, no side could prove his claim and win the case. For example, if I walked away from a movie in mid-production, the producer could not do anything about it” (quoted in Zeraati 2004:257–58). To be sure, contract laws ­existed—at least during the Pahlavi eras—but the legal system was so bureaucratized and arbitrariness and authoritarianism so rampant that it was not worth tangling with it. Vossoughi cites several movies that for one reason or another were abandoned in mid-production without any compensation to the a r tisanal silent c inema

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involved parties; he also cites the case of an officially registered contract with Asr-e Talai Studio for him to act in eight movies, which he abandoned in midstream without incurring any legal punishment. This legal uncertainty encouraged personal relationships, cronyism, improvisation, opportunistic practices, or behaviors driven by the luti codes of ethical conduct and manliness ( javanmardi). 7. Instability. Because of the artisanal characteristics noted here, the early Qajar industry suffered from chronic instability and weakness. Movie houses were ad hoc and ephemeral, emblematized by Tehrani’s Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema in 1904, which lasted for only one month. Some exhibitors gave up while others persisted: Tehrani abandoned the film business after the closure of his first movie house, while Ivanov opened several in different parts of town. To ensure stability, the movie houses were generally not stand-alone structures but formed part of an existing business, such as an antique shop (Tehrani’s first cinema before the one on Cheraq Gaz Street), a home-based venue (Batmagerian’s cinema), a photography shop (Ivanov’s Farus Cinema), a coffeehouse (Aqayov’s cinema), or a hotel (Grand Hotel Cinema). These movie houses often bore the names of the exhibitors, of the businesses they were attached to, or of the streets on which they were located. These humble and temporary entities gradually evolved into independent storefront cinemas or relocated to Westernized cafés and hotel halls with established clientele; eventually they transformed into specially built movie palaces with alluring marquee names that appealed to the Iranian sense of nationality and modernity and created associations with Hollywood. 8. Indirectness. During the entire Qajar period and much of the first Pah­ lavi period, film importation, particularly from the United States, occurred through intermediaries. Iran constituted too small a market to attract American sales efforts. So the American movies the Iranians imported were what European distributors sent them. These were generally older, cheaper “junk prints” that came by way of Baghdad, London, or Paris, while German and Russian films came directly at competitive prices. Iran’s primitive roads and transportation system also favored the latter: “Most films had to be taken in by camel or lorry; only Germany and Russia had direct rail lines into Persia, giving their films an extra advantage” (Thompson 1985:146). This indirect routing meant that junk prints, sometimes a decade old and worn, were common, resulting in an “inevitable lag time” (Askari 2007:4)— an important feature of film exhibition and reception in Iran. Film exhibition 36

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was driven more by foreign distributors’ policies and exigencies than by domestic spectators’ tastes and preferences; exhibitors cleverly turned the age of prints to their benefit by touting the reception history of films abroad as a mark of their distinction and durability. Routing the film prints influenced film reception by rooting certain film genres in Iran. As Kaveh Askari suggests, the popularity of adventure serials in Iran well into the late silent era may owe something to the mania for this genre in the intermediary country that circulated the films to Iran, the Soviet Union (2007:8). Finally, by controlling the lion’s share of the market, indirect importation probably had a significant impact on film production, for it determined the exposure of domestic filmmakers to world cinemas. This is an understudied area that could illuminate the cinematic aesthetics of Iranian directors, particularly of those, such as Ohanians and Ebrahim Moradi, who not only saw these junk films by way of Russian intermediaries but also received their film training in Russia. 9. Social Haggling. The pioneers’ diverse backgrounds and the dominant authoritarian structures affected the microphysics of the industry. Pioneers used skills learned from oppression to enhance their social and cinematic agency; as accomplished shifters, they had their pragmatism, flexibility, and ingenuity—engines of improvisation—overdetermine cinema and modernity. These qualities advanced them professionally in uncertain times and in an environment often hostile to cinema, but they also gave the film industry a bad name. This improvisational attitude was fed by Iranians’ profound penchant for individualism, which was an asset in the Qajar era when cinema was inchoate and artisanal and individual multifunctionality was necessary. But when an industrialized production mode emerged, such individualism and personal haggling became a liability. 10. Political Agency. Exhibitors’ social agency and instability particularly during the Constitutional Revolution reflected their professional rivalries and factional politics. On the one hand, religious moderates, riding on the crest of Mulla Sadra’s philosophy, which contributed to the Iranian renaissance of the seventeenth century and to the reformist Shaikhi and Babi movements in the mid-1800s, rejected the fatalism of religious conservatives who presupposed a decline of values until the appearance of the Mahdi. Religious modernists, on the other hand, posited a dynamic vision of society formed by average citizens. Ultimately, this position demonstrated “a strong conviction that religious evolution has to accompany social evolution” (Bayat-Phillips 1981:45).12 Secular modernists, influenced by Islamist reformist movements, modern a r tisanal silent c inema

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education, and contact with the West, denounced any concern with metaphysics and theology as abstractions and proposed scientific knowledge, reason, political liberty, and Western-style modernization as solutions to the country’s backwardness. The inept Qajar court formed a diminishing force field of feudal landlords, conservative clerics, and competing British and Russian representatives. Yet even the court was not monolithic. With Mozaffar al-Din Shah, the court eventually accepted constitutional reforms. His successor, Mohammad Ali Shah, assisted by Britain and Russia, reversed his father’s previous decisions and bombed the parliament building in 1909, ending the Constitutional Revolution’s period of reform. All these factions influenced the arrival of cinema. Religious conservatives (such as Shaikh Fazlollah Nuri) banned cinema, while religious modernists (such as Seyyed Jamal Vaez Isfahani) and secular modernists (such as Tehrani), and even Mozaffar al-Din Shah himself, supported its emergence. 11. Biography. Artisanal cinema depended on the initiative, perseverance, multifunctionality, liminality, interstitiality, cultural haggling, and political agency of individual entrepreneurs. Biographies had a decisive impact on cinematic agency and authorship. I therefore highlight biographical and authorial formations of key film pioneers in the present study. Many of these filmmakers survived long enough to become subjects of documentaries and fiction films about the early cinema—films now more readily available than the pioneers’ original works. I use interviews, biographies, and autobiographies liberally throughout the present work. 12. Spectatorial Diversity. Sociopolitical and demographic diversity were also characteristic of film spectators. Although box-office sales did not constitute a major source of income at first (so audience taste did not determine film availability), the politics and demographics of spectators, and their views about cinema as an institution of pedagogy and entertainment, were factors in the cinema’s emergence. Iran was an overwhelmingly Muslim nation at the time of the Constitutional Revolution (mostly Twelver Shiites), and it remains so today. Yet minorities were involved in cinema not only as film entrepreneurs but also as spectators. The dense intermeshing of diverse ethnicities and religious affiliations in the service of modernity and cinema was reinforced by the regional diversity of Tehran’s population, which made up the majority of movie spectators. As Ali Madanipour notes, “The further back in time we go, the larger the proportion of the Tehranis born outside Tehran.” In 1986, for example, about one-third of the population was born elsewhere; 38

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twenty years earlier it had been 45 percent, and in 1867 it had been 73 percent (1998:87–88). This means that by the time filmmaking and film exhibition began in 1900, Tehran’s population was very diverse. Such diversity and mobility was conducive to innovation and to the passion for refashioning identity, something both filmmaking and film viewing further contributed to. Yet at the same time diversity also caused tensions and haggling that impeded cinema’s institutionalization.

Court-Sponsored, Private, Noncommercial Cinema Because royal sponsorship (and that of the elite and of foreign powers) constituted the earliest form of film support, Qajar-era cinema, unlike its European and American counterparts, began as a private, upper-class enterprise. Films were initially made for and viewed by the elite in the privacy of homes. This system created an early cinema that was also rather static, for it was shielded from energizing political, social, and commercial pressures—the microphysics of power. With the opening of the first public commercial cinema in 1904 by Tehrani, however, cinema was suddenly swept up in the crosscurrents of forces that vied for political ascendancy. In the process, cinema gradually changed to a public commercial form of entertainment, but it still retained many of its basic artisanal characteristics. The struggle over cinema was set into motion by Mozaffar al-Din Shah, who viewed movies during his 1900 European trip and ordered his court photographer, Sani al-Saltaneh, to purchase both film cameras and foreign movies to screen to his subjects back home. The following section deals with these two important figures.

Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar (1853–1906) Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s appreciation of photographic technologies likely came from his father, Naser al-Din Shah, an avid photographer since his teenage years. The latter had an akkaskhaneh (photography studio) in the court, where he printed and stored the many pictures he took, including those of his numerous wives, some ninety women. He kept a journal on his travels abroad. From one entry we learn that while in Germany during his third trip to Europe he saw, on 13 June 1889 (14 Shawwal 1306), what might have been a demonstration of a zoopraxiscope that showed people running and horses galloping. The entry constitutes a rare record of an Iranian being exposed to this a r tisanal silent c inema

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precinematic visual device in its own time. Naser al-Din Shah states that he watched a few of these shows but left the premises because the place was airless and claustrophobic (Qajar 1990/1369:242). Almost eleven years later (in 1900), Mozaffar, the fifth shah of the Qajar dynasty, made an eight-month trip to Europe that included the Universal Exposition in Paris.13 Members of the elite took many such trips to discover the “secrets” of European progress and to cure Iranian “backwardness” (Ringer 2002). Like his father, Mozaffar kept a detailed travel diary, published later, in which he noted his spectatorial experiences. His first film entry, on Sunday, 8 July 1900 (10 Rabi al-Awwal 1318), reports on a private screening in Contrexéville, France, during which he viewed both magic-lantern slides and motion pictures. Among the latter were images of the spectacular sights of the Paris exposition, to which he noted his reactions in ways that suggest his self-othering astonishment: “We sat down and they dimmed the lights. We watched both shows [magic-lantern slides and films]. They are very good novelties. They bring to life many of the sites of the Exposition in a most astonishing and surprising manner. We saw many panoramas of the city of Paris, the Exposition buildings, the way the rain falls, and the river Seine flows and so on and so forth, and we ordered Akkasbashi [Sani al-Saltaneh, the court photographer] to purchase all the equipment” (Qajar 1982/1361:100–101).14 He also attended the Paris Universal Exposition itself, where he viewed films on a huge screen. The universal expositions, which dated back to the Crystal Palace exposition in London in 1851, celebrated the West’s colonial power and the scientific, industrial, and technological achievements of modernity.15 At the same time, the national pavilions of non-Western, often colonized, countries in these expositions displayed examples of far-away cultures in the form of “native” artifacts, relics, and specimens, including entire human families who lived (and sometimes died) on the premises. These national pavilions offered examples of how non-Western governments projected their nations to Westerners and others as both modern and exotic. At these expositions, the global political and economic prowess of Western countries was juxtaposed with their need for local raw materials from, and markets in, the non-Western world. Here also collided the imaginative worlds of the West and the rest, various national, racial, colonial, and subaltern fantasies and identities. Iran’s pavilion in the exposition of 1900 on the Rue des Nations, designed and constructed by the French architect Philippe Mériat, was patterned after the religious and educational complex, Madreseh-ye Madar Shah Sultan Hussein, with additional motifs borrowed from the Ali Qapu and Chehel Sotun palaces—all of 40

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them renowned Safavid monuments located in Isfahan. The overall effect of the pavilion’s exterior was one of “grandeur, elegance, and bright gaiety.” Inside, the building contained “both a ‘magnificently furnished’ reception hall and an ‘immense bazaar,’ where agricultural, industrial, and artistic products were exhibited” (Celik 1992:122).16 Mozaffar al-Din Shah did not write much about the grandeur of the Persian pavilion; instead, he wrote admiringly about a “moving panorama” in the exposition that showed a trip from Badkubeh in the Caucasus through Qazvin to Tehran, culminating at his royal palace (Qajar 1982/1361:150). He also wrote glowingly of all the technological advances of the European powers, including cinema, and he purchased many modern gadgets and machinery, such as watches, clocks, binoculars, film cameras, movies, oil lamps, gramophones, records, and a motorcar. These purchases were in line with one of the stated aims of his trip, to bring the “benefits of modern discoveries to his own country,” even though this interest was rather shallow and childlike (Wickens 1983:36). His actions made the shah a middleman between Iran and the West, between tradition and modernity. While films had been screened publicly for five years in the major cities of the world, cinema was still regarded more as a novelty than as a lasting and significant industry. The Universal Exposition of 1900 offered film a major international showcase that emphasized its various industrial, entertainment, and educational forms. The most impressive was the Lumières’ giant cinematograph screen, erected in the enormous Festival Hall, a sixty-threehundred-square-meter, circular space punctuated by pillars and grandstands (figure 24). Four sections of steps descended to a central circular stage, which was ninety meters in diameter. The details of the hall are important, for they illuminate the shah’s self-othering reactions to it. With fifteen thousand seats, the Festival Hall was “one of the largest spectacle halls in the world” (Toulet 1991:15). A large screen (21 × 18 meters) had been installed under the stage floor, which would be pulled up by a winch in the ceiling before each film show. The screen was made of a material that, when sprayed with water, transmitted and reflected images, thus allowing audiences to watch films from both sides of the screen. Around a 150 films were screened there free of charge, in a series of twenty-five-minute programs (two programs each night). Nearly 1.5 million spectators attended the film shows, consolidating at once the official international recognition of cinema and cinema’s association with both education and the Lumière name. The titles of the screened films are not known, but according to Emmanuelle Toulet, they were primarily documentaries, whose instructional value the a r tisanal silent c inema

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24  Lumière’s giant cinematograph screen jutting into the picture on the right, inside the Festival Hall, Paris Universal Exposition, 1900. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

exposition organizers emphasized. “Stress was primarily placed in the power of film to reproduce, for didactic ends, landscapes or dramatic performances, whose ‘artistic’ effect depended entirely on the conventional ‘beauty’ of the reality reproduced. . . . The underlying elitist project to instruct more than entertain strongly inserted itself into the major orientation of the Exposition, which was intended as a gigantic national ‘school’” (Toulet 1991:31). Almost a month after his first diary entry about his private film viewing, and two days after an anarchist attempted to assassinate him, on Saturday, 5 August 1900 (7 Rabi al-Tani 1318), Mozaffar al-Din Shah attended the Universal Exposition, where he viewed the Lumière films on the Festival Hall’s giant screen, which he favorably compared to the grand State Amphitheater in Tehran (Tekkiyehye Dowlat) (figure 25). Here is what he wrote: At nine o’clock in the evening we went to the Exposition and to the Festival Hall, where they show films, moving and incarnated pictures. . . . It was dusk and all the lights of the Exposition were on. When we first entered the Festival Hall, we were very impressed. It is a truly magnificent building, and similar to but twice as large as our own State Amphitheater, it is round in shape and adorned with cut crystal ceilings.17 All around it are two levels of seats covered with red velvet. In this hall, they show cinematograph [films]. They raised a very large screen in the middle of the hall and turned off all the electric lights and projected many films on that giant screen. Among them, they showed travelers riding camels in the deserts of Africa and Arabia, which were very interesting 42

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to see. We also saw films of the Exposition itself, the moving alley, the river Seine with ships floating on it, people swimming and playing in the water, and many other things, which were a pleasure to watch. We have instructed Akkasbashi to purchase all kinds of them [projectors and films?] to bring to Tehran so that, God willing, we could make a few [films] there to show to our own servants. We viewed about thirty films tonight. (Qajar 1982/1361:146–47)18 Ali Khan Zahir al-Dowleh, a member of the shah’s entourage, who was present that night, also recorded in his own diary a fascinating account of what he saw. His entry offers one of the earliest descriptions of the use of sound in cinema—and the first Iranian account. His majesty the Shah and others entered the hall. Everyone had been invited. There were not much more than one hundred Iranians and Westerners there. . . . We all stared at the bright, white screen. A dry and barren desert appeared in which a caravan of load-bearing camels was traveling. The sound of their bells could be heard from the distance. As they drew nearer, the bell sounds also grew louder until the camels were as large as life-size and the bell sounds and the camel drivers’ noises were as loud as if they were in the same room with us. The cinematographer who had filmed the caravan must have had a phonograph with him, for in the same way that the camera had filmed their moving images, the phonograph had recorded their sounds. When the two are played together, people become both viewers and listeners, watching and hearing simultaneously. They showed two or three more

25  Tekkiyeh Dowlat (State Amphitheater) in Tehran during a performance, circa 1890s. Frame enlargement, from Mehrdad Zahedian’s film Lost Reels

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scenes [perhaps of the sound films]. After watching for approximately one hour, the lights were turned on and we rose to leave. (quoted in Adl 2000/1379:11)

Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh (1874–1915) Following Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s order, Sani al-Saltaneh bought two film cameras (one a Gaumont), some raw film stock, and a number of movies to take to Iran. Before returning home, however, he accompanied the Shah to Belgium. Thanks to the Shah’s travel diary, we can pinpoint with rare accuracy the details of what is perhaps the first Iranian film, [Carnival of Flowers/­Jashn-e Golha, 1900], and the identity of the first Iranian cameraman.19 On Saturday, 18 August 1900 (21 Rabi al-Thani 1318) in Ostend, Belgium, the Shah took part in a “flower parade” or “carnival of flowers,” during which women on some fifty floats threw flowers and bouquets at him, which he joyously threw back (presenting or throwing flowers to royal visitors was common in Europe, as the diary of Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s father in 1889 demonstrates) (Qajar 1990/1369:113, 189, 240). Both father and son were delighted with such popular expressions. Mozaffar al-Din Shah wrote, “I had a wonderful time.” The cinematographer who filmed this scene was Sani al-Saltaneh, the official court photographer (Qajar 1982/1361:160–61) (figure 26). He used either the Gaumont he had purchased on the Shah’s order (Omid 1995/1374:21–22) or the camera he had borrowed from a Gaumont cinematographer accompanying the Shah to Ostend (Adl 2000/1379:14–15).20 Mehrdad Zahedian’s Lost Reels (Halqehha-ye Gomshodeh, 2004), about the Qajar cinema’s lost and deteriorated films, contains the footage of [Carnival

26  The court photographer Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh pictured in Europe in 1900 (spotlighted), when he filmed the Shah on his European tour. Frame enlargement, from Zahedian’s film Lost Reels

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of Flowers], most probably filmed by Sani al-Saltaneh.21 Filmed in long shot, the single-shot actuality shows women perched on moving carriages throwing flowers at the Shah, who is standing on the sidewalk in front of a lofty entrance. The Shah appears to be having a good time, as he vigorously throws back the flowers to the women (figure 27). Sani al-Saltaneh probably also filmed other events in Europe; according to the Shah’s diary, he and others showed films to the royal entourage on other occasions during this long European tour, such as one in the French resort town Contrexéville (figure 28). While still in Europe, the Shah apparently viewed some of the footage of his own visit to the Paris Exposition and to other European sites (Tahaminejad 2000/1379). His class, family relations, connection to the court, royal patronage, religious affiliation, and foreign education all favored Sani al-Saltaneh’s ability to introduce cinema to Iran. He was both well connected and well educated. His father, Mirza Ahmad Sani al-Saltaneh, was Naser al-Din Shah’s court photographer and a Freemason (member of Grand Orient lodge) who had converted

27  In a scene from Sani al-Saltaneh’s [Carnival of Flowers], Mozaffar alDin Shah (against the black background in the back of the picture wearing a black hat) throws ­flowers to women. Frame enlargement from Zahedian’s film Lost Reels 28  Mozaffar al-Din Shah (right) and his entourage gazing at the camera, filmed perhaps by Sani al-Saltaneh. Frame enlargement from Zahedian’s film Lost Reels

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to Baha’ism, receiving the name Mossavar Rahmani (the divine illustrator) from the Baha’i leader, Abd al-Baha. It is not clear if Sani al-Saltaneh himself was Baha’i or a Freemason, whether he denied these affiliations, or whether he left these matters indeterminate as part of his hybrid self-fashioning strategy in a society in which most Muslims regarded both Freemasons and Baha’is, who were generally pro-Western reformers, with deep suspicion. Sani al-Saltaneh solidified his integration into the court when he married Zivar al-Soltan, the sister of the Shah’s wife (Gaffary 1985:719). Sani al-Saltaneh was also part of an emerging crop of foreign-educated intellectuals who favored Western-style reforms. He had spent about ten years of his life, from age fourteen onward, with his father in Europe, where he had studied photography and engraving (Zoka 1997/1376:113–16). As his photographs in this chapter and chapter 5 show, he was a bit of fokoli (dandy), wearing European clothing, including tie and faux col (false collar). He accompanied Mozaffar al-Din Shah to Europe twice, and all the photographs taken during these travels are his. The court’s photography studio operated like a traditional scriptorium or atelier (ketabkhaneh) where books were written, copied, printed, illustrated, bound, and collected. These establishments were typically the personal property of their elite sponsors. Masters supervised papermakers, scribes, calligraphers, illuminators, painters, and binders. These specialists worked for the studios either as employees or on a freelance basis. The studios themselves moved from place to place with the relocation of their sponsors; sometimes they were set up for a specific publishing project and disbanded when it was finished. Finally, these book studios formed part of a larger studio system, constituting a sort of decentralized cottage industry, which included individual arts and craft studios (Simpson 1993). Early film studios in the Qajar and first Pahlavi periods exhibited some similar characteristics. Qajar-era photo studios were much smaller than the elaborate manuscript studios, as photo manufacturing required fewer steps. Individual official photographers (akkasbashi) both manned and managed them, although they must have had assistants. Sani al-Saltaneh was one such official photographer, who on this first trip to Europe with the Shah acquired the additional duties of an official cinematographer. It appears that he was also the official printer, for he published the diary of the Shah’s first European trip, imported a moveable-type printing press, and established Korshid Printing Company, through which he printed some of his own and others’ books. On his return from Europe, Sani al-Saltaneh filmed the earliest actualities inside Iran. On the Shah’s order, he apparently filmed [Lions in the Far46

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ahabad Zoo/Shirha-ye Baghvahsh-e Farahabad, 1900] and [Muharram Processions and Head-Cutting/Marasem-e Moharram va Qamehzani, 1901] which shows Muharram religious ceremonies and processions, including the qamehzanan, a group of men who cut and beat their foreheads with swords.22 He also filmed other actualities, including [The Parade of the Cossack Brigade/ Rezheh-ye Brigad-e Qazzaq], [Tehran’s Tramway/Teramva-ye Tehran], and [Bazaar Scenes/Manazer-e Bazar] (Gaffary 1985:719; Haidari 1997/1376:15). Zahedian’s Lost Reels and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film Selected Images from the Qajar Era (Gozideh-ye Tasavir dar Doran-e Qajar, 1992) contain many actuality films and performance films shot by early Qajar cameramen. The actualities in Makhmalbaf’s films, a dozen of which are filmed by Sani al-Saltaneh (Rahimian 1993/1372:102), include the following films: [Mozaffar al-Din Shah on a Hunt/Mozaffar al-Din Shah dar Hal-e Shekar], [Mozaffar al-Din Shah Practicing Firing a Gun/Mozaffar al-Din Shah Mashq-e Tirandazi Mikonad], [Mozaffar al-Din Shah Looking through a Telescope/Durbin Andazi-ye Mozaffar al-Din Shah], [Riders Exiting a Tehran City Gate/Khoruj-e Savarkaran as Darvazehye Tehran], [Riders Crossing the River/Gozashtan-e Savarkaran az Rudkhaneh], [Donkey Riders Galloping in a Tree-Lined Street/Takht-e Kharsavaran dar Khia­ bani Moshajjar], [The Arrival of the Shah Abdolazim Train at the Station/­ Rasidan-e Mashin Dudi-ye Shah Abdolazim beh Gar-e Mashin], and [Women Entering the Shah Abdolazim Train/Savarshodan-e Banovan dar Mashin Dudiye Shah Abdolazim]. Many of these works are not strictly documentary in that the filmmakers may have asked the participants to recreate what they normally did for the camera. The last actuality film shows three views: the train entering the station; women, veiled in black chadors and white face masks, walking by; and women getting on the train. The actuality films generally follow the style of the “cinema of attraction.” Each lasts less than thirty seconds. Most are filmed with a stationary camera that does not pan or tilt, in frontal tableau and in long shot, with the action occupying the entire frame. Yet in some scenes in Mozaffar al-Din Shah Looking through a Telescope, the main subject is not centered and the Shah and the telescope occupy the right-hand margin of the frame (figure 29). To take advantage of sunlight, all the scenes are filmed outdoors and during the day. There are no close-ups, and most films consist of a single shot.23 While there appears to be an in-camera cut in one actuality—perhaps the first cut in Iranian cinema—there is no evidence of continuity editing in any of the films. This brief actuality, filmed in long shot, shows a royal carriage outdoors and a number of officially dressed dignitaries. One of them (perhaps the Shah) is shown moving toward the carriage to enter it. This is followed by a jumpa r tisanal silent c inema

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29  [Mozaffar al-Din Shah Looking through a Telescope], filmed by Sani al-Saltaneh. Frame enlargement from Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film Selected Images from the Qajar Era

cut to the same scene from a slightly different angle as the attendant closes the carriage door on the dignitary inside. According to the historian of early cinema André Gaudreault, such in-camera editing frequently occurred in ­cinema-of-attraction films, but it does not constitute continuity editing (1999). These actuality films offered a mix of modern and traditional subjects. Some resemble their Western counterparts in style, but they are not copies; they exhibit their own native aesthetics.24 The performance films included in Makhmalbaf’s Selected Images from the Qajar Era are all comedies: [The Donkey Riders Play-Fighting with Pedestrians Using Sticks/Jang-e Kharsavaran va Piyadeh va Chomaq Bedast], [Bastinado on the Dwarf and the Black Servant/Falak Kardan-e Kutuleh va Gholam Siah], [Argument with an Arab/Moshajereh ba Arab], and [The Dwarf Rides the Arab/­ Savari Geraftan-e Kutuleh az Arab]. The key players in these comic films were the court comedians and jesters, among them Issa Khan the Dwarf and Mirza Abolqasem Ghaffari, a giant.25 The pairing of opposites (tall with short or fat with thin) constituted a tradition of comic theater that entered cinema at its inception and influenced the formation of film comedies. The first commercially made fiction film, Abi and Rabi (Abi va Rabi 1931), directed by Ohanians, features the eponymous characters, one tall and one short. While Naser al-Din Shah was interested in photography and was himself an avid photographer, his son Mozaffar was fascinated by both photography and cinema and, according to a descendant, the documentary filmmaker Ahmad Faruqi Qajar, he filmed several brief documentaries himself.26 One is [The Court Eunuchs/Khajehha-ye Darbar], a three-minute comic film that shows the eunuchs frolicking in front of the camera, trying to catch and tie each other with ropes (Golestan 1995/1374:5–7). The preponderance of comedies among these early performance films has been attributed to Mozaf48

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far al-Din Shah’s preference for comedy and burlesque (Adl 2000/1379:29). It must also be attributed to the general tendency in the royal courts to retain a coterie of official hybridized comics, mimics, and jesters who, with the Shah’s consent and for his pleasure, made fun of all social strata, including royalty. These films also reveal what was considered humorous in court circles, the primary audience for these privately sponsored films. Finally, they point up the underlying racism and ethnocentrism of Iranian identity and humor: laughter apparently came at the expense of the physically handicapped (dwarves), of social outcasts (eunuchs, blacks), and of foreign rivals (Arabs). Royal patronage was instrumental in the emergence and acceptance of cinema in European countries too. For example, there is “little doubt” that in Britain royalty played a key part in popularizing the new medium (Barnes 1976:187) and in “promoting the ethos of middle class respectability” for an industry that by 1907 was searching for social acceptance (Harding and Popple 1996:137). To that end, British royals began to go to the movies publicly, instead of having the movies brought to them in private. Although no evidence exists of any of the Qajar shahs attending a public cinema in Iran, Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s sponsorship of a court cinematographer, his film screenings at the court, and his own filming paved the way for film screenings in the homes of the elite and eventually in public cinemas. Even if he himself did not attend public movie houses, his favorite boy companion, Malijak, attended them frequently. Another Western technology the court favored was the gramophone. The Shah was apparently an avid listener to gramophone cylinders, on which he recorded his own voice and piano playing (Sepanta 1987/1366:89, 140).27 Sani al-Saltaneh showed his own and Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s films, along with imported French and Russian newsreels, in the court, in the Shah’s harem, and in the homes of the elite during weddings, birthday and circumcision parties, and other festive occasions (Gaffary 1992:567). On these occasions, gramophone records were also played (Sepanta 1987/1366:118–20), but we do not know whether they were played alongside the films. However, given Zahir al-Dowleh’s description of viewing films with accompanying gramophone recordings at the Universal Exposition in Paris, where Sani al-Saltaneh must also have been present, it is likely that the latter would have sought to duplicate that early experiment with sound cinema. As both these Western novelties had thoroughly penetrated the private sphere of the elite, their combined uses were likely. However, not everyone, not even all modernists, lauded the importation of such technologies. Even the famous advocate of modernity and scientific a r tisanal silent c inema

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method Abdolrahim Talebof complained that the money that toiling Iranians had generated by their blood and sweat was being taken abroad to purchase china and crystal and such “toys” as phonographs, rather than to obtain productive technologies such as machines, factories, weapons, and railroads (quoted in Behnam 1996/1375:74). He charged that the Iranian elite imitated the frivolous aspects of the West and of modernity, not their deep structures. This constituted the kind of criticism also lodged against Westernized dandies. Yet other modernists, such as the poet Alamtaj Qaem Maqami (aka Zhaleh), in her long poem “Dialogue with the Singer Sewing Machine” (“Goftogu ba Charkh-e Singer”), affectionately lauded the gramophone as one of the West’s labor-saving, scientific, and technological accomplishments. At the same time, she critiqued her compatriots’ backwardness, incompetence, and superficial imitation of the West.28 This debate about what constituted imitation and what accomplishment and what constituted reproduction and what production formed part of the discourse of modernity that would dog Iranians during the entire twentieth century. After Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s death in 1907, Sani al-Saltaneh left the court atelier to engage in farming, first in the nearby town of Karaj and later in the province of Gilan. There were perhaps multiple reasons, personal and otherwise, that he abandoned his career as a court photographer and an artisanal film importer, exhibitor, and cameraman. Yet the demise of the royal sponsor may have proved key, for artisanal arts are always at the mercy of the patron whose whims, likes, dislikes, and support, or lack thereof, determine the shape of the resulting art and the fate of the sponsored artist. Despite his official retirement from cinema, Sani al-Saltaneh continued to occasionally show films in private to his guests (Gaffary 1985:719). His film practice provided a model for government-sponsored cinema that would resurface in the documentary movement of the 1950s.29

The Rise of Public and Commercial Movie Houses Contained in the private domain, cinema was safe but limited. At the moment it expanded into the public sphere, sociopolitical and commercial crosscurrents enmeshed it in power plays among various factions and formations. Religious traditionalists cast cinema as the corrupter of native and religious values and of patriotism (accusing filmmakers of spying for foreign powers), while religious and secular modernists regarded it as an instrument of modernity and public education. This debate, too, would haunt Iranian cinema through50

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out its existence. Yet the introduction of movies into the public sphere and their commercialization helped free cinema from its private, courtly confines, transforming it from an artisanal cottage industry into a semi-­industrialized, studio-based film industry in the ensuing decades.

Western Christian Missionaries’ Magic-Lantern Services and Film Screenings Foreign-based Christian missionaries were involved early on in the microphysical dispositions and relations that favored Westernization, modernity, and thus cinema. As the director Adele Horne noted in The Tailenders (2006), her fascinating documentary about the Global Recordings Network, a grassroots evangelical organization founded to record Bible stories in more than eight thousand languages, Christian missionaries were from the start media savvy and at the “forefront of European approaches to non-European societies, whether in the company of explorers, conquerors or commercial traders.” Their legacy was “as complex and mixed as that of European expansionism itself.”30 In Iran, Christian missionaries of various denominations set up modern schools where modern subjects were taught, particularly the missionaries’ native languages, for the latter considered this the first step in Iranians’ adoption of the culture, religion, and products of their home countries.31 The masthead of the bulletin of the Alliance Française, which maintained many missionary schools in Iran during this period, carried the following statement: “Whoever learns the French language, becomes a buyer of French products, and the expansion of the French language will be an effective instrument in expanding trade, in opening the path of export, and in increasing national production” (Nateq 1996:253). It is not surprising, then, that the missionaries, aided by the French consulates, attempted to make the teaching of the French language mandatory in all Iranian schools (291). Some of these schools also housed science labs and printing presses, and on festive occasions, they staged choral, musical, and theatrical performances in their halls, frequently the only auditoriums in the cities and villages in which the missionaries operated. In fact, in 1900 the French Catholic mission in Tabriz set up the first public cinema in the country in the hall of the church school, naming it Soleil Cinema Theater (Malekpour 1984b/1363:61).32 It was located on the second floor of the Tabriz Arcade, seated one hundred people, and generally showed silent one-reelers (Haidari 1991c:252–53) (figure 30). The cinema’s film programming was rather meager, as it screened films once per night. Yet it proved a surprisingly long-lasting venue; it operated for about a r tisanal silent c inema

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30  Soleil Cinema Theater now in disrepair, located on the second floor of this building in today’s Navai Alley, Tabriz

nineteen years, until at least 1919 (Muzeh-ye Sinema-ye Iran 2004/1383:15). This stability perhaps resulted from its sponsorship by the Catholic Church, an established institution in northwestern Iran. The manager of the Soleil in later years (since at least 1917) was an Armenian named Alék S. Saguinian who worked for the telegraph office and whose nephew, Zora Sohrab Saguinian, was a member of parliament and who in 1932 interceded on behalf of Armenian theater troupes with the Ministry of Education to gain permission for them to stage plays in Armenian in Tabriz (Ranjbar Fakhri 2004/1383:281). There is little information about what the Soleil showed, although the image of the rooster on its logo suggests that it imported Pathé films (figure 31). It also showed Iranian newsreels, such as Esmailov’s [Third Graduation Ceremonies of the Military Officers and Awarding of Titles/Jashn-e Fareqoltahsili-ye Dowreh-ye Sevvom Sahabmansaban-e Nezam va E’ta-ye Manaseb, 1925] and [Picture of Prime Minister, 20 October 1925/Temsale Rais al-Vozara, 20 Mehr 1304], a ten-minute film documenting Reza Khan’s attendance of a graduation ceremony at a military school. The Soleil was apparently so popular with reformists and young people that it would at times fill to capacity, forcing the manager to close the doors early, which caused uproar among those denied entry (Zoka 1997/1376:111). Since the Soleil was one of only three auditoriums in Tabriz, it was used for theatrical performances as well, including those of a native troupe named the Charity Society Troupe (Goruh-e Nemayesh-e Jamiat-e Khairiyeh, aka Aktoral-e Khairieh) (Ranjbar Fakhri 2004/1383:54–55; Malekpour 1984b/1363:59). According to the historian Homa Nateq, the various Western missionaries (Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Lazarite, Orthodox, and Jewish), who represented not only their religious orders but also their respective national aspirations and colonial interests, competed with each other, sometimes violently and ruthlessly, for the hearts and minds of Iranians, particularly those of re52

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31  Alék Saguinian’s letterhead bearing his name as well as Soleil Cinema’s logo, which consists of the year 1917, the cinema’s multilingual name in Persian (top), French (middle), and Armenian (bottom), the sun of enlightenment and Christianity rising from behind the mountains (perhaps representing Mount Sabalan), and finally what looks like the red rooster emblem of Pathé Films in the foreground

ligious minorities (1996:12–13). Yet foreign missionaries were forced to officially limit themselves to promoting secular values, Westernization, modern education, and the teaching of their countries’ languages and cultures. This is because Islamic law considered Muslim conversion to Christianity an apostasy punishable by death or loss of property, in compliance with which the Qajar court banned conversion in 1840 (Rostam-Kolayi 2002:186). In the case of the Soleil’s manager and sponsor, as in Sani al-Saltaneh’s case, religious affiliation, ethnicity (Armenian), foreign connections (with the French), and class affiliation (upper class) provided a rhizomatic web of associations that facilitated the introduction of cinema through the French mission and Saguin­ian as agents. In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, Iranians considered the United States a “third power” that they hoped would balance the political and economic influences of imperial England and Czarist Russia. American missionaries were thus welcomed on political grounds. The aims of the American Presbyterian Church, which had established its first missions in Iran in the a r tisanal silent c inema

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1830s, were evangelism, education, and medical and public health services. Like the French Catholic missionaries, the Presbyterians resorted to the new audiovisual technologies to accomplish those aims. During the Constitutional Revolution, they frequently showed magic-lantern slides to villagers in northwestern Iran as part of their evangelical work. These hand-colored slides illustrating the life of Jesus Christ and other biblical stories were accompanied by live music and narration. They left powerful impressions on the villagers who had never before seen such shows. Stereopticon slides proved even more powerful, for they allowed two similar images to be superimposed to give an impression of depth, or two different images to be faded on and off to create an impression of movement.33 One American Presbyterian missionary, Loretta C. Van Hook, who worked in northeastern Iran, provided a fascinating account of such “lantern services,” and “stereopticon exhibitions,” as she called them. She reported that during one evangelical trip in 1905 that lasted sixtynine days and took her to the village of Khoi, “certainly more than a thousand” villagers attended her eight or nine lantern services. This means that on average more than one hundred people watched each of her shows—not a small audience. It was also an intensely engaged one: I gave a number of stereopticon exhibitions which attracted people by the hundreds. I was surprised to find how much more they cared for the Bible pictures than for the few other pictures I had with me, which I had brought for diversion and to give an idea of the world outside of Persia. At one village we had the screen fastened on the wall of the court [yard] and showed the pictures out of doors. When they were finished not a person moved a muscle to go, although they were sitting on the ground, many of them with nothing under them. I said, “Are you not satisfied?” “No.” The khan, one of the masters of the village, replied with emphasis, and so they were all run through again. It was the treat of their lives, while the pictures, appealing to the eye, helped to strengthen the impression of the story told. (Van Hook, 1905–6:3) This description makes clear that the missionaries’ live narration accompanied the images during the lantern services. This system of providing lecture with and commentary for lantern shows was widely used in the West during the 1890s, a custom that gradually faded with the arrival of film. During the Qajar era, live translators or screen recitors (dilmaj) were also used in the cine­ mas to explain the silent films, but that phenomenon had its source in Iranian traditional theater, not any Western performance tradition. Van Hook does not say what else was included in her lantern services and stereopticon 54

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shows, but the Presbyterian Church’s Catalogue of Lantern Slides and Motion Pictures notes that “visualized worship services” consisted of colored stereopticon slides, hymns, preludes, special musical numbers, and offertories (Presbyterian Church 1932–33:3). In addition, the church recognized schools as “the bait with which we attract the Musselmans,” establishing by 1895 around 117 schools in the Orumiyeh area, meaning the enrollment of more than twenty-four hundred students (Zirinsky 1993:122–23). Howard Baskerville was a young Princeton graduate teaching science and English at the American Memorial School in Tabriz, yet he also taught the boys and girls horseback riding and tennis and rehearsed with them for a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. His idealism soon drew him to the Iranian constitutionalists’ fervor, and he lost his life in 1909 while fighting for their cause, becoming a legend in Iran (Bernstein 2007). The American Presbyterian mission, however, whose telegraphic address printed on their letterhead was “inculcate,” had a more neocolonial project in mind. Over the years it integrated into its educational curriculum and evangelicalism such modern innovations as live music, singing lessons, student performances, printed Bibles, illustrated religious tracts, gramophone recordings, and motion pictures.34 Going through the extensive Presbyterian Historical Society’s archive in Philadelphia, I realized that these new narrative technologies not only inculcated biblical tales; they also inscribed and reinforced stories of Western domination and superiority over the Orient, as well as the story of the self-othering encounter between the West and the rest. As Michael Zirinsky notes, “Although they articulated a desire to train youth for Christian life, in practice what they did seems very much like training Iranians to become like Americans” (1993:125).35 The American Presbyterian missionaries’ performance of lantern services and the French Catholic missionaries’ film screenings to Iranian villagers and townspeople expanded the reach of visual culture and film beyond the closed, private domain of the royal court and the homes of the elite in the capital city. However, staged in outlying and remote places, such performances did not apparently arouse the kinds of public outcry or official action that accompanied Tehrani’s opening of the first public commercial cinema in Tehran. As will become clear, Iranian Christians, particularly Armenians, were instrumental in film exhibition and production. But there is little evidence that they used the movie screenings for only religious or proselytizing purposes. In September 1910, an ad for movie screenings in the private home of Vartan Vartaniants, located in the “Armenian neighborhood,” lauded the entertainment and pedagogical values of the movies, not their religious import. Vartaa r tisanal silent c inema

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niants had turned his home into an active cultural site and the movie screenings there into a celebratory occasion. He showed movies three times a night, seven days a week, each showing comprising between four and seven reels. Between each reel, the “respected gentlemen” were invited to the garden buffet, where they could partake of food, sherbet, lemonade, coffee, milk, and tea (Muzeh-ye Sinema-ye Iran 2004/1383:12). While foreign Christian missionaries employed audiovisual technologies in their proselytizing and civilizing missions, leading Muslim clerics generally shunned them, as Tehrani’s case below demonstrates. The contestation over cinema was emblematic of the larger struggle between Iranian conservatives and modernists to shape the nation’s culture and cultural discourses.

Ebrahim Khan Sahhaf bashi Tehrani (1859–1921) and Haggling over the First Commercial Cinema Tehrani was educated at the first modern Iranian college, Dar al-Fonun Polytechnic, where he learned English and became familiar with European culture and sciences.36 He could perhaps best be described as a secular modernist. He made his living as a businessman and an antique dealer, and he traveled abroad extensively—to Japan, Europe, India, Canada, and the United States—and imported Western scientific instruments and consumer products, including an X-ray machine, a steam-driven automobile, electric fans, dynamos, electric plating machines, phonographs, Kinetoscopes, movies, and film projectors. Businessmen played an important role in bringing cinema to the country. They were cultural brokers who served as important agents of commerce and social change, as well as of selfing and self-othering. They were of course themselves the first subjects of Western othering by means of cinema. On one foreign business trip lasting six months, Tehrani saw films in London, perhaps for the first time, just a little more than a year and a half after the first public exhibition of the moving pictures by the Lumière brothers in Paris. He wrote about this experience briefly in his travel diary. It is said that his wife, Nosratzaman, accompanied him on this trip. If she did, she may have done so to some places only. Only during his Parisian stay (in which Tehrani uses a plural pronoun, indicating that he was with someone else, perhaps his wife) is there any indication of her accompanying him. Had she been with him throughout, his nightly excursions to places of entertainment, his strolling, dining, and drinking with foreign women, which he describes in detail, particularly for the London leg of his trip, would likely have been curtailed. 56

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We thus remain deprived of learning about the reactions of what would have been perhaps the first Iranian female film spectator. On one night out, on 27 May 1897, Tehrani attended the Palace Theatre in London to watch performances, such as a troupe of lively women dancers, acrobats, and gymnasts who were “much more agile than monkeys” (Tehrani 1978/1357:39). His travel diary records what he saw next—the movies—in a brief and ­matter-of-fact manner that gives no overt hint of the impact the experience must have had on him. He writes, “Another [entertainment] feature was an invention that worked with electric power, which shows every thing in the same state, and with the same speed as the original. For example, it shows the falls in America exactly as they are, or it shows a regiment of soldiers marching, or a line of railway cars moving at the same speed as the original. And, this is an American invention” (Tehrani 1978/1357:39).37 After spending the night at the Palace Theatre, he emulates what he saw British men do after nightly shows. He walks the streets, picks up a female companion, and asks her, “Do you want a drink?” When she agrees, he takes her to a bar or a restaurant (he calls it qah­ veh­khaneh, coffee shop), where they eat and drink alcohol. At this point, the woman suggests that they go to her house to spend the night. Tehrani accompanies her some distance but then rejects her offer on the pretext of having to retrieve his wallet in the hotel. The link between entertainment, movies, drinking, and prostitution is very clear here—the earliest in Iranian cinema— but Tehrani remains silent about why he shied away from sleeping with the prostitute. He does note that the going rate for a night with a woman was at least five tomans, a fairly high price. Several years passed before he took the important step of setting up the first commercial cinema in Tehran in the backyard of his antique shop (at least by November 1903). Later he would continue his modernizing and entrepreneurial trajectory by opening a cinema on Cheragh Gaz Street (today’s Amir Kabir Street) in December 1904. He mainly screened Pathé films (Hai­ dari 1989c/1368:151). According to his wife, Tehrani obtained the Shah’s permission before setting up his cinema (Rahimian 1993/1372:152). He showed comic trick films, such as ones showing a hen laying twenty eggs or scores of people entering a carriage, as well as newsreel footage (or recreated footage) of the Transvaal war in South Africa (mostly from Pathé, imported from Russia). According to one report, audiences viewed the films while sitting on carpets, the same way that they attended rowzeh or taziyeh (Issari 1989:60). However, according to Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh who attended Tehrani’s Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema, audiences sat on benches.38 According to Tehrani’s son, Abolqasem Rezai, his father hired a screen a r tisanal silent c inema

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translator to stand near the front and explain, as was customary in the popular “reading of curtain performances” (pardeh khani), what was happening on the screen to audiences unaccustomed to film viewing (Issari 1989:60). If this is true, then it constituted the first instance of applying the customs of curtain reciting from traditional and religious theater to public film screenings. Tehrani also installed at the entrance of his cinema three Edison Kinetoscopes, by means of which customers could view film loops individually. Admission prices were two, three, and five qerans (Omid 1995/1374:23), a considerable amount of money. Most of his cinema clients apparently came from the elite, among them Gholamali Aziz al-Sultan (aka Malijak-e Sani), the Shah’s boy companion, Aliasghar Khan Atabak Azam (Amin al-Sultan), and Mirza Ahmad Khan Ala al-Dowleh, whose excitement about this Western novelty caused a stir in the upper echelons of society.39 Women were not admitted. The newsreel footage of foreign events, such as the anticolonialist war that the Boers waged against the British Empire from 1899 to 1902 in Transvaal and the victory of Japan over the Russian Empire in 1905, augmented and enlivened newspaper accounts of these events. Significantly, the newspaper accounts themselves were in turn fed by dispatches from the telegraph, which since its introduction had internationalized the country (Rubin 1999:493).40 In the age of telegraphs, mass newspapers, and newsreel films, no news event remained genuinely local. Iranian nationalists, who opposed the great powers, favored the Boers and the Japanese, celebrating the victory of Japan, this small, nonwhite, non-Western Asian nation, over what they considered a Western imperial behemoth (Varharam 1988/1368:314; Shirali 2005/1384:21– 22). The great educator of the Qajar era, Yahya Dowlatabadi, wrote glowingly in his diary about the Japanese victory and its lesson for Iran: “One must admit the truth that when knowledge and education are combined they produce Japan, and when pride and arrogance are conjoined they result in Russia” (1992/1371:vol. 1:352). The secret revolutionary societies, too, found inspiration in these events and in the news about them, and it is probable that the newsreel films of both the Boers’ resistance and the Japanese victory energized them to fight for their constitutional goals.41 Tehrani imported Western ideas along with the movies. He ardently supported a constitutional government and was apparently a member of the Secret Society (Anjoman-e Makhfi), which worked for progressive reforms. He may also have been a Freemason (Zoka 1997/1376:109). The revolutionary societies were examples of early civil society institutions of modernity. Initially, they were not very programmatic and did not advocate the violent overthrow of the Qajars. Bound together by their “discontent with existing con58

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ditions and a belief in modernization,” they wished “merely to awaken the people to the evils of the despotism and the benefits of freedom, and to convince them that progress was to be achieved by means of the ‘new learning’” (Lambton 1987:307–8). In the Secret Society’s ninth meeting on 18 April 1905 (12 Safar 1323), Tehrani declared he would join the society if members promised to wear black clothing “throughout their lives” as a sign of mourning for “our mother country who is in the throes of death. We must wear black and mourn until she has recovered her health” (Kermani 1983/1362:291). Before and after his film screenings, he reportedly appeared in his cinema dressed in black as a sign of “political mourning” and proselytized for his views. On 10 January 1906 he had an anonymous woman pass on a letter of warning to Mozaffar al-Din Shah: “Be fearful of the time when we shall remove the [royal] crown from your head and the [royal] staff from your hand” (Kermani 1983/1362:360–61). When the famous progressive cleric Seyyed Jamal Vaez Isfahani, Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh’s father, was hiding from despotic persecution, Tehrani gave financial assistance to his family and urged others to do so as well (Kermani 1983/1362:442).42 Traditional Muslim clerics, particularly the powerful Nuri, disliked Tehrani’s film activities, and the court disliked his politics. The reasons were multilayered. Nuri shunned Tehrani’s cinema apparently because he had heard that Tehrani showed images of foreign women without veils. But according to Tehrani’s wife, Nuri proscribed her husband’s cinema because he considered film a “satanic work of polluted [najes] foreigners” (Rahimian 1993/1372:101). Nuri may also have objected to film on the grounds that it was a “Western agent for penetration into Iranian religious tradition” that “stupefies” people (Tahaminejad 1973b/1352:14, 17). This view accords with his general conception of modernity as a “contagion,” “drug,” or “disease.” According to him, Western democracy, as imported by means of the new constitution, was either a “sleeping potion” or the contagion of a “fatal disease” (Nuri 1983/1362:49, 27). He seems to have grasped the significance of modernity (and by extension perhaps that of cinema) as an agent of alienation and social disruption that could other Iranians and challenge the authority of traditions and of clerics’ near intellectual monopoly. It would be congruent with such a position for Nuri to attempt a “cure” by withholding the poison or by eradicating the contagion: prohibiting cinema. Likewise, Nuri advocated press censorship by religious leaders, which he called “purification” (Cohen 1983/1362:184). Not only conservative clerics in Iran pathologized cinema. The critic Margaret Chute in The Graphic (1913) cleverly characterized film’s popular impact as “cinemitis,” spread by the film projector, an “infernal one-eyed machine— a r tisanal silent c inema

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a noisy demon.” She wrote, “Germs may be found, fertilising merrily, in millions of miles of perforated celluloid, generally labelled ‘film.’ When hatched, these germs produce a dire disease, which leads sane people to perform insane acts, and turns casual, everyday citizens into raging fanatics” (quoted in Harding and Popple 1996:172). Chute’s playful admonitions to spectators to be careful, avoid cinemas, or cover their eyes (“use blinkers”) were more benign and open-minded than those by panicked, censorship-prone English moralists or Nuri in Iran.43 The metaphor of disease continued into the late 1920s, when the Vatican called films a “lethal poison” (Seabury 1929:13, 210). The moral panic of Muslims in Iran was thus shared by other religions and nations in the West. The objections to cinema in Iran may have stemmed less from its supposed danger to health than its threat to the body politic. By creating an alternative, secular public sphere where people of both genders and all classes could gather to socialize, be entertained, and be educated, movie houses posed a challenge to traditional public spaces. Coffeehouses were male-centered, and religious public spaces, such as amphitheaters (tekkiyeh) and schools (maktab), were segregated by sex. Cinema’s association with crime, delinquency, and prostitution arose in Iran only after the rise of the star system, although by then these assumptions already formed part of the public discourse regarding cinema in Britain (Harding and Popple 1996:43). The court moved to close down Tehrani’s cinema after only one month of operation (Omid 1995/1374:23). It is possible that Mozaffar al-Din Shah, so fond of photography and film himself, moved to put Tehrani out of the filmexhibition business not because of an opposition to cinema but because of Tehrani’s pro-constitution activities (although these seem to have begun after the closure of his cinema). It is equally possible that the Shah, cognizant of the power of the clerical establishment and the conservatives within his own court, did not want to alienate them further by supporting a modern novelty when not only his own rule but also that of the Qajar dynasty depended on them. In Tehrani’s case the despotic court and the conservative clerics came together against a common threat, but not for long. The Shah died soon after granting the new constitution in 1907 and Nuri, charged with thwarting the new parliamentary system, was hanged in 1909 in one of Tehran’s public squares, after uttering these words: “What good, what ill, I am gone” (Martin 1989:190). The closing of Tehrani’s Cheragh Gaz Street Cinema is the first recorded instance of the public censorship of cinema in Iran. A precedent for state and religious intervention was thus set, and it would be invoked time and again. The fate of his cinema left Tehrani completely disheartened. According 60

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to his wife, he began walking the streets dressed as a dervish, praising Ali Ibn Abitaleb, the first Shiite Imam, and criticizing the despotic Qajar government (Haidari 1991c/1370:217), and he went into such heavy debt that he had to sell his films and film equipment.44 Djamalzadeh told me that Tehrani attended the fiery sermons of his father, Seyyed Jamal Vaez Isfahani, where Tehrani handed out paper and pencils to the audience free of charge, urging them to learn to read and write (Naficy 1984b).45 In the meantime, he lost his home to his creditors and was thrown into jail on the Shah’s orders (Kermani 1983/1362:433). He was apparently threatened with execution not only for opening a cinema but also for establishing a public bathhouse with private stalls for Jews and Armenians and for starting a mixed-gender school for children (Tahaminejad 1973a/1352:14; Omid 1995/1374:24). He also dressed as a dandy, wearing a tie when living in Mashhad, an unusual practice in that religious city, which must have made him highly controversial. Finally, he was accused of being a Freemason and a Baha’i, charges frequently lodged against progressive people in an overwhelmingly Muslim society to discredit them. According to Tehrani’s son Abolqasem, a documentary filmmaker who made a powerful film on the hajj pilgrimage, The House of God (Kaneh-ye Koda, 1968), Tehrani remained a devout Muslim to the end (Omid 1995/1374:24). These varied and conflicting stories about Tehrani may be due both to a dearth of verified information about him or to the general disinterest of premodern Iranians in scientific and historical precision. It may also result from the type of doubling and camouflaging of personal information that Iranian modernists practiced to introduce innovations and reforms into a traditional society without reprisal. Lack of information or conflicting information served to protect the liminal film entrepreneurs—but not completely or forever. Having fallen from grace financially and politically, Tehrani was exiled, first internally to remote Iranian desert towns (Jandaq and Biabanak), and soon externally to Iraq and India. In Hyderabad, he began publishing a progressive “religious” periodical called Homeland’s Chronicle (Nameh-ye Vatan) (Jafari Khanqah 2004/1383:210). According to his son, he returned to Iran during the First World War to work as a translator for the British and as a bookbinder and businessman in Mashhad, where he died. He was buried near the tomb of Nader Shah.

Mohammad Khalil Javaheri: A Freemason Cinematographer Born in Syria to an Iranian family who had a business managing Shiite pilgrims’ travels to Mecca for the hajj, Javaheri first went to school in Damascus a r tisanal silent c inema

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and later in Beirut and Istanbul. He studied philosophy and journalism. In 1922 he entered the film organization of Turkey’s armed forces, whose profits were channeled to the Wounded War Veterans’ Association. The organization trained him for three months; he then decided to film the Greco-Turkish war, his first work. He sailed from Istanbul on the French ship Lamartine toward Izmir, where he and two assistants shot eight hours of documentary footage of Greek forces fighting the Ottomans, a campaign that led to the defeat of the Greeks and the creation of an independent modern Turkey. The defeat brought about massive population exchanges and destruction. Javaheri filmed fleeing Greeks and the fire that engulfed Izmir (Raein 1978:4–6). He returned to Istanbul on the same ship, but on the way, an incident changed his life: four miles from Izmir the Lamartine encountered a boat whose passengers were waving hands and handkerchiefs in a request for help. Since they were Greek, the captain of the Lamartine refused to stop until Javaheri interceded on their behalf, threatening to arrest the captain with the aid of the other passengers if he did not assist the desperate refugees. When the Lamartine’s crew boarded the other ship, the Greeks wanted to kiss the captain’s hand, but he pointed to Javaheri and said: “This young man saved you.” Javaheri’s bravery and humanitarianism so impressed a French professor aboard the Lamartine as a passenger, that he recommended the young man’s enrollment into the Grand Orient Masonic Order, where he ultimately achieved high ranks. In 1940, Javaheri moved to Iran and openly professed to being a Freemason, a highly unusual move as Iranians regarded Freemasonry with suspicion. Esmail Raein, a historian of Freemasonry, calls Javaheri “the first Iranian who revealed himself publicly as a Freemason without fear and panic” (1978:2). Within a year he established a news agency, the Eastern Agency (Azhans-e Sharq), on Lalehzar Avenue, Tehran, specializing in news items about Iran and the Middle East. He also soon established an Iranian Freemason unit, the Homayun Lodge, and published biographies of world leaders, including of Reza Shah, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ibn Saud. In 1958 he gave up journalism and went into the construction business. Although information about Javaheri’s filmmaking career is scant, it offers one more intriguing link to a social formation of modernity—Freemasonry— that overdetermined cinema in Iran. Further research is needed to establish the exact role that Freemasonry may have played.

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Commercial Film Exhibitors and Their Politics of Location Pre-nickelodeon exhibitors in the United States (from 1895 to 1908) had more influence than film producers on what early spectators saw on the screens. They were the ones who chose the short films and the order in which they would be strung together to form their theaters’ film programs (Musser 1991, 1990). Variety and drama proved key in constructing these programs, as did the ethnic composition and particular tastes of the neighborhood. Film programming was thus highly localized. Film programs did not become uniform throughout the nation until the industrialization of film production and the rise of the studio system. It is not clear what role the Iranian exhibitors played in creating their own venues’ film programs. By and large they got their films not from their European and American makers but from intermediaries in neighboring countries. We do not know if the films were already compiled into programs or not. It appears that film exhibitors mainly localized the filmviewing experience, not the film programs: they took care of halls and seats in the exhibition environment; amenities like food, drinks, and music; and interpretive aids like live translators, Persian intertitles, and advertisements. The case studies of exhibitors below illustrate these localizing strategies and tease out the complex manner in which artisanal commercial exhibitors manipulated the microphysics of power and relationships to facilitate and channel both their personal film enterprises and the overdetermination of cinema in general. In this section, I deal with the emergence of the main artisanal commercial film exhibitors who came after Tehrani.

Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov (1875–1968) An ethnic hybrid and social chameleon, Ivanov was born in Tehran to an English father and a Russian mother (from the Tartar tribes). This genealogy, which he told to the film historian Farrokh Gaffary, is in some doubt (Omid 1995/1374:36). It is more likely that his father was Russian and his mother British. There is also uncertainty about his first name (Zoka 1997:1376:146). Early filmmakers and exhibitors often camouflaged their identities, both to construct new modernist identities and to safeguard themselves in uncertain times. Like Sani al-Saltaneh, Ivanov was well connected to the centers of power—he apprenticed with the court photographer Abdollah Mirza Qajar, took pictures of the elite, became an official photographer to the court of Mohammad Ali Shah (who had replaced his father Mozaffar al-Din Shah), and headed the photography department at Dar al-Fonun Polytechnic (figure 32). a r tisanal silent c inema

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32  Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov in old age 33  An elegant calligraphic signature seal bearing Ivanov’s nickname “Rusi Khan”

In 1907, he opened a public photography studio in Tehran, and he took many of the portrait photographs of the Constitutional Revolution period’s notables (Afshar 1983:272), many bearing the elaborate and elegant calligraphic seal of his photo shop (figure 33).46 Like Sani al-Saltaneh, Ivanov imported films (often Pathé films) and screened them first in the homes of the elite and in the royal palaces and harems on ordinary nights or on festive occasions, such as at the wedding of the crown prince Zel al-Soltan. In honor of the crown prince Ahmad Mirza, Ivanov and his partner, Mehdi Mossavar al-Molk, in 1907 screened two movies in the Golestan Palace’s Hall of Mirrors, playing gramophone recordings during the projection, which lasted two hours (Zoka 1997/1376:146–47). Ivanov found Sani al-Saltaneh’s model of private film exhibition wanting in audience reach. During Ramadan in 1907, he opened a cinema in the courtyard next to his photography shop on Ala Al-Dowleh Street (today’s Ferdowsi Avenue). He showed films on Monday and Friday nights for the price of two to three qerans to audiences of two hundred. He made innovations in film exhibition and publicity and formed expedient alliances, adeptly employing relationships to increase his audience, income, and the number of cinemas he managed. The Constitutional Revolution’s reformist newspapers, such as Suresrafil (Trumpet of Esrafil) and Habl al-Matin (Firm Rope), publicized his cinemas and their nightly programs, thus contributing to the emergence of an intertextual media web. According to one historian, Ivanov was the first film exhibitor to give 64

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titles to the films he showed, listing them in his newspaper ads (Rahimian 1993/1372:102). We learn from these that he showed a range of films, including some of foreign sights, comic skits, short fictional narratives, actualities, and newsreels. His programs apparently lasted for about an hour. His cinema proved very successful, allowing him to change his film programs frequently and to raise his ticket prices. Another of his innovations was to screen films in an educational environment. In 1908, he converted the backyard of the Dar al-Fonun Polytechnic auditorium into an open-air cinema with benches and a blue sheet for head cover, providing a pianist and a violinist to accompany the films (Javdani 2002/1381:19). When another entrepreneur, a Caucasian known as Aqayov, opened a successful commercial cinema in the Zargarabad Coffeehouse showing similar films, a bitter competition arose, which seems to have led to periodic jailing of both Ivanov and Aqayov. The rivalry encouraged both the professionalization of film exhibition practices and improvements in cinema interiors and services.47 Ivanov added a second cinema to his operation on Naseri Avenue and hired a pianist and a violin player to provide live music for the films.48 In 1908, he opened Farus Cinema on Lalehzar Avenue (with help from the radical Social Democrat Haidar Khan Amuoghli), which boasted such modern amenities as an electric power generator, electric fans, a restaurant, and a bar. Here, he screened French comedies with much success. Ivanov became the first exhibitor with a rudimentary “cinema chain.” He also offered perhaps the first student discounts at half price to those who produced letters from school principals (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:37). This was an astute move, for young people were generally much more interested in cinema and modernity than the older generation was. Ivanov also dabbled in filming, although this was not his forte. The only film credited to him is [Ashura, 1909], an eighty-meter actuality of the annual Shiite mourning procession called Ashura. The film was processed in Russia and screened there, though never in Iran (Gaffary 1992:568). In a crucial move, Ivanov attempted to make filmgoing more socially acceptable by arranging a film screening for some of the leading ulama (Muslim clerics), who fortunately did not issue a fatwa against cinema. Neither did they issue one in favor of it. Apparently, the absence of an anticinema edict was interpreted as a form of tacit endorsement, thus helping pave the way for increased attendance, particularly among conservative Muslims (Haidari 1991c/1370:229). One report also claims that Nuri requested a private screening of films in his cinema, which Ivanov obliged (Omid 1995/1374:37). Nuri’s reaction to what he saw there is unknown; yet Masud Mehrabi contends that after this screena r tisanal silent c inema

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ing, Nuri removed the fatwa against cinema (probably the one he had issued against Tehrani’s Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema), making filmgoing a legitimate pastime (1984/1363:19). If that is the case, the removal of the religious edict against cinema—the first instance of censorship lifted—must be considered a watershed moment in the history of cinema and an important accomplishment for Ivanov. The extent of Ivanov’s expediency becomes clear when one considers his political tendencies and his ethnic and national identity politics. He mollified radical reformists and Muslim religious conservatives when establishing his cinemas. He was a royalist, in contrast to the constitutionalist Tehrani. He backed Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, who opposed parliamentary monarchy and in 1908 bombed the Majles building, ushering in a period known as “minor dictatorship.” Ivanov also supported Russia, which now opposed parliamentary monarchy. Furthermore, he was friends with Colonel Vladimir Platonovich Liakhov, the commander of the Russian Cossack Brigade in Tehran, who assisted the Shah in sacking the parliament and who saved Ivanov from paying taxes and from punishment for other transgressions by the local police. In a further imbrication of politics, ethnicity, nationality, and film programming, Ivanov reportedly favored the exhibition of Russian and proRussian films, that is, films imported from Russia that took the side of Russia in its 1904–5 war with Japan (Omid 1995/1374:871; Haidari 1991c/1370:227). His Russian ethnicity seems to have been a determining factor in his politics of location and film programming. Ivanov’s innovations and successes as an exhibitor and his politics and political affiliations made the Farus Cinema an arena for political struggle during the Constitutional Revolution. On the one hand, it was a favorite spot for modernists and perhaps for right-wing members of the upper classes and foreigners, particularly Russian and British diplomats, who after the movies drank alcohol in the cinema bar and carried on loud conversations late into the night. On the other hand, pro-constitution mujahedin at one point seized the theater at gunpoint to view films and to discuss them afterward. When the mujahedin finally deposed Mohammad Ali Shah in 1909, the Shah took refuge in the Russian embassy and eventually went into exile in France. The public then ransacked Ivanov’s photography shop, destroying his films and equipment, including his [Ashura] film (Gaffary 1992).49 Ivanov closed his cinema, sold his film equipment, and in 1912 joined the deposed king and his family in France, where he died in Saint-Cloud near Paris in March 1968.50 Iranian film historians have almost uniformly condemned Ivanov as a political conservative and reactionary, but things were more complicated than 66

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that. Like most secular modernists of the era with roots in traditional and religious cultures, Ivanov had divided loyalties and multiple identities. His mixed background could account for his political conservatism and his interest in playing with roots, as well as for his professional radicalism and his opting for routes. Ivanov was a secular modernist, as is borne out by his tireless and innovative efforts to import and exhibit films in the face of religious opposition to cinema. As a liminal ethnic and an interstitial film exhibitor, he was driven not only by his ethnic politics and political loyalties but also by his desire to make a go of his film business. That he set up his Farus Cinema with the aid of a revolutionary fighter despite his loyalty to the Shah and to the reactionary Russian forces; that he placed ads for his film programs in both politically radical and pro-constitution papers; and that he attempted to appease clerical leaders gives evidence more of his political flexibility and pragmatism than of his reactionary politics.

Ardashes Badmagerian (Ardeshir Khan Vosuq al-Tojjar, 1863–1928) Badmagerian, who supposedly inherited Tehrani’s cinematograph, was an Armenian Iranian merchant who traveled abroad frequently and, like Tehrani, imported Western novelties and technologies. On one trip, he apparently worked at Pathé in Paris for a short while and visited the Universal Exposition there, importing a bicycle, a gramophone, and a cinematograph on his return to Iran. He was more of a businessman than a film exhibitor, and it took several years before he entered the film exhibitors’ circle. In 1909, aided by the great Russian Armenian Iranian photographer Antoin Sevruguin, Badmagerian opened a cinema in his own apartment on Ala al-Dowleh Street, where he exhibited Pathé-Frères films that were for the first time imported directly from Paris.51 An ad in the Iran-e No (New Iran) newspaper (12 September 1909) announced the opening of this unusual apartment-based cinema, promising that since the films came directly from Pathé, they were new and would change every three nights (Haidari 1990c/1369:151). Sevruguin’s grandson, Emmanuel Sevrugian, told me that his grandfather may have viewed Kinetoscope and silent films in the Prater amusement park in Vienna in the 1880s, that he showed Pathé films in his residence on Ala al-Dowleh (Ferdowsi) Avenue, and that he had filmed some footage of himself in Iran, which had gone up in smoke. This experience caused him to give up filming (Naficy 2008). In 1915, on the same street, Badmagerian opened an eightyseat public cinema, which he named Tajaddod (Modernity), emphasizing the linkage of cinema and modernity. There, he showed silent films related to a r tisanal silent c inema

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the First World War, which he imported from France and Russia, accompanied by live piano and violin played by two musicians who would later become famous, Morteza Mahjubi and Alinaqi Vaziri (Golestan 1995/1374:19). The screening typically lasted about fifteen minutes.52 Tea, cookies, and ice cream were served during the summer months. Since Tehran was not fully electrified at this time, film projectors were hand-cranked and used an acetylene light source (Omid 1995/1374:27). Like some other movie houses during this period, the Tajaddod was housed in a nondescript storefront above a pastry shop, but it stayed in business for a good decade. Aided by another French-trained film entrepreneur, Khanbabakhan Motazedi, Badmagerian in 1917 opened the first public cinema that catered exclusively to women. It was called Khorshid (Sunshine) and much of its programming related to the First World War came directly from Europe. This cinema became an important source of pictorial news for a largely illiterate population. The Russian consulate used the theater from time to time to show films to its Red Cross personnel; during intermissions a Russian military band supplied live marching music and the bar offered ice cream, tea, and lemonade (Haidari 1991c/1370:237–38). However, for reasons not known Badmagerian apparently stopped importing movies and refused to show the movies imported by others, forcing the Khorshid’s closure. Badmagerian also sometimes acted as a screen translator in his movie house. In 1928, he left Iran for Paris to receive medical treatment, but he died after an unsuccessful surgery (Muzeh-ye Sinema-ye Iran 2004/1383:77).

Khanbabakhan Motazedi (1892–1977) Motazedi may be considered the third cameraman in Iran (after Sani alSaltaneh and Ivanov), but he is the first professional cinematographer. He filmed not only actualities and newsreels but also the first fiction film in Iran. He was a transitional figure, bridging nonfiction and fiction film and the silent and sound film eras and the Qajar and Pahlavi political periods. I deal with him briefly here but will return to him again in the Pahlavi period. As a child, Motazedi had a magic lantern and reputedly viewed movies along with his father at the home of Arbab Jamshid Jamshidian, a wealthy Zoroastrian businessman (Haidari 1991c–92:23). He received his elementary education in the Alliance Française School, and then in 1908 went to Switzerland and France to study electromechanical engineering. His thus seems

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34  Khanbabakhan Motazedi watering his home garden, perhaps quoting Louis Lumière’s film The Waterer Watered (L’Arroseur Arrosé, 1895)

to be one case in which the aims of the French school system to Westernize Iranians and to turn them into “buyers of French products” was realized. In Paris, he befriended Léon Gaumont’s son, through him gaining employment in the Gaumont film factory. His two-year stint there familiarized him with film production and processing. Before his return home in 1916, Gaumont gave him a film camera, a projector, some 35mm raw film stock, film processing chemicals, and several reels of comedies (Omid 1995/1374:30).53 On his arrival in Tehran, Motazedi began making home movies, developing them in his basement lab, and screening them privately (figure 34). Soon, however, he began the commercial exhibition and production of films. As an exhibitor, he successfully attracted audiences, and he made a special effort to bring in women customers (see chapter 2). It was in the Sanati (Industrial) Cinema that Motazedi introduced live translators to interpret and recite the foreign-language intertitles aloud. Later, with Ali Vakili, he also inserted Persian intertitles into the films, intertitles that Motazedi photographed and processed in his home lab (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:62). According to Motazedi, this innovation soon increased the audience by 20 percent (quoted in Haidari 1997/1376:26). Persian intertitles for foreign movies remained in force until the 1960s, when dubbing replaced them. Like other artisanal exhibitors, Motazedi opened several cinemas in different parts of the city, with varied degrees of success, including one called Tamaddon (Civilization) in the poor district of South Tehran, emphasizing the pedagogical and civilizing function of cinema. Motazedi’s home lab may be regarded as the first film laboratory in Iran (Omid 1995/1374:30). We get an indication of the artisanal improvisation typi-

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cal of this era in the anecdote about Motazedi being so short of supplies that he and his assistants had to sometimes sew the film pieces together with needle and thread instead of attaching them with glue (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:58). His partner Vakili (b. 1887) was another important Qajar-era film exhibitor, who like Motazedi was Westernized by his studies at the Alliance Française School. Like Motazedi he continued his film activities into the Pahlavi era. Vakili was a European-educated businessman who became a successful importer of foreign products such as shoes and telephones, and later in life, after he gave up his film career, he became a senator in the upper house of Majles. Like other artisanal commercial exhibitors, he had a career marked by multifunctionality. He opened his first cinema, seating five hundred people, in the Grand Hotel auditorium in 1924, the year before the Qajar dynasty ended. It bore a simple, two-meter-long, black marquee with white lettering that said: Gerand Cinema. Only a few chandeliers adorned the interior (Baharlu 2000:27). As was customary, women were not admitted to this cinema. This hotel, whose name is the Persianized form of grand, became the site of many nationalist plays, films, and musical and theatrical performances popular with Westernized dandies and modernist Iranians.54 Astute businessman that he was, Vakili filled an important gap in film exhibition by opening another public cinema exclusively for women in 1928. He employed various strategies to attract and sustain women spectators. He also opened other cinemas, such as the Sepah (Armed Forces) Cinema on Sepah Avenue. In these he introduced innovations such as live orchestras, which played Iranian tunes before and during the screenings (Shoai 1975/1354:17). He joined Emil Zurkov, a Jewish businessman, Arnold Jacobson, a white Russian who had escaped communism, Alexander Levin, and the famous Jewish Iranian screen translator Eshaq Zanjani to form the Iran Cinema Company. Perhaps the first integrated film studio, it imported foreign films, distributed films inside Iran, and exhibited them in several movie houses that it owned in major cities, including the Iran Cinema in Tehran, which opened in 1926. The company also exhibited films in private venues and rented and sold all sorts of movies. In July 1930 (Mordad 1309), Vakili began publishing the first film periodical, Sinema va Namayeshat (Cinema and Performing Arts), a monthly magazine edited by a Zanjani that, according to Mohammad Sadrhashemi, contained an inordinate amount of advertising for movies and movie houses (1984:vol. 3:55). This is not surprising, as Vakili started the magazine mainly to advertise his own movies and those of others (Omid 1995/1374:894).

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2 ideol ogic a l a nd spec tat or i a l for m at ions

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iven the dearth of primary sources about Iranians’ first experiences with cinema, and given the significance of this contact for their cinematic and national identity, this chapter theorizes these experiences in light of the stories of early spectators, exhibitors, and cameramen. These include eyewitness accounts of film viewing by the Shah, by a famous reformist writer, by several film pioneers, and by some elite and ordinary spectators during the early Qajar period, both before and after the Constitutional Revolution. They reveal much about the emergence of modernity, subjectivity, and national identity among Iranians. Finally, these stories set the stage for a historical and theoretical treatment of film exhibition and reception in public cinemas later in the chapter.

Theorizing Cinematic First Contact and Early Spectatorship What films did spectators in the Qajar period see? Early film programs everywhere were silent, enlivened by intertitles, live music, lectures, and translations. These programs were eclectic. For example, Pathé and Méliès programs in 1905–6 consisted of several types of films (Guillaudeau 1984), and we know that at least Pathé films were screened in Iran. So-called trick films

highlighted cinema’s ability to manipulate reality and astonish viewers, while “performance films” showed sports events, dances, parades, festivals, magic acts, plays, and other scenes that were performed before the camera. Actualities featured official news events, everyday activities, ordinary scenery, and foreign views that showed picturesque natives from all over the world. This category included travel films, a subcategory very popular with audiences interested in exotic sights and sites (Musser 1984; Shohat and Stam 1994; Rony 1996; Russel 1999; Ruoff 2006). Each film in these early programs usually consisted of a single shot that lasted less than a minute. Gradually, another category emerged, the so-called primitive narratives, which remained until 1908. Produced by artisan filmmakers and exhibitors, these narratives, which were longer than the films of other categories, told stories enacted for the camera and put together using continuity editing. Because of the aesthetics of display and astonishment in them, Tom Gunning called these “cinema of attraction” films (Gunning 1996, 1994). The movies were agents of modernity not just because of what they showed—scenes of modern life—but also because of how they showed what they did, because of their technological and textual formations, in other words. Their production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption involved other formations and components of modernity—modernization, industriali­ zation, rationalization, discontinuity, individualism, representation, sensory reorganization, and consumerism. Lacking a local film industry during the Qajar period due to the absence of most of these formations of modernity and narrative cinema until 1929, when Ovanes Ohanians released the first fiction movie, Abi and Rabi (Abi va Rabi), Iranians could not narrate their individual stories or express their cultural and national aspirations in the new medium. As consumers of Western attractions and narratives, they instead began to see themselves via the way the West defined itself and imagined its others in the new medium. Many early films, particularly actualities and travel films, were in fact shot in the non-Western world, mainly Arab and Middle Eastern, but from Western, Christian, and Orientalist viewpoints. This first contact with Western films at the dawn of the twentieth century, like all first contacts between divergent cultures, proved a self-defining and self-othering encounter for Iranians, with profound psychological and ideological effects. What made the ideological work of Western consciousness-shaping industries such as cinema unusually captivating, but also elusive, was not only their narrative efficiency and alluring messages but also their transnational flow. Films’ indirect and global reach made unequal forces and mediations both inevitable and invisible. They became harder to resist than power relations 72

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involving direct control or the actual presence of foreigners, as in the case of colonialism in, say, India or Egypt. At the same time, Iranians did not benefit from access to colonialism’s enabling institutions—its bureaucracy, legal system, technology, and language. Such access, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, could have allowed Iranians to “critique, yet inhabit intimately,” the colonial culture and language (1993;60). Without that intimate access and habitation, the formation of their national identity vis-à-vis the West, and their accommodation to and critique of the West, tended to be broad and superficial yet complicated. In what follows, I theorize some of the complications of such accommodations and critiques.

Epistemic Violence: The Poisoned Gift of Modernity There are several dimensions to constructing oneself as the Other, or to seeing the self through the eyes of the Other. One involves the first-contact situation itself. Studies conducted by anthropologists, historians, literary critics, and filmmakers have focused on the highly charged, excessive, shocking, and often dangerous experiences of the first contacts between different peoples. Whether they occur between Columbus and the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the fifteenth century (Todorov 1982) or between white Australian gold prospectors and New Guinean Highlanders in the twentieth century (Connolly and Anderson 1985, 1987, 1992), these situations are transitory. But their consequences henceforth color the relationship between the contacting peoples, as well as their collective and individual identities. The West’s neocolonial relationship with Iran meant that Iranians suffered not direct violence but what Spivak calls “epistemic violence.” It included the Orientalist production of an exotic and sexualized Iran (chiefly homosocial) as a form of entertainment or that of a backward, wily Asiatic people on a land rich in resources important to the West. Means of production could be scholarly and imaginative literature—from Montesquieu to G. F. W. Hegel and from Karl Marx to James Morrier—as well as diplomacy, commerce, missionary work, tourism, sound recordings, and photography and cinema.1 Finally, epistemic violence included the Orientalist reproduction of Iran by Iranians themselves and their Occidentalist production of the West through their syncretic adoption of Western laws, values, customs, fashion, technology, and human sciences, all of which configured Iranians as the “self-consolidating Other” of the West (Spivak 1985:130). Epistemic violence is integral to modernity’s wide-ranging disruptions and perpetual disintegration. This othering i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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process requires no physical violence, although enough of that also occurred during the Qajar years to reinforce modernity’s epistemic disruptions. This included the Russian conquests of vast Iranian territories in the Caucasus and beyond in the 1800s, about which Iranians felt an intense nostalgia and loss (Kashani-Sabet 1999), and the Russian-British accord of 1907, which divided Iran into two spheres of influence. One form of epistemic violence involves representation by the Other, sometimes as a stereotype. For example, photography, introduced in Iran in the mid-1800s by Europeans, had a profound psychological impact on Iranians. The filmmaker Bahram Baizai rightly claims that “the pictures that foreigners took of us, represent a significant event in the history of our thought.” It meant that Iranians were forced to look at themselves directly and as others saw them without the usual Iranian haggling over reality and its meanings and without the shifts of interpretation that evolved with time, for photographs seemed more or less permanent, unchanging, and objective. What Iranians saw in these “realistic” images of themselves diverged from, and often countered, their presumptuous fantasy about their own superiority. “This shook the foundation of our beliefs,” Baizai wrote (1996/1375:373–74). Their encounters with Western civilizations, technologies of representation, and types of representation made Iranians self-conscious, that is, ­modern —and this self-consciousness unnerved them, for it set into motion two types of othering comparisons, one diachronic, the other synchronic. The former involved comparing their current lowly world status with their former glory in ancient times when the Persian Empire ruled a large portion of Asia and parts of Europe, while the latter entailed comparing their humble world position with the glories of the contemporary West. Both comparisons brought them face to face with their own irrefutable contemporary shortcomings and stasis and with the West’s undeniable current superiority and dynamism, which threatened their indigenous epistemology and identity. Thus Iranians began knowing themselves in the manner the West knew them or projected them by its representational practices—as backward, exotic, and traditional— and they began to know the West in the way it projected itself, as modern, confident, and progressive. This realization of belated modernity proved profoundly destabilizing, leading to a culture of inferiority and defensiveness that while tacitly acknowledging the country’s poverty and social backwardness, boorishly denied the problems, self-pityingly regarded itself as a victim, or arrogantly blamed others for its problems and shortcomings. It also contributed to a sense of profound grief (hozn, anduh) for lost glory and status, something Iranian literary and performing arts continually express. In fact, 74

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grief is valorized as cultural commodity. In Iranian psychology, sadness and grief are associated with depth, thoughtfulness, sincerity, and religious devotion, and their public expression is not only authorized but also encouraged as positively valued behavior, particularly during rituals of mourning. As the psychologists Byron J. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, and Robert Moradi note: “Whereas in some societies, the expression of anger is central to the assertion of selfhood and self-worth, in Iranian society the experience and competent communication of sadness and grief is essential to establish personal depth” (1985:391). Iran’s real social and economic poverty in the nineteenth century gave credence to foreign travelers’ negative representations. Many Iranians in their own travels abroad were shocked by what they saw, for in comparing themselves with the West, they found themselves utterly wanting. Indeed, many travelers embarked on foreign journeys to unravel the secrets of European success and to discover a remedy for Iranian ills, thus creating a considerable “travel literature” (Ringer 2002). To compare and contrast was the dominant mode of observation, and sorrow and grief at Iran’s fall constituted the narrative mode for their stories. For example, a nineteenth-century traveler, Haj Zain al-Abedin Maraghehi, in his travelogue about Europe addressed his country’s businessmen and complained of their failure to create “even one company” to advance their domestic business. He then moaned, “You are in need of foreigners to manufacture everything from the paper on which your Quran is printed to the shroud in which your dead are wrapped” (1978/2537:215). Another businessman, Haj Sayyah Mahallati (hereafter referred to as Haj Sayyah), who traveled widely to Russia, Europe, Japan, and the United States and in 1875 became the first naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran, wrote in his diary that “Iranians are from head to toe immersed in sadness when they consider their own conditions. When they go abroad, they are drowned in more sorrow for they see in what [good] state the great countries of the world are and in what [bad] state we are. Inside Iran, foreigners subjugate us; abroad, they humiliate us. Blessed are those who do not know anything at all and think that the world, humankind, and life are exactly like theirs” (Sayyah 1967/1346:214). Such self-othering results from the epistemic violence both of contact with the West and of becoming modern. Self-othering is, to use Dilip Gaonkar’s apt phrase, the “poisoned gift of modernity” (2001:3), manifest in Sayyah’s diary in the simultaneous pride and shame he felt when applying for U.S. citizenship as a political refugee (also see Ferdowsi 2001/1380). Ebrahim Sahhafbashi Tehrani, the first commercial film exhibitor, also i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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idealized the West and denigrated Iranians in his diary. While in England in 1897, he wrote: “You must see and envy” (Tehrani 1978/1357:38). In the United States the same year, he declared the country a “paradise” (73), demonstrating familiar self-doubt and injured pride: “How lucky are those who do not know and have not seen anything, for they sleep with ease of mind and won’t suffer from envy” (76). This longing for a time before the destabilization of the self is typical of Qajar-era travelers. From Victoria, Canada, Tehrani wrote passionately about his revulsion for the native self and attraction to the Western Other: Today was the Sabbath for these people and I went to their church. When I thought well, I realized that everything they have, we have its opposite. For example, they have electric lights in their place of worship and we have oil lamps. Their metal instruments are always clean and shiny; ours are dirty and rusted. They quietly listen in their churches while we talk and shout in ours. Their preachers talk in a language everyone can understand; ours talk in such a dense Arabic language that they themselves cannot understand it. They pass the donation plate quietly and people drop money in it for a certain cause without anyone making a special appeal; we insist on donations for our own personal play and pleasure. They sit on velvet-covered benches; we sleep on dusty wicker mats. They attract people to the church with beautiful and varied songs; we sing only with reluctance. The differences are enormous. The only thing that we do better is washing our anus with water [instead of using toilet paper]. (79–80) A few days later, on a ship taking him to Japan, he mused: “Before I came into contact with all these nationalities, I thought that we were also somewhat civilized humans [ensan], but during this trip I lost hope completely and realized that we are only good for dying” (84). In these passages, we witness a cultural O.K. Corral, where the self squarely faces its Other and is vanquished by it. He was not alone. Throughout the Qajar and the first Pahlavi periods, dissident writers and nationalist intellectuals made an analogy between the current state of the country and a sad ruin filled with pathetic victims and walking dead. In a famous long poem called “The Resurrection of Iranian Kings” (“Rastakhiz-e Shahriaran-e Iran”), which eulogized the passing of Iranian ancient glories, the modernist and reformist poet and playwright Mirzadeh Eshqi characterized Iran as a “ruined cemetery” and admonished his fellow citizens in these words: “It is not certain if you are alive or dead / Or if you are castrated or enslaved. / . . . Your ancestors weep for your current condi76

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tions / Because you are such a laughing stock of the world” (quoted in Ajudani 2003/1382:230). The man regarded as the first truly modernist writer of the country, Sadeq Hedayat, also characterized life in the 1920s in Iran as “this terrifying dream and painful nightmare,” a characterization that grew more despondent a decade later, when he compared life in his “motherland” to living as “martyrs in a cesspool” (quoted in Katouzian 1991:44, 51). The title of one of his books of short stories, Buried Alive (Zendeh Begur), encapsulates the suffocating experience of life in early twentieth-century Iran. For such figurations to work, the nation had to be victimized twice: once by feminizing it as an ancient, decrepit mother country (mam-e vatan) and a second time by positing the loss of its caring father figures (the shahs). This turned Iranians’ love of their country, in the words of Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, from patriotism to matriotism (2002:218), for in the absence of the fathers’ compassionate guardianship, all the nation’s children—male and female—were duty-bound to rise to protect and care for the mother country. Both Eshqi’s and Hedayat’s criticisms were aimed at Iranian contemporary backwardness compared to its ancient glories, largely before the Muslim Arab conquest, and at the stifling social conditions under the Pahlavi regimes compared to the freedoms available in Western liberal democracies. Compare and despair, as the saying goes. However, the modernists worked to revive the expiring corpse of the nation—Tehrani by opening the first commercial cinema and working for a constitutional monarchy, Eshqi through his socially engaged journalism and poetry, and Hedayat through his imaginative fiction and research into Iranian folklore. That the first was exiled (during the Qajar period), the second assassinated (during the first Pahlavi period), and the third committed suicide (during the second Pahlavi period) points to dear costs of modernity and its epistemic and physical violence. Nineteenth-century travelers, such as Haj Sayyah and Tehrani, represented Europe and North America in an idealized and gendered form, creating Occidental stereotypes matching the Oriental stereotypes that Westerners created of Iran. Many Occidentalized Europe through their gaze on Western women, viewing the region either as a Garden of Eden filled with “houris” to be desired, or as a den of immorality inhabited by “whores” to be avoided (­Tavakoli-Targhi 1997, 1991).2 Visual representations of the West in paintings and book illustrations or on pen cases and vases tended to show the moment at which an awe-struck Iranian male encounters the European houris and their no less attractive male companions. Early Iranian portrait photographs also used such scenes as painted backdrops. Such scopophilia transformed the unfamiliar heterosocial spectacle from astonishing to admii deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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rable (Najmabadi 2005:48–55). It was usually invoked when the travelers described female-male mingling in European parks and gardens, while the denof-­depravity conception described the enclosed dance halls, opera houses, and theaters, where women’s performances and flirting construed them as morally loose (Tavakoli-Targhi 1997:26, 63). If the reformists opted for the paradisical image because it expressed their utopian ideals of freedom and progress, religious conservatives mobilized the promiscuous image. In decades to follow, conservatives used disease terms and phrases like Westernitis, Occidentosis, Westoxication, plagued by the West, and struck by the West (gharbzadegi). They also employed terms of medical intervention, such as injection (tazriq), or terms of military conquest, such as cultural invasion (tahajom-e farhangi), to describe the epistemic violence of contact with the West and with modernity. Becoming modern or Western in these terms thus resembles a disease that destroys a healthy native organism. These counterrepresentations of the West included Iranians who had “gone Western,” who had been struck and othered, such as dandies and, later, filmmakers. These representations were as negatively cathected with Occidentalist representations as the Orientalist representations of Iranians by the West. In the passage above, Tehrani’s abject othering by the West appears to be total. He had met the West and was stricken, injected, assaulted, and vanquished by the epistemic violence of the contact as though by a deadly disease. These selfing and othering reactions involving contact with the West, undertheorized in histories of national cinema, are mobilized here because they led to lasting ambivalent perceptions about cinema, filmmakers, and entertainers as agents of unbridled Westernization and moral corruption. They also led to popular film genres: the dandy, luti, and foreign-bride movies.3 There is another significant dimension to the epistemic violence of cinema that is rarely discussed: the shift that cinema engendered in the relationship between spectators and the world, which went from one primarily based on oral and aural communications to one largely (at least in the silent era) centered on optical and visual cognition. The shift from ear to eye brought about by modernity affected the relationship of the subject to the world and to knowledge, power, and identity. If sound is perishable and unstable, vision can be stabilized and made permanent. Sound exists only when it is dying or coming into being; it cannot be frozen in place like a still image. In addition, sight is analytic, distancing the seer from the seen, while sound is immersive, unifying the sender of sound with its recipient (Ong 1982:71–74). Images may exist separately from their producing agency, but no voice exists without the force that generates it—the breath. Thus a unique relationship exists among 78

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voice, interiority, and identity, and it is perhaps due to this connection that voice and speech are associated with potency and magical power. In orally oriented cultures, such as Iran, words, particularly poetry, prayer, and curses, have a strong grip on both the producers and the recipients of utterances. Such a culture must have experienced cinema and visuality as traumatic. The shock of visuality is evident in the anecdotes of panic and astonishment of the first film spectators. The gradual switch from orality to visuality, which disrupted the intimate, direct, collective, and all-enveloping relationships of spectators to the world, required training in visual comprehension. The movies themselves provided these through their evolving aesthetics, as well as through the social etiquettes of moviegoing. The documentaries made in Iran in the 1950s by the United States Information Agency (usia) were designed precisely to accommodate the nonliterate audiences’ sensibilities and to educate them about various health, geographical, and agricultural topics through visual presentation and visual training—to modernize them through training their vision. If, as Jacqueline Rose has claimed, the unity of a culture and the psychic unity of its subjects go hand in hand, with the latter a precondition of the former (1986:142), then cinematic self-othering and epistemic violence imperil the unity not only of the spectating subjects but also of the national subjects, as a result of which the ideological unity of Iranian spectators, already threatened by modernity and their contact with the West, would suffer further destabilization.

Astonishment and Shock: The Serpent’s Eye What do we learn from the Iranian eyewitness accounts of first experiences with film? For one, we must recognize the diversity of venues in which films were viewed. Mozaffar al-Din Shah and Ali Khan Zahir al-Dowleh watched films at the Universal Exposition of 1900 in Paris; Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh viewed films in London’s Palace Theatre in 1897; Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh watched them in 1904 in Tehrani’s Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema, a commercial movie house; and Khanbabakhan Motazedi’s father and Afasr al-Moluk Hoveyda (see below) viewed films in 1915 and 1907, respectively, in the private homes of the elite in Tehran. These viewing sites point to the upper class’s cosmopolitanism and foreign travels and to the artisanal versatility of early cinema that led to movie exhibitions in private and public. i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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Many Iranian eyewitness accounts resemble first-contact anecdotes of cinema spectators elsewhere. The dominant aesthetics of film at the time were driven, as Gunning has formulated it, less by telling stories than by the act of display, causing astonishment, shock, and even panic in spectators.4 The astonishment was probably reinforced because cinematic display involved a paradigmatic shift from ear perception to visual cognition. Even single-shot actualities involved the “cinematic gesture of presenting for view, of displaying” (Gunning 1996:73). The filmic display of parades, feeding a baby, trains arriving at stations, and workers leaving a factory—subjects of the early Lumière actualities—required an audience whose existence the cinema of attraction often acknowledged. Early Iranian actualities such as [Mozaffar al-Din Shah Hunting], [Mozaffar al-Din Shah Looking through a Telescope], [Riders Exiting a Tehran City Gate], [Donkey Riders Galloping in a Tree-Lined Street], and [The Arrival of the Shah Abdolazim Train at the Station] subscribed to a similar aesthetics of display. They addressed the audience directly: characters faced the camera that stood for the spectators, and no continuity editing obscured cine­ matic address or psychologized film viewing. Iranians seemed astonished not only as spectators but also as participants in film. Shots of filmed subjects often showed the latter staring intensely into the camera with a deer-in-theheadlights attitude (figure 35). While spectatorial astonishment seems to have mostly resulted from the aesthetics of display, that of being filmed appears to have resulted mostly from the technology and apparatus of filming. The aesthetics of display produced a replica of the material world in its modernity, which fascinated Iranians. In his travel diary, Mozaffar al-Din Shah refers to film’s ability to “incarnate” life, and Tehrani insists on film’s ability to show “every thing in the same state and with the same speed as the original” (Tehrani 1978/1357:39). In 1902, on his second European tour, the Shah

35  Mozaffar al-Din Shah (first from left) is mesmerized by the “serpent eye” of Sani al-Saltaneh’s camera filming him. Frame enlargements from Zahedian’s film Lost Reels

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reviewed troops for an actuality film (now at the British Film Institute in London). Called Grand Review of Artillery by His Imperial Majesty The Shah, it is a silent, black and white, 35mm short (104 feet), filmed on 22 August 1902 by Paul’s Animatograph Works. It shows Lord Frederick Roberts on horseback leading the Shah and his entourage into Woolwich Commons, where they review a parade of horse-drawn artillery. The Shah is accompanied in an open carriage by Prince Arthur Connaught and by an unidentified Iranian dignitary. The film emphasizes less the visiting Shah—who is generally filmed in long shots or from the side and behind—than the parade of British officers, soldiers, and artillery, thus betraying the national bias of the British cameraman. In one shot, however, as the Shah’s carriage pulls in front of the camera, he stares into the camera directly and quizzically for quite some time, as though questioning its presence. The Shah, who kept a diary on this trip also, did not record his reaction to this military review or to his being filmed. However, he noted his reaction to a film about a similar review conducted on 24 July 1902 (17 Rabi al-Thani 1320). In this entry he expresses his “pleasure” at viewing the film of his visit with King Edward VII and the review of the arsenal (no record of this film was found).5 From his description one can deduce that he was particularly taken by the film’s power to duplicate both reality and movement, for he wrote, using the royal plural form: “It was as if it was ourselves in motion” (quoted in Adl 2000/1379:18).6 The insistence of Tehrani and the Shah on the power of filmic realism may well stem not only from the medium’s ability to faithfully duplicate reality but also from its redemptive power to preserve either physical reality or its “aura,” later theorized by Siegfried Kracauer (1997) and Walter Benjamin (1969). The redemption, restoration, or documentation of reality were worthy and desired functions for cinema because both physical reality and its aura were undergoing massive disruption and transformation for Iranians under the Constitutional Revolution. The cinema of attraction aroused curiosity about what was displayed as well as about how it was displayed. In the Shah’s account of his film viewing in Paris, already cited, it is clear that early films evoked a sense of wonder and curiosity about the peoples and customs of other lands. On viewing desert caravans in Africa he comments about how “interesting” they were, and how he drew “pleasure” from watching the filmed scenes of the Paris Exposition. This curiosity and pleasure in seeing other worlds was intimately tied to film’s pedagogical function. The movies’ aesthetics of display also invested everyday activities with extra meaning, beauty, and gracefulness. The Shah was struck by the way rain fell, the river Seine flowed, or people played in water. In the exi deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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cerpt below, Motazedi relates an anecdote about his father’s first film impression in 1907 in the home of a prominent Zoroastrian businessman and community leader, Arbab Jamshid Jamshidian:7 “I was fifteen years old. One night, when my now deceased father . . . came home late, my mother asked him: ‘Where were you?’ He answered: ‘Tonight, I was a guest of Arbab Jamshid in Jamshidabad, where I saw a strange and fascinating show. A Russian by the name of Rusi Khan [Ivanov], who has a photography shop on Ala al-Dowleh Street, had brought a projector to show moving pictures. One film showed a person smoking a cigarette, with the smoke clearly visible on the screen. Another showed a person jumping into the pool; the water drops that splashed around were visible on the screen. He called this strange apparatus cinematograph’” (Omid 1990/1369:41). Like the Shah, Motazedi’s father was struck by the visibility and realism of mundane reality. These Iranian reactions are in line with Georges Méliès’s astute observation that viewers of early actualities were not astonished by the sight of people walking, walls falling, or babies being fed, for they had seen these in the theater, with whose conventions of illusion they were familiar. What astonished them was visuality and visual evidence, the sight of an ephemeral phenomenon, such as the rustling of leaves in a breeze and the dust let loose by a falling wall, which demonstrated that what they saw was no illusion or performance but “a gray, flickering mirror of a past reality” (Macdonald and Cousins 1998:4, emphasis in the original). The shock of filmic realism must have been stronger among Iranians than for people elsewhere—East or West—because of the contrast that realism posed to Iranian sensibilities, ways of seeing, and artistic expression. For a variety of reasons, major Iranian visual arts have in the main been abstract (arabesque designs in tiles, textiles, paintings, carpets), symbolic (calligraphy), and stylized and idealized (miniature paintings). With the development of the invisible style of continuity filming and editing, filmic realism went far beyond physical resemblance to include the psychic and ideological alignment of spectators with characters, sometimes against their own interests. This must have further compounded the shock of realism, for it encouraged Iranians to identify with their others against their own wishes. Other attributes of modernity such as movement and speed also astonished early audiences, particularly if they were aggressive and aimed toward the camera and spectators. The convergence of early cinema with modern means of transportation intensified modernity’s annihilation of space and time by bringing films shot in far corners of the world, and often from moving vehicles, to spectators across the globe. Moreover, this convergence expanded the availability of “panoramic perception,” a new, technological view 82

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of the world defined as “a mechanically mediated, mobile, and enframed point of view first associated with railway travel but structurally similar to the mobile point of view provided by the early cinema” (Abel 2005:639). Many films heightened the reality effect of their content or manipulated and distorted physical reality, causing further astonishment, shock, panic, and a “crisis of confidence in the eye” (Chanan 1980:109). Djamalzadeh’s recollection of people panicking in Ivanov’s cinema at the sight of an on-rushing train offers one example of this reaction, one apparently so universal as to become a cliché in film studies. The film exhibitor Ali Vakili also recalls that as late as the 1920s, scenes of speeding trains, cars, boats, and horse racing frightened spectators, who attempted to escape from the cinemas to avoid a crash (Omid 1995/1374:29). Yet assaultive camera movement or diegetic action and the resultant astonishment produced not only fear and panic but also pleasure. We find an example in the amusing eyewitness account of the veteran actor Mortaza Ahmadi, who relates the reactions of spectators to a roaring lion lunging toward the screen in a silent Tarzan movie in Tehran’s Mihan (Nation) Cinema: “Thinking that the lion was assaulting them from the screen, the female and male onlookers panicked and, with shouts and screams, ducked under the seats and onto the floor. After a few moments . . . , frightened and trembling, they emerged with white faces, and while rubbing their heads and faces, which had been injured in their rush to hide, they sat on their seats. For a few moments, they stared at each other with astonishment, and then they began to laugh at their baseless fright” (Ahmadi 1999/1378:31–32). Shock and panic, followed by the collective recognition of having been had and of actually being safe, produced a kind of pleasure that must have endeared cinema to audiences. The film director Amir Shervan, in recounting his experience of watching films as a child in the 1930s, related his fright at the image of gunmen shooting at the screen. “The grown-ups were also frightened, as they ducked to avoid being hit, and when they realized that they had been missed, they laughed with pleasure” (Naficy 1988:5). Narrative complications and suspense also panicked premodern audiences unaccustomed to dealing with them. Shervan paints a graphic scene perhaps typical of such narrative panic. I remember watching with my father a film, whose title I don’t recall, during which I was very frightened. This was due to the panic that that particular story or that particular scene had created in me. Another time I had gone to the movies with my mother who, like most

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women in those days, wore a black chador. Whenever I was frightened by the movie I would hide under her chador, but in order not to miss the film, I would peep from under it. In fact, I felt protected under her veil and could watch the movie without fear. . . . The first night I was very frightened, but the next day I demanded that my mother take me to the movies again. She asked, “You were frightened, why do you want to go again?” I answered that I loved it. So we went to the same movie five or six nights in a row. Gradually, my fear diminished. (Naficy 1988:1–3) Experiencing fear and panic in the safety of cinemas, particularly from under one’s mother’s veil, may be considered a key source of childhood cinematic pleasure in Iran. That the aesthetics and discourses of display, movement, speed, astonishment, and panic persevered for nearly three decades shows how novel film and modernity remained during the entire Qajar period and well into the first Pahlavi era. Early spectators were shocked not only by the realism and sometimes assaultive nature of early films and actualities but also by trick films, which manipulated reality and caused a person or an object to magically disappear, reappear, or change shape. Their surprise and panic resulted from the “fort/ da” aesthetics of “now you see it, now you don’t,” which disrupted the laws of reality and realism (Gunning 1996:82). The restoration of the physical world after the trick, without giving away the trick’s secret, enhanced the power of the cinema as a magician par excellence (Barnouw 1981). In a series of letters from Geneva, Switzerland, where he lived most of his life, Djamalzadeh, then ninety-two years old, told me about his first film experiences (figure 36). He saw film for the first time in November 1904, at age twelve, in what must have been Tehrani’s Cheragh Gaz Street Cinema. Following is part of his description of the cinema and of what he saw there: When you entered the Cheragh Gaz Street from the Tupkhaneh Square, immediately to the right, there was a famous coffeehouse on the second floor and a store below it, whose doors were open. I saw that amidst dust and dirt, a turbaned Seyyed [a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed] was sitting at a table, selling tickets. I knew him, he was from Isfahan, and his name was Saif al-Zakerin. Above the door, there was a sign in large letters that read “Cinema.” The ticket price was two qerans, which I paid. He guided me inside, perhaps with the aid of a lantern, as the hall, which contained wooden benches and a screen, was sunk in utter darkness. Few spectators were there, for it was afternoon and business-

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men were at work in their stores. The Seyyed sat me down on a bench and left the hall. You could not see a thing in the darkness except the screen, which was lit and clearly visible. It was the first time that I had watched film and I was frozen and astonished that people were silently moving on the facing wall, inside a square screen that measured two meters squared. It showed a man paving a street with a very huge and heavy steamroller. Suddenly, a pedestrian fell under the steamroller and was turned into a flat cardboard figure like this [a hand-drawn flat figure was attached to the note]. Right away, another person arrived and with his ax and shovel lifted the cardboard figure off the ground and stood him up and he was alive again. 8 Meanwhile, I also saw water running in a gutter and a white horse passing by. The entire show did not last more than 15 to 20 minutes. The Seyyed came in and announced that the show was over. I ran nonstop to our house, which was far, . . . and breathlessly told my father and mother about what I had seen. I swore to them that I was telling the truth, that I had seen the story with my own eyes. My mother was very puzzled, but my father smiled knowingly and tried to comfort me by showing me how it could have been done like a shadow play (Naficy 1993b:146–47).9 The second time that Djamalzadeh watched a film in Tehran must have been a few years later, and it probably occurred in one of Ivanov’s theaters on Naseri Avenue across the street from Dar al-Fonun Polytechnic, which opened in 1908.10 This cinema was again a long store, which was fitted with benches and chairs for the spectators. The ticket price was, I think, two qerans, and a young friend and I bought tickets and entered. The screen was at the far end of the store (which was 10–15 meters long). On both sides, they had placed wooden benches, on which some 60 to 70 people were seated. Films were screened continuously, and when my friend and I entered, a train was belching smoke in the distance and heading directly toward the audience. It was rapidly getting clearer and larger and we in the audience were very frightened and made all sorts of noises. Thank God it passed safely and we realized that there was no danger. . . . You cannot believe it, but as God is my witness, what I have written you is the truth. (Naficy 1993b:147)

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36  Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh in his nineties. Frame enlargement from Reza Allamehzadeh’s documentary The Night after the Revolution

Djamalzadeh’s sense of astonishment and disbelief was so strong that even when some eight decades later he wrote to me about the train film, he felt compelled to swear to God that he was telling the truth. George Bernard Shaw very powerfully summed up in 1914 cinema’s power to captivate spectators—its “victims,” as he called them—by stating that it kept them “not only awake but fascinated as if by a serpent’s eye” (quoted in Costello 1965:1–2). For cross-cultural spectators, like Iranians, this mechanical serpent’s eye appeared even more fascinating and frightening—it was dazzling. The superior Western industrial products (ships, electric lights, the telegraph, trains, telephones, gramophones, cameras, telescopes, bicycles, automobiles, and industrial machinery) pictured in the movies and gradually entering the lives of Iranians in this period also added to the technological luster and hypnotic power of films and the Western countries they represented. This reaction was reinforced by a literary discourse of astonishment about the West that preceded cinema. Travelers to Europe whose published travel journals bore titles such as The Book of Astonishment marveled at superior Western knowledge, power, and equality—all of which were amply showcased in the early actualities, performance films, and cinema-of-attraction films.11 It was also reinforced by an earlier nonvisual component of modernity, which emerged with the arrival of gramophones in Iran in the 1880s, years before that of the film projector.12 Gramophones, imported from Europe, were popular with the elite and the royalty, who played to rapt audiences not only musical recordings purchased abroad but also locally recorded music and conversations. In one of these remarkable cylinder recordings, Esmat al-Dowleh Qajar, the daughter of Naser al-Din Shah, eloquently states her astonishment at the technology of recording that both lures and others her, for it reminds her of the larger national othering that it inscribed. Recorded on the night of 28 January 1899 (16 Ramadan 1316), her voice states: “If I were to describe all the inventions of this period, it would take too long . . . , so let me be brief. One of 86

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these fascinating inventions is this phonograph, which records my words and will reproduce them anytime I wish. Consider that once we were more powerful than all of our neighboring governments and our authority surprised and astonished all foreigners. But now it has come to pass that we are astonished by their inventions and industry. We have been around since the ancient times, but they are new; we must discover the reasons and the causes of this” (quoted in Sepanta 1987/1366:379). Both the phonograph and the cinematograph made what was absent present. In that they were truly magical. Yet, surprisingly, both machines not only preserved presence but also produced absence, for to reproduce the subjects’ voices and images on wax cylinders and celluloid strips, the subjects themselves would have to be absent, with their absence at the time of projection signifying their presence at the time of recording. Christian Metz explained this dichotomy pithily in the case of photographs: “I must perceive the photographed object as absence, its photograph as present, and the presence of this absence as signifying” (1982:57). Cinema was truly magical, even celestial, turning spectating into a kind of religious experience bordering on worship. This was what I call the deus ex machina factor of early cinema. The film projector was not locked away inside a projection booth; it sat among the spectators, its projection mechanisms exposed to view. Spectators could witness it working its magic, bringing an absent world to life with the turn of a switch or the cranking of a handle, with the whirring of a motor, the turning of reels, and the illumination of the single serpent’s eye. This deus ex machina factor also characterized production, where the presence of the one-eyed serpent of the camera transfixed the filmed subjects, producing the intense stare of Iranians in early actualities. The discourses of astonishment and preservation among Iranians actually date further back, to a time before the public unveiling of moving pictures by the Lumière brothers in 1895—something hitherto not noted. In his fascinating book of 1892, Talebi’s Vessel of Wonders or Ahmad’s Book (Safineh-ye Talebi Ya Ketab-e Ahmad), Abdolrahim Ibn Abutaleb-e Najjar-e Tabrizi, commonly known as Talebof, provided amusing scientific explanations for both natural and technological wonders in an understandable yet sophisticated language. Patterned after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, Ahmad’s Book pre­sents the author’s everyday situations with his imaginary children, particularly with his curious and precocious son, Ahmad, who when faced with natural or technological puzzles turns to his father for explanation. Unlike the authoritarian teachers of his time, Talebof resorts neither to one-way religious sermons nor to fanciful but inaccurate explanations; rather, he takes time to provide his i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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children with rational explanations using analogy, everyday language, and experimentation—modernity in practice. Among the technological advances he explains are the phonograph, the photographic camera, and Edison’s Kinetoscope, without actually using the latter’s technical name. He concocts one situation that combines his explanations of the phonograph and the Kinetoscope, a situation that also reveals Iranian assumptions about both gender roles and Westerners’ trickiness. His elaboration of the various discourses associated with early cinema is significant: astonishment, epistemic violence, the simultaneous annihilation and preservation of time and space, and pedagogy. Here is the situation in the book. The children hear the voice of what they call a “foreign” street vendor shouting outside their home about the dried fruit he has for sale. The children, who have seen him before, tell their father that the farangi (foreigner) rides a wheeled cart in front of which is mounted a platform full of his goods. Apparently, the seated farangi does the shouting, while his partner walking alongside him does the selling. Ahmad explains that the day before, the two vendors came to the door, calling on the women of the house to come and buy their goods. That day, Ahmad’s sister, Mahrokh, answers their call and goes to the door and purchases some dried figs. Then Ahmad goes to the door and purchases something else, to which the vendor responds with, “God keep you safe, little girl.” A surprised Ahmad wants to know why the farangi called him a girl. Talebof responds that the foreigner, who does not know Persian, must have used a ruse: The man sitting on the cart is not a real man but the painted portrait of a one. Inside the box on which the portrait is painted a gramophone is installed, bearing a recording of a few anticipated lines of dialogue in Persian. Based on the assumption that only women would be at home during the day to purchase things from him, the recorded voice addresses only women. This then becomes an occasion for a fairly detailed explanation of Edison’s invention, the phonograph—using both the name of the inventor (yidison) and of his instrument (phonogheraf ). Talebof describes how music and voices can be recorded on the gramophone cylinders in one place and reproduced in another. He then extends this discussion by relating that “that same Edison, the wonder of the age,” has invented another instrument that records forty-eight pictures of the person whose voice is being recorded on the phonograph. These pictures, he tells the children, record all the subject’s sentiments of “anger, joy, and sadness and all of his gestures and movements, such as clipping of his eyebrows, and body movements.” Then, tapping into the discourse of astonishment and preservation, he states that with the same device people thousands of miles away can see and hear exactly what has been recorded, by 88

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which they will be “astonished” as to “what they are seeing, who they are seeing, and how they are seeing.” Next, he invokes a pedagogical discourse, common in early cinema criticism, by envisioning situations where classroom lessons in Isfahan can be filmed and realistically reproduced hundreds of miles away in Tabriz and Tehran. Talebof invokes another important characteristic of the phonograph, the photograph, and the cinematograph—their ability to realistically preserve and revive absent people. His musings at the end bring up a final point: the epistemic violence, doubt, and alienation that these machines can produce in their audiences. Talebof ponders Ahmad’s amazement at devices that surpass his childhood comprehension, leaving the boy no choice but “disempowerment, astonishment, and silence” (Talebof 1892/1311:159–62). Talebof’s is a prescient analysis of the impact that Western audiovisual technologies would have on Iranians, long before their arrival. Unsurprisingly for a gender-segregated society, there are few accounts of early film spectatorship by women. I can cite only one from the early Qajar period, from an upper-class woman, Afsar al-Moluk Hoveida, who recounts viewing her first film in 1907 in a private setting when she was only five years old. Hoveida’s matter-of-fact description of the steamroller film she saw projected at a home matches Djamalzadeh’s recollection of the same scene in a public cinema: “I had gone to the home of an acquaintance where I encountered ‘film’ for the first time. They had placed the apparatus on a table in the front room. It had a long tube . . . and we sat in the second room. . . . There was a screen on the wall. . . . The film showed a steamroller and a man who was flattened longer and longer by it and then shorter and shorter by hammering him . . . and it showed several ladies with ancient attire exiting a landau carriage” (Omid 1990/1369:41). The account by Zia Ashraf Nasr, Shaikh Fazlollah Nuri’s granddaughter, tells of her jubilant film viewing in a public cinema in the 1920s, quoted in a later chapter. Esmat al-Dowleh’s observations quoted above about the impact of the gramophone and of Western technology on Iranian self-perception and Alamtaj Qaem Maqami’s poem about the Singer sewing machine as a valuable technology (cited in chapter 1) also indicate that women were exposed to cinema and other Western technologies and talked about their epistemic impact. However, perhaps because of illiteracy and other forms of disenfranchisement, women did not write much about them, or if they did write, their accounts did not get published. The dearth of women’s writings about cinema’s impact may have another source: the possibility that self-othering may have been a male phenomenon. Women’s lack of power in society may have made them regard foreign phenomena, off and on the screen, as simply one more “other” world in whose constitution they had i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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no hand and that they therefore needed neither to fear nor to be (b)othered by. Hoveida’s very objective description of the steamroller may have resulted from her viewing the film so long ago, when she was only five years old. On the other hand, Djamalzadeh’s account is more gripping perhaps because he was both older when he saw film (twelve years old) and was a better storyteller. These issues point to the potential unreliability of eyewitness accounts without proper historicization, contextualization, and theorization.

Religious Panic There were Muslim religious objections to the cinema from the start. Muslim theologians have voiced at least four objections to visual representations. These are based on the fear that through visual representation imaginative faculties may overcome reason, that sustained reflection on the visual representation of empirical things may distract from the realities of the world they represent, that image-making may counter the Prophet Mohammed’s dictate against idolatry, and that acts of creation simulating those of God are blasphemous (Dabashi 2001:14). It appears, however, that Iranian Muslim clerics did not ban cinema because of Islam’s prohibition against human representation. Rather, their reticence may go back to their attitudes toward other representational arts, which, as the art historian Layla Diba has noted, seemed to have been “dictated by pragmatic concerns rather than by a consistent application of Islamic law” (1998:44). As a result, the prohibition against human representation was far less prevalent in Iran than in other Islamic societies. A still from about 1907 in Diba’s book (42) shows a crowd of people carrying a life-size photographic portrait of Muhammad Ali Shah to the Majles as a substitute for the absent king during the Constitutional Revolution. Iranian artistic traditions of making an idealized icon of the absent ruler prevailed over Islamic figural prohibitions. That paintings and photographs often idealized their subjects also means that the penchant for idealization prevailed over realistic treatment. The condemnation of cinema because of its display of unveiled foreign women in public places (considered “naked” in the religious discourse of the time) was more prevalent and led to the first instance of public censorship of the movies in Iran. Nuri’s alleged prohibition of Tehrani’s cinema may have also been driven by fear of the modernity and colonialism that cinema embodied: “polluted foreigners” sent images (considered a “contagion”) to “stupefy” Iranians and undermine the authority of Shiite tradition and Muslim clerics. 90

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The modernist emphasis on visuality, which cinema emblematized, tended to reduce the power of the clerics, which was primarily based on orality: memorization, recitation, and sermons. Not until the 1960s would religious speech and oratory again enter the popular arena with the audiocassette sermons and speeches of Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, countering the visual and specular regime of the Shah and modernity.

Alienating Identification: Constructing the Self in the Others’ Cinematic Mirror Encounters with the West must have further disrupted Iranians’ psychic unity through what Jacques Lacan called “alienating identification” (1977:128–29). He thus described its engine, the “mirror phase”: The preverbal infant, who experiences its own body as fragmented and uncoordinated and its self as lacking both individuality and subjectivity, recognizes with jubilation its own reflection in the mirror as a cohesive and complete ideal image—that of its primary caretaker, its (m)other (1–7). The child’s jubilation at the mirror, therefore, is not based so much on the recognition of its own image as on the misrecognition of itself as the Other. This misrecognition becomes a key moment in identity formation. The fusion of the self with the specular Other by means of identification is neither complete nor constant: identification with the Other runs parallel to alienation from the self. And the favored union with the Other is increasingly challenged as the child acquires language and becomes socialized. The resulting alienating identification sets into motion an ambivalent subjectivity that is neither unitary nor unified. Rather, it is split and destabilized, for it wavers between unity with the Other and differentiation from the Other, and between alienation from the self and return to the self. Like identification, ambivalence becomes a key to knowledge and to the formation of personal subjectivity and collective identity, as human beings will forever after “anticipate their own images in the images of others” (Ragland-Sullivan 1987:25). This alienating identification is inscribed into the epistemic violence of modernity’s incursion. Importantly, identification is encouraged not only by the process of the mirror phase but also by the invisible style of classical realist cinema, which psychologically aligns spectators with diegetic characters, resulting in spectator identification with cultural others. This is how many non-Western spectators identified not only with the natives on the screen but also with their colonial masters or with Tarzan. Identification with the Westi deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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ern Other is a form of idealization and fetishization that occurs to harness the potential psychic violence and panic of both modernity and cinema. Fetishization works in two overarching and contradictory ways. On the one hand, it signals the recognition of a threatening lack in the self; it disavows the lack by turning the difference between the self and the Other into a harmless fetish or stereotype. To paraphrase Freud, the horror of modernity sets up a sort of “permanent memorial” to itself by creating a fetish as its own substitute (1961:154). Paradoxically and inevitably, the fetish points to that which it is replacing, thereby becoming an index of the absence. Thus, despite the fixity of the fetish, the subject (fetishizer) is always placed in an ambivalent position, of two minds about the fetish, alternating between belief and disbelief. Like the veil forced on women that both conceals them and turns them into a lure, a fetish of the West masks the absence, lack, and shortcomings that Iranians perceived in themselves vis-à-vis the West. Yet it does not do this hermetically or permanently, for each fetish acts as a reminder of the threat that it simultaneously conceals and contains. Homi Bhabha showed that in a colonial context, stereotyping constitutes a form of bidirectional fetishization. The recognition of racial and sexual differences between the colonizers and the (neo)colonized, in this case between Europe and Iran, is disavowed by both sides’ fixation on stereotypes that restore an original presence in each case. Stereotypes simplify to be productive in terms of power and knowledge. Such simplifications are not false representations but arrested, fixated forms of representation (Bhabha 1983), resistant to historical change. These “typical encapsulations” (Said 1979:58) can be recycled to marginalize and control the Other and to bolster the self. Like fetishization, stereotyping is inherently ambivalent: It requires both the recognition and the disavowal of difference, and it yields as much mastery and pleasure as anxiety and defense. I here use metaphorically Lacan’s theory of alienating identification and its armature, the mirror phase. I do not regard the movie screen as a literal mirror or see Iranian spectators as children. In fact, I have reversed Lacan’s alienating identification by placing the Symbolic within the self (associated with the homeland) and the Imaginary within the outside (associated with the West). While the Symbolic is not operative in the infants’ encounter with the mirror, it is activated during adults’ cinematic spectatorship. Film viewing unfolds within the Symbolic for autonomous individuals, who experience the filmic encounter within a social setting (a theater). This means that, unlike the encounter in the mirror phase, which remains free from the interference of language and socialization, the cinematic encounter with the West invoked 92

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socially constructed features of difference such as language, culture, history, religion, ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, leading to various ambivalent, resistive, and hybridized reactions. Since neither infatuation with, nor revulsion from, the West produces satiated subjects or subjects at ease, cinematic contacts result in ambivalent and ill-at-ease subjectivities. By regarding the movie house not only as an unconscious psychic space but also as an active and conscious social place for cognition and meaning production involving both the Symbolic and the Imaginary, we can problematize the similarities that some proponents of “apparatus theory” have posited between infants facing the mirror and spectators watching movies—in particular their putative immobility, passivity, trance, even regression, and overcathexis of vision (Baudry 1980; Metz 1982). My theorization of filmic reception, inflected by lively, active, and sonorous Iranian movie houses, reinforces both the psychic processes of identification and alienation and the socially engaged and interactive dimensions of cross-cultural cinematic reception. There is nothing unilateral and passive about film spectatorship. Metz has noted that “at the cinema, it is always the other who is on the screen” (1982:48), and it is through exposure to, and comparison with, the Other that the self is defined. The initial exposure of Iranians to movies made in the West may be regarded metaphorically as constituting their first crosscultural mirror-phase experience with the Other. This encounter must have been traumatic, sufficiently so as to cause defensive countermeasures of idealization, fetishization, alienation, and stereotyping. Although early Western film programs included many “foreign views” showing scenes filmed in nonWestern countries, including in the Middle East, the bulk were filmed in the West, offering for identification the far richer economic and technological lifestyle there. The early globalization of Western cinema lent all cross-­cultural relations a discursive and specular dimension. Each nation could see itself reflected in the Others’ cinema. This idea drives the historical reactions of Iranians throughout over a century of cinema to their representations in Western media. Most of the cinema-of-attraction and narrative films screened in Iran in the early 1900s contained Western subjects, specular Others against and with whom Iranians created not only their individual subjectivity and national identity but also their conception of the West. Iranians’ first contact with the cinema engendered celebratory identification with the Other/foreigners—what Kaja Silverman calls “heteropathic” or “exteriorizing” identification. Quoting Max Scheler, Silverman discusses two primary types of identification, heteropathic and idiopathic. In heteropathic identification, the self is “overwhelmed i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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and hypnotically bound and fettered by the other,” while idiopathic identification involves the “total eclipse and absorption of another self by one’s own” (1992:264). Theoretically, Iranians introjected the Western cinematic Other as the ideal, idealized, and exoticized ego—one that was worth possessing or becoming. This specular Western Other appeared whole and modern when compared to the self, which was presumably experienced as fragmented and backward. This would reinforce the social othering that Iranians experienced in their contacts with the West. At this point, spectators, in Louis Althusser’s words, could be said to be happily hailed or interpellated by cinema (1971). Theoretically it was this kind of total hailing, this heteropathic identification, that alienated the film exhibitor and political reformer Tehrani from his own culture and caused him both to denigrate Iranians and to identify with and idealize Western stereotypes. Even Mozaffar al-Din Shah, one of whose titles was “Shadow of God,” felt othered by the West. This might explain why he remained silent about the grand Persian national pavilion at the Paris Universal Exposition but was effusive about the size and grandeur of the exposition’s Festival Hall, which he noted was twice the size of the State Amphitheater, the piece of pride among the Qajar performance halls in Tehran. His cinematic self-othering was also undergirded by his overwhelming sense of “almost mythical kinship with his royal cousins in Europe” and by an alienation from his own compatriots (Wickens 1983:36). The Shah thus decided to own his own film apparatus, for by possessing the machines of the Other he could become like the Other and possess its power. This is what Tehrani also did. Second, the Shah wanted to cinematically astonish his subaltern courtiers (his “servants,” as he called them) in the same manner that film had astonished and (b)othered him. Both he and Tehrani created this astonishment by filming scenes in Iran and screening them in the court and elite circles. These acts of screening and filming not only astonished and othered their spectators but also empowered the cinematographers themselves. Therein lay the power of cinematic imitation and identification. Only by becoming producers of their own images with which to form “idiopathic” or “interiorizing” identification could Iranians counter the heteropathic effects of watching foreign movies. As will emerge here, identification by means of cinema remained heteropathic throughout the Qajar period and much of the first Pahlavi one, as Iranians were primarily consumers of foreign movies and only artisanal producers of their own limited films; it tipped toward idiopathic structuration as domestic productions took industrialized and authorial forms toward the end of the second Pahlavi regime.

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The early cinéastes and spectators were not alone in their alienation from the self and in their admiration and adoption of things Western; many secular young intellectuals, spectators or not, concurred with them. What was taking place was not only a historical battle between self and Other, Islam and Christianity, East and West, premodernity and modernity, but also a generational battle between young and old. For example, Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, a progressive young intellectual, in 1920 famously declared in the exile periodical Kaveh (published in Berlin) that “Iran must become Europeanized, in appearance and in essence, physically and spiritually” (quoted in Gheissari 1998:41).13 Another periodical, Farangestan (Foreign Lands), which young progressive students published in Berlin 1924, sounded a similar clarion call in its inaugural issue’s editorial, advocating both total Europeanization and the supremacy of the youth and modernity over the older generation and tradition. We must endeavor to free Iran from ignorance and misery. We must prepare the country for a moral revolution that would transform us from medieval humans into twentieth-century humans. . . . We wish only to live, but a life that is worth the twentieth century. We are all moving in the same direction: the sovereignty of young thought over old thought. We are not afraid, for we are confident of our victory because we have the right on our side. Iran must be revived. Everything must be renewed. We want a new Iran, new thought, and new people. We want to Europeanize Iran. We want to unleash the flood of the new civilization toward Iran. We want to follow the dictates of the following important words, while preserving Iranian intrinsic moral values [quoting Taqizadeh]: “Iran must become Europeanized, in appearance and in essence, physically and spiritually.” (quoted in Behnam 2000/1379:97–98)

The Power and Burden of Self-Representation What were the effects of seeing oneself on the screen? The only early reaction we have is that of Mozaffar al-Din Shah, where he expresses his pleasure at seeing the film of his visit with the British king, Edward VII, in July 1902. The Shah’s pleasure stemmed perhaps from the power of film not only to produce an accurate rendition of the world but also to reproduce an accurate rendition of him on the screen. This reading corroborates a famous humorous anecdote about a Qajar king (perhaps Mozaffar al-Din Shah), which may be apocryphal but nonetheless relevant in this context. On looking at himself

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in the mirror, the Shah is said to have jubilantly and proudly proclaimed, using the royal plural pronoun: “We looked upon ourselves in the mirror and were pleased with ourselves.” This is perhaps the first recorded mirror-phase encounter of an Iranian with cinematic self-representation. Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s gratification with his own filmed image is corroborated by Prince Arthur Connaught, who was his host during his British visit, when he noted that the Shah “loves being photographed whenever he gets the chance” (quoted in Wright 1985:179). That powerful British royalty, idealized by Iranian royalty in those days, accompanied a weak Qajar Shah and appeared with him in the same shots must have enhanced the power of film as an agent of the Shah’s selfing. In truth, however, the British royals privately did not hold a favorable opinion of the Shah, and it was one laced with colonial and Orientalist attitudes. For example, in a “Darling Mama” letter to his mother the queen, Prince Arthur wrote that when greeting the Shah in Dover on his arrival on British soil, he found him “more civilized than I expected.” However, “He is not very good at inspecting guards of honour and evidently hadn’t the vaguest notion what to do. He was very pleased to have come through this first experience of a sea journey without being ill. He has brought a suite of no less than 48 people who speak nothing but a little bad French. . . . He won’t go more than 20 miles an hour in the train and says ‘la tunnelle est très mal.’ It took us over 3 hours getting from Dover this morning. . . . All the bands have learnt to play the Persian Anthem, which is simply excruciating. I foresee I shall be pretty sick of it by the time I’m done” (quoted in Wright 1985:176). During this trip, the Shah was entertained at the famous Crystal Palace, like his father before him, and he attended the Empire and Hippodrome Theatres, where he may have seen more movies. Prince Arthur said this of the visit to the Empire: “On Tuesday we took him to the Empire which I think he quite enjoyed in spite of looking as if he contemplated suicide. He always looks like that though so that one cannot judge by outward appearance” (quoted in Wright 1985:178). As future chapters will indicate, these sorts of negative stereotypes of Iranians were not limited to private opinions and correspondences but were widely circulated in feature films and documentaries—what I call “mediawork.” Throughout the history of cinema, Iranians understood cinematic selfrepresentation as a source of empowerment, and they knew that countering Western representations of Iran was of paramount importance in creating a new modern national identity to help overcome their sense of belatedness. Iranian critics were the first to take on this burden of self-representation and counterrepresentation when they objected to the way Westerners portrayed 96

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Iran and Iranians in their documentary and travel films. The press published these critical reviews, helping create the conditions for the construction of a modern Iranian nation. With the dissolution of the ineffectual Qajar dynasty and the arrival of a modernist, autocratic, and statist Pahlavi dynasty, the state took on the burden of monitoring foreign representations of Iran (and of the Shah) and of countering them. This development, however, politicized the process of representation. Diplomatic measures and censorship were supplemented by domestic propaganda films, newsreels, and even the creation of spectacular news events whose filmic coverage would create favorable views of the country and its regime. The alienated and defensive self-perceptions of Iranians were reinforced not only by Iran’s socioeconomic backwardness but also by Orientalist literature and the ethnocentrism of early documentary and fiction films about Iranians and Muslim populations.14 Throughout the twentieth century, Western films about Iran aroused a mixture of identification and hailing, on the one hand, and alienation and haggling, on the other, among individual spectators, film critics, the mass media, and governments that sometimes took official actions against the films. Iranian filmmakers attempted strategies of selfing and self-othering in their own lives and in their movies, as did the Pahlavi shahs and the Islamic Republic mullahs. Their cultures of spectacle were driven by syncretic Westernization and by syncretic Islamization, respectively. Some Iranians returned to atavistic categories and discourses of authenticity to fend off alienation. Many secular nationalists, such as Eshqi and Hedayat, resorted to a pre-Islamic, chauvinistic, Persian, or Zoroastrian culture; Muslim conservatives invoked the early Islamic world as an ideal. At the same time, both groups adopted aspects of the West and of modernity. Both also engaged in denial, defensiveness, xenophobia, and racism either against Iranians’ traditional Others, particularly the Arabs and Turks, or against their modern Other, the West. The othering of Arabs, which has a history in modern Iranian literature (Saad 1996), surfaced in the early Qajar period’s performance films, such as in [Argument with an Arab] (ca. 1900–1905) and [The Dwarf Rides the Arab] (ca. 1900–1905), which denigrated Arab characters humorously in the years leading to the Constitutional Revolution, when Iranian modern nationalism needed an inferior Other to establish its new self-identity (figure 37). At times, the rejection of traditional Others was so strong, and the identification with the West so potent, that the Western Other, in Freudian terms, displaced the self. That is, the positive attributes of the West were detached from it and cathected to the self, as though the self had owned i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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them all along (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973:121–24). The Other was thus viewed as the self, only improved. As the historian Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi notes, “Iranian modernists attributed undesirable customs and conditions [of Iran] to Arabs and Islam, and appropriated the desirable European manners and cultures by depicting them as originally Iranian” (1990:83). This allowed early Iranian reformists and modernists, for instance, to claim Iranians as the originators of European military uniforms and table manners; of European ideas of liberty, equality, republic, and parliament; and of Western technological innovations such as the telescope, the camera, and the telephone (83– 84). By doing this, they could become Westernized without guilt or shame because they were not becoming something foreign, the self-consolidating Other of themselves, but were in a sense returning to the self. Mirza Malkum Khan, an influential Armenian Iranian who spent only ten of the sixty-two years of his life inside the country, used this ingenuous strategy. Described by Hamid Algar as “the first coherent advocate of westernization in Iran,” (1973:18), Malkum Khan suggested in 1891 that reform, Westernization, and modernity must be dissociated from Christianity and presented as “latent in Islam” (14). This “expedient” reconfiguration allowed him to claim that “the prophets” had known about “the telegraph, the camera, the New World, or a thousand other truths” but that in “their perfect wisdom” they had chosen not to disclose this latent knowledge in their own time (39). Despite Algar, however, this might not have been so much an expedient strategy as a legitimate effort at creating an alternative modernity for Iranians, one that suited their culture and traditions. Another related strategy was to claim that progress and modernity, as represented by Masonic lodges, modern newspapers, the rule of law, and the

37  Iranian selfing at the expense of the Arab Other. A scene from the comic film [Argument with an Arab] (ca. 1900–1905), in which a man dressed in Arab garb and turban (on the ground) is being beaten up by others, perhaps filmed by Ebrahim Khan Sani al-Saltaneh, enlarged from Zahedian’s Lost Reels

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parliamentary system of government, which Malkum Khan advocated, were not necessarily Western but universal truths and institutions accessible to all. Later on, during the Qajar and the first Pahlavi periods, documentary filmmakers such as Motazedi and fiction directors such as Ebrahim Moradi, Ovanes Ohanians, and Abdolhosain Sepanta would emphasize scenes of increasing urbanity, renewal, and modernization to express the wish to be modern. This tension between the ideal and the real and, indeed, as the art historian Abolala Soudavar notes, the “distinct preference” for the ideal over the real and for stylization over naturalistic representation is not only at the heart of Iranian art and literature (1992:14) but also central to Iranian cinema and to the reception of foreign movies in Iran. These early constructions tended to be binarist, pitting an imaginatively homogeneous Iran against its equally fabricated unitary others. But even in the early Qajar period Iranians involved in cinema were not homogenous; nor was the West. A diverse range of people overdetermined cinema and modernity, ensuring that selfing and self-othering by means of cinema was not unilateral and the resultant modernity not a replication of the West’s but an alternative modernity. Thus I examine not only the formal structures and institutions of production and exhibition but also the informal and interstitial sites of struggles where translations and accommodations of all sorts occur.

Syncretic Westernization Syncretic Westernization involves a mixture of identification and hailing, on the one hand, and alienation and haggling, on the other, and it was an option that many cosmopolitans, dandies, Westernized intellectuals, the Pahlavi shahs, and numerous filmmakers attempted. The aim was to Occidentalize Iran: to adopt some modernized features of the West and to simultaneously revive ancient Persian, pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian, and even mythical elements. Reform and revival became the ruling ideologies during the Pahlavis, particularly under Reza Shah, who was bent on authoritarian modernization, secularization, centralization, and nationalism and who took easy offense at perceived insults to Iranian national honor. In the words of Shahrokh Meskoob, the dominant form of nationalism in Iran was simultaneously retrospective and prospective: it looked back to go forward (1994/1373:487). The Akan people of West Africa have a powerful term for this concept, sankofa: it refers to reclaiming the past to understand the

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present and move to a better future. It is symbolized by a mythological bird that while flying forward looks backward with an egg in its beak.15 While it had many new features, syncretic Westernization, according to Alessandro Bausani, had been at work during the “entire course of Iranian cultural history” (1975:44). Resorting to atavistic forms but impregnating them with new meanings, or adopting new forms appropriate to contemporary times but retaining a recondite core of values, were ancient practices. Located at the crossroads linking China and the Indian subcontinent to Meso­ potamia and to what became known as Europe, Iran throughout history continually experienced cultural and political influences that favored Westernization. Indeed, the Iranian tendency to look north and west may have been not so much due to the Iranian penchant for Westernization but part of the diasporic trajectory of fully modern humans—Iranians included—from their origin in the mother continent, Africa, to Asia and Europe, documented by recent scientific discoveries (Wilford 2007). The future for Iranians is thus always already in the north and west, while origins are always construed to be in the south and east. Further, Bausani has argued that Zoroastrian reformation, Mesopotamian influences, Hellenization after Alexander’s conquest of Iran, Islamization in the seventh century ad, and finally Western-style modernization since the nineteenth century were all instances in which a period of Western influence was followed by a period of “rearchaization,” together forming syncretic Westernization (46). Even the Islamic Republic, formed in the aftermath of the fall of the Pahlavis in 1979, resorted to a form of syncretism, except that the history to which it referred was the early Islamic era, not the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian era of the secularists. As I demonstrated in my book The Making of Exile Cultures, Iranian exiles who left the country to escape the Islamic Republic also engaged in rearchaization. For example, the opening sequences and official logos of many exile television programs in the 1980s and 1990s consisted solely of fetishized icons either of the pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian, or Persian civilizations, or referenced the official culture of the prerevolution Pahlavi era. Likewise, programs bore titles that circulated secular, nationalistic, and Iranian concepts such as Melli tv (National tv ), Pars tv (referring to Pars, an ancient, pre-Islamic province, as well as a modern province), and Arya tv (referring to non-Semitic, Aryan roots) (Naficy 1993a:135– 37). Whether it invoked the pre-Islamic era or the time before the Islamic Revo­lution, exilic rearchaization served to disavow threats, posed either by Arab Muslims in the seventh century or by the Islamic Republic in the late twentieth century. As the archeologist Warwick Ball notes, the Persian Empire that the Achae­ 100

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menid created was by 500 bce “the largest the world had seen. . . . It was also the world’s first multinational empire” (2011:22) Sociopolitically this necessitated and encouraged the kind of syncretism described; artistically it led to the development of an “extraordinarily eclectic” style discernable in the Achaemenid architecture, which he calls an international style, intermingling different cultures, ideas, and artistic practices (26). Sociologically and artistically the results may not always be efficacious or aesthetically pleasing, but that is part of the risk of syncretism, eclecticism, and internationalism. Finally, Iran did not leave the west unaffected. More recent non-Eurocentric research shows that the contact of ancient Persians with the Greeks “acted as a catalyst for the subsequent golden age of fifth century bc Athens. . . . From this contact with Persia, European civilization was born” (5). Reza Shah’s syncretic Westernization, at first favored by many elites, was not only driven by a response to the West but also by a reaction against political decentralization, ethnic and tribal divisions, and Islamic traditions, all of which hampered reform and nationalism. The glorification of a pre-Islamic past helped hide the European origin of many of his reforms and to differentiate the Pahlavis from the Qajars (Keddie 1999:87). Iranians consciously and unconsciously adopted a variety of strategies of selfing and self-othering in encounters with the West. Some resisted and haggled, while many were hailed and accommodated. Traditionalists saw the situation as a hostile binary encounter between irreconcilable religions and civilizations. Some secular reformers, on the other hand, so identified with the West that they desired to become entirely Western. Others assimilated certain aspects of modernity to fashion hybridized identities that partook of both Western and Iranian civilizations but were ambivalent or critical of both. There were those who ascribed the origin of modernity to Western and Christian cultures and those who sought its roots in the malleability of Iranian and Islamic civilizations. Some rejected the West entirely and took a decidedly nativistic turn. Many suffered from a profound sense of shame, loss, and defeat at Iran’s lost glory and sorry contemporary conditions; others enjoyed their symptoms quietly and nursed their denial and hate. As cinema moved from its artisanal infancy in the Qajar period to its industrial adulthood in the late Pahlavi era and beyond, the various modalities of alienating identification, authenticity and modernity, selfing and othering, and syncretic Westernization and eclecticism found themselves embodied in the diegetic characters, narratives, and themes of Iranian cinema, forming recognizable character types, film genres, and film movements.

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Pedagogy and Morality The epistemic violence and self-othering trajectory of cinema may produce modernity and self-empowerment when directed toward education. Djamalzadeh related to me the earliest eyewitness account of the pedagogical use of film when he talked about viewing a movie in a classroom in the 1900s: The third time that I saw a film in Tehran I was with my father, and it was in a modern school that, I think, was called Aqdassiyeh.16 It was one of the four modern schools in Tehran in that it had a yard, classrooms, benches, a principal, and an assistant principal. The principle, Mr. Said al-Ulama, was friends with my father, and he wanted to screen films for his young pupils for the first time.17 He had invited a number of intellectuals and my father, and I went along. . . . It was a very short film, which showed a baby who did not follow proper table manners, as he kept sticking his finger in his nose and chewed his food badly. While the film was being shown, Mr. Said al-Ulama stood in the darkness and told the students: “Look and see how offensive it is for a child to stick his finger in his nose.” (Naficy 1993b:147–48)18 The modern lifestyle that such films inculcated differed so much from contemporary social practice in Iran that it needed narration. Acting as an early dilmaj, the principal, Mirza Ebrahim Said al-Ulama, a pro-constitution modernist and a member of the Religious Scholars Society (Anjoman-e Tollab) (Shirali 2005/1384:128), helped the students read the film with the grain, not against the grain, as they might have, for example, by mocking the unruly boy or by finding fault with Western table manners and parenting. The idea behind showing the film was to encourage an imitation of the West and its modern ways. Clues supporting this contention can be found in the presence of Djamalzadeh, of his reformist clerical father, and the other dignitaries invited to witness the screening. We can speculate that they were brought to this event for several reasons: to experience the astonishment of film viewing; to witness the modernity of visual education at the new school; to view the use of film as a moral teacher; and to validate the whole project of modern, secular education. The Shiite establishment’s opposition to cinema may have partly stemmed from film’s power to challenge the key source of clerical authority—the education of the young in maktab, or religious schools. Secular modernists had reasons for wanting to present film as an educational and moral teacher and to keep it in the hands of the schools.19 Many Iranians thought of film as a 102

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pedagogical tool with which to address the backwardness of their educational system. The secular reformists from the mid-nineteenth century onward frequently resorted to Western-style theater and to translations of the works of Molière and Voltaire to teach Enlightenment values and modern ethics to Iranians. Magic-lantern slides, too, were used for pedagogical purposes, not only by foreign missionaries but also by modernist Iranians. As Taqizadeh recalls, an Armenian physician named Pashayan, who had created a temperance society in Tabriz in 1903, used to organize events at which Iranian and American doctors spoke to audiences of three hundred people about the importance of abstinence while projecting slides of both healthy and alcohol-damaged hearts and livers for education, as well as pictures of Africa for entertainment (1989/1368:33–34). Iranians would ascribe similar pedagogical and civilizing attributes to cinema.20 Some evidence justifies this idea. A wordy flyer for film screenings in Vartan Vartaniants’ home in Tabriz’s Armenian quarter, dated 12 August 1910 and calling the movies iluzion (illusion), drives home the peda­gogical value of cinema. It claims that the iluzion will expose the “honorable gentlemen” to the “progress and scientific miracles of the century,” listing among these the factories, machinery, scientific discoveries, and the progressive behavior and conduct of people in the West. After seeing these, the flyer contends, viewers will admit that they have “gained knowledge and improved their thoughts.”21 Another example comes from the curriculum of Tehran’s modern high school, Dar al-Moalemin-e Markazi, established by Abolhasan Foruqi in 1919. It listed, among the various subjects to be taught in fourth-grade natural science classes, new modern inventions such as the “moving picture, gramophone, wireless telegraph, electric light, newspaper, book publishing, and printing press” (quoted in Navai 1998/1377:57). Whether these subjects were taught, and in what manner, is not known. But that they formed part of the official curriculum indicates a wish to become scientific and modern by becoming familiar with modern communication technologies. Proponents of cinema also thought that religious objections to cinema would be weakened if films were mobilized for educational purposes. Also, as an article in the reformist newspaper Iran-e No in 1909 argued, by making educational films themselves, Iranians could become the educational and financial beneficiaries of cinema, instead of “greedy foreigners,” who dumped bad movies on Iranians and took their profits abroad (Tahaminejad 1992/1371:48, 1993/1372:38).22 Yet cinema was not placed in the hands of either educational institutions or the government, and before long, commercial filmmakers, who solely sought i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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to make money from entertainment, entered the scene. Opposition to cinema was sufficiently strong and sustained throughout the Qajar period that local entrepreneurs found it necessary to wrap their film enterprises in the mantle of pedagogy and morality. The film exhibitor Ardashes Badmagerian, for example, claimed in the 1920s that he imported films for the “ethical renewal” of Iranians, and the first film periodical, Cinema and Performing Arts (Sinema va Namayeshat), declared in 1930 that “today cinema is an important element of social life and a major vehicle for moral uplift and education of human beings” (Tahaminejad 1992:50). An editorial in an issue of the daily Ettela’at (28 October 1928) hammered on the notion that “cinema and the gramophone are two effective agents in the life of any society and two powerful forces in the moral upbringing of each nation” (quoted in Sa’dvandian 2001:456). Likewise, the first domestic feature fiction film, Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa, Aktor-e Sinema, 1933), dealt head on with the pedagogical and moral import of film, for in it a traditional haji who originally objected to cinema changes his mind when he becomes convinced of its educational and uplifting values. The mobilization of the discourses of pedagogy and moralism to popularize cinema continued throughout the century. Realism was an important attribute of accepted cinematic representations; those who opposed film (and musical recordings and modern novels) often criticized these media’s capacity for fantasy. The enemy was not cinema but fantasy and the imagination.

Artisanal Exhibition and Reception Practices Since the Qajar period cinema consisted chiefly of film exhibition, mostly of foreign films. The artisanal exhibitors’ practices to attract customers and filmgoers’ behavior in the cinemas (spectatorial formation) turned movie houses into key sites of cultural exchange, national identity formation, and individual struggles over authenticity and modernity. In this view, each film exhibition became more than a screening; it was, as Rick Altman phrased it, a “threedimensional event occupying space and time within a multi-­dimensional culture” (1999:31). Imported films were shown in ad hoc and artisanal settings, as individual events. Starting in 1900, entrepreneurs screened movies in the homes of the elite or in the royal palace in Tehran, usually for festive occasions such as weddings and circumcisions. Some pioneer exhibitors operated their cinemas as

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side businesses: Tehrani’s first cinema opened in the back of his antique shop around 1903, Tajerbashi’s cinema began operating from his business on Naseri Avenue in April 1908, and Mirza Enayatollah Khan Davasaz’s cinema opened in May 1908 on the second floor of his pharmacy. Other commercial entrepreneurs opened their cinemas in their homes: Badmagerian, with the aid of the photographer Antoin Sevruguin, opened one in his own apartment on Ala al-Dowleh Street in 1909; Vartaniants showed movies in 1910 in his home in the Armenian district of Tabriz; and Abdollah Baqai showed movies at home in Tehran as late as 1934. These private cinemas did not last long. The more enduring venues were public cinemas, such as the Soleil Cinema established by the French Catholic mission in Tabriz in 1900, which operated for nearly two decades. Commercial movie houses, starting with Tehrani’s Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema in 1904, emerged triumphant after suffering tumultuous growing pains. Movie house numbers rose after 1906; many were run by minorities. The diaries of the Shah’s favorite boy companion, Gholamali Aziz al-Sultan (also known as Malijak-e Sani), provide a fascinating account of these venues, showing the frequency with which at least one elite spectator went to the movies, the days he went, and the circumstances under which he watched the films. I have tabulated these data in table 1. Table 1 charts a member of the elite’s pattern of filmgoing during one decade. Malijak, who lived in tumultuous historical times in both the Qajar and first Pahlavi periods (1878–1941), recorded his film attendance between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-six. The table reveals fascinating information about spectatorial formation and exhibitor practices during the transition from the Qajar to the first Pahlavi era. Malijak went to the movies often, sometimes daily. Mostly he went to the commercial movie houses, although sometimes he saw films in elite homes, his own residence, or the royal palace, sometimes with women present. He also sometimes attended home cinemas, such as those operated by Badmagerian and Sevruguin. Movie watching was a nighttime social activity; friends and family members often accompanied him. He went to the movies on any day of the week (except Thursdays), including on the Muslim Sabbath, Friday, disregarding the sanctity of that day. In each attendance, he watched from a few “views” (pardeh) to two and a half hours worth of movies. He apparently enjoyed most of what he saw, frequently commenting, “nice views.” Over the years, he attended several different movie houses and took note of their rise and fall. Filmgoing was a modern social equalizer, as different social strata partook.

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table 1  Film Viewing Pattern of Prince Gholamali Aziz al-Sultan, Malijak-e Sani, 1903–14 Gregorian Date

Iranian Shamsi Date

Day Of Week

Screening Venues & Films

22 Nov. 1903

30 Aban 1282

Sunday

After visiting a friend, he attends Tehrani’s antique shop for movies; on Sunday, the screenings are for foreigners only; on this day there are few people in attendance: only him, a Dutch embassy employee, and a few others.

23 Nov. 1903

1 Azar 1282

Monday

After evening prayer and studying, he goes out to the movies, perhaps to Tehrani’s antique shop.

29 Nov. 1908

8 Azar 1287

Friday

At the prime minister’s party for foreign ambassadors in Shams al-Emareh Palace, films are screened after dinner.

8 Dec. 1908

17 Azar 1287

Saturday

At Zel al-Sultan’s party in Amirieh Palace, films are screened after dinner and live music.

20 Aug. 1909

29 Mordad 1288

Friday

After an all-day celebratory event involving live music, auction, and lectures, sponsored by the Okhovvat Society to raise funds for families of Constitutional Revolution martyrs, Malijak goes out to the movies.

11 Sept. 1909

20 Shahrivar 1288

Saturday

He goes to Badmagerian’s Ala al-Dowleh Street Cinema, which has a well-stocked coffee shop.

20 Nov. 1909

29 Aban 1288

Sunday

He goes to Badmagerian’s Ala al-Dowleh Street Cinema, where he finds out that only Armenian clients are allowed entry in honor of their Sabbath; he is forced to go to Ivanov’s Farus Cinema on Lalehzar Avenue, which he considers to be superior.

20 Dec. 1909

29 Azar 1288

Tuesday

He goes to a public cinema with a friend to see “nice views”; not crowded.

27 Dec. 1909

6 Dey 1288

Tuesday

After taking photographs of Khasseh Kha­nom, he views films in his private home with his family, including women.

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Gregorian Date

Iranian Shamsi Date

Day Of Week

Screening Venues & Films

1 April 1910

11 Farvardin 1289

Friday

After night prayer, he goes out with his male companions to watch “nice views” at Badmagerian’s Ala al-Dowleh Street Cinema.

3 April 1910

13 Farvardin 1289

Sunday

He goes out to see what he calls “nice new films.”

8 May 1910

17 Ordibehesht 1289

Sunday

After night prayer, he goes out to the movies.

20 May 1910

29 Ordibehesht 1289

Friday

With friends he goes out to see “nice views,” then returns home.

28 May 1910

6 Khordad 1289

Friday

After a party, a meal consisting of fava beans and rice, and evening prayers, he walks to Ivanov’s Farus Cinema to watch “nice views”; he also watches a meteor from the balcony of Batmagerian’s cinema.

13 June 1910

22 Khordad 1289

Sunday

After a ceremony naming a new infant and a Shiite lamentation (rowzeh) at home, the photographer Antoin Sevruguin shows with his portable projector “nice views” to Malijak and others.

27 June 1910

5 Tir 1989

Sunday

After a visit to Khasseh Khanom’s home, he watches movies on the way home, apparently at Farus Cinema.

9 Dec. 1910

17 Azar 1289

Saturday

He rides out to the movies. Sevruguin has gone bankrupt and Ivanov has handed his business to someone else.

13 March 1913

27 Esfand 1291

Tuesday

After jumping over fire to celebrate char shanbeh suri in anticipation of the Persian New year, Malijak rides out to see movies at Ivanov’s new cinema; very few spectators are present.

25 March 1913 5 Farvardin 1292

Tuesday

After visiting family and a personal lawyer, he goes out to the movies, and directly returns home.

12 April 1913

Sunday

After visiting Asef al-Saltaneh’s new home, he goes to the movies.

23 Farvardin 1292

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table 1 continued  Film Viewing Pattern of Prince Gholamali Aziz al-Sultan, Malijak-e Sani, 1903–14 Gregorian Date

Iranian Shamsi Date

Day Of Week

Screening Venues & Films

6 Sept. 1913

15 Shahrivar 1292

Saturday

After a day of partying and gambling at Sahm al-Dowleh, he goes to Ivanov’s cinema at night, where he watches “nice views”; stays the night at his friend’s house.

6 Oct. 1913

14 Mehr 1292

Monday

He goes out to the movies with various dignitaries, perhaps to Ivanov’s Farus Cinema.

8 Oct. 1913

16 Mehr 1292

Wednesday He is invited by Sardar Zafar to attend a play in Ivanov’s Farus Cinema; many dignitaries, Foreign Ministry personnel, and others, some 500 people, are in attendance. He praises the performance and enjoys it.

15 Oct. 1913

23 Mehr 1292

Wednesday After dark, he asks permission from the crown prince to go out with several dignitaries to the movies, perhaps to Ivanov’s Farus Cinema; watches “nice views” for two and a half hours.

5 Jan. 1914

15 Dey 1292

Monday

After dark, he picks up friends and rides to the movies; returns home to rest.

Source: Table composed by the author based on entries in “Az Ruznameh-ye Khaterat-e Gholamali Khan Aziz al-Saltaneh, Malijak-e Sani,” MSF, no. 258, (2000/1379), 12–13.

Watching movies was part of the evolving structure of leisure and entertainment for those who could afford it, an “event” that capped others, as it often followed parties, dinners, concerts, evening prayers, celebrations, and visits with friends. Early exhibitors, such as Tehrani and Badmagerian, were sensitive to the needs of their spectators and scheduled their film screenings to fit their ethnoreligious affiliations, reserving Sundays for Christians, foreigners, and Armenians. Malijak also refers to watching movies during an auction party involving fund-raising. This points to a wider noncommercial practice in the early period of cinema: films were used to educate and entertain but also to raise funds for sometimes secular charitable causes, which directly countered the traditional practice of sponsoring religious lamentations and performances to raise funds for religious charities. 108

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If conservative religious circles engaged in the struggles over cinema’s public presence by shunning and banning it, secular and religious modernists got involved by screening films in a great variety of venues. For example, on the night of 19 August 1909 (2 Shaban 1327), Zahir al-Dowleh, who had written about his film viewing experience at the 1900 Paris exposition, gave an evening party in his home in Tehran to raise funds for the families of the pro-constitution mujahedin fighters killed in Tehran and Azarbaijan. The festivities included a lottery, sweets, fruit, tea, ice cream, lemonade, a live orchestra, and movies (Tafrashi Hosseini 1972:243–44). Altogether, twelve thousand toman were collected, which indicates that hundreds of people may have attended the event. The reformists also screened films in educational settings, such as at the Aqdassiyeh elementary school during the Constitutional Revolution. Revolutionary societies such as Anjoman-e Okhovat (Brotherhood Society) staged pantomimes, plays, musical performances critical of despotism, and movies. As table 1 indicates, Malijak reports on one such event involving cinema, which the Okhovat Society sponsored on 20 August 1909. Likewise, the educational and philanthropic clubs or companies that formed after the revolution staged numerous plays and sometimes screened films as part of their project of inculcating modernity. For example, in 1910, the Farhang Scientific Company (Sherkat-e Elmiyeh-ye Farhang), formed by the graduates of the Political Sciences School in Tehran, organized adult classes and a school (called Ma’refat) and offered translations and readings of books, plays, and conferences in which films were also screened and discussed.23 The Iranian Women’s Charity Company (Sherkat-e Kheiriyeh-ye Khavatin-e Irani) also showed two films at end of one of their conferences held in the Atabak Garden (Tahaminejad 1992/1371:49). At the same time, the reformists continued to screen films privately in homes and in public commercial cinemas. The cross-fertilization of theater and cinema in the service of modernity was dense and multifaceted. The Performance and Conference Company, also known as the National Theater, rented the room above the Farus Print Shop, containing fifty seats, to stage its theatrical performances. This was perhaps the same space that Ivanov used for his Farus Cinema. Likewise, another social club, the High Performance Company of Ershad (Sherkat-e Namayesh-e Ali-ye Ershad), also staged its plays of 1913 in the same space above the print shop. Later, in 1915, it chose another venue, the Grand Hotel, which commercial exhibitors frequently used to screen movies. The Grand Hotel hall, owned by a Mr. Baqerof, constituted the primary professional theater space in Tehran and it became the linchpin of the Western and modern performing arts. i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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Not only film exhibitors and theater troupes but also music bands and comic troupes used its stage. For example, from 1917 to 1922, the Comedy Company of Iran (Sherkat-e Komedi-ye Iran) performed plays, musicals, and operettas in that hall. In addition, progressive and modernist political groups, such as the Young Iran Society, staged their performances there, for example, Hasan Moqaddam’s Jafar Khan Has Returned from Europe (Jafar Khan az Farang Amadeh) and Said Naficy’s The Twentieth-Century Girl (Dokhtar-e Qarn-e Bistom). Finally, Armenian theater clubs were very active, including the Welfare Club of Armenian Women of Tehran (Anjoman-e Kheiriyeh-ye Zanan-e Armani-ye Tehran), which staged the famous Azari operetta Arshin Mal Alan (The Cloths Peddler), by the composer and writer Uzeyir Hajibeyov, with the help of a leading performer, Avanes Tomasian, to raise funds for the establishment of a kindergarten. Performances took place in several locations, including in the Qajar court for the Shah’s harem, where Armenian actresses who played the male parts in disguise, wearing makeup, beards, and mustaches, were frisked by eunuchs to ascertain their gender. The group also played in the Grand Hotel hall for the wives of notables. Armenians were not the only Iranian ethnic minority to stage plays and musicals in this hall. In 1919, the operetta Ardeshir and Ester (Ardeshir va Ester) was performed there in Persian to benefit Jewish educational programs (Floor 2005:224–31). Some of these plays and operettas, such as Arshin Mal Alan and Mashhadi Ebad (also by Hajibeyov) would be turned into movies by Iranian filmmakers soon after sound became available. Such a dense intersection of the performing arts was part of the microphysics of modernity. In the late 1920s, seven commercial movie houses operated in Tehran (Salimi 1929a/1308). There were also some itinerant film exhibitors who carried their projectors and screens from one neighborhood to another and showed their films in ways similar to traditional curtain reciters. The social historian Jafar Shahri provides a rare eyewitness account of one such itinerant film exhibition in Tehran from when he was ten or eleven years old, in the mid1920s. It is worth quoting at length. A man with his trumpet was calling the people to gather in the Sirk (circus) Alley. Between 20 and 30 people, young and old, gathered. It was near dusk when a porter appeared, carrying a brown box on his back, accompanied by a man with a goatee beard and a pauper carrying a stool on his shoulder. When they got to the head of the alley, they set the stool down and placed the brown box on it. The man with the goatee opened the box and pulled out a white sheet of cloth and ordered

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that it be mounted on the wall. He himself opened the four sides of the box, which were attached with hinges, to reveal a large instrument that looked like a camera, except that it was bigger with various attachments, one of which looked like a gramophone pickup arm, which I later found out was used to show the movie. There was a big battery, like an automobile battery, on the side of the box. The white cloth, which was like the curtain reciters’ painting, was stretched out and nailed to the south wall. The projectionist was slowly and methodically attaching the wires to the battery and was going hither and thither for no real reason, in an attempt to make the whole affair seem more elaborate to attract more customers [similar to curtain reciters]. When he thought he was ready, he asked his assistant, the stool man, to push back the gathered crowd and he came forward and shouted that everyone must move out of the screening area and pay to get back in. With his trumpeter’s aid, he pushed people out and strung a rope around the area, attaching the ends to the walls. The trumpeter began to collect money and to let those who had paid to get in under the rope, while the other assistant helped with crowd control. By then 70 or 80 people had gathered, who had thought this was a traditional curtain reciting session where they had the option of donating money or not. As soon as they heard about having to pay, they began to disperse one by one. A few roughnecks tried to muscle their way into the roped area, but after they were beaten back by the stool man, they gave up. Only 22 or 23 people remained, two of whom were my brother, Mohammad Ali, and I. We paid and entered the so-called hall! The man with a goatee—the operator—spoke Persian with an Armenian accent, and he asked us to sit in front of the screen and look at it. We sat and stared ahead with all our senses and powers. A bell rang from the shahr-e farang [the projector], after which the operator ordered us to be silent; then another bell rang, which meant the film had begun; finally another bell rang, with which the screen lit up and he began his narration about a lady and a gentleman who were walking down the streets of New York City. He continued with his narration to the end of the film [which was about a tough guy who was trying to steal another man’s girlfriend]. We were so astonished that our breaths were locked inside our chests. . . . Seeing their moving image, someone screamed, “Oh, they are really walking there.” People made one sort of noise or another, talking to themselves or to others, saying things like, “Look at i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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how they walk and how, for goodness sake, they are talking with each other.” There was a lot of noise from the audience who liked or disliked the scenes, from the projector, which broke the film from time to time, and from people who whistled, bad-mouthed, or swore at the movie or at each other or who lauded and encouraged the movie and each other. (quoted in Mehrabi 1991/1375:30) Movie exhibition was not confined to Tehran. By the 1920s, Tabriz had the Catholic mission’s Soleil Cinema, operated by the Armenian Alek Sakinian, as well as Iran Cinema, which was run by the Russian Jewish émigrés Arnold Jacobson and Emil Zurkov. In Mashhad, Musa Khan Etebar al-Saltaneh began showing films in 1911 in a three-hundred-seat hall owned by a Russian émigré named Oganov. Musa Khan made this a regular cinema until 1927. The Russian-Iranian military marching band played during its silent films. Another Russian émigré, Grisha (Sako) Sakovar Lidzeh, opened Rasht’s first official cinema, Mayak, in 1924.24 Shiraz’s first official cinema, Dariush, began operations in 1926, while in Abadan and Ahvaz the mobile film units of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company screened newsreels and short films for both the public and the oil workers starting in the late 1900s (Omid 1995/1374:100– 101). By the 1920s, the company was operating several permanent cinemas in these and other oil towns. Since no feature fiction film was made during the Qajar era, all the features shown in these cinemas were imported American, French, British, Russian, and German films, consisting of a mixture of highbrow and popular fare. Among the most famous were Abel Gance’s Barberousse (1916), D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Scott Sidney’s Tarzan of the Apes (starring Elmo Lincoln, 1918), and Fritz Lang’s Die Niebelungen: Siegfried (The Ring of Niebelungen: Siegfried, 1924). Men carrying advertising sandwich boards of movie posters, movie hawkers who called to spectators, live screen translators, musicians who played during screenings or intermissions, roaming vendors who sold hot and cold food in the movie houses, forestage performers who offered humorous skits, songs, and dances before the movies, and the spectators who talked out loud to the screen or to each other during the films all helped turn screenings into attractive and noisy three-dimensional events. In their attempts to attract audiences for these movie events and to make cinema acceptable, artisanal film exhibitors haggled with myriad social taboos, technological problems, and political and religious forces. Almost all of these were vestiges of premodernity, demonstrating the underdevelopment

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of the various formations of modernity. Specifically these included the religious establishment’s opposition to cinema and the public’s general xenophobia, on the one hand, and intense attraction to the West, on the other; lack of government legal and financial support; lack of technical and artistic infrastructures; lack of authorial individuality and subjectivity; a generally conservative and illiterate population; and the gendered segregation of social spaces, including movie houses. The novelty of the cinema and of movies constituted yet another factor. Gradually a spectatorial formation emerged. The commercial movie houses, which in 1903–4 began modestly and tentatively in the backyard of Tehrani’s antique shop, evolved into special-purpose places with nonpersonal marquee names. The semiotics of naming inscribed the national struggle for authenticity and modernity in which the exhibitors and audiences participated.25 The marquee names of cinemas were nationalist (Melli, Iran, Da­ riush, and Ferdowsi), Western and Occidental (Grand, Mayak, and Palace), or modernist (Tajaddod, Sanati, and Tamaddon).26 All of them constituted modernist “structures of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s phrase (1977), that countered traditionalists’ structures of feeling. The politics of naming during the nickelodeon era in the United States generally favored names that “created images of the movie theater as a friendly, familiar gathering place close to home” (Fuller 1996:52). They also took on an exotic and Orientalist cast: The Egyptian and Grauman’s Chinese theaters in Hollywood, both still extant. Iranian naming politics tended to position the cinemas not as homey sites but as gateways to other places and times, generally in the contemporary West. They were exotic and Occidentalist. Reflecting the fluidity of artisanal Qajar cinema, however, movie-house names changed frequently, either because the venues changed hands or because owners changed their politics or target audience. For example, Vakili changed the name of his Sepah (Armed Forces) Cinema to Zohreh (Venus) Cinema. It was a turn away from politics (Sepah celebrated Reza Shah’s creation of modern armed forces) and a move toward a kind of universal imagination of movie stars. In Persian, the word setareh (star) refers both to the stars in the sky and to the movie stars.27 If the politics of naming and renaming in the Qajar and Pahlavi periods followed secularly nationalistic and Western ideas, they became religiously nationalistic and oriented toward the third world in the aftermath of the revolution of 1979, reflecting the massive ideological and political shift that took place. To attract filmgoers during the hot summer months, exhibitors started open-air cinemas, called “airdomes” in the United States (Abel 2005:14–15), sometimes on rooftops and sometimes in parks and gardens. The first of i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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these was Dariush Cinema, which began operations in the early 1920s in Shahpur Square in Tehran (Omid 1995/1374:33). Before electric fans and air conditioning, airdome cinemas were a must. In fact, some movie-house owners built two houses, with the airdome located on top of the enclosed unit. The airdomes were open only during summers, while the enclosed cinemas operated during the rest of the year. Yadollah Taleqani, an old-time film technician, recalls that Motazedi’s Tamaddon Cinema, where he worked, was one such double-decker affair from the start (quoted in Salehi 2001/1371:20). The airdomes depended on good weather and tapped into a desire for the informal, the communal, and for outdoor leisure in Iranians, who sought cool, shady spots for their evening and weekend outings. Not all spectators were paying customers, as airdome neighbors often gathered on their own rooftops, from which they viewed the movies for free.28 Those who lived near airdomes would sometimes leave their homes at show time to avoid having to host freeloading neighbors and friends. To further draw in customers and turn filmgoing into a bigger event, exhibitors gradually improved the interior facilities and services of their permanent cinemas. The utilitarian benches became individual numbered seats, thus feeding into modernity’s individualism. Some movie houses, such as Tamaddon Cinema in Tehran, which had two halls, one covered and the other open-air, followed in their seating arrangements the history of theater seating, with different classes of customers. Individual, numbered seats were reserved for first-class customers, while benches with backs were reserved for second-class moviegoers, and backless benches, forming the largest section, were allocated to third-class clientele.29 The whitewashed walls or sheets that served as screens gave way to proper movie screens. The dim and stuffy atmosphere of early venues evolved into electrically lit and fanned comfort, with refreshments served during intermissions. Surprisingly, several early cinemas, such as those of Tehrani and Ivanov, began operations during the holy month of Ramadan, when piety and abstinence from worldly pleasures are the norm. This reflects the artisanal exhibitors’ understanding of event-based screening in the evenings, after the break of their customers’ daylong fast. For if piety and abstinence from food, liquids, smoking, and sex characterized Ramadan’s daytime, its nighttime was given to celebration and excess. It appears that some exhibitors engaged in “counterprogramming,” scheduling their films at the same time as the performances of the annual taziyeh, which occur during Muharram (Mehrabi 1984/1363:18). By so doing, they may have wanted to compete with this religious form of entertainment, or, more likely, they may have intended to 114

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persuade people already out of their homes for one form of entertainment (religious) to go to another (secular). Whatever their intention, secular entertainment won, especially after Reza Shah in the mid-1930s banned the elaborate taziyeh performances and the intense processions of flagellation and head-cutting that formed part of this annual mourning ritual. Although films were silent, inside the movie houses there was anything but silence, as Shahri’s anecdote about the itinerant screening demonstrated. All four types of sounds identified by Altman were present during film exhibitions: the sound of the film, audience sounds, the noise made by the apparatuses, and advertising sounds outside (1999:32). Hired barkers ( jarchi) walked the streets and alleys shouting out the movie titles, the names of the stars (then called “artists” in Persian), and the name of the cinemas. In 1929, a Swedish émigré, Fredrick Talberg, projected movie ads, painted or photographed on glass slides, onto a screen that he hung at the intersection of Lalehzar Avenue and Berlin Alley, the hangout of dandies, moviegoers, and flâneurs.30 To further attract customers, exhibitors such as Georges Esmailiov and Badmagerian stood outside their movie houses ringing bells (Hai­dari 1989b/1368:154). Inside the cinemas, too, Iranian oral culture made for a noisy and interactive atmosphere. Dated 1969 (1348), figure 38 shows a painting by the famous cartoonist, film animator, and air force colonel Jafar Tejaratchi. Its title in both English and Persian, written on the garbage can in the foreground, reads: “A modern moviehouse 40 years ago in Tehran.” The painting is filled with ethnographic details of film reception in an open-air movie house in the late 1920s in Tehran. It is a dark, starry night with a crescent moon. The spectators are seated in four sections: within the hall itself, the first four rows from the screen are the cheapest seats, occupied by men; the next five rows are mixed-gender rows, with women seated in the section on the right; the most expensive seats are the loge seats in the back of the theater, which are separated by a barrier; and finally, nonpaying spectators watch the movie from neighboring rooftops behind and in front of the screen. There is much activity in the movie house: balloons contain spectators’ dialogue with each other and with the movie screen, a farmer in row three has tied his sheep to his seat, a woman is holding up her baby, who is projecting a stream of urine, and a pot of food nearby is boiling away on a portable heater. Just behind this scene a woman with a face veil is talking to another in the row behind about the food that is being cooked. Fight scenes are repeated three times: on the movie screen with Charlie Chaplin in action, on a poster on the wall in the background, and among the spectators in the hall. A man in row three from the screen is holding up a i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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tray of refreshments. In row five the man wearing what looks like a helmet is a dilmaj, who with his stick points to the screen and disciplines unruly spectators. The projectionist is faintly visible above the loge seats, just behind the beam of light. Musicians providing a soundtrack (and perhaps sound effects) are seated behind the screen. The spectators seem to be enjoying the film, since all are smiling. By engaging in loud dialogue with the movies, as they had in traditional storytelling, audiences were no longer just consumers of the movies but also the producers of their meaning. In the process, filmmaking and film viewing were conjoined in what Roland Barthes calls a “single signifying practice” (1977:162). Live musicians or gramophone records provided Persian musical accompaniment, which both indigenized and deconstructed the foreign films. Theaters that aspired to attract higher-class spectators, such as Iran Cinema in 1926, played only Western music. Some theaters placed their musicians near the entrance to attract customers and moved them into the movie house to play during the screening once the film began. Audiences accustomed to flexible-length film shows arrived and departed at will, causing disruptions. Sometimes, to accommodate long movies, exhibitors started the films earlier

38  The ethnography of film reception in an open-air movie house in the late 1920s in a 1969 painting by cartoonist Jafar Tejaratchi.

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than they had advertised, causing arguments between theater managers and those patrons who had arrived on time only to see the films already in progress (Khatibi 1994:327–28). In the early days, if the town notables and neighborhood lutis arrived late, the projectionist would stop the film in mid-stream in their honor to resume the screening only after they were seated (Mehrabi 1984/1363:420). Because of technical problems and the age of the junk prints, the films broke frequently, sometimes several times during a screening; whistling, heckling, stomping, and clapping would result, as would chanted slogans like “show the film or return the money.”31 The screening of each film generally involved several planned intermissions to allow for reel changes (cinemas generally had only one projector). Food sellers walked the aisles, loudly hawking sherbet, lemonade (soft drinks came later), ice cream, mixed nuts and seeds (ajil), cigarettes, hot tripe stew, and liver kebob—sometimes even during the film. Before entering Tamaddon Cinema, some spectators purchased tripe soup from the café next door and brought the steamy, odoriferous meal into the movie house (an early version of odorama!) (Salehi 2002:23).32 In an interview, the modernist writer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan told me that when he was about six in the late 1920s in Shiraz, he used to go to Mohammad Khan Hendi’s Pars Cinema, where they served various snacks, including ice cream in refillable cups. Once he was so engrossed in the movie that he had not realized that he had emptied the cup. Suddenly he noticed someone pulling on the cup strongly, trying to take it away. Having thus been brought back to reality, he realized that it was the vendor who wanted to retrieve the empty container (Naficy 2007c). When they socialize, Iranians like to eat watermelon, pumpkin, and sunflower seeds, a habit they took with them to the movies. The loud and rapid cracking of seeds interrupted the films’ quiet moments.33 The hulls were sometimes spat out onto the backs of the people in front, or they were spat out from the balcony onto the heads of the spectators seated below, causing fights. The spitting out of hulls in cinemas continued into the Pahlavi period, a practice that Ettela’at condemned in the 1930s as bad etiquette and bad for health.34 Food was apparently not the sole source of odor, since at times filmgoers or their impatient children, not wanting to miss the movie, urinated on the floor. Shusha Guppy relates a possibly apocryphal story illustrative of the kinds of haggling in which theater managers and spectators engaged:35 In desperation, the management projected a plea on the screen before each showing: “Gentlemen are requested to kindly refrain from relieving them-

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selves inside this cinema,” or simply, “Please do not urinate here but use lavatories outside.” When polite language failed to produce the expected result, harsher words were used: “God’s curse on the son-of-a-whore who pisses in this cinema!” or, “Whoever pisses in this place is the son and brother and husband of whores! He himself is a bugger!” No good. Finally, it was thought that the image would succeed where words had proved ineffectual—a drawing of a huge equine penis was projected with the caption: “This will bugger any son of a whore who dares to piss here, and will then take care of his wife, mother and sister as well!” The audience just laughed, and turned the insult back on to the management by drawing similar niceties on the walls of the cinema. Eventually a solution was found: a little ditch was dug all around the auditorium which carried away any liquid from the floor to the sewer. (1988:167) It would take years for movie exhibitors to train premodern audiences used to the collective, unruly, and noisy modes of oral tradition to learn the new modern habits of silent, respectful, and individualized film spectatorship. The press also had a role in this education, as it carried articles about etiquette. Cinema brought modernity not only by means of the film industry, but also by the transformation of the viewer’s role. The real silencing or modernizing of the spectators—their disciplining—would come long after sound had entered cinematic texts and their exhibition contexts. In the meantime, the presence of screen translators, professional or amateur, added layers to the sound palimpsest and to the eventfulness of Iranian film spectatorship.

Live Screen Translators: The Dilmaj In the silent era, the exhibitors hired screen lecturers or translators (dilmaj) to describe, even dramatize, the projected scenes and to translate foreign-­ language intertitles. Because they were engaged in multiple acts of cultural and linguistic translation that transformed foreign source texts—the movies —into Persianized tales, it is more appropriate to call them screen translators than screen lecturers, as is more customary in film studies, although for the sake of variety, I sometimes also use the word lecturer. The word dilmaj generally applied to the silent cinema screen translators only, who narrated the movies live as they were being projected.36 Translating the screen was a con-

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tinuation of the popular indigenous tradition of the “reciting of the curtain” or of the “narrating of the curtain” (pardeh khani), which predated cinema.37 On a large curtain hung outdoors was painted a complex tableau, a panorama, depicting scenes of the national epic, Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (The Book Kings) or of Imam Hosain’s martyrdom. Some reciters hung a secondary white curtain over the painted one, which they pushed back gradually to reveal new scenes as the plot required. Standing next to the curtain, the reciter or narrator (pardeh khan) pointed to the details of each scene, explaining and dramatizing by his narration, movements, gestures, tone of voice, and impersonation of characters the events of the tableau for the spectators gathered around him. He also commented on the story, closing the show with the religious and moral lessons to be drawn. These curtain-narrating performances were not only religious, cathartic, and entertaining but also commercially driven. Throughout the performance, the reciter engaged in various strategies to complicate the plot and to create delays and suspense to cajole a voluntary performance fee from as many of the enthralled onlookers as possible. Screen recitation was therefore a complex performance that went well beyond mere storytelling, and its genesis is in oral tradition performed storytelling (naqqali). These traditions influenced curtain reciting, itinerant peep shows (shahr-e farang), theatrical forms like puppet theater (khaimeh shabbazi) and shadow plays (sayehbazi), and movie-screen translating (figure 39).38 The translators’ syncretic adaptation of curtain recitation to cinema was ingenious and complex, and it served both to incorporate cinema into tradition and to legitimize it by this means—two important functions that Germain Lacasse identifies for screen lecturing (quoted in Gunning 1999). Sometimes, they would stand next to the movie screen (in Persian pardeh, meaning both curtain and movie screen) and, as the film was projected, describe the mise-en-scène using long pointers or warn the spectators of coming plot changes or of the film’s moral lessons. They walked in the aisles, translating the ­foreign-language intertitles or reading the Persian intertitles out loud. Golestan recalled that in the late 1920s two interpreters worked in Shiraz’s Pars Cinema, both of whom walked with a limp. One, a Mr. Yamini, was from Isfahan and spoke with that region’s accent. He limped through the aisles, commenting on the movie and uttering the dialogues of characters, one after another. The other, Mirza Yusof, carried a cane, but he performed his function while seated near the screen. Sometimes, he used a flashlight with which to read the intertitles (Naficy 2007c). At times the dilmaj apparently also acted out the scenes, embellishing the characters and the stories, as in curtainreciting performances. There is an amusing report of a luti dilmaj, named i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

39  Precinema entertainment. A peep show or shahr-e farang (foreign views), with its attendant narrating the pictures that children view through peepholes. Still c. 1890–1900 by Antoin Sevruguin, gelatin silver print, courtesy of Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Myron Bement Smith Collection

Hamzehi, who translated films in the Tamaddon Cinema and talked in the colorful style of the era’s tough guys. He was a fan of Richard Talmadge’s films, and if a bad guy punched his hero unfairly, Hamzehi would intone, “The motherfucker punched Richard in the chin” (Omid 1995/1374:110). Screen translators facilitated the understanding and appreciation of both native tales and narrative technologies from the West. Since the Western worlds filmed by documentarians (the real world) and by fiction filmmakers (the diegetic world) were very unfamiliar to average Iranians, the translators’ explanations and interpretations made the works intelligible. It was also necessary for them to explain how films told their stories to audiences unfamiliar with filmic conventions, such as temporal and spatial shifts, unusual framing and camera angles, and trick cinematography. In this they served the additional function of visual educators and modernizers. Had the twelve-year-old Djamalzadeh seen the steamroller trick film with a live translator to explain, he would probably not have panicked. His father, a cleric who was an eloquent speaker and narrator of religious tales, acted as a film translator when he set his son’s mind at ease by analogizing the unfamiliar images projected on the screen to familiar shadow-play images. Screen translators were thus important intermediaries, educating, entertaining, and softening the blow of cinema’s 120

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epistemic violence. Djamalzadeh’s account of the screening of an im­polite child in Aqdassiyeh School is the first example of a principal performing the legitimizing, incorporative, interpretive, educational, entertaining, and moralistic functions of the dilmaj for the benefit of school children and assembled dignitaries. The screen translators provided another important social function in Iran not noted by Lacasse: gender integration. Gender segregation in exhibition spaces meant that there were a few female dilmaj who translated the happenings on the screen at female-only screenings, as borne out by an ad in Ettela’at from April 1928 for Sanati Cinema, which boasts that a “knowledgeable female translator” (mottarjemeh-ye alemeh) will be on hand to narrate the “best industrial and moral movies,” such as Black Eagle, “along with pleasant music” for “the respectable ladies” four times a week (quoted in Sa’dvandian 2001:450).39 The incorporation of the dilmaj into the spectatorial space was facilitated by another traditional theatrical form. Taziyeh elaborately reenacted, dramatized, explained, and mourned the martyrdom of Imam Hosain, of his family, and his followers by Yazid, the Ummayid caliph, in the month of Muharram in 680 ad in the plains of Karbala (present-day Iraq). Indeed, this archetype of the unjust usurpation of power and of martyrdom forms a defining characteristic of Shiite cosmology, which Michael Fischer has aptly called the “Karbala paradigm” (1980:21). The invocation of this paradigm allows Iranians to continue to express grief and to channel outrage at an unjust world, even to the present day, in a socially sanctioned and personally meaningful and redemptive fashion. In taziyeh performances the stage apparatus is made visible, since no curtain separates the circular stage from the audience that surrounds it. In addition, men and boys play the parts of women, and they read their parts from scripts they hold in their hands. In this way, “the script serves as a barrier to any suggestion that the actor actually becomes the person he portrays” (Chelkowski 1979a:5). Like the curtain reciters, the actors speak in declamatory voices to each other and to the audience. The protagonists (the oliya’), the family of the prophet, recite their lines, which are written as poetry, while the opponents (the ashqia’), the killers of Imam Hosain and his family, declaim prose lines. When directly addressing the audience, they sometimes narrate the story, sometimes verbalize the characters’ feelings, and sometimes tell of their own feelings of shame and humiliation as actors who are playing the parts of evil people. This self-reflexive form of performance and address is most often used by the antagonists, who apologize to the audience for the i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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evil parts they are playing and tearfully profess their personal devotion to the imams, declaring that they are only playing the parts of the bad guys and are not themselves evil. The taziyeh audience, in turn, responds with cries of commiseration, loud weeping, the slapping of their faces, foreheads, and thighs, and chest beating. This differentiation between being (budan) and acting or representing (nemudan), which is so crucial to the taziyeh performances and to Western forms of performance, is a fragile one, for under certain circumstances acting and being are conflated with disastrous consequences for the players. Sometimes the actors who play the bad guys’ parts are socially shunned or physically harmed because of this conflation of the part with the person playing the part.40 The conflation became crucial once again in the aftermath of the 1978–79 revolution, when it was used to purify the Pahlavi-era film industry from “bad” ­elements —those male and female actors who had played the parts of bad guys and loose women. The screen translators’ adoption of some of the pardeh khani and taziyeh conventions constituted ad hoc and inchoate attempts at finding an indigenous modern language and form for the Iranian cinema.41 The most sophisticated uses of such conventions surfaced some nine decades later in the selfreflexive style of the postrevolutionary art-house cinema, most notably in the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Dariush Mehrjui, Rakh­ shan Banietemad, Samira Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi. This style made visible what the invisible style of classical realist cinema had assiduously concealed—the apparatuses of production and reception. This local, self-reflexive style became global as it catapulted Iranian art cinema onto the world stage. The adoption of traditional theatrical conventions by filmmakers and film exhibitors was not unique to Iran; other non-Western countries with long histories of theater, such as India and Japan, engaged in similar adaptations. In India, the live screen narrators were variously referred to as translators, lecturers, or demonstrators (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1964:43). Seated or standing next to the screen, they “read the title cards for the benefit of the audience, spoke the lines for the main characters, and gave a running commentary on the happenings on the screen” (Armes 1987:109). In Japan, they were called benshi, performers with a long history in the kabuki and the bunraku (doll-drama) theaters. Like the Iranian reciters and the Indian translators, the benshi narrated scenes, explained them, and extrapolated on them. The most accomplished became more famous than the movie stars and developed such individual styles that “seeing the same picture with a different benshi often

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gave the effect of an entirely new movie” (Anderson and Richie 1960:24). In many cases the Iranian dilmaj, Indian narrators, and Japanese benshi saved bad films by imbuing them with new local and national meanings. Even in the modern West, interpreters were deemed necessary. In the United States, for example, as early as 1896, some exhibitors employed “lecturers” to explain the movies during screenings. However, others regarded the lecturers’ services as unnecessary on the grounds that “the views speak for themselves, eloquently” (quoted in Pratt 1973:17). They were also widely active in the silent era in other Western countries, including in Canada (particularly in Quebec), Holland, Spain, Belgium, Poland, and France.42 The emergence of continuity editing in the first decade of the 1900s increased the intelligibility of fiction films immensely, obviating the need for lecturers. But documentary films used them well into the 1920s and beyond, particularly travelogues. Often Western filmmakers themselves traveled the film circuit with their documentaries, introducing them, providing live narration during screenings of silent films, and answering questions at the end.43 The widespread uses of voice-over narration in Iranian documentaries may owe something to this legacy of film translators and screen reciters and the oral traditions and performances they updated. The Iranian dilmaj served another function that Lacasse identifies for film lecturers: resistance (see Gunning 1999). But this function was contradictory. Their translations helped Westernize Iranians and indigenize Western movies, both in content and in form. The explanatory and performative commentary transformed Western movies, which were becoming representational through continuity cutting and filming, into presentational products. This function of the dilmaj—making films presentational—carried over into the narrative cinema of the Pahlavi period, creating hybrid texts that mixed presentational and representational styles. The analysis of Qarun’s Treasure (Ganj-e Qarun, 1965) in volume 2 points to the copresence of the two styles, but the role of the dilmaj is only suggested, awaiting further study. The translators also localized foreign movies, suiting them to ethnically and linguistically diverse audiences. Not all screen translators rendered intertitles into Persian. For example, in 1926, a Mr. Eftekhari working in Tabriz, a city with a predominantly Turkic and Azari population, provided live translations of film intertitles in Iran Cinema from English and Persian into Azari Turkish (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:55).44 It is likely that the translators also made other commentaries to adapt the film to their local audiences, perhaps changing the narrative meaning of the films, as the benshi did in Japan (Burch 1979:79).

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This complex function evoked complex audience reactions. At the beginning, the power of skillful dilmaj to “foretell” the plot was chalked up to their prescience—part of the magic of cinema. However, some spectators, particularly the educated ones, resented them. They thought translators botched the films’ true meaning and ruined their dramatic effects. For these spectators, the translators’ mediation tended to collectivize the viewing experience and interfered with individualized filmic subjectivity, and therefore with the film’s function as an agent of modernity. Moshfeq Kazemi, a writer of popular novels and newspaper serials, was not pleased with live narrators, since instead of suturing him into the diegesis, they pulled him out of it. He stated this graphically: “I was tremendously touched by the upper-class Russian lady in the film, but the laughable translations of the interpreter standing in the hall, which were uttered with a sudden loud voice at the most sensitive moments of the film, poured cold water on the emotional turmoil inside me” (Rahimian 1993/1372:104). The translators interfered with modernity in another way: if they provided narration during the entire film, they more than likely turned multivocal, democratic films into a univocal, authoritarian experience, as they vocally represented all the characters. Nonetheless, the dilmaj were liked enough to have their return demanded if they were absent from their regular posts for a few days. Some translators took their modernizing function of disciplining and silencing the unruly spectators seriously, cursing and even striking them with their pointers to force them into silence and submission to the movie (Ahmadi 1999/1378:30–31). The Armenian Iranian exhibitor Badmagerian acted as his own screen translator in his Tajaddod Cinema, becoming the first regular dilmaj (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:40).45 The following account of a spectator, Abdollah Bahrami, in 1915 in this cinema sketches a rich and amusing picture of the ethnography of film viewing and of the signifying contribution of the dilmaj to the increased intelligibility of foreign movies: As customers took their seats and waited impatiently for the hall to become dark and for the film to appear on the white screen, they talked loudly with each other and cracked and ate melon seeds noisily. Not to lose the audience, Ardeshir Khan [Badmagerian’s nickname], who had a rotund and spectacular body, would enter every fifteen minutes to give us the good news that the film was about to begin. [It seems that] he was waiting for at least twenty customers before closing all the doors and windows and drawing the thick curtains. Then, a tar [a string instrument similar to a guitar] player and a drummer would begin to play

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native music, preparing the audience for the exciting scenes. Ardeshir Khan himself would stand on a platform to explain to the audience in a serious and decorous manner the film’s story and characters. Faint pictures, containing periodic bright flashes, would appear on the screen, tiring the eyes. At least once or twice during the show the film would break. You couldn’t understand much from the pictures, but Ardeshir Khan drew our attention to the happenings on the screen. He spoke Persian with a sweet Armenian accent and would sometimes say things that we had not heard before, which pleased and entertained us. One time I had gone there to see the movies with my fellow students, and we entered the hall and sat on the seats as explained before. The film that night was very simple and short. Ardeshir Khan declared with a loud voice: “Gentlemen, look carefully, so you won’t forget. This man who is behind this door and looking through the keyhole is a merchant and a very good person. However, his wife, . . . what can I say, is one of those women. The husband has just returned late in the night from a pilgrimage and he sees that somebody else is lying down in his bed [with his wife]. At first, he does not believe it, but on looking further, he realizes that it must be someone else, because it is not he who is in the bed. The poor man is now puzzled, wondering what to do so as not to lose face. If he shouts, the neighbors will wake up and the affair will be revealed, and he will completely lose face in the bazaar. If he goes in quietly, it is probable that the man who is strong and burly will rise and beat him up thoroughly. As you see, he cannot decide what to do, and he is now watching the [sexual] goings-on, which I will not name, through the keyhole.” With this explanation, we spectators craned our necks to see better, but the screen was so dark and unclear that we could not see the action. All we were able to see was a man and a woman and then the husband who entered the room, carrying a bucket of water. However, Ardeshir Khan with his cute accent enlightened us. He said that the husband had finally decided to risk all: “He goes to the kitchen, takes a bucket full of dirty water, comes quietly into the room, and dumps it on the man who is lying down with his wife.” With this finale, Ardeshir Khan laughed boisterously and a few spectators followed suit. Then, the lights went on and the film session was over. To thank us for coming to his theater, Ardeshir Khan said: “These two people reached their goals, I hope that you, too, will reach yours.” (quoted in Rahimian 1993/1372:104) i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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This account tells of the type of stories that may have turned Muslim clerics against cinema. Apparently, it showed not only an unveiled foreign woman but also an adulterous one. The film’s comic rendering of the story, enhanced by the exhibitor’s entertaining live translation, highlighted the pleasure to be drawn from it, not the moral lesson. Badmagerian’s parting comments, however, can be interpreted as his attempt at putting a moralistic gloss on a potentially controversial scene—a form of resistance, or counterreading, of the movie. The goal that he claimed was achieved was apparently the restoration of the marriage, not its breakup. By transforming the Western character into a bazaar merchant and by claiming that he was returning home late at night from a pilgrimage, Badmagerian indigenized him and turned the issue of his wife’s infidelity into one of his loss of face in the bazaar. By so doing, he intensified the Iranian spectators’ identification with the foreign male characters, facilitating Westernization. After the introduction of sound, the live translators continued to offer commentary during the nondialogue and action sequences. The film director Amir Shervan told me about his experience of watching in the mid-1930s the first Iranian talkie, Irani’s and Sepanta’s The Lor Girl, during which a translator used his stick to point to the screen while commenting on the characters and the outcome of the action. He would say, for example, “Jafar is being chased by the bad guys, but he will win in the end because good always triumphs over bad.” Such predictions would cause the spectators to wonder aloud, “How does he know that?” Often, he would also try to jazz up the film “by making it exciting by talking faster and faster during the chase scenes, sort of like the movies’ musical track” (Naficy 1988:8–10). The intervention of professional and student narrators and translators made for only one aspect of the translation and mistranslation processes to which all films that cross national borders are subjected. These processes are not limited to the linguistic realm; psychological, cultural, sociopolitical, visual, and artistic interpretations are also involved. The dilmaj increased the movies’ intelligibility, but they could also subvert the filmmakers’ intentions. Translating in real time meant that they often used colorful Persian stock phrases and familiar oratorial styles, indigenizing and enriching the films. Translators also acted as guardians of public morality and taste, as censors. As Eshaq Zanjani, one of the first and most well-known translators, relates: “Prior to censorship laws, when we encountered words and sentences that did not suit our mentality, morality, and customs, we often chose either equivalent words and phrases or replaced them with more respectable ones. And sometimes we deliberately omitted the translation of some of the intertitles, 126

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which could cause spectator heckling. And when Persian-language intertitles replaced foreign-language ones, an attempt was made to control their translation. In short, we translators and interpreters were the first film censors in Iran” (quoted in Omid 1995/1374:888).46 Dubbing, which became standard practice later, introduced its own modalities of translation and mistranslation, of hailing and counterhailing, and of censorship. The live translators also helped film exhibitors differentiate themselves to attract spectators. More entertaining translators, such as Badmagerian, attracted larger crowds. Overall, the dilmaj were vital to the film experience until 1936, when under Reza Shah’s modernization program movie recitation was officially banned (Shoai 1976a/2535:16). In the silent era, people would not hesitate to tell the actors on the screen what they should do next. No sooner had the movie started than someone who had already seen it would begin to tell the story out loud, moments ahead of the action. Some audience members objected to this foretelling, as it ruined the drama for them. To help comprehension, even during the sound era, every ten minutes or so the diegesis would be interrupted by an explanatory intertitle in Persian, a practice Motazedi and Vakili had initiated. These titles did not solve the problem for the majority of viewers, who were illiterate, so the act of telling the intricacies of the plot proved helpful to most people. Thus professional dilmaj and even student volunteers were in demand as intermediaries between the native population and the Western text. Outside cinemas, adult men who could not read would engage young, literate boys to read the intertitles for them in exchange for free tickets or other favors. The simple act of translation thus evolved into exchanges of other sorts, including homosexual relations—a serious moral and legal offense. The student translators proved doubly useful once inside: other illiterate people would try to seat themselves within earshot to listen for free. The asynchronous chorus of young boys reading the intertitles out loud, however, aroused the ire of those who could read. The film comedian, writer, and director Parviz Khatibi relates that he and his childhood friend, Majid Mohseni, who would later become a movie star and a parliamentarian, loved the film serials of Richard Talmadge and Buster Crabbe, which they saw many times. Thus deeply familiar with them, Moh­ seni would often tell the film’s plot aloud in the cinema; spectators protested, causing commotion and fights, leading to the boys’ raucous ouster or escape from the premises (Khatibi 1994:27). Film exhibition and reception involved resisting and accommodating not only the West and the dominant Iranian cultural and religious norms but also the political rules of the state. This dimension of haggling by means of i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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cinema became more pronounced as the state became more modern, centralized, militaristic, and authoritarian under the Pahlavi regimes, which began in 1925, and as it became religiously organized under the Islamist regime after 1979, when the government interjected itself into movie houses in ways described in other volumes and chapters.

Coffeehouses and Hotels That film exhibition was artisanal is proven by the variety of its ad hoc venues. But many cinemas opened in modern cafés and hotels, as well as in traditional coffeehouses, heterotopic institutions that facilitated the creation of a modern public sphere in Iran. These venues also facilitated cinema’s integration into old and new pastimes. For example, Khan Nayeb Moili opened his cinema in the Boulevard Café; Iran Cinema opened in Oganov’s café on Lalehzar Avenue; and Vakili opened his in the Grand Hotel—all modern places. Aqayov opened his cinema in the traditional Zargarabad Coffeehouse. All were located in Tehran and provided food, sweets, water pipes, refreshments, and music. The Grand Hotel was the fulcrum of modern culture in Tehran. Its auditorium proved a popular venue for modernist concerts, plays, and movies; its café accommodated lounge lizards, dandies, and flâneurs (figure 40). To help integrate this modern institution of Western pleasure into an austere Muslim society, film exhibitors touted the hotel itself, and by extension the entertainment to be had there, as ethically uplifting. A well-known annual publication, Salnameh-ye Pars (Pars Yearbook), in its 1928 issue called the Grand Hotel “a school in which one can learn ethics, responsibility, humanitarianism, patriotism, avoidance of bad and eagerness toward good” (Sa’dvandian 2001:481). The integration of movies into coffeehouses, however, was culturally more significant than that into Western venues, for it involved deeper cultural adaptations and indigenization. Coffeehouses (qahvehkhaneh) were traditional centers of male entertainment, where tea, water pipes, and food were available, as well as live musical performances and traditional storytelling, comic theater (ruhozi), and curtain reciting.47 Skillful players and narrators dramatized famous love stories and heroic deeds. They also provided comic skits that critiqued situations of the day. The renowned writer Said Naficy describes the staging of one such comic play in Zargarabad Coffeehouse about a money-loving haji and his attempt at procuring a wife. As befitted the male-only environment of the coffeehouses

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40  Grand Hotel in Tehran, the site of East-West and traditionmodernity encounters, where film screenings, plays, and concerts took place. The droshky and automobile parked in front of the hotel symbolize these encounters.

and the then current prohibition against women performing in public, male actors played all the female parts (2002/1381:459–61). The screening of the movies in coffeehouses helped assimilate movies to cultural habit. Coffeehouses were the sites of other modernizing efforts as well. Apparently, the Zargarabad Coffeehouse on Amirkabir Street not only accommodated Agayov’s film screenings but also in 1907 functioned as a modern school (named Entesarieh) that offered night classes to adults (Nateq 1996:48). The famous Isfahan cleric Mohammad Taqi Aqa Najafi in 1914 complained that “people have become lax in their religious duties and the foundation of their faith has loosened” because many stores have installed gramophones (quoted in Sepanta 1987/1366:179). In the 1920s, some coffeehouses, such as those on Chaharbagh Avenue in Isfahan, attracted customers by piping their gramophone recordings onto the street, playing them so loudly that it raised the ire of neighbors, clerics, and the police (Rice 1923:199).48 Decades later, in the early 1960s, when television first arrived in Iran, some coffeehouses installed a television set in a prominent place to attract customers, as most ordinary people could not afford to purchase their own sets.49 These public televisions became very popular with children, whose presence in places of male entertainment fed into the illegal and immoral practices of pederasty and pedophilia, raising the ire of community leaders. In one case, a cleric denounced the coffeehouses for providing corrupting attractions to children, causing a prominent neighborhood luti, Haj Esmail Rezai, and his underlings to ransack several coffeehouses (Mirzai 2002/1381:198). The multifunctionality of the coffeehouses and the interconnection of various traditional and modern media and forms of entertainment in them corroborate yet again the intertextuality of modernizing institutions that helped overdetermine modernity and cinema in Iran.

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Modern Streets, Flâneurs, and Moviegoing Modern streets and squares, with their social, spatial, and sensory complexities, played a major role in modernity’s and cinema’s overdetermination, far more than the coffeehouses. Lalehzar Avenue in Tehran, the site of many of the early commercial cinemas, including those of Ivanov, Esmailiov, Jacobson, and Vakili, and of the first European style hotels such as Grand Hotel, was one of several streets that contributed to the new, modernized social space of the city. A former French diplomat said of Tupkhaneh Square, near which Tehrani’s Cheragh Gaz Street Cinema was located, “that ‘civilisation’ has stamped itself most strongly of anywhere in Tehran. Here is the centre for tramways and cabs; here are the Imperial bank and the telegraph office connected with the two European systems” (Rubin 1999:312). Modern streets attracted city dwellers with their width, cobbled surfaces, and pavements that were separated from the street by lines of trees irrigated by constantly flowing streams (Madanipour 1998:34). Many modern shops also began moving to Lalehzar, where they remained open well into the night. Traditional coffeehouses, modern cafés, and restaurants dotted this and other modern avenues, providing safe spaces for modernist dandies and intellectuals to hang out for hours, discussing politics, drinking tea and coffee, smoking cigarettes, reading their works, and ogling women. A report by F. L. Bird, a teacher at the American College in Tehran, paints an accurate picture of northern Tehran in 1921: “This newer part, the product of western influence, has many wide, well-graded streets, some of them lined with elms and plane trees; and it boasts of a tramway, electric lights, motion-picture theaters, hotels and restaurants, European shops, and numerous respectable buildings of semi-Western architecture” (1921:371). Lalehzar was for years nicknamed the “lovers’ lane” (Shahri 1997/1376:vol. 1:278). Ala al-Dowleh (later renamed Ferdowsi) was another street in northern Tehran along which several early cinemas were located, including those of Ivanov and Badmagerian. This street also housed the sprawling embassies of Britain and Russia, with their huge, well-kept gardens and grounds, as well as the luxurious homes and orchards of the rich. The convergence of purveyors of modern entertainment, consumption, and political power in these streets was not coincidental; it led to the increased luster of filmgoing and to the evercloser association between cinema and things lofty and Western. The concentration of media and power, as well as an intensification of sensory experiences, transformed these streets from physical sites into new cathected sights of the imagination and of insight. 130

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Sex segregation extended to the streets, but gradually some changes occurred. At first, women were barred from strolling down Lalehzar Avenue after dark. Later, after the First World War, they were allowed to walk along the sidewalk on the eastern side, while men walked on the opposite side. This led to an interesting gendered evolution of the public space: the shops on the eastern side, which catered to more discerning female customers, began to stock higher-quality and more desirable goods than those on the western side, which catered to the men, a situation that persisted for decades, long after the gendered segregation of sidewalks had disappeared (Naficy 2002/1381:285, 622). Women could also pass through Lalehzar and other modern streets by riding carriages or the horse-drawn tram—perhaps the same tram whose image in Léon Poirier’s The Yellow Cruise (1935) caused controversy during Reza Shah’s reign. The dearth of women turned the street into a site of male dalliance and decadence. Once again Bird, the teacher at the American College, offers a succinct description: Khiaban-e Lalehzar is Teheran’s Fifth Avenue and the pride of all the inhabitants. In the evening this short street is thronged with male promenaders. Fastidious, self-important Persian gentlemen of leisure, garbed in frock coat or flowing mantle, saunter along, jostling humbly dressed tradesmen or peasants, and an occasional Westernized American family elbows through the crowd. . . . Persian women are conspicuous for their absence, and if a few brazen ones do appear they suggest nothing quite so much as black shrouds tottering along on high-heeled slippers; even their faces are concealed by black horse-hair blinders. . . . Modern shops, with show-windows displaying actual European creations or their ludicrous imitation, alternate with junk-shops and second-hand stores, where every conceivable commodity can be unearthed, all the way from dusty opera hats to astronomical telescopes (sold to the shops by departing Western travelers). (1921:377–78) As women gradually appeared in public spaces, Lalehzar became the site of various female and male flâneurs, amphibolic mimics, and Westernized dandies, all of whom flouted tradition in favor of flaunting Western behavior, makeup, and dress. The nightlife of Lalehzar became the object of national fascination, humor, and criticism (Shahri 1978/1357:145–49; Ettela’at Mahaneh (Noruz 1336/March 1957), 28–29). Going to the movies on these streets provided a double dose of the shock of modernity, especially for the majority of the spectators who lived in poorer neighborhoods. Travel to Lalehzar by bus or on foot was a physical and a psyi deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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chological journey. A childhood film-viewing experience related to me by Shervan illustrates these dimensions of this journey, bringing this section to a close. In those days, there were no cinemas near our house, as all of them were located far away in central Tehran, such as on Lalehzar and Ferdowsi Avenues. There was a great distance from our house to those streets. One afternoon I wanted to see a Richard Talmadge movie on Ferdowsi Avenue. I had enough money for the movie ticket but not enough for the bus. So I walked the entire distance because I loved the movies. I sat through the first screening, then I sat through the second and the third screenings, because I really loved that movie. Then I realized that I was very hungry, so hungry that I almost fainted. I left the theater and walked toward our house for a while, but could not endure it any more. So I sat somewhere on the curb. Suddenly, my old grandmother appeared out of nowhere, standing tall over my head. It had become dusk by now. She asked: “What are you doing sitting in the street, why are you so late?” Apparently, I had been gone for so long that she had become worried and had left the house searching for me. (Naficy 1988:15–16)

Gender Segregation and Women Spectators The heterosocial construction of public space and Islamic rules that segregated genders, confining women to the private sphere, ensured that their admittance into the cinemas would be fraught with difficulties and much male and family anxiety. They also ensured that the discourse about cinema would from the start be a gendered one. The historical review here illustrates the complex functions that cinema played in bringing women into the public sphere and in transforming them into spectators, citizens, and consumers. As women’s social roles became more prominent through their engagement in the Constitutional Revolution and in other progressive social causes, and as they became integral to the concepts of the nation, the public sphere, and the public, their status as spectators also underwent a distinct but tortuous redefinition, which ultimately gained them admittance to certain types of cinemas. This gendered reconstruction of the category of “audience” was integral to modernity and to cinema’s institutionalization. As Abbas Amanat notes, however, “the perception of sensuality that was associated with the image of the 132

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unveiled or even thinly-veiled woman did not subside, particularly since freedom in the post-Constitution period allowed for greater sexual indulgences” (quoted in Taj al-Saltana 1993:98). Until women’s political value to the nation as voting citizens and their financial value to the exhibitors as part of the paying public became apparent, women’s entry into cinema remained problematic, bedeviled by prohibitions and impediments of all kinds, as well as by haggling and accommodations of all sorts. Women’s exposure to film initially occurred only in the privacy of rich peoples’ homes or in the royal harem. When in the early 1900s Sani alSaltaneh showed his films privately in the harem and in elite homes, he accommodated women by screening the films twice, once to the men and a second time to the women (Omid 1995/1374:22). Hoveyda’s recollection of her first film viewing at home in 1907 provides an early eyewitness account of such a private screening, as does Malijak’s recollection of watching movies at home with women in 1909. Yet when Tehrani made film exhibition public in 1904 to an apparently all-male audience, it was the image of the unveiled foreign woman that apparently caused Nuri’s proscription of cinema. That the first instance of public film censorship occurred over women’s representation is no surprise, for women’s representation was always associated with modernity (and later with moral excesses of various sorts). In modern Iran, any time that national identity is at stake, women, their social roles, and their representation on screens become central to the national debate. The binary representation of European women as houris and whores, which nineteenth-century Iranian travelers fancifully created in their travelogues, showing women’s flamboyant makeup and hairstyles, their lavish and risqué attire exposing their uncovered hair and bare shoulders, arms, and cleavage, and their insouciant behavior involving the free and open association with unrelated young, beardless men, was patriarchal, pornographic, voyeuristic, scopophilic, and ultimately moralistic. The negative representations, cathected to male sexual desires and anxieties, were transferred to modern women in Iran and condensed into the derogatory term Western dolls (­­arusak-e farangi). This concept implied modern women’s othering: they had adopted the purported immodesty, promiscuousness, lookism, and immorality of Western women—a condensation that became internalized and fixed into a stereotype and a fetish for Westernized women and for women dandies in Pahlavi-era cinema.50 While the Edenic imagery reproduced the Islamic conception of an idealized paradise as a reward for faithfulness, the promiscuous representation offered a warning to the faithful about the pitfalls of immorality that the freeing of women from the Islamic construction of space and i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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gender could bring about. The presence of European women in public places violated two Muslim customs: they appeared unveiled with unrelated (namahram) men. This is what traditionalists wanted to prevent from happening in Iran, for women’s routine presence in public places such as parks, streets, and cinemas would be interpreted as always already sexual and immoral, let alone their presence onstage as entertainers performing for strangers. This fanciful and distorted construction of modern women’s presence in public spaces and in places of entertainment made it well-nigh impossible for Iranian women, particularly those from respectable families, to either appear on film screens or in public movie houses during the Qajar period. Moreover, the relationship of nineteenth-century Iranian travelers with European women uncannily anticipated the relationship of twentieth-century Iranian spectators with movie screens. In their travels, male Iranians assumed the voyeuristic and generally passive position of onlookers, before whom European females were active agents of display and cathected vision; in the cinemas also, Iranian spectators assumed a voyeuristic and awe-struck stance toward the screen, which displayed alluring Western industry and culture, including unveiled women.51 The position of Iranians as observers of Western women and of Western movies replicated fractally the national longing for form, which positioned Iran as the passive watcher and admirer of the West and of things Western. Nuri’s proscription of Tehrani’s cinema should be seen in light not only of the historical reasons already cited but also of these psychological, social, and ideological dimensions of women’s representation, which made the sight of unveiled Western women on Iranian screens so potent and unsettling to the patriarchal, heteronormal, and religious orders. Women’s screen presence constituted a form of epistemic violence. There was another factor that made women’s public presence a threat. During the Constitutional Revolution, women had demanded that they be “counted in” in the expanding definition of social space and citizenship (Naj­ mabadi 1993:67).52 In the process, they had become not only agents of nationalism but also of modernity. The American financial and tax consultant in Iran, William Morgan Shuster, observed that “the Persian women since 1907 had become almost at a bound the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world. That this statement upsets the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is the fact. . . . Having themselves suffered from a double form of oppression, political and social, they were the more eager to foment the great Nationalist movement for the adoption of constitutional forms of government and the inclusion of Western political, social, and commercial and ethical codes” (1912:191–92). 134

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Immediately after the Constitutional Revolution, a “women’s press” emerged, with papers such as Danesh (Knowledge, 1910) and Shekufeh (Blossom, 1914), edited by women for female readers. These and other secular papers elaborated on the national value of women’s domestic labor and advocated for women’s education and professional work (Amin 1996:214–19). While emergent journalism was receptive to women and to their causes, cinema, as a capital-intensive medium very new to Iran, could not be. Moreover, women’s entry into the film industry invoked new social problems and theological issues, requiring entirely new struggles and accommodations. It took many years for women to become accepted into the public space and as members of the category called “audience,” even though women’s groups occasionally screened films as part of their educational and charity activities.53 During the entire Qajar period, no Iranian woman is known to have been involved in film. However, in the same period, several periodicals were edited and published entirely by women, and newspaper advertisements for clothes, cosmetics, movies, and medicine had begun to target women.54 Although there were no women film actors (no fiction films were made in this period), Iranian women were filmed in public places in brief actualities, some of which may have been screened in public cinemas. Sani alSaltaneh filmed one such extant actuality, [Women Entering the Shah Abd alAzim Train].55 In just three shots it shows a group of women pilgrims, veiled in black chadors and white headbands (picheh), entering the tram to go to the Shiite shrine of Shah Abd al-Azim, located in Rey, just south of Tehran (figures 41a and 41b). Textually, this brief film is rather simple (lasting less than thirty seconds), but it is contextually complex and significant. Compare this film with similar ones by the Lumière brothers, such as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) and Arrival of Express at Lyons (1895), which Sani al-Saltaneh must have seen in Paris: The Sani al-Saltaneh and Lumière films resemble each other in showing a train arriving at a station. But there are differences. The speed of the Lumière train caused panic; Sani al-Saltaneh’s film emphasizes less the train’s arrival (technology) than the women pilgrims and their boarding of the train (sociology). Even though it is filmed like the Lumière films, at an oblique angle to the oncoming train, Sani al-Saltaneh’s work is shot from a higher angle, which deemphasizes the movement of the slow train and reduces the resultant visceral reaction to it. Instead of highlighting the spectator’s psychic space, Sani al-Saltaneh’s film stresses the social space of the diegesis, which perhaps for the first time in Iranian cinema shows Muslim women in public places. Given the gendered segregation of space in Islam, Sani al-Saltaneh’s film would have presumably shocked not i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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41a and 41b  Two frames from Sani al-Saltaneh’s actuality [Women Entering the Shah Abd al-Azim Train], one showing women entering the station, the other entering the train—perhaps the first moving pictures of Iranian women in public. Enlarged from Zahedian’s film Lost Reels

so much because of the arrival on the screen of a moving train but because of the arrival of a group of veiled women. The film makes public what is private. Religious traditionalists could thus interpret the filming of women and the public screening of it as sexually provocative and as a violation of Islamic rules and traditions. That the women were filmed in public at all indicates either that they did not notice the camera or were unconcerned with it since they were properly veiled. It could also be that the clergy had not as yet become aware of the filming of women and of the screening of their images in public, so that there was no official prohibition against these practices yet (Nuri’s edict against cinema came a little later). Despite this early appearance of Iranian women on camera, women were rarely subjects of films in the Qajar period. When Ivanov began exhibiting films publicly in 1907, three years after Nuri’s proscription of Tehrani’s cinema, the concept of the “public” did not include women. For this reason male actors played the women’s parts when 136

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Ivanov staged plays in his Farus Cinema hall (Naficy 2002/1381:459). From newspaper advertisements for films, we know that women were not welcomed into public cinemas. In an ad published in the fiery constitutionalist news­paper Habl al-Matin (14 October 1907), Ivanov welcomes to his cinema with “utmost respect” all the “lofty gentlemen.” Women are not mentioned at all. As an astute businessman, however, Ivanov found a solution for this religiously driven social exclusion of women by offering, in another ad elsewhere, to show films in the privacy of peoples’ homes using a portable projector (Haidari 1991c/1370:227). It is not known how many members of the public took him up on this offer; however, we know of at least one case. According to Motazedi, his father viewed his first film in a private home where Ivanov screened films with his portable projector. That Ivanov’s ads appeared in radi­ cal constitutionalist papers, such as in Habl al-Matin (whose editor Mirza Sayyed Hasan Kashani was exiled to India in 1907) and Suresrafil (whose editor Jahnagir Khan Suresrafil was hanged in 1906), demonstrates several things.56 For one, as noted earlier, perhaps Ivanov was not as rabid an anticonstitutionalist as film historians have claimed. For another, he was a savvy businessman, calculating that the readers of these publications, who favored modernity and political reforms, including a more socially active role for women, would also be open to the new and modern medium of film. Third, it is possible that he was actually addressing women directly as potential spectators, for these papers were read by women, discussed women’s issues widely, and carried passionate articles and letters by women. For example, in an issue of Habl al-Matin from September 1907, in a “polemical letter” a woman bravely challenged the theological premise of the fatwa against women’s education, which Nuri, then the highest-ranking ayatollah in Tehran, had issued (Afary 1996:191). Ivanov’s advertising strategy of directly addressing women as a way of attracting them highlights an important aspect of the discursive struggle over cinema involving women—a struggle that would become more pronounced and direct over time. Indeed, it would take another decade before exhibiting films to women both publicly and regularly would become a reality, albeit a flickering one. On his return to Iran in 1917, Motazedi rented Badmagerian’s Khorshid Cinema and encouraged women to attend it by setting aside three nights of the week for women spectators only (Rahimian 1993/1372:103). Such gender-segregated use of the same public space may have followed the practice of public bathhouses, which set aside certain days or hours for women. Perhaps this new endeavor was driven by the social upheavals of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which had intensified Iranians’ thirst for foreign i deolog i ca l a n d sp ec tato r ial fo r matio ns

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news, social change, and modernity, including cinema. But this effort to attract women, like many others, failed; it was an isolated attempt by a lone film artisan who benefited from temporary support. The history of early cinema is filled with the stories of individual efforts, which bore fruit only incrementally and painstakingly. Women’s presence in public places and on movie screens would wait to undergo a major transformation during the Pahlavi era.

The case studies offered in this chapter demonstrate the complexities of the period’s cinema. It involved the complex microphysical relations of power, knowledge, desire, pleasure, individual and national imaginaries, and identities. Instead of limiting Iran’s cultural history, including film history, and the country’s relations with the world to the inadequate but customary binaries of East versus West or Muslim and traditional culture versus modern and secular culture, these chapters have shown that networks of relations, exchanges, contingencies, and maneuvers were engaged in the field of cinema involving diverse classes, ethnicities, nationalities, histories, religions, genders, languages, and cultures. Yet these networks did not work spontaneously together to overdetermine modernity and cinema; rather, they were sometimes facilitated by the actions of the Shah and the elite or by those of global commercial cinemas, particularly those of the Soviet Union/Russia, Europe, and Hollywood. The artisanal cameramen, importers, distributors, exhibitors, and translators at the nexus of these networks were the key active agents in shaping this cinema in specific ways. As hybridized figures and Westernized businessmen and dandies, many of them embodied several sets of dichotomies in their own lives, accounting for their generally progressive and modernizing actions and for their expedient and situationist practices. The strategies by which Iranian audiences were hailed by the diegesis and by the extradiegetic Western worlds, which the movies represented, and the strategies by which they haggled with and interpreted the movies, also transformed the movies’ interpellative powers. By means of these strategies they indigenized the films and became producers of some of their meanings, which intensified both the movies’ self-defining and self-othering potentialities. Because of these complexities, the overdetermination of modernity and cinema cannot be conceived of as having been centrally planned and directed by either a cohesive, totalitarian Qajar state and its elite or by the neocolonialist foreign powers and their commercial industries intent on subjugating Iranians. Neither was the opposition to their overdetermination limited to Muslim clerics. 138

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Subsequent chapters shall show that many of the social forces and networks that shaped cinema during the Qajar period, and that were in turn shaped by film, continued to influence the future directions and forms of the film industry, giving Iranian cinema its regularities and particularities. Yet change would steadily arrive, for the ruling ideology and the various social formations and contingencies of each era tended to produce new and divergent cinematic formations, film styles, film authors, spectators, and films.

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3 s tat e for m at ion a nd nonfic t ion cinem a Syncretic Westernization during the First Pahlavi Period

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eza Khan’s ascendance to power was slow but steady. He staged a coup d’état in 1921 (with the aid of Sayyed Zia al-Din Tabatabai and British support) and became minister of war. Then he orchestrated the Majles to depose the Qajar dynasty in 1925, and he crowned himself shah in 1926—the first king of the new Pahlavi dynasty. His end, however, came rather abruptly, in September 1941, after the Allies invaded Iran and forced him from power and into foreign exile, first to Mauritius and then to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he died in 1944. Subsequently, his son, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza, became shah. Reza Shah’s sixteen-year reign represented a new and dynamic era in Iranian history and modernity during which a highly centralized state—the first since the Safavids—was able to control society by means of “extensive instruments of administration, regulation, and domination” (Abrahamian 1982:136). Although still nascent, artisanal, and treated as a sort of afterthought, cinema nevertheless benefited from this instrumentalist vision of the state to centralize, rationalize, regulate, and propagate a modern, secular, and sanctioned new national identity and official culture. The centralized state’s engine was the revivalist and reformist policy I have called “syncretic Westernization,”

formulated by the Iranian elite, which the Shah made the state ideology. One of its key components was to revive and strengthen certain ancient Persian, pre-­Islamic, and Zoroastrian cultural features while simultaneously instituting various formations of modernity—sociopolitical, technological, cultural, ideological, spectatorial, and authorial—under the authoritarian guidance of the Shah. The overarching idea was to transform the multiple ethnic, multilingual, and largely tribal populations of the country into a unified, modern nationstate consisting of “one people, one nation, one language, one culture, and one political authority” (Abrahamian 1982:142). To that end the Majles passed legislation on culture, heritage, fashion, language, gender relations, and mass media (including cinema). Iranians welcomed some pieces of this legislation and resisted others, which led to syncretic adaptations, accommodations, and resistances of all sorts, as well as to the emergence of hybridized figures in both society and cinema: Westernized dandies. To the polarity of self/Iran and Other/West/Arabs, therefore, was added a third term, the authoritarian state, a term and a source of power that began to dominate the other power players, formations, and dispositions, heavily influencing the microphysics of modernity and national identity. The Qajar era’s post–Constitutional Revolution democratic nationalism was replaced with the authoritarian nationalism of the first Pahlavi shah.

The Society for National Heritage (Anjoman-e Asar-e Melli) An important ideological formulator and enforcer of syncretic Westernization was the Society for National Heritage (snh), created in 1921 by a group of modernist government officials and Westernized intellectuals. It aimed to preserve, protect, and promote “Iran’s patrimony” (Grigor 2004:17). Among these pioneers and those who later joined them were the court minister Abdol­hosain Taimurtash; the scholar and former prime minister Hasan Pirnia; the scholar and former prime minister Mohammad Ali Forughi; the Qajar prince and finance minister Firuz Mirza Firuz; the wealthy Zoroastrian businessman and Majles deputy Arbab Keikhosrow Shahrokh; and the justice and finance minister Ali Akbar Davar. Other prominent politicians included Hasan Mostofi, Hasan Esfandiari, Ebrahim Hakimi, and Haj Seyyed Nasrollah Taqavi, while the prominent intellectuals included such luminaries as Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, Isa Seddiq, Ali Asghar Hekmat, and Said Naficy. European and American scholars were also important both in forming the 142

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snh and in carrying out its missions. Among these were the German archeologist Ernst Hertzfeld; the American art historian Phyllis Ackerman and her husband, the archaeologist, art historian, and antique dealer Arthur Upham Pope; the French architect André Godard; and the Hungarian Iranian ethnologist Ali Hannibal. While architecture and traditional arts and crafts constituted the chief fields of snh activities, several members were also involved in other cultural and artistic areas, including in cinema and film culture. These modernist politicians and scholars formulated the ideology of syncretic Westernization, which had been in gestation since the Constitutional Revolution, and used it to win over Reza Khan (who later became Reza Shah)—although, as Talinn Grigor has shown, the credit for the ideology and its accomplishments was consistently given to Reza Shah throughout the Pahlavi periods, while he was merely its chief enforcer. To accomplish its aims in architecture and the arts, the snh created a comprehensive inventory of religious sites and historical places; converted them into cultural heritage sites (opening them to non-Muslim Iranians and foreigners); destroyed some of the existing buildings, many already in ruins; located and autopsied the corpses of those interned; manufactured images and sculptures in their likeness; erected in place of the ruins some forty modern mausoleum complexes; conducted over sixty preservation projects; and created a national public museum and a public library in Tehran. Major architectural works that the snh undertook during both Pahlavi periods included the construction of modern mausoleums for the poet Ferdowsi in Tus (1934), for the poet Hafez in Shiraz (1938), for the philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in Hamadan (1952), for the poet Baba Taher in Hamadan (1970), for Nader Shah in Mashhad (1959), for the painter Kamal al-Molk in Naishapur (1962), for the poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam in Naishapur (1963), and for Pope and Ackerman in Isfahan (1972). These new secular national monuments, as well as the Shahyad Monument in 1971 (now called Azadi [Freedom] Monument), designed by Hossein Amanat, commemorating the 2,500 anniversary of the Persian Empire were inaugurated with pomp and elaborate circumstance, over which the Pahlavi shahs usually presided, surrounded by domestic and sometimes foreign diplomats and dignitaries.1 Ordinary Iranians were generally excluded from these events; yet the state-controlled media covered them extensively. Some of the newsreels from the era of Reza Shah, filmed by Khanbabakhan Motazedi and others, documented such cultural inaugurations or others that celebrated the openings of industrial plants, railways, banks, armed forces events, and st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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modernization projects, all of which formed the backbone of the ideology of syncretic Westernization. Even the first Persian-language sound movies, Ardeshir Irani’s The Lor Girl (1933) and Abdolhosain Sepanta’s Firdausi (1934), about the life of the great poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi, benefited from these syncretic Westernization projects. In addition, the likenesses of great nonreligious historical figures of art and culture were circulated via commissioned paintings, drawings, photographs, stamps, postcards, coins, and other consumer products, with each visual instantiation endlessly authenticating “the implicit totality of the image invented by the snh,” making the rhetoric of the Iranian “Aryan” type, of the “ancient glorious past,” and of the “impending modern nation” seem both credible and inevitable (Grigor 2004:19).

Sartorial and Cultural Modernization In 1928, the Majles outlawed men’s traditionally diverse ethnic clothing and headgear—with the exception of that worn by the clergy—in favor of Westernstyle coats, jackets, and Pahlavi hats (pillbox hats, or kepis with front visors).2 Of all the new dress codes, the brimmed hats, along with the “international” (chapeau) hats, which replaced them in 1935, proved the most controversial. For although they were supposed to eradicate ethnic distinctions, modernize the appearance of Iranians, and subsume them as national subjects, they also aided the Shah’s secularization project by interfering with Muslim prayer, which requires the faithful to touch the prayer clay tablet on the ground (mohr) with a bare forehead.3 The brim prevented that. Secularization received a new impetus when a royal edict the same year banned the annual Shiite public mourning processions known as Ashura, which traveled throughout towns and villages during the first ten days of the month of Muharram. In these emotional processions men and boys would often bloody themselves by cutting their heads with swords, beating their chests with open hands, and flagellating their backs with heavy chains. The processions would usually culminate in elaborate taziyeh passion plays. The edict banned these processions and passion plays, which had the potential of becoming politicized and manipulated by opponents of secularization, but it allowed the more subdued and smaller religious commemorations and lamentations called rowzeh khani.4 The forced male uniform and modern look (including a clean-shaven face) made a favorable appearance in the first full-length fiction film, Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa, Aktor-e Sinema, 1933), directed by the Armenian dandy 144

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42  Syncretic Westernization in men’s fashion. The haji (Habibollah Morad) seated by his water pipe, dressed in the state-prescribed Western suit and Pahlavi hat while still sporting a Muslim beard. Frame enlargement from Ovanes Ohanians’s film Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor

Ovanes Ohanians. The key protagonist, Mr. Haji, is a traditional and religious man who, in deference to the Shah’s sartorial reforms, does not wear the customary long cloak and headdress; instead, he dons the prescribed Pahlavi coat, trousers, and hat. Yet he is religious, wears the Muslim beard, and performs his daily prayers (figure 42). Another protagonist, on the other hand, a modern film director (played by Ohanians himself), is clean-shaven and wears a completely Westernized suit and tie. That the movie favors the modern Western look, and by extension all things Western, becomes clear when the haji goes from disliking cinema to lauding its value to modern society. The movie was complicit with the state and the elite in propagating Westernization and the state-decreed modern look as a marker of the new man and the new nation.

National Representation and Linguistic Nationalism To facilitate the new ideological formations, Pars News Agency was created in 1935 to receive foreign news and to transmit official domestic news to the world.5 The aim was not just to facilitate Iran’s international connections but also to control the flow of news and national representations. The chief of police had to approve all news materials other than what the Pars News Agency relayed.6 The opening of Tehran University introduced modern higher education to the country; and the millennial anniversary of the poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi, whose national epic was being revived to undergird the new official state nationalism, was widely celebrated.7 Taking a cue from the state-­ sponsored revival of Ferdowsi, the expatriate director Sepanta made one of the first Persian-language sound movies, Ferdausi (Ferdowsi, 1934), about the life and times of this national poet, whose epic Shahnameh is credited with helping maintain Iranian national identity in the face of Muslim Arab conquest. st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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In 1934 the Foreign Ministry required the use of the Farsi name Iran, rather than Persia by foreigners (Iranians have always called their country Iran). 8 Persia supposedly evoked negative connotations among foreigners of a weak, ignorant, miserable, disintegrating, and confused old country, while Iran invoked images of a modern, progressive, and dynamic nation proud of its civilized heritage (Kashani-Sabet 1999:218). Geographic and linguistic boundaries had to be defended. Frontier frictions necessitated new frontier fictions. Persianizing the names of streets, towns, cities, and regions across the country gained momentum. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, in response to the ravages of exile, the strict Islamization at home, and the bad name that Iran accrued internationally, Iranians abroad began increasingly to call their home country Persia and themselves Persian— another reiteration of the rearchaization process described in chapter 2. Also in the 1930s, Reza Shah designated Persian (Farsi) as the official national language, to be used in the educational system, in state bureaucracy, in secular courts, and in the mass media, including newspapers and radio (the latter was inaugurated in 1940). This helped shape the direction of the nascent medium of talking pictures by making Persian the overwhelmingly dominant language of cinema, although Iran had large non-Persian-speaking populations (including Azari Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Gilaki, and Arabic). The adoption of a national language and its propagation by the mass media was instrumental in creating out of disparate Iranian populations a discursive national community à la Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” (1983). But there was a move to “purify” Persian of foreign words. The Iranian Academy (Farhangestan-e Iran) was established, which introduced many new equivalents for Arabic and European terms that had made their way into Persian. It appears, however, that the academy did not offer any equivalents for Western inventions, such as telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema, and film, whose foreign names were (and continue to be) widely accepted in Iran. The Latinization of the Persian alphabet was hotly debated both by the Iranian Academy and by the Majles; unlike in Turkey, however, it was not adopted. On 7 July 1937, the cabinet passed regulations to suppress foreign words and names from documents, trademarks, and businesses. It further prohibited “the use of foreign names and terms” for Iranian firms, stores, works of art, and products. The names of commercial cinemas and film studios, many of which were of European origin, had to be changed into both Persian language and Persian script.9 To the American chargé d’affaires, C. Van H. Engert, reporting to the State Department, this legislation was “a further proof of the narrow spirit of nationalism and chauvinism which seems to permeate every­thing 146

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the Iranian government does.”10 Interestingly, the regulations exempted certain forms of communication from this ban, among them, foreign-­language film intertitles.11 In 1936, state-driven efforts under the Shah at inculcating secular, Persian consciousness and national uniformity, important components of syncretic Westernization, intensified. Following the earlier replacement of the traditional Muslim lunar calendar (hejri) with the solar calendar (shamsi), time was standardized across the country. All citizens were required to adopt a surname, and Reza Shah himself adopted “Pahlavi” as his own, which referred to the Iranian language, Pahlavi, before the Muslim Arab conquest of Iran—his own personal rearchaization.

The Women’s Awakening Movement and Unveiling The public wearing of the veil by women, which had gradually modified and lessened since 1929, was officially banned by an edict on 8 January 1936 (17 Dey 1314), making for a highly inflammatory moment of syncretic Westernization. In his official declaration, the prime minister Mahmud Jam, who was also the minister of the interior, spelled out the reasons for the unveiling edict, part of the sartorial reform policy: “An ignorant woman who lives under the hijab is incapable of preserving her own prestige and honor and is always subject to men. She cannot provide assistance to her family and her husband, and she will always need a guardian or a master. If women are educated and enter society they can better manage their family affairs and their own affairs, as well as provide real support for their men” (quoted in Jafari, Esmailzadeh, and Farshchi 1994/1373:70).12 This was the beginning of the state-sponsored so-called women’s awakening movement, which, as the quote above shows, was nevertheless tied to the male guardianship of women and to the sponsorship of the state, for Reza Shah’s government was unwilling to allow independent women’s activities and organizations (Sanasarian 1982:67). Unveiling was achieved by a combination of state prevention, coercion, encouragement, violence, propaganda, and the publicizing of unveiled women. Modern schools were the first public sites in which systematic unveiling took place (Rostam-Kolayi 2003:171). In public settings, such as the streets, the police at first peacefully stopped women to ask them to remove the veil; facing resistance, however, they gradually resorted to force, tearing the veils off of recalcitrant women. They also prevented veiled women from “entering shops, cinemas, public bathhouses or from riding in horse-drawn st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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carriages and cars,” thus making everyday public activities impossible for them (Chehabi 1993:219). Managers of public places, such as cinemas, cafés, and hotels were “threatened with heavy fines if they discriminated against women” (Abrahamian 1982:144). Mullahs, school principals, and even mayors of small towns who spoke out against unveiling or proved ineffectual in implementing it were jailed or dismissed from their posts (Jafari, Esmailzadeh, and Farshchi 1994/1373:130–32, 355). The state’s ideological apparatuses were mobilized to prepare and guide public opinion about the awakening movement and its engine, unveiling. For months prior to the unveiling edict, the pages of the daily newspaper Ettela’at were filled with “images of unveiled Iranian women and with coverage of the activities of the [official] Women’s Society” (Amin 1996:294).13 This coverage included excerpts of official speeches in support of women’s entry into education, the workforce, and society as long as they maintained their main duties—child rearing, care of husbands, and homemaking. The proliferating women’s magazines, sponsored by women’s organizations, some of which were secretly funded by the government, wrote articles in support of women’s emancipation and entry into public spaces (Hamraz 1997/1376:51–53). Despite some real gains, women had no right to vote. Their “emancipation” was tamed by subsuming it under male guardianship, and it was recruited to serve the state-sponsored nationalistic programs. Instead of voting, women were urged to attend public functions in homes, schools, parks, factories, and government offices—without the veil but accompanied by their husbands. Indeed, male civil servants were ordered by their superiors, often at high ministerial levels, to appear with their unveiled wives (or with other womenfolk) in public, including in cinemas and at specifically organized mixed-gender public celebrations, conferences, and parties. The publication in newspapers of photographs taken during these functions circulated the outings nationwide, publicly committing their subjects to the state-sponsored cause. These organized public functions were deemed the necessary, safe, and wholesome counterparts to the streets, such as those in Isfahan, which were neither safe nor wholesome places for unveiled women: there they were ridiculed and harassed not only by men but also by women passersby (Jafari, Esmailzadeh, and Farshchi 1994/1373:398). The unveiling edict and its coercive and oppressive methods of implementation caused haggling and adaptations of all sorts. Opposition took the overt form of public denunciations of unveiling and of violent clashes with the police.14 On the other hand, many modernist women and men welcomed the reforms and abided by them publicly, and some, such as the dandies, flaunted 148

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them. These complex and amphibolic figures followed the dictates of the state by adopting the official Pahlavi fashion, but in their excessiveness they parodied and criticized the state’s policy. (My final chapter in this volume is devoted to these figures.) There were many other, less ambivalent, forms of manifest and latent opposition and adoption (Chehabi 2003a). Some women feigned illness to excuse themselves from appearing unveiled at public functions, causing trouble for their husbands (Jafari, Esmailzadeh, and Farshchi 1994/1373:146). Many families pulled their daughters out of schools. Some women, in particular Afghani immigrants, who insisted on wearing their own style of the veil (chadar, later burqa), were threatened with deportation (181–88). Many city women fled to the less-policed villages. My paternal grandmother, Fatemeh Okhovat, and her children, for example, left Isfahan for the village of Pudeh (now Puyanshahr), but when the rural police also began harassing villagers for veiling, she and her family returned to Isfahan. There, she and many other women in the family opted to stay home during daytime, making their public forays— to the baths, for example—only in the dead of night. Such voluntary sequestering made life very difficult. When they ventured out in daytime, they wore long overcoats and hats, on top of which they wore scarves, so that if the police tore off the scarf, the hat would still cover their hair (Naficy 1973/1352). Bolder women openly defied the authorities and appeared veiled in public, while others, such as a group of women from Yazd, voiced their protest by appealing to members of the Majles, asking them to “take our revenge on these oppressors and give us freedom of veiling” (Jafari, Esmailzadeh, and Farshchi 1994/1373:375).15 Near the end of Reza Shah’s tenure, the U.S. chargé d’affaires, Engert, sent an insightful, “strictly confidential,” lengthy letter (thirty-eight pages long) to the State Department, assessing Reza Shah’s achievements. He began his evaluation by stating that “one usually thinks of a military man as apt to be lacking in imagination and vision, but in the case of this soldier-dictator one must admit that he has shown unexpected originality. For he not only reconstructed the political and economic life of the nation, but he put himself at the head of a modern reforming movement which had as its aim the complete social transformation of the Iranian people.”16 However, when it came to assessing the social transformations achieved, Engert found fault with the Shah’s “famous sartorial reforms”17 and with his “rejuvenation and embellishment of the national façade” in Tehran18 because of their superficiality and emphasis on materialism. Noting that the Shah seemed “incapable” of addressing the spiritual and intellectual needs of his people, Engert declared that “European st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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forms, rather than European thought, have been adopted for the social experiments, and much of it is still only ‘window-dressing’”.19 Despite its superficiality and coerciveness, the state-enforced women’s awakening did bring women into the public sphere, provided they were chaperoned by their male guardians. Etiquette was deemed necessary to make unveiling palatable to the conservative majority and to separate the modestly unveiled “good” women from the morally loose unveiled “bad” women. These rules governed the greeting of men and women in public; the types of coats, hats, and gloves that women could wear; and the type of voice that they could use in public (Amin 1996:328–29). In essence, the visual external veil that had been removed was dispersed and reincorporated into ritualized behavior and dress codes that gendered public spaces and put men and women in their places. Nesta Ramazani, the daughter of a Zoroastrian Iranian father and an English mother, who was a young dancer at the time, describes the situation well: “So with other westernized young women I learned to lower my eyes, to cultivate a shy demeanor and quiet voice, and to keep my legs tightly closed and my skirts well pulled down, for these gestures had become the hallmarks of modesty. A seemly demureness was my armor, my chador” (2002:135). This demure, alluring but passive public persona was the price women paid for unveiling. With the rise of market capitalism these shy but alluring mannerisms were readily incorporated into the sexist and patriarchal discourses of movie stardom and commercial advertising, which used women’s bodies to pitch sale messages. Women’s “emancipation” turned them into agents of capitalism and consumerism. Up to around the time of the unveiling edict, the figure that most represented modernity’s excess and sexual anxiety for Iranians was not the modern woman, because she had been secluded, segregated, and veiled. Woman signified premodernity and backwardness. Instead, it was the Westernized male dandy who most dished out excess and anxiety. He represented an ersatz but nevertheless threatening modernity. With unveiling and other modern reforms came a shift in women’s representation, as unveiled modern women in the public sphere and on the screens began to be identified with modernity’s excesses, epistemic violence, and moral corruption, an association that both they and the cinema, television, and advertising industries that used them would pay for in the years to come. These associations tapped into the old images of women in public as whores and Westernized dolls, images that were revived and updated. With the exile of Reza Shah in 1941, the compulsory unveiling campaign began to wane. By July 1943 the minister of the interior was complaining that 150

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veiled women were not prevented from riding taxis, buses, and carriages and from attending cinemas in the capital city, predicating a return to the previous unacceptable situation (Jafari, Esmailzadeh, and Farshchi 1994/1373:424). During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah women could choose whether to appear in public veiled or unveiled, defusing the situation. In the meantime, both film exhibitors and film producers took advantage of the new social openness and reforms to attract women to the cinemas and to cast them in the movies, feeding the association of women with modernity’s excess. The various reforms brought women into the public space and turned them into “national subjects” who now needed, and deserved, to be represented. Women became “cinematic subjects”: diegetic subjects who appeared in the movies, and spectating subjects who were addressed by the movies. It would take years, however, before women became producing subjects, making their own films. The first instance of a woman acting in a feature film without a full veil predates the Shah’s official unveiling edict, thus suggesting that cinema, like the press, may have had a hand in preparing public opinion for women’s entry into public space. This first adult female actor was Asia Qestanian, who appeared as the haji’s modernist daughter in Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor as a woman enamored of cinema and who connives with her fiancé to make a film of her father (figure 43). As a Christian Armenian, less bound by Islamic strictures, she had more latitude. In fact, because of their religion, Armenian women formed the first cadre of female actors in Iran, both in theater and in cinema (after the males stopped cross-dressing and performing women’s parts). Another young Armenian woman, Zoma, Ohanians’s daughter, played the part of the dentist’s assistant in the film. That her father directed the movie and played the part of the diegetic film director also helped, for she

43  Cinematic unveiling predating the official Pahlavi sartorial reform. Parvin (Asia Qestanian), playing Haji’s daughter, is unveiled in some scenes. Frame enlargement from Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor

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was working under his guardianship, which protected her from the putative vices of the movies. Reza Shah’s authoritarian rule centralized all meaningful powers—the ideological and repressive apparatuses—in the hands of the king. The powerless legislature passed laws at his behest, the centralized bureaucracy carried them out, and the modernized military and police enforced them under his command. The creation of a modern standing army and the virile ideology undergirding both it and modern nationalism masculinized the idea of the homeland (vatan), which had previously been posited as a weakling ancient female. The modern army brought a measure of safety and security to the vast country racked by years of inept Qajar rule, tribal unrest, widespread banditry, and foreign meddling. Nevertheless, the idea of homeland as a victimized female continued to percolate in the discourse of modernists. In the realms of mass media and cinema, the Shah’s authoritarian rule involved centralizing not only production and dissemination but also censorship of Iranian news and radio broadcasting. A new body called the Propaganda and Publication Organization (Sazman-e Tablighat va Entesharat) was legally enabled to censor all performing arts, including taziyeh and movies, before they ever became public. Authoritarian rule also involved instituting an after-the-fact system of censorship, which either proscribed or permitted the distribution of already published books, magazines, and newspapers and the performance of already completed films and plays. Another institution, the Public Opinion Guidance Organization (Sazman-e Parvaresh-e Afkar; pogo), formed public opinion by various means, including cinema. The monitoring of foreign publications and media, including cinema, and their representation of Iran was also put into place. This resulted in both defensive reactions to nonfiction Western films and the production of indigenous newsreels and documentaries that showcased the Shah’s modernization projects. These efforts to censor and control the epistemic violence of foreign movies and to propagate and exhibit the locally made, positivist, and self-empowering documentaries are discussed in this chapter.

Haggling over Cinema and Nonfiction Films The shift from the private, noncommercial exhibition of nonfiction films during the Qajar rule to a public, commercial one under Reza Shah took many years, and it appears that it was only with the freelance filmmaker Khanbabakhan Motazedi that it finally became a reality. However, even then, publicly 152

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exhibited documentary films remained artisanal and largely sponsored by the state. For one, earlier arrangements had set precedents: The Qajar court sponsored either court cameramen, such as Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh, or artisanal freelancers, such as Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov, to film the activities of the court and of other public figures for screening in the private homes of the elite. Beside their entertainment value, these early actualities and news films served as instruments of social aggrandizement for their sponsors, which necessitated their control over the works’ financing, production, and exhibition—a type of control that has persisted throughout the history of Iranian documentary cinema. The underdevelopment in the Qajar era of the economic and technical infrastructures necessary for an indigenous cinema also contributed to the documentary’s cloistered and ad hoc existence. For example, the first primitive laboratory for processing documentary footage was put into operation by Motazedi as late as 1917. The legal structures to protect and support local productions beyond state sponsorship were slow to evolve. At the time that indigenous filmmaking was poised to become a reality, the worldwide depression caused the Iranian government in February 1931 to take over the country’s foreign trade and to restrict all imports, including movies, film equipment, raw stock, and chemicals. These centralizing and restrictive measures may have contributed to the state’s primary role in documentary cinema, the entrenchment of foreign movies, and the slow growth of any indigenous film industry. Prevailing sociocultural conditions militated against the growth of a domestic film industry. The majority of the population was illiterate and could read neither foreign-language nor Persian intertitles. The early association between moviegoing and amorality turned movie houses into putative dens of iniquity. Whatever its root causes, this association turned the simple act of moviegoing into the equivalent of attending immoral and outlawed establishments. After staging their coup d’état in 1921, Reza Khan and Seyyed Zia Tabatabai issued a declaration of martial law on 23 February, a declaration highly revealing of this association. Titled “I order” and signed “Reza, the leader of the Cossack Brigade,” it banned in itemized clauses all newspapers, all public and private social gatherings, and all communications by post and telegraph. Item 6 stated that “all liquor stores, theaters, cinemas, photography shops, gambling clubs must remain closed and all drunks will be prosecuted” (Agheli 1997/1376:144–45). Unlike the banning of the press, of public gatherings, and of post and telegraph communications, each of which had received its own separate line in the declaration, the closure of cinemas, theaters, and photo shops was lumped together with the ban on liquor stores, casinos, and st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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public drunkenness, all of which resulted from religious and social taboos.20 Associations with vice and amorality were used throughout the history of cinema to justify censorship of movies. By this means, the state supposedly protected its citizens from both indigenous and Western vices. The Muslim religious establishment continued to regard cinema and modernity as agents of Western corruption and self-othering. For example, on the eve of the Qajar dynasty’s demise in 1924, a leading Muslim cleric, Ayatollah Seyyed Hasan Modarress, is reported to have made the following prediction to the last Qajar king, the young Ahmad Shah, about what was to come with the imminent change of dynastic regimes: In the new regime that they have planned for Iran, we will be handed a type of modernity that will present the most disgraceful aspects of Western civilization to our next generation. . . . The press and cinema will circulate in the country a plethora of foreign novels and myths . . . , in such a way that the young generation, girls and boys, will gradually build their thoughts and opinions on the foundation of such empty myths. They will think that Western civilization and the livelihood of modern nations are limited to dancing, singing, fantastic banditry . . . and other types of moral corruption and unchasteness, as though these are necessary for being civilized. (Tahaminejad 1998/1376:69) It appears that he was not opposed to Western modernity or to cinema per se, but to the adoption of certain aspects of modernity and to certain types of Western movies (apparently fantasy and crime films). A little less than two decades after the start of the Constitutional Revolution, he seemed to be searching for an alternative modernity not dominated by, or solely based on, imitating the West.21 This quest for an indigenous form of modernity is a recurrent theme in the history and identity of Iranian cinema and culture in the century under examination. Simultaneously, however, as noted earlier, from the Qajar period onward, a counterdiscourse supported cinema due to its perceived pedagogical and enlightening capabilities. It was not unusual for citizens, government officials, or the Shah to hold contradictory beliefs on film and cinema. Reza Shah equated cinemas with amorality and banned them; later he ordered the construction of movie houses in Tehran’s poor South End, so that instead of going to “centers of corruption,” the residents could spend their leisure time in the cinemas (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:63–64). The shift in the conception of cinema from morally corrupting to morally uplifting was perhaps instigated by his desire to use cinema instrumentally as an ideological state apparatus 154

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to educate lay people and to promote the new official syncretic culture. The task of creating movie houses in the South End was given to Motazedi who, aided by the chief of police, Colonel Mohammad Dargahi, established the first cinema in that district, on Esmail-e Bazzaz Street (later Mowlavi). Its name, Tamaddon (Civilization) Cinema, testified to its pedagogic and modernizing intentions.22 Tamaddon Cinema did brisk business at first, making between thirty and thirty-five tomans per night. But the time came when its box-office sales dwindled to two or three tomans nightly. It was then that the police apparently intervened to mobilize more customers (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:64–65). Reza Shah was not “indifferent” to cinema, as Mohammad Ali Issari contends (1989:96), yet neither was he bent on promoting it as a national priority. Rather, he might have been ambivalent about cinema’s value and therefore refrained from developing a coherent, authoritarian plan for its deployment, as he had done for many other media and cultural institutions. It is true that, surprisingly, he did not take over this important and modern consciousnessshaping industry the way he had all other instruments of coercive and ideological power. It is also true that no separate cinema commission was created at the pogo when he put into effect his most ambitious plan to influence public opinion and shape national consciousness. Yet he helped cinema along, locally and incrementally, by commissioning newsreel films; by regulating commercial cinemas, film imports, and cinematography in the country; by having local filmmakers such as Motazedi screen their films for him privately; by rewarding native filmmakers such as Motazedi for their works and initiatives; and by ordering the construction of new cinemas. Haggling over cinema’s social position and political formation was highly complex. Objections to Western movies were not all religiously motivated. Indeed, some of the most vociferous opposing voices came from the secular and nationalist camps who, motivated by Reza Shah’s modernization campaign, wanted to modernize not only the country but also its cinematic self-­ representation abroad. There is a crucial difference at this point between religious and secular disapproval of Western movies. One was primarily moral, the other chiefly political; one involved primarily fiction movies, the other documentaries. Whereas the religious community primarily objected to the depiction of lust and sin in Western fiction movies, the government and secular elite chiefly opposed the representation of modern Iran as backward and premodern in foreign documentary films. If the religious elite wanted to proscribe cinema on moral grounds, the secular elite wished to prescribe its contents on political and pedagogical grounds. st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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In the Others’ Mirror: Western Mediawork about an Exotic, Underdeveloped Iran Instead of delightedly identifying with what they saw in the mirror that Western movies about Iran held before them, Iranian modernists and secular strata were alienated and offended by what they saw. These reactions were fanned by Orientalist depictions of Iran as an old, exotic, decrepit, and backward country and by an emerging sense of Iranian modern nationalism, what Charles C. Hart of the American Legation in Tehran characterized as “fanatical nationalism,” which resulted from the “general suspicion and dislike of foreigners.” They set in motion a highly complex and contentious battle of representations and mediaworks.23 It was as if the release of each foreign film about Iran was a distorting mirror that caused a crisis of identity in Iranians, requiring some defensive response from the state and from the educated public. Western mediawork about Iran—newsreels, travelogues, industrial films, educational films, and institutional documentaries; occasional fiction movies about ancient Persia or modern Iran; and later television newscasts, news specials, and news documentaries—served both the projections of the West and the othering trajectory of Iranians. Mediawork—the combined representational practices of various media and consciousness-shaping industries— can be compared to Freud’s concept of “dreamwork,” which transforms producers’ latent, often distorted, ideologies, desires, and fears of the Other into manifest media representations (Naficy 1995). A staggering number and variety of these media images of Iran were produced during the first century of cinema, the first eighty years of which I document in my book Iran Media Index (1984f). It identifies and annotates more than thirty-five hundred nonfiction film titles from 1900 to 1981 on topics ranging from agrarian reforms to the lend-lease program of the Second World War, and more than thirty years of television news and documentaries made in the United Kingdom and the United States about Iran between the early 1950s and 1981. The histories of representation of Iran and of Iranian relations with the West in modern times are indelibly inscribed in these films and television programs and in the reactions and counterreactions they aroused among Iranians and Americans in particular. Through the reactions toward film production and cinematic self-representation they caused among Iranians, these foreign films are also indelibly tied to the history of Iranian cinema and to its ideological and spectatorial formations. I discuss here only Western films that are significant on their own merit or caused a public reaction among Iranians, affecting discourses about cin156

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ema and national identity. These films provide examples of the politics of cinematic representation and ideological formation. At their best, these reactions to Western mediawork fit into Frantz Fanon’s second and third phases of the tripartite process of creating an anticolonialist “national culture,” as well as into its elaboration in the cinematic field by Teshome H. Gabriel. According to Fanon, in the first, so-called assimilation phase, the native tends to unquestioningly accept the superiority of the colonial and imperial cultures and incorporates them into his (or her) own. Yet this capitulation may lead to the second phase, “return and remembrance,” whereby the indigene chooses to return to the native soil to remember and revitalize aspects of his or her culture and history. Energized by the ensuing sense of empowerment, the native may then enter a third phase, “combat and liberation,” in which he or she will fight for liberation and the formation of a new national culture (1963). In Gabriel’s adaptation of this theory to cinema, the first phase results in a national cinema exhibiting primarily foreign movies and producing domestic movies based on colonial and imperial models. In the second phase, filmmakers return to their own stories, folktales, narratives, and performance traditions to energize a new cinema. In the third phase, the state’s involvement in creating and maintaining a national film industry and cinema is crucial. Its products create national self-representations that bind people into a unified nation and create self-representations that correct foreign representations (1989). While these theories are reductive, instrumentalist, and authoritarian, they do identify the steps that many non-Western countries have taken to recruit cinema as an integral component of their new national identity and culture. Qajar-era cinema fits the first phase, while the Pahlavis’ syncretic Westernization and the Islamic Republic’s syncretic Islamization—and both regimes’ recruitment of cinema and the media in these processes—fit the second and third phases of such third worldist theories. Governments of course did not knowingly apply Fanon’s and Gabriel’s theories; rather, these ideas had become commonplace enough among the elite and the nationalist intelligentsia as to become common sense, even before their formulation by the theorists.

Travelogues British Instructional Films produced several short travelogues as part of its The Heart of Asia series. Those dealing with Iran include the following films, which demonstrate that British interest in Iran partly derived from its colonial interests in India and that Western films projected an Orientalist represenst a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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tation of Iran as a wild desert and a premodern, exotic land, one traversed by intrepid Westerners. Through the Back Door into India (1929) shows the travails of an Englishman driving a car from Iran into India, during which he limps into various Iranian towns. His car breaks down between Isfahan and Yazd, and later he braves a sandstorm in the desert before arriving in India. Likewise, An Eastern Gate Crasher (1930) shows an automobile journey across Iranian mountains, through Baluchestan, and into India. In a Persian Town (1928), produced by Propatria Films, focuses on the daily life in the desert town of Yazd. While it provided valuable ethnographic images of the city, this film created a romanticized and exotic vision of Iran, paternalistically emphasizing exoticisms like donkeys in mysteriously narrow and winding alleys, muezzin calling in the minaret, people praying, a woman in an alley veiling herself from the gaze of a passing man, children studying in a classroom (over whose image the text of an Omar Khayyam quatrain is quoted), and men lining up against a wall smoking water pipes. This latter image is preceded by an ironic intertitle: “Citizens in the streets of Yazd, completely absorbed in very important decisions.” The film also shows scenes of the weighing of camel meat, of bread baking, wool making, and the preparation of opium for packing and smoking, ending with an opium addict asleep on the sidewalk, accompanied by the intertitle: “Once a man of high position in Yazd, now a slave to opium.” No record of Iranians’ reactions to these films is available; however, they provide a catalogue of Orientalist stereotypes. One film that aroused strong reactions due to its epistemic violence and the alienating identification it caused was the feature-length travelogue The Yellow Cruise (La Croisière Jaune, 1931–34), sponsored by the French car company Citroën, filmed by André Sauvage, and directed by Léon Poirier. It shows a caravan of more than half a dozen yellow Citroëns (some equipped with tank treads) carrying an expeditionary group of forty-two social scientists, biologists, botanists, filmmakers, and mechanics. The eastward group, headed by Georges-Marie Haardt, started from Beirut, meeting the westward group in the Gobi Desert. Headed by Louis Audoin-Dubreuil and Victor Point, the second group, starting from Beijing, was accompanied by the philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. The massive project, involving some thirty thousand miles of travel, began in April 1931 and ended in February 1932. The film took a few more years to complete. Although filmed as a silent movie, the final cut carried a soundtrack containing native music and folk songs, as well as snippets of dialogue recorded on location and added during editing (Liotard, Thévenot, and Thévenot 1950:61). Both the expedition and the film provided fascinating audiovisual documents of the daily life, performances, and exotic sights of the 158

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various peoples and places that the two groups encountered. They also served as effective propaganda touting the resilience of both the Citroën cars and the French scientists and engineers who were shown to successfully brave desert sand storms, torrential rivers, and craggy, snowcapped mountain passes. The Yellow Cruise publicized its sponsor’s automobiles and French ingenuity and industry. It also functioned as an Orientalist fantasy machine, in Edward Said’s words, for it “produced” the East from the point of view of the West as ancient, unchanged, primitive, and exotic (1979). En route, the Haardt group passed through Iran, going through Kermanshah, Hamadan, Qazvin, Tehran, Naishapur, and Mashhad, and ultimately entering Afghanistan.24 That seven minutes of film on Iran shows poor villages in the west of the country with half-naked children in the alleys (accompanied by extradiegetic tar music), people cooking, city women walking about in black chadors, bazaar scenes, mosques, and tribal migration. In Tehran, the film shows an elaborately decorated city gate (apparently the Qazvin Gate) and documents the slaughtering of an adorned camel in the crowded Sepah Square on the occasion of the feast of sacrifice, Eid-e Qadir (accompanied by diegetic crowd noise). It then shows ancient male body-building exercises performed outdoors (accompanied by special zurkhaneh drumming and chanting) and an open-air audience with Reza Shah Pahlavi and Crown Prince Mohammad Reza, who ride off in one of the Citroëns. According to a long letter from a reader named H. Amiraslani, who lived in Belgium, which was published on the front page of Ettela’at in 1932, The Yellow Cruise contained scenes of the Lalehzar Avenue horse tram. Each tram was usually divided into compartments, one specifically for women; sometimes a separate tram carried women (figure 44). The copy of the film that I have seen does not contain the offending tramway scene, but according to Amiraslani, the scenes on the tram caused a negative stir among Iranians in Europe who thought them demeaning and backward. It is possible that Amiraslani had confused this film with another or was reporting on a different, shorter version of The Yellow Cruise.25 Amiraslani writes that the sight of the horse-drawn streetcar immensely embarrassed him and other Iranians abroad. He then elaborates: Before, it was the clothes and hats and the varicolored turbans worn by Iranians . . . who resembled characters in a masked ball, which attracted the foreigners’ attention. Fortunately, this great defect has been overcome, but the thing that now destroys the prestige of our entire country is this horse-drawn streetcar.26 This is because in order to attract cus-

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tomers, film companies always try to show films that are in all respects strange . . . , and audiences react to them with laughter and derision. . . . For this reason, these films spread negative propaganda against Iran. It is very hard to tolerate the presence of this disgraceful horse-drawn tramway, which the French call a toy, for even in the tiniest European colonies there are electric tramways and regular bus services, which I have frequently seen in the movies. Every time I read about Iran in the papers here, I come across a reference to this toy. . . . Does this bring us anything but a bad name and shame? (Amiraslani 1932/1310:2) The horse-drawn streetcar was dismantled less than a year after the letter’s publication, but it is not known if it was due to such negative press coverage. Likewise, it is not known if the picture of the tramway was removed from the film due to Iranian protest. However, given Reza Shah’s insistence on modernizing Iran through railroads and electrification, thus modernizing its surface reality, and his defensiveness and oversensitivity about the country’s image as premodern and backward, it is entirely possible that the negative reactions to The Yellow Cruise contributed to the removal both of the image and of the reality to which it referred. Such a strong disapproval of the film obscures that its voice-over narration was sympathetic to Iranians. In various spots, the male narrator links them to Europeans by their shared Aryan race, notes the resemblance of the Pahlavi hats to French hats, admires Iranian smiling girls and women, and expresses enjoyment at hearing Persian music. Another notable film expedition involving Iran is Leila Roosevelt’s and

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

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44  Tehran’s gendersegregated horse-drawn tramway, Cheragh Gaz Street. Women occupy the car on the right. Still c. 1890–1900 by Antoin Sevruguin, gelatin silver print, courtesy of Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Myron Bement Smith Collection

Edna Olmstead’s trip around the world with trucks. Fox Movietone newsreels issued a five-minute film, Round the World Trip Made by Two Girls, shot on 30 April 1934 in New York City, which celebrated the end of the two middleaged women’s travels. Here, speaking uncomfortably to the camera, they list the various countries they visited while pointing to a world map painted on the side of their Dodge truck (the trip’s sponsor). They had gone to Iran despite warnings of banditry there; three U.S. embassy employees had been kidnapped recently in Iran, increasing travelers’ worries. But the “girls” were undeterred. They entered Iran through Iraq, traveled westward, and exited Iran into India. Apparently, Iranians were just as curious about these strangers as the women were about the exotic Iranians. One early morning when the women woke up in their truck, they were astonished to find a huge crowd outside watching their strange modern caravan. Leila was Franklin Delano Roose­velt’s cousin and married to Armand Denis, a Belgian filmmaker-­ adventurer with whom she made other films.27

Ethnographic and Expedition Films In addition to the travel films and newsreels documenting travelers passing through Iran, which tended to treat the country and its people cursorily, there were other films that dealt with the country either at length, allowing its society and culture to shine through, or in an ethnographically informed manner.

Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Marguerite E. Harrison made Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, an ethnographic film about Iran that proved influential. Cooper produced, Schoedsack served as the cameraman, and Harrison was the on-camera star who not only accompanied the Bakhtiari tribes on their arduous migratory routes but also partially financed the film.28 The Americans’ motives behind their travels were wanderlust, expansionism, exceptionalism, and triumphalism—the ideology of Manifest Destiny. As I have explained fully elsewhere, all three were anticommunists who had traveled far and wide on behalf of the U.S. intelligence services or fought along with its armed forces. They had crossed paths in various risky adventures that uncannily foreshadowed their eventual collaboration on the film Grass (Naficy 2006a). At the time of filming, however, none seemed to be involved with the intelligence services. The misogyny of the two male partners, particularly st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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that of Schoedsack regarding Harrison, is recreated in the relationship of the principal characters in Cooper’s and Schoedsack’s blockbuster fiction movie King Kong (1933), particularly in the early ship voyage sequence. Grass deals with the transhumance migration of one of the Bakhtiari subtribes, the Baba Ahmadi, from a warm location in the south to the cool, green pastures in central Iran, near Isfahan. Like popular Orientalist travelogues of the time, the film begins by showing the filmmakers on a journey, through Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, in search of what the film repeatedly calls the “Forgotten People,” who, it claims, live in the “cradle of civilization” in a manner that has not changed for “three thousand years.” Like other expedition films, the film mobilizes a map to chart its search for and discovery of the indigenous tribes (figure 45). After “finding” the Baba Ahmadi, the filmmakers accompany the tribe and their thousands of animals in their semiannual migration accross the torrential Karun River and the formidable Zardeh Mountain. The lengthy river sequence shows in graphic detail the way tribesmen inflate goatskins and tie them together to form rafts. They ford Karun’s turbulent and icy waters by swimming, and they herd thousands of sheep, goats, donkeys, and horses across it; their wives, children, small animals, and belongings are carried on the rafts. Each year brings loss in human lives and livestock. Schoedsack’s cinematography is crisp, dramatic, and breathtaking, particularly where humans are framed against massive mountains, vast valleys, or torrential waters. The film historian Erik Barnouw has called the river crossing “one of the most spectacular sequences ever put on film” (1993:48). Watching the crossing of the Zardeh Kuh through winding passes and up huge rock faces, where men and women climb the snowy slopes barefoot, is also unforgettable; Kevin Brownlow has characterized it as “the most unforgettably epic shot of documentary history” (1979:526) (figure 46). The film presents nomadic life as a battle of survival against the unruly forces of nature and toward a life source, grass—the film’s subtitle is “A Nation’s Battle for Grass.” Western film historians recognized Grass as a classic of documentary cinema, rating it second only to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) (Brownlow 1979:529). Yet despite these great documentary sequences, Schoedsack’s breathtaking photography, and the film’s general sympathy for the tribes, Grass propagated an Orientalist vision of Iran. It homogenizes the tribes as a mass of indistinguishable people, and while it identifies Haidar Khan and his son as leaders, we do not learn much about them (figure 47). Further, it presents the tribespeople as noble savages living not in 1924, when they were filmed, but in the prehistoric times of Western imagination. This holds true despite the film’s opening and the letter that closes it, 162

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45  Map of the route the American explorers took from Turkey to Iran to “discover” the Bakhtiari tribe the film designates as “the Forgotten People.” Frame enlargement from Cooper’s, Schoedsack’s, and Harrison’s feature documentary Grass 46  The Baba Ahmadi tribe and thousands of animals, flattened against the far valley, zigzag up the formidable Zardeh Kuh, a shot that was apparently based on a painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps, which Cooper had seen in Paris. Frame enlargement from Grass

which refer to contemporary times, for these references are bracketed off from the film. Grass also suffers from overdramatic, ethnocentric intertitles, provided by the copywriters of Paramount Studio. In addition, it offers no understanding of the tribe’s social and economic foundations, or of its relationship to the central government, which, under Prime Minister Reza Khan (soon to become the shah), was bringing the armed tribes under military control. The film closes with a testimonial letter. Written in Persian and English by the tribe’s chief, Haidar Khan, and notarized by the U.S. vice consul in Tehran, Major Robert W. Imbrie, the letter confirms that the filmmakers were “the first foreigners to have crossed the Zardeh Kuh pass and the first to have made the 48 day migration with the tribe” (in the Persian version, it is fortysix days) (figure 48). This epic film was not screened in Iranian public cinemas for two decades, until Reza Shah’s abdication. Grass showed armed tribesmen migrating freely at a time when the government was beginning to settle them in “model vilst a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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47  The chief of the Baba Ahmadi tribe, Haidar Khan, and his son enjoy the tribe’s arrival into the “land of grass” after their arduous trek. This is the only close-up of the two in the entire film, and it comes at the very end. Frame enlargement from Grass 48  Certificate testifying that the three American explorers were the first to cross the Zardeh Mountain with the tribe in forty-six days. Major Robert W. Imbrie’s notarization in English is at the bottom. Frame enlargement from Grass

lages.” It showed a “primitive” and pastoral way of life that matched neither the full reality of the tribe’s life nor the wishful projection of a modern Iran under Reza Shah. That he was aware of the film is almost certain, for Harrison had an audience with him in Tehran after the trio had filmed the migration. He could not have viewed the footage then, for it was taken out of Iran undeveloped for subsequent processing in Paris. Yet it appears that Iranians had seen the completed film by the mid-1930s, for an American writer in Iran reported that the Shah’s government had “banned” the film, which was “still angrily denounced as ‘slanderous’ by upper-class Tehranis sensitive about their tent-dwelling compatriots—and kin” (Singer and Baldridge 1936:78). The tragic murder of Imbrie by a mob in Tehran may have also factored in the film’s public absence in Iran. This murder became the first of several modern-day rifts in relations between Iran and the United States that involved 164

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49  The certificate of honor that President Jimmy Carter bestowed on Ernest Schoedsack: “This certificate is awarded by a grateful nation in recognition of devoted and selfless consecration to the service of our country in the Armed Forces of the United States.” Courtesy of Schoedsack’s son, Peter

the politics of national representation. It deserves a fuller exploration here because it highlights the mutual distrust originating from neocolonialism, the epistemic violence involving visual media, the complexity of national projection through cinema, the way Reza Khan used the incident to gain political power to become the new shah, and the idea that the incident may have expedited the passage of important censorship legislation that governed photographing and filming inside Iran. Decades later, President Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded Schoedsack a certificate honoring his service to the U.S. armed forces (figure 49). The Imbrie Affair In 1924 Reza Khan was consolidating his power to replace the Qajar dynasty. Tension was in the air, and demonstrators in the streets were apparently instigated by both his secular and clerical political opponents. On 3 July, the fiery secular reformist, poet, and playwright Mirzadeh Eshqi, who also edited the newspaper Qarn-e Bistom (Twentieth Century), was assassinated, causing tumultuous demonstrations by about thirty thousand people in Tehran against the government, which they accused of masterminding the murder. Demonstrations soon became anti-Baha’i, causing this minority population to close businesses and sequester themselves in their homes (Ferrin 1930:30–34). st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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Within a week, public sentiments were whipped up further by an alleged miracle close to a Shiite sacred fountain in Tehran, Saqakhaneh-ye Noruz Khan at the Shaikh Hadi intersection, which supposedly had first blinded and then restored sight to a Baha’i boy. On 18 July, Imbrie, whom the historian Michael Zirinsky has described as an “impetuous” and “anti-Soviet” “spy-adventurer,” went to the fountain to photograph for the National Geographic Society the crowd that had gathered in honor of the miracle (1986:276–77). Anticipating trouble, he had taken along as a bodyguard Melvin Seymour, an oil-field roughneck. Leaving their droshky nearby, Imbrie set up his camera and tripod in the street and began taking pictures. When people objected because they thought he was photographing veiled Muslim women, he moved, but continued to take pictures. Several men blocked the fountain and his camera with their cloaks, turbans, and hats, but Imbrie, apparently angered, moved again to a more central spot (Seifi-ye Qomi-ye Tafrashi 1983/1362:281). The crowd was enraged by his intransigence and, when a seventeen-year-old mullah accused him and his bodyguard of being Baha’i and of attempting to poison the water fountain, it attacked. The two managed to escape into their waiting carriage, which sped away; the crowd, joined by soldiers, pursued and continued to assault them with rocks and sticks, pouring boiling water on Imbrie when a coffeehouse gave them temporary refuge.29 Finally, aided by the police, the Americans escaped, but when their droshky came to a halt at a police station, the mob surged over it like a wave. Seymour was beaten badly and Imbrie “was pulled from the carriage and vanished beneath a sea of fists, stones, cudgels, and Cossack sabers” (Hardcastle 1979:10). The police, who had orders not to exacerbate religious tensions, did not shoot into the crowd, which had grown into the thousands. Instead, they transferred the victims to the military Nazmieh Hospital nearby. The furious and unruly mob broke in and attacked Imbrie as he was lying naked on a hospital bed being treated by three doctors (one American, one French, and one Iranian). They beat him with chairs, tiles removed from the floor, and by “scythe and machete and hammer and boiling water” (Agheli 1997/1376:189). Even though he had suffered some 107 wounds, 43 of them serious, Imbrie apparently remained conscious throughout, finally succumbing to his injuries and to a loss of blood around four hours after his photographic mission had begun. His wife, who had come to be with him in the hospital, was kept outside the door. Imbrie’s savage murder became a media cause célèbre inside and outside Iran. Fox News carried stories about the affair. One newsreel (of 2 August 1924) carried an item called “Persia,” stating that the United States demanded compensation from “the dictator of Persia” (Naficy 1984f:97). The issues of 166

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10 August, 25 August, and 29 September had follow-up stories about the uss Trenton taking the body to the United States. These rather jingoistic newsreels were almost certainly not shown in Iran; they would have aroused hostility from the hypersensitive prime minister, Reza Khan, further complicating diplomatic relations. The foreign press and Iranian society were filled with wild rumors and speculations, the most prominent being that the British had incited the riots to prevent an imminent oil concession for northern Iran to the American Sinclair Oil Company (the concession did not go through).30 The official domestic press and progressive periodicals came out against the religious factions and the foreign governments that were thought to have brought on the incident. Habl al-Matin called the murder “a shameful incident” and characterized its instigators as “plague-causing bacteria upon progress,” while Farangestan called it a “shameful stain” (Tavakoli-Targhi 2002:206, 231). W. Smith Murray, the second secretary of the American Legation in Tehran, ascribed the attack to the “recrudescence of clerical power” opposing Reza Khan’s plan to change Iran’s system of government from monarchy to a republic—a plan that the premier forfeited publicly (Murray 1997).31 Seeing an opportunity, Reza Khan wasted no time in taking charge and placing Tehran under martial law, causing his opposition to declare that he had instigated the incident himself to take power. The irate U.S. government wanted gunboats sent to Iran to teach the country a lesson. The Iranian government expressed profound sorrow over the incident, and in response to an American diplomatic note of protest promised to punish the culprits, to provide $60,000 indemnity for Imbrie’s widow and $3,000 for Seymour, to pay $110,000 to cover the cost of the U.S. warship Trenton to return the body home, and to offer full military honors and a national salute to the body as long as it was on Iranian soil. Reza Khan promptly met all but one of the American conditions.32 It took him almost a year of vacillation to punish by firing squad three low-level culprits, two of whom were underage—an army private (Morteza), a seventeen-year-old preacher of Shiite passion plays (Seyyed Hosain), and a fourteen-year-old thief (Ali). Imbrie’s brutal murder proved instrumental in consolidating Reza Khan’s power, as immediately after declaring martial law, he arrested his political opponents, “muzzled the opposition press, stopped street demonstrations, strengthened discipline in the army, and curbed the clergy.” A year later, he dissolved the Qajar dynasty and declared himself the shah at the head of a new Pahlavi dynasty. The incident implicitly encouraged Reza Khan’s assumption of dictatorial power as a “price that had to be paid for satisfactory settlement of the Imbrie dispute” (Zirinsky 1986:283). It also seems to have consolidated enduring st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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(mis)perceptions and (mis)representations of national character between the United States and Iran. It offered a distorted lens that confirmed a U.S. view of Iranians as “Oriental” types who did not value “human life as such”—­ characteristics echoed in the explorers’ accounts of the Bakhtiari. Iranians, on the other hand, learned that despite its sanctimonious talk about justice and democracy, a great power like the United States could expediently bend its own democratic rules and values (Zirinsky 1986:286–88). Given this complicated context, it is understandable that Grass was not publicly screened in Iran until after the Allied powers had forced Reza Shah into exile. What was shown when the film was finally allowed was not the feature-length silent film but a shorter (forty-minute) sound version (perhaps produced by the bbc), containing portions of Rimsky Korsakov’s Sheherazade as a soundtrack and a Persian voice-over narration. The well-known scholar Mojtaba Minovi wrote and read the narration, which provided a sympathetic and nationalist counterdiscourse to the original ethnocentric intertitles. The British Council distributed this version nationally to movie theaters (in 35mm format) and to industrial, cultural, and educational institutions, including to its own branches across the country (in 16mm format). The film’s circulation produced contradictory reactions involving both identification (selfing, self-empowerment) and alienation (othering). According to the filmmaker Mohammad Ali Issari, who for a time in the 1940s served as the British Council’s film officer, this version proved popular. Iranians saw themselves on-screen for the first time, and in a generally positive light. As he told me in an interview, Grass “satisfied the Iranians’ sense of national pride” (Naficy 1982). The French sociologist Edgar Morin, quoting the Iranian filmmaker and scholar Farrokh Gaffary, noted that many grown Bakhtiari men, who on seeing the film recognized themselves as children, were delighted. The Persian-language narration had indigenized the film and enhanced what Morin called the “pleasure of auto-identification” (1956:109). Certainly Issari’s autoidentification had a lasting effect on him. He told me it set him on a documentary film career, starting with his own film about the tribes. The wider circulation of this version produced contradictory and self-­ alienating reactions. A well-known writer, Ali Javaherkalam, who viewed the British Council’s version of Grass in 1931 in an oil-workers’ cinema operated by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in the Akbarabad neighborhood, relates that during the screening some oil workers and invited guests became so agitated by the perceived negative depiction of Iran that they loudly objected and walked out of the cinema. The next day, one of the company’s high-ranking Iranian officials admonished them for their defensive anger at a film that he 168

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thought had honestly documented Iranian reality (Rahimian 1988/1367:61). A mixed reaction also came from Bakhtiari tribal leaders. For example, Amir Bahman Samsam, in a letter from his Parisian exile to me, noted that he had seen both the American silent and the British Council’s sound versions of Grass and felt that the depiction of the migration process was “realistic and without errors” and that the route taken by the Baba Ahmadi was the one they would normally take (Naficy 1984e). This assessment dispenses with the notion put forward by some scholars (Sadoul 1965:105; Barsam 1992:55) that the Baba Ahmadi had taken an unusually picturesque and difficult route to accommodate the desire of the filmmakers for dramatic footage. Hamid Khan Bakhtiar, the son of the Il-Khani, the chief of all Bakhtiari tribes, who had paved the way for the American filmmakers to travel with the tribe, had also viewed the British Council’s version as a young governor of the region. In a letter to me years later from his British exile, he corroborated the accuracy of the film. However, his emotional reaction to the film was a mixture of identification and alienation: “I was made proud of the defiance of the men and women of the tribe but very saddened by their poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy” (Naficy 1984a).33 As the years passed, Grass seemed to empower Iranians more than alienate them, for they recognized in its specular projection a sympathetic, realistic, and awe-inspiring rendition of their own simpler, authentic past (Tahaminejad 1975/1354:74). Even Iranians abroad were proud of it. For example, Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh, who had seen it in a movie palace in Berlin, described Grass as “truly worth seeing,” particularly the scenes of crossing the Karun River (Naficy 1984c). The footage captured the imagination of filmmakers inside and outside Iran, some of whom attempted to reproduce and update that primordial vision of the country, with mixed results.34 And it has continued to be screened in university classes and film clubs in Iran and in the United States.35 Beginning in the 1930s, European, American, and Iranian anthropologists and scholars studied Iranian tribes, but it is not clear to what extent this film influenced them.36 Aware of some of Grass’s shortcomings, Cooper attempted a remake of it in 1956 in Technicolor and sound, against Schoedsack’s advice. As the new version’s executive producer, Cooper assembled a Hollywood crew consisting of C. V. Whitney Productions, the director Lowell Farrell, and the cinematographer Winton Hock. They concocted a story of a young tribesman studying medicine in the United States (played by Khosrow Zolqadr Sadeqi), who, on returning to his tribe, joins their annual migration. Over $300,000 was apparently spent on filming in Iran, but the project eventually ran out of funds st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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and out of steam and was never completed (compare this to the original film’s budget of $10,000). The Imbrie incident in 1924, initiated by an act of photography, particularly one involving a foreigner and an “infidel” taking pictures of Muslim women and of religious places, had a lasting impact. It affected many Western photographers by injecting fear and foreboding into the photographing and filming of Iranians. An example is the British Pathé film Lure of the East (1924). The piece documents the expedition of the British major F. A. C. Forbes-Leith from Leeds through Iran (visiting Kermanshah, Hamadan, Qaz­vin, Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Kerman) to Quetta, India (later Pakistan). Montague Redknap filmed the expedition and Frederick Watts edited the footage. As was typical of the expedition documentaries made between the wars, this one focused on the motorcar adventures of a Western team through rough terrain, exposing in Orientalist fashion snippets of the quaint customs of Iranian natives and ancient monuments. The five-month 8,500-mile expedition yielded a film shown in serialized form. An Iranian section opens with an intertitle referring to the fear the Imbrie affair had produced. It reads: “The Barracks, built somewhat on Russian lines, in front of which the fatal attack on Major Imbrie took place. The Authorities here were most nervous for our safety and insisted on an armed escort accompanying us anywhere we went.” The subsequent shot shows a uniformed Iranian policeman occupying the back seat of the expedition car. Apparently, the armed guard did not suffice, as another intertitle later says that it was with the aid of a Seyyed (a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed) that the travelers managed to take moving pictures, “for the natives are most fanatical and dangerous.” The Seyyed, in vestments, is shown shaking the hand of an expedition member while smiling broadly before a crowd of onlookers.37 The Imbrie affair also affected the photographic missions of the historian of Iranian antiquity Arthur Upham Pope.38 The affair may also have spurred later censorship regulations about painting, photographing, and filming that had an impact on the work of foreign and native camerapersons.

Censorship Regulations Calls for censorship were common in the first Pahlavi period, many based on moral grounds. In July 1930, the periodical Aineh-ye Iran (Mirror of Iran) noted the importance of movie screenings for entertainment and moral education. The paper urged that movies be censored not just on political grounds— which was already happening—but also to ensure they upheld traditional cus170

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toms and values. Within three months of this article, the government passed legislation requiring all movie-house owners to obtain a permit from municipal authorities prior to screening any movie. These authorities were to “cut out” any part of the film that they found to be “inconsistent with public morality and modesty” (Sadr 2003/1381:27). According to Andrew J. Lynch of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in a report dated 24 December 1937, this meant no scenes showing “revolutions, riots, any internal chaos, and calamities of war.” Also, “amoral” movies and films that either encouraged “passive resistance” or “insulted” Islam were banned. Surprisingly, incidents of outright banning remained few, for Lynch reported that in 1937 Iranian authorities had reviewed about three hundred movies and banned only the one about a contender’s attempt to unseat the Habsburg dynasty in Europe, because films about legal regime changes were not welcomed in Iran (Sadr 2003/1381:58). Efforts at censorship remained local and generally spotty until a year later. On 19 May 1938 (29 Ordibehesht 1317), the cabinet approved the “Regulations Governing Taking Motion Picture Films and Photographs, Painting, and Drawing,” which created a set of sweeping rules for what could be filmed, photographed, and drawn in Iran and specifying their enforcement. Because these regulations set a precedent for all subsequent censorship laws, and because they demonstrate the extreme sensitivity and defensiveness of Iranian officials about the country’s filmic representation, a detailed examination is warranted. — Before any filming, all native and alien subjects intent on taking moving pictures in Iran must submit a request to the police. In the request they must specify their first names, family names, the numbers of their birth certificates, residency permits, or passport; they must specify their profession and title, as well as their purpose in taking films, kind and size of cameras, and locations they propose to film. — After obtaining the permit, they may film only if accompanied and supervised by officials. — Without a police permit no one has the right to take moving pictures of arcades, streets, buildings, national parks, landscapes, other views, seaports, commercial vessels, factories, or interiors of historical and religious monuments. — Filming fortresses, fortifications, strongholds, military establishments, and their appurtenances is strictly forbidden. Filming anything that is inconsistent with the interests, prestige, and dignity of the country is absolutely forbidden.

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— All motion picture cameras brought into the country by travelers will be sealed by the frontier customs and returned to their owners. The frontier customs must insert a note in the travelers’ passports indicating the kind, specifications, number, and customs declaration of the travelers. The cameras will be unsealed by the local police, where the travelers want to film, only after they have obtained the necessary permit. — All exposed films must be submitted to the police for inspection and approval. No exposed film may cross the frontier without police permission.39 According to the Society for Applied Anthropology in New York, which conducted a study on filmmaking in Iran for the United States Information Agency (usia) in the 1950s, further laws forbidding the photographing of people were also put in place. These laws mainly meant to prevent Western visitors from taking pictures of what they considered “picturesque sights,” such as “beggars, dervishes, and, in general, the ragged, half-starved peasantry.” Iranians felt these laws necessary because such films and photographs “were being passed off as being typical of Iran” (quoted in Issari 1979:578).40 James Moose, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Tehran, in a letter to the secretary of state that contained the translation of the filming regulations of 1938, correctly predicted the difficulties of filming in Iran that these rules would institutionalize, particularly Article 11, which forbade the photographing, drawing, or filming of anything inconsistent with the interests, prestige, and dignity of the country.41 The Swiss-born traveler and author Ella K. Maillart, who made a journey by car in the summer of 1939 with a female companion named Christina through Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, provides an example. The pair carried five cameras (for black-and-white and color photography, as well as for color motion pictures), and Maillart reported that handling them grew riskier as they moved eastward through Iran and into Afghanistan (1986:28–29). In Torbat-e Jam, near Mashhad, she photographed a “wailing” woman at a grave site, causing the police to investigate the pair’s photography in cemeteries. Because their photographic permit was out of date and they had no permission to be in such a location, they decided to engineer a risky but comical escape. Christina sped away with the car feigning a need for gasoline, and Maillart feigned having “colic” behind a wall, while running to join her companion (110–11). At the Afghan border, Maillart reported “photophobia” as the latest “affliction of Afghan officialdom,” which was probably a “contagion” imported from Iran, a country that “tries to nip in the bud pictures that show her not

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yet entirely modern” (152). The regulations of 1938, the rumblings of the approaching Second World War, and the fear of foreign spies may have exacerbated Iranian photophobia, driven by the country’s perceived inferiority toward the West and its desire to appear modern. Iranian official photophobia afflicted even those foreign visitors who were well connected, as the case below demonstrates.

Arthur Upham Pope’s Carpet-Weaving Films In 1939, the year in which film censorship regulations passed the Majles, the famed archaeologist and art historian Arthur Upham Pope, director of the American Institute for Iranian Art and Archaeology in New York City, commissioned a documentary film on Iranian carpet production. Pope was a key international advocate of Iranian art, as well as an antiques dealer with close connections to Reza Shah and his government, who reawakened the Iranian elites’ love of beauty and promoted the understanding and appreciation of Iranian arts and crafts in all their manifestations as a form of national heritage, one to be safeguarded by the state. His advocacy was instrumental to the creation of the Society for National Heritage. Yet through the years, he became a controversial figure in Western antiquity and diplomatic circles, as he was sometimes accused of unsavory practices such as phony assessments of antiques and the plundering and smuggling of ancient Persian artifacts (Majd 2003). Because of his close connections and devotion to Iranian arts, he was able to organize several major arts events, including the International Exhibition of Persian Art at the Royal Academy in London in 1931, an exhibition that in the spirit of the great world fairs treated the Europeans to “sixty centuries of Persian art.” Sponsored chiefly by King George V of England and Reza Shah, this exhibition attracted donations of art from top European and Ameri­ can museums, creating a “truly astonishing gathering of Persian art” (Wood 2000:115). The exhibition proved popular, bringing in 3,000 spectators on its opening day and 259,000 by the time it closed, causing the British press to claim that London was “going Persian” (119–20). An anecdote is illustrative. Upon completing his viewing of the exhibit, King George V turned to the exhibit’s chairman, Sir Arnold Wilson, and said, “’Wilson, I am peeved with you.’ Sir Arnold blanched, ‘Your Majesty . . . ?’ ‘I had thought of making war on the Persians,’ reflecting on the oil crisis, ‘and you have caused my people to enter into a love affair with them’” (quoted in Gluck and Siver 1996:197). Pope and his wife, the art historian Phyllis Ackerman, put together a massive, six-volume reference book, A Survey of Persian Art, timed for the exhist a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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bition’s opening and containing excellent photographs that Pope and others had painstakingly taken in Iran, but its publication was delayed until 1938.42 As part of his Architectural Survey Expedition of Iran in 1939, Pope commissioned an American rug merchant–turned-filmmaker, Stephen Nyman, to make a “more commercial” film than his previous silent film on the topic, which not only would be “a very effective aid to rug sales [but also would] deepen American interest in the art of the Oriental carpet” (Ittig 1996: 357). Nyman spent twelve months traveling the length of the country (about ten thousand miles) filming on 16mm color stock various historical monuments, religious sites, arts and crafts artisans, and carpet industries. The filming took place during the Second World War when, according to Nyman in a clear reference to the Imbrie affair, “fanaticism made it necessary to photograph the architectural masterpieces of the country in disguise, and in danger even of losing one’s life” (quoted in Gluck and Siver 1996:270).43 The expedition encountered many difficulties, including harrowing desert storms, scorching heat, plague and other illnesses, and Nyman’s detention following a traffic accident in Mashhad in which a child was killed (Ittig 1996:357–58). The exposed footage also brought on difficulties of its own, as it became ensnared in new censorship regulations and the events of the Second World War, which “sealed all exits to the West and made it very hazardous to send out the film” (Gluck and Siver 1996:269). So Nyman took the exposed footage out of the country himself by driving the expedition truck and the trailer that housed Pope’s photographic laboratory into India. According to an agreement between Pope and Iranian officials, the footage was to be sent by the U.S. State Department to Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, for development. After processing, the footage was to be sent by the State Department to the Iranian Legation in Washington for censorship before being delivered to Pope, who had scheduled a screening of it, apparently in New York City. Many letters were exchanged among the various parties, and they all point to the difficulties of making nonfiction films in and about Iran under the new censorship regulations. Pope had wanted to make a film on carpet weaving to promote Persian carpets, whose market had declined in the 1920s and the 1930s, particularly in its largest base, the United States, and to raise funds for his institute, which in 1946 was renamed the Asia Institute (Ittig 1996:356). He had appealed to Wallace Murray, the chief of the division of Near Eastern affairs of the State Department, for help in expediting the footage’s processing. In a letter, Pope apologized to him about having “bothered” such a high official of the U.S. government with “such an apparent trifle.” He reassured him, however, that the “value and possibilities” of the film “are more than may appear.”44 174

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Sensitive to Iranian defensiveness and regulations governing filming, Murray for his part instructed Eastman Kodak to deliver the developed film to the State Department and simultaneously send a letter to the Iranian chargé d’affaires in Washington, testifying that “no copies have been made of the films, that they are intact, no cuts having been made, and that they have passed into no outside hands.”45 Yet apparently the Iranian government insisted that the film be sent to Iran for censorship before being released to Pope. On learning of this development, a dismayed Pope complained to Murray: “These [film] plans were made in the confidence that the agreement made with the Iranian government would be kept. We are not trying to steal the Crown Jewels, nor is this film of any military value to the rumored Russian invasion.”46 He was doubly incensed, for in another communication to Murray, he stated that a “representative of the police” had been present throughout filming, as required by the dictates of the censorship regulations, and censorship had thus already been exercised, as “no views were taken that they have not approved.” His indignation at his treatment comes through clearly: “It is, of course, very disappointing to us to be treated as if we were not friends of the country. We have proved our loyalty over and over again, and demonstrated that we are as much concerned for the prestige of the country as anyone” (quoted in Ittig 1996:358). The film was not completed in time for the opening of the Exhibition of Persian Art, another major event that Pope had organized, this time in New York City. Nyman had to return to Iran to film additional scenes of carpet weaving in Kerman, which were later edited into the rest of the footage to create the twenty-four-minute sound film called Weaving a Persian Rug (1947). Government sponsorship, the loyal cooperation of Iranian officials, and the zest and patience of designers and craftspeople who played themselves in the film, including the master designer Taherzadeh Behzad, resulted in an “invaluable record of the state of the craft at that time—which was shortly before at least some of these procedures were to become mechanized” (Ittig 1996:358). The film included not only documentary footage of the many processes involved in rug making but also animated sequences that revealed the anatomy and physiology of the knotting techniques. This and other films that Nyman made for the Asia Institute may have acted as models for the fine arts documentaries of the late Pahlavi period.47 If a person with the international prestige of Pope, his proven pro-Iranian pedigree, and his close links to the Pahlavi court and government had so many difficulties making a pro-Iranian art documentary, one can appreciate the difficulties that average Iranians, or foreigners, encountered filming inside Iran under Reza Shah.48 st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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The regulations of 1938, which applied to both foreign visitors and Iranians, were designed to counter the Orientalist discourses on Iran and to ensure that only those images of the country circulated that represented it as a “modern nation” with a “glorious ancient past”—ideas on which Reza Shah’s syncretic Westernization and nationalism were built and which the Society for National Heritage and the International Exhibition of Persian Art in London also touted. For Americans, the lessons from the Imbrie incident continued to reverberate for decades. Pope, for example, wrote an account of his photography adventures in Iran, whose title, “Killed for Photographing a Fountain!,” refers directly to the Imbrie affair. In it he colorfully recounts that after receiving royal permission to take pictures of the magnificent Shah (now Imam) Mosque in Isfahan in the mid-1920s, he was escorted by a large security detail consisting of the chief of police, the chief of the detectives, an army representative, and half a dozen plainclothes men.49 Despite this, he was accosted by a “fanatical” mob of Muslims, who charged that the mosque was being “violated by foreigners.” The police chief’s strong intervention averted another disaster. Pope also related an amusing story about how he escaped another mob at the Shah Abdul Azim shrine near Tehran when he “put on a good imitation of an attack of malaria,” all the while clandestinely photographing the shrine. He gleefully boasted that “the attack of malaria had worked beautifully” (Pope 1996:179–80). Apparently, as late as the 1950s, the U.S. embassy in Tehran routinely warned against photographing religious events in Iran by invoking Imbrie’s unfortunate fate (Zirinsky 1986:288). The regulations of 1938 were also designed to block movies inconsistent with Reza Shah’s nationalistic ideology and autocratic tendencies. In 1937, of the 300 films reviewed only 1 had been banned; in 1940, out of 253 films reviewed, 9 movies, all of them American, were banned. Frank Tuttle’s All the King’s Horses (1934) was banned because it “insulted the royalty,” J. Walter Ruben’s Riffraff (1935) because it showed “workers’ struggle,” Alfred Santell’s Winterset (1936) because it showed “revolutionary activities,” John Stahl’s Parnell (1937) because it showed “revolutionary activities,” Frank Lloyd’s Wells Fargo (1937) because it showed “subversive activities,” Willard S. Van Dyke’s Marie Antoinette (1938) because it showed “scenes of revolution,” Frank Lloyd’s If I Were King (1938) because it “insulted the royal family,” Walter Lang’s The Baroness and the Butler (1938) because it “lacked attractiveness for the audience,” and another film on the assassination of President Lincoln, whose title was not specified, was also banned because it “lacked attractiveness” for the audience (Sadr 2003/1381:61–62). By paternalistically “protecting” Iranians from exposure to such movies, the government in fact protected itself 176

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from any subversive, counterhegemonic thoughts, at the same time that it prevented Iranians from developing their individuality and subjectivity—in effect preventing them from becoming modern.

Fictional Narratives One of the earliest fiction movies involving ancient Persia is D. W. Griffith’s three-hour epic, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle throughout the Ages (1916). The film interweaves four separate stories, involving the fall of Babylon, the death of Jesus Christ, the massacre of the Huguenots, and a modern love, which build with enormous energy into a tour de force of continuity and parallel ­editing— an effect that is dampened by the film’s incessant moralism. In December 1926 a film by Griffith titled The Conquest of Babylon (Fath-e Babol) was shown in Tehran. This was a retitled version of The Fall of Babylon (1919), which Griffith himself had excerpted from Intolerance to form “a whole evening” of the Babylonian story (Pratt 1973:212).50 The film retained—even intensified— the energy of the final sequences of Intolerance, in which the forces of the Persian king Cyrus rush toward Babylon and, aided by the betrayal of a Babylonian priest, sack the city. The sets built for this sequence were so massive and elaborate that some seventy years later they were still regarded as “among the most remarkable ever devised for a motion picture” (Schickel 1984:315). Despite the Persians’ victory, Griffith’s sympathy was with the Babylonians, as revealed by the intertitles, point-of-view filming, and narrative closure, all of which favored the defeated. The Iranian press, however, interpreted the film differently, as a glorious story of Persian conquest over a foreign foe, an interpretation clearly signaled by the change in the film’s title from The Fall of Babylon to The Conquest of Babylon. A lengthy ad in the daily Ettela’at touted the arrival of the “excellent film about Cyrus the Great and the conquest of Babylon.” It asked people who had read about Cyrus the Great, the “reviver” of Iran, to now come to the Grand Hotel Cinema to “see him in person,” as though the film was a documentary about a contemporary leader. Appealing to Iranians’ pride in their long and “glorious” history, the ad ended by urging them to come to the “first grand exhibition” in which “you can see your magnificent historical ancestors.”51 Five days later, the same newspaper reported that “most of the gentlemen ministers, dignitaries, and parliament members” attended the screening, during whose intermissions two musical concerts had been performed and one short comedy film screened.52 By deliberately misreading the film’s sympathies, the newspaper turned a film of dest a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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feat into a story of victory, thereby transforming The Fall of Babylon from an instrument of othering into one of selfing. Historical epics involving ancient Persia, such as Intolerance and The Fall of Babylon, and feature-length documentaries about modern Iran such as Grass, multiplied the imperial projection of the West and the othering trajectory of Iranians. However, the epistemic violence and othering of cinema have a lot to do with the subjects of the othering, who are not simply passive receivers, or victims, of the process. Often, knowingly or unknowingly, they participate in their own othering and subjectification—hence my preference for the term self-othering. Yet at the same time that these films othered Iranians by belittling their historical triumphs or by emphasizing their contemporary social backwardness, they provided evidence of their long history (in the case of Intolerance and The Fall of Babylon) and of their bravery and heroism (in the case of Grass), thus providing flattering mirror images in whose reflections Iranians could recognize—even misrecognize—themselves and feel proud. That the screening of The Fall of Babylon was sponsored by the officially sanctioned Renewal Club (Kolup-e Tajaddod), and that major political figures and the social elite attended it, underscores the structural link between modern nationalism under Reza Shah and the construction of a glorious ancient, preIslamic past by means of cinema. Such interpretive uses and abuses of the movies by producers and spectators emphasize the key functions of cinema in constructing and maintaining useable pasts, imagined communities, and invented traditions, as well as their constitutive role in creating the present modern nation and national imaginaries.

Institutional and Industrial Films Institutional and industrial films represented both the modernization and industrialization projects of the Pahlavi state under the Shah’s leadership and the influence of Western countries and companies with political and economic interests in Iran. The confluence of these interests and influences, which formed part of the strategy of achieving political equilibrium, led to the creation of two new film genres, railway and oil films, that depicted Iran as a modern nation. Both the railway and oil industries were sources of pride for Iranians because they gave evidence of the country’s headlong trajectory toward centralization, industrialization, modernization, and projection of a national image. But some of the films in these genres proved controversial in their representation of the nation. 178

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Railway Films The construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway, a massive national project that took eleven years (1927–38) to complete, led to one early documentary film genre and gave evidence of Iranian modernity and national aspiration. This railway, which connected the Persian Gulf in the south to the Caspian Sea and to the Turkish border in the north, proved important in unifying the nation, and it was undertaken in two simultaneous sections, a northern and a southern one. Instead of giving the construction projects to a single foreign power, a multinational rail syndicate was created. The Syndicat pour Chemins de Fer en Perse (Persian Railway Syndicate) consisted of German, American, French, and British firms. The German railway group was contracted to build the shorter northern line, while the American Ulen Company was handed the concession for the southern line. Ulen subcontracted portions of its lines to other partners. The creation of the syndicate fit Reza Shah’s policy of equilibrium, balancing the British and Soviet powers with third and fourth powers (Germany and the United States). The German commercial involvement in the northern rail line “constituted by far Germany’s greatest interest” (Russell 2002:32), and it was completed by 1930. Contracts were canceled for the southern line because of skyrocketing costs, disputes among syndicate members, and the Iranians’ inability to pay their contractors on time. The remaining construction was entrusted in 1933 to a Swedish-Danish syndicate known as Konsortium Kampsax, which in turn subcontracted the work to several British, French, Swiss, Italian, German, and Iranian companies.53 According to a British intelligence report, Iranian workers comprised “ninety-five percent” of the workforce, “mainly because of the prevalence of malaria in the north and the great heat in the south” (Harrison, Sherwin-White, and Mason 1945:549). The involvement of so many companies, some of which sponsored films about their exploits in Iran, is a factor in the confusion among Iranian film historians as to which company sponsored which documentary on the construction of these lines, a confusion I may perpetuate here, as some of these films are not readily accessible for examination. An early key railway film was the documentary Iran Railway (Rah Ahan-e Iran, 1930), made by the Germans, documenting railway lines between Tehran and the Caspian Sea. The Danish filmmakers Ingolf Boison, Axel L ­ erche, and Theodor Christensen also made the forty-five-minute railway documentary titled Iran: The New Persia (Iran, det Nye Persien, 1939) for Minerva Films, which Kampsax sponsored (I have viewed this film at the Danish Film Archive, dfi).54 Boison and Lerche began filming in Iran in 1933, but they st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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turned the editing and completion of the film to Christensen, who at the time had made only one film. According to Palle Bøgelund Petterson, a film archivist and researcher at dfi, in an e-mail to me (28 April 2009) this was fortuitous, for the resulting film proved very successful, “helping Christensen to become an important name” and known as the “founder of Danish documentary.” Indeed, Iran: The New Persia is often considered to be the first Danish documentary, although others regard Poul Henningsen’s Denmark (1935) as a candidate for this honor. Filmed in crisp black-and-white photography and carrying a voice-of-God narration, Iran: The New Persia begins in a manner that became standard in industrial and travel documentaries about Iran: Alborz Mountain, rugged terrain, nomads, and animals accompanied by a contrasting voice-over intoning, “We have met these people before, they have lived here for thousands of years.” Then in what amounts to a “primary scene” of modernization, shots of the tranquil and desolate ruins of Persepolis and other ancient monuments are intercut with active shots of turning industrial machinery and military prowess—tanks, fighter planes, guns—accompanied by this voice-over: “From Persepolis to our time, from Old Persia to Modern Iran.” The same modernization thesis governs the rest of the film, which is devoted to documenting how the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway and the opening of industrial plants under the authoritarian and enlightened direction of Reza Shah modernized and industrialized Iran, moving it from plowing “just as in the Old Testament” to plowing with motorized tractors like a twentieth-­ century country. The film recounts the Shah’s various reforms and innovations: the sartorial reforms, the modern military, the new national anthem, the Boy Scouts. At the same time, the maintenance of traditional arts, architecture, and crafts as integral to Iran’s modern identity is saluted with the extensive filming of Isfahan architecture, artists, and artisans at work. Yet modern ways are shown to be still rudimentary, as a scene in a modern restaurant documents very slow service. In its second part, the film notes the history of the effort to build a northsouth railway in Iran, which brought Kampsax onto the scene. In the film, the company director communicates with Kampsax’s worldwide divisions through telephonic and wireless communications from the company headquarters in Copenhagen and so sets into motion a vast industrial operation to build railroads where previously no modern roads or transport existed. Clearly influenced by Griersonian documentaries, particularly Harry Watt’s Night Mail (1936), the film uses poetic language and repetition, accompanied by beautiful cinematography, to document the six years it took to complete 180

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the gigantic project (eight months ahead of schedule). In the process the construction process accumulates an impressive list of accomplishments: 4 million kilograms of dynamite, 1.5 million meters of railroad ties, and 100,000 tons of rails were used; 55,000 workers worked 600 million hours to build 1,500 meters of track daily; and they built 250 tunnels and 250 bridges. After the inauguration of the completed line by Reza Shah and his son, the crown prince, the camera follows a train taking off at 7 a.m. from the Caspian Sea heading fourteen hundred kilometers south to the Persian Gulf as a poetic voice-over offers a barrage of facts and as animation is intercut with live action to demonstrate the numerous hairpin turns and bridges that the train crosses to get through the rugged northern mountains. Minerva created three versions of Iran: The New Persia. The technical version showing only the construction and working processes of the railway was for screening to Kampsax personnel. A second cultural version, which I viewed at dfi in Copenhagen, was intended for public screening. This was transferred to 16mm, and multiple copies were made for distribution to Danish schools. This version had its première at Cinema Dagmar in Copenhagen in 1941, and it was rereleased more than forty years later in 1989 in the Delta Cinema. According to Bøgelund Petterson in an e-mail of 25 May 2009, in 1939–40 the film was “shown in all major cinemas and in total it might have been seen by 500,000 people.” For twenty years after the 1940s, Statens Filmcentral distributed the film by renting it to Danish schools. Finally, a special private version was made for Reza Shah, which was delivered to him. “This copy still exists in Teheran,” claims Bøgelund Petterson.55 We do not know of the reaction to this film in Iran; however, Iran Railway caused controversy there. The film was apparently divided into two main parts, and when it was screened publicly in January 1931 in the Iran Cinema, it caused two diametrically opposed reactions—manifesting alienating identification. The first part, which documented poverty-stricken village life and appalling road conditions in northern Iran to justify the railway project, aroused audience alienation, sadness, and anger, for it was perceived as misrepresenting all of Iran as poor and backward. However, the second part, which showed modern urban settings in the city of Sari, new buildings, bridges, factories, horse races, and the construction of the ambitious railway lines through hazardous, rocky mountains, as well as the inauguration of the lines by Reza Shah, was well received by an applauding audience as evidence of Iran’s progress and modernization (Omid 1995/1374:32). Reacting to the first part of the film, the daily Ettela’at complained that Western film companies tended to focus on the exotic, strange, and extraordist a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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nary to attract spectators, but that these scenes emphasized poverty and degradation and did not represent the “moral and ethical character” of the people pictured. The reviewer defensively denied that such poverty existed in Iran at all, claiming that he himself had never seen it. It appears that this reviewer, like Reza Shah and many of the elite, was less worried about Iranian reality than about its filmic representation. He seemed less worried about what Iranians thought about their miserable conditions than what Westerners would think. He feared that foreigners would think of Iranians as “uncivilized” and of their country as an “uninhabitable ruin.” He criticized the film for implying that the improvements and modernization achieved in Iran resulted from the foreign rail companies’ operations, not from the actions of Iranians themselves under the new shah.56 Many of the these charges against European documentary filmmakers were valid; however, the defensive posture of those who denied the blemished aspects of Iranian reality belied their awestruck inferiority vis-à-vis the West, coupled with an anxious desire to appear modern—reality notwithstanding. A newspaper article urged Iranians to either produce their own positivist films about Iran, emphasizing the country’s modernization and achievements, or to ban foreigners from making unflattering films in Iran.57 Both ideas seem to have been put into practice under Reza Shah: the regulations for cinemas of 1936 and the censorship laws of 1938 quashed negative filmic representations and the commissioning of Khanbabakhan Motazedi to make newsreels, including railway films, helped with the positivist projection of the country.58

Oil Films Major British commercial concerns, particularly oil companies, made records of their activities on film, which they distributed in 35mm and 16mm formats to public cinemas in Britain and in 9.5mm format to home consumers there. These films were more than internal company records; they meant to inform the public and influence policy. The companies were cognizant of Reza Shah’s sensitivity about Iran’s “image problem” and of his desire to project modernity and thus followed provisions of the law that forbade filming “anything that is inconsistent with the interests, prestige, and dignity of the country.” Institutional films avoided direct criticism of the Shah; in fact, many implicitly or explicitly disseminated his top-down syncretic Westernization. In effect, foreign companies with major interests in Iran became Reza Shah’s propaganda arms at the same time that they bolstered their own institutional inter182

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ests. One prominent example of this sort of pro-Shah institutional sponsorship was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company—later renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (aioc)—and its filming operation in Iran. Formed in 1909 to explore for oil and export it, the aioc sponsored many “oil films” about its operations and the good life the company was bringing to its workers and other Iranians. Its first production, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Operations in Iran, filmed in 1921, was edited years later (in 1938) into a sixty-seven-minute silent film with intertitles. The film provides a survey of the company’s activities in the drilling, pumping, and transportation of oil, including the operation of the Abadan refinery, then the largest in the world. The company’s next venture, The Persian Oil Industry (1925), directed by J. D. Kelley for Topical Films, is ninety-eight minutes, with the self-aggrandizing subtitle The Story of the Great National Enterprise. It depicts the company’s activities in locating oil fields, in drilling and pumping oil, and the workers’ good life. A year later, this film was edited down to forty-five minutes for screening in technical institutions and schools, and soon after, a shorter, ­fifteen-minute version was released for exhibition in public cinemas and company branches, bearing a new title, In the Land of the Shah (1926). Between 1926 and 1938 nearly a million people in Britain and on the Continent viewed it, and copies of it were sold in 9.5mm format for home consumption. The title change may have been prompted both by the wide distribution of the film and by a desire to appease the Shah, for the original title could have branded it an “advertising film” for the company, rather than for the country.59 By the end of 1929, the aioc had decided to make a new film of its operations to replace In the Land of the Shah. Its scenes of the oil plant were out of date, and its “local color” was “susceptible to criticism as being no longer representative of Iran.”60 According to a letter by a reader named H. Khuzestani printed in Ettela’at in 1928, In the Land of the Shah and its predecessor film The Persian Oil Industry suffered from another representational shortcoming, one often voiced by leftists and government opponents. In this long and scathing letter addressed to the newspaper editor, Khuzestani (more than likely a pseudonym) bitterly complains of a vast discrepancy between the prosperous image of the aioc’s operations in Iran and the actual dreadful conditions suffered by Iranians working for the company. Here is a portion of the letter: In Tehran they show you the beautiful films of the oil operations in the south. Of course, these tell of the enormity of the [oil] company’s buildings and facilities and of the importance of its oil lines, and, naturally, you and your journalist colleagues enjoy them, and perhaps think that

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this company is serving and benefiting Iran. But, have these films ever shown the wretched lives of those lowly Iranian workers who for three qerans a day toil in highly dangerous conditions and in really heartwrenching manner? Have these films ever shown you the manner in which in the southern oil regions a group of Indian workers [midrank aioc employees] are made superior to, and rule over, Iranian workers in their own homeland? Have these films ever shown you the dictatorial manner in which the [British] managers of the southern oil concern govern your fellow citizens and push and shove them around and stifle those who voice the slightest complaint? . . . The southern oil company is to be blamed not only for pillaging our livelihood and violating our rights but also for another harm that it brings us, which is less noticeable but is most horrible, and that is moral damage and psychological injury. . . . The British managers of the company try to erase from the minds of Iranian workers the concepts of patriotism, bravery, and love of the homeland and replace them with love for Britain and with absolute obedience to the managers. . . . That is, [they want us to become] more En­ glish than the English.61 The oil company’s plan for a new film encountered years of opposition from the Iranian government, perhaps because of worries about more of the type of criticism voiced by Khuzestani, until the government gave permission for filming in October 1936. Strand Film Company hired John Taylor of Realist Film Unit to produce the new film in Iran. The result was the fifteen-­minute Dawn of Iran (1937–38), the company’s first sound film, directed by Arthur Elton. In personal correspondence with me, Taylor wrote that the Iranian filming locations were of such difficulty that “you never forgot.” The country was “largely undeveloped,” the dirt roads were rough and had many “wind ripples,” to the point that “our teeth and everything else in the cars rattled,” and the weather was sometimes terribly cold, forcing the film crew, including an Iranian police captain assigned to it, to sleep for weeks in their clothes, hats, shoes, and overcoats. They crossed the Karun River on inflated goatskins, much like the Baba Ahmadi tribe did in Grass, and rode mules through mountain peaks to reach the geologists and explorers in the far-flung aioc operations. However, Taylor thought that Iranians themselves were “charming” and “generous,” and he enjoyed the tasty local food. Like Pope’s, Taylor’s report contains one of the few documented instances of the manner in which

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Reza Shah’s regulations that governed filming were implemented. The government had given them a list of subjects off limits to photography, among them camel caravans and carpet making, because “it was considered that they would make Iran look primitive.” To ensure compliance, a police captain was assigned to the film crew, who “had to look through the camera and censor every shot on the spot” (Taylor 1982:1). They filmed many sights, from the Persepolis ruins to Isfahan’s mosques, and from oil refineries to the TransIranian Railway, which Taylor characterized as “one of the greatest engineering feats of modern times.” The film also contained the scene of Reza Shah putting in the “golden bolt.”62 Taylor also directed for the aioc Dawn of Iran . . . Dawn in the East . . . The Story of Modern Iran (1938), which signals its thesis of Iran’s syncretic modernization under Reza Shah by starting with a title card stating that since the Shah’s order in 1935, Persia should be known by its original name, Iran. 63 The modernization thesis is underscored in the film’s beginning when the Shah inaugurates, amid milling crowds, the first part of the Trans-Iranian Railway linking Tehran to the Persian Gulf—a triumph of engineering and national determination. Then, by means of crisp and evocative cinematography of ancient ruins and monuments, as well as through intimate shots of people and craftsmen, the film rearchaizes Iran by recounting a brief history of the country, from the ancient Achaemenid times to its glory days under the Safavids, its demise under the late Qajars, and its revival as a modern nation under the Pahlavis. In what the British film historian Rachel Low calls “one of the most famous and haunting sequences” (1979:125), the words of Dariush (Cyrus), the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, are heard in an address to the broken columns and bas-reliefs of the Persepolis Palace, now lying about in the dust: “I am Dariush, King of Kings. . . .” The film’s positivist project becomes obvious when it begins to document at dizzying speed the modernization process during Reza Shah’s reign. In one sequence, Dariush addresses school children, urging them to be patriotic: “My children, show your affection to your country by industry and work so as to ensure its independence and liberty.” In another sequence, he addresses young women, recently unveiled under Reza Shah, again urging them to work hard for the country’s advancement. While haunting and innovative, this voice-over technique is highly paternalistic, corroborating Reza Shah’s authoritarian rule and the change in the definition of patriotism that he was ushering in—from one based on loyalty to religious sentiment and to the tribe to one derived from loyalty to a secular state and nation. Surprisingly, the film does not emphasize the role of the oil industry in

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modernizing Iran. Low thought the film contained “handsome” and dramatic shots of Iran but lacked involvement and was burdened by a “heavy narration” (1979:125). The film’s positivist stance toward Reza Shah’s nationalist ideology and modernization projects points to the success of the regulations of 1938 in controlling the images of Iran that foreigners recorded and projected. In 1926, the aioc established its first film-screening program in Abadan, and by extension its first cinema, to show films to its staff.64 Interestingly, this is long before it even contemplated building a movie house in the company headquarters in the Britannic House in London.65 It was perhaps in one such aioc cinema in Abadan that Javaherkalam viewed Grass in 1931. The aioc, British Petroleum, and other oil companies made many more oil films as the nationalization of the oil industry became a major topic in the 1950s and beyond (see Naficy 1984f). The interests of Western companies in exploiting Iranian natural resources and in claiming responsibility for the country’s modernization were negotiated by means of film with the political interests of the Iranian government and of the elite serving as correctives in national representation and projection. What were negotiated by these films were not only commercial and political interests but also cinematic ones. Despite their ideological and representational shortcomings, as the film historian Paul Rotha states, these documentaries were “valuable in widening the screen’s horizons,” and the visiting documentary film units, such as Topical Films, Strand Film Company, and Realist Film Unit, sometimes did “much to inspire and help local production” (Rotha 1967:619). The overseas operations of these film units were inspired by John Grierson’s famed film units, for whom Taylor, Elton, and Rotha all had worked. Because of their commitment to the realist documentary form and to a socialist viewpoint, they could potentially erode the conventions of entertainment movies and the stereotypical views of non-Western worlds that Hollywood dream factories were propagating. In this they appear to have failed, despite their good intentions. However, like Nyman’s and Pope’s art films, which formulated an aesthetic prototype for fine art documentaries, these foreign institutional films succeeded in creating and circulating key narrative and generic conventions of social documentaries that were to endure. This may have been their true legacy. Whether Iranian filmmakers were influenced or inspired by them is not certain. The only certain link is the establishment of the Golestan Film Workshop, two decades after the nationalization of the oil industry, with Elton’s help to make institutional films for the aioc’s descendant, the National Iranian Oil Company (nioc).

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Foreign Commercial Sound Newsreels By the early 1930s, Western sound newsreels, made by commercial companies, were playing in Iranian theaters before the main features. Sound theaters were so unusual still that when Palace Cinema opened in 1930, many officials and members of the social elite were invited, including the court minister, who first viewed a sound newsreel and then the main sound feature film (Shoai 19751354:332–33). A Turkish photographer apparently filmed the first sound newsreel in Persian [Mr. Forughi’s Journey to Turkey/Safar-e Aqa-ye Forughi beh Torkiyeh, 1932], which was shown extensively in Iran. 66 In it, the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Ali Forughi, is seen conferring with the Turkish leader, Kemal Atatürk, and delivering a brief speech in Persian. His speech astonished spectators unaccustomed to hearing Persian spoken in the movies. The newsreel’s screening before the first Persian-language talkie, The Lor Girl (1933), made for a formidable double bill. Another Turkish film crew, headed by the director Kenan Beig, made a feature-length sound documentary about Reza Shah’s reforms and his official visit to Turkey, his sole foreign trip (except his last one into exile), titled His Imperial Majesty’s Journey to Turkey (Mosaferat-e Alahazrat-e Homayuni beh Torkiyeh, 1935). This seminal trip proved instrumental in inspiring Reza Shah to institute his secular, cultural, and sartorial reforms (Chehabi 2003a:197–98; Marashi 2003), and the documentary about it was shown in three cinemas in Tehran simultaneously (Iran, Pars, and Melli) to unexpectedly large audiences. Motazedi also filmed the feature documentary Reza Shah’s Trip to Turkey (Safar-e Reza Shah beh Torkiyeh, 1934), covering the same visit. These films on the Shah’s state visits were part of what I have called the “culture of spectacle” (Naficy 1993a) and what Afshin Marashi aptly calls “performing the nation,” in which both of the Pahlavi regimes and the Islamic Republic engaged. According to Marashi, this performance involved “the prolific staging of public ceremonies, commemorations and spectacles during the official visit—and at least as importantly, the media coverage of those events in the popular press—[which] worked to publicize the adoption of the new Wilsonian model of national politics by the two emerging states [Iran and Turkey]. Flags, anthems, cheering crowds and symbols of the nation followed the two heads of state throughout the almost month-long visit” (2003:102). The daily newspaper Ettela’at, whose owner, Abbas Masudi, had accompanied Reza Shah and had filed regular glowing reports about the trip, carried a large illustrated ad on its front page announcing the sound documentary of the royal visit to Turkey, most likely that of Kenan Beig, as a “brilliant page in Iranian st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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history.”67 The movie-house schedules and ads that the newspaper published show that the film was spoken in Turkish and Persian and was feature length, consisting of eleven reels (lasting about 110 minutes). 68 Undoubtedly, this was the first time such a long documentary was screened publicly in Iran, perhaps on government order. It was also perhaps the first time that Iranians everywhere heard what the film historian Mohammad Tahaminejad has characterized as “the deep and strong voice” of the Shah who, responding to Atatürk’s welcoming him as a “brother,” said: “I am very happy to have attained my longtime wish of meeting you” (2005:14). Thus His Imperial Majesty’s Journey to Turkey, which circulated nationally in Iran, helped construct not only a modern nation but also a new father for the new nation, one with a full, embodied voice, which must have served to enhance his charismatic and forceful personality. The cinemas showing the film were festively decked out with posters of the Shah and with the Iranian and Turkish flags, carrying out the spectacular performance of nationhood and patriotism for an audience awaiting the event with “extraordinary enthusiasm.”69 Audience anticipation and large-scale attendance caused the filmmaker Ebrahim Moradi to speculate that the government was perhaps packing the houses (Omid 1995/1374:838). Wide publicity in newspapers before the screenings also played a role. In the 1930s, many commercial American, British, and German sound newsreels, including Paramount News, Hearst Metrotone News, British Movietone News, ufa Sound Weekly, and Pathé Sound News, were regularly screened in Iranian cinemas. Yet they treated audiences to a rather limited range of Iranian topics. Besides the Imbrie items by Fox News and Lure of the East released by British Pathé, other items concerned Iranian leaders, including Seyyed Zia Tabatabai, Reza Shah, and the court minister, Abdolhosain Teimurtash. The courting and marriage in 1939 of the crown prince, Mohammad Reza, to the seventeen-year-old Fawzia, the sister of the Egyptian king, Faruq, and the cele­ bratory arrival of the newlywed royal couple from Egypt to Tehran, was also covered extensively.70 These royal wedding newsreels circulated the image of a happy, modern, and cosmopolitanism Iranian royalty. The newsreels of the Egyptian wife of the future Shah may have had an important role in opening Iranian markets to Egyptian feature movies. One screening of a famous documentary is worth noting here for the way it promoted Reza Shah’s ideology and programs. In 1939, Mohammad Reza gave a copy of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi film Olympia (1936), her exuberant documentary about the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, to the minister of education, who subsequently ordered that it be screened in movie houses nationwide. In Tehran, the movie was scheduled for Mayak Cinema. The ministry 188

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also ordered that the capital city’s newspapers widely advertise the screenings, which benefited the Physical Education Organization of Iran, one of the royal family’s pet projects. In an extraordinarily detailed attempt to promote the film, the ministry supplied not only five different ad copies for the movie to be used in the newspapers but also asked that the ads be prominently displayed in large typeface either on the front page or the second page. Finally, it asked that whenever appropriate, the papers publish information and reviews about the film.71 It is not known how widely the film was actually screened or publicized. Yet such publicity would have promoted not only the film itself and the Shah’s sports organization but also the Nazi ideology of Aryan genealogy, physical beauty, national purity, and forceful power, which suitably dovetailed with the Shah’s ideology of syncretic Westernization. In August 1941, when the Allies invaded Iran and deposed Reza Shah in favor of Mohammad Reza, the newsreel output of Western companies about Iran underwent a strategic transformation.

In One’s Own Mirror: Iranian Newsreels and Documentaries The model of a sponsored and artisanal cinema inherited from the Qajar era, the underdevelopment of the various formations of modernity and national cinema, and the cultural and religious suspicion about cinema militated against the emergence of an indigenous film industry early in this period. However, the ideological formation that propagated nationalism and syncretic Westernization, countering Western mediaworks, was well developed. An indigenous documentary cinema undergirded by state support emerged to serve this ideological formation, one that was double edged. Documentary cinema was thus regarded from the outset not so much as a means of individual self-expression or of social examination and criticism—of authorial formation—but as a means of public enlightenment, national representation, and state projection. Thus documentary cinema from the start was tainted by its association with the sponsoring state (or head of state), with the official state ideology, and with an official style. The first Pahlavi-period documentary cinema produced proto-newsreel films. In the same period, though, a wide range of nonfiction, instructional, and educational films were projected. As in the Qajar period, artisanal pioneers made the films. The discussion of the career and contributions of one of these, Motazedi, begun in a previous chapter, continues below, along with that of a few others. st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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Freelance Newsreel Filmmakers: Khanbabakhan Motazedi (1892–1986) Motazedi was a freelance filmmaker. Unlike other pioneers such as Sani alSaltaneh and Ivanov, he was not only an official court cinematographer; as a multitalented entrepreneur, he performed many functions: filming, processing, editing, intertitling, and exhibiting. He depended not on the steady support of a basically homogenous court system or a single sponsor but on diverse, and perhaps competing, governmental agencies that commissioned him to make films, such as the Pahlavi court, the armed forces, the ministry of education, and the private commercial sector. Motazedi’s work established a model for a commissioned, propagandistic cinema, financed largely by the state and exhibited in commercial movie houses. Motazedi was the first filmmaker producing official newsreels, serving to disseminate news, consolidate the image of the Shah, and propagate the ideology of Iran as a modernizing nation with a glorious inherited past. He lived at a crucial juncture in Iranian political life, and his newsreels spanned both the Qajar and Pahlavi rules (figure 50). For example, he filmed Mohammad Hasan, the brother of the last crown prince of the Qajars, and he also filmed Reza Khan before he deposed the Qajars to become the first shah of the new Pahlavi dynasty. He made The Cossack Brigade (Qoshun-e Qazzaq, 1925), about the armed forces unit, which under Russian command became an instrument of that country’s policies in Iran and which later under Reza Khan’s leadership became a formidable instrument through which he came to power and then maintained control. Motazedi screened this film for Reza Khan, who approved of it and rewarded him with the high sum of 50,000 rials. Reza Shah in the Constitutional Assembly (Reza Shah dar Majles-e Mo’asesan, 1925) shows the assembly session that in December 1925 deposed the Qajar dynasty and replaced it with the Pahlavi dynasty. The Opening of the National Consultative Assembly (Eftetah-e Majles-e Showra-ye Melli, 1926) shows the new shah opening the parliament, during which the noise of Motazedi’s camera was the only sound breaking the silence and decorum of the occasion (Tahaminejad 1975/1354:71). Reza Shah’s Coronation in the Golestan Palace (Tajgozari-ye Reza Shah dar Kakh-e Golestan, 1926) is a twenty-minute newsreel of the Shah’s coronation on 26 April 1926 before national leaders and foreign diplomats.72 It also contains shots of the priceless crown jewels that formed the financial backing of the Iranian currency. The Shah apparently liked this film also and awarded Motazedi for having filmed, processed, and edited it himself (Haidari 1991c:263). What Motazedi had done fit the Shah’s doctrine of self-sufficiency, which urged Iranians to become independent of foreign imports by producing domestically 190

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50  An elderly Khanbabakhan Motazedi at home with his 16mm handheld camera and portable film projector

the materials that satisfied their basic needs (such as textiles, sugar, and cement). According to Motazedi, due to these successes, the minister of war commissioned him to film from then on all official ceremonies, including The Sixth Consultative National Assembly (Sheshomin Dowreh-ye Majles-e Showraye Melli, 1926), Groundbreaking of Tehran Railway Station (Kolang-e Eftetah-e Sakhteman-e Rah Ahan-e Tehran, 1927), and Armed Forces College (Madreseh-ye Nezam, 1927) (Haidari 1991c–92:26). He also filmed the groundbreaking of the Bank-e Melli building, the inaugurations of railway lines and bridges, official horse races, and army parades (Shoai 1976a/2535:13–14). In addition, Motazedi made newsreels about similar topics in collaboration with the commercial film studio Perse Film Company, owned by the fiction filmmaker Ohanians.73 On top of making newsreels for governmental and private agencies within Iran, Motazedi was hired by a group of American consultants to film newsreel footage for them in Iran. According to their contract he sent the films to the United States unprocessed (Haidari 1991c/1370:271). Finally, Motazedi claimed that he had made [State Amphitheater/Tekkiyeh Dowlat 1925–36], a short film, shot on two different occasions in 1925 and 1936, of the magnificent taziyeh amphitheater in Tehran, which was torn down as part of the Society for National Heritage renovation projects. Motazedi’s constitutes perhaps the only film of this theater, but it has not been located yet. Motazedi’s films bolstered the Shah’s programs, as he depended on the Shah and the state, creating a model for official documentary film. The ordinary activities of ordinary people were apparently not yet considered viable, worthy, or entertaining subjects for documentation, as most Iranians were very poor and backward and, if filmed, would have projected an image of Iran that contradicted the official ideology. Nonetheless, these newsreels cannot be written off as mere propaganda, for they document Iranians’ desire for modernity. They created the precursors to sports films, industrial films, and propaganda films. st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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The commercial cinema director and screenplay writer Parviz Khatibi has described Motazedi at work, providing a rare eyewitness account of the first Pahlavi-period newsreel filming. The event was a parade and air show in the Jalaliyeh Arena in Tehran on 22 February 1935 (3 Esfand 1313), staged in the presence of Reza Shah to celebrate the anniversary of his successful coup d’état and his ascension to the throne. Khatibi and his friend Majid Mohseni (later to become a movie star and a Majles deputy) were high school students and members of the Boy Scouts—another modern institution the Shah had created—and they were marching before the Shah’s stand. At one point, Mohseni pointed to Motazedi who was filming the parade by hand-cranking his camera. Madly in love with cinema, Khatibi became simultaneously so excited and mesmerized by this sight that he barely noticed the king. Then, one of the planes performing acrobatic maneuvers crashed nearby and burst into flames. Yet Motazedi continued to film the Shah instead of the unfolding news event. The ruler seemed to have been better attuned to what constituted news, for he shouted at Motazedi, ordering him to “film the other side, film the other side,” causing him to swing around to cover the burning plane. But a few moments later when he turned around to film the Shah again, it was the prime minister who ordered him to go back to filming the plane crash (Khatibi 1994:515–16). Most of Motazedi’s newsreels and those of others were shown in public movie houses and military barracks on festive occasions, such as the various national anniversaries and the openings of new cinemas, institutions, and industries by the Shah. They were also shown before feature movies on nonfestive occasions. Unlike their newsreel counterparts in the West, which included several items edited together to form a total package that lasted for ten minutes or more and bore the name of the newsreel companies (Baechlin and Muller-Strauss 1952; Fielding 1972), most of Motazedi’s newsreels remained brief, devoted to a single event, and bore no credits. But he or others apparently put together several single news films into longer newsreel programs for commercial cinemas. For example, Mayak Cinema in Tehran on 29 October 1933 (7 Aban 1312) showed a series of eight news films, creating a full program—all of the items having to do with the activities of the government or the Shah.74 The documentary’s role in binding viewers together as a modern nation is seen in the first film of the national anthem: it was a compilation of Motazedi footage played in all cinemas along with the newly created anthem. The regulations for cinemas of 1936, which the cabinet passed in January, required that all first-class and second-class cinemas play the national anthem in live or recorded form, during which spectators had to stand 192

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(Shoai 1975/1354:597). This was another way in which the Pahlavi state interjected itself directly into public space, public consciousness, and places of entertainment. In the years to come, the prominent place in the anthem given to the image of the Shah and the forced screening and honoring of the anthem in cinemas would become a political liability for the state. The cinema regulations were supportive of nonfiction films, for they mandated that all first-class cinemas show before each feature movie both a newsreel (no more than two months old) and a short subject film of an “educational or industrial or geographic or sports” nature (quoted in Shoai 1975/1354:593). Second-class cinemas were required to show only a newsreel before the main feature. The regulations did not necessarily benefit documentary cinema because they encouraged only films that extolled the Shah and his policies. The pro-Shah output of Motazedi certainly corroborates this view. However, it is also possible to think that the regulations genuinely favored nonfiction cinema, foreign or Iranian, and that they were designed to expose citizens in the far-flung regions of country—the majority of whom were illiterate and ­provincial—to modern life and the wider world. Indeed, the screening of these newsreels about the Shah and his modernizing projects performed both functions of the mass media, propaganda and pedagogy, before the arrival of radio (1940) and television (1958). Because there was no requirement that theaters show Iranian newsreels or short subject documentaries, the regulations did not significantly help the domestic film industry. At the same time, since another provision of the law allowed the replacement of the educational films, there is a good possibility that many box office–conscious exhibitors instead showed short entertainment films or film serials imported from abroad. Even if the exhibitors of the first-class theaters had wanted to regularly screen all three types of mandated films (newsreels, educational shorts, and features), they could not always fit them into the two-hour screening time that had become standard in Iran (Issari 1989:82). As foreign feature movies grew longer, reaching the ninety- to a hundred-minute standard length, the exhibitors found it difficult to show more than a feature and a short, since they had to consider added time for Persian-language intertitles. Motazedi, an artisanal multitasker, was also heavily involved in film exhibition, and he filmed the first fiction film made in Iran, Abi and Rabi (1929), which Ohanians directed. He filmed his home, family, and film lab, excerpts of which are included in Tahaminejad’s documentary, Iranian Cinema, from the Constitution to Sepanta (1970). Another artisan, Georges Esmailiov, a Russian émigré, made at least one st a t e forma t i on and no nfic tio n c inema

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ten-minute newsreel, Third Graduation Ceremonies of the Military Officers and Awarding of Titles (Jashn-e Fareqoltahsili-ye Dowreh-ye Sevvom Sahabmansabane Nezam va A’ta-ye Manaseb), filmed on 12 October 1925 (20 Mehr 1304) and showing the graduation ceremony of the Military Academy and the granting of the officers’ diplomas by the prime minister, Reza Khan Pahlavi. Shown in the Soleil Cinema in Tabriz that year, it featured the crown prince, Mohammad Reza, five years old at the time (Tahaminejad 2005:1–2). Newsreels were not screened only in Tehran, as Tabriz Scenes (Manazer-e Tabriz, 1929) was also shown in Tabriz in 1929. It consisted of scenes of city life, among them old and new buildings, city squares, Sadeqiyeh bazaar, a natural ice storage facility, and grocery stores selling fresh herbs (Tahaminejad 1981/1360:21). This was one of the few multipart newsreels—really a ­documentary—made in Iran that was devoted to ordinary subjects, not royal personages or official events. The maker of this newsreel is unknown, but because of its “outsider’s gaze” on Iranian subjects, the historian Jamal Omid ascribes it to a foreign filmmaker (1995/1374:836). Not all official newsreels were well received. For example, Mahmud Jam’s Journey to Cairo (Mosaferat-e Mahmud Jam beh Qahereh, 1938), which documents the trip to Cairo of the Iranian entourage, headed by Jam, the minister of the interior and Reza Shah’s confidant, to arrange for the marriage of the crown prince to Princess Fawzia, was soon removed from screens. Apparently, the cause was the minister’s obsequiousness toward Egyptian officials, signaled by his frequent bowing to them, and his “lustful glances at Egyptian women,” which created controversy in the Iranian elite circles (Omid 1995:864). In 1929, in a two-part article in Ettela’at, an A. Salimi, inspired by the mobile film vehicles that in the Soviet Union had screened films in the remote regions of the country, suggested that such a mobile cinema system be put into use in Iran. He suggested that they be operated by the security services with the aim of pacifying the restless tribes, which Reza Shah was at the time quelling with military force. Having recommended the mechanism for delivering the pacifying arsenal, he then moved on to offer a blueprint for the ammunition: domestically produced newsreels and educational and public health films. As he conceived of them, these films could show the military might of the government, modernization and progress achieved under the Shah, natural beauties of the country, historical monuments, the parliament building, and children performing calisthenics. Salimi held that these films could be influential not only in settling the tribes but also in countering the Orientalist stereotypes of Iran that had relegated it to the pages of The Thou194

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sand and One Nights (Salimi 1929a/1308, 1929b/1308). Apparently, nothing came of this proposal until later, when the British Council in the 1930s and the usia in the 1950s set up their elaborate mobile film systems. The only educational institution that over the years seems to have repeatedly engaged in screening films to students, constituting an educational cinema venue of sorts, was the Dar al-Fonun Polytechnic College in Tehran. As early as 1908, Ivanov had screened movies there, perhaps a mix of newsreels and entertainment films, such as the ones he was screening in his commercial cinemas. These and other similar exhibitions apparently remained few and far between. The serious step in turning the college into an educational cinema was taken in December 1934, when the Ministry of Education approved the installation of a film projector in the school for the purpose of using it in instruction (Javdani 2002/1381:32). When in 1935 the pioneer of feature film Moradi, supported by the Ministry of Education, began showing educational films to the Polytechnic students (Tahaminejad 1976/1355:116), one more important step in that process was taken. However, we do not know how long this effort lasted, how regular it was, and what films were shown. With the advent of the Second World War the tenuous infrastructure of the Iranian film industry began to collapse. Nevertheless, late in the decade, several newsreels and documentaries were made celebrating the country’s modernization and industrialization. Among these were new official newsreels by Motazedi.75 He transformed the Qajar period’s pattern of brief and occasional actualities about the life and times of elites and officials during the first Pahlavi period into frequent official newsreels and documentary films about Iranian modernization and the leadership role of the Shah in that process. These set a blueprint for longer newsreels and propaganda documentaries in the future. During the second Pahlavi period, when modernity and Westernization became synonymous and integrated into the state ideological apparatuses, and during the subsequent period of the Islamic Republic, when hostility toward the West and the decoupling of modernity from Westernization became the ruling ideology, both governments attempted to use the consciousness-shaping industries instrumentally to bolster their holds on power, to shape the hearts and minds of their national subjects, and to project a unifying, modern representation of the nation. Although both were highly autocratic, neither the Pahlavi nor the Islamic government was homogenous or monolithic, and both were forced to enter into the microphysical struggles and negotiations of nationhood with opponents and dissidents (authorial formation) and with public tastes and demands (spectatorial formation).

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4 a t r a nsi t iona l cinem a The Feature Film Industry and Sound Cinema

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eature fiction film production began during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925–41). As during the Qajar period, filmmaking was facilitated by entrepreneurial pioneers, in particular an Iranian expatriate poet-turned-­ filmmaker working in India, Abdolhosain Sepanta (also known as Spenta), and other immigrants working in the country, most important, Ovanes Ohanians (also known as Oganiants). Syncretic Westernization and expanding exchange relations with the West and neighboring countries were ushering in both modernity and national cinema formations. Technological advances such as sound brought Persian language and new stories to cinema, created by song, dance, music, and dialogue. This helped create a new, modern national identity. Film studios and acting schools were established in this period, the number of movie houses nationwide increased, film imports expanded, and laws, regulations, and administrative state structures for promoting, regulating, and censoring movies were put into place. These developments and evolving modern infrastructures were not coherent, systematic, or organic, however. Much was imposed on the industry from above or grew in an ad hoc fashion. Thus fictional cinema, like its nonfictional counterpart, remained semiartisanal. The cinema of the first Pahlavi period constituted a transitional stage between the artisanal Qajar cinema and the hybrid, industrial cinema of the second Pahlavi period in the 1970s: it exhibited features both

of silent cinema, the cinema of attraction, and artisanal production, and of sound cinema, the cinema of narrative integration, and industrial production. Because of these transitory characteristics, individual entrepreneurs continued to play a pivotal role not only in the rise of documentary cinema but also in the emergence of fictional cinema. The entrepreneurs who contributed significantly to the fictional cinemas of the first Pahlavi period, and those extensively examined here, are Ohanians, Ebrahim Moradi, and Sepanta. Of these, only one—Sepanta—produced a body of work large enough to be considered an auteur. Each case tells us something both about the individual directors and their lives and times and about the emerging conditions of cinema and modernity in the country. Finally, with its invisible style of filming and continuity editing, sound cinema facilitated the construction of individual subjectivities, helping transform the notion of the audience from a collective group to individually addressed spectators. The rise of a modern middle class, who could afford to attend cinemas and who valued the experience of spectatorship and consumerism, was also an important factor.

Silent-Era Cinema and Fiction Films By the mid-1930s, Tehran was fast modernizing and, according to American tourists, it was “filled with newness.” “A boomtown air” was created by new shops, “moving picture palaces,” cafés, and the edifices of the British Bank and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (Singer and Baldridge 1936:24).

Exhibition, Importation, Reception, Differentiation It was in this boomtown atmosphere that film exhibition gradually became a profitable business; fourteen movie houses were operating in Tehran, whose population in 1932 was 310,139 (Madanipour 1998:83). These movie houses were the Baharestan, Dariush, Didehban (also known as Mayak), Farus, Ferdowsi, Grand, Iran, Mada’en, Melli, Palace, Sa’adat, Sanati, Sepah, and Tehran (Omid 1995/1374:33). The summer open-air cinemas (Baharestan and Da­ riush) continued to operate through both the Pahlavi periods, entertaining not only paying spectators inside but also those watching free from neighborhood balconies and rooftops. The empress Farah Pahlavi describes watching films from the balcony of her childhood home with her cousin Reza Ghotbi, who would later become the head of the national broadcasting networks: “On other evenings Reza and I would be fascinated by the giant screen of the 198

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open-air cinema, the Diana, as it sent reflections flickering across the sky like weird shadows” (2004:30). In line with Reza Shah’s linguistic nationalism, all but two of these fourteen movie houses (the Grand and the Palace) had Persian or nationalistic marquee names, and their advertisements were generally in Persian only. However, there were local exceptions to the homogeneity of linguistic nationalism to accommodate diplomats or non-Persian speakers or émigré populations. In 1939, Mashhad movie houses carried both Persian and Russian advertisements and posters (Maillart 1986:104). According to the statistics reported by Henry S. Villard, the U.S. vice consul in Tehran, the twenty-nine movie houses in the country in 1929 became thirty-three in 1930 (1931:37). Another U.S. embassy report gave the number of cinemas nationwide in the 1930s as thirty-four, with room for twenty-two thousand filmgoers and revenue of over 4 million rials ($170,000 at the time). Of these, nine movie theaters were in Tehran; four in Tabriz; three each in Isfahan, Mashhad, and Rasht; two each in Shiraz and Anzali; and one each in Kermanshah, Hamadan, Qazvin, Ahvaz, and Tajrish; the locations of three theaters were not listed (quoted in Faghfoory 1993:295).1 These figures show two phenomena: an overall increase in the number of movie houses nationwide and the predominance of Tehran in film exhibition. Film production was also concentrated there. This dominance decreased in the 1930s, but throughout the life of Iranian cinema, Tehran remained the overwhelming center of film production and the central market for film exhibition and film culture—the Hollywood of Iran, Tallywood. Almost all these theaters were equipped with only one 35mm film projector, which meant that the screening of each movie had to be stopped for each reel, creating several intermissions during which people could talk and eat. This turned moviegoing into an event. In October 1930, the government began to levy a tax on movie tickets: 15 percent for Tehran and 10 percent elsewhere (Javdani 2002/1381:26). Ethnoreligious affiliation and multinational connections continued to play an important role in movie-house ownership and film programming. In 1929 Turkish consulates complained that Armenian movie exhibitors in Tehran, Tabriz, Rasht, and elsewhere were politicizing their screenings by programming films that were against Turkey and in favor of Armenian national aspirations. As a result, the government investigated the Armenian exhibitors (Baharlu 2000/1379:34). Along with the rise in the number of cinemas came an increase in the volume of imported films. In 1928 the United States exported 133 movies to Iran, a tr ansitio nal c inema

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while France exported 100, Germany 30, and the Soviet Union 32. These figures later rose dramatically. In 1929, the United States exported 227 movies, while France exported 110, Germany 47, and the Soviet Union 57. Although imports decreased in 1930 due to a worldwide depression, the American first ranking remained intact, with 145 exports, compared to France’s 94, Germany’s 60, and the Soviet Union’s 42 (Issari 1989:66). American screen supremacy continued throughout both Pahlavi periods. But many of these imports were junk prints exported to Iran by intermediaries. In addition to the low quality, age, and lag time of these prints, the quality of projection and sound systems left a lot to be desired, and censorship did not help. The travelogue of Caroline Singer and Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge provides a rare description of the reception environment in the mid-1930s in Iran. There are two talking-picture theatres and six small theatres in which antiquated silent pictures and speechless “talkies” are exhibited. Nowhere, however, are news-reels shown. And all films containing intimations of opposition to established authority or scenes of mob violence are banned. The talking-picture theatre is crowded with veiled women, a few sharing boxes with men, but the remainder sitting in a women’s section which, black with chadars [sic], is blacker than the night. The “talkie” is a Hollywood film whose dialogue and tunes are, because of faulty apparatus, a series of baffling squawks. But there are captions in Farsi, French, and Russian. It is a gangster story. Murders and ­arrests— the latter a victory for authority—take place in the rear room of a cabaret upon whose dance-floor girls, wearing little more than plumes, goggle and wiggle before diners. . . . The adjoining box is over-flowing with Sheiks [“Kurdish sheiks” whom Reza Shah had apparently relocated to Tehran], among them leathery old men who, witnessing their first ­moving-picture, are horrified. . . . Such pictures are all right for men. But they are terrible for our women to see. (1936:34) The number of people attending cinemas grew along with the urban populations in Tehran and in the major cities where the movie houses were located. Tehran’s population increased from 210,000 in 1930 to 540,087 in 1941; likewise, the population of the second largest city, Tabriz, increased from 150,000 to 213,000 and that of the third largest city, Isfahan, increased from 80,000 to 204,598 in the same period (Ehlers and Floor 1993:263). This rapid growth resulted from a drop in infant mortality and rapid urbanization, with high migration from rural areas. Internal migration was particularly high among ethnoreligious minorities, who contributed disproportionately to the cadre of 200

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people who produced, exhibited, and watched movies and who provided other forms of entertainment. For example, of the ninety-five thousand Iranian Jews in 1948, 60 percent lived in Tehran, Isfahan, and Hamadan (Banooni and Simnegar 1996:33). According to the statistics by Tehran Municipality, in 1931 the residents of Tehran went to the movies 1,032,973 times and paid 20,963,150 rials (Baharlu 2000/1379:47). If we use the population of 210,000 for 1930, then on average each person went to the movies nearly five times. Other factors related to Reza Shah’s Westernization also contributed to increases in audience. The decree of 1932 that banned Muharram processions and taziyeh passion plays and limited religious performances to sermons and lamentations removed major sources of public entertainment and socialization in which Muslims of all ages and of both genders could participate, usually free of charge. This created a need for inexpensive, mixed-gender public entertainment, such as the movies. But since religious prohibitions made the movies off limits to most women, moviegoing became an activity for young males, until the unveiling decree of 1936 increased womens’ movie attendance. Reza Shah’s policy of “one nation under Shah” gave protection to minorities, allowing a freer public presence, including at the movies. This, too, must have increased movie attendance.2 Reza Shah’s policies created an enormous increase in the numbers of the intelligentsia, which by the end of his reign constituted 7 percent of the country’s total labor force. As Ervand Abrahamian observes, this allowed educated members of society to develop into a middle class that “shared similar educational, occupational, and economic backgrounds. The intelligentsia was thus transformed from a stratum into a social class with similar relationships to mode of production, the means of administration, and the process of modernization” (1982:145–46). This emerging middle class with its ideology of modernity, modernization, and secular nationalism—and its higher income— constituted the missing link that would eventually transform Iranian cinema from an artisanal cottage industry to the hybrid industrial enterprise it became during the second Pahlavi period. All these factors led to the steady increase in cinema attendance throughout the country despite a worldwide economic depression and government restrictions on imports (Issari 1989:66). If the intelligentsia during the Qajar era had opposed the government because of its resistance to modern reforms, the Pahlavi-era middle-class intelligent­ sia joined the government to implement reforms. As Ali Gheissari notes, “The intelligentsia regarded him [Reza Shah] as a secular patriot capable of putting an end to political divisions and social chaos, isolating the forces of traditionalism, and limiting the power of the ulama” (1998:45). Disenchanta tr ansitio nal c inema

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ment with the new government surfaced widely only later when the Shah consolidated his authoritarian rule and became a dictator. As the number of cinemas, the supply of movies, audience size, and class capital rose, a dense cross-pollination of exhibition, reception, and promotion practices ensued. Exhibitors differentiated themselves by the facilities and services they offered in their movie houses, the types of movies they showed, and the class and ethnicity of the customers they attracted. The Dariush and the Baharestan, for example, both began as open-air cinemas that closed down after the summer. Many exhibitors found it necessary to upgrade the quality of their staff and amenities. Grand Cinema, Sanati Cinema, and Pari Cinema targeted female audiences by making their establishments physically safe and morally wholesome. The Palace Cinema established itself in 1931 as a premier sound cinema and the first especially constructed, opulent “movie palace.” Gradually, cinemas broke into three main classes. First-class cinemas showed more serious foreign movies, often in their original languages, while second- and third-class cinemas showed popular foreign features, serial films, and, later on, movies produced in Iran—all of them dubbed into Persian. This tripartite classification became institutionalized with the “Regulations for Cinemas” of 1936, which dictated a higher grade and more diverse film programming for the first-class cinemas: newsreels, educational and documentary films, and feature movies. There were geographic and demographic underpinnings to these developments, which intensified the urbanization trends that had begun in the Qajar era. One of the most important consequences of Reza Shah’s urban modernization was the “emergence of a socioeconomic dualism between the traditional bazaar and modern ‘Westernized’ shopping areas along the new avenues” (Ehlers and Floor 1993:267). Traditional social spaces (mosques, schools, bazaars, and public bathhouses) were generally located in the old parts of towns, while modern ones (hospitals, banks, universities, department stores, shopping arcades, and movie theaters) were concentrated in the new sectors. There were movie houses in poorer areas of towns, but there were fewer of them and they were second- and thirdclass cinemas, while first-class cinemas and movie palaces were located only along the new and modern avenues, such as Lalehzar in Tehran and Chahar­ bagh in Isfahan. Exhibitors also differentiated themselves by the movies they screened and the national cinemas in which they specialized. In Tehran, for example, Farus Cinema showed movies principally made in Russia and the Caucasus. Viatcheslaw Tourjansky’s Michel Strogoff (1926, starring Ivan Mosjoukine) was its most famous film. Sepah Cinema, on the other hand, showed chiefly 202

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American movies and film serials (Tarzan films among them), while Iran Cinema screened European—particularly French—movies and movie serials. Upgrading and specialization helped exhibitors differentiate themselves to attract middle-class audiences. After the movies’ novelty wore off, however, educated Iranians became less inclined to attend cinemas, for they considered moviegoing to have become a lower-class pastime, partly due to the generally low quality of the imported films and the local productions and partly due to the still lowbrow exhibition spaces. This created a new challenge for the exhibitors: how to attract a better class of customers to their establishments?

The Rise of the Middle Class and Film and Media Cross-fertilization Qajar-era exhibitors discovered that media cross-fertilization, such as screening films along with other media and arts, attracted audiences. Rhizomatic crossovers were undergirded by the top-down propagandistic and moralistic uses of film and cinema, which the Pahlavi state favored when it passed its sartorial and cultural decrees and created such state-run agencies as the Society for National Heritage and Public Opinion Guidance Organization (pogo). Driven by free enterprise, private-sector funding, and state support, cross-pollination circulated film content as well as the medium of film as such. It also consolidated the circulation of capital and labor. Media crossover contributed to a wider acceptance of Western entertainment and of modernity. This section discusses only foreign-movie exhibition; the following section will deal with the domestic film industry. Cross-pollination took many forms, all driven by the challenge of attracting a better class of clientele. Fortuitously, this coincided with the emergence of the middle class. Some inchoate forms of crossover had emerged during the Qajar period, but exhibitors were not sufficiently sophisticated, nor did a large base of well-off spectators exist. Pahlavi-era exhibitors linked their offerings to literature, movie stars, ethnoreligious affiliations, newspaper serialization, news events, special educational and fund-raising events, and theatrical and musical performances. The chief vehicle of cross-fertilization early on was advertising: newspaper ads, flyers, posters, billboards, and sometimes spectacles involving ballyhoo, barkers, musicians, and planes. A foreign movie called The Emperor of Sahara (Emperatur-e Sahra), shown at Sepah Cinema in Tehran, was advertised in the daily newspaper Hesar-e Adl starting on 28 May 1930. The arrival of the movie was touted in breathless copy as though the emperor himself—along with his a tr ansitio nal c inema

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millionaire companion, Genevieve, and her beautiful daughter, Marguerite— were arriving in Tehran to grace the cinema like high-class guests. However, the film print failed to materialize for several weeks, forcing the film exhibitor to concoct an elaborate story that he published as a telegram in the same paper, notifying the readers that the plane carrying the emperor had crashed near Alexandria, Egypt, and that the millionaire and her daughter had fallen ill. Other ads and notices by the exhibitor kept the film’s title in circulation further. Four months later, another telegram from the emperor himself was printed in the paper announcing his arrival at Sepah Cinema and his readiness to receive spectators. On the afternoon of Friday, 3 October 1930 (11 Mehr 1309), the day of the screening, a Junkers plane flew over the capital distributing a cloud of flyers that reminded the residents about the joyous screening of the long-awaited movie that night (Sa’dvandian 2001:462–67). Movies were linked through advertising to the books they were drawn from, with which educated Iranians were familiar. Since the majority of the population at this time (mid-1920s to mid-1930s) was illiterate, this connection indicates that exhibitors sought middle-class audiences with sufficient class capital to enjoy literature-based foreign movies and to appreciate the cosmopolitan aspirations they aroused. An advertisement in Ettela’at from 1926, for example, touted the screening of Rasputin in Tehran’s Grand Cinema by announcing, “Seeing is believing. You have read the history of Rasputin, the famous starets of Czarist Russia; now come and see his life and crimes with your own eyes.”3 In 1927, another ad in the same newspaper for the same cinema promoted a film based on Victor Hugo’s works: “Glad Tidings to the Lovers of Literature and Owners of Taste. . . . Few people in the world have not heard of the name and the high rank of Victor Hugo, the great writer of France and the world, or have not read his works.”4 An ad for Sepah Cinema declared that Attila is the “only film that is completely based on written history,” in the production of which two thousand women, ten thousand brave men, and ten thousand horses had participated.5 The ad claimed that in its first screenings, Attila had attracted ten thousand spectators in Tehran alone.6 Even though this figure is probably exaggerated, it gives an indication of the audience size that the exhibitor thought realistic enough for publication and impressive enough to bring in more spectators. Iran Cinema’s strategy was to exhibit European movies and serials based on famous novels, such as Count of Monte Cristo (1934), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), The Three Musketeers (1935), Les Misérables (1935), Michel Strogoff (1926), and Fritz Lang’s two classic films, Die Niebelungen: Siegfried (1924) and Metropolis (1926). To attract Westernized spectators, from its inception in 1926, 204

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Iran Cinema refused to play Persian music. Apparently, it began with a solo piano player and then added gramophone recordings. Mayak Cinema showed Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Baghdad (1924), starring Douglas Fairbanks, and Harry Pollard’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1928) (Shoai 1976a/2535:22–23). If the Iranian elite gradually became disinclined to attend the movies, foreigners living in Iran were regular customers; silent movies with intertitles were comprehensible reminders of home. The idea that literature-based movies produced the best cinema persisted throughout the first Pahlavi period and well into the second. In 1948 a reviewer in the daily newspaper Kayhan declared that a film could be called “good” if “its story is written by a famous writer and is adapted from a famous book” (quoted in Tahaminejad 1973b/1352:12). The literary connection proved crucial to the Iranian new-wave movement in the 1970s. Ethnoreligious connections also mattered. A large newspaper ad in 1931 for Sepah Cinema announced the “greatest historical film based on the holy Bible.” Called Ardeshir, Esther, and Mordecai (Ardeshir, Ester, va Mordekhai), this “Eastern movie,” the ad boasted, was based on a play written by “the famous playwright” Jean Racine.7 Here, literary and biblical references joined “Eastern,” the latter attribute appealing to Iranians’ wish to see their own history and mythology represented in the movies (Esther and Mordecai are buried in Hamadan, Iran). During this period, several biblical movies were promoted on that basis—tales that were well known to Iranian Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Sepah Cinema cleverly advertised its screening of Jacob’s Well (Chah-e Yaqub) by analogizing the movie itself to a well and by creating a publicity contest about it. The contest was based on a puzzle that went something like this: What is four thousand meters deep at night and in daytime fits inside a can only one meter across? The winners of the puzzle contest were admitted to the screening free of charge. 8 In June 1926, Grand Cinema advertised in three languages (English, Armenian, and French) the screening of what appears to be Alice Guy’s early French movie The Life and Death of Our Savior, Jesus Christ (La Vie et la Mort de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, 1906). That the ad was not in Persian indicates that the exhibitor was addressing Iranian and foreign Christians.9 The most prominent ethnoreligious intertextual references were surprisingly not to the Islamic world or to Muslims, who formed the majority of the population, but to Jews and to the stories of the Jewish people, as demonstrated by the above titles. This was due to the large number of films with Judeo-Christian themes produced in the West; it may also indicate the large number of Jews among Iranian movie importers and exhibitors, as well as a tr ansitio nal c inema

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among urban audiences. But the facts are hard to come by. One movie was promoted because of its Islamic content. Baharestan Cinema touted a film called The Crusades (Jangha-ye Salibi), which apparently depicted the “bravery and magnanimity” of the Muslim warrior Saladin toward Christian fighters, including Richard the Lionheart.10 Another form of cross-pollination was to run movie serial stories in newspapers, which allowed audiences to keep up with the story if they had missed one episode. Thus entertainment and information, films and newspapers, were linked, one reinforcing the other. The ad in Ettela’at for Secrets of the Hidden Woman (Asrar-e Zan-e Makhfi), starring Ruth Roland, announced that the movie was being shown in Iran for the first time; it also indicated the story’s serialization in the same newspaper.11 The ad copy emphasized the differing modes of comprehension and enjoyment that each medium afforded, as it ended by stating: “Read the serialized story in Ettela’at carefully and see the film with your own eyes in the Grand Cinema, for reading and watching have their own special pleasure.”12 The newspaper summary of the film began a week before the screening, under the captivating title of “Revenge Drama.” 13 The staggered timing of the newspaper summary with the film’s opening was perhaps calculated to entice the readers to go and see the movie. In 1928, an ad for a seven-reeler French comedy called Adventures (Havades) at Grand Cinema took a different tack. After describing the movie with elaborate exaggeration, it added: “Readers who enjoy the summary should come to Grand Cinema to see the story and thousands of other visual details, which cannot be stated in words.”14 Sepah Cinema announced that in honor of the anniversary of Reza Shah’s coronation, it was screening “the world’s most magnificent movie,” The Wandering Jew (Yahudi-ye Sargardan), whose “masterpiece” of a story was being serialized in the periodical Iran.15 The ad invoked dense intertextual references consisting of allusions to a special occasion, to literature, and to newspaper serialization. From early on, film screenings became a standard part of the structure of celebration, entertainment, education, and fund-raising, creating cross-­ pollinations and intertextualities of different sorts—moralistic, pedagogical, and civic. Iranian modernists in particular heavily promoted such dense uses of film. As noted, in 1909, Zahir al-Dowleh gave a fund-raising party for the families of the pro-constitution mujahedin fighters during which live music was played and silent films were projected. Also in the Qajar era, movie screening in traditional coffeehouses integrated this new form of Western entertainment with ancient Persian storytelling. Adding sound to silent movies with live translators, orchestras, and gramophone recordings created a dense, 206

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cross-fertilizing connection of media and the performing arts. These sorts of connections led to the kind of specialization and professionalization that would make possible the emergence of an entertainment industry in later years. During the first Pahlavi period, some of these fund-raising practices continued. Public screenings were held for local athletes in Tehran,16 for earthquake victims in Khorasan,17 or for flood victims in Tabriz.18 Movies were also screened at public events that celebrated important affairs or people, such as at the hundredth anniversary of the birth of a famous French chemist, PierreEugène-Marcellin Berthelot, in November 1927 in the hall of the Ministry of Education. Hosted by the speaker of the parliament, Mirza Hosain Khan Pirnia, the event was lavishly staged and involved speeches and the screening of an educational film about the chemist.19 As I elaborate below, the propaganda arm of Reza Shah’s government, the pogo, also used film screenings to lure audiences to its various civic functions and to enliven dull patriotic lectures. Movie houses and theaters often occupied the same venues, so film and theater cross-pollinated. In the early 1930s, plays were staged in more than thirty locations in Tehran, four of which were movie houses.20 The most famous of these multifunctional sites was the Grand Hotel auditorium, which during both the Qajar and first Pahlavi periods was used for film screenings and theatrical and musical performances. Eventually theaters suffered greatly because people preferred talkies to traditional plays. Some older theaters and theater troupes collapsed, but new venues also opened, such as the Zoroastrian Theater, where the modernist troupe Jame’eh-ye Barbad (Barbad Society) performed.21 Newspapers created bizarre crossovers by sponsoring plays and concerts, which they widely promoted in their pages and whose overpriced tickets, incredible as it may seem, they imposed on well-to-do spectators and officials by blackmailing them (Naficy 2002/1381:246–47). Such extortions from a powerful but fearful ruling class occurred because most newspapers could not survive on their income from subscriptions, advertising, and single-issue sales (343). Film exhibitors were not sufficiently confident to risk alienating the press by fighting their attempted extortion. They then attempted to attract the emerging middle class, including women, to their cinemas by increasing ticket prices. This was justified by new theaters upgrading their facilities to match Western standards and by instituting gender segregation measures to attract women and families. With the conversion to sound, these theaters were transformed into “movie palaces,” the first being Palace Cinema, which a tr ansitio nal c inema

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opened in Tehran in 1931. The higher ticket prices that movie palaces charged kept the lower classes out and increased high-class attendance. Iranian cine­ mas had traditionally charged different prices for different sections of the hall, with the seats farthest from the screen charged the most. While this accommodated different classes of spectators under one roof, it had a drawback for the middle and upper classes because the people who had paid less would migrate to the unfilled higher-price seats immediately after the start of the feature films, causing resentment among those who had paid more for their seats. Although most theaters did not have all the amenities, all of them moved toward providing them. So ticket prices rose, from two to three qerans during the Qajar era to ten qerans in the mid-1920s, causing accusations in the press of price gouging. This was particularly hard on women and families. A. Salimi, a reviewer critical of high ticket prices, explained the importance of movie houses to the lower classes: “In the age in which cinema is one of life’s necessities and a principal agent for moral improvement, enlightenment, and general education, movie houses are like schools. Indeed, they must make up for the 10 night-schools that the Ministry of Education closed down last year!” (1929a/1308).

Commercial Feature Film Productions and Early Film Studios The first commercial film production companies were established in the first Pahlavi period. They produced only four silent features between 1929, when the first feature was shot in Iran, Ohanians’ Abi and Rabi, and 1934, when the first Persian talkie, The Lor Girl, produced by Irani and Sepanta in India, was imported and released in Iran. Between 1934 and 1937 only five sound features were produced, one in Iran and four by Sepanta in India. No other feature movie was produced until well past the end of the Second World War, in 1948. This meager output points to the artisanal situation of film production during this transition period. In fact, no commercial studio system like that in Hollywood ever developed in Iran, for the state involved itself heavily in cultural policy and in the regulation, production, and censorship of films, thus preventing the industry from evolving organically. Only individual studios were created, many of which did not last long enough to establish either a house style or a systematized production mode. There were a few major commercial movie companies, such as Pars Film Studio, which lasted for several decades and produced many films, that offered some sense of historical and 208

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stylistic continuity, or a “house style.” But these did not emerge until after the Second World War (Pars Film Studio started in 1949). In the first Pahlavi period individual entrepreneurs thus continued to play their pivotal roles, but this time as owners of single-film studios instead of as freelance jacks-of-alltrades. Cross-cultural exchange relations among immigrants, ethnic minorities, expatriates, and foreigners were instrumental in creating the Iranian feature film industry, as the following case studies of pioneers of fiction cinema demonstrate.

Ovanes Gregory Ohanians (1900–1961) and Perse Film Studio A Russian Armenian born in Eshqabad, Turkmenistan, Ohanians was apparently trained at the Cinema Academy of Moscow and had made a few films in Eshqabad. Unable to find work in the Soviet Union, however, he emigrated to Iran in 1929, where within a year he audaciously directed Iran’s first longform fictional film, Abi and Rabi, when he could barely speak Persian. There are contradictory reports by him and others about his true place of birth (some say he was born in Mashhad, Iran), date of birth (some give his birth date as 1901), name, genealogy, nationality, film training, and purported doctoral degree (once he claimed it was in medicine, another time in film studies).22 Like Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov, Ohanians provides an intriguing case study of the types of expedient cultural hybridity and self-fashioning strategies in which Westernized film pioneers engaged. What we know for sure is that with ceaseless effort, Ohanians created Tehran’s first film studio, established Iran’s first film acting school, and made not only newsreels for the government (with Khanbabkhan Motazedi) but also the first silent feature. He worked systematically. He trained his own talent, establishing the Film Acting Training Center (Parvareshgah-e Artisti-ye Sinema) in May 1930, with financial assistance from the Russian émigré Grisha Sakovar Lidzeh, who owned Mayak Cinema. The Department of Education (Edareh Ma’aref ) prevented Ohanians from calling his establishment a “school” (madreseh) because the curriculum failed to meet its standards. He ended up calling it a “training center” (parvareshgah) instead (Haidari 1991c–92:198). Around 150 students applied, 12 of whom (all men) completed the first cycle of instruction, which included classes in acting, photography, filmmaking, gymnastics, boxing, fencing, ballet, Eastern and European dancing, and swimming. The curriculum was likely influenced by the Soviet film system, which Ohanians had observed. Ohanians and his first batch of students produced several short nonfiction a tr ansitio nal c inema

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and fiction films as part of their training, which they exhibited to an excited invited audience of civic leaders, parliamentarians, and journalists. These included films about the lives of three poor people who were on the verge of death due to hunger, about a jailbreak, about a robbery, about a comic and illiterate dentist at work in his office, and various performance films of sports and demonstrations of physical prowess. The ideas of some of these shorts would later be incorporated into the plot of Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor. In the same year, 1930, Ohanians established his Perse Film Studio, and with help from his student actors he wrote, acted in, directed, and edited the first silent fiction movie in Iran, Abi and Rabi, which the veteran newsreel cameraman Motazedi filmed and which Lidzeh produced. No copy of this slapstick comedy starring a tall, thin man and a short, chubby man (played by Ohanians’s students Mohammad Zarrabi and Gholamali Sohrabifard) exists, for the film print was lost in a fire in Mayak Cinema in 1932. Reputedly modeled after the Danish comedy couple Harald Madsen and Carl Schenström, the film, shot in different outdoor locations in Tehran, showed modern buildings and streets, such as Cheraq Gaz Street, the tramway to Rey, and pilgrims at the Shah Abd al-Azim Shrine in Rey, where the adults prepared meals and, ewers in hand, went to the washrooms and children played around the pool. The film also contained disjointed comic scenes strung together with documentary ones without a coherent narrative. The comic scenes included such episodes as Abi (tall and thin) drinking an excessive amount of water from a garden hose but Rabi’s belly inflating, or the short and plum Rabi, flattened by a heavy stoneroller, being restored to normal size by Abi’s hammering. According to Moradi, Ohanians’s rival, the movie was just a haphazard compilation of films that students of the school had shot for their class exercises, as well as scenes from foreign movies, including Mickey Mouse clips (Moradi 2000/1379:52–53). Since no print of it exists, it is difficult to sort out what the film really contained. However, from these descriptions it appears that this first act of Iranian narrative self-representation, produced by an émigré filmmaker, was as composite as the director himself. Mayak Cinema screened Abi and Rabi on 1 January 1931, preceded by newsreel footage titled Tehran and Environs. Spectators were delighted. Apparently, Ohanians had hired a young man to act as a dilmaj and give transitional commentary, such as “The doctor now enters,” and to announce the film’s ending by saying: “With this, we declare the end of the film” (Baharlu 2000/1379:43). Reports indicate that Abi and Rabi likely did not have any intertitles or ending credits, necessitating the services of a narrator, in part because some of the images were too dark to see. 210

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Despite the film’s collage textuality and technical and narrative flaws, Iranian reviewers celebrated its self-representational prowess. Ettesamzadeh, a reviewer for the film magazine Setareh-ye Jahan (Star of the World), tapped into the nationalist discourse of Reza Shah and praised the movie for showing both the modern and historical sights of Tehran. Another reviewer, Reza Kamal, spoke about the “enormous delight and ecstasy” that he had experienced when watching this domestic movie that by its mere existence had countered both the Orientalists’ negative opinion of Iran and Iranians’ own self-­loathing. He graphically elaborated: “When I saw on the screen the student actors and the pleasant scenery of our dear capital city, my delight and ecstasy exceeded limits. It was as though after a period of immigration during which I had endured the pain of exile and suffering I had returned to my familiar homeland and encountered once again the beloved faces of my countrymen. . . . I will never forget this experience. It was good because it was Iranian . . . , because it showed that we have the talent and capability for accomplishing anything” (quoted in Omid 1995/1374:45). Domestic filmmaking had become part of the “accomplishments” of the Iranian middle class, with which they could counter the epistemic violence of Western self-othering. The incorporation of documentary scenes of urban life and modernity in fiction movies, a characteristic of the first Pahlavi period, not only helped document the emergence of modernity, capitalism, and middle-class life but also, as in the Qajar films, Iranians’ wish to appear modern and to become modern. These scenes also inscribed the sensory complexity of urbanization and modernization in Iran and the textual complexity of mixed-genre movies that combined the features of the cinema of attraction with those of the cinema of narrative integration. Abi and Rabi generated good income (twelve times the film’s negative cost) as well as good reviews, energizing Ohanians to continue movie productions. An earnest institution builder, he created the International Institute of Motion Pictures of Asia, which offered “honorary doctorates” to applicants who paid their fees, purportedly recruiting noted figures to serve on its board, including the writer and historian Said Naficy, a member of the Society for National Heritage, and the journalist and publisher of Ettela’at, Abbas Masudi. He also created the International Federation of Scientific Societies, a bogus organization whose ideology was “absolute cosmopolitanism without regard to nationality, religion, politics, social caste, and belief” (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:116). The following year, 1931, Ohanians offered the second term of his film school, in which Naficy taught a history of costumes and from which eigha tr ansitio nal c inema

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teen more students graduated. He attempted to organize classes for women and children as well, but without success. One group worked with him on his next comic silent feature project Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor; another group, bent on drama, worked with Moradi on his silent feature The Capricious Lover (Bolhavas, 1934). The filming of Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor for Perse Film Studio was undertaken under highly artisanal but capitalist conditions. Ohanians sold forty shares to investors, each worth fifty tomans. He engaged in the first instance of product placement by prominently displaying the film posters and marquee of the Luna Park Cinema, in which one of the last sequences of the film was shot (apparently free of charge). He also showcased the storefront of the Omega watch dealer, accompanied by a line from Haji that endorses the watch, for which Ohanians apparently received money from the dealer (Omid 1995/1374:59–60). In an utterly twenty-first-century move, the watch was incorporated into the film’s plot. Ohanians faced technical difficulties, but his ingenuity triumphed. His cinematographer was Georges Pavlov Potemkine, a White Russian émigré. The camera he used was at least twenty years old, with three lenses, only one of which worked. It was hand cranked, a deficiency that was overcome when one of Ohanians’s students, a tailor, attached a hand-cranked sewing machine to the camera to obtain a smoother and more even filming speed. At the time, it took up to eighteen months to import negative film stock from Europe through the port of Khorramshahr, often under damaging conditions. Ohanians and Potemkine resorted to using a mixture of negative and positive stock, resulting in uneven contrasts. Finally, filming was sometimes interrupted because of a lack of funds, raw stock, or proper equipment, forcing Perse Film Studio to pick up newsreel work for the government to finance the feature project, which took more than a year and a half to complete (Omid 1995/1374:49). Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor is a technically sophisticated and delightful comedy that self-reflexively counters negative views of cinema. Stylistically composite, the film contains tableaus and shots that rely on the shock of display (features of the cinema of attraction) along with a moving camera, mobile frames, continuity filming and editing, and dissolves, features of the cinema of narrative integration, embodying what Tom Gunning calls the “dialectical structure of shock and flow” (2006:312). The story revolves around a traditional religious man named Haji (Habibollah Morad) who goes from hating cinema to loving it. He is ignorant about the contemporary world; and although he professes morality and honesty, he is lecherous. This character 212

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became one of the most enduring types in Iranian cinema, and appeared with some variations in many movies.23 Haji appeared in modernist literature and pop culture; in 1945 Sadeq Hedayat made him the main character of his novel Haji Aqa, transforming him into the “other of modern masculinity”—­ hypocritically religious, filthy, lecherous, greedy, polygamous, and misogynistic. True believers in Islam must have been offended by this character. In Ohanians’s film, the haji character remains an inchoate but still definite type. His appearance is syncretically both Western and traditional: following Reza Shah’s sartorial edict, the haji wears a Western suit and a Pahlavi hat; at the same time, however, he sports a religiously prescribed beard. His older daughter, Parvin (Asia Qestanian), wears no veil in one sequence and wears the chador loosely in another in which she engages with her father in a sexual game, while Haji’s younger daughter, Pari (played by Zoma Ohanians, the director’s daughter), is without a veil. Both female actors are Armenian. This cinematic unveiling accorded with new trends, anticipating the official unveiling edict a few years later. The modern younger girl wants to dance to gramophone recordings with the comic male servant. Parvin is enrolled in a film acting school, along with her fiancé, Parviz (Abbas Tahbaz). The haji’s household thus represents a microcosm of society, one caught in the transition between tradition and modernity (his wife is curiously and unexplainably absent). The brunt of the film’s critical humor comes at the expense of the Muslim traditionalists represented by Haji. The film is self-inscriptional and self-reflexive. It begins with Ohanians himself acting as a movie director who, seated behind a desk in his film acting school, is stymied in his search for an idea for his next movie. He acts out, writes, and rewrites the scenes, alternately holding the pen in his left and right hand, an ambidextrousness that underscores his versatility and hybridity in other cultural realms (figure 51). He looks thoroughly Western, almost like a dandy: clean-shaven in a white shirt and tie. The same is true of his male secretary and typist, mustachioed and more of a dandy, the first representation of this type in Iranian cinema. One of the director’s acting students, Parviz, comes to the director’s rescue by suggesting that they make a movie about his future father-in-law, Haji, who opposes the involvement of his daughter Parvin with Parviz in film acting. Accepting the suggestion, the diegetic Ohanians contrives with Parviz a story that involves Haji’s servant stealing his watch, forcing him to chase the culprit throughout the capital city. This chase narrative gave the extradiegetic Ohanians the excuse to showcase various modern streets and places of Tehran, such as Lalehzar and Es­ tambul Avenues, the City Park, Tupkhaneh Square, and Pars Café—some of a tr ansitio nal c inema

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51  Early cinematic self-reflexivity and directorial self-inscription: Ohanians as a dandified diegetic film director acts out a scene as he writes the screenplay. He is wearing his glasses on his head. Frame enlargement from Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor 52  Haji examines with curiosity the breast of a mannequin wearing Western fashion. Frame enlargement from Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor

them famous dandy hangouts. Such depictions of Iranian modernity and urbanity suited both the state’s policy of syncretic Westernization and the selfperception of the emerging middle classes. Filming in these real places also provided rare documents of what Tehran looked like in the early 1930s. In addition, the chase narrative gave the director the opportunity to feature visual shock and the display of colorful and entertaining people: young gymnasts, an Indian yogi’s magic acts, and a group of musicians playing for a provocatively dressed female dancer (some of which is filmed in extreme close-up, the first musical number in Iranian cinema). It also gave Ohanians an opportunity to incorporate one of his student’s film ideas: Haji’s visit to a modern dentist, where he engages in sexual play with the life-size cardboard cutout of a Westernized female mannequin (figure 52). Finally, the chase narrative gave the director an opportunity to satisfy his audience’s increasing appetite for action-driven stories, one whetted by American action and adventure movies. Perhaps imitating Fairbanks, the well-known acrobat Mirahmad Safavi, one of Ohanians’s first acting students, performed a daring jump off the high balcony of a café onto a moving truck, an event watched by so many onlookers that over two dozen policemen were needed to control the crowd.24 214

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53a and 53b  The transformative power of cinematic selfrepresentation. Haji cannot believe his own image on the screen. However, when the mixed-gender spectators, fashionably dressed in Western clothing, applaud his movie, he changes from opposing cinema to loving it. Frame enlargements from Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor

This episode is both a documentary event and a filmed story that relies on combining the shock of display with narrative storytelling. It also self-­ reflexively makes fun of early film audiences’ penchant for sunflower seeds, for it shows two mesmerized onlookers who break so many seeds while watching the thief’s jump that the hulls they spit out form a huge pile on the back of another onlooker standing in front of them.25 At the same time, the film intertextually refers to Ohanians’s own earlier film Abi and Rabi by showing two onlookers, one of whom is very tall and the other very short (perhaps these are the same actors as in that film). During the haji’s search, unbeknownst to him a movie crew is filming him. At the end they manage to lure him into a movie house to see the result. When he realizes that he has been brought into a cinema, a place of vulgar and sacrilegious entertainment, he is upset but curious (figures 53a and 53b). When he discovers that what the audience is watching is the film of his own search for the thief—at the conclusion of which he is recognized by them and widely applauded—he changes his mind. When the film within the film is over, the director Ohanians appears in front of the modern-looking male and female spectators (with some dandies among them) to answer their quesa tr ansitio nal c inema

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tions. One person asks a comic question that seems to cast aspersion on cinema’s ability to entertain: “What is the difference between cinema and mixed nuts [ajil]?,” to which Ohanians replies—invoking the pedagogic discourse about film—that film cures mental ailments while mixed nuts cause physical ailments, requiring surgery. Then, Haji comes up and reconciles both with the director and with the movies by declaring his 180-degree turnaround: “Cinema is one of the most important means of educating and improving public morals. Since I was cured by cinema, from today onward I will devote all my intellectual powers to this industry.” He acquiesces to the wedding of Parvin to her fiancé and to their acting in the movies, wishing them a dozen children, all of whom, he hopes, will become movie stars. At this point, Pari (Ohanians’s own daughter) joyfully says: “Well done, dad.” This intertitle, whose addressee is left indeterminate, creates an interesting moment of selfreflexive ambiguity: Is the girl congratulating her diegetic father, the haji, for changing his mind about modernity and the important role of cinema in its propagation, or is she praising her real-life father, Ohanians, for directing the first feature fiction film in Iran? Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor owes something to Soviet cinema. Ohanian’s idea of having a film crew self-reflexively film his subjects across the cityscape, as well as his rendition of the modern city, are reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s seminal documentary The Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s Kino-­Apparatom, 1929), and the film’s melodramatic acting is reminiscent of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s movies. Haji encounters in the final Lacanian scene—the first in Iranian cinema—his own self on the screen, whom he happily recognizes and with whom he readily identifies. In a feat of Eisenstein-style editing, the film cuts several times between the scenes of Haji and spectators watching and key scenes of the film, which we, the extradiegetic spectators, have already seen. What this editing strategy accomplishes is to suture us into the film, so that we now will see from Haji’s point of view what we had seen from our own. Because of this alignment of the gazes, the extradiegetic spectators tend to side with the diegetic spectators and with Haji. This autoidentification is a potent instrument of empowerment and selfing as it nominates the self—Iranians— to be the proper subject both of filmic representation and of filmic spectatorship, both of which are components of modernity’s subjectivity. This feat of self-representation is also empowering to the filmmaking subject, Ohanians. The sequence augurs the serious beginning of reversing the cross-cultural epistemic violence and othering engendered by cinema and of creating a modern national identity with cinema. Haji does not find his watch (the director returns that to him at the end), but he jubilantly and assuredly finds cinema, 216

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filmic subjectivity, and himself, as reflected in and refracted by film. What he is cured of by cinema is the Iranian sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West and of absence of filmic representation. However, as in all mirror scenes, recognition and applause is accompanied by misrecognition and alienation, which is heightened in cross-cultural mirroring. This would hold particularly true for the religious and traditional strata of society, who would not find empowering representations of themselves either in Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor or in Haji’s conversion to a cinema lover. This first feature-length fictional movie negotiates between tradition and modernity, between the presentational style of a cinema of attraction and the representational style of classical realism, between artisanal and semi-­ industrial production modes, and between silent and sound cinemas. Stylistically, it is driven both by presentational and representational visual regimes. Long after the demise of the cinema of attraction in the West, Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor is filled with this mode’s techniques, where the audience is made to witness acts of diegetic display (the acrobat jumping off the high building, gymnasts performing, the yogi engaging in magic acts) and of cinematic display (car chases, the sudden disappearance and appearance of characters, acrobats in reverse motion jumping back up to form a human pyramid). The acting style, too, tends to be presentational, rather than representational, strengthening the films affiliation to the cinema of attraction, as does its shooting style, which contains many master shots and two-shots, instead of close-ups and shot–reverse shots. The film contains many digressions that both slow the forward movement of the plot and hamper the clarity and comprehension of the film, which signal the underdevelopment of modernity and the symptoms of narrative chaos that characterized artisanal cinema. These digressions and the various narrative lacunae give the film an oneiric, streamof-consciousness quality. At the same time, however, in the style of the best classic realist silent movies, the film contains many shots involving different viewpoints, including traveling shots from a moving car and what appear to be handheld shots. There are also several scenes involving a subjective camera, analogy, and externalized psychology (figure 54a, 54b, and 54c). These indicate modernist sophistication concerning individuality and individual subjectivity. Its sophisticated uses of filmic techniques turned Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor into an outstanding work of silent cinema, despite its narrative ellipses and detours and its broad slapstick comedy. Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor opened on 30 January 1934 in Tehran’s Royal Cinema, where it was introduced by Said Naficy, who stated: “This film, which a tr ansitio nal c inema

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54a, 54b, and 54c  Cinematic analogy by means of overlapping dissolves. Two dissolves of three shots create both an analogy between Haji’s head and a watermelon and a cinematic counterpart to a common Persian proverb that equates a dense person’s head to an empty-sounding watermelon. Frame enlargements from Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor

was made several years ago and with old equipment and systems, has many faults; however, it is an Iranian film that represents Iranian life. We recommend that Iranian artists be supported so that they can improve their shortcomings” (quoted in Omid 1995/1374:50). Naficy was pushing the ideology of the Society for National Heritage away from promoting and preserving ancient Iranian arts to supporting a modern art form. His critique of the technical faults of the film and his important call to aid domestic film­makers 218

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set the tone for much of the contemporary criticism that followed. But no one mentioned the story’s binary conflict between religious tradition and modernity in which modernity emerges triumphant—a first, and a conflict that would intensify in the Pahlavi period, both in society and on the screen. Some later critics, such as Mohammad Tahaminejad, saw in Ohanians’s politics the hand of “radical futurists,” who thought the solution to “problems of people like the haji is to have their daughters become actors.” He surmised that the film might have been an “exaggerated propaganda” vehicle to recruit more women to his acting school (Tahaminejad 1976/1355:116). In the interest of reaching a variety of audiences and because of Ohanians’s own multiple identities, this silent film ambitiously carried Persian, French, and Russian language intertitles and was accompanied by live or recorded music in the cinemas in which it played.26 The film decidedly constitutes an accented cinema in its artisanal production, the hybridized identity of its director, and its intertitles. The Persian intertitles are more accented than the French, for they contain a mixture of vernacular and formal Persian words, indicating Ohanians’s incomplete command of the language. Despite public enthusiasm, the exhibition of this exuberant and important movie proved a total failure. It was upstaged by the screening, two months earlier, of the first Persian-language talkie, The Lor Girl, which killed the prospects of both the film and its director. Colonel Maqasedzadeh Foruzin, the biggest investor in the movie (with twelve shares), who was credited as the principal producer, took away some of the film equipment from Perse Film Studio to offset his losses, and Morad, who starred as the haji, apparently took the film print as his payment. Despite the milestones that Ohanians had achieved, he was very discouraged by this turn of events and by the failure of his subsequent attempts to revive his film school and make additional movies. These sudden fluctuations in fortunes are characteristic of the artisanal production mode. Ohanians migrated to India in 1938, like the pioneer of the Qajar period cinema, Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi Tehrani, and like the pioneer of sound cinema, Sepanta. He found no success in India, where he proposed a multiple-camera synchronized system called Ohan Film, also without success. He entered Indian politics as the country was tumbling toward partition, for which the British apparently jailed him. After a decade of exile, he returned to Iran in 1947, more despondent than before. Soon, he converted to Islam, took the name Reza Mozhdeh, and tried to revive his film career, but to no avail. Then, he called himself Professor Mozhdeh (meaning “Glad Tidings”), claiming to specialize in hair loss cures a tr ansitio nal c inema

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and opening the Mozhdeh Beauty Shop in Tehran. While some customers were apparently happy with his cures, others complained to the Ministry of Justice, which asked him to produce his medical credentials. These proved to be bogus. After a trial, his beauty shop was closed down and he went out of business (Haidari 1989a/1368:154). Returning to moviemaking in the early 1960s, he proposed to the head of the Fine Arts Administration (faa), Mehrdad Pahlbod, to make a CinemaScope color movie based on his own play Reza Shah the Great (Reza Shah-e Kabir), which he wanted to dub into nine languages in honor of the upcoming twenty-fifth hundredth anniversary celebration that was in its initial planning stages. The faa denied him any assistance on the basis that it only supported documentary films (Haidari 1991a/1370:197). If the public did not take his claims of inventions seriously (among them, of a jet plane, a missile, and a flying saucer), it appears that the tax bureau did, for rumors have it that Ohanians died at the age of sixty-one from a heart attack caused by a very high tax bill, issued by the government, based on his widely publicized and inflated claims of extravagant inventions (Omid 1995/1374:54–56). In his last public pronouncement, he spelled out his vision of cinema: “Film has captured the past, present, and future, it enlivens history, and it displays the true beauty of nature. . . . It creates an intense desire in people for a better and higher life. Most importantly, it is one of the best and newest means of entertainment for the people of the East, particularly for Iranians, whose access to the means of education and entertainment, such as opera, concert, wholesome theater, museums, exhibitions, public parks, and conference halls is very limited” (quoted in Omid 1995/1374:55). He suggested structural changes for the industry: higher taxes on foreign movies and lower ones on domestic films. He also suggested a list of topics for future movies, which contained much of the canonical stories, fables, myths, and life stories of real and mythical figures of Iranian history. Among these were the lives of the pantheon poets Omar Khayyam, Mohammad Hafez Shirazi, and Abolqasem Ferdowsi; the destructive Mongol invasion of Iran; the stories of the mythical heroes Rostam, Sohrab, Amir Arsalan, and Hosain the Kurd; the stories of the famous popular romances Iskandarnameh and One Thousand and One Nights; and the love stories of Khosrow and Shirin and Bahram and Golandam. Many of these would become subjects of the movies in years to come, as filmmakers mined Iranian history and mythology for stories and characters. But Ohanians’s vision of cinema as an entertainment medium was not realized under Reza Shah, whose government was bent on instrumentalist and nationalistic uses of film, particularly of newsreels. 220

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The convoluted trajectory of Ohanians’s life and career is emblematic of the difficulties that artisanal and interstitial film entrepreneurs faced, of the types of identity crossover, camouflaging, and self-fashioning in which they engaged, and of the sort of situationist behavior and business practices that they employed to make movies in a transitional society generally suspicious of cinema and with a government and a business class still not convinced of the value of supporting such an enterprise.

Ebrahim Moradi (1899–1977) and His Studios Born in the port city of Anzali by the Caspian Sea, Moradi, like many cinema pioneers, was a politically active modernist; he was also an inventor, a tinkerer, and an entrepreneurial businessman. At age thirteen, he joined the radical Jangali movement in the north and for a time clerked for the Gilan Republic (Tahaminejad 1986/1365:177). After the Jangali defeat in 1917, he escaped into Russian exile with his father, at a time when Russia was undergoing its own revolution. This contact with the outside world jolted him and provided him with knowledge of new technologies and the modern arts. As a child, he had loved the few movies he had seen in Iran, but it was in the Soviet Union that he learned photography and printing, and on his return in 1922 he brought with him a camera, with which he began a photography career. He soon decided he wanted to make fiction movies. In 1928 he traveled to Moscow and Leningrad clandestinely—travel to a communist country was forbidden—where he obtained some film training and equipment. Within a year, he established Jahan Nama Studio in Anzali, the first film studio outside the capital, and began working on the preproduction of what became The Brother’s Revenge; or, Body and Soul (Enteqam-e Baradar ya Jesm va Ruh, 1930), the first real attempt at making a feature fiction movie in Iran (figure 55). The film concerns two brothers in love with the same woman. Through trickery one brother steals the woman and his brother’s property and kills his rival. Years pass, but the ghost, or soul, of the brother lives on and trains as a yogi to take revenge. According to Moradi’s screenplay (Moradi 2000/1379:1– 12), with his powerful eyes, shown in giant close-ups, the yogi is able to mesmerize people and to transform them. His ghostly presence is omnipresent as the movie’s ethical center, spouting moral lessons. When the woman repents and pleads with him for forgiveness and compassion, the yogi is merciless, condemning her to ten years of suffering, the equal of his. The ghost was an innovation that allowed Moradi to use to advantage the conjuring powers of cinema, including showing the ghost’s point of view and flashbacks. a tr ansitio nal c inema

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55  Ebrahim Moradi (center, looking to the camera) filming a scene of his feature film The Capricious Lover. Ahmad Gorji is on the bed, Ahmad Moradi is behind the camera, and Mohammadali Qotbi is second from left.

As an artisanal filmmaker, Moradi produced the film, wrote the screenplay, and photographed it. The casting of women posed a problem, particularly among the Muslims in a small town like Anzali. At the time, male actors performed the parts of women in theater. Moradi wanted realism, however, and he cast two Armenian women, Lida Matavousian and Jasmine Joseph. This innovation in casting became a general practice in early fiction cinema, one that Ohanians and others followed. He even engaged one of the actresses as a temporary wife (sigheh), to make the casting of unrelated women and men in the same movie religiously lawful. This innovation was tried again in the heyday of the Islamic Revolution in the early 1980s. He began filming but ran out of money and had to end the film at fiftyfive minutes. It was screened for only two nights in the Armenian Hall in Anzali and for one night in the city of Rasht, both to small audiences (Omid 1995/1374:86). No copy of the film exists. Moradi then moved to Tehran to raise funds to either finish The Brother’s Revenge or to start a new movie. To publicize his presence as a filmmaker in the capital city, he published an article in the daily Ettela’at, which spelled out the value of cinema for the country’s economy and prestige: “The film industry can produce wealth and employ thousands of people on a daily basis. It can also improve public morals, create courage, patriotism, and national self-respect, and present past history and today’s accomplishments and scientific discoveries to local and foreign viewers. In today’s civilized world, this type of fine art is also part of public necessities. . . . A country needs film studios as much as it needs sugar cane factories or textile factories [an apparent jab at Reza Shah’s industrialization projects]” (quoted in Omid 1995/1374:87).27 This article brought him to the attention of some students from Ohanians’s Film Acting Training Center who were more interested in making dramas than comedies. They formed Iran 222

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Film Company with their own funds and collaborated with Moradi on his next project, The Capricious Lover, a melodramatic love story about the seduction and corruption, by a city dweller, of a young peasant girl newly arrived in Tehran. The naming of the first two film studios in Iran by Ohanians, Perse Film, and by Moradi, Iran Film, both referring to the names of the country, exemplified the different politics of each director, one an outsider and a Russian émigré, the other a native nationalist. Fortunately for Moradi, his choice of name played into the nationalist agenda of Reza Shah, who within a year would rule that henceforth the name of the country would change from Persia (Perse in French) to Iran. The theme of the film, favorably comparing the authenticity of villagers with the sophistication and superficiality of city dwellers, set a thematic model for many future commercial melodramas. Filming proved very complicated. Iranian customs confiscated Moradi’s Zeiss Ikon camera and held it for eighteen months over the interpretation of the regulations of 1932 that gave the government the monopoly on all imports and over his status as a potential communist sympathizer (because of his unauthorized trip to the Soviet Union) (Tahaminejad 1976/1355:119; Omid 1995/1374:105). His ordeal did not end with these difficulties. As he told it, he began filming some general documentary scenes with much “enthusiasm and ardor,” only to be stopped by the Gilan police, who confiscated his camera for the second time, forcing him to appeal to General Mohammad Hosain Khan Airom, the chief of Tehran’s police. The general is said to have intimidated Moradi, asking, “Why are you filming the life of ordinary people? Go and make films of the lives of Sa’di and Hafez [famous ancient poets]” (quoted in Haidari 1991c/1370:247). Moradi professed to the general that there had been a “misunderstanding” and that he was a “patriot.” Finally, with the intercession of Abdolhosain Teimurtash, the minister of war, he was able to obtain the release of his equipment (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:81). This sort of wrangling with officials echoes the difficulties of documentary filmmakers. Newspaper ads and personal contacts helped Moradi to cast his four female parts for The Capricious Lover. While filming in the small northern towns of Langarud and Rasht, he encountered obstacles created by traditional busybodies and officious officials, who wanted to control what was filmed, and by owners of film locations, who wanted to be filmed themselves. The district mayor, for example, opposed the filming of a scene in which a jilted female lead commits suicide by throwing herself into the river, because he claimed that under his watch such events could not take place. Moradi attempted to solve the problem by having a man, dressed as a woman, act in the suicide scene; however, the mayor, angry at this attempt to bypass his objection, confiscated a tr ansitio nal c inema

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his camera. It was released through the intercession of the father of one of the key actors, a community leader and investor in the film. The problem of placating the location owners was dealt with by filming them with an empty camera. Filming in Tehran went smoothly with the exception of a fight between an actress and her real-life husband over her acting in the movie (Omid 1995/1374:88–89). Moradi set a new trend by casting Muslim women to play both the leads (played by Qodsi Partovi and Asieh) and the bit parts (played by Turan Veissi), even though, as he related, at the time women considered acting in the movies an “insult.” Because of official defensiveness concerning the exotic and quaint images that foreigners had made in Iran, all filming in the country, including for The Capricious Lover, was done under the supervision of official minders (Moradi 2000/1379:49). Adverse social conditions, cultural attitudes, and political considerations were not the only guarantors of the artisanal production mode. Technical problems presented near insurmountable difficulties to Iranian filmmakers. Because of shortages of good-quality negative stock, they filmed on positive stock. Due to the lack of trained film technicians, Moradi was forced to employ low-level technicians more used to making watering cans and mousetraps. Film processing was difficult. At the time, Tehran did not have a piped water system, forcing Moradi to use the open-air tank in his backyard, which was a feature of every Iranian courtyard, to wash the processed films. Each time after washing the footage, he was puzzled by spots of removed emulsion. Further investigation led to the discovery of the culprits: the fish in the pond had nibbled on the emulsion. Electricity in Tehran was also weak and fluctuated so greatly that he had to resort to gas-burning lamps to print the footage.28 Finally, in May 1934, the silent movie The Capricious Lover was ready for screening, a few months after the unsuccessful release of Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, which had been trounced by the very popular The Lor Girl. Ads favorably compared The Capricious Lover with foreign movies and appealed to Iranians’ nationalism. One ad touted the great efforts that had gone into producing a domestic movie that “rivals from every aspect the good foreign movies” and will be the “cause of pride and honor for every Iranian.” Another declared, “This very attractive movie will prove to our dear fellow citizens that we, too, can produce good movies in our country” (Moradi 2000/1379: 40, 44). The opening-night screening at Mayak Cinema was attended by the prime minister, Mohammad Ali Forughi, the speaker and members of the Majles, and other government officials. The minister of education awarded Moradi a Medal of Science for his “talent and capabil224

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ity.” While acknowledging some of the film’s technical problems (fluctuating brightness), the well-known writer Gholamhosain Mosta’an praised it for its generally high artistic qualities, in particular the believable acting of its cast, especially the two female leads, who had never acted before. However, he found the movie’s realism wanting, particularly in scenes that showed women riding horses (uncommon in Iran), and its narrative flawed by abrupt scene transitions (Moradi 2000/1379:42). Ettela’at, on the other hand, echoed the movie ads. The selfing power of cinema emerges clearly in the reviews, which also praised the movie for applying the ethical norms of society to cinema and teaching the spectators about the dangerous consequences of capriciousness (Omid 1995/1374:90). From then on cinema’s pedagogical function would become a key standard by which good movies would be distinguished from bad. The Capricious Lover, like Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor and others that followed, showcased important sights, historical monuments, and the increasing modernization of the country. This approach appeased government officials in charge of film permits. Reviewers like Mosta’an praised these localizing and modernizing features at the same time that they sometimes questioned their relevance to the film’s plot. According to Moradi, officials such as Forughi, who viewed the movie on at least two consecutive nights, praised the nationalistic elements (Moradi 2000/1379:48). Though the film was on Sepah Cinema’s screen for nearly a month and on several screens in the provinces, it did not do well at the box office, largely because it was silent in an era when sound movies had become quite the rage. Moradi tried to turn his work into a sound movie by composing a musical soundtrack played by live musicians, including himself (Tahaminejad 1976/1355:121). The movie’s lackluster performance was compounded by competition from the commercial distributors who imported lucrative foreign sound movies and who worked together to shut out domestic movies. Despite the praise of government officials during opening night, the government did not put into effect the comprehensive legal and financial structures necessary for the growth of a domestic film industry. Disappointed with the unfriendly commercial environment and with government inaction, Moradi joined the Ministry of Education and Fine Arts and established the Educational Cinema at the Dar al-Fonun Polytechnic, where he showed educational films to students (Omid 1995/1374:93). He also created a center for newsreel production in the ministry, for which he filmed Groundbreaking Ceremonies of the Bank-e Melli Building (Kolang-e Avval-e Bana-ye Sakhteman-e Bank-e Melli, 1938?) and Inauguration of the Women’s Film Center (Eftetah-e Kanun-e Sinema-ye Banovan, 1939), which showed the minister of education, Aliasghar Hekmat, during the ceremony. Both of these were a tr ansitio nal c inema

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sound newsreels, with their sound recorded on gramophone records (Omid 1995/1374:107). Moradi also continued with his technical experimentations, inventing machines for intertitling and dubbing foreign movies (in collaboration with Motazedi), and he published several articles about cinema (Moradi 2000/1379:38). After several years, when Iranian cinema emerged from its wartime doldrums, Moradi began making feature movies again in the 1950s, none of which proved commercially successful.

Sound Enters Movie Houses and the Movies To make foreign movies comprehensible, silent-era exhibitors hired screen dilmaj to provide live narration during screenings, inserted Persian intertitles into the movies, and toward the end of the era distributed printed plot summaries in Persian to their patrons.29 To make film viewing enjoyable, they played gramophone recordings or hired musicians to play during the shows. The freelance screen translators, the unruly spectators providing either loud running commentary or talking back to the screen characters, and the fights they caused, supplied additional sound elements during the screening of silent movies. In short, watching movies during the first Pahlavi period proved a very noisy experience. Even when sound entered the capital city’s cinemas, small towns still showed silent films in the old way. Jalal Golshan, a retired judge from Yazd, told me in an interview that the exhibitor of Golshan Cinema in Yazd in the early 1930s hired a man who from a chair facing the screen narrated the movie intertitles for the spectators. “When the pictures were showing, the spectators were very noisy. But when the intertitles came on and he began reading them, every one was absolutely quiet. As soon as he finished, the spectators returned to their loud clamor, talking to the characters on the screen, whistling, catcalling, betting with each other about the plot outcome, and sometimes even arguing and fighting with each other. Every filmgoer brought with him a paper bag of nuts and seeds, which he broke and ate noisily throughout the movie” (Naficy 2005b). The movies were silent—but not the movie houses. Soon after the American movie The Jazz Singer (1927), directed by Alan Crosland, brought in sound cinema, Ettela’at reported this event and characterized synchronized sound movies as the “best and newest invention ever seen.”30 However, sound cinema was not established in Iran until the early 1930s. The first era of sound recording, begun during the Constitutional Revolution, had come to an end with the First World War. The second period of 226

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recording music began in 1927, putting recordings of famous singers (Qamar al-Moluk Zarrabi) and performers (Morteza Naidavud), by the German company Polyphon and the British company His Master’s Voice, within reach of their fans (Sepanta 1987/1366:189). The popularity of portable, hand-wound gramophones and these recordings contributed to the emergence of sound cinema, which required technical and performing talent. Radio also had an important part in promoting sound cinema, albeit a decade later. Inaugurated in Tehran in 1940, radio soon expanded to other cities. Among its popular programs were classical Persian music, played by various orchestras, and pop songs and dance tunes, played and sung by modern pop groups. By 1950, when domestic sound cinema was finally on the rise, around eighty-six singers and players were working at Radio Tehran (Sepanta 1987/1366:309). Among the popular singers were Ruhangiz, Ruhbakhsh, Delkash, and Marziyeh. Their songs and music, broadcast on radio, were also recorded on gramophone disks and sold widely; sound recording and radio began to cross-­ fertilize, creating an important nexus for the rise of a future pop culture industry in the second Pahlavi period. A small technical feature in the 1940s that allowed gramophone sound to be fed by a simple wire into radio amplifiers reinforced this media imbrication. Many auditoriums, cafés, theaters, and movie houses used this technology. Some of these radio performers’ music and songs found their ways into the movies. Accompanied by dance they were instrumental in forming a new movie genre, the musical. The impact of sound on cinema also changed the stories the movies would tell. For example, the story of the first sound movie made inside Iran, Ali Dariabaigi’s The Tempest of Life (Tufan-e Zendegi, 1948), begins in a musical concert, where the male and female protagonists, Farhad and Nahid, meet each other and fall in love, a love that encounters many obstacles before its fulfillment. The movie’s musical scores were by Darvish, Alinaqi Vaziri, and Ruhollah Khaleqi, played by the National Music Orchestra, and some of the songs were sung by Gho­ lamhosain Banan. All would become famous trendsetters. When Western talkies were first introduced in the early 1930s, Iranians unaccustomed to character speech in cinema conjectured that they involved some form of ventriloquism and trickery and that sound movies were actually silent, while the unintelligible (foreign) voices heard from the speakers were the voices of actors hired by movie-house managers and hidden behind the screen (Shoai 1973/1352:63). Other cynics conjectured that sound movies were a trick of the exhibitors who wanted to dismiss the screen translators and musicians to save money (Issari 1989:69). There were genuine reasons for such views, as chicanery was frequent in a tr ansitio nal c inema

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the early days of sound. In January 1930, for example, Ettela’at carried a column by an A. Ohadi in which the writer complained bitterly of the fraud perpetrated by Iran Cinema in Tehran. The exhibitor had apparently announced the arrival of a new sound movie in newspaper ads and by flyers pasted around town; however, to the disappointment of the expectant moviegoers who had gone to the cinema, he had postponed the screening several times. When the advertised movie was finally exhibited, it turned out to be silent but accompanied by unrelated gramophone recordings of Arabic and Western pop songs. Angered by such misrepresentations, Ohadi called for the authorities and police to curtail such unethical practices (Ohadi 1930/1308:1). A few days later, an R. Fathi in another column echoed Ohadi’s criticism and further complained that although Iran Cinema had sold him a ticket for its fraudulent sound movie, he could not find an empty seat. Apparently, the hall was filled to capacity by curious spectators who had been lured by the exhibitor’s wide publicity, which included another unsavory practice: live announcements of the supposed sound movie’s screening during the performance of a play (Fathi 1930/1308:2). The 1936 “Regulations for Cinemas” were passed in response to these sorts of fraudulent exhibitor practices. The talkies gradually took hold as a legitimate film form. Screenings increased from two to three times per day. The projection system sped up from sixteen frames per second to the sound speed of twenty-four frames. Ticket prices also went up, to the chagrin of the moviegoers. Cinema owners, many of whom were Russian and Arab émigrés, began to compete with each other to attract more, and a higher class of, spectators. The first movie palace equipped for sound films was the aptly named Palace Cinema in Tehran, which opened its doors in August 1931. Owned by Mortaza Qolikhan Bakhtiar, it was a large and lavishly decorated hall seating twelve hundred people. It consisted of a ground level and two additional floors, which housed individual private theater boxes, each accommodating four individuals. The opening night’s show was completely sold out, and the government officials, parliament members, and foreign dignitaries who had been invited by the minister of court were in attendance. Charles C. Hart of the American Legation in Tehran had also been invited to be the “honorary patron of the evening,” since the slated feature film, Rio Rita (1929), was an American product. But he haughtily declined the invitation because, as he wrote to the secretary of state, he “could think of no manner in which I would less enjoy the evening.” He was able to dutifully report, however, that although three hundred invitations had been issued, “some thousand official guests arrived,” displacing the more “insignificant persons who had bought tickets.”31 According to Ettela’at, the evening’s 228

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program began with a newsreel, containing several items, each accompanied by its own “natural sounds.” These were followed by several short comedies, leading to the main feature film, which surprisingly is not named. Despite the novelty of sound, the newspaper reviewer expressed preference for the silent films, for the opening night’s sound movie was in English only and, unlike silent movies, did not contain explanatory intertitles. Disappointed, the writer wished for the day that Iranians themselves could become producers of Persian-language talkies. Charles Hart, on the other hand, while noting that the venture appeared to be financially successful, was less sanguine about the value of cinema, for he called it one more item in the “list of questionable benefits which Western scientific progress is bringing to this changing oriental [sic] city.” Apparently, all was not well inside the dream Palace, as the stuffy air, the scratchy sound system, and the lack of Persian translations drove some spectators out of the theater before the conclusion of the movie.32 Despite initial difficulties, within two years the film periodical Setareh-ye Jahan (29 October 1933) reported the opening of the “most luxurious sound cinema movie house” in the country at Mayak Cinema in Tehran, which “rivals the best of what is available in Europe.” It touted the theater’s sound system as “completely clear,” allowing audiences to hear the sound newsreel of the Turkish leader Ghazi Kemal Pasha and the Iranian prime minister Forughi in Turkish and Persian, respectively, and the “pleasurable” feature sound movie, Kiki (Mademoiselle Kiki, 1932), starring the popular Anny Ondra (Sa’dvandian 2001:503–4). Explanatory captions filmed in Persian were inserted into the films at five- or ten-minute intervals, much like intertitles. This technique combined the explanatory attributes of live screen translations with the economy of silent-era intertitles, since exhibitors did not need to hire translators. The cut-in translations, while solving some problems, created others. They lengthened the show time, forcing the exhibitors to cut the movies down to fit the standardized two-hour time slot. Sometimes the projectionists inserted the wrong captions and screened the movies for several nights before realizing their mistake (Issari 1989:70). Cut-in translations were an accepted part of foreign sound movies, particularly in the second- and third-class cinemas, until after the Second World War, when they were replaced by dubbing. The intertitles created a measure of asynchronicity among the spectators with different access to foreign-language dialogue. Watching a comedy, Persian-only speakers would laugh only after the Persian intertitles, while those who understood the original language of the movie would laugh at the time of the dialogue. Nesta Ramazani relates a funny incident about her BritishIranian mother viewing English-language comedies in Tehran in the 1940s, a tr ansitio nal c inema

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where her “bell-like” laughter at the humorous dialogue minutes before other spectators prompted “heads to turn and stare at this shameless woman who was making a spectacle of herself” and causing her children embarrassment (Ramazani 2002:17). By the mid-1930s, movie houses outfitted with sound equipment were springing up outside the capital city and around the country. However, as a British missionary noted, the effect of the talkies could not be judged because they had not yet “taken a real place in the life of the people” (Moare 1937:35). Much of the cynicism about sound cinema was shattered when the first sound newsreel in Persian Mr. Forughi’s Journey to Turkey (Safar-e Aqa-ye Forughi beh Torkiyeh, 1932) was shown at Mayak Cinema in Tehran and elsewhere. The brief speech in Persian that the foreign minister Forughi delivered astonished audiences unaccustomed to hearing Persian spoken in the movies and distrustful of film exhibitors’ practices. What allowed sound movies to take their real place in the life of Iranians was the back-to-back screening of this seminal newsreel with the first Persian-language talkie, The Lor Girl, both of which became highly popular.33 However, sound quality as recorded on films and as reproduced in theaters would not significantly improve until much later, with dubbing in the 1950s and with synchronous sound recording in the late 1970s. Sound cinema’s institutionalization brought with it the disciplining of the spectators, although the tradition of spectators’ interactivity with the screen and with each other did last. The disciplining and silencing of spectators was another step in their becoming modern, for it made them, as individuals with personal desires and fears, better subjects for the cinema’s diegetic address. This had political repercussions, for as passive spectators in cinemas, they also became better passive national subjects in the political arena, becoming spectators to their own modernization and in the spectacle of power and authority that was Reza Shah’s regime. Iranian interethnics and émigrés continued to play a pivotal role in the film industry. Many were cinema owners, but movie houses changed hands frequently, making it difficult to ascertain ownership. By the early 1940s, Tehran boasted at least seventeen movie houses, a number of which were owned by minorities. In the 1930s and 1940s, Mayak Cinema (also known as Dideh­ ban Cinema) was owned by the Russian émigré Lidzeh; Homa Cinema was co-owned by an Arab émigré from Iraq, Georges Naim, and an Armenian Iranian, Salim Shahanian; Ferdowsi Cinema was either owned or managed by an Armenian Iranian, Haikaz Chaknavarian; and Setareh Cinema was either owned or managed by Russian nationals (Omid 1995/1374:110–11). Improve230

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ments were not uniform throughout the country. Tehran received the lion’s share, with a few major cities following suit. Even in the second largest city, Tabriz, with a population of 214,000, the conditions of film viewing remained inadequate in the 1940s. The U.S. consul in Tabriz, Samuel G. Ebling, offered a rare description of such conditions and of audience demography during the difficult years of the Second World War, when Soviet forces occupied the city: There are no motion picture theaters at Tabriz in the commonly accepted sense of the term. There are four small halls where sound films, four or five years old, are shown by outworn machines, the furnishings of the theater being limited to primitive wooden benches. These motion picture shows are patronized by the roughest element of the local population, such as laborers, apprentices, and truck drivers. The lack of ventilation and the stench of the unwashed audience prevent a person of ordinary standards to derive any pleasure from attending such performances. During the winter months local residents are advised as a health measure to abstain from attending picture shows owing to danger of typhus infection. . . . There is one hall, owned by the Roman Catholic Mission, seating about 400 persons [perhaps Soleil Cinema], which could be rented at a nominal figure. . . . Local living conditions with respect to police protection leave much to be desired. Iranian citizens, especially, owning to numerous thefts and assaults on the streets late at night, are refusing to leave their homes after dark.34 Five years later the British vice consul in Tabriz reported that commercial cinemas were showing many foreign movies: British and American, fourteen films; Soviet, four films; Egyptian, three films; Indian, three films; and French, two films. He also noted that Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy comedies were highly popular in Azarbaijan provinces.35 Iranian cinema benefited not only from the interethnicity, migration, and Western education of the filmmakers but also from transnational interchanges with Iran’s neighboring countries. While Ohanians and Moradi provided instances of such exchange relations during the silent era with the Soviet Union, Sepanta offered another, in the sound era, with India.

Abdolhosain Sepanta (1907–69) and Indian Film Studios Sepanta was born in Tehran to a father who was a translator to the Qajar court and an educated mother who belonged to a noted clerical family in Shiraz. He attended French and Zoroastrian schools (St. Louis and Jamshid Jam, rea tr ansitio nal c inema

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spectively) in Tehran and the British missionary school in Isfahan (Stuart Memorial, later Adab High School), and from his youth showed an interest in literature, the arts, and history. This diverse cultural, linguistic, religious, and upper-class upbringing opened his horizons early on. The Constitutional Revolution’s desultory and sorrowful aftermath turned him away from contemporary issues and pointed him toward ancient Persian history, mythology, and literature, from which he would draw almost all his film ideas. It was this interest in ancient Persian and Zoroastrian religion and culture that took him to Mumbai in 1927, and to the Indian scholars Dinshah Irani Salister and Behramgore Ankelsaria, for both of whom he worked as a researcher and translator.36 Sepanta also conducted his own research into Iranian history, translated Persian literature into English, including the works of the exiled poet Aref Qazvini, and began publishing, in November 1928, the periodical Durnama-ye Iran (Iranian Panorama) for the Iranian and Parsi communities, which lasted for only fifteen issues (four months). Its contents were so radical, supporting women’s rights and opposing superstition and ignorance, that they created problems for Sepanta in India, causing his worried mother to send him a strand of her whitened hair. In the accompanying letter she asked him to be cautious and act with deliberation: “If you don’t take pity on anyone else, take pity on your old mother who has only you in the world. . . . When writing, place this strand of hair before you, so you think of your mother and write with wisdom” (Sepanta 1962/1341:27). Sepanta’s name prior to his trip to India had been Abdolhosain Shirazi. It was Salister who apparently suggested the last name he finally adopted, Sepanta, an Indianized version of the Persian phrase “three thoughts” (seh pandar), referring to the Zoroastrian sacred trinity of good deeds, good thoughts, and good words (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:85). 37 During a visit to the Imperial Film Company studios in Mumbai, where a Parsi director, Khan Bahadur Ardeshir Marwan Irani, born to an Iranian-­ Zoroastrian family, was directing an Indian film in Urdu, Sepanta first thought of making movies (Omid 1995/1374:64). He persuaded Irani to make a film in Persian on an Iranian topic for distribution inside Iran, what became The Lor Girl, or Yesterday’s Iran and Today’s Iran (Dokhtar-e Lor, ya Iran-e Diruz va Iran-e Emruz, 1934). Irani himself was considered the “father of the Indian talkie” for directing India’s first Urdu film, Alam Ara (1931), and for producing India’s first English talkie, Light of the World (Noor Jahan, dir. Ezra Mir, 1932) (Mahmood 1985:61). Urged by Irani, Sepanta started studying filmmaking and script writing and began writing screenplays. Even though the exchange relations between Iran and India have historically been vast and deep and at 232

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the time there was a community of Iranian migrants and a sizable population of Parsis in India, it was hard to find Persian-speaking actors. The role of the female star, the first Persian-language part, was given to Ruhangiz Saminezhad, a young Iranian who was married to a studio member and who spoke Persian with a heavy regional accent (Kermani). Although Irani is credited as the film’s director, Sepanta served several key functions in The Lor Girl. He claimed to have written the screenplay; he played the role of Jafar, the film’s protagonist; he coached the Indian actors in the art of Iranian gestures, body language, and behavior; and he dubbed the voices of some of the minor players with his own. In turn, Sepanta seems to have learned from Irani not only film production and directing but also some of the key film genres, such as the socials, mythologicals, and love legends, involving much singing and dancing, in which Irani specialized. Indeed, The Lor Girl and the subsequent sound movies that Sepanta himself directed for the Imperial Film Company and for other studios fall into these Indian generic categories, demonstrating a close match between Sepanta’s interests in Persian mythologies, social issues, and love stories and the film genres that Irani had developed for conveying myths and stories in India. The exchange relations between Indian cinema and Iranian cinema thus went beyond exporting Indian movies to Iran, for they involved genre transfers as well. Filming began in April 1933, and The Lor Girl was ready for exhibition within seven months. The story revolves around Jafar, an undercover government agent with romantic tendencies, whose assignment is to subdue Qoli Khan, a Lor tribal chief, who has been robbing caravans and killing people. The narrative is driven not only by Jafar’s efforts to defeat the bandits but also by his love for a girl named Golnar (Saminezhad), whom he first meets in a way-station café for caravans whose owner, Ramazan, is an informer for Qoli Khan. Qoli Khan has kidnapped Golnar from her respectable parents and has given her to Ramazan, who has forced her to perform the demeaning job of serving tea and dancing and singing for men in his establishment. One night, a bullish Arab sheik, who pays to be with Golnar, attempts to violate her, which she valiantly repulses until Jafar comes to her aid. Love blossoms between the two. The following morning, on his official duty as a caravan guard, Jafar is ambushed by Qoli Khan and badly injured. While singing a love ballad in the café, Golnar learns of the ambush and rushes on horseback to find and nurse her injured lover. He thanks her for risking her life, to which she responds: “Risking life for love is nothing.” When Qoli Khan catches up with them and threatens to kill Golnar, however, a nationalist Jafar retorts: “I will sacrifice many girls like her for my a tr ansitio nal c inema

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country.” Undeterred, Golnar once again rescues Jafar, who has been thrown by the bandits into a well, motivating the film’s final cliff hanger, in which Qoli Khan is captured and killed. Jafar and Golnar find a boat and set sail to Mumbai, along the way singing songs of love to each other. The pair spend years in exile. Reza Shah comes to power in Iran and a new Iranian flag is raised high, causing the exiles to consider returning. Here the film shows a modernized Iran, one secure from banditry under the new Pahlavi regime. Under a picture of Reza Shah on the wall in Golnar’s parental home, to which she is now restored, she plays the piano happily. Personal love, love of country, and love of the Shah fuse and become triumphant. Jafar is now dressed in a Pahlavi-dictated suit and cap, while Golnar is without a veil, demonstrating the victory of Reza Shah’s sartorial reforms. As she plays the piano, he sings a patriotic song to the new ruler, whose picture, as a rising star, ends the film. In the first few minutes of The Lor Girl, four musical numbers are performed for men in the diegesis, one by Sepanta standing by a tree (figure 56). The arrival of sound musicals (the first silent musical occurred in Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor) brought an important dimension of modernity to cinema, namely, its complex and intense sensory experience. While sound, noise, and music formed part of the spectatorial experience in the silent era, these were contextual, supplied by exhibitors and spectators, not by the films. The musi-

56  Jafar (Abdolhosain Sepanta) sings a ballad by the tree in The Lor Girl.

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cals supplied textual sound, noise, music, and dance diegetically, thus creating sensorial experiences enhanced by scopophilia. The Lor Girl’s musical numbers set several genre precedents. The protagonist falling for a café girl is one, as is the café location itself as a cinematic chronotope, in which wholesome and naive girls from respected families or from villages are usually coerced into dancing and singing for men (figure 57). This formula, which Sepanta borrowed from Indian cinema, became the engine of future popular melodramas and stewpot movies. That the first Persian-language sound movie was also the first musical film, and highly popular, was significant, for it set a pattern for the new genre of Persian musicals. Almost all of Sepanta’s subsequent films, made in India, were in this genre. In The Lor Girl, the lead actors sing their own songs during filming. These songs and Saminezhad’s dancing in the inn were designed to provide pleasurable spectacles, but unlike in American musicals, the songs’ lyrics did not directly express the inner feelings of the individual characters. Instead, they reiterated public sentiments and a philosophy of life, fate, morality, and love, whose expression was customary in Persian classic poetry. These lyrics were didactic and performative, and their familiarity must have been reassuring for audiences of the early sound movies for whom such poetry was the stuff of life and quoted in daily conversation.38 With the emergence of sound, poetry became a shaping presence in Iranian cinema, even in the nonintellectual commercial cinema. Perhaps such a reassurance was needed to bring cinema both into the public sphere and into the consciousness of Iranians. The Lor Girl was transitional not only in its use of poetry but also in its dialogue, which was delivered in a language that combined the formal, public theatrical tradition with the informal, personal language of everyday speech.

57  Golnar (Ruhangiz Saminezhad), the first café girl in a sound movie, from The Lor Girl.

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Sepanta’s son, Sasan, a sound specialist, has stated that his father’s dialogue in the movie retained the rhythm, pacing, and other characteristics of his normal speech (1987/1366:285). The coming of sound in Iran allowed filmmakers to play into nationalistic discourses to attract audiences, funding, and political support. Song-and-dance numbers constituted important cinematic and nationalistic markers because they distinguished sound movies from silent films and domestic movies from foreign films. They inscribed not only the national language, Persian, but also national dances, music, rhythm, and poetry—all of them intimate means of constructing and maintaining personal and national identities. The soundtrack became the site of the national. Significantly, in addition to its soundtrack, The Lor Girl engaged in several other discourses of nationalism. The topic of the film, banditry by Iranian tribes, was cleverly chosen to appeal to the nationalistic policies of Reza Shah, which involved disarming and settling the tribes and quelling the highway robberies that had grown alarmingly under the Qajars. The film’s opening caption explains this political backdrop, setting the stage for the café scene. It reads: “Before the auspicious era of the Pahlavi, when the south and west of the country were under the influence of various tribes, in the Khuzestan region, in a café.” The film’s ending, under the gaze of Reza Shah’s picture, seals this discourse. The subtitle of the film, Yesterday’s Iran and Today’s Iran, also highlighted the improvements and modernization that Reza Shah’s ascendancy had brought the country. In a flashback scene, in which Qoli Khan attacks Golnar’s home, killing her parents and kidnapping her, a soothsayer predicts the rise of a new star in the firmament, one that “will shine brightly in the darkness and fill the land with light.” An animated sequence of the globe and of the stars follows, suggesting that this rising star is none other than Reza Shah. The movie also mobilized another nationalistic discourse, significant in the Pahlavi ideology of syncretic Westernization: anti-Arabism. The film marks it through the unsympathetic character of the Arab sheik who attempts to rape Golnar. The demonizing of the Arabs fit Reza Shah’s brand of nationalism and Zoroastrian and Parsi history, for the Muslim Arab’s conquest of Iran in the seventh century and the ensuing Muslim intolerance caused many Zoroastrians to emigrate to India, where they formed Parsi communities. This anti-Arab and pro-Parsi stance also fit the political economy of the Imperial Film Company, which with the help of the Parsi Theatre had produced a whole genre of Indian mythological pictures (Mahmood 1985:64). The original print of The Lor Girl was much longer than the one now available, for it contained two extradiegetic bookend sequences that are now miss236

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ing. In the first sequence, the film’s opening, Irani appears on camera and, speaking in Persian with a heavy Indian accent, welcomes the audience, introduces the film, and reminds viewers of the success achieved under Reza Shah, ending his remarks by intoning, “Long live Iran, long live his imperial majesty, Reza Shah Pahlavi” (Omid 1995/1374:160). Surprisingly, he does not make much of the cinematic achievement of The Lor Girl as the first sound movie with both Persian dialogue and songs, unlike the introduction to the first American sound film, The Jazz Singer, which emphasized its technological feat of synchronous sound recording. In the second, now deleted, sequence, at the film’s end, the spectators are treated to a tour of the Imperial Film Company studios, prompted by Jafar’s and Golnar’s visit to the studio during their exile in India (Omid 1995/1374:66). Sepanta and Abdulally Esoofally, Irani’s partner in the Imperial Film Company, carried the film print with them from India to Tehran, where it opened on 20 November 1933 at Mayak Cinema (figure 58). At the time, cinemas changed their programs twice a week, but The Lor Girl proved to have incredible stamina, for its screening lasted for 37 days at Mayak Cinema and apparently for another 120 days in Sepah Cinema. The movie continued to play in different Tehran cinemas throughout the following year, for over a month at each venue. It also did very well in the provinces, including in Isfahan, Sepanta’s hometown. The film director Parviz Khatibi provides a fascinatingly detailed eyewitness account of his watching the movie at Mayak Cinema at age seven, accompanied by his little sister and chaperoned by a female housekeeper. According to him, hundreds of people had gathered outside the box office. As was customary, they had not lined up for tickets but were competing for them in a swarm. In the melee, some children, including his sister, were able to sneak into the cinema without tickets and without being trampled. The owner of the theater, “Monsieur Mayak,” a White Russian émigré, was apparently happy with the degree of public interest, for he was whistling nonchalantly inside the theater lobby. Perhaps partly due to the chaos of the crowd, the film began about an hour late; however, when the Persian-­speaking actors spoke on the screen for the first time in history, the delighted spectators broke into applause, something that was repeated periodically throughout the movie. When the movie ended and the audience exited the theater, a new throng quickly filled the seats, causing those who had failed to get in to implore Monsieur Mayak to let them in. Suddenly, a voice proclaimed loudly: “Ladies and gentlemen, do not worry, the film will be screened for a long time, I promise you.” A moviegoer who had recognized the owner of the voice, shouted, “Look, it is him, Mr. Sepanta himself, the a tr ansitio nal c inema

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58  The poster for The Lor Girl. It reads: “The Lor Girl. The first alltalkie and musical film in Persian made by Farsi Film Company in the Imperial Company, Bombay, under the directorship of Khanbahador Ardeshir Irani.”

lead actor.” Others shouted, “Long live Mr. Sepanta, long live Mr. Sepanta.” Delighted with his reception, the returned expatriate and actor shook hands with some fans and waved at others until the police arrived and dispersed the crowd. Then, the observant child noticed that two assistants stuffed the boxoffice earnings of the night into four five-gallon petrol cans and took them upstairs to the theater owner’s office, while Monsieu Mayak continued with his delighted whistling. Whether faithful or fanciful in all its details, this account serves to demonstrate the immense popularity and financial success of the first Persian talkie, a success not based on the number of first-time viewers only. Many spectators were repeat viewers—a new phenomenon in Iranian cinema—­including Khatibi who claims to have seen the movie over seventy times and remembered the lyrics and melodies of its many songs decades later in exile (1994:510–54). So much for what happened outside Mayak Cinema. Inside, the hall was full of excited spectators, who filled all the seats. When the lights were lowered and the film began, a heavy silence fell. The film’s producer, Irani, who was present, introduced the film briefly and apologized for its technical flaws, which he attributed to its being the “first Persian language talkie filmed out238

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side the country with inadequate equipment.” The film began, accompanied by music and singing. A viewer named Dinyar Mazdeyasna wrote, “The music enchants the soul. The superb acting causes the spectators to applaud and to utter: ‘How wonderful!’” (Baharlu 2000/1379:49–50). The critics also praised the movie for showing the “Eastern soul,” “beautiful scenery,” and the “progress” achieved in Iran. At the same time, however, they complained of the players’ strained or bad acting, their heavy Indian accents when speaking Persian, and the inappropriateness of some of the music and of the lovers’ visit to the Imperial Film Company. The scenes showing progress were apparently met with thunderous audience applause as well as with the critics’ praise. Made defensive by Western movies’ othering representations and by their own sense of inferiority toward the West and hungry for empowering self-representations, Iranians were satisfied, indeed, jubilant—like the child in the mirror phase—at this attractive but programmatic national projection. Indeed, in reviewing the movies of Ohanians, Moradi, and Sepanta, critic after critic commented on the importance not only of self-representation but also of a positivist national projection, even if—or particularly if—these representations and projections exceeded reality or were Orientalist. Tehranis were not alone in their infatuation with this first Persian talkie, as Golshan’s recollection to me of his childhood viewing of The Lor Girl in his father’s movie house, Golshan Cinema, in Yazd testifies. I saw the film when I was around thirteen or fourteen years old. My mouth was frozen open from astonishment. Everybody had the finger of amazement to the mouth [a Persian saying] because we could not believe that a picture was talking. We were particularly struck by the scenes of conversation between the heroes Jafar and Golnar, especially the one in which she invites him to come up to her room at night through the window. After nearly seventy years I still remember clearly how coquettishly she told him that. People were so clamoring around the movie house trying to see the movie that after a few days, the Zoroastrian exhibitor not only lowered the ticket price to one rial but also allowed people to watch the film from neighboring rooftops, where they sat with their legs dangling from the sides of buildings. Golshan Cinema’s two halls—both covered and open-air—were open only to men, but this movie was so popular that the exhibitor allowed the women to watch it for one night only, but from the rooftops—very much the way they were allowed to observe religious ceremonies and lamentations [rowzeh]. (Naficy 2005b) a tr ansitio nal c inema

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Golnar’s coquettish words, urging Jafar to “come through the window and see me after midnight,” reminiscent of Mae West’s famous line to Gary Cooper in She Done Him Wrong (1933) to “come up and see me some time,” became a favorite phrase among the Yazdi and other youths. The Kermani accent of the female lead, which at first had created a problem of realism for Sepanta because it did not match the accent of a Lor tribeswoman, also became an asset. Saminezhad and her “sweet” accent became quite the rage, as people imitated it everywhere (Issari 1989:107).39 In an interview with me, Badi’eh Misaqiyeh (Eshraghian), niece of the famous movie producer Mehdi Misaqiyeh, offered another example of the immense popularity of The Lor Girl among young Iranians. She recalled that when she was about seventeen, she saw the film several times with her extended family members because they were “overwhelmed with joy [zoqzadeh] watching it” and wanted to see it again and again. After the movie she and her nieces and nephews would take turns playing the parts of Jafar and Golnar at home, repeating the film’s dialogue. They even put on plays for the family, to whom they sold tickets, in which they recounted the film’s story and sang some of the love songs. An interesting instance of the use of the movies as an instrument of moral education is that her parents promised to take the children to the movie if they “were good children” and behaved properly: “From then on, we wanted to be good, so they would take us to see The Lor Girl again, for we loved it, and we did not have many modern toys or other forms of entertainment” (Naficy 2006b). The film historian Farrokh Gaffary has rightfully noted that this film still “retains a naive charm and unpretentious sincerity” (1992:569). Despite the film’s popularity in Iran and India, however, Sepanta was dissatisfied by the way some Iranian critics, authorities, film directors, and movie exhibitors treated it, apparently attempting to block its wider distribution. Producers and exhibitors of silent films were particularly jealous, and according to Sepanta, “vengeful,” about the unprecedented success of this sound movie (Omid 1995/1374:71). But the film had made its mark. Its success caused both Sepanta and Irani to pursue other sound-film projects, made in India, for the Iranian market. Their next movie was Firdausi (1934), which charted the life of Ferdowsi, Iran’s epic poet whose sixty-thousand-verse epic poem, Shahnameh (Book of Kings), written in the tenth century bce, is well known to Iranians, literate or illiterate, consolidating the intimate connection of sound cinema with poetry and Persian language. The film recreated not only Ferdowsi’s life but also the famous and tragic battle from the Shahnameh between the heroic father and son, Rostam and Sohrab. In a precedent-

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setting move, the Iranian Ministry of Education underwrote the film’s budget and Sepanta himself played the part of the poet. Again, Sepanta was astute in his choice of topic, for it both suited his personal interest in ancient Persian culture and poetry and the Iranian elite’s interest, particularly that of the Society for National Heritage (snh), in using that culture for nationalist and modernist purposes. The Shah had ordered the millennial anniversary of the great poet to be celebrated on a grand scale in September 1934 in the town of Tus, where Ferdowsi is buried. For this occasion a mausoleum was erected thanks to the snh and an international fourday Congress of Orientalists was organized for early October. As the director this time, Sepanta worked very hard to make the movie ready in time for this momentous occasion, with which Iran attempted to project an empowering self-representation as a modern nation with a glorious past. However, when the finished product was screened for Reza Shah prior to the events, the ruler objected to certain scenes, particularly to those of the encounter between the poet and Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi, his mentor, and ordered Sepanta to reshoot and reedit them. The director complied and completed the final version just in the nick of time. Firdausi was screened several times at the millennial events in the presence of hundreds of world scholars and dignitaries. The Indian scholar Ankelsaria, who saw the movie there, told Sepanta that the revisions had made the film too short and incoherent (Omid 1995/1374:72). The film was also shown in commercial movie houses in Tehran, but it did not do well there either. Perhaps its incoherence did drive away spectators, for they had been accustomed to the narrative strength of Shah­ nameh performances in coffeehouses; the film’s short length (around fifty minutes) may also have repelled the exhibitors, who could not fit it into their standard two-hour time slot.40 Sepanta and Irani hired Fakhrozzaman Jabbarvaziri, an Iranian actress who had been trained in Paris, for their next sound movie, making her the first born-and-bred Muslim Iranian actress of the sound era.41 Shirin and Farhad (Shirin va Farhad, 1934), based on Hakim Nezami’s famous love story Khosrow and Shirin, is a romantic musical occurring during the reign of the Sasanian king Anushiravan the Just, before the invasion of Iran by Muslim Arabs. The film retells the legendary love story in which a stonecutter named Farhad achieves the impossible because of his love for Shirin: cutting a water canal through the Bisotun Mountain. Again, this ancient story of preIslamic Persia, memorialized in poetry, suited Sepanta’s interests, the lovedriven musical genre he was developing, and the Pahlavi state’s ideology of

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syncretic Westernization. Sepanta directed the movie, his last collaboration with the Imperial Film Company, starred in it (as Farhad), wrote the screenplay for it, and designed its costumes and sets.42 The film contained many musical numbers (about forty-two), and some of its dialogue was delivered as songs, sung artfully by another Iranian actress, Iran Daftari. Sepanta liked this rather polished movie the most among his works, and reportedly it “had a tremendous impact on the audience” in India and “brought a tidy fortune” for its Indian stars and producers. Indeed, the film’s “phenomenal success . . . set the vogue, establishing the dominance of songs and music in early talkies [in India] which still continues to be a major audience attraction” (Jha 1985:75). The movie also did well in Iran, playing for several weeks in two cinemas, the Sepah and the Mayak, simultaneously. Sepanta made two other sound movies in India for the Iranian market, but not with the Imperial Film Company. He directed, starred in, and wrote the screenplay for Black Eyes (Cheshmha-ye Siah, 1936) for Shree Krishna Film Company in Mumbai, a film that unlike the others was set in India to reduce the production costs and to avoid the problems of unavailable Iranian costumes and settings, which had dogged previous movies. Despite relocating the setting, the film’s story remained Iranian, dealing with a love story during the conquest of India by the Persian king, Nader Shah, in 1737. However, the Indian board of censors was incensed at the sequence showing the Iranian king burning and sacking the city of Lahore. After having the offending scenes removed, the movie was released in India, where it did well at the box office, particularly among the Parsi and Iranian populations, as well as among the critics. Despite the meddling of the Imperial Film Company’s representative in Tehran, Black Eyes remained on two screens in Tehran for several weeks (Iran Cinema and Pars Cinema), confirming the wisdom of Sepanta’s practice of choosing Iranian stories and importing Iranian actors to India with whom Iranians could better identify. Because of the success of this film in India, Sepanta was able to sign a contract with the East India Film Company in Calcutta, which had recently merged with the Franklin Company of Hollywood, to bring to the screens another ancient Iranian love legend, memorialized in the poetry of Hakim Nezami and others, Laili and Majnun (Laili va Majnun, 1937). In this most lavish of his movies, Sepanta acted as the male protagonist, Majnun, and Jabbarvaziri played the female protagonist, Laili. Even though he was making this movie for a studio, Sepanta still operated in an artisanal fashion, serving multiple functions. In addition to directing and acting, he wrote the screenplay, most of the song lyrics, and edited the film. As with his other films, he was also intimately involved in the production, set 242

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design, and costumes of the movie, not only using ancient Iranian models and motifs but also apparently borrowing heavily from the popular movie The Son of the Sheik (1926), starring Rudolf Valentino (Raminfar 2000/1379:101). This multifunctionality partly resulted from his making the film for two national audiences, Indian and Iranian, and his having to negotiate all sorts of cross-cultural issues and interests. Indian audiences loved the movie. The film’s success in India and his other successes in Iran caused Sepanta to think about returning to his homeland to set up a studio with the help of his Indian counterparts. After almost twelve years of exile, he and an Indian colleague left for Iran carrying the print of Laili and Majnun. Another reason for Sepanta’s decision to return to Iran may have been his lack of recognition in India as a director. At the Imperial Film Company, where he made most of his movies, he was not treated like a first-class citizen or a contender, but only as a guest; few Indian film histories refer to him. It may also have had something to do with the Indian prejudice against foreigners, or with his contractual relations with the studios. The fact is that Sepanta was the first Iranian making movies in exile, from where he penned poems of longing about his homeland (see Sepanta 1962/1341:30). The stories of all his movies were adaptations of Iranian classic literature, poetry, or myths. These autobiographical and textual practices form Sepanta’s authorial signature. That he never became an Indian citizen and remained a liminal exile too Iranian and too focused on his homeland may also have been responsible for his ambivalent reception as a director in India and his decision to leave for Iran. His return trip to the homeland did not prove glorious. At the port of Bu­ shehr, on the Persian Gulf, the customs officials so mistreated and insulted him that he “regretted” having returned. This mistreatment was analogous to that he had received in India—a lack of recognition. According to his son, Sasan, customs officials treated his father as “a nobody” and even confiscated his film. He was able to release it only after he arrived in Tehran (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:104). Lack of recognition both at home and abroad is no uncommon fate for the exilic and émigré filmmakers of the world who work interstitially, in between and across multiple social formations, culture industries, and communities of address. However, as Sepanta’s own biography here shows, and as I have demonstrated elsewhere, interstitiality is not only a liability but also a source of strength and creativity (Naficy 2001:chap. 2). On his return, Sepanta was shocked by the poverty in Iranian provinces that hid behind the glossy urban façade that the Shah’s government had created, and which he himself had so ardently praised in his first film, The Lor Girl. In addition, government officials in Tehran did not pay attention to his a tr ansitio nal c inema

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letters of introduction from the Iranian consulate in India, making him more disappointed and angry. Only money seemed to talk, and money was something Sepanta did not have. When an official viewed Laili and Majnun, he objected to it for not praising the Shah, an objection Sepanta thought he could surmount if he only had the money and were willing to bribe the censors. Film distributors and exhibitors who earned their living by importing and showing foreign movies blocked the screening of his film, forcing Sepanta to sell it at a value far below the market. Even the powerful minister of finance, Ali Akbar Davar, who received Sepanta a few days before his own suicide, disappointed him by telling him, “You should serve the country, how could these people understand film and cinema? You have made a fundamental mistake by making films.” Sepanta was finally able to screen the film for almost a month in a Tehran commercial cinema, but it did not do well. Claiming to represent the Imperial Film Company, Sepanta offered a plan to the Ministry of Education and Endowment to dub “educational and public health” films and bring them to public screens at a 20 percent discount. He also proposed plans for setting up a sound film studio and a cinema and theater institute. Nothing came of these proposals (Mirzaei Pary 2007:56, 60–61). In the meantime, his mother’s illness took Sepanta to Isfahan, where he stayed the rest of his life. There he contacted the newly created pogo and the Ministry of Education for film work, but to no avail. Poor and despondent, he found employment in Isfahan’s Wool Factory, doing menial office jobs and working, as he characterized it, with “the worst and most loathsome people” (quoted in Omid 1995/1374:77). The workers made fun of him as a dancer (raqqas), a highly pejorative term for low-level entertainers. He responded to them in long, angry poems, stating that “my acting is on public display on cinema screens, while your deceitful acts occur only behind the scenes” (Sepanta 1962/1341:31). In 1944, he began publishing in Isfahan a periodical called Sepanta, which lasted for ten years. After the demise of the magazine, he was hired as a translator for the British Consulate and for a while also worked as an assistant to the American Point 4 program in Isfahan, but apparently not on film projects. Toward the end of his life, he returned to cinema, but this time to the private, amateur, and small format of 8mm film, in which he filmed a lot of footage of the beautiful Isfahan countryside, some of which he put together as a film called Autumn (Paiz, 1946–49). First shown publicly in Iran at a Cinema-ye Azad gathering in 1972 (an amateur film collective), this film employed no actors.43 Instead, in documentary fashion, it showed villagers in the 244

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field, girls weaving carpets, cracked garden walls, autumn leaves swept away by water, and a few fleeting shots of the aging Sepanta in the alleys (Shoai 1976a/2535:56–57)—a fitting, sorrowful film to end a significant career in cinema. In addition to his landmark movies, Sepanta left behind some eighteen books that he had written and translated. After Sepanta’s Laili and Majnun in 1937, no Iranian feature films were made until 1948.

Regulating Film Exhibition, Films, and Culture The regulation, control, and enforcement of culture and cinema under Reza Shah were complex, replicating his authoritarian, state-driven ideology of syncretic Westernization, with its mix of rearchaization, nationalism, secularism, centralization, and modernization. On the one hand, it involved proscriptive measures that banned unauthorized works and behavior, while, on the other, there were prescriptive measures designed to produce and propagate authorized works and behavior. Some instances of these measures have already been cited in the cases of Ohanians, Moradi, and Sepanta. In their centralization, these measures were reminiscent of similar efforts under way at the time in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Proscriptive Measures While the commercial private sector was generally in charge of importing, distributing, and exhibiting movies, the Pahlavi state intervened in these processes in various ways. It interjected itself into film exhibition when the cabinet, in a flurry of modernizing and homogenizing laws in the 1930s, passed the landmark “Regulations for Cinemas,” which contained seventy-one provisions, most of them dealing with movie houses and exhibition practices.44 These were designed to protect the moviegoers’ health, safety, comfort, and morality and to promote the state’s politics and the person of the Shah.45 They were also designed to rationalize and professionalize the importation and exhibition of films. Exhibition Regulations for Cinemas in 1936 For the first time, the law set specific standards for all aspects of film exhibition: for fire safety in the halls and projection booths, for the number and quality of seats, for the distance between each row of seats and between the a tr ansitio nal c inema

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first row and the screen, for the exit doors that had to open out, and for adequate air circulation, heating, and lighting. It charged the municipalities with approving the architectural plans of cinemas and with supervising their construction. It set standards for ticket prices, ticket-return policies, the numbering of tickets, and children and student discounts. It banned smoking and the sale of food and drinks in the halls during film screenings. To protect children from inappropriate movies and to protect adults from crying babies, the law forbade children under five from the cinemas; and to protect the youth, it required that in cases determined by the police, the sign “Under 18 Not Admitted” must be prominently displayed outside cinemas. Of course, not all of these laws and subsequent regulations were followed uniformly as, for example, parents continued to bring their babies into the cinemas and children continued to attend horror films inappropriate for them (Omid 1995/1374:99). The law divided movie theaters into three classes, institutionalizing what had already become the norm, with the first class having to live up to the most stringent requirements, such as the following: — The projectors must be double system, with accompanying sound reproduction equipment. — Each film program must consist of three segments: newsreels (not older than two months); educational, industrial, geographic, or sports films; and feature films (no older than one year and no shorter than two thousand meters). — The air circulation and heating system must be of top quality. — Sufficient space must be allocated for the waiting room, cloakroom, and toilets. — There must be no more than one intermission in each program, which should not last more than ten minutes. — Exhibitors must publish their film programs in Persian, including summaries of the films’ contents, and distribute them to their patrons for free. — Each new film program must be advertised at least once in a local newspaper in Persian, specifying the date and time of the screenings. — Ticket prices must not exceed ten rials or fall below two rials. As noted earlier, while the requirement that the first-class cinemas run a documentary and a newsreel before each feature appeared to support nonfiction cinema, in practice it did not work that way. In a direct interjection of the state into every night’s programming, all first-class and second-class cinemas were required to play the newly created national anthem either by live orches246

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tra or by gramophone recording at the end of each night’s program, in honor of which the audience had to stand up. That the third-class cinemas were exempt from this requirement suggests that the state did not consider the lower classes, which formed the majority of the population, worthy subjects for its nationalistic projects. The law also offered regulations designed to control unfair or fraudulent competition among importers and exhibitors. It required film importers to provide the police with a list of the movies for which they had signed contracts with foreign exporters and which they wanted to screen in the coming three months, along with documents that proved they owned the rights to them. On the basis of these documents, the police would register the movies in their names. The law prohibited importers and exhibitors from showing movies already registered to others by fraudulently changing their titles. Finally, the law put the police in charge of issuing permits to cinema owners, film importers, and film exhibitors. It was also charged with issuing exhibition permits for each movie and with rating its appropriateness for children under eighteen or for all regions of the country. The exhibitors were required to follow the police recommendations. Significantly, the law did not stipulate the standards or the mechanisms by which the police should judge or censor individual movies, thus opening the way for arbitrary and uneven censorship. In addition to fulfilling the specific purposes for which they were designed, the regulations of 1936, along with administrative and legal regulations in other spheres, helped facilitate the sociopolitical, cultural, and industrial formations of modernity and cinema. For example, the national Law of Commerce, enacted in 1932, instituted for the first time a modern accounting system for both the public and private sectors, defining the legal and financial attributes of various types of commercial companies, their accounting systems, and the government’s responsibilities in the inspection and supervision of these entities (Nafissi 1987/1366). This law facilitated the creation of film studios as legal entities. The centralization of control and censorship was characteristic of Reza Shah’s administrative reforms. The “Regulations Governing Taking Motion Picture Films and Photographs, Painting, and Drawing,” which the cabinet passed in 1938, consolidated the police as the grand arbiter and enforcer of what could be filmed, imported, exported, exhibited, and viewed in Iran. While such detailed, heavy-handed, and paternalistic government control helped professionalize the industry, speeding its transition from the artisanal to the industrial mode, it also stifled and limited its possibilities. In a move that underscored these paternalistic and authoritarian tendena tr ansitio nal c inema

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cies and their negative consequences, in June 1939, the government revised the “Regulations for Cinemas” to exclude children up to the age of seven from the cinemas. Children between the ages of seven and sixteen were to be admitted, but only “one day a week, before dark, to see instructive films” or other films authorized by the Ministry of Education. The American chargé d’affaires in Tehran, C. Van M. Engert, in a letter to the secretary of state speculated that the revisions were motivated not only by a desire to protect the “moral welfare” of the children but also by the pressure brought on by the pogo, which was “desirous of removing the young generation as much as possible from the influence of foreign pictures, in the hope that by the time they grow up Iran will have created its own motion picture industry which will show the people exclusively what the Government in its superior wisdom will deem it good for them to see!”46 The Propaganda and Publication Organization (Sazman-e Tablighat va Entesharat), whose successive heads ironically were major literary figures, such as Ali Dashti, Mohammad Hejazi, and Ebrahim Khajehnuri, was created to censor and issue publication permits for various media, including movies.47 Although the government was the only organ of official censorship of movies nationwide, it was not the only interested party. Throughout the two Pahlavi periods, both clerical and secular critics warned of the social dangers of uncontrolled access to morally suspect Western movies and theaters and of loitering in cafés and streets—a favorite pastime of the dandies. Individual municipalities also intervened in movie exhibition for political or social reasons. In 1930, for example, the Tehran City Council passed a resolution requiring permits for all movies and the removal of “unchaste” scenes from them. In deference to public health and social etiquette, it also banned the breaking of seeds and the spitting of their hulls in both cinemas and theaters.48 Censoring Imports and Domestic Productions The state further interjected itself into cinema by making all foreign trade a government monopoly in February 1931. This system allowed unrestricted importation by the government while requiring permits for private importers (United States Department of Commerce 1932:579). According to the Foreign Trade Monopoly Law, importing photographic and cinematographic cameras adaptable to airplanes was prohibited. Importing motion picture cameras and radios required a government license. The export of films and photographs taken of the country’s industries, ports, and monuments was subject to prior police permission (Harrison, Sherwin-White, and Mason 1945:487–89). The United States remained the number one supplier of feature movies 248

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and, not surprisingly, it ranked first in the movies censored. Censorship reduced the choice and quality of the movies available in the country, partly accounting for the plethora of low-quality commercial comedies and melodramas. In 1941, the year that the Allied invasion and occupation of the country forced Reza Shah’s abdication, the American Department of Commerce reported that about 250 feature movies sufficed to supply the Iranian market for one year. The year before, American productions had provided 60 percent of the films shown in that market, Germany had provided 20 percent, and France and Russia had provided 5 percent each (United States Department of Commerce 1941:6212). Of course, with the Allied occupation in August, German movie exports to Iran ceased, and American dominance continued, with U.S. imports accounting for between 70 and 80 percent of the movies shown in 1942–43, and nearly the same percentage again in 1948. France and the Soviet Union were the other major exporters, with Britain, India, and Egypt also contributing a few films each year (Issari 1989:67–68). A flood of Polish refugees streaming into Iran to escape the Nazi and Soviet horrors brought with it the deadly disease typhus, leading to radio announcements exhorting the public to stop riding buses and frequenting public places such as schools, bathhouses, and movie theaters (Ramazani 2002:119). While this was not a censorship issue but a public health issue, it solidified the status of movie theaters as an important public institution. The censoring of domestic productions took several forms. Government prescriptions channeled all newsreels and nonfiction productions into documenting and bolstering the official ideology, policies, projects, and the person of the Shah. Proscriptive regulations applied the same, and often more stringent, criteria to domestic productions as to foreign movies. Following the censorship law of 1938, scenes of military establishments and anything inconsistent with the interests, prestige, and dignity of the nation, the Shah, and Islam were prohibited. The depiction of any revolutions, riots, internal disorders, indecencies, or pacifism led to cutting, as did scenes of poverty and illiteracy, even though the majority of the population was poor and illiterate. Recall the story that Moradi related of the Tehran’s police chief telling him to stop taking footage of ordinary people and instead concentrate on filming the lives of classic poets. This statement by the police chief, in charge of all forms of censorship, seems to have become a general policy, for of the nine fiction movies released under Reza Shah, between 1930 and 1937, four were Sepanta’s historical and mythological films—Firdausi, Shirin and Farhad, Black Eyes, and Laili and Majnun. In three films, Ohanians’s Abi and Rabi and Moradi’s The Brother’s a tr ansitio nal c inema

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Revenge and The Capricious Lover, time was safely and vaguely indeterminate. The story of the first Persian-language talkie, Irani and Sepanta’s The Lor Girl, predated the Pahlavi era, but it was made contemporaneous by its panegyric preamble and coda and other scenes that lauded the modernizing changes that had occurred under the Shah. Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor was the only film that dealt directly and totally with contemporary life in Tehran under Reza Shah. However, the price of being contemporary was rather high, for the movie in its attempt to stay away from the taboo subjects of poverty, riots, indecency, and anti-Shah rhetoric, also stayed safely away from serious social issues or from any criticism that could offend the government. On the other hand, it managed to safely disparage traditional Muslims while internalizing the Shah’s reforms, Westernization, and modernity, including cinema. In this situation, we observe the triumph of the state’s hegemony over other forces, including the artisanal commercial filmmakers who were vying to obtain their own moments of commercial success.

Prescriptive Measures: The Public Opinion Guidance Organization The centralization and control of official culture took a new turn when the cabinet on 28 December 1938 (8 Dey 1317) created the Public Opinion Guidance Organization (pogo, Sazman-e Parvaresh-e Afkar), appointing as its director Ahmad Matindaftari, the minister of justice (Agheli 1997/1376:311). That the powerful minister of justice, later to become the prime minister, was placed in charge of the organization corroborates Ervand Abrahamian’s contention that the pogo was modeled after the top-down propaganda machines of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy (1982:143). Engert, in reporting the formation of the pogo, offered a similar opinion by stating snidely that the organization was “almost certainly inspired by some manual fathered by Herr Goebbels.”49 In addition, Matindaftari’s speech on 2 February 1939, in the auditorium of Dar al-Fonun Polytechnic, echoed the German National Socialist rhetoric in a frightening manner. He stated that after the Great War, “thinkers” had concluded that “the State comes above everything, that individuals must efface themselves for the benefit of the State, i.e., whenever the interests of individuals conflict with the interests of the State, the interests of the State must always prevail.” Sounding out some of the key tenets of Reza Shah’s reforms, he declared that the government must be vigilant to eliminate dissent and to “create a unified intellectual force” by directing public opinion to support “the permanent interests of the country.”50 The chargé d’affaires, who reported to the secretary of state on this important speech, noted that “countless arti250

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cles” in the Iranian press had praised the establishment of the pogo, “pledging their support and cooperation.” He then offered translations of excerpts from newspaper articles, which add fresh evidence to the idea that the pogo was inspired by Nazi and fascist ideologies and was designed both to Iranianize and to institutionalize those ideologies. One of them sounded off the prescriptive themes of Reza Shah’s ideology: “The duty of the press is to prevent aberrations of the masses and to right despondence, that great evil which has done us so much harm. The press should help the spiritual revival of the masses by producing a virile ideology for the whole country.”51 This prescriptive function of creating a “virile ideology” was not limited to the press alone, however, as an Ettela’at article, innocuously titled “Literature,” expanded it to include literature, poetry, music, painting, fiction, history, language, and the arts. The article began dramatically: “Everything is new in this [Pahlavi] era.” It then went on to sound the clarion call for the new official art and culture to fit the new era: “Poetic imaginations should . . . be freed from the ties of old and antiquated tradition and made to harmonize with the spirit of our age. . . . By this freedom we mean liberation from the influence of archaic imaginations and false illusions. . . . The world today is incompatible with dervish-like verses that reflect indifference, sadness, indolence, pessimism, melancholy, and profound grief, envy, pain, and suffering. Today poetical rhyme and musical rhythm, painting or the arts must serve the psychological requirements of the present generation and should serve as models for the generations to come.”52 While literature and the arts definitely needed to be renewed, agents for this renewal should have been writers and artists, not the state. However, using the dizzying statist rhetoric of the time and sounding its most prescriptive themes of virility, patriotism, nationalism, and the worship of power and force, the article went on to say: For the present world is the world of power and vigor. It is power that safeguards the existence of living nations. This daily increasing faith in force must also be reflected in literature. The tone of poetry and music must be virile. It must stimulate the soul and direct the thoughts toward the realities of life. It must awaken national pride, make the country the real idol of love and worship, and show that death for the sake of the country is a natural and noble thing. When this type of idea permeates our literature, it will burn the roots of weakness and depression, free our minds from the influence of dervish-like poetry, fill the brain cells of our children with the name of Iran, and make each fiber of our system sing the love song of Iran.

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Let those who can write poetry or compose music or paint or write well serve the country and the community, and their literary works may thus become useful if they are inspired by the exigencies of our time.53 The “exigencies of our time” referred to Reza Shah’s syncretic Westernization, which included Iranian secular nationalism, whose origin was located in pre-Islamic times, devotion to the country (mihanparasti), and loyalty to the Shah (shahparasti). To ensure that this ideology was served by the arts, the pogo established and operated a nationwide network of cultural activities, which lasted until Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941. A central committee in Tehran was created to manage the operation, composed of representatives of the newly created Tehran University, one or two principals of secondary schools, and the heads of the Department of Adult Education, the Boy Scouts, and the Press Bureau. The central committee’s chairman and chief secretariat were to be appointed by the cabinet. Six commissions with branches in major cities were also established whose chairmen were appointed by the cabinet.54 Their chairmen were all government or military officials or well-known civilian figures.55 Individual commissions were set up both to organize and to regulate conferences and speeches, radio broadcasts, publications, plays, musical performances, and the press. Cinema was, however, neglected by not having its own commission.56 As the scholar Said Naficy, a participant in the central committee, noted, the aim of the pogo was “to unify the thoughts, aspirations, and desires of the people to the point of achieving true commonality and unity among them, so that no duality or difference of thoughts and human aspirations would crop up among the educated people” (quoted in Hamraz 1997/1376:57). When in October 1939 Matindaftari became prime minister, he inaugurated Radio Tehran’s broadcast, thanks to the pogo’s radio commission. His speech broadcast on that occasion stated very clearly these unifying nationalist goals and aspirations: “From now on, the distance that separated our country and our capital city from the rest of the world will not exist. Internal and world news will immediately and constantly be broadcast and heard. From today onward, the educational apparatus for the development of public opinion that has been set up in various fields of knowledge will bring its educational messages to the ears of listeners directly and without delay, and all will benefit from this gift uniformly and simultaneously. . . . In the near future, radio sets will be put at the disposal of all, so that all the people in the country, wherever they are, can easily and freely benefit from the broadcasts” (quoted in Sepanta 1987/1366:303). No other speech could have so cogently and astutely spelled

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out the terms of Benedict Anderson’s thesis on the imagined nation and the significant and signifying roles of the media and journalism in its construction, propagation, and maintenance, though it was made decades before Anderson’s formulation in 1983. Centralization, coordination, homogeneity, and the control of culture among the various ideological state apparatuses nationwide would be ensured, as well as the loyalty of the people to the policies of the state and to the person of the Shah. A modern nation would emerge. The budget for the various pogo commissions and their diverse activities came from the Ministry of Education, local municipalities, physical education societies, contributions from the private industry (textile factories in Isfahan, for example), as well as from a 2 percent tax on movie tickets. Each commission was to create guidelines and procedures for its respective area of operation, which were to be implemented nationwide, thus ensuring the homogenization of the modern national culture that the regime sought. At the same time, these guidelines tended to professionalize the various arts and institutions, encouraging the various formations of modernity. The conference commission, for example, prepared topics of speeches, lists of approved prospective speakers, and instructions for appropriate speeches. Speakers who fanned out across the country (some of whom were university professors, some government officials) were to follow those guidelines, delivering a massive number of talks. In 1939 alone, they gave 6,663 speeches (Hamraz 1997/1376:60). The press commission prepared guidelines for improving all aspects of journalism, including the papers’ writing style, advertising format, design, and layout. However, the commission’s task did not end with creating guidelines and procedures, as it also shaped content in the press. To that end, the commission brought together writers to prepare topics and articles inspired by the aims of the pogo and to publish them as models of journalism. The commission was also to “give consideration to the method of distributing Government notices among newspapers and magazines,”57 a consideration that may have entailed financial remuneration to those periodicals that toed the line (by placing government notices and ads with them). The writer Mohammad Hejazi, some of whose romantic stories would become popular, inspiring movie melodramas, and who was the head of the publication commission, began a glossy journal in March 1939.58 Called Iran-e Emruz (Today’s Iran), it embodied the prescriptive aims of the pogo and of its press commission, becoming “the latest and most lavishly printed attempt of the Pahlavi regime to promote its existence and glorify its accomplishments” (Amin 1996:84–85). The music commission created the first modern official national anthem on the Shah’s order, which began with the words, “Long live our king of kings.” a tr ansitio nal c inema

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The playing of this anthem, which in the years ahead would be popularly known as the “King of Kings Anthem” (“Sorud-e Shahanshahi”), soon became mandatory fare in movie houses. Significantly, the state ordered no separate cinema commission, demonstrating again that under Reza Shah film did not share equal status with conferences, theaters, radio broadcasts, periodicals, books, or musical performances, for each of which a dedicated commission had been created.59 There were inchoate efforts in the pogo to involve cinema, and the pogo’s activities intersected with cinema at several points, helping integrate film with the other arts and media to bolster the state ideology. According to the Moscow-trained Iranian-Turkmen filmmaker Enayatollah Famin, he was hired by the pogo branch in Tehran to make documentaries, though the order to obtain film equipment from abroad to do so was not fulfilled before the fall of Reza Shah and the dissolution of the pogo (quoted in Haidari 1997/1376:78). Movie houses, however, helped support the pogo financially through the 2 percent box-office tax already noted. In towns lacking modern auditoriums, pogo commissions staged their events in movie houses. Though lacking a commission for film, the pogo considered films one of the apparatuses for the “developing and guiding of public opinion” (Delfani 1996/1375:1), and pogo chapters resorted to film screenings to spice up otherwise dull patriotic lectures, some of which failed to attract noncoerced audiences. Government officials acting paternalistically, like the great national father Reza Shah, strongly urged male civil servants not only to attend these events themselves but also to take along their wives without their veils. If they failed to do so, they had to account for it to their superiors, and sometimes they were dismissed. Although the institution was not fully panoptic, the pogo attempted to function panoptically by the vertical control of its central committee and by the dispersal of power throughout the country by means of its committees in major towns and cities. Yet it also had a counterpanoptic effect in that pogo activities created networks of horizontal interrelations and dispositions among academics, writers, musicians, composers, dramatists, actors, film exhibitors, and radio producers, and announcers—members of the various ­commissions—that favored the cause of cinema and modernity in general.60 In 1938, the year in which the pogo was created, the Journal de Téhéran, the French-language newspaper printed by the same company that published Ettela’at, reported on the status of the various cultural productions and cultural centers in the entire country that were to be regulated by the pogo. According to the paper, Iran could boast 45 newspapers, 23 periodicals, 192 publishing houses, 247 bookshops, 105 printing establishments, 36 reading 254

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rooms, 16 theaters, 45 cinemas, 20 literary and artistic societies, and 1,634 sporting clubs and Boy Scouts organizations. 61 Centralization, coordination, professionalization, and control over culture, the media, and ideology were massive undertakings that, despite its short life, the pogo attempted to achieve. The assessment of the ideological work of the pogo by Engert, the U.S. chargé d’affaires, bears quotation at length here for its incisiveness about the impact of its authoritarian measures on Iranian psychology and society and the country’s polity: In a sense, of course, the proposed regimentation of thought is not a new thing in Iran, for in practice a strict censorship has for some fifteen years been trampling upon the freedom of the press and of speech. The holding of public meetings has been forbidden and all comment on events or criticism of policy and persons has been muzzled—chiefly to cover up the mistakes of excessive national planning! But henceforth, it seems, more systems will be introduced. Instead of merely preventing people from talking freely in public places they will be told what to think in their own homes. Under the pretence of patriotism virtually one man will control the mind of Iran, and by means of this new organized propaganda the people will be easily misled and confounded by deliberate lies or half concealed truths. A maudlin hero-worship (which has become so characteristic of the German and Italian attitude toward Hitler and Mussolini) to feed a ruler’s vanity and personal caprice will now more than ever prevent the people from knowing the facts, or the truth behind the facts. And Iran will furnish another glaring illustration of the irreconcilable conflict between dictatorships and democracies. 62 Unfortunately, his predictions about the silencing effect of these cultural policies and institutions and their work in bolstering the Shah’s cult of personality and dictatorial rule held true.

Spectatorial Formation: Public Discourse about Film and Filmgoing During most of the Qajar period, only men had attended public cinemas, but gradually women found their way there, too, becoming part of the spectatorial formation. Iranian gender segregation of movie houses resembled racial segregation in the United States, which kept African Americans out of mainstream cinemas during the same period. The strategies used to admit the a tr ansitio nal c inema

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formerly excluded groups showed uncanny similarities, too. First women attended movie houses on days exclusively set aside for them in male-only theaters, and later, in 1928 in Pari Cinema, they sat on one side of the mixed-­ gender movie theater. Began as a women-only cinema, the Pari soon converted to a mixed movie house (Baharlu 2000/1379:32). The notion of safety derived from anonymity turned movie houses into sites for cultural and political resistance. Young girls and boys, who were not customarily allowed to walk the streets together or to meet openly in cafés and restaurants without chaperons, found the darkness and safety of the movie houses conducive to charged moments of privacy, intimacy, and eroticism. Public cinemas became sites of dating and of the enactment of private desires—heterosexual, homosocial, and homosexual. Such a violation of the traditional boundaries of private, public, and gendered spaces was part and parcel of the emerging sociopolitical, cultural, and spectatorial formations of modernity, and it was celebrated by the liberals but condemned by the conservatives who constituted the majority. The latter made a causal link between Western movies and the moral corruption of Iranians that they imagined taking place in the movie houses (although many of them never attended any such venue). The Qajar-era notion of European opera houses, dance halls, and theaters, where men and women socialized, as dens of iniquity crept into the conservative conception of movie houses. This linkage became much stronger than in the days of Shaikh Faz­ lollah Nuri’s condemnation of the Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema, for two reasons. First, women were now associated not only with modernity but also with its excesses and vices. Second, the movies now offered substantial and powerful experiences due to their longer length, the acquisition of sound, the use of the classical realist style, and attractive, bigger-than-life stars whose lives and loves—off and on the screen—had become the subjects of intense audience interest. The exhibitors’ ads in newspapers and magazines and on billboards and posters attached to city walls touted the movies and the stars. This kind of wide publicity campaign seems to have begun with The Lor Girl, whose ads promoted not only the film’s visuals but also its musical numbers and sound quality (“With the best projector in the world, the spectators can hear very clearly even the breathing of the actors”). The exhibitors organized ballyhoo troupes consisting of people or caravans of cars carrying flowers, colored papers, large film posters, and horns that made noise to advertise, discuss, and celebrate the movies in the streets (Haidari 1989b/1368:156–57). The popularity of the movies perhaps increased Iranian’s tolerance for the architectural ersatz that syncretic Westernization encouraged. The Society for National Heritage and Reza Shah’s syncretic Westernization projects were 256

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driven not only by the destruction of the old, unwanted traditional buildings, monuments, and streets but also by the construction of their modern replacements. The impulsive destruction of old and the hasty construction of modern buildings gave some Tehran streets a Hollywoodesque quality, for the new streets looked like movie sets. Rosita Forbes, a visitor to Tehran in 1931, noted that these streets “looked as if they had not quite settled where they were going, and the rows of new houses, one room deep, were all frontage” (quoted in Grigor 2004:42–43). Tehran was becoming Tallywood. The coming of sound and its accompanying singing and dancing indigenized and Iranianized cinema, but it also strengthened the association of cinema with vice, for long before Islam, from the Parthian era (227 bce) onward, singing, dancing, and the playing of music had been associated in Iran with moral turpitude and prostitution (Floor 2008:174). This association would grow with the emergence of musical film genres and the growth of modern and urban venues of entertainment and pleasure, such as cafés, hotels, cabarets, movie houses, and brothels.63 The religious press circulated this real and discursive link between movies and the moral corruption of youth most directly and emphatically. For example, the periodical Homayoon published in the religious city of Qom, declared in 1934 that the filmic depiction of “long, passionate kissing” automatically “ignites” the fire of lust in youths, which will destroy them like “flames engulfing dry thistle,” resulting in the worst forms of sexually transmitted diseases. 64 Again, the concept and language here resembled Nuri’s, who in 1907 had described Western civilization as a destructive “furnace.” By analogizing the work of cinema to spark, fire, and furnace, the critics were invoking the signifieds of these terms in the religious discourse, the heat of passion and the fire of hell. This objection apparently held only for fiction movies, indicating that even the religious press was not opposed to cinema per se, but to cinema as entertainment. The religious press might not have been opposed to all fictional movies either, but to certain genres only, such as melodramas and musicals, which heightened spectators’ emotional and sensorial engagement. In another issue, Homayoon characterized mixed-sex movie houses as sites of immorality and of “sexually charged gatherings.” In the overheated and alarmist language of Muslim traditionalists, the article declared that “even though women and men are made of the same material, the consequence of their mixing is worse than the mixing of wolf and sheep, for while the wolf kills its prey immediately, the mixing of men and women gradually corrupts and destroys their lives.”65 These graphic and sexualized conceptions both of cinema and of movie houses, reminiscent of Qajar-era conceptions of European women, were widea tr ansitio nal c inema

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spread not only in the religious press but also among the general population. In an Islamically conservative town such as Ardebil, for example, there were rumors in the early 1940s that the owner of Jahan (World) Cinema, Abdollah Navi (also known as Fatollah Zadeh), was exhibiting “naked dancing women” on the stage or behind the screen, causing the ulama to issue a death fatwa against him (by “naked” they probably meant unveiled). As his son, Parviz Navi, told me years later, to counter this accusation of immorality, Navi invited all the ulama to visit his cinema, and while the film was being screened, he took them to inspect all the spaces, including the stage, backstage, and the projection booth, to educate them about how movie projectors worked and to prove to them that there were no naked dancing women in the movie house. The inspection visit apparently had the desired positive effect, for thereafter the ulama refrained from interfering with the cinema’s operations. On the other hand, the modern secular sector—those in the armed forces and in educational fields—was supportive of cinema, encouraged by Navi’s offer of periodic free screenings (Naficy 2005a:4–5). 66 The case of the first cinema in Yazd is also illustrative of the tensions surrounding cinema and religion in this period in a small town. In 1933 Reza and Mohammad Golshan, two landowners and businessmen brothers, built the first commercial movie house in Yazd, which according to Reza’s son, Jalal, in an interview with me in Houston, was at the time “a fanatical, clergyridden town, where going to the movies was considered against tradition and Islam. It was religiously illegal [haram].”67 The brothers were shielded from the town’s fanatical wrath, however, because they were prominent citizens and influential—Mohammad was the first head of Yazd’s chamber of commerce—and both were friends with government officials, such as the police chief and the governor, and with leading clerics, all of whom used to visit the brothers’ homes. Nevertheless, even they were sufficiently wary of a religious backlash and of being accused of earning a living from sin that they rented the movie house to a Zoroastrian man (his first name was Mehraban). As Golshan told me, in the many years of its operation, no one openly criticized his father and uncle for owning the movie house, except once, probably a dozen years after its opening, when a cleric named Haji Ansari who had come from Qom implicitly berated the family in one of his sermons by saying that “one person builds a mosque and another a cinema.” Jalal Golshan’s narrative of his childhood moviegoing experiences provides a further example: “I went to the movies in Golshan Cinema frequently as a teenager and, of course, for free. I sat in the loge section. I liked the movies a lot. Sometimes I would take my friends with me also. But going to the cinema was considered not a 258

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proper and religiously condoned behavior. Parents would chide each other— and each other’s children—indirectly and sarcastically, by saying things like: ‘Our children don’t go to the movies; they are not the moviegoing types.’ For some people, moviegoing was a clandestine activity, as they did not want others to find out. If someone said to them: ‘I saw you in the movies,’ they would go pale or blush from shame, as if a terrible secret had been revealed” (Naficy 2005b). Both owning and attending the cinema were accompanied by conflicting discourses, driven by the intense desire for modernity, on the one hand, and by shame and moral qualms, on the other. The recollection of Jalal Golshan’s son-in-law, Jafar Hakimzadeh, of his childhood moviegoing in Tehran sheds light on this contradiction: “We used to have a caretaker named Ali Yazdi during the war in the early 1940s when I was in elementary school, who used to walk us from home to school and from school home. One evening, after he had picked us up from the school, another relative and I insisted that he take us to a Lalehzar Cinema to see a Tarzan movie. We insisted so much that he relented. While we were busy watching, we noticed something amazing: Ali had pushed a few of the movie-house chairs aside and was busy performing his evening prayer right there in the middle of a talking picture. He did not want to miss his prayer and was not taking any notice of the film. However, we were ashamed by his public display of religion” (Naficy 2005c). For the modernist youths, the manservant’s incongruous behavior of praying in a movie house, indicating social backwardness, was embarrassing. A postcolonial, subaltern reading of this behavior, however, would consider it as the manservant’s local resistance against the encroaching top-down modernization of the state and the elite strata, turning the movie house into the equivalent of a mosque. Orthodox Muslims, on the other hand, would have considered praying in the movie house, the den of iniquity, invalid and sinful. Progressive thinkers did not oppose cinema. Some really approved of it, like Golshan’s uncle and father, and enjoyed going to the movies, while many considered it at worst sinful and at best frivolous. Others, such as the renowned social critic Ahmad Kasravi, lumped cinema together with the other technological and communications inventions of the West, whose ultimate value in improving human life and security he surprisingly questioned. For example, in one of his many books, Kasravi asked: “Has human suffering in life been lessened by riding an automobile or a train, by flying on a plane, by talking on the telephone, by sending telegraphic messages, by watching movies, or by listening to the radio?” His short but emphatic answer, which borders on Luddism, was: “Alas, no; regretfully, no” (quoted in Tavakoli-Targhi 2002/1380:215). a tr ansitio nal c inema

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Since the movies were generally thought to act as moral guideposts for youths, both religious and secular leaders frequently called for their censorship and outright ban, compounding the state’s political censorship. One authoritative source suggested that the following films be banned: American movies, films dealing with lovemaking and crime, newsreels that highlight new fashion trends in clothing and makeup, and films that either propagandized the politics of foreign governments and religions or defamed Eastern nations (Jahed 1930/1309:164–66). Indeed, the “Regulations for Cinemas” of 1936 and the “Regulations Governing Taking Motion Picture Films and Photographs, Painting, and Drawing” of 1938 may very well have come partly in response to these public calls for controlling “cinemitis,” the menace and disease of cinema. There was a class dimension to the critique of the movies as agents of moral corruption. The lower classes who formed the majority of the audience frequented cheaper, third-class movie houses in their own neighborhoods, where popular movies were shown in a noisy, contentious, and freewheeling atmosphere not as much subject to the regulations of 1936 as were the first-class establishments. Educated filmgoers, on the other hand, went to the firstclass cinemas, such as those on Tehran’s Lalehzar Avenue, where both the movies and the movie-house atmosphere were more sophisticated and controlled and where the spectators followed a more decorous and modern etiquette of filmgoing. However, perhaps because moviegoing gradually became the most popular pastime of the lower classes and the youth, educated and upper-class Iranians began to shun commercial cinemas, particularly those that specialized in screening Iranian commercial movies. This created room for the emergence of membership-driven elite film clubs in which foreign films were screened often in their original languages, sometimes accompanied by talks by film critics and discussions with spectators. The first of these was the National Film Center (Kanun-e Melli-ye Film), which Gaffary established in December 1949 on his return from Europe. It began by holding its regular movie screenings in the cinemas operated by foreign embassies, such as the British Council, the Iran-Soviet Cultural Relations Society, and the Iran-­ America Society, and in the commercial cinemas in Tehran. The traditionalists and religiously inclined people also shunned commercial cinemas on religious grounds. This left the second- and third-class cinemas to a largely uneducated mass of single adult males and young schoolboys. As the social historian Jafar Shahri notes, it was common to think of movie houses as dens of lower-class iniquity, whose clientele were “louts, loafers, ruffians, and deviants” who learned lessons in “crime and mischief” from each 260

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other and from the movies and who “seduced and lured” young boys into the darkness of the cinemas, where by “handling and playing with their private parts they could open up the path of desire and pleasurable satisfaction.” In this manner, he warned, “every night” a new group is added to the lot of “deviants” (1988/1367:388–89). The darkened movie houses removed the necessity of maintaining the masquerade that had tried to contain the penchant for homosociality, homoeroticism, and homosexuality. These closed and closeted secrets were opened up in the cinema’s darkness, even though their public practicing was considered immoral and illegal and was severely punished.68 By the late 1930s, movie theaters had begun to rival mosques in terms of their potential impact on the hearts and minds of the population. The Swiss writer Ella Maillart understood this potential. When in 1939 she visited the ruins of the ancient Ali Shah Mosque in the Tabriz Citadel (Arg), she noted that an open-air cinema had been established in the mosque. At one end of its courtyard was hung a giant screen and at the other end, where the arched mihrab used to indicate the direction of Mecca during daily prayer, “was throned the fire-proof cabin of a cinema-projector, new god, and bestower of oblivion to our mass civilisation” (1986:62). The rivalry between the movie house and the mosque would be invoked over and over again throughout the century. At any rate, this combined class-based and religiously inflected critique made a potent adversary for cinema. It created very negative perceptions of cinema as an industry, an art form, and a legitimate pastime—perceptions that lasted and intensified for decades, resulting in the destruction of a third of all movie houses in the revolution of 1978–79 and justifying the “purification” and purging of the film industry that followed the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Like all the formations of cinema, the spectatorial formation involved a highly complex politics. Filmgoing involved not only violating the dominant cultural and religious norms of mixed-sex and same-sex interactions but also the political rules of the Pahlavi state. The darkness and anonymity of the movie houses made them safe meeting places for political activists who, to escape the gaze of the feared police and secret service, gathered there to exchange words, notes, books, and packages. 69 When the state interjected itself into the sites of exhibition by requiring theater managers to display either before or after each movie session the picture or a film of Reza Shah accompanied by the official, pogo-designed national anthem, in honor of which spectators had to rise to their feet, it created a climate of fear in the theaters, for those who refused to stand up risked individual or collective punishment by the police (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:66). Others chose passive or evasive a tr ansitio nal c inema

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forms of resistance. For example, according to the writer Bozorg Alavi, his good friend Sadeq Hedayat made sure to either arrive in the cinemas late or, if he arrived on time, would go to the toilet just before the anthem and return only after it was over. That way he did not have to rise in its honor (Alavi 1997:184). Hedayat himself recounts an amusing story that illustrates another form of passive resistance to the anthem. Once, he and two friends had attended a movie house to see a film on the life of the composer Hector Berlioz. When the national anthem was played, everyone rose to their feet except he and his friends. A policeman interrogated them, asking: “Why are you not rising? Don’t you hear the national anthem?” Hedayat in his usual sardonic style answered: “No! Because I don’t have an ear for music, and I didn’t understand that what they are playing is the national anthem.” A thinking policeman would have seen through Hedayat’s clever retort by asking him why, if he did not have an ear for music, he was attending a sound movie about a composer. At any rate, the policeman ordered them out of the theater, but they remained put until the anthem was over, at which time one of Hedayat’s companions, Mozaffar Baqai, who was a member of the parliament, showed the policeman his MP card, which peacefully resolved the whole affair (quoted in Farzaneh 1988:230). Gradually, during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, some audience members began to resist openly by refusing to remain standing through the entire anthem. They would get up at first but would sit down soon thereafter. In the ensuing years, the government wavered on enforcing the anthem policy. For a long time it tolerated the spectators’ latent and open resistance; then it tried to enforce the policy by punishing the culprits; and finally it abandoned the anthem altogether in the late 1960s after it was found to be a political liability. As soon as sound took root, following the regulations of 1936, the police banned the use of live translators and interpreters, causing a steep fall in movie-house attendance, such as at Tamaddon Cinema in which a Mr. Hamzehi was a popular translator (Omid 1995/1374:110). Cinemas that showed Indian, and later, Egyptian musicals, attracted customers by playing songs from their movies through outdoor speakers. The regulations of 1936 banned such ballyhoo, but the ban was not enforced effectively. Tehran Radio began to broadcast not only news, information, music, and government propaganda but also popular songs and film musicals either performed live or played from records, thus circulating them to a larger audience. The playing of pop records in coffeehouses, in movie houses, and on the radio brought to an eager public the songs and the musical virtuosity of the entertainers whose 262

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art had hitherto been out of reach of ordinary people (Sepanta 1987/1366:178). On the other hand, film entrepreneurs recruited popular singers (such as Delkash) to perform in film musicals, turning them into movie stars. Thus each medium fed and enriched (or, some claimed, debased) the other. By the late 1940s, the cross-fertilization and intertextuality of musical recordings, radio broadcasts, movies, and popular magazines that wrote about the lives of the stars had begun laying the foundations of a nascent horizontally and vertically integrated entertainment industry and an industrial mode of production. The circulation of the voices, images, and gossip about the private lives of the stars and entertainers was also setting into motion what in the 1950s became the star system.70

Women Enter the Movie House With the dynastic political shift in 1925, from the Qajar to the Pahlavi, and with Reza Shah’s sartorial reforms that banned women from veiling and encouraged them to appear unveiled in public places in the mid-1930s, the status of women as spectators also underwent a pronounced shift, modernizing and complicating the spectatorial formation. Efforts to bring women into the public space of the cinemas far preceded the Shah’s sartorial reforms. For example, on his return to Iran in 1923, Alinaqi Vaziri, a pro-reform musician who had been trained in Europe, established a private music conservatory in Tehran in which he began to systematize Iranian musical notation and music education. To increase the public appreciation of music and to enhance the social status of musicians, who were regarded with disdain and derision as “amusement workers” (amaleh-ye tarab), as “sleazy entertainers” (motreb), or simply as “dancers” (raqqas), he opened the Musical Club (Kolup-e Muzikal) on the school premises, where he and his student orchestra put on weekly musical performances for the club members (Khoshzamir 1979:94– 95). Soon, he began to give public concerts to full houses, some of them in his Musical Club and some in the hall of the Grand Hotel, the popular site of film screenings. These concerts made a deep and lasting impression on Iranian modernists, such as the scholar Said Naficy, who considered them among the “important events” of those years, providing “mental nourishment” for those attending them (2002/1381:402). Vaziri was a proponent of women’s liberation, and when in 1926 he moved his conservatory to the glittery Lalehzar Ave­nue, he opened a musical club for women as well.71 Believing that until women were attracted to the movie houses, the number of filmgoers would remain small, he, in a totally modernist move, urged a tr ansitio nal c inema

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Khanbabakhan Motazedi to join him in establishing a cinema for women. In April 1928, the pair changed the name of the Musical Club to Sanati (Industrial) Cinema and began showing silent movies to women, with a trio of students on the piano, cello, and tar providing live musical accompaniment (Shoai 1976a/2535:5–6; Khoshzamir 1979:117). Five months later, however, when Raoul Walsh’s movie The Thief of Baghdad (1924) was playing, Sanati Cinema caught fire due to faulty wiring in the projection booth, causing panic among the fleeing women who abandoned their chadors and personal effects in their rush to escape.72 Naficy provides a graphic account of the situation and of its aftermath, which is revealing in terms of gender relations involving moviegoing. He relates that his sister had left the house to attend this cinema, when he heard the news of the fire by telephone. Rushing to the site of the cinema on Lalehzar Avenue, he encountered a “heart-wrenching” scene: “Numerous young women who in their haste to escape had lost their chadors, shoes, handbags, and other articles were rushing randomly about in the street in a state of bewilderment and panic, moaning and crying. However, the young men, who had gathered in the street, instead of helping them and rescuing them, took the opportunity to ‘flirt’ with them and to ogle at them. . . . This scene was indescribably ugly and painful, one of the worst I have seen in Tehran” (2002/1381:629). Although no one was seriously injured, the damage was sufficiently extensive to force Vaziri to abandon his women’s cinema project. Despite its initial disastrous result, however, this event seems to have had a very positive impact on institutionalizing women as a regular and legitimate audience. This fire and the sensational newspaper accounts of a deadly fire that year in Madrid, which had killed scores of moviegoers, frightened Iranian women and their families from going to the movies; yet they had tasted the movies and wanted more. Exhibitors, too, had perhaps glimpsed the additional revenue that women could bring. The solution that Ettela’at offered, even though it was paternalistic, seemed sensible: allow the close male relatives of women, such as their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, to accompany them to the cinemas to give them “courage and protection.”73 These relatives could protect the women not only against fire and physical harm but also against moral temptations and corruption, which movies and moviegoing represented to many Muslims. The status of cinema was still so precarious, however, that the management of Sanati Cinema felt compelled to defend both itself and the cinema in general in a letter published in Ettela’at. It defended both the diligence of its staff in rapidly putting out the fire and the raison d’être of running a cinema. It stated that the manager’s willingness to 264

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go through all the troubles necessary to establish a cinema for women was not due to his desire for financial gain, but due to his patriotism and his desire to educate women about contemporary European life and social refinement.74 Clearly, the manager was mobilizing in his defense not only the pedagogical justification for cinema but also the patriotic language of the state. Satopari Aqababov, an Armenian actress and opera singer trained in Berlin and in Moscow, and her husband, Satenik Aqababian, seem to have adopted Ettela’at’s suggestion, for they in 1928 opened Pari (Fairy) Cinema on Mokhber al-Dowleh Square above the Nushin Café, perhaps the country’s first movie house owned by a woman and designed from the start to cater to both men and women (Muzeh-ye Sinema-ye Iran 2004/1383:78). Women sat on the right side of the theater, men on the left. Aqababov also established a theater troupe called Pari (Dezham 2005/1384:43). It took decades before another woman, the Armenian Iranian Sanasar Khachaturian, opened a commercial cinema in Tehran, Diana Cinema, in 1948. It is tempting to think that owning the means of representation—movie houses—helped facilitate women’s entry both into the public sphere and into representation on cinema screens, but further study is needed. Motazedi assisted with Pari Cinema’s operation. As a mixed-gender but segregated theater, it proved highly successful—albeit for a brief period—and it became the reigning model of film exhibition, which recognized and normalized the presence of women in movie houses. Simultaneously, Ali Vakili worked to transform women from domestic subjects to paying spectators. To do this, he turned to another Iranian minority group and rented the auditorium of the Zoroastrian girl’s school on Naderi Avenue, naming it the Zoroastrian (Zardoshtian) Cinema, to show films exclusively to women. An ad in Ettela’at announced the “glad tidings” that the Zoroastrian Cinema was now showing the second half of the famous fifteen-part serial The Santa Fe Trail (dir. Ashton Dearholt, 1923) to “respectable women.”75 To further attract women and their families, Vakili announced in another ad that all children were admitted at half price and that the theater’s “servants and personnel” were all Zoroastrian women.76 To further entice women, most of whom did not work outside the home and did not have an independent source of income, he offered to sell two tickets for the price of one.77 This was a shrewd move, as women were much more likely to attend a place of entertainment accompanied by a family chaperon or a friend than alone.78 Other venues, such as Alborz Cinema, attempted to attract women in a different way, by hiring a female dilmaj to provide a live interpretation of the movies.79 Movie houses were important sites of modernity and citizenship, on par a tr ansitio nal c inema

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with schools and the press, even though not initially recognized as such universally. A prerequisite for transforming women from domestic into spectating subjects was to turn them into national subjects. This could be accomplished not only by bringing them out of their homes and into public places but also by exposing them by means of the movies to modern public education, of which most of them were deprived in this period. This move involved appealing to both the pedagogical and paternalistic attitudes of men. One reviewer took a page from Reza Shah’s nationalistic project to urge Vakili to bring to his Grand Cinema movies that taught Iranians, particularly women, the values of “patriotism, national pride, self-reliance, and awareness of modern life.” However, he urged that ticket prices be lowered to attract women and disenfranchised people to his cinema. 80 A year later, the issue was still alive—as was the paternalistic tone—as an article urged exhibitors to reduce their prices for women because they needed the education and information the movies provided more than men due to their “simple nature” and their “susceptibility to advice.”81 To turn women into a viable cinematic constituency, Vakili not only opened his movie houses to them but also opened them to the public discourses about the movies, including advertising that addressed women as the primary audience. He dramatized in his newspapers ads the women-centered stories and the heroic acts of female stars, such as the “famous and unique Ruth Roland” in her film serial, from whom they could learn “lessons in ethics, bravery, and self-respect.”82 An ad for the film serial The Tiger’s Trail (1919), directed by Robert Ellis and Louis J. Gasiner and starring Roland, whom Ephraim Katz has called the “Queen of Hollywood silent serials” (1994:1169), used hyperbolic language clearly designed to attract women: “In this serial, which is the masterpiece of the most famous American actors, you will witness the extraordinary acts of the renowned American actress Ruth Roland. You will gain a new spirit and a sense of bravery on viewing this serial, which has cost millions and in which thousands of people have acted and which contains the defiance and courage of a young girl in fighting for her rights” (quoted in Omid, 1995/1374:33–34). No statistics are available to corroborate the impact of these strategies to attract women to the movies. However, as Vakili’s evolving exhibition methods demonstrate, the exhibitors continually experimented with ways that both attracted modernist women to the cinema and appeased the conservatives. Despite his various accommodations, the Zoroastrian Cinema did not last long. Yet Vakili pressed on. Perhaps emboldened by the new climate of reform and Westernization instigated by Reza Shah, he turned his Grand Cinema into a segregated mixed-gender hall by devoting the balcony to 266

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women and by designating separate male and female entrances. This allowed him to publicly invite both men and women to the same cinema, emphasizing by the large type size in his newspaper ads that the women’s doors were separate from those of the men. To further appease the conservatives and the clerics and to encourage women, one ad declared that the staff of Grand Cinema and the police will not sell tickets to, and will not permit any, “immodest women and lewd and corrupt-thinking young men” to enter the theater. 83 An article praised the mixed attendance of women and men in Grand Cinema and expanded the already acknowledged parallel between the movie house and the mosque by noting that the same women who used to attend and weep at religious mourning rituals (rowzeh) were now attending the cinemas with their men, where, while abiding by principles of ethical conduct, they were exposed to the world (Nikanjam 1928:4). A woman who had experienced her first film viewing apparently in this cinema was Zia Ashraf Nasr, Nuri’s granddaughter. In an interview with me when she was eighty-eight years old and in exile in the United States, Nasr stated that she attended the Grand Cinema before Reza Shah had come to power in the early 1920s with a close friend, the wife of the well-known writer Zain al-Abedin Rahnema. She, too, described the similarity of the theater setting to the rowzeh ceremonies and the self-othering impact of the film experience, in the following manner: The first film I ever saw was in a movie house in which women were segregated from the men as in mosques, except that they were not separated by a curtain. Women sat in the balcony and men downstairs, closer to the screen. The film was called something like Daughter of the Sun (Dokhtar-e Aftab) and it was silent, but a man standing in the middle of the hall translated the screen for us. It was a love story about a young shy girl who is in love with the sun and a boy who is in love with her. It was a very beautiful film and a very important experience for us because we had not seen any movies before and we were astonished about how they made the peoples’ pictures walk and talk. Although we could not hear them speak, we could see their lips moving. When we left the cinema we felt very happy and proud that we had seen film, as though we had been honored by the experience. It felt as though we had gone abroad to Europe and returned. (Naficy 1991) Nasr’s sense of a vicarious presence in, and the experience of, Europe by means of film, echoes, albeit in a much more eloquent, emotional, and personally meaningful way, the recollections of the first male viewers of the movies in the late 1890s and the early 1900s. a tr ansitio nal c inema

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The government and educated Iranians were not alone in seeking to bring women to the cinema. Westerners, too, particularly religious missionaries, continued to expose young Iranians to Western culture and cinema as part of their civilizing and proselytizing missions, thereby facilitating their self-­ othering. In the waning years of the Qajar dynasty in the early 1920s, when women’s attendance in public movie houses was frowned on and exclusive women’s cinemas were nonexistent, European and American missionary schools screened films for their female students. The American Missionary School in Tehran (which later became the renowned Alborz College) was considered an American “factory” for “manufacturing” new men and women and for “molding” the new life of “an awakening nation.” Here, the girls watched movies without their veils, thereby forcing their male teachers and visitors to leave the premises during the screenings. The Iranian elite, who sent their children to this school, so trusted the Americans that, as an eyewitness noted, these film shows were the “only public entertainment which the police permit the Moslem women of the capital to attend” (Powell 1923:261–65). By the mid-1930s, when Reza Shah’s sartorial reforms had been put into effect, women were able to attend mixed-gender movie houses with relative freedom. However, this was not the case uniformly even in one city, let alone in the entire country, for the influence of Islamic customs and Iranian traditions worked to thwart such innovation. Mixed-gender attendance was generally more prevalent in the well-to-do neighborhoods and only in the larger cities. As a comprehensive British intelligence account in 1945 reported, although legislation forbade the chador and allowed women to visit cafés, restaurants, and cinemas, such “intercourse [was] common only in the largest cities” (Harrison, Sherwin-White, and Mason 1945:346). After Reza Shah’s exile and the relaxation of the ban on wearing the hijab, moviegoing by women became more fraught with anxiety. As my own mother, Batul Okhovat, related, Muslim women with modern aspirations, such as herself, who were raised in traditional families in big cities like Shiraz and Isfahan, were conflicted and felt “humiliated” attending cinemas both with or without head scarves (Naficy and Naficy 2001:246–47). Despite being circumscribed, uneven, and psychologically taxing, women’s access to the cinemas was highly significant, for it exposed women not only to new social relations but also to visuality, speed, sensory experiences, and increasingly sophisticated movie narratives, causing stronger and longer-lasting epistemic violence and self-othering reverberations. Sattareh Farman Farmaian, the scion of a princely family, relates that in her youth she and a friend attended foreign movies in Tehran, which were “a popular form of fashionable entertainment.” Her anecdote about watch268

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ing Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939) corroborates both the social segregation of women spectators late into the first Pahlavi period, even after the forced removal of the hijab, and the way the screen translators apparently engaged in film censorship. She and a friend had gone to a foreign cinema, where they sat in the “women’s and children’s section.” During the film, an attendant beside the screen “called out what was being said,” and when Rhett kissed Scarlett, causing Farman Farmaian to blush, the attendant held “something up to cover the actors’ faces so that the audience would not witness indecencies” (Farman Farmaian with Munker 1992:122–23). An American visitor so astutely enumerated the various entertaining, pedagogic, and othering effects of these Western narratives on molding women that it is worth quoting her in full: The cinema gives them [women] a new source of laughter, that fundamental need; a thousand details to consider—whether it is better to sit on chairs or the floor, why a man holds a door open for a woman, the use of knives and forks, the youthfulness of older Europeans, the gaiety and roundness of Western babies. There, the women who cannot read (even in Tehran only 10 per cent are literate) can see a new and wonderful life, and, being very observant, little escapes them. The cinema, more than anything else, is making the women disconnected and from that alone will come change; ten years hence there will be more unhappy women in Persia than to-day, but in fifty years hence perhaps the Persian women will be happier than the Europeans. (Meritt-Hawkes 1935:292) American movies had served a similar function in the United States during the nickelodeon era in the early 1900s in terms of socializing and assimilating the mass of European émigrés unaccustomed to the modern American ways of life. Now, they appeared to be on their way to help assimilate another premodern population, Iranian women, into the modern world. However, Iranian women were not displaced to a foreign country. Rather, they were being displaced, othered, and in Meritt-Hawkes’s words, “disconnected,” “made unhappy,” and modernized in situ, in their home country. Significantly, MerittHawkes considered the Westernizing impact of the movies not in isolation but in the context of the overdetermination of modernity and Westernization in Pahlavi Iran, where women were not only going to the movies but also going to modern schools, training to be teachers and nurses, learning to sew with Singer sewing machines, playing musical instruments, learning foreign languages, reading books and novels, and traveling abroad for education. a tr ansitio nal c inema

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The gendered segregation of space, shattered by modernity and by moviegoing, was translated into a set of etiquettes that both facilitated male and female interactions in public places and preserved moral and religious codes. Essentially, this involved transforming the oral tradition habits of active engagement to the modern visual and passive spectatorship. The mainstream press took up the challenge of educating the public about moviegoing etiquette, exhorting them to behave, be silent, eat quietly, and to avoid talking, fidgeting, and moving about. Amirhosain Arianpur, who later became an oppositional leftist sociologist, offered a fascinating example in a three-part article in 1945 in Ettela’at-e Haftegi, titled “How to Behave in Cinema and Theater.” Based on the moviegoing etiquette developed in the United States, the articles meticulously spelled out the details of going to the cinema: how to invite members of the opposite sex to the movie house; how to be proper “hosts” or “guests” during the drive (or bus ride) to the cinema; how to purchase tickets, enter the cinema, and seat the various members of the party; how to behave once seated in terms of avoiding talking aloud, coughing, putting on makeup in public, or wearing flamboyant female hats that obscure the vision of those behind; how to get in and out of the rows during the screenings or at intermissions (walk with your back to the screen so as to not offend your seated friends, do the reverse if you do not know those in the seats); and finally, how to exit the cinema to return home (Haidari 1990d/1369:159–60). Importantly, this social transformation by means of cinema was intimately tied to other formations and transformations of modernity: the ideological and textual transformation of viewers, including women, from a collective audience to individually addressed spectators, or groups of spectators, capable of harboring private and individual desires, impulses, and orientations, which the movies can address and fulfill. This transformation, brought about by the classic cinema’s invisible style, facilitated the interpellation of the spectators not only as cinematic subjects but also as national and consuming subjects. It took Motazedi and Vakili more than ten years and a dynastic political shift favoring modernity and Westernization to finally succeed in tenuously constructing women as consumers of the movies. If, in the Qajar period, women were generally barred from cinemas for fear that they might be contaminated by it and, in the first Pahlavi period, they were legally but grudgingly admitted to the cinemas, in the second Pahlavi period, they would become central to the cinema and to the film industry. Ironically, this centrality would cause them to be regarded, especially in the subsequent Islamic period, as the very cause of the cinema’s and the nation’s contamination.

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Women Enter the Movies Because of the prejudices of Muslims and of the traditionalist strata of other religions against women performing in public and because of the association of cinema with moral corruption, the appearance of women on the screen was more complicated and contingent than their entry into the movie house. Traditionally, this prejudice had led to various strategies of aversion, subversion, and substitution by the film industry to bring women onto the stage and screen. In the theater in the early 1900s, for example, men disguised as women often performed the parts of women, or non-Muslim Christian women, particularly Armenians, performed on the stage as Muslims. Loreta Hairapetian is credited as being the first professional female theater actor, who entered the profession by performing in a musical in 1926 when she was only fifteen years old (Dezham 2005/1384:329–30). Males who masqueraded as women were called “male cross-dressers” (zanpush), and there is a longstanding tradition of their presence in the Iranian performing arts, even up to the Islamic Republic era. 84 Many young boys, before developing facial hair, worked with musical troupes, masquerading as girls and performing seductive dances. The strategy of using Christian women to represent Muslims on the stage, because they were not bound by the Muslim restrictions on depicting women, was transferred into cinema. The first instance occurred in Iran’s second fiction film, Moradi’s silent movie, The Brother’s Revenge, which cast two Armenian women, Lida Matavousian and Jasmine Joseph. In Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, too, two Armenian women performed: Asia Qestanian (also known as Gustanian) and Ohanians’s own daughter, Zoma. 85 The strategy of casting a relative of the director offered a third option, for it was thought that the presence of a male relative at the film’s helm protected the actress from the corrupting practices of moviemaking (such as from the infamous “casting couch”). Casting based on kinship became more prominent during the Islamic Republic era due to the imposition of the hijab and other factors. Armenian women appeared in the movies of Moradi and Ohanians either unveiled or with minimal head covering. Kowtowing to the dominant morality and gendered national ethos, they wore modest clothing and behaved modesty, even when they danced on-screen. Nonetheless, there were glimpses of the subversion of modesty rules, of the sexualization of the veil and of the women who wore it, and of homoeroticism. For example, in the drama of the thief jumping off the café balcony in Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, a mother

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59  Cinematic desire expressed by means of superimposition. Haji’s nursing on the baby’s milk bottle implies his desire for the mother’s breast. Frame enlargement from Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor 60  A father-daughter sexual game. Haji absent-mindedly plays with his daughter’s finger, instead of with the tip of his water pipe, and she responds coquettishly. Frame enlargement from Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor

who wears a veil and is holding a baby in her arms is standing in the street among a crowd of onlookers watching the event. She is so mesmerized by the drama of the imminent jump that absent-mindedly she sticks her baby’s milk bottle, nipple first, into the mouth of an unrelated male onlooker, the haji, standing next to her. Nonplused, he proceeds to eagerly suck on it, like a baby. This scene is not only comical but also erotically and sexually suggestive (figure 59). In another earlier sequence in the same movie, Parvin, Haji’s older daughter, this time wearing a loose chador, walks in on her father who, dressed in his Pahlavi hat, is smoking a water pipe in his room. He washes his hands in a portable basin as she pours water for him from a pitcher. Suddenly, distracted by a photograph of an American movie star, she mistakenly pours the water on her father’s hat, while holding her fingers high in the air and telling her father in a seductive way that she wants to become an actress. He looks at Parvin with surprise, and while looking at her, reaches for the mouthpiece of his water pipe; however, instead of grabbing it, he mistakenly grab’s his daughter’s finger to bring to his mouth. Both her seductive moviestar pose for her father and his playing with her finger turn this domestic 272

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f­ ather-daughter scene into a subversive scene that suggests incestuous desire (figure 60). In their drive toward realism and authenticity, commercial directors breached traditional and religious prohibitions by venturing to cast Muslim women. Moradi provided the first instance by casting Qodsi Partovi and Turan Veissi in his melodramatic love story, The Capricious Lover. The first woman to play in a Persian-language sound film was Ruhangiz Saminezhad, who played the lead in Irani’s and Sepanta’s The Lor Girl. She was no more than thirteen years old when she went to Mumbai with her husband, who needed a surgical operation, where she was recruited for the movie. As Golnar, she was not only the love object of the film’s hero, Jafar, but also a heroine in her own right. She was a model of an activist, take-charge woman who fought off the sexual advances of the Arab sheik with a knife, sang songs for men, escaped from a window, rode a horse to where Jafar was ambushed and injured, saved him from the bandits, and escaped the country with her lover—a radical representation of women that was not to be followed for decades in cinema (figure 61). However, even though she acted in this movie in India, which did not suffer as much as Iran from Muslim prejudices against the movies and against women’s public performances, the experience proved traumatic for her, being emblematic of those of many early actresses. In fact, it was so traumatic that this was her first and last film-acting job, one that, as Tahaminejad tells it, affected her entire life like a “nightmare.” Late in life, in the early 1970s, she related her experience to Tahaminejad in a filmed interview that became part of his essayistic film about cinema, Iranian Cinema, from the Constitution to Sepanta (1970). Below, I present a heavily edited (for fluency) version of that interview, which demonstrates her naiveté about cinema, the difficulties of filming, and the extensive prejudice and recrimination she suffered in India and Iran as a result of her acting in The Lor Girl. The Imperial Film Company was planning to film me. I didn’t know they were filming, I thought it was a toy. My contract was for forty days, but since the story and dialogues were not ready it was extended to seven months. Every day, Mr. Sepanta had to write the dialogue for us during the filming, since nothing was ready. You think acting was easy in those days? No. Nothing was prepared for us ahead of time. This much for our hardship during filming . . . , however, there was a similar amount of hardship outside the studio. Every time we left the Company, we had to have two bodyguards in addition to our driver, to prevent fellow Iranians [immigrants] from the cities of Kerman and Yazd from damaging

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61  Cinematic nationalism based on feminism and antiArabism. Golnar (left) valiantly defends herself against her Arab attacker (right) until Jafar arrives (center). Still from The Lor Girl

the car, from throwing bottles at us. [In some places], they threw Canada Dry bottles at us. We had to cover our heads with something not to be recognized. It was for these reasons that I gave up acting. . . . In Iran, too, my mother, sister, and family were all suffering at the hands of the people who made fun of them because their relative, I, had been a movie actress. My uncles, my father, and my mother pressured me not to act in the movies. When I returned to Iran, everywhere I went in Tehran, Isfahan, and Abadan, scores of people and school children gathered around me. They received me enthusiastically and were gracious toward me. But when I went to my hometown, Kerman, I had to hole up, so that people would not find out what I had been, what I had done. Even today my nieces blame me for their life stresses. . . . That’s why I gave up acting. At times, I have thought of returning to working in films, since they wanted me both in India and in Iran. But the memories of these hardships and sufferings at the hands of Iranians have forced me to withdraw for years and I do not wish anyone to know where I am. (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:87–89) These types of technical difficulties during filming and the social harassments afterward are reasons enough for her decision never to act in films again. However, her thick Kermani accent, which was much criticized by some Iranian purists, and her lack of training in both the art and the business of acting, may also have had something to do with her decision. Another actor who was imported from Iran to India to act in Sepanta’s films was Fakhrozzaman Jabbarvaziri, who played the female lead in all of Sepanta’s subsequent movies, Shirin and Farhad, Black Eyes, and Laili and 274

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Majnun. Apparently, she had studied in Paris for three years, spending some time learning to act. For a short while before joining Sepanta in India, she was the head of women’s classes in Ohanians’s Film Acting Training Center, an endeavor that proved unsuccessful, as few women attended classes. Because of her sustained involvement in Ohanians’s operation in Iran and in several movies in India as the female lead, she can be considered the first real actress in Iranian cinema. The tensions surrounding women’s participation as spectators inside the movie houses and as actors within the diegesis, and the solutions arrived at during the first Pahlavi period, were repeated in fascinating ways much later, in the cinema of the Islamic Republic. During the second Pahlavi period, women occupied much more prominent but complicated positions both as spectators and as actors.

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5 moder ni t y ’s a mbi va l en t subjec t i v i t y Dandies and the Dandy Movie Genre

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he colorful, hybridized Western social mimics collectively called the fokoli (Westernized dandies) were figures of modernity who threatened the Islamic, patriarchal, secular, and heteronormal orders—before modern women were shoehorned into occupying that position. Dandies may have been lightweight characters, but they were also significant social types who signaled both admiration for and ambivalence about the West and the rest. They became prominent figures in modern literature, popular culture, and cinema.

Westernized Dandies (Fokoli) The history of the dandies goes back to the mid-1800s, when Iranian businessmen traveled abroad and the Qajar governments began sending students to Europe for higher education and military training. They became particularly prominent from the early 1900s onward and received a boost when the ideology and practices of Westernization became a fact of life under Reza Shah. They flourished during Mohammad Reza’s reign: the country’s petrodollar income quadrupled in the 1970s; a massive number of Iranians trav-

eled abroad (around forty thousand Iranian students were in the United States alone in the late 1970s, the largest foreign student body in the country); European, Russian, and American tourists and consultants visited Iran in large numbers (about forty thousand American consultants worked in Iran in the late 1970s); and consumer ideology and Western pop culture, entertainment, fashion, and advertising flooded in. The female dandy phenomenon emerged later, particularly with Reza Shah’s forced removal of the veil and the women’s awakening and emancipation movements. These developments were undergirded by the entrenchment of capitalist relations, consumer culture, and the rise of a middle class whose members wanted to be independent and modern individuals who could afford to spend their leisure time and surplus incomes on entertainment and self-fashioning. The dandies proved threatening because they were perceived to be either truly modern or to be performing modernity. By so doing, they engaged in national, racial, ethnic, gender, and class “passing.” This meant that they were denying what they actually were—their origin; their ethnic, gender, and class affiliations; and their Iranian and Islamic identities. All social passing involves not only performativity but also drag and cross-dressing, multiplying the dandies’ threat. Over the years several dandy types evolved, as did derogatory terms about them. Fokoli, from the French faux col (false collar), referred to men who wore detachable collars and other fashionable European clothing and affected European languages and mannerisms. This made for the most common dandy type, but there were others. Farangi ma’ab, literally “foreign-mannered,” and qerti, an effeminate showoff, were applied to male and female dandies alike. Zhigolo and zhigolet, from the French gigolo and gigolette, referred to lounge lizards who wasted their time at parties and in cafés. Alamod, from the French à la mode, referred to followers of European fashions. Dezanfekteh, from the French désinfecté, meaning disinfected or sanitized, derided the dandies’ exaggerated concern with cleanliness and makeup.1 Historically, the latest type and designation was Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s gharbzadeh, literally “Weststruck” and often rendered as “Westoxicated,” or “plagued by the West.”2 However, Al-e Ahmad saw it as a pathology that augured other, medically oriented equivalents, such as Westomania, Westernitis, Westitis, and Occidentosis. No single expression exhausts the meanings of the term dandy, but fokoli and gharbzadeh are the most common. Although there were women dandies in Iran (zhigolet), similar to their counterparts in the West (Fillin-Yeh 2001), male dandies dominated newspaper cartoons, periodicals, radio programs, and movies, as well as public places of modern commerce such as streets, shopping arcades (pas278

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azh), cafés, and movie houses, in which they performed their newly fashioned identities. This gender imbalance resulted from the country’s dominant patriarchal and heterosocial structures, which allowed men access to both Western cultures and these public spaces while segregating and “protecting” women, confining them to domestic spaces. What distinguished the dandies from other Westernized Iranians was their excesses and performativity. Instead of wearing veils, visors, headscarves, and other clothing that concealed their dresses, bodies, hair, and faces, women dandies showed their hair and wore Western dresses, skirts, stockings, European hats, and makeup and carried handbags. Instead of wearing long tunics, turbans, beards, and cotton shoes (giveh) the male dandies wore short coats, vests, trousers, hats, sunglasses, watch fobs, leather shoes, ties, scarves, and cravats and used walking sticks.3 The key was not just to sport Western fashions but to exaggerate and insist on them. Only to honor the dead did dandified men temporarily abandon their ties and leave their shirt collars unbuttoned (Naficy 2002/1381:553). The dandies of both genders also wore strongly scented perfumes, displayed gender-bending behavior—­effeminacy for males and brazenness for females—and affectedly smoked cigarettes and pipes. Caroline Singer’s and Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge’s travelogue from the mid-1930s describes a mixed gathering of dandies in a Chaharbagh Avenue café inside a movie house in Isfahan’s Armenian district: “The avenue throbs with jazz played upon violins, tars, and drums, by Armenian youths from New Julfa, in a gallery above the foyer of a motion picture theatre, crowded with men who wear both collars and ties; Moslem women, the stuff of whose chadars [sic] and veils—adroitly folded to one side—is conspicuously fine; and Armenian misses in frocks and berets” (1936:57). The dandy style resulted from the distortion and exaggeration of government Westernization (as forms of resistance) and from the dandies’ own intense alienating identification with both Iran and the West. Under the Islamic Republic, dandies continued to evolve and flourish, among secular people as well as among clerics.

Iranian Dandy Discourse and Cinema Dandies were incorporated into the traditional improvisatory comic theater, ruhozi. As Peter Chelkowski notes, the fokoli was represented there as “a pitiful [Westernized] man who either pretends to be superior to his peers or else is confused about his place in society. He is the butt of the Siyah [the blackmodern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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Filmmakers as dandies 62  Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh 63  Ardeshir Khan Batmagerian

face manservant character ubiquitous in ruhozi]. Sometimes this man represents a European with absurd and laughter-provoking manners” (1991:779– 80). This derisive representation extended across all visual and performing arts in Iran. Many filmmakers were themselves dandies. The first filmmaker, Mirza Ebrahim Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh, the official Qajar court photographer, was a cosmopolitan dandy, as were the film exhibitors Ardeshir Khan Batmagerian and Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi Tehrani (figures 62 and 63). Dandies were also among movie spectators from early on. As Qahreman Mirza Salvar (Ain al-Saltaneh) notes in his diary on 20 September 1909 (19 Shahrivar 1288), Lalehzar Avenue—the center of movie exhibition—was in “uproar” (hengameh) every night because dandy women with “curled hair, tiny shiny bonnets with flowing red ribbons” rode up and down the famous avenue in droshkies. Another hangout was Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov’s Farus Cinema nearby, popularly known as “the fokoli court” (darbar-e fokoliha), which had a bar that sold ice cream, fruit, and beer until two hours past sunset. Even though the beer was so expensive that three customers often shared one bottle, some got drunk and became unruly, forcing the occasional closure of the establishment. One particular troublemaker was a fokoli named Hasan Khan, who was as beautiful “as the moon” and wore glasses.4 As early as 1908, Max Linder’s comedies, shown in Ivanov’s Darvazeh Qazvin Cinema, provided French models for Iranian middle-class youths. In such movies as Les Débuts d’un Painteur (Max Learns to Skate, 1907), L’Obsession de l’Équilibre (The Would-Be Juggler, 1908), and Max Se Trompe d’Étage (Max Comes Home, 1910), Linder experimented with various comic characters, which by 280

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1910 solidified into “an impeccably dressed young bourgeois dandy—in frock coat, tie, and vest, with either striped or black trousers, spats, a top hat, and cane. . . . Max rarely ever worked; instead, he either courted young women (not always unmarried), frequented restaurants and night clubs, or indulged in various sports. In other words, he epitomized what Eugene Weber has called the leisure French bourgeois rentier or young man living on an allowance and pursuing a life of ‘decadence’” (Abel 1990:39). Iranian dandies lived off the allowances from their parents, not off the monies they received from their sugar daddies or sugar mommies. Linder comically critiqued dandyism. The emerging middle-class youth could both identify and laugh with his characters. Lower-class youths, traditionalists, and intellectuals, on the other hand, often resentful of dandies’ easy lives, could laugh at them. With Reza Shah’s reforms in effect, male and female attendance and mixed seating in movie houses created tensions. The social historian Jafar Shahri relates this experience with a dandy couple in a cinema: The man and the woman sitting in the seats in front of me were breaking seeds and talking aloud during the movie. I protested. This resulted in the man responding, “What’s it to you?” Then, he added harshly, “Uncivilized little man, the cinema is not your place,” and mumbled to himself: “Even here we can’t be free from prying people.” Then, his girlfriend chimed in: “Why are they allowing these miserable people in here?” With our argument escalating, the man rose to confront me, to show me that they were right [about being superior to me]; and they were right! The man was wearing a green jacket and a shirt with a detachable collar ( faux col), adorned with a red bow tie. His hair was all greased up and his neck was held so stiffly and so high as if he had just swallowed a cane. The woman who was with him was wearing a colorful, flowery dress, hair done in a permanent curl, thick makeup, and she looked at people coquettishly and with sidelong glances. She was totally civilized, as though she had just been transported from the center of Paris to Varamin, Tehran! The incident ended with her turning to her companion and declaring: “Don’t waste your time dealing with these worthless people.” With that they plopped themselves back in their seats and began to crack seeds more vigorously and talk louder than before. I couldn’t stand staying in the cinema any longer. One of the reasons I didn’t go the movies very often was this sort of spectator behavior. (quoted in Mehrabi 1991/1369:31)

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Through the decades, dandy filmmakers and spectators created several memorable movie genres, such as dandy films, luti films, and foreign-bride films, which inscribed dandified characters through whom the tensions of authenticity and modernity were worked out, creating textual formations, such as genre conventions. Exaggeration and ambivalence characterized these social figures and film characters, which were misunderstood, ridiculed, and condemned by all sides—by high-culture secular and leftist intellectuals, by religious leaders, by ordinary people, and ultimately by the pop culture itself, including the movies, which produced and circulated their representations. But these hybridized figures and genres became powerful vehicles through which some Iranians expressed their national longing for form and negotiated their modern identities. Interpellated by Western movies and movie stars, Iranian dandies became the subjects, idealizing, imitating, and even fetishizing them and the modern world they stood for. Some bought from street vendors outside movie houses 35mm film frames of the movie stars, which were cut from film prints. These frames became fetish objects, which the dandies held dear, placed in albums, traded, and viewed in the privacy of their homes by shining a light at them or projecting them on walls.5 Dandified men appropriated the identity markers of movie stars, particularly those from Hollywood, leading to such fashionable trends as the “Duglasi mustache” (patterned after Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s facial hair), the “Corneli hair style” (emulating Cornel Wilde’s tousled pompadour hair), and romantic glances à la Charles Boyer. Women emulated Dorothy Lamour’s seductive poses, Ingrid Bergman’s infectious smiles, and Esther Williams’s swimming style. 6 They not only fetishized the stars’ pictures, physical attributes, and fashions but also their names, which they pronounced with exaggerated elaboration. To name them aloud was to identify them, identify with them, redefine them, and make them part of one’s own world—­competencies to be flaunted (Naficy 2003). In their zeal they usually exaggerated the stars’ names, gestures, and postures. Such excess, part of the political economy of dandyism and hybridity, transformed dandies’ imitation into mimicry. Identification became parody. These dandies developed a colorful argot that included many foreign words (particularly French ones), abbreviations, and altered diction. These fashions were not particular to Iran and did not remain static, as they evolved over the years and continue to do so.7 Movie palaces had grand marquees bearing Western names, such as Empire Cinema, Moulin Rouge Cinema, Radio City Cinema, and B. B. Cinema (for Brigitte Bardot); gigantic painted billboards; opulent concession counters 282

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at which dressy spectators of both sexes milled about; and a ballyhoo of music and movie soundtracks piped to the outside. They became sites of secular worship that rivaled, even surpassed, the mosque. In these heterotopic places, young female and male dandies gathered without adults for moments of privacy otherwise difficult to obtain in the highly group-oriented, taboo-ridden, sex-segregated Iranian society. 8 Movie-house owners in large cities responded to the passion of the young for the movies by adding morning screenings, for which students often cut classes, adding to the fear that traditional adults harbored about the impact of the movies on their children. As a result, movie houses were seen as sources of corruption, on par with such serious vices as gambling, alcoholism, and heroin and opium addiction (a critic also counted “telephone romances” among these).9 Dandies stood for frivolous amusement, flamboyant impersonation and display, flagrant idleness in and around cafés and cinemas, apparently aimless strolling and loitering in the streets, and the flirtatious harassment of women dandies. Yet Iranian flâneurs (parsehgard or velgard) persisted as the dandies evolved throughout the two Pahlavi periods and the era of the Islamic Republic.10 Critics accused the dandies of imitating only the superficial markers of Western culture to counter the austere gravitas of Muslim and secular intellectuals in Iran. For this reason they were often called motreb (sleazy entertainer), a term that gradually acquired some of the most virulently negative connotations of amorality, impropriety, prostitution, and debauchery. Early in his career Morteza Ahmadi was a popular singer and performer in vaudeville-style forestage skits (called pishpardeh), performed before film screenings and during movie intermissions and, later, became a versatile character actor in commercial movies. He relates that when he was beginning his stage career, his father beat him up because he had become a motreb (1999/1378:67, 76–78). His description expresses eloquently, if somewhat overdramatically, performers’ social liminality and the dismal regard the public had for them: “They [performers] had no place in society. No one except their cohorts would make friends with them, no one would marry his daughter to them, no government office would hire them. They died quiet deaths. No one in the mortuary would relish washing the corpse of an actor. Shop owners would refuse to sell them goods, as their money was considered to be religiously unclean [haram]. Actors did not much show themselves in society, and they were content with their own loneliness. If a few of them resorted to narcotics, it was to escape from themselves” (Ahmadi 1999/1378:8). Given such a negative view of professional performers, and by association of the dandies, all of whom were damned with the “sleazy entertainer” moniker, it modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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took much courage or shamelessness, depending on one’s point of view, for them to continue in their ways. Over the years, not only the popular press but also many respected writers and artists criticized the dandies and made fun of them in newspaper and magazine articles, comic strips, poetry, humor pages, radio variety shows, and in theatrical plays and dandy movies.11 Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh’s seminal book of short stories, Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud (Once upon a Time), published in 1916, offered one of the earliest examples of such satirical and critical discourses about the dandies in modern literature (Jamalzada 1985). In the collection’s key story, “Persian Is Sugar,” he created two memorable types that have since become archetypes in Iranian literary and cinematic worlds: a Westernized dandy who heavily sprinkles his speech with French words (some used incorrectly) and an archconservative Arabicized Muslim counterpart, a haji type, who spouts Arabic words (sometimes inappropriately). Through these dichotomous social types, Djamalzadeh ridiculed and criticized the phoniness of both of them, thus contributing to their popularization and, simultaneously, to heightened criticism toward them. Another writer whose work provided some imagery and vocabulary for the dandy discourse was Hasan Moqaddam. He was a Europeanized Iranian and a bit of a dandy himself, and he served as an attaché for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in various countries throughout his short life, including in Turkey and Egypt. At the same time, however, he remained a progressive social critic and an intellectual (Arianpur 1988/1367:vol. 2:302–3). Like many dandies, he engaged in various strategies of hybrid doubling, ambivalence, and camouflage, including writing much of his work in French, some of it under pseudonyms, including Pierrot Malade (Crazy Pierrot) and his favorite, Ali Noruz (Ali New Year) (figure 64). The latter is engraved along with his real name on his tombstone in Leysin, Switzerland. In the 1920s, he was a member of the Young Iran Society (Anjoman-e Iran Javan), whose members had published Farangestan in Berlin, a radical periodical advocating the Europeanization of Iran. The constitution of the Young Iran Society called for modernizing Iran by adopting the “good aspects” of European civilizations, including women’s liberation and the establishment of museums, libraries, and theaters (Jamshidi 1994:141). In 1926, in its periodical Ruznameh-ye Iran Javan, the society advocated an “educational revolution”: sending talented youth to Europe for training (Bayat 1995/1374:20). In 1922, Moqaddam wrote, directed, and starred in a one-act comic play, Jafar Khan Is Back from Europe (Jafar Khan az Farang 284

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64  Hasan Moqaddam, himself a dandy, the author of the famed play about a Westernized dandy, Jafar Khan Is Back from Europe

Amadeh), performed under the auspices of the society in the Grand Hotel hall (where under the name of Grand Cinema movies were screened), a performance that took Tehran by storm and catapulted Moqaddam to fame as a perceptive satirist and social critic.12 The title character Jafar Khan (played by Moqaddam) is a sharply delineated dandy who on his return from a long stay in Europe asks the butler to present his calling card to his mother to see if she has the time to receive him. Jafar, named after one of the Shiite imams (Jafar Sadeq, literally meaning honest Jafar), is dressed in the latest haute couture of Paris, holding the leash of a poodle, which he calls Carotte (Carrot), breaking an Islamic taboo against dogs. He speaks Persian with a strong foreign accent, and his sentences are sprinkled with French expressions and with criticism of Iranian traditions. The choice of the name Jafar for the dandy is ironic and astute, since he embodies the antithesis of the honest character of his namesake. Nima Yushij (also known as Ali Esfandiari), the father of modern Iranian poetry, recalls coming to Tehran from his village a few months after the play’s première and seeing the plain square yellow flyers still on the walls of the capital. In his review, he astutely called it “an impressionistic” play, which like impressionist paintings captures reality and people’s feelings with a few brushstrokes (Yushij 1972/1351:122). The play became so famous and Moqaddam’s criticism of the dandies’ over-Westernization was so accurate that even today the phrase “Jafar Khan Is Back from Europe” is used to make fun of those exmodern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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cessively Westernized. The play was adapted for television and movies. In the early 1960s, Ali Nasirian directed a theater troupe of the Dramatic Arts Bureau of the Fine Arts Administration in the performance of Jafar Khan Is Back from Europe for the first time in front of the cameras of the newly created private channel, Iran Television, which aired it live (Omid 1995/1374:1032). And decades later, in 1989, under the Islamic Republic, Ali Hatami made a comic feature movie of the same title. The film did not receive an exhibition permit until Mohammad Motovasselani was brought in as a codirector and added three new characters and made some plot changes (Haidari 1991d/1370:169–73). Modernity and dandyism exact a price. Disruption and internal displacement are strewn throughout the play, while exile is signaled by its ending, in which Jafar, fed up with the rigidity and intolerance of Iranians, decides to return to Europe. In Hatami’s and Motovasselani’s movie, Jafar Khan Has Returned from Europe, when a dandified Jafar returns to his hometown, Isfahan, wearing a cowboy hat and bearing a lap dog and the title of professor, his astonished father says, “This is not the Jafar I sent to the West [ farang]; he has changed completely.” Jafar’s family’s efforts at restoring him to his “authentic” native self are thwarted. Their most potent weapon—marrying him off— is not available: he is already married to an American. In addition, in a typical criticism of Westernized Iranians, Jafar has lost his Iranian compassion for family and cares little about his mother’s recent death or about his sick father. His effort to transform the village of Jafar Abad into a new modern town, comically named New Jeff, fails, and the ensuing battle between the proponents of tradition and those of modernity drives him into exile in Europe, leaving behind a devastated village without a proper name or identity. As in the original play, the cure for a Westernized dandy is not reform or hybridity but a return to the West. When writing the play, Moqaddam himself had already taken his protagonist’s path, living much of his life abroad, partly due to his job with the Foreign Office. He left for Europe in 1925 to seek treatment for his tuberculosis, to which he succumbed in Switzerland the same year, at the age of twentyseven.13 Unlike Jafar Khan, Moqaddam was more than a stereotypical dandy; he was a talented storyteller and writer, a serious researcher of Iranian folklore, a critic of conservative traditions, and a modern cosmopolitan traveler and world citizen who knew at least one foreign language, French, well (Jannati 1954/1333). Unfortunately, his play created a dandy stereotype that the emerging media industry widely circulated, peaking in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Sadeq Hedayat, a modernist dandy, founded a literary genre known as qazziyeh (par286

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ody), which embodied in literature what the dandies embodied in their own lives, mimicry. Qazziyeh writers, similar to parodists, “imitate the manner and style of a literary work, or mimic it, in order to satirize and or belittle it, or to draw attention to his own mockery or humor” (Parsinejad 2002:211). Hedayat published a versified “Qazziyeh-ye King Kong” that mockingly tells the story of a short man who sees on Lalehzar Avenue a female dandy with “long legs, chic, and beautiful.”14 He follows her into a movie house showing King Kong (1933). When the movie is over, he threatens to throw himself off the balcony like the “monkey” King Kong if she does not say yes. The woman takes pity and “sells herself” to him (Hedayat 1993/1372:207–11). The analogy of the male dandy and the monkey, which emphasizes the dandies’ penchant for imitation, and of the female dandy and the prostitute, which emphasizes their apparent loose morality, made for typical criticisms. Seyyed Fakhr al-Din Shadman, an influential intellectual, devoted most of his book titled Conquering Western Civilization (Taskhir-e Tamaddon-e Farangi, 1948) to critiquing dandies.15 He posited an irreconcilable, antagonistic, and binary relationship between the West and the rest—between self and other and between Iran and the West—a relationship he claimed was in a state of crisis. He wrote, “The enemy [the West] is powerful and wise and time is short and [our] field of action limited. Either Western civilization will conquer us or we shall have to conquer it. Our national existence is at stake” (1948/1326:108– 9). He argued that Western culture’s invasion was far more devastating than earlier Arab and Tartar military invasions had been, for Western culture conquered its subjects by “seduction,” leaving the West itself immune to harm (25).16 Who was the agent of this ruinous seduction? None other than the fokoli, who constituted the “worst and basest enemy of our nation” (22). They were an internal enemy, a fifth column (doshman-e khanegi) (22). This charge represented a definite escalation in antidandy and anti-­Western intellectual discourse; in the years to come, other critics, such as Al-e Ahmad (1978/1357), would echo it. Still later, under the Islamic Republic, the issue of Western cultural invasion would be revived, whose fifth column agents this time were no longer dandies but the domestic secular intellectuals and Iranian binationals and exiles. Characterizing the dandies’ hybridity, duality, ambivalence, excess, and performativity variously as “shamelessness,” “immodesty,” “cowardice,” “conceit,” “deceptiveness,” and “ignorance,” Shadman charged further that despite their appearance and claims to the contrary, dandies were pseudointellectuals ignorant of Iranian or Western history, literature, and language (1948/1326:13–15). Seduced by Western-style entertainment, they presumed modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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that “Western civilization is limited to cheek-to-cheek dancing, gambling, and hanging out at noisy and smoke-filled taverns. They do not know that the foundations of Western civilization are study, research, debate, and travel for the sake of knowledge” (19). For Shadman the solutions to the problem of contact with the West did not lie in nativistic essentialism or a superficial imitation of all things Western. Instead, like the Young Iran Society, he urged a reasoned, selective adoption of important aspects of the West, in other words, a form of syncretic Westernization. A few years after the publication of Shadman’s arguments, a college student named Ali Asghar Hedayati made the same point. He complained that instead of learning from great leaders in science and politics, such as Marie Curie and Joan of Arc, Iranian youth were learning from popular movie stars to become dandies. They imitated the Western stars’ poses, gestures, glances, makeup, hairstyles, and fashion (1952/1331:44–46). Mehdi Sohaili, a prominent poet and satirist, also made devastating fun of the dandies. I have here translated a portion of his article “Our Indigenous Cornel Wildes and Esther Williamses” to give a flavor of the antidandy discourse of the 1950s: Nowadays you see groups of young dandies [zhigolos] who, to complete their phony poses, wear red plaid shirts that look like public bath towels [long], they slick their hair tightly down along the sides of their heads by applying quince-seed hair oil [la’ab-e behdaneh], they raise up the hair in the front of their head like a hen’s tail, and worst of all, they leave the hair on the back of their neck unshaven like dervishes who live in the desert. These spoiled brats call this Cornel Wilde style, since it resembles that of the famous movie star. No one is there to ask these street loiterers this question: Have you learned only the hairstyle from Cornel Wilde? After all, he does not spend all day in the streets without a penny in his pocket, bothering people. His shirt is not like your Excellency’s shirt whose front is intact but whose torn back bears a thousand patches. Cornel Wilde is not illiterate like you, who cannot read one line of the newspaper without making ten mistakes. As soon as that young female dandy—too young, like a barely hatched chick—goes to the movies, she begins to want to swim like Esther Williams, cry like Hedi Lamar, or compete with Ingrid Bergman’s smiles. Every day she rehearses thousands of poses in front of the mirror and practices smiling, by grinning from ear to ear. This twenty-something girl is unable to prepare a traditional onion soup, but she is capable of dancing to Western music she hears on the radio, and when she is fin-

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ished dancing, she makes love to Hollywood from a distance. (Sohaili 1954/1333:74–75) Like Shadman and Hedayati, Sohaili does not believe the West or its cinema to be inherently bad. It was the intermediaries who spoiled everything, bringing in the nefarious aspects of the West while degrading cherished native values. Al-e Ahmad, a prominent communist writer who later turned Islamist, reinvigorated the criticism of Westernized Iranians in the 1960s. He, like Shadman before him and Ali Shariati, Ehsan Naraqi, Dariush Shayegan, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after him, formed part of the Iranian intellectual contribution to third world intellectuals’ critique of colonialism and modernity, critiques that ushered in the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. Indeed, as Fredric Jameson has noted, the beginning of the period called “the sixties” should be located in the decolonization of the third world that so profoundly influenced the sociopolitical movements in the first world (1984:180). Iranian discourse constituted part of that movement even though this was not acknowledged at the time, partly because Iranian intellectuals did not consider themselves part of the colonized third world and partly because their debate did not go far beyond national borders. In Al-e Ahmad’s influential monograph Gharbzadegi, banned by the Pahlavi regime but clandestinely circulated, the author argued that Occidentosis infected and destroyed susceptible natives from inside (1961/1340:27). Mobilizing the vocabulary of pathology, also employed by Shaikh Fazlollah Nuri, whom he praised, Al-e Ahmad identified the agents of the infection as Westoxicated Iranians whose symptoms formed a catalogue of ambivalence, ambiguity, and performativity. They were “lightweight,” “shiftless,” “unscrupulous,” “asses in lion skin,” “passive spectators,” “without belief or conviction,” “phony,” “dissembling,” “effeminate,” “overdressed,” and “faithful consumers” of Western industrial goods (92–96).17 Al-e Ahmad, like many other secular and religious social critics of his time, such as Shayegan (1977) and Shariati (1978), advocated a revivalist return to native Iranian and Muslim roots—an influential thesis that helped lay the intellectual foundations of the Islamist revolution three decades later.18 The movies also made fun of the dandies. The first Iranian feature fiction movie, Ovanes Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, filmed in the modern streets of Tehran, contains many men dressed in the kind of outfits dictated by Reza Shah and two lead female characters without a veil, while several wear Western hats. It also contains a comic dandy, the assistant to the diegetic director, who is clean-shaven, wears a Western suit, a cravat, cufflinks, European hairstyle, and a large handlebar mustache that the director—Ohanians

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65  Diegetic dandies. The assistant to the film director (on right) before the director (on left) cuts his mustache with scissors, emasculating him. Frame enlargement from Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor

himself, also wearing Western suit and tie—proceeds to clip with his scissors in a fit of rage (figure 65). This brief scene is significant: the mustache allowed the dandy a masquerade of manliness. Without it he is the nubile young man (amard, ghelman) whom the real men publicly desired in premodern times and now, in modern times, covet only secretly. The clipping of the mustache also emphasizes the dandies’ emasculation. Even commercial filmfarsi movies (lowbrow comedies and melodramas popular with the lower classes), which were themselves objects of intellectual derision, parodied the dandies. Often, the mocking characters were their nemeses, the toughs (lutis and jahels). Two examples suffice. A tough named Habib (Fardin) in Siamak Yasami’s Mr. Twentieth Century (Aqa-ye Qarn-e Bistom, 1964) frequents a café and sings a ditty in a comic Persian-English language, which parodies the dandies’ foreign inflections. Known in Persian as “Havar Yu Mester?” (“How Are You, Mister?”) or as “I Lov Suzi, Lahaf Duzi” (“I Love Susie, She’s a Doozie”), this “Penglish” song was released as a 45rpm record. Amin Amini’s comedy, Mademoiselle Auntie (Madmoizel Khaleh, 1957), also contained a duet by male and female singers whose lyrics made fun of the dandies’ Cornel Wilde hairstyle and cute behinds, as well as of their penchant for keeping up appearances. They looked snappy on the outside, but if you looked carefully you would notice that the soles of their nice-looking shoes were torn, as was the lining of their fancy jackets.19

Dandyism as Criticism and Consumerism Dandies did not form a unified social stratum, and Westernized dandies must be distinguished from modern intellectuals. Not all dandies were intellectuals, but all intellectuals were dandyish. The dandies discussed here, however, 290

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came from the middle class, did not hold positions of power, and were not necessarily intellectual. They were liminal subjects inhabiting the in-between spaces of Iranian society, sufficiently distanced from the center to play with its values and norms and to criticize them. Yet because of their higher education and class affiliations, they aspired to upward mobility and were often protected from the vagaries and vengeance either of the central power or of the disempowered marginalia, what Sadeq Hedayat called the rabble (1994). Western education and exposure to life in Europe and to the disruptions of modernity—and in some cases, of exile—had instilled in them some critical consciousness, anxious performativity, and ambivalent subjectivity about self and other and about authenticity and roots and modernity and routes. If during the Qajar era traditional coffeehouses and the Grand Hotel had emerged as the most important sites of cultural transgression and cinematic exchanges (in addition to storefront movie houses), in the first Pahlavi period modern cafés, restaurants, new hotels, shopping arcades, and stand-alone cinemas occupied that position. These were sites of modernity and leisure, where modernity and leisure could be seen, consumed, and performed. Dandies inhabited these transitional physical spaces between the public streets and the semiprivate places of commerce and orality (involving both eating and talking). Homa Katouzian characterizes Hedayat and his cohorts as “social and intellectual rebels” arising from “relatively open and well-to-do families” who were “shocking, chic, and à la mode, rather contemptuous of their elders as well as [of] ordinary Iranians” (1991:54). The leftist writer Bozorg Alavi, who with Hedayat formed part of a quartet of intellectuals (including Mojtaba Minovi and Masud Farzad), relates that the group gathered daily in the Voka Café, the Lalehzar Café, or the Naderi Café to hold court with other intellectuals (Alavi 1997:165–67) (figure 66). These gatherings were informal, but they had a long history in Iran, updating the native dowreh gatherings (salons) that had generally occurred on a rotating basis in members’ homes. Parviz Khatibi, a poet, playwright, film actor, and film director, considers the times he spent in the company of intellectuals and artists such as Hedayat, Minovi, Ehsan Tabari, and Hosain Behzad in the Café Ferdows among the “most fertile days” of his life (1994:398). In Isfahan, dandies and Westernized intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s hung out at the Park Café and the Polonia Café, operated by Armenians and Poles.20 The dandies also went to the movies at particular screening times, attended film clubs springing up in major cities to view foreign movies in their original languages, and visited the cultural arms of European, American, and Soviet embassies to socialize, use their libraries, mix with the opposite modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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66  Heterotopic sites of dandyism. The Café Naderi in Tehran was a favorite gathering spot for intellectual dandies. Still courtesy of Mahmoud Pakzad and Jahanshah Javid, Iranian.com

sex, and take language classes. They frequented photography shops—by the end of the 1920s Isfahan boasted twelve such establishments (Damandan 2004:37)—which catered to the desire of modern youths for professional portraiture. With the removal of the veil, studio photography of unveiled women and whole families became the rage. The dramatic poses and far-off looks of longing and desire that young women and men adopted for these portraits in the 1950s were influenced by Western movies and movie stars. Portrait photography enhanced the culture of spectacle and display, part and parcel of dandyism. The immobilized gazes of the seated spectators in the darkened movie houses or in the photography studios on Lalehzar and Chaharbagh Avenues were transformed into the mobile gazes of the flâneurs and dandies who strolled down these modern streets and who were dressed both to look and to be looked at. They thus reproduced the voyeuristic and exhibitionistic structures of the cinema and photography. But these dandified practices also signaled something else: Iran’s imbrication into the capitalist world economy and consumerism. As Ann Friedberg has noted, there is a constitutive relationship between movie watching on the one hand and window-shopping and consumerism on the other (1993). Once out of the movie houses and into the 292

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modern avenues, the dandies’ gazes at the movies and at each other extended to the consumer goods displayed in the fancy store windows. By supplying the products of the West that the movies displayed, the merchants lining the streets and arcades became part of the process that overdetermined cinema, modernity, and consumer culture. Cinema became integral to the emergence of consumer capitalism in Iran. Politically, the dandies were mainly “conformist rebels” (Chehabi 2003b: 203) in that they followed the Pahlavi shahs’ reforms while simultaneously harboring ambivalence about their top-down autocratic, state-driven Westernization. Many desired a free play of individuality. Even those dandies who were not intellectuals and appeared only to imitate Western surface values engaged in cultural criticism despite maybe not intending to. They expressed this criticism not in the familiar manner and or in venues sanctioned by secular or religious intellectuals, that is, through subversive literature, poetry, art, or membership in political parties or religious groups. Instead, they performed their criticism in the way they constructed and staged their hybridized identities in public spaces. The reformist educator Yahya Dowlatabadi reported in his diary that when he returned to his hometown of Isfahan in June 1919 after many years of absence, he found the city, widely known as “half the world” for its beauty and elegance, in a state of disrepair and filled with dust because of drought. “Group after group of young dandies [ farangi ma’ab], wearing luxurious clothing, leisurely strolled down Chaharbagh Avenue, constantly defending their clothes, eyes, and mouths against dust and dirt” (1992/1371:vol. 4:112). The insistence of the dandies on display may be read as a type of performed criticism of the city’s social amenities and of city officials. Such performed criticism in unauthorized venues was often indecipherable, causing misreadings that led to more derogatory stereotyping of the dandies. Authoritarian regimes and societies will experience dandyism as always already subversive and counterhegemonic because it produces slippage and doubt rather than certainty and clarity. The dandies’ penchant for dressing up and their playfulness with appearances; their indulgence in pleasurable pursuits and sensory complexity; their engagement in leisurely street grazing and gazing; their joy in rule-breaking and in the astonishment of others; their ambivalent identity and gender-bending masquerade; and their apparent apolitical attitude—all these posed a threat to society, to leftist intellectuals, to the clerical establishment, and to government officials. Dandies thus caused controversy and became at once objects of desire, derision, and dread. Mehrzad Boroujerdi attributes the continued popularity and relevance of Moqaddam’s Jafar Khan Is Back from Europe to its twin focus on the quesmodern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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tion of Iranian identity and on Iranian ambivalence toward modernity and modernization (2003:12). The point, however, is that ambivalence is not just about modernity and modernization but also about Iranian traditions and authenticity. Moqaddam’s play contains scathing criticisms of traditional Iranian customs—Jafar’s family’s clothing, table manners, superstitions, and arranged marriages. Moqaddam also engaged in self-criticism. Reportedly he responded to his critics, “This is my own life. I have criticized myself. I, too, came from Europe” (quoted in Jamshidi 1994:155). That he played the lead role in this production increased the autobiographical and autocritical dimensions of his play. In addition, he used his own mother as the model for Jafar Khan’s mother, who is heavily derided in the play. Like many Westernized dandies, Moqaddam demonstrated modern subjectivity through self-awareness, selfreflexivity, and self-criticism. Many intellectual critics of Jafar Khan Is Back from Europe and of other dandy movies failed to read the dandies’ parodic, performed criticism and did not appreciate the potential subversion of Iranian and Western cultures that came from their ambivalence, ambiguity, and performativity. They failed to see that many of the pathological terms with which they condemned the dandies referred not so much to their imitation of the West as to their mimicking, which undermined both Western and Iranian traditions. They were reading only the identification, not the alienating mechanism. Instead of validating mimicry as a strategy of resistance, they regarded it as mere imitation, which only served to create self-doubt and shame. And since they regarded the objects of the dandies’ imitation to be the superficial trappings of the West, not its deep values, its philosophy, or its technoscientific achievements, they could claim that Weststruck individuals knew neither the self nor the West well and that they did not fully belong to either. Dandies in this view became lightweight floating signifiers in search of signifieds. In part, this misreading stemmed from the distrust that both secular and religious intellectuals across the political spectrum had for mimicry and its engine, performativity. Shadman and Al-e Ahmad were not alone in their incomplete reading of modern dandies. Hamid Algar’s fascinating biography of the nineteenth-­ century pro-Western reformist Mirza Malkum Khan also does not read mimicry as a playfully performative strategy of resistance but sees it as lightweight, facile, and opportunistic imitation. He charges that Malkum’s accomplishments in reforming Iran were vitiated by a “basic lack of seriousness and an ineradicable penchant to pretense and charlatanry” (1973:19). Yet the playful art of pretense lies at the heart of mimicry’s performative criticism. Perhaps these and other critics feared the full import of dandies’ behavior, for it posed 294

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a potential threat to the established patriarchal and intellectual social orders in whose constitution and maintenance both the state and its loyal opposition had a stake. If traditionally the West fetishized its Others as noble savages (White 1986), then Westernized dandies were third-world subjects who struck back at the West by turning themselves into fabulous chimeras, social monsters, or inappropriate Others, both of their own and of Western societies. By mimicry, inappropriateness, excess, and deviancy they responded to, deflected, and returned the interpellating gaze of Eastern and Western powers. Like organic intellectuals, dandies engaged in cultural haggling with the self and the other in their search for an alternative modernity. Both imitation and mimicry are important performance practices in Iranian traditional theater such as ruhozi, whose saliency in the society at large remains understudied (this theater is also called taqlid, meaning “imitation and mimicry”).21 In their encounters with the Western “mirror,” the dandies fused, defused, diffused, and even refused. In other words, they embodied various strategies of both identification and alienation. In imitating Western culture (fusion), dandies circulated things Western (diffusion) while devaluing their native culture (refusal); but in the surplus, parody, and inappropriateness of their imitation they offered, usually unbeknownst to themselves and to their critics, a critique of both Western and Iranian traditions (de-fusion, re-fusion, refusing). Their performance produced hybridity and partiality, not universal, homogenous, and stable subjects. As early as 1810, dandies’ ambivalence was derided in terms such as shotor-morgh (ostrich), literally, “camel-bird,” implying two very different creatures transformed into a useless combination. Camel-bird eventually became “camel-cow-leopard” (shotor-gav-palang), an even more fabulous and illconstituted chimera.22 Yet partiality and excess were not shortcomings, as the critics claimed, but strengths, for these not only signified their hybridity and modernity but also signified on—critiqued—the sources of this hybridity and modernity. The production of universal, homogenous, and uniformly dressed subjects was in fact the object of the Pahlavi state under Reza Shah, who issued his various modernizing decrees and legislation in the 1930s to that end. However, the dandies did the state one better by their excess in adopting additional unauthorized, hybridized fashions, which by displaying individuality and personality, posed a threat to the totalitarian state. Of course, the dandies were not only mimicking the West but also imitating it and its consumerist lifestyle and stars. But there was pleasure in their fetishizing, the pleasure of duality, of manifestly admiring things Western modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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but latently harboring critique—often without knowing it. They took pleasure in owning the West and its products and, in turn, in becoming owned by them. Their pleasure also derived from the fact that they criticized not only the West but the stifling traditions at home as well. The influential leftist and Muslim intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s, who opposed the second Pahlavi state’s takeover of all public spheres, imposed their own homogenous and totalizing conceptions of oppositionality. Concerned with “the people” and the downtrodden of the world, both types were serious. Culturally, one was chiefly interested in European high culture and Marxism, while the other tended to favor Shiite religious discourse and traditions. Ideologically, one was driven by nostalgia for an essentialist, pre-Islamic Iranian identity or by a prospective nostalgia for an egalitarian communist future, while the other was motivated by the authenticity and purity of the golden age of Islam and by Shiite paradigms of a more just and equitable future. Because their parodic excess as criticism of native and foreign cultures was misread, the dandies were scorned both for debasing the authenticity of native Iranian traditions and for copying unwanted Western fashions. Criticism from all sides was the price of ambivalence and hybridity. When Iranians formed productive exilic communities in the aftermath of the revolution of 1978–79, the bifocality of displacement finally brought a recognition of dandyism’s virtues. A cartoonist named Mahmoud, whose works are published by the Internet magazine Iranian, edited by Jahanshah Javid, used the dandies of Pahlavi-era cinema to critique Iranian Americans’ overemphasis on ostentatious display and their nostalgia for bygone dandies and lutis. The transplantation of the dandies paralleled the transplantation of another cinematic character—the lutis, dealt with in volume 2 of this work. The dandies were modern and counterhegemonic, and therefore unsettling, in another way. Their sense of fluid behavior and their penchant for playfulness and flamboyance created gender troubles in a society in which gender differences were visibly marked, spatially demarcated, and vehemently patrolled. The dandies’ style defied, played with, and blurred the hard edges of gender identity. This transgressive fluidity created a moral panic in both traditionalists and Pahlavi modernists. Many songs, some bordering on the pornographic, parodied and condemned the dandies’ sexual and identity ambiguities (Shahri 1997/1376:vol. 1:282–84), because their personal transgressions were seen to imply transgressions in other spheres, particularly in politics, which turned dandies into potent social and political figures who demanded surveillance and ideological processing from various state apparatuses and the culture at large. 296

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The Dandy Movie Genre This genre processed the presence of dandies and the moral panic they aroused by setting up a conflict between modernity and authenticity. Dandies, who represented modernity, were opposed to lutes, who represented Iranian nativism; the latter usually emerged triumphant in the narratives. Lutis constituted important social figures in Iranian national identity, and a significant and enduring movie genre arose around them: the tough-guy film. Unlike the dandies, who lost themselves to the West, the toughs generally retained their authenticity, manliness, and chivalry, thus gaining gravitas and profundity. The dandy genre of the 1950s–70s poked fun at male and female dandies. There were also other commercial filmfarsi movies, such as Mr. Twentieth Century and Mademoiselle Auntie, that ridiculed dandies without actually including a sustained dandy character. These are part of the discursive formation that circulated the dandies. That comedy was deemed the best form to deal with these social types may have something to do with the anxiety that they stirred in Iranians. Had they been taken seriously, the issues they raised would also have to be dealt with consciously. In comedy, their antics could be enjoyed without panic. Comedy allows the mainstream to defuse the threat posed by social Others. An urban mise-en-scène including fight scenes between male dandies or between dandies and lutis characterized the genre. Song-and-dance scenes in which scantily clad women performed for a male diegetic audience were also common. The fighting occurred in streets and sometimes in cafés, while the dancing usually took place inside cafés and cabarets. These movies were made neither by art-cinema directors nor by the dandies themselves; their production values were low, as was sympathy with the dandies. Businessmen after easy box-office successes made these films, and they reproduced the generally disparaging yet comic representational stereotypes of the dandies as Weststruck imitators rather than subversive mimics. To appropriately mark them as outsiders and as threats to society, the movies showed dandies encountering difficulties in finding steady jobs and suitable wives. Yet if they underwent punishment and reform, they could qualify for marriage, providing happy endings for the movies. Almost all dandy movies followed this didactic and moralistic reform structure, rendering them politically conservative. In the process, they fulfilled the function of homeostasis often associated with genres. In the following I examine several B-grade dandy movies, which fall into the popular filmfarsi category, and a landmark television serial by a new-wave director. modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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Shapur Qarib’s The American Mamal (Mamal-e Emrikai, 1974) Written and directed by Shapur Qarib, and starring two idols of pop culture and cinema, Googoosh and Behrouz Vossoughi, The American Mamal exemplified the didactic reform structure. Vossoughi plays a dandy, derisively called Mamal (nickname for Mohammad), who is preoccupied with the United States (hence his nickname American Mamal), its movie stars (he claims to have met stars such as Burt Lancaster and Yul Brynner), and successful Iranian immigrants in the United States (who reportedly have made fortunes by purchasing gas stations).23 He leads a life of impersonation: he pretends either to have returned from the United States or to be on his way there. Even though he is named after the Muslim Prophet Mohammad, he wears a large Christian cross pendant around his neck, sunglasses, and long hair, and he smokes Iranian cigarettes disguised as American ones (figure 67). His speech, delivered in the language and diction of the lutis (postdubbed by Vossoughi himself), is sprinkled with colorful luti and American expressions, creating a comic hybrid language. For example, the name of his friend Aqa Karim-e Gol (meaning Mr. Karim, the flower) becomes Mister Karim-e Felaver (flower pronounced in Persian), uttered in the lilting luti manner. Mamal’s father constitutes the film’s moral center, for he calls his son a qerti (an effeminate showoff) and is ashamed of his scheming life and his shady deals and petty crimes to pay for his visa to the United States, which make him have a number of run-ins with the law. Mamal falls in love with Nasrin (Googoosh), a young rich girl, who wears mink coats, lives in a fancy house, and drives a convertible Mercedes Benz (figure 68). Like Mamal, Nasrin is involved in games of pretense: she pretends to be the daughter of a rich widow who is using her to attract young

67  A dandy named Mahmud (Behrouz Vossoughi), whose nickname is Mamal, is so starstruck with American movies that he calls himself “American Mamal.” Frame enlargement from Shapur Qarib’s movie The American Mamal

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boys for her pleasure. Born poor, both Mamal and Nasrin think that only impersonation will raise their class status and make them happy. To them the United States represents not only a rich land but also one of opportunity and the imagination; they regard Iran as a closed, stifling society with limited options for modern youth. This sentiment is expressed in one of Googoosh’s songs, played extradiegetically over the scenes of intimacy between Mamal and Nasrin, whose refrain is “help me, help me, don’t let me rot in this place.” Even though the film’s dandies are superficial and cartoonish—no intellectual here—their impersonation of things modern and their hybridization are driven by a desire for freedom, possibility, and the chance to occupy the center. In the end, Mamal and Nasrin find out about each other’s games of pretense, and only after admitting to each other that they are “nothing” do they become “something” and genuinely fall in love. The word nothing here is highly loaded, for it has multiple connotations. It implies that the two are nothing important in society; that they are no longer impersonating someone important or rich; and that there is no connection between their appearance and their true selves. In short, no hybrid slippage or excess exists between who they are and who they appear to be, between their insides and their outsides. At this point, both Mamal and Nasrin exude inner purity (safa-ye baten), obtainable only when the inside and the outside coincide—an idealized but unreachable goal for Iranians. By admitting that they are not hybrids, that they do not wish to go the United States anymore (Mamal tears up his passport and the U.S. visa), and that they love each other, they prove their authenticity and return to an empowered self. In a moralist and conservative move, sincerity and coupling close the world of individual possibility and modernity that dandyism had opened. Mamal no longer speaks in his parodic luti-dandy lingo or continues in his superficial impersonations; reformed, he now speaks

68  A female dandy, Nasrin (Googoosh), falls for the American Mamal. Frame enlargement from The American Mamal

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69  The poster for The American Mamal. Collection of the author

with a sincere tone and in a serious manner. Frivolity has been replaced with nativistic gravitas. Susan Fillin-Yeh notes, “Flux and volatility are characteristic of Western Europe and America in years around 1800 when dandies were newly visible and Brummell, Disraeli, and Allston were men operating in an unstable social, political, and artistic climate” (2001:9). Likewise, the Iran of the 1960s and the 1970s, shaken by an influx of petrodollars, foreign tourists and consultants, imported Western products and ideologies, as well as by Iranians’ travels abroad and social unrest at home, was volatile and ripe for dandyism, as dandyism created a third space of possibility by interrupting the binary structures of self (Iran) and other (the West). However, The American Mamal and other dandy and luti movies shied away from the radical and transformative possibilities of the movement. They only used it to ridicule it, to entertain audiences, and to make Iranians feel good about themselves (figure 69). As required by the generic conventions of the dandy film, The American Mamal contains several extended fights between dandies and toughs and at least two long cabaret dance numbers by female entertainers performing a 300

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belly dance and a striptease for diegetic audiences consisting of Mamal, Nasrin, and their friends. Heterosexual love and marriage serve as agents for transforming dandies into suitable and acceptable citizens. Hosain Madani’s Tough Guys and Gigolos (Jahelha va Zhigoloha, 1965) involved both dandies and toughs and the dandies’ moralistic transformation through marriage. In it, a group of dandies, representing modernity, and a group of neighborhood toughs, representing Iranian traditions, are in continual conflict until, toward the end of the film, one of the lutis marries the sister of one of the dandies and one of the dandies marries the sister of a tough guy. As a marker of their modernity, in one early fight scene the dandies emulate the finger-snapping moves of the dancers in Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961), which the toughs also emulate but in an exaggerated fashion that cleverly parodies the dandies’ parody of the American original—mirror within mirror within mirror. Lutis transformed themselves atavistically in real life and in movies by reviving Iranian traditions of chivalry or sometimes by assimilating into those traditions new Western forms. As such, like dandies, lutis constituted an important dimension of the Iranian discourse of modernism. The astute pairing of dandies and toughs as polar antagonists in movies provided for entertaining sparring between two sets of colorful characters. At the same time, since these characters were culturally rooted, their pairing and sparring symbolized the larger sociocultural tensions and attractions that characterized Iran’s relationship with the West. The dandies became appropriate citizens not only through love and marriage but also through their transformation from sexually ambiguous, effeminate, shady, Weststruck characters into honest, authentic, manly, and strong tough guys. Suppressed homosociality and homosexuality formed important undercurrents of dandy and luti movies. Since these practices were considered immoral, unmanly, un-Islamic, and illegal, they had to remain hidden. But they could not be hermetically sealed away. The dandies’ effeminacy marks the surplus homoeroticism that escaped society’s heteronormative preferences. Unmarried, neatly dressed, clean-shaven, nubile young dandies posed both a threat and a lure, not only to women but also to men. They had to be ridiculed, despised, or transformed into something nominally respectable and unthreatening. There was a constitutive relationship between the dandies and the tough guys in the movies, often a transformational one. The direction of value favored the conservative, nativistic side—dandies becoming lutis, not vice-versa. This is the case not only in The American Mamal but also in Baby Dandy. modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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Reza Safai’s Baby Dandy (Jujeh Fokoli, 1974) The protagonist of Reza Safai’s Baby Dandy is Feraidun, a novice dandy (hence the adjective jujeh, referring to a hatchling, a chick—a baby dandy). He is the son of a famous heroic luti unfairly murdered years earlier by a villain tough (a lat). This pedigree is significant because it establishes both the linkage and the contrast between the tough guys and the dandies. Feraidun’s origins are established in a hospital birth sequence that parodies the story of Kimiai’s Qaisar (1969). As it turns out, Feraidun is born to Farman, the tough-guy brother of Qaisar who is slain in Qaisar while defending his family’s honor. This intertextual reference to Qaisar, the archetypal tough-guy movie, is characteristic of genre cinema, whereby genre conventions are often signified on by later movies. Instead of choosing a traditional Muslim luti name for his son, Farman gives him a nationalist Iranian name, Feraidun, and instead of apprenticing him in his own profession of butchery, he sends him to modern schools to become a doctor. But Feraidun (played by Bahman Mofid, a famous luti character actor) becomes a singer in a rock band and performs in nightclubs. The movie posits the replacement of chivalry by superficial dandyism and Westoxication. In the film Feraidun receives the nickname “Fifi.” Effeminate monikers made for common satirical tools in those days. People, including his mother, disdainfully call Feraidun a motreb. The dandified protagonist calls his mother “mommy,” instead of using naneh. He sports an over-thetop 1970s hippie uniform of long hair, a disheveled beard, bead necklaces, an open vest, and bell-bottom pants, along with his dandified gestures and phrases. The film conflates all things Western as frivolous, immoral, effeminate, inauthentic, shallow, and ostentatious. All this means that Feraidun is not a productive, appropriate, or respectable member of society and that no parent would want to give his or her daughter to him in marriage, especially not the respectable elder luti whose daughter, Shirin, Feraidun wants. The solution is for Feraidun to become a luti himself. After much intrigue, two female relatives put Feraidun in the hands of Hosain Pashneh (Hosain the Heel, played by the famous comic Reza Arhamsadr).24 After Feraidun’s prowess and character are tested and he is comically trained in the arts of luti conduct and combat, he is ready for a final violent showdown for Shirin’s hand with his lat rival, Ismail Gavkosh (Ismail the Bull Killer). Feraidun’s transformation under Hosain Pashneh’s tutelage favors all things native and atavistic. His name is changed to Vali or to Ferferi (meaning “curly haired”), his hair is cut short, and his beard is replaced by a 302

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handlebar mustache, a luti emblem of manliness. He wears the luti uniform of black pants and coat, black shirt, and black fedora hat. He begins to carry a long Yazdi handkerchief in his hand, to drink huge amounts of local vodka (araq), and to pick fights in bars. He also begins calling his mother naneh. In the final showdown, he predictably triumphs over his rival, thus qualifying as a real man to marry Shirin. Shirin, too, undergoes a transformation, from miniskirt-wearing dandy to modest, respectable girl. The reason behind her transformation is the same as Feraidun’s: she must become marriageable to escape her father’s clutches. She dons the chador but her transformation is shallow and incomplete, as she only pretends to follow tradition and wears her head-to-foot veil in loose and provocative ways that show her miniskirt and bare legs. Even though Baby Dandy validates luti life and Iranian traditions of heteronormal gender construction, it also makes fun of luti codes of conduct. It criticizes the men’s violence and pokes fun at their supposedly manly style by having a comic tough sing their masculine songs in an effeminate manner. The movie also ridicules the feminine traditions. As was customary, the film has half a dozen fight scenes, as well as cabaret scenes in which scantily dressed women sing and dance for a male audience. The conservative solutions that Tough Guys and Gigolos and Baby Dandy offered restored the kind of tribal custom in which kinship and intermarriage guaranteed stability. Indeed, in Iranian cinema, marriage is posed as the ursolution to many irreconcilable divisions—class, national, and ethnic—and to many situations involving society’s outsiders and in-betweeners, such as dandies and lutis. Marriage was the engine for social assimilation, mobility, and cohesion. In Javad Taheri’s first movie, Effeminate Aziz (Aziz Qerti, 1971), Aziz, an effeminate dandy, as the title suggests, is made socially acceptable when he decides to change his ways. He successfully surmounts many obstacles and marries his girlfriend. The antagonistic and transformational relations between dandies and tough guys created the most enduring and prolific—if understudied and underappreciated—ur-genre of Iranian cinema, often derisively called filmfarsi (Persian-language film). In volume 2 a long chapter is devoted to this genre. Even small genres are not homogenous or static. The dandy genre had at least two subgenres, a nativist and a Westernized one. In the more conservative and nativist version, such as in Baby Dandy, the dancers were all Eastern women, performing traditional Middle Eastern or Persian dances for an allmale diegetic audience. In the Westernized version, exemplified by The American Mamal, the dancers performed a mix of Eastern dances (belly dancing) modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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and Western dances (striptease) for a mixed-sex audience. The walls of gender separation seemed to crumple in the Westernized subgenre. The American Mamal used modern casting: Vossoughi, its young film star, was cast alongside a pop singer, Googoosh, and the pair had a sensational off-camera romance and brief marriage. Press coverage of their lives created an intertextual relationship between the market and media. Another layer of intertextuality was added by the use on the soundtrack of Googoosh songs that also ran on radio and television. Googoosh’s soundtrack album, Dariyai, created crossover marketing opportunities for the film, the record, and the star personae of Vossoughi and Googoosh. This was something new in Iranian cinema. The American Mamal’s modernity thus only partly derived from its characters and narrative; some of it also resulted from its intertextuality—the underlying structures that produced, marketed, and exhibited it. The film opened in midMarch 1974 to coincide with the two-week holiday of the Iranian New Year (Noruz), and it was exhibited simultaneously in fourteen first-run cinemas in Tehran alone. The movie made 121,000,500 rials and garnered the number one box-office ranking for 1974 (Omid 1995/1374:669).

Naser Taqvai’s My Uncle Napoleon (Daijan Napoleon, 1976) The accomplished documentarian and new-wave director Naser Taqvai adapted Iraj Pezeshkzad’s satirical novel My Uncle Napoleon as a television serial, which became the most popular series in the history of Iranian television up to that point.25 Filmed on 16mm film stock and postdubbed, it was aired in eighteen weekly installments of an hour each on both the first and the second channels of National Iranian Radio and Television (nirt). It immediately became the talk of the town, with some of the colorful catchphrases uttered by its protagonists circulating widely for years. In its first network airing, it made 20 million tomans—more than four times its 4.5 million tomans production costs. Apparently, many European countries, including Britain, France, and Germany, expressed interest in purchasing the rights to broadcast it, but nirt demanded too high a price. Taqvai ascribed part of his work’s huge success to its serial structure, which replicated the familiar, convoluted, and episodic traditions of oral storytelling, such as those manifest in The Thousand and One Nights (quoted in Talebinezhad 1996/1375:81). Although it did not centrally deal with the dandies, My Uncle Napoleon did have at least two important characters who exhibited certain dandy attributes. Set in the 1940s, the serial deals with the life of Uncle Napoleon and his 304

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extended family and servants. Like many a dandy, Uncle Napolean (Gholamhosain Naqshineh) is fixated on Europe. He admires and loves his imperial namesake unquestionably and considers any criticism of the French emperor a personal affront. The uncle’s claim to fame is based on his elaborate, often fanciful and falsified, bravery in fighting the British occupation of Iran in the 1940s and earlier. This experience has influenced him so profoundly that he sees a British conspiracy behind every major event in the country—­caricaturing Iranians’ general love of conspiracy theories, particularly those involving the British.26 The other main dandy-like character is the dapper, ­bowtie-wearing, Duglasi mustache–bearing, and lecherous Asdolla Mirza (Parviz Sayyad). He hails from a princely family and frequently weaves the English “Moment! Moment!” into his Persian. He also uses the city name San Francisco as a verb or a noun to describe sexual intercourse, as in to “sanfrancisco someone” or to “go to sanfrancisco with someone.” While Uncle Napoleon is anti-British and pro-France, Asdolla Mirza is pro-American, but these attitudes are not shallow and ephemeral; rather, they are deep and ontological. In both cases these characters are who they are because of their imaginary relationships with France, Britain, and the Unites States. As befits dandies, both engage in the art of masquerade and ostentatious display, one putting on a show of bravery, the other of sexuality. A difference existed between the two in terms of dandy discourse, however. Uncle Napoleon’s identification with the French and with Napoleon was total. The copy matched the original, without excess or slippage. Asdollah Mirza’s identification, on the other hand, was tinged with alienation, producing parodic excess and slippage and thereby allowing him to critique both Iranian and American cultures. The result was that the former lacked selfawareness as a subject of Western interpellation, while the latter was overly self-­conscious about his subjectivity and about his actions. Consequently, one may conclude that while Uncle Napoleon engaged in imitation, Asdollah Mirza engaged in mimicry. Their strategies of selfing and othering, often rendered incisively and humorously, and recognizable to most Iranians, also made for important reasons for the serial’s popularity.

Ali Hatami’s Haji Washington (Haji Vashangton, 1982–88) Hatami shot Haji Washington years before his Jafar Khan Has Returned from Europe, but due to censorship problems it was actually released years after the latter. While Haji Washington did not concern dandies per se, it dealt squarely modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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with the selfing and othering discourses of modernity, particularly among the upper classes who traveled and lived abroad, making its discussion germane in this context. (It did also feature a dandy character.) The film centers on the destabilized life of Hosain Qoli Khan (Ezzatollah Entezami), the first Iranian diplomat appointed by the Qajar court as an ambassador to the United States, where he serves for one year in Washington (hence his nickname, Haji Washington). In his diary entries in Europe, he complains that although there are Iranian government representatives in many countries, Europeans do not know much about Iran (a perennial complaint by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iranian travelers). He muses that perhaps this is because Iranians changed to European attire, obliterating their differences and uniqueness. The ambassador has an assistant and translator—his dilmaj, as he calls him—who is a fastidious dandy with a bowtie, dark-rimmed prescription glasses, and a meticulous mustache. Eventually, he abandons his boss to study medicine, while the ambassador, who at first had filed glowing (false) reports about how he had been welcomed in Washington, dismisses the rest of his household staff, for no one ever visits him and he receives no funds from Iran to run the embassy (the only mail he receives is a letter to the Turkish ambassador misdelivered to him). Isolated in his opulent residence (called Paradise Hotel), the ambassador gradually becomes delusional, playing with a life-size stuffed doll resembling his daughter and hallucinating visits by the U.S. president dressed like a cowboy (Richard Harrison) and by a Native American in war paint and feathers riding a white stallion, who supposedly seeks asylum from Iran. In his overwrought delusional state, the ambassador interprets these visits as signs of his own and his country’s importance, rather than impotence or irrelevance, keeping up his rosy official façade, until President Cleveland disabuses him by telling him that he has not been president for four months. His pointed question, “Don’t you read the papers?,” awakens the uninformed ambassador as though from a slumber (figure 70). In the film’s pièce de résistance sequence (in terms of the discourse of self and othering), Haji Washington slaughters a sheep on the special day of sacrifice, during which his disillusionment with his diplomatic mission, with his personal worth, and with his father’s cruelty turns into anger. With each forceful blow of his enormous cleaver on the animal’s carcass, he shouts out one of his shortcomings, and by proxy those of his country—timidity, weakness, hesitancy, seditiousness, duplicity, and fraudulence—until the carcass is cut into small pieces. After giving away the meat to various people at the gate, an 306

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70  The poster for Ali Hatami’s Haji Washington. Collection of the author

exhausted Haji makes a dire assessment of his country: “I foresee a dark and spoiled future for Iran.” The film ends with the dispirited, lone ­ambassador —expelled by the United States and recalled by Iran—adrift in a rowboat on a vast ocean. Hatami produced, wrote, and directed the film for the Islamic Republic’s First Channel television. Like other Hatami historical films, this one was very meticulous in its mise-en-scène, as every effort was made at historical accuracy in terms of setting, décor, stage properties, costumes, makeup, lighting, and acting (particularly Entezami). However, the pacing of the film in terms of camera movement, actors’ movement, and dialogue delivery is so studied and observational as to be laborious and lugubrious. The inaccurate postdubbing of most of the voices also counteracts the film’s visual authenticity and richness, creating a dissonant text. Finally, the parody of the ambassador’s modern i t y’s ambivalent subj ec tivity

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dandified assistant with a visual tic and a stutter did not work; it turned him into a caricature of dandies.27 Globalization and ongoing interactions and exchange relations between Iran and the West, despite various political impediments, will likely ensure the continued evolution of the dandy genre, as it processes new individualized subjectivities and national identities for Iranians in a postnational and fragmented global world.

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How It All Began 1 I generally used Photo Homayun, ran by the Shokrani family, whose son, Mohammad, was my friend and the class jokester. 2 For more on my immediate family’s history, see Ahmad Naficy 1999/1378; Majid Naficy 2006; Hamid Naficy 2001/1380; Nasrin Naficy and Mehdy Naficy 2001/1380; Azar Nafisi 2008, 2003; Nahal Naficy 2009; and Okhovat 2007/1386. 3 Saeb dissolved at the end of 1950s and soon begat the Jong-e Isfahan group in the 1960s and 1970s, which published Jong-e Isfahan magazine. After the revolution the group begat another literary group that published Zendehrud magazine. For more on Isfahan’s literary circles, see Naser Motii, “Yad Avari” (Shahrivar 1384/2005); Majid Naficy 2005, 114–17; Mansuri 2007a/1386; Mansuri 2007b/1386; Golshiri 1991/1369; and Kalbasi 2003/1382. 4 My paternal uncle Ahmad, a few years younger than my dad, also went to the movies in Isfahan at sixteen and eighteen (just before the Second World War) accompanied by his uncles Yusof and Loqman. Both times he attended open-air movie houses on Chaharbagh Avenue. The first time, he watched a silent Richard Talmage movie during which a dilmaj translated the intertitles for spectators, who were segregated by gender. He ends his diary entry about this film viewing by commenting on the sensorial pleasures of spectatorship in a “garden cinema”: “They had sprayed water on the [hot] ground and the fragrance of Nyctaginaceae and petunias had penetrated everywhere.” I thank Mohammad Reza Nafissi for letting me quote from his father’s unpublished diary. 5 The usia films dealing with Iranian topics that I reviewed were For Your Health (Bara-ye Salamati), Tuberculosis Is Curable (Bimari-ye Sel Alajpazir Ast,

1951), Preventing Dysentery (Jelowgiri az Eshal, 1951), Cleanliness Results in Health (Pakizegi Mojeb-e Tandorosti Ast), Budding and Grafting (Paivand Zadan, 1951), Paint Brush and Painting (Qalam Mu va Tarz-e Naqqashi), Cold (Zokam), Abadan: Land of the Black Gold (Naft ya Tala-ye Siah, 1953), Iranian Scenery (Manazer-e Iran), The Near East Foundation (Bongah-e Khavarmianeh), and Milk and Milk Products: Hygiene (Behdasht-e Shir). Those dealing with subjects in the United States were Tomorrow Is Better Than Today (Farda Behtar az Emruz, about kindergartens), Outdoor Sports in America (Varzeshha-ye Khareji-ye Emrika, shown twice), Leisure Time Activities (Dar Moqe’-e Faraghat Cheh Karhai Bayad Kard), Hidden Truth (fiction), and one whose title I do not know. All these were made in the early 1950s. 6 The Iran-America Society in Isfahan held English-language classes, had a modern library, and screened American movies. There I saw a film on President Lincoln, perhaps John Ford’s classic Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). 7 Sadly, two members, David Denton and Vince LeClaire (Elf), committed suicide a few years later. The commune still exists near the usc campus and one member, Robert (Rush) Riddle, still lives there and serves as its archivist. 8 For this project, an xds Sigma 7 digital computer and a dec 340 graphics station were used. A team of computer science graduate students headed by Vinton G. Cerf working under Professor Leonard Kleinrock on a project funded by the Advanced Research Project Agency of the U.S. Defense Department— which became the Internet—assisted me in developing a graphic interface language we called Mosaic, with which I produced computer-generated images. Subsequently, I modified these images by using the analogue computers of Computer Image Corporation, Beverly Hills, which I further manipulated using video special effects. Ken Yapkowitz, a ucla music graduate student, composed and recorded the soundtrack for the film using synthesizers as well as recordings of Muslim preachers in a rowzeh at my uncle Karim’s house. 9 I have talked about these autobiographic issues and more in an interview published in Sullivan 2001, 59–64. 10 These are the family members that the Islamic Republic government executed (their political affiliations and dates of deaths are noted): Mohammad Javad Kalbasi, Rah-e Kargar member, summer 1982; Sadeq Okhovat, member of the Marxist group Peykar, 1982; Ezzat Tabaian (the wife of my brother Majid), a Peykar member, January 1982; Hosain Okhovat-Moqaddam, a Peykar member, February 1983 (the husband of my sister Nooshin); Hosain ­Okhovat-Fudehi, a Peykar member, 1983; Babak Qadiri, a member of Razmandegan, 1983; Said Naficy, a member of the Peoples’ Mojahedin Organization of Iran (pmoi), summer 1983 (my brother); Fahimeh Okhovat (Said’s wife), a pmoi member, summer 1983; Mahmud Okhovat, a pmoi member, 1983; Jafar Dorri, a pmoi member, 1983; and Shahryar Hakimi, a member either of the pmoi or the Peoples’ Fadaian Organization of Iran (pfoi), summer 1988. Said Okhovat, an anti-Shah Marxist cousin, was probably killed in Afghanistan in 1977–78. I thank Majid Naficy for supplying the details of this list.

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11 The following were signatories of the first public call to boycott the festival (others added their names as the campaign continued): Mary Apick (actress), Shohreh Aghdashloo (actress), Hushang Baharlou (cinematographer), Shahram Boroukhim (actor), Haideh Changizian (ballerina), Azar Fakhr (actress), Ali Fakhreddin (actor), Shahrokh Golestan (filmmaker), Abdolali Homayun (actor), Parviz Kardan (actor, playwright), Masha Manesh (actor), Marva Nabili (filmmaker), Kamran Nozad (actor), Akbar Ghovanlou (actor), Parviz Sayyad (actor, playwright, filmmaker), Barbod Taheri (filmmaker), and Houshang Touzie (actor, playwright). 12 These producers include Masud Assadollahi, Iraj Gorgin, Ali Limonadi, and Parviz Qaribafshar. 13 On the Encyclopaedia Iranica and its founder, Ehsan Yarshater, now in his nineties, see the twenty-five-minute bbc program, Chehrehha (2008), produced and directed by Amanda Herper, available online (http://www.bbc.co .uk/persian/tv/2008).

Introduction 1 I have benefited from Stephen Crofts’s formulation of national cinemas and modernity, although he deals with only the first three formations (Crofts 2000). 2 In formulating the components of modernity here, I have been inspired by Ben Singer’s formulations (2001:17–35).

Chapter 1  Artisanal Silent Cinema 1 In 1907 Russia and Britain signed a treaty dividing Iran into two spheres of influence, the northern part of the country constituting the Russian sphere while the south was British. The Iranian government principally exerted its power in the central region. 2 “Nation” was not the only key concept recoded by Iranians in their effort to establish a new democratic social order and to reimagine themselves as a modern nation. For the manner in which other related key concepts were “resignified” to dissociate Iran from Islam, see Tavakoli-Targhi 1990:79. 3 There were few telephones in Iran. Jamalzadeh (1983/1362:184) reports that before 1917, Tehran had 380 telephones, Tabriz 200, Mashhad 100, Isfahan 80, Rasht 80, Shiraz 50, Qazvin 30, and Hamadan 14. 4 The exile press was not uniform in its ideologies and political positions. Among the papers that around the time of the Constitutional Revolution advocated Westernization and secular nationalism were Qanun (Law) in London, Parvaresh (Education) in Cairo, and Akhtar (Star) in Constantinople. Among those that supported the formation of a religiously sanctioned Islamic community were Al-Urvatul in Paris and Habl al-Matin (Firm Rope) in Calcutta (Mowlana 1991:49). On the press in exile during this period, see Mowlana 1991; Entekhabi 1993; and Asemi 1998. 5 Almost all the early twentieth-century independent periodicals were artisanal,

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improvisational, and amateur projects sustained by the heroic efforts of multifunctional publisher-editors. A good example was Mirzadeh Eshqi’s publication of his modernist periodical Qarn-e Bistom (Twentieth Century). On his artisanal production mode, see Qa’ed 1998/1377:chap. 5. 6 There were other reasons for the economic stagnation and devastation of Iran, including the massive losses and debts the Qajar shahs incurred either through wartime defeats (two against Russia, leading to the loss of much territory) or their excessive borrowing from foreign powers to fund their extravagant lifestyles; Iran’s geography and arid climate; the country’s tribal social structure; and the so-called Asiatic mode of production (Chaqueri 2001; Ashraf 1980/1359; Krader 1975; Issawi 1971). 7 Every village, town, and region became known for the excellence of a specific agricultural or manufactured product—a localization that continues despite globalization and increased transportation, communication, and mass manufacturing, even in the diaspora. 8 George Esmailov opened the Pathé Cinema in the Grand Hotel in 1921 and a film school near Lalehzar Avenue in 1925. Others are discussed in due course. 9 For example, Homa Nateq reports that among the 5,000 Jewish residents of Shiraz in 1903 (of the city’s population of 50,000), there were 90 businessmen, 400 porters, 103 jewelers, 10 wine makers, and 60 musicians (1996: 140). Lawrence Loeb, who cites the same statistics, notes that the Shirazi Jews were considered not only the finest musicians in Iran but also the most numerous, as in 1908 there were probably only 40 Jewish musicians in Tehran (1977:82–83). C. J. Willis, the British physician who lived in Iran for several years between 1866 and 1888, has this to say of the plight of Iranian Jews in the Qajar era: “As for the Jews, their position is terrible. Probably in no country in the world are they treated worse than in Persia. Beaten, despised, and oppressed, cursed even by slaves and children, they yet manage to exist, earning their living as musicians, dancers, singers, jewellers, silver- and goldsmiths, midwives, makers and sellers of wine and spirits. When anything very filthy is to be done a Jew is sent for” (2004:74). For more on the history of the Jews in Iran and on their contributions to the country’s culture and art, see Sarshar 2002 and Loeb 1977. For more on the contributions of the Armenians, particularly during the period of the Constitutional Revolution, see Berberian 2001. On the Armenians’ contributions to cinema, see Muzeh-ye Sinema-ye Iran 2004/1383. 10 For a useful overall review of the status of Iranian minorities in the twentieth century, see the special issue of Iran Nameh titled Non-Muslim Communities in Iran 19.1–2 (2001), edited by Janet Afary and Reza Afshari. 11 According to Homa Nateq, Lutherans and Protestants, goaded by British and Americans, also engaged in these acts of anti-Jewish discrimination and violence in Iran (1996:134–37). 12 For more on religious modernists during the Qajar period and beyond, see Chehabi 1990.

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13 The Shah paid for this and his subsequent European trip in 1902 by contracting loans from Russia, an act that heightened popular discontent with despotic Qajar rule (Lambton 1987:310). 14 Ali Khan Zahir al-Dowleh, a member of the Shah’s entourage, also recorded this film screening in his own travel diary (quoted in Adl 2000/1379:9). 15 The Shah’s father, Naser al-Din Shah, was so enamored of the Crystal Palace during his first visit to England in 1873 that he attended it twice before leaving for Persia (Wright 1985:130). 16 A cartoon in the periodical Kashkul (4 June 1907) made fun of Iran’s participation in such Universal Expositions and of the government’s attempt at representing the country as modern. It depicted the Iranian pavilion as a dismal structure showcasing the life of the urban poor and the lower classes (Balaghi 1998). The Iranian pavilion at the Chicago Columbia World Fair in 1893 was called Persian Palace, and its marquee advertised “Persian Café, Concerts, Dancing Girls.” On its second floor, the palace showcased French dancers dressed and posing as Iranians and dancing for visitors. An Iranian official, Moin al-Saltaneh, who visited the palace, reported that Iranian men working there felt “offended” by the “barbaric” act of French women posing as Iranians dancing for men and that they planned to engage in work stoppage as a form of protest (Akbari and Khounani 2005:15–16). 17 The Tekkiyeh Dowlat (State Amphitheater) was a giant performance hall built between 1869 and 1875 by the order of Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s father, Naser al-Din Shah, near the royal palace. It was a round, four-story building, with a reported seating capacity for twenty thousand people, visible from miles outside Tehran. In it, elaborate Shiite religious passion plays (taziyeh) and certain state functions (such as Naser al-Din Shah’s funeral) were performed. The plays were sponsored by the royal court, often to the displeasure of the clerical establishment, which could not countenance an alternative form of displaying Shiism (Amanat 1997:435). Unfortunately, the structure was destroyed in 1948 to build the National Bank of Iran on the site (Shahriari 1984/1365:vol. 1:85; Najmi 1982/1363:307–25; Kiani, 1984:56; Homayouni 2001/1380:148; Malekpour 2004:145). For a detailed description by an American visitor of the State Amphitheater around the same time as the Shah’s description of the Paris Universal Exposition, see Chelkowski 1979a:6–7. 18 That the Shah refers to viewing some thirty films indicates that he may have stayed for only one of the two nightly film programs. 19 According to Shahriar Adl, the Shah in 1899 had ordered Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh’s father in Paris to purchase for him film cameras and projectors. Recently discovered records show that either one or three cinematographs (which acted as both a film camera and film projector) were purchased, arriving in Tehran on 11 February 1900 (2000:3–4). If this is the case, then it is possible that between February and April 1900, when the Shah left for his European tour, films were both screened and made in Iran, although no record of this has turned up so far. There is also a report that Sani al-Saltaneh filmed

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a brief actuality of the Shah in Paris in 1900, called [French Troops Marching before ­Mozaffared-Din Shah] ([Razheh-ye Qoshun-e Faranseh az Barabar-e Mozaffar al-Din Shah]) (Mehrabi 1996/1375:206). 20 There is a report that Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov filmed Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s coronation on 2 May 1896 (Issari 1989:58). If this is true, he should be considered the first Iranian cameraman. However, this story has not been corroborated, and it is doubtful that only five months after the first public unveiling of film (in the Salon Indien in the basement of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, on 28 December 1895) an Iranian would film an event inside Iran. 21 The film Lost Reel also contains the story of Shahriar Adl’s momentous and fortuitous discovery in 1982 of early films by Iranian cameramen, thought lost, in the Golestan Palace’s archives while searching for Qajar-era photographs. Mostafa Alemi, head of the film laboratory of the Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic (vvir), pulled a print of the badly damaged films, which is stored in the network’s archives. It took Adl more than a decade, a change in the ownership of the films (from the Ministry of Finance to the National Heritage Organization), and a shift of key personnel (the appointment of Seyyed Mohammad Beheshti, the former director of the Farabi Cinema Foundation, as head of the heritage organization) to marshal the forces to send the footage for restoration to Centre National de la Cinématographie in Paris. The repaired films, which amount to 1743 meters—about seventy-five minutes in length—were turned over to Iran in 2003 (“Mozaffar al-Din Shah Marammat Shod,” Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film, no. 310 (Dey 1382/December 2003), 21. 22 These early films had no official titles, but for ease of reference in this book, I have given them titles by adopting the keywords that historians have used to describe or to title them. To indicate that these are not actual film titles, I have placed them in brackets (probably these films never had any official on-screen titles). 23 According to Mohammad Tahaminejad, other footage by Sani al-Saltaneh of the Shah’s European trip that has been unearthed recently in Tehran contains both panning and traveling camera movements, and in one scene the Shah is filmed indoors from inside the train carriage as the camera moves beautifully toward him (2000/1379:18–19) 24 See the discussion of Sani al-Saltaneh’s film [Women Entering the Shah Abdolazim Train] later in this chapter. 25 Ghaffari is wearing a cone hat in [The Donkey Riders Play-Fighting with Pedestrians Using Sticks] (Adl 2000/1379:31). 26 Naser al-Din Shah’s other son, Zel al-Soltan, who became the powerful governor of Isfahan, was also a photographer in his youth, giving a copy of a selfportrait he had taken to the British physician and telegraph officer C. J. Willis in the 1870s (Willis 2004:146). 27 On these wax cylinders were recorded the voices of many dignitaries, including those of the prime minister, Aliasghar Khan Atabak Azam, and of Prin-

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cess Esmat al-Dowleh, Naser al-Din Shah’s daughter. The voices of famous clerics sermonizing and of singers singing and the sound of musicians playing instruments were also recorded privately (Sepanta 1987/1366: 83–85). Princess Taj al-Saltana, another of Naser al-Din Shah’s daughters, reiterates in her diary that she listened to music and went to the theater frequently, although she does not mention gramophone recordings or film watching in the harem. She also herself played the piano (Taj al-Saltana 1993). The first gramophone recording on flat discs took place during the Constitutional Revolution in 1906, when Mozaffar al-Din Shah gave the monopoly of manufacturing to an American firm named the Gramophone Co. For a complete catalogue of cylinders and flat discs recorded in those early days, see Sepanta 1987/1366. 28 Alamtaj Qaem Maqami, born in 1883, was the mother of the modernist poet Pezhman Bakhtiari. 29 A European traveler who visited the Shah’s palace in the early 1900s and took a kind of inventory of its holdings noted that a small “boudoir” contains the “latest appliances of civilization,” including a grand piano, an ice cream soda fountain, and “a large apparatus for projecting moving pictures on a screen” (Landor 1903:233). This suggests that in addition to Sani al-Saltaneh’s projector, the court may have owned its own projector. 30 So far the Global Recordings Network has recorded Bible stories in over fiftyfive hundred languages and dialects, forming the largest archive in the world. For this program’s Website, see http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2006/tailenders/ about.html. 31 The modern schools run by Iranians also taught many modern subjects. For example, Loqmanieh School in Tabriz taught photography as early as 1906, as well as six languages: Arabic, English, French, Persian, Russian, and Turkish (Nateq 1996:288). 32 Yahya Zoka gives 1902 as the date of Soleil Cinema’s inauguration (1997/ 1376:111), which still makes it the first public cinema in the country. 33 One such set of slides, offered by Wilson’s Lantern Company, reenacted the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac, culminating in one slide of Abraham’s hand holding up a dagger dissolving onto another slide of Isaac prostrate before him. A missionary’s screening in 1879 of this set to a town in the United States “produced a great effect, and the story filled their untutored minds with wonder and delight; but when at last the dagger was seen moving toward Isaac, the women were wild with fright, and dashed away, as for life” (Barnouw 1981:35–38). 34 See Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. 1934a and 1934b; see also Hoare 1937:54–55. The Catalogue of Lantern Slides and Motion Pictures of the Board of National Missions, Board of Foreign Missions, Board of Christian Education, American Bible Society (Presbyterian Church 1932–33) contains a list of “stereopticon lectures,” 16mm and 35mm motion pictures, cue sheets, and music that were available for rental by the missionaries. The

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latter two items were designed to augment the experience of the silent films by providing narration and music. During my ten-day research in the Presbyterian Historical Society Archives in March 1989, I did not find any evidence of silent films being used in the early 1900s as part of evangelism. 35 Women missionaries had a dominant presence in the Protestant church’s civilizing mission, constituting 60 percent of the American Protestant missionary force overseas in 1893. Women volunteered for missionary foreign service for a variety of reasons, including their desire to spread the Gospel and their belief that missionary work was a viable alternative to traditional teaching, offering them opportunities to become independent. There were other strategic considerations as well that suited the church’s political ends. Since foreign customs in many countries, as in Iran, made women inaccessible to male missionaries, women missionaries, especially those who were single, were considered highly suitable for the task. Although women held a subsidiary status in most traditional Iranian families, they exerted a powerful if subtle influence on their members. By proselytizing them, the Presbyterian women missionaries found that they could reach and touch the entire family (Heuser 1987:7–8). The Presbyterian Historical Society’s archive contains many detailed reports by women missionaries about their intimate and sustained relationships with Iranian women in northwestern Iran. 36 Tehrani’s dates of birth and death given above are not exact, as they are based on the estimates that his son Abolqasem Razai has provided (see Omid 1995/ 1374:23–24). 37 The “falls in America” must doubtlessly refer to the Niagara Falls, about which many actualities were made, including the Lumière brothers’ Niagara Falls (1897), exhibited the same year that Tehrani saw films in London. Tehrani may be referring to this film or to the Biograph’s Niagara American Falls (1896). His descriptions of the other films are too general to aid in identifying them. 38 This contention is corroborated by Tehrani’s going-out-of-business ad in a newspaper, in which he listed for sale not only his films, film projectors, and film screens but also benches probably used in his cinema. For a copy of this ad, see Mehrabi 1984/1363:14. 39 This report about Atabak attending Tehrani’s cinema in 1904 must be apocryphal, for Atabak was in exile in Europe from 1903 to 1907. On his return in early 1907, Mohammad Ali Shah appointed him prime minister, but he was assassinated in August 1907 (Shuster 1912:xxii–xxv). His assassin, Abbas Aqa, was a member of a terrorist committee headed by Haidar Khan Amuoghli (Algar 1973:254), who within a year would help form Ivanov’s Farus Cinema. At any rate, it is very likely that Atabak would have seen films elsewhere, perhaps even in his home, for he was enamored of Western novelties such as gramophone recordings and had widely traveled abroad. Prince Ala al-Dowleh, a former governor of Shiraz and Tehran and “a major tax-evader,” supported the despot Mohammad Ali Shah; he, too, was assassinated in 1911 (Shuster 1912:176).

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40 Mirza Malkum Khan first demonstrated the telegraph at the Dar al-Fonun College in 1851. The first telegraph line was established between Tehran and Suleimaniyeh in 1858, which was extended to Zanjan a year later (Rubin 1999: 545). 41 The reverse movement also took place in that, as Cosroe Chaqueri notes, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution “propelled, if not inspired, the Young Turks’ revolution of 1909 and Egypt’s nationalist movement after World War I” (2001:29). 42 In a letter to me in 1984, Mohammad Ali Djamalzadeh called his father “the Iranian Voltaire,” who from the pulpit espoused progressive reforms and equality for all races. He remembers that once his father went to the Jewish ghetto in Tehran and declared from the pulpit that in the same way that air and sun benefited all people equally, land, country, constitution, and welfare should benefit all people equally (Naficy 1984c). According to another letter, Djamalzadeh’s father spent much of his time on the run and in hiding both from the despotic Prince Zell al-Soltan, the governor of Isfahan, and the powerful clerical leader Aqa Najafi. This made communication between his parents very difficult. However, they found an ingenuous technological solution, which again shows that not all clerics opposed modernity. Djamalzadeh remembers that he was four or five years old when he went with his mother to the Armenian district of Isfahan (New Jolfa) so that she could send a voice message, recorded on a gramophone, to his father (Naficy 1984d). In 1908, on the order of Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, Djamalzadeh’s father was imprisoned, where he died by poison, becoming a revolutionary martyr. 43 In 1909, only two years after Nuri’s declaration of Westernization as a disease, the pope prohibited Roman Catholic clergy from attending movie houses. Likewise, the Salvation Army banned its members from the movies. The pope’s ban constituted a precursor to official film censorship in England by the film industry itself, which created the British Board of Film Censors in 1913 (Harding and Popple 1996:64). 4 4 Apparently he sold his film equipment to the film exhibitor, Ardashes Badmagerian. 45 Although Djamalzadeh knew several details of Tehrani’s life, he said he did not know that he ran a cinema. This may be due to Djamalzadeh’s old age (then ninety-two), to the short time that Tehrani was a film exhibitor, or to the peripheral place that cinema occupied in Tehrani’s business ventures. 46 There were other notable Qajar-era film exhibitors who were also professional photographers. One was Gholamreza Ekonomy, a commercial photographer who took pictures of the elite in Tehran, such as of Ahmad Shah and the famous educator Abdolrahim Talebof, and who screened films, which he both imported and apparently took in Iran (Zoka 1997/1376:162–63). Another was Yusof Khan Osipiants, an Armenian, who took photos of the crown prince Mohammad Hasan in Tabriz and from 1928 to 1936 filmed Russian-­language intertitles that were spliced into movies primarily screened at the Vatan (Home-

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land) Cinema in that city (222). There was also Tony Ovanes Mardirosian (also known as Thooni Johanes), an Armenian photographer who became an official photographer of Prince Zel al-Soltan, the governor of Isfahan, and who opened the first movie house not only in that city but also, if Parisa Damandan’s information is correct, the first small movie house in the country in 1898 (Damandan 1998/1377:113–14). Like other artisanal photographers and film exhibitors he engaged in other exchange relations as well, for example by opening a lemonade-making factory, a modern hotel (named Jahan, or World), and by importing bicycles and renting droshkies (24–25). Not much more is known about these photographers’ film activities. Finally there was Sevruguin, discussed later in the chapter. For more on Isfahan photographers, see Damandan 2004. 47 The rivalry between Ivanov and Aqayov is the central story of Hasan Hedayat’s fictional comedy film, Grand Cinema (Gerand Sinema, 1988), which comically and rather broadly dramatizes both the professional lives of these two filmmakers and their respective pro-Russian and pro-British politics. 48 From Djamalzadeh’s description, it appears that his second film viewing occurred in this cinema, although he does not mention that music played during the screening. 49 The film historian Mohammad Tahaminejad disputes the ransacking of Ivanov’s shop (2001/1380:20). In his history of photography, Iraj Afshar also does not mention that Ivanov’s shop was plundered. He merely reports that after Ivanov went into exile, his photography shop functioned under the management of Mehdi Mossavar al-Moluk (1983:272). The looting of photography shops during the Constitutional Revolution, which foreshadowed the revolutionary destruction of nearly two hundred cinemas nationwide some seventy years later, was not unusual. Many photographers were pro-reform and pro-constitution, and they memorialized important events and heroes of the revolution (such as Sattar Khan). The wider distribution of photographs by the newspapers increased the reach and power of both photography and revolutionary heroes, bringing despotic law on the photographers. During the “minor dictatorship,” for example, photographers suffered beatings and occasionally murder, and their shops were often ransacked because the counterrevolutionaries believed photographers to fan the fires of revolution with the sale of photographs and postcards (Zoka 1997/1376:283–85). These lootings also made the photos and glass plates of women hot commodities of public trade, causing the police to announce publicly the confiscation of any such photograph or plate and the punishment of the culprits should it be determined that the works had been recently copied (Iran Now, no. 165 (29 March 1910/17 Rabi al-Awwal 1328), 3. I thank Afsaneh Najmabadi for putting this source at my disposal. Such use of women’s photographs broke the separation of public and private spheres. 50 Apparently, he sold his equipment to another exhibitor, Georges Esmailiov, also known as Mirza Ismail Qafqazi.

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51 Sevruguin consolidates the intimate link between photography and cinematography. He was a pioneer photographer, on whom Mozaffar al-Din Shah conferred the title of khan, to which Sevruguin added parvardeh-ye Iran (nourished or nurtured by Iran) as his last name in his Persian passport (Behdad 1999:92). He lovingly photographed the land and people of Iran during the tumultuous years of the Constitutional Revolution and beyond, creating a large collection of artistically and ethnographically valuable glass-plate photographs. He appears in some of them, making his photographs both historically and autobiographically inscribed. Unfortunately, he was not properly recognized as the great artist he was, one of the first Iranians to hold a selfing mirror to both Iranians and others. Many of the photos of the revolution and of Iran’s countryside, national monuments, social and domestic life, and of people from all walks of life that are anonymously printed in Iranian and Western publications are his. By means of these photographs, he returned the gaze of the Western tourists and travelers, professional or not, who had produced a rather Orientalist vision of Iran. Even though some of his photos fed into Orientalism and othered Iranians, many countered Western fantasies of Iran through realism and self-representation. In that, they empowered Iranians. When during the upheavals of the Constitutional Revolution his house was inadvertently ransacked, all but two thousand of these plates were destroyed. Reza Shah apparently confiscated these because they contradicted his modernization project by reminding Iranians of their “old-fashioned” reality (Navab 2002:120). Nearly seven hundred of the surviving plates are now housed in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives in Washington.   My research in this collection and in associated papers in May 2000 did not turn up any references to Sevruguin’s collaborative film exhibition with Badmagerian or to Sevruguin’s other kinds of involvement in cinema. None of the pictures show a cinema or a film screening. The only relevant photo depicts a precursor of the film projector, a portable peep-show instrument, literally called “foreign cities” (shahr-e farang) from about 1890–1900, which shows three people looking through its viewing holes under a cover. Tahaminejad notes that Sevruguin was perhaps the official representative of Pathé films in Iran (1993/1372:40). This might very well account for his collaboration with Badmagerian to start this cinema. Like many pioneers of film discussed here, Sevruguin was a complex person with complicated and ambiguous origins and a life history to match, an ambivalence he fanned as part of his hybridized identity. For more on Sevruguin’s life and work, see Bohrer 1999 and Navab 2002. 52 The opening date of Badmagerian’s Tajaddod Cinema is in dispute. Some historians, such as Behzad Rahimian and Jamal Omid (1995/1374), contend that it occurred in 1910–11. I tend to agree with Gholam Haidari, who gives the date of 1915 (Haidari 1991c/1370:232–41). 53 There are conflicting opinions about how Motazedi obtained his first camera; see Haidari 1991c/1370:255–57.

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54 The modernist poet and writer Mirzadeh Eshqi and the dandified reformist, poet, and singer Aref Qazvini staged plays and performances in the Grand Hotel auditorium (Shahri 1997/1376:vol. 1:278). Eshqi directed and acted in his own nationalist play Resurrection (Rastakhiz), which is said to have been the first “all-musical” play or “Iranian opera” (Said Naficy 2002/1381:134). The famous female singer Qamar al-Moluk Vazirzadeh (popularly known simply as Qamar) gave her first concert at the Grand Hotel in 1924 without a veil, more than a decade before Reza Shah officially banned the garment. Apparently Qamar had received death threats and thousands had gathered on Laleh­ zar Avenue outside, but the performance passed without incident and proved a “huge success” (Chehabi 2000:159).

Chapter 2  Ideological and Spectatorial Formations 1 On Orientalism see Said 1979; on the Orientalist and sexualized production of Iran, see Mirsepassi 2000; Tavakoli-Targhi 2001; and Najmabadi 2005. 2 For views of Western travelers’ construction of the Oriental woman, see Marbo 1996. 3 Iranian novelists also invoked this cluster of negative representations of the West, particularly after the British- and American-engineered coup against Mohammad Mossadeq, by means of which they constructed a modern Iranian identity and developed new literary forms (Ghanoonparvar 1993). 4 For eyewitness accounts by Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy of their first film viewing experiences, see Leyda 1983: 407–411. For an African account see Hampate Ba 2005. For geographically diverse accounts, see Breakwell and Hammond 1990; and Macdonald and Cousins 1998. For the impact of the first contact between white Australians bearing both arms and cameras and the black Papuans of New Guinea, see Connolly and Anderson 1992, 1985, and 1987. 5 Fox News appears to have covered the Qajar era more than other Western newsreels. For a list of such newsreels, see Naficy 1984f:112–18. 6 Reading some of the reactions of British royalty to early cinema, one notices in them a sense of astonishment about film’s power to duplicate reality that resembles the one expressed by Iranian royalty (Harding and Popple 1996:136– 38). However, the reaction of Iranian royalty contained a self-othering dimension, emanating from the inferiority that Iranians felt regarding the West, which is absent from the British reaction. The Iranian educator Yahya Dowlatabadi, who attended the First Universal Races Congress in London in July 1911, reported that when he was presiding over the congress’s eighth session, British photographers took “moving pictures” of the event. Surprisingly, he did not note any reaction to this (1992/1371:vol. 3:184). 7 Jamshidian was the largest Zoroastrian merchant, employing one hundred people in Tehran in 1905; he created a school, a public bath, and a celebration hall for religious ceremonies, all institutions that helped consolidate Zoroas-

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trian ethnic solidarity (Amighi 1990:152). It is highly probable that the hall was also used for film screenings. 8 This description is reminiscent of a scene in James Williamson’s five-minute film, An Interesting Story (1905), about a man so absorbed in a book that he absent-mindedly and accidentally runs into all types of comic troubles, including being run over by a steamroller and flattened, only to be restored by two bicyclists with their pumps. I thank Scott Curtis for identifying this title. 9 Djamalzadeh narrates the same story in the bbc’s Persian-language program on Iranian cinema, with several differences. For comparison, see Golestan 1995:12–13. 10 In the same year, shortly before his reformist clerical father, Seyyed Jamal Vaez Isfahani, was poisoned in jail by Qajar loyalists, the young Djamalzadeh was sent for education to Beirut, where he attended the Antoura Catholic secondary school administered by the Lazarite mission. Later, he moved to France and Switzerland for education, and for more than a dozen years, he worked for the Iranian embassy in Berlin, Germany. He spent the rest of his life in Europe, initially working with progressive Iranian exiles and collaborating with the famed exile periodical Kaveh, published in Berlin. He revolutionized Iranian literature by introducing the modern short story form with his first book of stories, Once upon a Time (Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud). In one of these stories he painted an indelible portrait of a Westernized dandy, which I discuss in another chapter. In the early 1930s Djamalzadeh settled in Geneva and worked for the International Labor Organization, during which time he continued to publish his stories, essays, and research into Iranian culture and art. 11 Mirza Ettesam al-Din’s book is called The Book of Wonders of Guardianship (Shegarf Nameh-ye Velayat) and Mirza Abolhasan Khan-e Ilchi’s travelogue about London is titled The Book of Astonishment (Heiratnameh). 12 Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s father, Naser al-Din Shah, was exposed to the Edison phonograph in London in 1889, during his second trip to England, where he apparently purchased an instrument (Wright 1985:138). Hendy Landsdowne, the British foreign secretary, relates an amusing story involving Mozaffar alDin Shah and the gramophone during his 1902 trip to England. It shows the Shah’s apparent knowledge of the instrument. During a visit at the Marlborough House (where the Shah was staying), diplomatic conversation with the Shah and his prime minister was “impeded by the din of a huge musical box which some thoughtful attendant had set going as an appropriate accompaniment and which no one knew how to stop. Finally, the Shah led an attack upon it in person aided by the Grand Vizier, the interpreter and myself; and—a most auspicious omen—it was the Shah himself who discovered the particular lever which put the beastly thing to sleep again” (quoted in Wright 1985:177). 13 Also see Entekhabi 1993:192. Years later, Taqizadeh reduced the forcefulness

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of his radical position without fully refuting it; see Arianpur 1988/1367:vol. 2:232–33; and Behnam 2000/1379:190–94. 14 For analyses of ethnocentric and Orientalist views of Middle Eastern societies in American feature films and mass media, see Said 1981; Shaheen 1984; Naficy 1984f, 1995; Shohat 1993; Shohat and Stam 1994; Kamalipour 1995; Bernstein and Studlar 1997; and McAlister 2001. 15 Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa (1993) dramatizes this concept as a contemporary fashion model returns to Cape Coast Castle in Ghana and travels to the past to Africans’ capture and shipment to the West as slaves. 16 As one of the best schools, which offered six years of elementary schooling and three years of middle school education, Aqdassiyeh had illustrious alumni and teachers. Among its alumni were Abdolhosain Hazhir, who became prime minister, and the famous novelist Bozorg Alavi, who lived most of his life in East Germany; among its teachers it counted the famous scholar Said Naficy. See “Beh Yad-e Aqa Bozorg Alavi, Dastan Nevis-e Bozorg-e Moaser,” Asheghaneh 16, no. 190 (2001/1379), 45; and Naficy 2002/1381:76–84. 17 His full name was Mirza Ebrahim Said Shams Said al-Ulama-ye Larijani. 18 In my attempts to identify the film that Djamalzadeh is talking about, I came up with the following possibilities. A flyer for Ivanov’s Farus Cinema, listing the films it was screening in autumn 1909, has one film titled Impolite Child (Bacheh-ye Bitarbiat), which indicates that Ivanov was the source of the print screened at Aqdassiyeh. This film could have been the Lumière brothers’ Feeding the Baby (Le Déjeuner de Bébé, 1895), which shows Auguste Lumière and his wife feeding their infant; however, the baby is not misbehaving in the way Djamalzadeh has recalled. Another likely candidate is The Dear Boys Home for the Holidays (1903) directed by the British filmmaker and chemist James Williamson, which shows the mischief of two young boys back home from school. They rub crayon paint (which looks like food) onto the face of their infant sibling, thickening his eyebrows and putting a mustache on it, causing the infant to cry, put his finger in his mouth, and rub his face with his own dirty fingers. As punishment, the boys get spanked and the infant receives kisses and hugs from his parents. An excerpt of this film is included in Noël Burch’s six-part film series What Do These Old Films Mean?, vol. 1, Great Britain, 1900–1912: Along the Great Divide (1987). 19 Interestingly, similar pedagogical reasons were invoked to relegitimize cinema seven decades later after the revolution of 1979. This time the clerics who took over power rather than secular forces made the argument. 20 In fact, this pedagogical link was perceived as so direct that Mirza Reza Khan Tabatabai Naini, the publisher of Ruznameh-ye Te’atr (Theater Newspaper), in its first issue on 5 May 1908, declared that there are three “principles of progress and civilization”: schools, newspapers, and theater (Tabatabai Naini 1987/1366:20–21). Ebrahim Sahhaf bashi Tehrani, the first commercial film exhibitor, also saw moral teaching as one of theater’s chief functions (Tehrani 1978/1357:52).

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21 “E’lan,” Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film, no. 258 (2000/1379), 16. 22 Apparently, because of the publication of this article, the film exhibitor Mehdi Rusi Khan Ivanov, unhappy with the article’s antiforeign and anticommercial cinema stance, stopped placing advertisements for his movie house in Irane No (Tahaminejad 1992/1371:49). If true, the incident would perhaps constitute the first instance in which a film exhibitor applied economic pressure to the press as a form of censorship. As Goel Cohen in his massive history of the Iranian press during the Qajar era documents, this pro-constitution newspaper, with its masthead motto of “a nationalist, political, social, economical, literary, technical, and moral newspaper,” was also under constant threat of political censorship by conservative governments (1983/1362:537–60). This was only one element in the expanding intertextual relationship of film exhibitors and distributors with the press. 23 Members of the Farhang Scientific Company included well-known political and literary figures such as Mohammad Ali Forughi, Solaiman Mirza Eskandari, and Abdollah Mostowfi. Others who also participated in promoting, staging, and directing plays were Ali Akbar Khan Davar, Reza Maleki, Mirza Mohammad Ali Khan Maleki, and Mahmud Bahrami (Floor 2005:224). In his three-volume administrative and social history of Iran, Abdollah Mostofi describes some of the company’s playwriting, translating, and performances (1997:565–66). The company, which had opened in 1909, closed its doors in 1911, to be replaced by the National Performance and Conference Company (Sherkat-e Namayesh va Konferans, Te’atr-e Melli), otherwise known as the National Theater, which lasted until 1916. 24 Rasht’s first film screening occurred in 1918 in an auditorium managed by a cultural society named Anjoman-e Farhang (Culture Society), which organized film screenings, put on theatrical performances, and ran a library (Malekpour 1984b/1363:65). 25 On the politics of naming cinemas, see Tahaminejad 1998/1376. 26 Here are the translations of and explanations for these names: Melli means “national”; Dariush is the name of the most famous king of the pre-Islamic Achaemenid dynasty; Ferdowsi is the author of the most famous Iranian national epic poem, the Shahnameh (Book of Kings); Gerand is the Persianized version of “grand”; Mayak is a Russian term that means “lighthouse”; Tajaddod means “modernity”; Sanati means “industrial”; and Tamaddon means “civilization.” 27 The frequent changing of names, locations, and owners of theaters has caused some inaccuracy and confusion in the historiography of Iranian cinema, and the current work is no exception. 28 Drive-in cinemas opened up later, in the 1960s, in Tehran. 29 “Sinema, Tafrih-e Salem, Jazzab va Agah Konandeh Ast,” Hamshahri, 1 June 1997/11 Khordad 1376. 30 Two Jewish émigré brothers, Moushekh and Napoleon Sarvari, also created movie advertisements in 1928, either in the form of painted cloth billboards

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hung outside the movie-house entrances or as ads printed on papers that they distributed to customers (Haidari 1989b/1368:156). 31 In Isfahan cinemas this chant in the local accent went this way: “filmo bedeh, egeh nimidey, pulesho bedeh.” 32 Khandaniha magazine reported that as late as 1947 Tehran Cinema sold hot tripe soup in the cinema hall, where holders of the cheapest tickets sat on straw mats on the floor near the screen (Sa’dvandian 2001:514–15). 33 Iranians’ appetite for seeds is so great that it was estimated that in 1984 alone a total of 200 million toman ($25,000,000) worth of seeds had been consumed in movie houses nationwide (“Ja’i Bara-ye Masraf-e Tannaqolat va ­Tanvir-e Afkar,” Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Film 3, no. 31 [1985/1364], 4). High-class theaters no longer permit the breaking of seeds. 34 “Ba’zi Adat-e Napasand,” Ettela’at, 12 September 1933/21 Shahrivar 1312, 1. 35 Guppy told me in a conversation that she had heard this story from one of her family servants, a story typical of the kinds of tales she had heard in her childhood (Naficy 2000a). 36 The word dilmaj is the Persianized version of the Turkish word dilmaç, meaning “interpreter,” which entered Turkish from Hungary by way of the German word Dolmetscher, meaning “translator.” The world dilmaç is no longer in use in Turkey, and in Persian it is generally applied only to screen translators, not other types of translators. It is possible that dilmaç originated from the word dragoman, which the OED online defines as “an interpreter; strictly applied to a man who acts as guide and interpreter in countries where Arabic, Turkish, or Persian is spoken.” Dragoman comes from the Arabic targuman (interpreter). 37 Victor Mair demonstrates that such practices of “picture recitations” have their roots in the ancient East, particularly in India, yet these practices turn up in many different countries, both in the East and the West (1988). 38 For more on curtain reciting and other traditional Iranian theatrical performances, see Gaffary and Ovanessian 2001; Chelkowski 1991; and Beeman 1981. 39 This might be W. S. Van Dyke’s movie Under the Black Eagle (1928). 40 Jean Baronnet’s incisive fifty-minute documentary film about a taziyeh performance in the city of Natanz, Le Lion de Dieu: Théâtre Ta’Ziyeh à Natanza (1972), contains interviews with players of bad-guy roles who were hurt by spectators because of such a conflation (it has no English subtitles). For an informative though less elegant Iranian film (with English subtitles), see Parviz Jahed’s Ta’zieh in Another Narration (Taziyeh beh Ravayat-e Digar, 2000), filmed in the Mazanderan region, which intercuts scenes of a taziyeh in a village with interviews with major scholars of the art form, including the filmmaker Bahram Baizai. 41 On taziyeh (passion plays), rowzeh (religious sermons), ruhozi (comic theater), naqqali (storytelling performances), and pardeh khani (reading of curtain performances) and their relationship to Iranian and Islamic theater, performing arts, and cinema, see Asgar 1963; Baizai 1965/1344; Thaiss 1973; Chelkowski

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1979b; Pettys 1982; Beeman 1982; Haeri 1982; Safa 1984/1363; Malekpour 1984a/1363; Faik 1986; Riggion 1988; Oskui 1991/1370; Taqian 1995/1374; and Mottahedeh 2008. 42 See a special issue of Iris (no. 22, 1996), edited by André Gaudreault and Germain Lacasse, titled “Le Bonimenteur de Vues Animées/The Moving Picture Lecturer,” containing several important articles on film lecturers in various countries. Also see Burch 1979; and Gunning 1999. 43 Marguerite Harrison traveled with her documentary film on Iran, Grass (1924), and lectured with it as late as 1938. 4 4 On the other hand, the Armenian photographer Osip Iosiphianz prepared Russian-language intertitles, which he inserted into silent and sound foreign movies for screening in Tabriz’s Vatan (Homeland) Cinema (Zoka 1997/ 1376:222). 45 Strictly speaking, Said al-Ulama, who narrated the baby film at Aqdassiyeh, or the interpreter whom Tehrani hired for his Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema, should be considered the first dilmaj, but Badmagerian was the first to regularly engage in live screen narration in commercial cinemas. 46 In addition to Zanjani, other expert screen translators of this period were Hasan Lachini and Akbar Haqshenas. 47 For more on coffeehouses as sites of pleasure, see Matthee 2005. 48 As Rice reports, by the early 1920s gramophone recordings had become popu­ lar not only in public places, such as the coffeehouses, but also in peoples’ homes when hosts entertained their guests. Apparently, they were becoming “very general” in Armenian homes (1923:35, 199). 49 The practice of installing television sets in coffeehouses continued decades later and in another place, in the 1980s in exile; then, popular Iranian restaurants in major American cities played tapes of prerevolution shows and music videos to their nostalgic customers (Naficy 1993a). 50 Tavakoli-Targhi shows that Iranian upper-class male travelers were themselves at times the objects of the gaze of European women, due to their exotic looks, clothing, and habits (1997:10). 51 Jamshid Malekpour in his historiography of Iranian theater points to the passivity of Iranian travelers in European theaters. Many of them in writing their travelogues limited themselves to describing the halls and the shows that they watched; they also recorded their astonishment at the realistic décor, the flamboyant makeup and clothing, and the unfamiliar dancing and singing (1984b/1363:chap. 2). Like the filmgoers, they were astonished voyeurs, not participants. 52 On the transformation of the meaning of key concepts during the Constitutional Revolution involving women, see Najmabadi 1995, 1996. For more on the participation of women in this revolution, see Afary, 1996:chap. 7; and Paidar 1995:chap. 2. 53 Cinema was not the only institution of modernity that was condemned in this period, as leading clerics, such as Nuri and Sayyid Ali Shushtari, castigated

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new schools modeled after Western ones. Characterizing them as “contrary to Islam,” they issued a fatwa against such schools. As a result, “young students and their teachers were often attacked on the streets, spat on, and accused of ‘unchaste’ and ‘immoral’ behavior” (Afary 1996:190). 54 For more on the emergence of a women’s press during the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods, see Amin 1996, 2002. 55 This footage can be seen in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Selected Images from the Qajar Era (1992). A different version of [Women Entering the Shah Abd al-Azim Train], containing a longer shot of women coming into the station and a reverse angle of the train arriving into the station from behind, is included in Mehrdad Zahedian’s Lost Reels (2004). 56 For more on these periodicals and the fate of their editors, see Sadrhashemi 1984/1363; and Cohen 1983/1362.

Chapter 3  State Formation and Nonfiction Cinema 1 On the construction and evolution of the meaning of the Shahyad Monument, see Grigor 2003. 2 Most of the dates for Reza Shah’s reformist legislation and decrees are taken from Agheli’s two-volume chronicle of Iranian history (1997/1376). 3 For more on the relationship between nation building and dress code, see Chehabi 1993. 4 For a description of the subdued forms that processions, passion plays, and commemorations took after the ban, see Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Iran, 1930–1939, National Archives Microfilm Publications, 1981, publication M 1202 (hereinafter rds), roll 8, target 2, letter no. 650 written by Charles C. Hart from the American Legation in Tehran to Secretary of State, 29 May 1931, 1–8. 5 The Pars News Agency was headed by the Jewish Iranian journalist and translator Moshfeq Hamedani, underscoring the contributions of ethnic minorities to Iranian mass media. 6 “Censorship of the Press,” rds, roll 20, target 2, 891.91/5, no. 260, 5 November 1934, 1. 7 To honor the occasion, the Ala al-Dowleh Street, in which some of the early cinemas were located, was renamed Ferdowsi Avenue. 8 Apparently, this change of name was prompted by Iran’s legation in Berlin, presumably to emphasize to outsiders the Aryan roots of the name Iran (Abrahamian 1982:143). 9 Perhaps this is why Ohanians’ film studio named Perse Film (using the French word for Persia) was changed to Pars Film (Persian for the Pars province, the seat of the Achaemenid Empire). Mayak Cinema also changed its name from its Russian original to its Persian equivalent, Didehban Cinema (Searchlight). 10 “Restrictions in the Use of Foreign Languages,” rds, roll 8, target 1 political affairs, letter no. 1120, 31 August 1937, 1.

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11 “Regulations re Suppression of Foreign Languages and Names from Documents, Trademarks, etc.,” rds, roll 8, target 1, enclosure no. 2 accompanied by letter no. 1226 written by the United States Chargé d’Affaires, C. Van H. Engert, 4 February 1938, 1–2. 12 Some contended that the removal of the veil had partly to do with depriving “fugitive male criminals and political agitators of their common disguise, the Moslem women’s costume” (Singer and Baldridge 1936:32). 13 For more on preparations for the unveiling edict, see Chehabi 2003a; and ­Rostam-Kolayi 2003. 14 Objections to the forced male dress code, particularly to the so-called Pahlavi hats, led to tumultuous demonstrations in the religious city of Mashhad in which around two thousand people were reportedly killed, which gave the event the name the Gowharshad Uprising (Qiam-e Gowharshahd) (Agheli 1997/1376 v.2 :286–87). 15 After the revolution of 1978–79, several feature films turned to a critical and condemnatory examination of the unveiling period under Reza Shah, including Alireza Davudnezhad’s Disarmament (Khal’-e Salah, 1994) and Mojtaba Rai’s Ghazal (1995). 16 “Observations Regarding the Coup d’État: The Shah and His Achievements,” rds, roll 7, target 1 political affairs, letter no. 1254, 14 March 1938, 19. 17 Ibid., 20. 18 Ibid., 21. 19 Ibid., 22. 20 Soon after the declaration of martial law, the ban on cinemas was lifted as long as film screenings took place between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. 21 Modarress did not live long enough to see how accurate his prediction had been, as he died in 1927 under mysterious circumstances. 22 For more on the circumstances surrounding the creation of this cinema, see Haidari 1991c/1370:267–69. 23 rds, roll 8, target 3, letter no. 411, 4 March 1931, 1–2. 24 For Iranian newspaper reports about the group’s composition and travel in Iran, see “Karevan-e Zard dar Sahra-ye Mangol,” Ettela’at, 20 April 1931/7 Ordibehesht 1310, 3; “Karevan-e Zard,” Ettela’at, 23 April 1931/2 Ordibehesht 1310, 2; and “Mosaferat-e Heiat-e E’zami-ye Sitroen,” Ettela’at, 7 December 1931/15 Azar 1310, 1. 25 According to Pierre Leprohon, André Sauvage had planned to complete from the massive footage accumulated on the expedition not only the feature film The Yellow Cruise but also twenty-four shorter films on different topics (1960:126). Because of disagreements in editing, Léon Poirier, the director of The Black Cruise (La Croisière Noire, 1926), about an African expedition, was brought in to complete the project. H. Amiraslani may have seen and reacted to one of these thematic short films on Iran, which could have contained extra or different footage from the long version. It is also possible that, as Jamal Omid suggests, The Yellow Cruise may have been screened in Europe in serial

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form, containing the tram scenes, before the film’s actual completion (Omid 1995/1374:836). At present at least two versions of this film seem to exist, one about twenty minutes long, which I have seen, and the other a ninety-minute version, which is rarely shown. This latter version was last screened officially in Paris in June 2004, accompanied by live music. I thank Paula Amad for bringing this screening to my attention. 26 The “defect” is the diversity of indigenous and Islamic clothing and headgear that men wore, which was “corrected” when Reza Shah’s sartorial reforms replaced them with a Western-style uniform. 27 Other travel documentaries in which Roosevelt participated and that emphasized, as was customary in the condescending foreign travelogues of the time, the exotic and bizarre human and animal lives of non-Western worlds, include Camera Thrills in Wildest Africa (1934), documenting the Roosevelt Expedition to Africa; Bizarre Expeditions (ca. 1935), documenting Denis’s and Roosevelt’s travels in a Dodge car and a truck through Africa, which was released to theaters; and Wheels Across India (1937) focusing on the expedition’s adventure in the Indian subcontinent, including Burma. 28 Cooper and Harrison both published autobiographical accounts of their travels with and the filming of the Bakhtiari tribes. Cooper’s account (1925), containing many valuable stills taken by Schoedsack, was translated years later into Persian by a Bakhtiari chief (Cooper 1955/1334). Harrison’s account forms a chapter of her autobiography (1935). Schoedsack was not much of a writer, but years later, after he had gone blind, he recorded his version of his travels on audiotape. I have a copy of this tape; Kevin Brownlow must have had a copy of the same tape, as his narrative about Grass is a more or less complete transcript of it (1979). During some twenty years of research on the film, I have interviewed scores of people involved with it and with the filmmakers; their names appear in Naficy 2006a. 29 Some of this narrative is based on a series of detailed and revealing articles that Khandaniha magazine published in 1951 (5 Azar 1330, 12 Azar 1330, 16 Azar 1330, and 19 Azar 1330). 30 For a book containing translations of many news reports from foreign periodicals about the Imbrie incident, its causes, and its consequences, see Nuri Esfandiari 1956/1335. According to this book, the New York City Herald of 20 September 1924 contained a long article on the matter, for which Margaret Harrison was extensively interviewed. Having just returned from Iran, where she had had an audience with Reza Khan, she ascribed the killing to the volatile and chaotic politics of the country at the time, the desire of Reza Khan to change the political system from monarchy to republicanism, and the oil-­ concession negotiations with the Americans (92–95). 31 W. Smith Murray, “Report on Murder of Consul Imbrie on Charges of Being a Baha’i,” Documents on the Shaykhi, Babi and Baha’i Movements, no. 1 (1997), available at http://www.h-net.org/~bahai (last accessed 9 November 2010). 32 By order of the United States Congress, most of the $110,000 Iranian pay-

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ment for the warship was set aside to pay for the education of Iranian students in American colleges and universities (Hardcastle 1979:12). 33 Also, Amir Hosain Zafar, the Ilkhan (the chief of all the Bakhtiari tribes), who years later translated Grass into Persian, praised the book for showing “realistic scenes of the internal life of the Bakhtiari tribe to those who are not able to tour their region” (Cooper 1955:v). 34 The best of these are Houshang Shafti’s Flaming Poppies (Shaqayeq-e Suzan, 1962), Anthony Howarth’s People of the Wind (1978), and David Collison’s Woven Gardens (1975). 35 I screened the British Council’s version several times in the mid-1970s to my documentary film students at the National Iranian Radio and Television College. 36 As the anthropologist Ali Bolookbashi notes, if the eighteenth century had been the era of Westerners’ research into Iranian languages and religion and the nineteenth century that of archaeological and literary studies, the twentieth century was marked by the ethnographic examination of Iranian communities (2004:2). Iranians’ own academic studies of their society began with the creation of the Anthropology Museum of Iran and the Institute of Iranian Anthropology, both in 1937. The Second World War put a damper on such studies, until 1958, when the Anthropology Research Center of Iran was established in Tehran. It was expanded in the 1970s into several departments, including one devoted to ethnographic film. 37 For information on and the footage of Lure of the East, see the British Pathé Website (http://www.britishpathe.com). 38 The novelist Vita Sackville-West in her diary of her travels in the Bakhtiari regions in the late 1920s also recounts two incidents in which this sort of fear and foreboding when photographing Iranians is palpable (1928:94–99). 39 From the dispatch of James S. Moose Jr., the American chargé d’affaires in Tehran, which contains the English translation of the regulations. rds, roll 8, 20 July 1938, 2. For a truncated Persian language version, see Omid 1995/ 1374:837. 40 For the complete text of this fascinating study, see Appendix G in Issari 1979: 577–92. 41 James S. Moose Jr., in rds, roll 8, 20 July 1938, 2. 42 Over the years, this survey grew into a monumental sixteen-volume work, A Survey of Persian Art: From Prehistoric Times to the Present (1964–77). 43 According to Nyman, he had made a silent, 16mm film of rug weaving as part of Pope’s earlier expedition to Iran in 1937, with which the filmmaker toured museums and galleries and with which he lectured (quoted in Gluck and Siver 1996:355). 4 4 rds, roll 8, dated 8 November 1939, 1. 45 Ibid., 2. 46 Ibid., 1. 47 Stephen Nyman also directed Arts of Persia (Les Arts en Perse, 1947) and Cities

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of Persia (Villes Persanes, 1947), whose narrations were written by Pope. In addition to these films, the Asia Institute also produced in the late 1940s several other films, including Persia and Her Magic Carpet, A Persian Travelogue, and Persian Arts and Crafts, which Nyman probably directed. For more on these films, see Naficy 1984g:15, 18; Ittig 1996; and Pope 1996:194.   At the same time that he was working with Pope, Nyman was apparently also a representative of the Twentieth Century–Fox studio in Iran, which was under contract with the United States Information Agency (usia) Tehran. Under that arrangement, Nyman made other films on the Iranian arts, distributed by Fox and shown in Iranian cinemas. For a while, he also ran the Borna Film Studio with Esfandiar Bozorgmehr and the documentary filmmaker Abolqasem Rezai, the son of Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi Tehrani, the first public cinema operator in Iran. The studio, which made some films and also dubbed foreign films into Persian, closed down in 1950 (Omid 1995/1374:840–41). 48 Iranians also loved Pope and Ackerman in return, something they demonstrated by burying the pair prominently in a lovely spot along the leafy Zayandeh River in Isfahan. 49 After the formation of the Society for National Heritage, the state took over all historically revered sites, including mosques, shrines, mausoleums, and seminaries, and transformed them into national heritage sites, opening their doors for the first time to non-Muslims and foreigners, including to photographers. The Shah Mosque was the first to be opened to foreigners (Grigor 2004:33). 50 Lester D. Friedman (1982:326) includes The Fall of Babylon in his chronological list of Jewish American films. The ad for the film in Ettela’at does not refer to the Jewish connection. 51 “Sinema-ye Ali-ye Sirus-e Kabir va Fath-e Bobol,” Ettela’at, 8 December 1926/ 16 Azar 1305, 1. 52 “Dar Gerand Hotel,” Ettela’at, 13 December 1926/21 Azar 1305. 53 The German policy during the First World War of economic and political “thrust to the east” (Drang nach Osten) continued throughout the 1930s, with increasingly diverse commercial and technical engagements in Iran and a trade agreement in 1935 that allowed Germany to import goods to Persia without an import license (Russell 2002:41). 54 Decades later, the Ministry of Culture and Art included scenes from this film in a documentary about the rail system, Bridge of Victory (Pol-e Piruzi, 1961). 55 In 1965, scenes of Iran, the New Persia were incorporated into another film, The New Iran (Det Nye Iran), which Svend Aage Lorentz directed. The same year, Ingolf Boisen wrote a book, Iran and Denmark through the Ages, published by Kampsax, which celebrated the long history of relations between the two countries, including the exchange visits of the Iranian shah and the Danish king that year. In 2008, Annette Mari Olsen and Katia Forbert Petersen cut sequences of Iran, the New Persia into their exilic return film, My Iranian Paradise (see vol. 4, chapter 5).

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56 “Film-e Rah Ahan-e Iran,” Ettela’at, 24 January 1931/4 Bahman 1309. It seems as if the makers of Iran, the New Persia had learned something from the controversy aroused by Iran Railway, for they did not dwell on the backwardness of the country and its people, and there is no record of negative reaction against the film. 57 “Filmbardari,” Ettela’at, 3 January 1931/13 Dey 1309. 58 Other foreign-made railway films were The Southern Section of the Trans-­ Persian Railway (1929), apparently made by the German syndicate, and The Visit of His Imperial Majesty the Shah to the Southern Sector in January 1930 (1930). One centered on the construction and the other on the opening of the southern portion of the rail system. Both films boasted great photography, including breathtaking aerial images of the railway lines and mountains (Tahaminejad 2005:9). 59 Garth Pedler, “British Petroleum: Their Documentaries before 1939,” n.d., a three-page report sent to me by the Scottish Film Council in 1982. 60 “Chronological Record of the Activities of aioc and Scottish Oils in Regard to Film Matters,” 11 November 1952, 2. This report was sent to me by the British Petroleum Company Limited, 12 December 1979. 61 “Kompani-ye Naft-e Jonub,” Ettela’at, 2 October 2, 1928/10 Mehr 1307. 62 Denis Bignell, “Film of Iran,” a four-page report obtained through correspondence with Janet McBain, an archivist at the Scottish Film Archive, 31 March 1982, 3. Some parts of this report duplicate John Taylor’s correspondence with me. 63 The aioc also acquired industrial films made by others about British and Iranian oil industries, such as Trans-Iran Railway (1930), made by the Uhlan Company, and in 1938, it formed its own film unit, which made the two-hour sound film AIOC Technical Film 1938, which James Davidson directed. 64 “Chronological Record of the Activities of aioc and Scottish Oils in Regard to Film Matters,” 2. 65 A proposal to build a theater in the Britannic House for showing films to company officials was put forward in 1938, but it was abandoned. See “Chronological Record of the Activities of aioc and Scottish Oils in Regard to Film Matters,” 4. 66 Mayak Cinema in Tehran showed the sound Foroughi newsreel for “a very long time” (Shoai 1973/1352:63). 67 Ettela’at, 25 June 1935/3 Tir 1314. 68 Ettela’at, 29 June 1935/7 Tir 1314; Ettela’at, 27 June 1935/5 Tir 1314. 69 Ettela’at, 27 June 1935/5 Tir 1314. 70 For more on these films, see Naficy 1984g:97–101. 71 For the facsimile of the ministry’s order to the police, see Tahaminejad 2002/ 1381:26. 72 Vita Sackville-West (a novelist and the wife of Harold Nicolson, the secondranking diplomat in the British Legation in Tehran) was present at Reza Shah’s coronation. In her eloquent account of her travels in Persia, she notes that it

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was due to the presence of the mullahs that no official ceremonial music was played during the coronation: “So it was in silence that we waited [for the arrival of the Shah to crown himself], a warm silence broken only by the whispering and rustling of the crowd” (1990:131). 73 These included the following films: [Inauguration of the Northern Railway Line/ Eftetah-e Rah Ahan-e Shomal, 1927], [Inauguration of the Bank-e Melli-e Iran/ Eftetah-e Bank-e Melli-e Iran, 1927], [Ground-Breaking Ceremonies for the First Building of Tehran Railway/Marasem-e Kolangzani-e Nakhostin Bana-ye Rah Ahan-e Tehran, 1927], [His Imperial Majesty’s Trip to Mazanderan/Mosaferate Alahazrat-e Homayuni beh Mazanderan, 1931], [Laying the Foundation of the Melli Bank Building/Nasb-e Avvalin Sang-e Bana-ye Bank-e Melli, 1933], [Laying Down the First Rails of the Railway System/Aghaz-e Railgozari-ye Rah Ahan, 1933], [Celebrating the Iranian Constitution in the Parliament/Jashn-e Mashrutiat-e Iran dar Majles, 1934], [Ceremonies of Tehran Horse Races/Marasem-e Asb Davaniha-ye Tehran, 1936], and [The Armed Forces Parade/Razheh-ye Qoshun-e Lashgari, 1936]. Some of these may be duplicates of state-commissioned films, as their titles are very similar. About six minutes of Motazedi’s news film footage is included in the film Iran’s State Railway (Rah Ahan-e Dowlati-ye Iran, 1976), directed by Kianush Ayyari for National Iranian Radio and Television, which presents a history of the country’s railway system. It was originally called The Pulse of the Train (Nabz-e Qatar) but, according to the director, National Iranian Radio and Television (nirt) reedited and retitled it because it considered it “anti-propaganda” (Mehrabi 1996/1375:202). 74 These included news films showing Turkey on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of its becoming a republic; Forughi’s trip to Turkey; Reza Shah’s arrival in the Constitutional Assembly; the Shah on the throne in the Marble Palace; the Military Academy’s annual celebration attended by the Shah; Reza Shah’s visit to the north-fork railway lines; a National Assembly celebration; the laying of the Melli Bank building’s foundation (Javdani 2002/ 1381:31). 75 Among them were [Inauguration of the Nationwide Railway/Eftetah-e Rah Ahan-e Sarasari, 1938], [Inauguration Ceremonies of the Textile Factory/ Marasem-e Eftetah-e Karkhaneh-ye Risandegi, 1939], [Wedding Ceremonies of the Shah and Fawzia/Marasem-e Ezdevaj-e Shah va Fowzieh, 1939], [Ceremonies Inaugurating Risbaf Factory/Marasem-e Eftetah-e Kharkhaneh-ye Risbaf, 1939], [Ceremonies Inaugurating the Boy Scouts/Marasem-e Eftetah-e Pishahangi, 1940], and [Inauguration of Radio Tehran/Eftetah-e Radio Tehran, 1940].

Chapter 4  A Transitional Cinema 1 The number of cinemas in individual cities add up to thirty-four, not thirtyfive, as Faghfoory has it. These statistics are not complete, for there were more cities with cinemas at this time, including Ardebil in the northwest, which had several movie houses, though not simultaneously: Sherkat-e Sinema Ar-

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debil (Ardebil Cinema Company) opened in 1929, Iran Cinema in 1931, and Jahan (World) Cinema in 1944 (Naderi 1995/1374:175–77). 2 In time, the Shah’s syncretic Westernization and its revival of pre-Islamic roots and appeal to Aryan purity changed the anti-Jewish discourse from one based on religion to one based on race. 3 Ettela’at, 27 October 1926/4 Aban 1305. Ticket prices ranged between three and ten qerans. Probably the film is Rasputin, the Black Monk (1917), directed by Arthur Ashley. 4 Ettela’at, 23 November 1927/1 Azar 1306. 5 This Attila is perhaps the Italian version directed by Fabo Mari in 1918. 6 Ettela’at, 11 December 1929/20 Azar 1308. 7 Ettela’at, 9 May 1931/18 Ordibehesht 1310. The story of Esther and Mordecai, on which the Jewish festival of Purim is based, supposedly happened during the reign of Khashayar Shah (Xerxes 485–465 bce), while Ardeshir was the king who founded the Sasanian dynasty in 226 bce. Thus the mixing of these three mytho-historical figures in the movie title does not make historical sense. I thank Janet Afary for bringing this point to my attention. 8 Ettela’at, 8 January 1931/18 Dey 1309, 4. 9 The ad appears in Muzeh-ye Sinema-ye Iran 2004/1383:19. 10 Ettela’at, 15 September 1931/23 Shahrivar 1310. 11 This movie is probably the American film The Masked Woman (1927), directed by Silvano Balboni. An unfortunate practice that exhibitors engaged in at the time was to cut up a feature film into several sections, each of which was shown on one night as part of a film serial. 12 Ettela’at, 25 September 1927/2 Mehr 1306. 13 “Deram-e Enteqam,” Ettela’at, 17 September 1927/25 Shahrivar 1306. 14 “Gerand Sinema—Lalehzar,” Ettela’at, 18 January 1928/27 Dey 1306. 15 Ettela’at, 23 April 1930/3 Ordibehesht 1309. Perhaps this film is Raoul Walsh’s The Wanderer (1926) or Maurice Elvey’s The Wandering Jew (1923). 16 “Beh Asheqan-e Varzesh va Adabiat Besharat Bad,” Ettela’at, 23 September 1927/31 Shahrivar 1306. 17 “Gerand Sinema—Iran Cinema,” Ettela’at, 12 May 1929/22 Ordibehesht 1308. 18 “Film-e Mashhur-e Attila dar Sinema Sepah,” Ettela’at, 15 December 1929/24 Shahrivar 1308. 19 “Jashn-e Berthelot,” Ettela’at, 2 November 1927/10 Aban 1306. 20 Of the other performance halls twelve were in high schools, eight in theaters, two in cafés, two in hotels, and four in educational institutions (Floor 2005:265). 21 “Te’atr-e Zartoshtian—Kolup-e Barbad,” Ettela’at, 8 August 1931/16 Mordad 1310. 22 One Website that contains a detailed CV of Ohanians gives his date of birth as 8 October 1896 and his place of birth as Toog village, Caucasia (Armenia), see http://iraniancinema.net/ohanians-titles.html. For a detailed discussion of

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Ohanians’s various life and career histories see Tahaminejad 1993/1372:113– 46; Mehrabi 1984/1363; Haidari 1989a/1368, 1991a/1370; Hovian 2002/1381; and Muzeh-e Sinema-ye Iran 2004/1383:79. 23 For more on the various comic types in Iranian cinema see Haidari 1991d/ 1370. 24 Because of the failure of a second camera that was to cover the acrobat’s landing, the film only shows his leaping off. 25 Apparently, there are multiple versions of Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor on video at the Iran National Film Archive, as some versions do not have all the scenes described here, including the seed-breaking one. 26 For the complete screenplay of Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor, see Omid 1984/1363. 27 For ease of understanding, I have simplified Moradi’s convoluted sentences in my translation. 28 Ettela’at, 10 June 1973/20 Khordad 1352. 29 The Grand Cinema distributed such plot summary sheets in 1928. See “Gerand Sinema,” Ettela’at, 26 August 1928/4 Shahrivar 1307. 30 “Sinema-ye ba Sowt,” Ettela’at, 24 January 1928/3 Bahman 1306. 31 rds, roll 8, target 3, letter no. 844, 7 September 1931, 1. 32 “Sinema Palace: Film-e Nateq,” Ettela’at, 11 August 1931/19 Mordad 1310. 33 Perhaps referring to the efforts of Abdolhosain Sepanta and others in India to make Persian talkies, the Reverend Moare reported that “there have been advertisements for Iranian girls to go to India to appear in Iranian films” (1937:35). 34 “Difficulties of Inaugurating a Motion Picture Program in the Tabriz Consular District,” 24 January 1944, National Archives and Record Services, 800.4061 Motion Pictures/403, 1–2. 35 “British Cultural Propaganda,” BW 49/1, 1943–46, report by C. G. Bidwell, 7, British Public Record Office. 36 Within a decade, the famous writer Sadeq Hedayat would also work with Ankelsaria. 37 Sepanta spelled his name in English idiosyncratically, as Spenta; however, I have opted for a version that is closest to the Persian pronunciation of his name. 38 For examples of such lyrics, see Sepanta 1987/1366:283–84. 39 In 1970 Manuchehr Qasemi directed Jafar and Golnar (Jafar va Golnar), a remake of The Lor Girl. 40 If neither the initial modern Ferdowsi mausoleum nor the Sepanta Firdausi movie lasted, the “citadel in verse,” to quote his own poetry, that Ferdowsi had built a thousand years earlier continued to impress later generations, even those under the Islamic Republic, which was suspicious of Iranian nationalist pantheons. 41 She is reported to have sent a letter to Sepanta stating that a young Iranian writer, Sadeq Hedayat, interested in cinema, was about to arrive in India (Tahaminejad n.d.:122). Hedayat did go to India, and in 1937, the year in which

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Sepanta made his last film there, published a mimeograph version of his famous novel The Blind Owl (Buf-e Kur), long before its publication in Iran. India offered fertile ground to Iranian intellectual exiles. It is interesting to note that Hedayat, in a letter from Mumbai to his friend Mojtaba Minovi in London, in which he describes how he ended up in India, states, “By resorting to telephone calls and recommendations [from superiors] I was able to obtain a passport quickly under the pretext of being a specialist in writing the dialogue for Iranian movies” (quoted in Katouzian 2003b:240). There is no documentation so far that he actually worked on movies in Iran or India. 42 The Indian scholar B. Jha, however, contends that both Shirin and Farhad and Laili and Majnun, which he renders as Shirin Farhad and Laila Majnun, were produced by the film company of J. F. Madan, a Parsi businessman and a doyen of the Parsi stage in Calcutta (1985:75). 43 According to Sasan Sepanta in an e-mail to me, Spring was screened again in July 1999 by the Islamic Republic’s Channel 4 tv in the piece Bargi az Tarikh: Abdolhosain Sepanta; Fasli dar Cinema, directed by Ramin Mohseni (Naficy 2007d). 4 4 These regulations seem to be based on an earlier set of Public Exhibition Regulations dated 19 February 1928 (29 Bahman 1306) issued by the interior minister, Hosain Samii, which contained thirty-nine provisions (for a full text of these earlier regulations see Ranjbar Fakhri 2004/1383, 112–16). 45 This analysis is based on the full text of “Regulations for Cinemas Approved on 5 Bahman 1314,” (25 January 1936,) in Shoai 1975/1354, pp. 593–598. For an English translation of the full text see Issari 1979, vol. 2, Appendix A, pp. 299–309 (Appendix A). 46 rds, roll 8, target 3, letter no. 1623, 1 July 1931, 2. 47 In 1951, this organization was part of the Ministry of Education, whose duties consisted of issuing permits for publishing newspapers, magazines, nongovernmental advertisements, and books; evaluating theatrical plays and movies from “ethical, religious, and educational perspectives” and issuing performance permits for them; and encouraging writers to write and translate useful plays (Dayereh-ye Joghrafiai-ye Artesh 1951/1330:72). 48 “Namayeshha va Te’atrha,” Ettela’at, 8 October 1930/16 Mehr 1309, 49 “Creation of Government Propaganda Office,” rds, roll 4, target 1 political affairs, letter no. 1508, 19 January 1939, 3. 50 “Activities of the Propaganda Bureau,” rds, roll 1, target 1 political affairs, letter no. 1533, 14 February 1939, 2. 51 Ibid., 3. 52 “Literature,” Ettela’at, 13 February 1939/24 Bahman 1317, enclosure no. 2 with dispatch no. 1533 in “Activities of the Propaganda Bureau,” rds, roll 1, target 1 political affairs, letter no. 1533, 14 February 1939. 53 Ibid., 3. Virility of mind, body, and morality were considered vital to the creation of the new Iran, propagated nationally through newly developed sports and calisthenics programs, associations, and events. Under Reza Shah, phys-

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ical education was considered one of the “pillars of life” (Schayegh 2002: 346). 54 For an English translation of the statutes of the Public Opinion Guidance Organization, see the three-page addendum to “Creation of Government Propaganda Office,” rds, roll 4, target 1 political affairs, letter no. 1508, 19 January 1939. For Persian-language descriptions of pogo statutes, commissions, and personnel, see Hamraz 1997/1376:56–63. 55 The conference commission was headed by the minister of foreign affairs, Mozaffar Azam; the radio commission by Amir Khosravi, the minister of finance; the publication commission by the writer Gholamhosain Rahnema; the drama commission by a ministry of finance administrator, Sayyed Ali Khan Nasr; the music commission by Major Minbashian; and the press commission by the novelist Mohammad Hejazi (Hamraz 1997/1376:56). 56 In 1922 the expatriate reformist journal Iranshahr had called for a war on moral corruption in Iran, suggesting the following as arsenal: the use of propaganda and speeches, moral treatises and books, national morality societies, an army of moral teachers, films and plays, punishment and retribution, attention to health and physical fitness. As Camron Amin notes, Iranshahr’s proposed plan was a prophetic blueprint for Reza Shah’s pogo (1996:114). 57 “Statutes of the Press Committee, Approved at the 8th Meeting of the Central Committee of the Organization for the Orientation of Public Opinion,” rds, roll 20, target 1 political affairs, enclosure with dispatch no. 1547, 12 March 1939, 1. 58 One such melodrama was Parichehr (1951), directed by Fazlollah Baigan and made for Tehran Film Studio. 59 Surprisingly, there was no commission devoted to religion and religious affairs either. 60 During the time of relative press freedom that followed Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941, pogo was criticized heavily by, among others, the fiery journalist and novelist Mohammad Masud in his autobiographical treatise The Flowers That Grow in Hell (Golhai keh dar Jahannam Miruyand). Unknown assailants assassinated him in 1947; however, recent writings have assigned the act to the operatives of the main communist party in Iran, the Tudeh Party (Amin 1996:91). 61 “The Cultural Progress of Iran,” Journal de Téhéran, 25 January 1938, rds, roll 9, target 1 political affairs, enclosure with dispatch no. 1236, 14 February 1938, 2. 62 “Creation of Government Propaganda Office,” rds, roll 4, target 1 political affairs, letter no. 1508, 19 January 1939, 3–4. 63 According to Willem Floor, 5 percent of Tehran’s population of 240,000 in 1922 earned their living through prostitution (2008:250). 64 “Tablighat,” Homayoon 1, no 1. (1934/1313), 25. 65 “Tablighat,” Homayoon 1, no. 1 (1935/1314), 31. 66 In his correspondence with me, Parviz Navi told me that his father was the

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owner of Jahan Cinema, established in 1944, although Atabak Naderi in his book on the Ardebil Theater and cinema history contends that Hasan Najaflu was the owner (1995/1374:75–77). Navi explained that Najaflu, who was a comic actor and theater director, served only as the Jahan Cinema’s projectionist. His father was forced to bring in other partners, such as Najaflu, after the roof of the movie house caved in due to heavy snow, and he needed further funding for its repair. Subsequently, Najaflu took on new partners, Hajbaba Hosainzadeh and Masih Aqa Mohammadi, and opened a new movie house called Iran Cinema on the same land owned by Navi. In the early 1950s Navi sold the land on which the movie house stood to the new partners running the new Iran Cinema (Naficy 2005a:3–4). 67 In his personal biography of the city of Yazd, Jalal Golshan gives 1930 as the date of the cinema’s establishment and says that the owner was his uncle, Mohammad Golshan (2005/1384:73). 68 The penalty for sodomy, performed by force or intimidation, had been death until the 1933 Law on Offenses against Decency and Morality changed it to imprisonment with hard labor from three years to ten years (Article 207). In addition, this law’s Article 211 ruled that whoever seduced, facilitated, or forced young men or women less than nineteen years of age to “corruption and debauchery” would be sentenced to “correctional imprisonment of from six months to three years and the payment of a cash fine of from 250 to 5,000 rials.” “Law on Offenses against Decency and Morality (Amending Articles 207–214 of the Penal Code),” rds, roll 5, target 1 political affairs, enclosure with dispatch no. 1648, written by George Wadsworth, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim to Secretary of State, 3 February 1934, 1–7. 69 Bozorg Alavi’s famous novel Her Eyes (Chemhayash), about the life of an antiShah painter, contains episodes in which its leftist protagonists meet clandestinely in cinemas to exchange notes, packages, and ideas. 70 In the short run, it appears that the rise of cinema and moviegoing stifled Iran’s pioneer theater movement in Tehran, but not so much in the provinces, where Iranians were “less lavishly endowed with cinemas” (Singer and Baldridge 1936:38). 71 On Vaziri’s important contribution to the modernization of Iranian music and music teaching, see Khoshzamir 1979 and Chehabi 1998. 72 The first recorded cinema fire occurred on 30 September 1909 (15 Ramadan 1327) in Amir Khan’s cinema on Naseriyeh Avenue. It was caused by the slow cranking of the projector whose hot lamp set fire to the flammable nitrate film stock. Fortunately, damage was minimal, but Amir Khan badly burned his left arm (Sa’dvandian 2001:448). 73 “Hariq dar Emarat-e Sinema,” Ettela’at, 1 October 1928/9 Mehr 1307, 1. See also the newspaper Nahid’s account of the fire in Omid 1995/1374:38–39. 74 “Towzih,” Ettela’at, 2 October 1928/10 Mehr 1307. 75 “Besharat Beh Khanomha-ye Mohtarameh,” Ettela’at, 1 March 1928/10 Esfand 1306.

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76 “Sinema-ye Zardoshtian Bara-ye Khanomha-ye Mohtarameh,” Ettela’at, 10 March 1928/Esfand 19 1306. According to this ad, the films that Vakili showed in the Zoroastrian Cinema were the same as those he showed in his Grand Cinema. As Sani al-Saltaneh had done in the early 1900s, Vakili showed the same films twice to segregated audiences, but in a public setting: once to only women in the Zoroastrian Cinema and a second time to men alone in the Grand Cinema. 7 7 “Do Mozhdeh-ye Yekja dar Sinema Zardoshtian Bara-ye Khanomha-ye Moh­ trameh,” Ettela’at, 26 April 1928/6 Ordibehesht 1307. 78 Although it is not clear that Zoroastrians engaged in film exhibition, like most minorities they were forward looking and open to institutions of modernity. They had a very high rate of literacy (93 percent in Tehran in 1922), and three Zoroastrians, one of them, Arbab Kay Khosrow Shahrokh, were put in charge of developing the Iranian railroad system. In addition, Shahrokh opened a library and a publishing house for the Majles and put into place the public telephone system in Iran (Amighi 1990:173). 79 This unnamed translator was the sister of the well-known male screen translator Eshaq Zanjani who translated the screen at Vakili’s Grand Cinema (Tahaminejad 1993/1372:55). See also “Besharat-e Makhsus beh Moshtarian-e Mohtaram-e Gerand Sinema,” Ettela’at, 27 December 1928/5 Mehr 1307. 80 “Favayed-e Sinema,” Ettela’at, 30 December 1928/9 Dey 1307. 81 “Ejtema’at—2,” Ettela’at, 2 January 1929/12 Dey 1307. 82 “Gerand Sinema: Serial-e Tarikhi va Binazir,” Ettela’at, 29 January 1928/8 Bahman 1306. 83 “Gerand Sinema,” Ettela’at, 29 August 1928/7 Shahrivar 1307. 84 Famous male cross-dressers included Fazlollah Baygan and Colonel Abdolrahim Etemad Moqaddam. The former continued to play female roles into the 1950s (Khatibi 1994:118). 85 Asia Qestanian, whose parents, Misha and Margo, were themselves theater actors, was the first woman to be trained at Paris’s Institute of Cinematography. She and her parents performed on stage in many European countries. Zoma Ohanian was the first woman to go through her father’s film school (Hovian 2002/1381:136–37).

Chapter 5  Modernity’s Ambivalent Subjectivity 1 For some of these terms see the dictionaries of Mohammad Moin (1963– 73/1342–52) and Abolhasan Najafi (1999/1378). 2 Heshmat Moayyad and Paul Sprachman, the translators of M. A. Djamalzadeh’s Once upon a Time, used the term wog (Westernized Oriental Gentleman), a derogatory Orientalist piece of American slang, for the dandies (Jamalzada 1985:31–43). Fokoli, farangi ma’ab, zhigolo, zhigolet, qerti, alamod, dezanfekteh, and gharbzadeh are all derogatory terms, but unlike wog, these terms are neither Orientalist nor racist and come from an Iranian perspective. 3 For a full list of what the dandies wore, see Shahri 1997/1376:vol. 1:278–84.

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4 “Dar Bareh-ye Fokoliha,” Mahnameh-ye Sinemai-ye Sinema, no. 258 (21 Shahrivar 1379/11 September 2000), 16. 5 I did this as a child (see the preface). The filmmaker Kumars Purahmad also recalls similar experiences in Isfahan with the movie frames of the stars (2001/1380:104). 6 This is reminiscent of the citizens of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, who in Jean Rouch’s film, I, a Black (Moi, un Noir, 1957), frequent a bar named Chicago and adopt the names and identity markers of famous movie stars, such as Edward G. Robinson and Dorothy Lamour. They are not only made the subject of the movies but participate in their own subjectification by means of which they are temporarily empowered. For this film, see my interview with Rouch (Naficy 1979b). 7 As in Iran, Lebanese dandies sported “Duglasi moustaches.” The Lebanese novelist, Hassan Daoud, describes the meaning of Duglasi and other moustaches as markers of manhood for the dandies he was growing up with (2000). 8 For a description and analysis of heterotopias and heterotopic spaces such as cafés, cinemas, and train stations, see Foucault 1982. 9 “Aludegiha-ye Javanan-e Ma,” Khandaniha 18, no. 62 (1958/1337), 14–18. 10 For a report on postrevolutionary flâneurs and their favorite cafés, see “Kafehgardi,” Yek Hafteh, no. 11 (2002/1380), 8–9. For a theoretical and sociological study of parsehzani in contemporary Iran in the light of critical theory, see Kazemi 2009/1388. 11 For a sample of the criticism from the 1950s, see the article, “Eshi Jun in Cheh Harfi-ye keh Mizani? Man Chehtor Mitunam ba Mardi keh Hanuz yek ‘Tango’ Dorost o Hesabi Balad Nist Beraqseh Ezdevaj Konam?,” Khandaniha 10, no. 74 (1950/1329), 31–33. A famous radio comedian, Hamid Qanbari, created in the late 1950s and early 1960s a dandy comic character named Fuful, who both circulated and critiqued the dandy stereotype. For years thereafter, Fuful was used as a general put-down for Weststruck Iranians. 12 Most of the activities of the Iran Javan Society in the 1920s revolved around supporting progressive candidates for the Majles or around organizing public service musical concerts and nationalist and modernist plays in Tehran (Bayat 1995/1374:18). Almost all members of the society who participated in the plays were amateurs. According to a prominent member, Aliakbar Siasi, what they lacked in professional training, they made up for in their enthusiasm and hard work. Both the public and Reza Khan applauded these efforts (quoted in Behnam 2000/1379:115–16). 13 For the text of the play Jafar Khan Is Back from Europe and for some biographical material on Hasan Moqaddam, see Jamshidi 1994. 14 The reformist poet and writer Mirzadeh Eshqi, himself a bit of a dandy, parodies the fokoli in various poems and essays, including in his famous “Nohehye Jomhuri” (A Sermon for the Republic), published in the final issue of his magazine, Qarn-e Bistom (Twentieth Century), before his assassination. See Eshqi 1965/1344:283–84.

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15 For more on Shadman, see Gheissari 1998; and Milani 2004. 16 What intensified the emotionality of Shadman’s discourse was that he did not offer any footnotes in his book and did not marshal any evidence to support his contentions. 17 Al-e Ahmad’s characterization of a Weststruck individual (gharbzadeh) closely resembles Paulo Freire’s description of the oppressed in his influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As though echoing Al-e Ahmad (or vice versa), Freire says the oppressed is a dual, divided, shiftless, ambivalent, inauthentic, diseased “being for another,” one who suffers from self-doubt and inferiority and is in essence a “host” to the enemy, the oppressor, whom he has deeply internalized (2009:48–69, 156). 18 For Iranian intellectuals and their struggles to come to terms with modernity and authenticity in this period, in addition to those cited in the text, see the following works: Naraqi 1974/1353; Hanson 1983; Shayegan 1992, 1977/2536; Dabashi 1993; Boroujerdi 1996; Gheissari 1998; Vahdat 2002; Nabavi 2003a, 2003b; Milani 2004; and Jahanbegloo 2004. 19 For the lyrics, see Jairani 2000/1379:92–93. 20 In his biography of Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Abbas Milani speaks of him as an intellectual dandy who, unlike superficial dandies, knew European culture and languages well (2001:78–79). Though in a position of power, he also engaged in many of the dandies’ playful and performative practices. He was more comfortable speaking French or English with the Shah than Persian, as he thought he spoke Persian with an accent (222). Known as a “leftist intellectual, a habitué of cafés” (64), Hoveyda wore fashionable, tailored suits (prepared by the Shah’s Italian tailor) and a daily fresh orchid in his lapel, which was matched by a tie of a similar color (24–25). In addition, he sported a pipe, a cane, and danced sensually at parties, where at times he used vulgar street language. Although he was apparently neither a homosexual nor a Baha’i, like many dandies and modernists, he was widely rumored to be both. 21 For some of these practices in ruhozi (or takht-e hozi) theater, see Taqian 1995/1374. 22 For more on the camel-bird appellation and the intellectuals’ critique of the Westernized dandies, see Behnam 1996/1375:74–76. 23 This is a protoexilic film for Vossoughi in that it foreshadowed the star’s migration in the wake of the revolution of 1978–79 to the United States, where he had a hard time making a living as an actor, partly because of general antiIranian hostility due to the American hostage crisis (Avilar 2001). He sold his Qolhak Cinema in Tehran and with the earnings purchased a carwash and gas station in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of Los Angeles, from which he earned a living and supported his brothers’ applications for green cards. Vossoughi himself recognizes the protoexilic dimensions of this film when he states that “years later, when I was busy pumping gas for a customer [in my gas station], I was suddenly reminded of The American Mamal and realized

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that, finally, Mamal had [achieved his wish and] arrived in the United States and become the owner of a gas station” (quoted in Zeraati 2004:257). 24 Reza Safai shot the film entirely in Isfahan in deference to Arhamsadr, who lived and worked there (Safai 2001/1380:131–32). During the day Arhamsadr worked as the director of the National Insurance Company, and at night he acted in his famous comic plays in the Sepahan Theater. 25 Taqvai produced, directed, and wrote the screenplay for My Uncle Napoleon. For the original novel, see Pezeshkzad 1972/1351; for its English translation, see Pezeshkzad 1996. For more on Taqvai’s films and career, see Haidari 1990a/1369. 26 After the revolution of 1978–79, some Iranians claimed that the British had engineered that cataclysmic event, which drove out the Shah and replaced him with the Ayatollah Khomeini. 27 Some of the sound and narrative problems and the goofy portrayal of the dandy may have been exacerbated by the extensive censorship of the film, which required making changes to its music and dialogue and eliminating certain scenes to obtain an exhibition permit, six years after its initial festival première.

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Toulet, Emmanuelle. 1991. “Cinema at the Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900.” Persistence of Vision, no. 9, 10–36. United States Department of Commerce. 1941. “Annual Survey of Motion Picture Industry in Iran.” Industrial Reference Service, Part 8, Motion Pictures and Equipment (March), no. 32, 6212. ———. 1932. Commerce Yearbook, vol. 2, Foreign Countries. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. Vahdat, Farzin. 2002. God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Van Hook, Loretta C. 1905–06. “Report of Evangelical Work,” Board of Foreign Missions, microfilm reel 274, mf10, f7619, Presbyterian Historical Association, Philadelphia. (1 October 1905–1 October 1906). Varharam, Gholamreza. 1988/1367. Nezam-e Siasi va Sazmanha-ye Ejtemai-ye Iran dar Asr-e Qajar. Tehran: Entesharat-e Moin. Villard, Henry S. 1931. “Film Importers Face Difficulties in Persia.” Commerce Reports, no. 14 (6 April), 37. Vincendeau, Ginnette. 1996. The Companion to French Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Washington, Peter, ed. 2000. Persian Poets. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Whissel, Kristen. 2008. Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and Silent Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. White, Hayden. 1986. “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 183–96. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wickens, G. M. 1983. “Shah Muzaffar Al-Din’s European Tour, ad 1900.” Qajar Iran: Political, Social, and Cultural Change, 1800–1925, ed. Edmund Bosworth and Carole Hillenbrand, 34–47. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilford, John Noble. 2007. “Skull Supports Human-Migration Theory.” New York Times, 12 January. Williams, Raymond. 1977. “Structure of Feeling.” Marxism and Literature, 128–35. London: Oxford University Press. Willemen, Paul. 1989. “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections.” Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Willemen, 1–29. London: British Film Institute. Willis, C. J. 2004. In the Land of the Lion and the Sun; or, Modern Persia, Being Experiences of Life in Persia from 1866 to 1881, new edn. Washington: Mage. Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. 1996. Global/Local: Cultural Productions and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press. Wood, Barry. 2000. “‘A Great Symphony of Pure Form’: The 1931 International Exhibition of Persian Art and Its Influence.” Ars Orientalis, no. 30, 113–30. Wright, Denis. 1985. The Persians amongst the English: Episodes in Anglo-Persian History. London: I. B. Tauris.

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Yushij, Nima. 1972/1351. Arzesh-e Ehsasat va Panj Maqaleh, 2nd edn. Tehran: Haidari. Zeraati, Naser. 2004. Behrouz Vossoughi (Yek Zendeginameh). San Francisco: Aran. Zirinsky, Michael P. 1993. “A Panacea for the Ills of the Country: American Presbyterian Education in Inter-war Iran.” Iranian Studies 26, nos. 1–2, 119–37. ———. 1986. “Blood, Power, and Hypocrisy: The Murder of Robert Imbrie and American Relations with Pehlavi Iran, 1924.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 18, no. 3, 275–92. Zoka, Yahya. 1997/1376. Tarikh-e Akkasi va Akassan-e Pishgam-e dar Iran. Tehran: Entesharat-e Elmi va Farhangi.

370

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inde x

Abdollah Mirza Qajar, 63 Abi and Rabi (Ohanians), 48, 72, 193, 208, 209, 210–11, 249 Abrahamian, Ervand, 201, 250 Accented cinema, 6–7, 219 Achaemenid, 100–101, 185 Ackerman, Phyllis, 143, 173–74 Actualities: content of, 72, 86; by Lumière, 80; by Sani al-Saltaneh, 27, 46–47, 80, 98, 135–36; style of, 47–48. See also Documentaries Adl, Shahriar, 313 n. 19, 314 n. 21 Adventures (film), 206 Aesthetics of display, 72, 80–81 Af hamsadr, Reza, 302 Ahmad, Aijaz, 24 Ahmadi, Morteza, 83, 283 Ahmad Shah, 154 Aineh-ye Iran (periodical), 170–71 aioc (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company), 183–86 Airdomes, 113–14 Airom, Mohammad Hosain Khan, 223 Akkasbashi Sani al-Saltaneh, Ebrahim Khan. See Sani al-Saltaneh, Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi Alavi, Bozord, 262, 291 Alborz Cinema, 265 Alborz College, 268 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal, 278, 287, 289 Algar, Hamid, 98, 294

Alienating identification, 90–95 Ali Shah Mosque, 261 Allamehzadeh, Reza, 86 Alliance Française, 51 All the King’s Horses (Tuttle), 176 Al-Saltaneh, Ain, 280 Althusser, Louis, 94 Altman, Rick, 104 Amanat, Abbas, 132–33 Amanat, Hossein, 143 American Mamal, The (Qarib), 298–301, 304 American Missionary School, 268 American Point 4 program, 244 American Presbyterian Church, 53–55 Amini, Amin, 290 Amiraslani, H., 159–60 Anderson, Benedict, 145, 253 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (aioc), 183–86 Anglo-Persian Oil Company, 112, 168, 183 Animated films, 23 Ankelsaria, Behramgore, 232, 241 Ansari, Haji, 258 Anti-Arabism, 98, 236, 274 Apparatus theory, 93 Aqababian, Satenik, 265 Aqababov, Satopari, 265 Aqayov, 65, 128, 129 Arbitrary rule theory, 31

Architectural Survey Expedition, 174 Ardeshir, Esther, and Mordecai (film), 205 Argument with an Arab (performance film), 48, 98 Arianpur, Amirhosain, 270 Armenian-Jewish relations, 33–34 Armes, Roy, 25 Arrival of the Shah Abdolazim Train at the Station, The (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47, 80 Art-house films: authors of, 25; cinematic relations and, 3; modernization and, 11; national cinema and, 3; as second cinema, 6; state-supported, 24 Artisanal mode of production, 10, 11–12, 21, 30, 39, 208; biographies and, 37; in documentaries, 189; exhibition and reception practices and, 104–18; hybrid self-fashioning of filmmakers, 34–35; improvisation in, 35–36; indirectness in, 36–37; instability of, 36; interstitiality of, 35; middleman function of filmmakers, 32; multiculturalism of, 33–34; multi­functionality of filmmakers, 31; political agency and, 37–38; social haggling and, 37 Ashura, 65, 144 Ashura (Ivanov), 65, 66 Asia Institute, 175 Askari, Kaveh, 37 Astonishment, 40, 72, 79–89, 94, 102, 239 Atabak Azam, Aliasghar Khan, 58 Atatürk, Kemal, 187 Audience. See Spectatorship Audoin-Dubreuil, Louis, 158 Auteur directors, 23–25 Autoidentification, 168, 216 Autumn (Sepanta), 244–45 Avicenna, 143 Axworthy, Michael, 7 Azadi Monument, 143

372

i nd e x

Baba Ahmadi, 162, 163, 164 Babi movement, 37 Baby Dandy (Safai), 302–4 Backwardness, Iranian: critique of, 50, 77; cure for, 28–29, 37–38, 40; of educational system, 103; images of, 16, 73–74, 94, 97, 150, 155–56, 159–60, 178, 180, 191, 259; women and, 150 Badie, Mohsen, 35 Badmagerian, Ardashes, 32, 67–68, 104, 105, 124, 127, 137 Bahai’ism, 33, 46, 165–66 Baharestan Cinema, 202, 206 Bahrami, Abdollah, 124–25 Baizai, Bahram, 24, 74 Bakhtiar, Mortaza Qolikhan, 228 Bakhtiari tribe, 162, 163, 168, 169 Baldridge, Cyrus LeRoy, 200, 279 Ball, Warwick, 100–101 Ballyhoo troupes, 256 Banan, Gholamhosain, 227 Banietemad, Rakhshan, 24, 122 Baqai, Abdollah, 105 Baqai, Mozaffar, 262 Barberousse (Gance), 112 Barnouw, Erik, 162 Baroness and the Butler, The (Lang), 176 Barthes, Roland, 116 Baskerville, Howard, 55 Bastinado on the Dwarf and the Black Servant (performance film), 48 Batmagerian, Ardeshir Khan, 280 Bausani, Alessandro, 100 Bazaar Scenes (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47 Behzad, Hosain, 291 Behzad, Taherzadeh, 175 Beig, Kenan, 187–88 Benjamin, Walter, 81 Berg, Jeffrey, 4 Bergman, Ingrid, 282 Berman, Marshall, 12–13 Berthelot, Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin, 207 Beur films, 6 Bhabha, Homi, 92 Biographies, 38

Bird, F. L., 130, 131 Black Eyes (Sepanta), 242, 249, 274 Black film, British, 6 Blacktop (Naficy), xlix, l Bøgelund Petterson, Palle, 179, 181 Boison, Ingolf, 179–80 Boroujerdi, Mehrzad, 293–94 Boulevard Café, 128 Box office figures, 4 Boyer, Charles, 282 Bretton Woods agreement, 4 British Instructional Films, 157–58 British Pathé films, 170, 188 Brother’s Revenge, The (Moradi), 221–22, 249–50, 271 Brownlow, Kevin, 162 Buried Alive (Hedayat), 77 Café Ferdows, 291 Calendars, lunar and solar, 146 Capricious Lover, The (Moradi), 222, 223–25, 250 Carnival of Flowers (Sani al-Saltaneh), 44–45 Carter, Jimmy, 165 Castoriadis, Cornelius, xxxi Censorship: first instance, 15, 90, 133; Indian, 242; justification of, 154; lifted, 66; police and, 247, 249–50; public viewing and, 17–18; as purification, 59–60; regulations for, 170–77, 182, 249; religious vs. secular, 260, 317 n. 43; self-, liii; state, 10, 15, 60, 97, 152, 153–54, 208, 247–49, 255, 323 n. 22; translations and, 18, 126–27, 269 Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (cidcya), 23 Chaknavarian, Haikaz, 230 Chaplin, Charlie, 115, 116, 231 Charity Society Troupe, 52 Cheklowski, Peter, 279–80 Cheraq Gaz Street Cinema, 27, 36, 57, 79, 84, 256

Christensen, Theodor, 179–80 Christian missionaries, 51–56, 105; American, 53–55; women, 316 n. 35 Chute, Margaret, 58–59 cidcya (Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), 23 Cinema and Performing Arts (periodical), 104 Cinema Dagmar, 181 Cinema-of-attraction films, 47–48, 72, 80–82, 86, 93, 211, 217 Cinematography, 120, 155, 162, 180, 185, 319 n. 51 Cinema-ye Azad, 244 Citroën cars, 158–59 Clothing, modernized, 144–45, 148–49, 213, 234, 263, 268, 289, 295 Coffeehouses and film exhibition, 128–30 Comedy Company of Iran, 110 Comic theater, 48, 110, 128, 279 Connaught, Arthur, 81, 96 Conquering Western Civilization (Shadman), 287 Conquest of Babylon, The (Griffith), 177–78 Constitutional Revolution (1905–11): modernity and, 8, 9, 27, 28; news­ paper reporting and, 28 Consumerism, 10, 19, 150, 198, 292–93 Consumers vs. viewers, 5 Continuity editing, 72, 82, 123, 177, 198, 212 Cooper, Gary, 240 Cooper, Merian C., 161–62, 169 Cossack Brigade, The (Motazedi), 190 Count of Monte Cristo (film), 204 Court Eunuchs, The (Faruqi Qajar), 48 Crabbe, Buster, 127 Crofts, Stephen, 3–4 Crosland, Alan, 226 Crusades, The (film), 206 Cuban Revolution (1959), 6 C. V. Whitney Productions, 169

ind ex

373

Daftari, Iran, 242 Dandies, Westernized, 12, 131; cafés and, 291; characteristics of, 279, 282; cinema and, 279–90; comic theater and, 279–80; consumerism and, 292–93; critique of, 50, 281, 287–90, 295; described, 46; discourse of, 284, 301; emergence of, 142; female, 278; filmmakers as, 280; haggling by, 295; history of, 277–79; movie theaters and, 291–92; performed criticism by, 294, 296; as sleazy entertainers, 283–84; speed and, 20; in tough guy films, 290, 301 Dandy films, 297; creation of, 282; criticism of, 294; as indigenous genre, 2; stereotypes and, 16; subgenres, 303–4 Danesh (newspaper), 135 Dar al-Fonun Polytechnic College, 56, 63, 65, 85, 195, 225, 250 Dar al-Moalemin-e Markazi, 103 Dargahi, Mohammad, 155 Dariabaigi, Ali, 227 Dariush Cinema, 112, 114, 202 Darvish, 227 Dashti, Ali, 248 Davar, Ali Akbar, 142, 244 Davasaz, Mirza Enayatollah Khan, 105 Dawn of Iran (Elton), 184–85 Dawn of Iran . . . Dawn in the East . . . The Story of Modern Iran (Taylor), 185 Dearholt, Ashton, 265 Delta Cinema, 181 Denmark (Henningsen), 180 Derrida, Jacques, xxxii Diana Cinema, 265 Diba, Layla, 90 Didehban Cinema, 112, 192, 205, 210, 224, 229, 230, 238 Dilmaj. See Live translators Displacement: causes of, 3, 13; dandyism and, 286, 296; modernity and, 8, 13, 21, 286 Diversity, 38–39

374

i nd e x

Djamalzadeh, Mohammad Ali, 31, 57, 79, 83, 84–86, 102, 169, 284 Documentaries: ad hoc, 153; fine arts, 175; indigenous, 189–95; style, 6, 23. See also Actualities Dodge trucks, 161 Dogma cinema, 6 Donkey Riders Galloping in a Tree-Lined Street (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47, 80 Donkey Riders Play-Fighting with Pedestrians Using Sticks, The (performance film), 48 Dowlatabadi, Yahya, 58, 293 Dramatic Arts Bureau of the Fine Arts Administration, 286 Dubbing, 18, 69, 127, 226, 229–30, 307 Durnama-ye Iran (periodical), 232 Dwarf Rides the Arab, The (performance film), 48 Eastern Gate Crasher, An (travelogue), 158 East India Film Company, 242 Ebling, Samuel G., 231 Edison Kinetoscopes, 58, 67, 88 Educational films, 193, 195 Edward vii, king of England, 81 Effeminate Aziz (Taheri), 303 Ellis, Robert, 266 Ellis Island (Naficy), l Elton, Arthur, 184 Émile, Ahmad’s Book (Rousseau), 87 Emperor of Sahara (film), 203 Empire of the mind, 7 Engert, C. Van H., 145–46, 149, 248, 250, 255 Enlightenment values, 103 Epistemic violence: cinema and, 121, 134, 152, 165, 178, 216; modernity and, 73–79, 91, 102, 150; othering and, 73–74, 78, 178, 216; self-othering and, 211, 268 Equilibrium policy, 179 Esfandiari, Ali, 285 Esfandiari, Hasan, 142

Eshqi, Mirzadeh, 76–77, 97, 165 Esmailiov, Georges, 52, 115, 193–94 Esmat al-Dowleh Qajar, 86–87, 89 Esoofally, Abdulally, 237 Ethnic minorities, 3, 11, 33–34, 38, 200–201, 209 Ethnographic films, 161–77 Ettela’at (newspaper), 104, 117, 148, 159, 181–82, 187–88, 194, 206, 222, 225, 226, 228, 254, 264–65 Ettela-at-e Haftegi (periodical), 270 Exchange relations, 3, 14, 197, 209, 231, 232–33, 308 Expedition films, 161–77 Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 205, 282 Fall of Babylon, The (Griffith), 177–78 Famin, Enayatollah, 254 Fanon, Frantz, 16, 157 Farah Pahlavi, 198 Farangestan (periodical), 95, 167, 284 Farhang Scientific Company, 109 Farman Farmaian, Sattareh, 268–69 Farrell, Lowell, 169 Farsi language, 7, 146 Faruqi Qajar, Ahmad, 48 Farus Cinema, 65, 66, 67, 137, 202, 280 Ferdowsi, Abolqasem, 119, 143, 144, 145, 240–41 Ferdowsi Cinema, 230 Fetishization, 92, 282 Fictional films, 177–78, 197; in silent era, 198–203 Fillin-Yeh, Susan, 300 Film Acting Training Center, 209, 222, 275 Film clubs, 15, 18, 260, 291 Film exhibitions, 62–67, 94; artisanal, 104–18; barkers for, 115; coffeehouses and, 128–30; hotels and, 128–30; itinerant, 110; mobile cinema systems, 194–95; private, 17–18, 32, 55–56, 64, 79, 89, 105, 133, 153; public, 9, 18, 32, 51, 105; regulation of, 193, 228,

245–47; timing of, 114; women and, 18, 58, 68, 70, 89, 137, 255–56. See also Movie houses; Translations Film festivals, lvi–lxi, 15, 17, 18 Film importation, 36–37, 198–203, 245, 247, 248–50 Film projectors, xxxv–xxxviii, 117 Firdausi (Sepanta and Irani), 144, 145, 240–41, 249 Firuz Mirza Firuz, 142 Fischer, Lucy, 19 Flaherty, Robert, 162 Flâneurs, 20, 115, 128, 130–32, 283, 292 Fleming, Victor, 269 Fokoli. See Dandies, Westernized Forbes, Rosita, 257 Forbes-Leith, F. A. C., 170 Foreign bride films, 16 Foreign films. See Western films Foreign Trade Monopoly Law, 248 Foreign travel films, 16, 72, 97, 123, 133, 157–61, 162, 325 n. 51, 328 n. 27. See also Actualities Forughi, Mohammad Ali, 187, 224, 225, 229 Foruqi, Abolhazan, 103 Foruzin, Maqasedzadeh, 219 Foucault, Michel, 2 Fox Movietone, 161 Fox News, 166, 188 Franklin Company, 242 Friedman, Jonathan, 19 Fund-raising, 108–9, 203, 206–7 Gabler, Neal, 34 Gabriel, Teshome H., xxxiv, 16, 157 Gaffary, Farrokh, 63, 168, 240, 260 Gance, Abel, 112 Gaonkar, Dilip, 75 Gasiner, Louis J., 266 Gaudreault, André, 48 Gaumont, Léon, 69 Gender: relations, 14, 77–78, 264; segregation by, 131, 132–38, 160, 255–56. See also Women

ind ex

375

George V, king of England, 173 Gerand Cinema, 70, 109, 128, 129, 177, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 263, 266–67, 285 Ghaffari, Mirza Abolqasem, 48 Gharbzadegi (Al-e Ahmad), 289 Ghessari, Ali, 201 Gholamali Aziz al-Sultan, 49, 58, 105–8 Ghotbi, Reza, 198 Globalization: Hollywood cinema shaped by, 4; national cinema and, 7; national identity and, 308 Global Recordings Network, 51 Godard, André, 143 Golestan, Ebrahim, 117, 119 Golestan Film Workshop, 186 Golshan, Jalal, 226, 239, 258 Golshan, Mohammad, 258 Golshan, Reza, 258 Golshan Cinema, 226, 239, 258 Gone with the Wind (Fleming), 269 Good, Byron J., 75 Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio, 75 Googoosh, 298, 299, 304 Gramophones, 49, 86, 129, 226, 227 Grand Hotel Cinema, 70, 109, 128, 129, 177, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 263, 266–67, 285 Graphic, The (Chute), 58–59 Grass (Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison), 161–65, 168–69 Grief, 74–75, 121, 251 Griffith, D. W., 112, 177 Grigor, Talinn, 132 Groundbreaking Ceremonies of the Bank-e Melli Building (Moradi), 225 Gunning, Tom, xxxiv, 21, 22, 72, 80, 212 Guppy, Shusha, 117–18 Gustanian, 151–52, 271 Guy, Alice, 205 Haardt, Georges-Marie, 158 Habermas, Jürgen, xxxii Habl al-Matin (newspaper), 137, 167

376

i nd e x

Hafez, 143 Haggling: cinema and, 37, 56, 117–18, 127–28, 155; dandies and, 295; diversity and, 39; identification and, 97, 99; over reality, 74; self-othering and, 101; social, 15, 37; women and, 15, 133, 148 Haidar Khan, 162, 163, 164 Hailing: cinema and, 18, 127; counterhailing, 18, 127; identification and, 94, 97, 99; self-othering and, 101; social, 15; translations and, 127 Hairapetian, Loreta, 271 Haji Washington (Hatami), 305–8 Haj Sayyah, 75, 77 Hakimi, Ebrahim, 142 Hakimzadeh, Jafar, 259 Hamid Khan Bakhtiar, 169 Hannibal, Ali, 142 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 15, 20 Harrison, Marguerite E., 161, 164 Hart, Charles C., 156, 228–29 Hasan, Mohammad, 190 Hatami, Ali, 286, 305, 307 Hats, dress code for, 144, 145 Heart of Asia series, 157 Hedayat, Sadeq, 77, 97, 213, 262, 286–87, 291, 334–35 n. 41 Hejazi, Mohammad, 248, 253 Hekmat, Ali Asghar, 142, 225 Hendi, Mohammad Khan, 117 Henningsen, Poul, 180 Hertzfeld, Ernst, 143 Heterosexuality, 14, 256, 301 High Performance Company of Ershad, 109 Hillman, Michael, 22 His Imperial Majesty’s Journey to Turkey (Beig), 187–88 His Master’s Voice, 227 Hock, Winton, 169 Hollywood cinema: influence of, 2, 4–6; Jewish importance in, 34; on local-language productions, 7; ma­jor changes in, 4–5; protectionism and, 6;

vertical and horizontal integration of, 4, 5. See also Western films Homa Cinema, 230 Homayoon (periodical), 257 Homeland’s Chronicle (periodical), 61 Homoeroticism, 261, 271, 301 Homosexuality, 14, 127, 256, 261, 301 Homosociality, 14, 73, 256, 261, 301 Horne, Adele, 51 Hosain, Imam, 119 Hotels and film exhibition, 128–30 House of God, The (Rezai), 61 Hoveyda, Afasr al-Moluk, 79, 89–90, 133 Hoveyda, Amir Abbas, 339 n. 20 Humanism, 8, 18–19 Ibn Sina, 143 Identity formation, 90–95. See also Othering; Selfing; Self-othering; Self-representation Identity politics and cinema, 6, 16–17 If I Were King (Lloyd), 176 Illiteracy, 68, 89, 113, 127, 153, 193, 204, 249 Imbrie, Robert W., 163–70, 176 imf (International Monetary Fund), 4 Immigration, 3, 6 Imperial Film Company, 232, 233, 236, 239, 242, 243, 273 Imperialism, 16, 18, 29 Improvisation, 35–36, 37 In a Persian Town (travelogue), 158 Inauguration of the Women’s Film Center (Moradi), 225 Indian mythological film genre, 236 Individualism: improvisation and, 37; modernity and, 8, 18–19, 21, 28, 72, 114; spectatorial formation and, 17–21 Industrial films, 178; oil films, 182–87; railway films, 179–82 Industrial rationalization, 11–12 Inferiority, 14, 74, 173, 182, 217, 239 Interethnicity, 3, 33–34, 230, 231 International Exhibition of Persian Art, 173, 175, 176

International Federation of Scientific Societies, 211 International Institute of Motion Pictures of Asia, 211 International Monetary Fund (imf), 4 Internet film genre, 2 Intersectionality, 3 Interstitiality, 3, 35, 67, 99, 221, 243 Intertextuality, 5, 64, 129, 205, 206, 215, 263, 302, 304 Intertitles, 18, 32, 69, 118, 119, 123, 126–27, 147, 205, 226, 229 In the Land of the Shah (Kelley), 183 Intolerance (Griffith), 112, 177 Iran (Boison, Lerche, and Christensen), 179–82 Iran Cinema, 70, 181, 202, 204–5, 242 Iran-e Emruz (journal), 253 Iran-e No (newspaper), 103 Iran Film Company, 222–23 Irani, Ardeshir, 20, 108, 144 Irani, Khan Bahadur Ardeshir Marwan, 232 Iranian (online magazine), 296 Iranian Academy, 146 Iranian cinema: as accented cinema, 6–7, 219; authorial formation of, 23–25; biographies and, 37; cultural continuity and, 7–8; diasporic, 13–14; exchange relations, 3, 13, 197, 209, 231, 232–33, 308; feature film production, 197–98; filmfarsi movies, 290, 297, 303; hybrid self-fashioning of filmmakers, 34–35; ideal in, 99; ideological formation of, 15–17, 189; improvisation in, 35–36; indigenous genres of, 2; indirectness in, 36–37; infrastructure for, 153; instability of, 36; interstitiality of, 35; Iranian state and, 2; local, national, and transnational, 3; mode of production in, 9, 10, 11–12, 21, 30–39, 201, 262; modernity and, 1–3, 7–9, 11, 15–16, 25, 72; modern literature and, xxxviii–xxxix; multiculturalism of, 33–34;

ind ex

377

Iranian cinema (cont.) multifunctionality of filmmakers in, 32; national culture and, 16; nostalgia and, 12, 15; political agency and, 37–38; popular vs. state-supported, 24; propagandistic, 97, 152, 159, 190, 191, 193, 195, 203, 219; realism in, 104; regulation of, 170–77, 182, 193, 228, 245–50; religious minorities and, 13; secular, 13; sexualized conception of, 257–58; sociopolitical formation overview, 9–11; sound movies introduced in, 11, 43–44, 144, 197, 226–31, 237–38, 257; spectatorial formation of, 17–21, 104–5; taboo subjects in, 250; technical problems in, 224, 225, 229, 230; textual formation of, 21–23; women in, 135, 271–75 Iranian Cinema, from the Constitution to Sepanta (Tahaminejad), 193, 273 Iranian Revolution (1978–79): British and, 405 n. 26; displacement and, 3, 296; Iranian cinema and, 9, 12, 18, 122; Shiite Islam and, 13; technology and, 29 Iranian Women’s Charity Company, 109 Iran/Persia, 146 Iran Railway (documentary), 179 Iranshahr (journal), 336 n. 56 Iran Television, 286 Isfahani, Seyyed Jamal Vaez, 59, 61, 321 n. 10 Islam: cinema viewed in, 90–91, 102–4, 154–55, 257; conservatives vs. modernists, 37–38, 97; Islamic law, 53, 90, 131; modernity and, 98; women in film viewed in, 136. See also Shiite Islam Islamic Republic: censorship by, 10, 24; establishment of, 8, 9; fiction films in, 22–23; mixed-gender spectatorship viewed by, 18; rearchaization and, 145 Islamic Revolution (1978–79): British and, 405 n. 26; displacement and, 3,

378

i nd e x

296; Iranian cinema and, 9, 12, 18, 122; Shiite Islam and, 13; technology and, 29 Ismail Qafqazi, Mirza, 52, 115, 193–94 Issari, Mohammad Ali, 155 Ivanov, Mehdi Rusi Khan, 32, 36, 63–67, 85, 136–37, 280, 314 n. 20 Jabbarvaziri, Fakhrozzaman, 241, 274–75 Jacobson, Arnold, 70, 112 Jacob’s Well (film), 105 Jafar Khan Is Back from Europe (Moqaddam), 284–86, 293–94 Jahan Cinema, 258 Jahan Nama Studio, 221 Jam, Mahmud, 147 Jamalzadeh, Mohammad Ali, 31, 57, 79, 83, 84–86, 102, 169, 284 Jame’eh-ye Barbad, 207 Jameson, Fredric, 289 Javaheri, Mohammad Khalil, 61–62 Javaherkalam, Ali, 168 Javid, Jahanshah, 296 Jazz Singer, The (Crosland), 226, 237 Jewish-Armenian relations, 33–34 Joseph, Jasmine, 222, 271 Journal de Téhéran (newspaper), 254 Junk prints, 36–37, 117, 200 Kahn Ala al-Dowleh, Mirza Ahmad, 58 Kamal, Reza, 210 Kamal al-Molk, 143 Kasravi, Ahmad, 259 Katouzian, Homa, xxxii, 31, 291 Katz, Ephraim, 266 Kaveh (periodical), 95 Kayhan (newspaper), 205 Kazemi, Moshfeq, 124 Kelley, J. D., 183 Khachaturian, Sanasar, 265 Khajehnuri, Ebrahim, 248 Khaleqi, Ruhollah, 227 Khan, Hazan, 280 Khan, Issa (the Dwarf), 48

Khan, Mirza Malkum, 294 Khatibi, Parviz, 127, 192, 237, 238, 291 Khorshid Cinema, 68, 137 Khosrow and Shirin (Nezami), 241 Khuzestani, H., 183–84 Kiarostami, Abbas, 24, 122 Kiki (film), 229 Kimiai, Masud, 302 Kinetoscopes, 58, 67, 88 King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack), 162 “King of Kings Anthem,” 180, 192–93, 246–47, 253–54, 261–62 Kololis. See Dandies, Westernized Konsortium Kampsax, 179, 180 Korshid Printing Company, 46 Kracauer, Siegfried, 81

functions of, 18, 119–21, 123; resentment toward, 124; subversion by, 126; taziyeh conventions, 122 Lloyd, Frank, 176 Lor Girl, The (Sepanta and Irani), 20, 144, 187, 208, 219, 224, 232–40, 250, 256, 273, 274 Lost Reels (Zahedian), 44–45, 47, 98 Low, Rachel, 185 Lumière brothers, 56, 80, 87, 135; cinematograph screen and, 41–42 Luna Park Cinema, 212 Lure of the East (British Pathé), 170, 188 Lutis: code of conduct, 36; as social figure, 297; speed and, 20 Lynch, Andrew J., 171 Lyotard, Jean-François, xxxi

Lacan, Jacques, 91, 92 Lacasse, Germain, 119 Laili and Majnun (Sepanta), 242–44, 245, 249, 274–75 Lalehzar Café, 291 Lalehzar Cinema, 259 Lamour, Dorothy, 282 Lang, Fritz, 112, 204 Lang, Walter, 176 Lantern services, 53–54 Lanzmann, Claude, 5 Latin American cinema, 6 Laurel and Hardy, 231 Law of Commerce, 247 Lerche, Axel, 179–80 Levin, Alexander, 70 Liakhov, Vladimir Platonovich, 66 Lidzeh, Grisha Sakovar, 112, 209, 230 Life and Death of Our Savior, Jesus Christ (Guy), 205 Linder, Max, 280–81 Lions in the Farahabad Zoo (Sani alSalteneh), 46-47 Live translators (dilmaj), 54, 57–58, 69, 102, 118, 125, 128; banning of, 262; as censors, 126–27, 269; female, 265;

Madani, Hosain, 301 Madanipour, Ali, 38 Mademoiselle Auntie (film), 297 Madsen, Harald, 210 Magic-lantern slides, 40, 103; lantern services, 53–54 Mahallati, Haj Sayyah, 75, 77 Mahjubi, Morteza, 68 Mahmud Jam’s Journey to Cairo (newsreel), 194 Maillart, Ella K., 172, 261 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 24, 47–48, 122 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 122 Male cross-dressers, 271 Malijak-e Sani, 49, 58, 105–8 Malkum Khan, Mirza, 98–99 Man with a Movie Camera, The (Vertov), 216 Marashi, Afshin, 187 Marie Antoinette (Van Dyke), 176 Marxism, 6, 296 Masudi, Abbas, 187, 211 Matavousian, Lida, 222, 271 Matindaftari, Ahmad, 250, 252 Mayak Cinema, 112, 192, 205, 210, 224, 229, 230, 238

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Mazdeyasna, Dinyar, 239 Media: characteristics of, 5; Christian missionaries and, 51; concentration of, 130; cross-fertilization of, 203–8, 256, 263; Farsi language and, 146; globalized, 13; imagined nation and, 253; intertextuality and, 304; modernity and, 19, 129; national identity and, 16, 28–29; newspaper blackmail, 207; othering by, 16, 56, 156, 178, 239; sponsorship and, 152; state-controlled, 143, 152; Western mediawork, 16, 56, 96, 156–57, 178, 189 Mehrabi, Masud, 65–66 Mehrjui, Dariush, 24, 122 Méliès, Georges, 82; films of, 71 Meskoob, Shahrokh, 99 Metcalf, Barbara, xxxi Metropolis (Lang), 204 Metz, Christian, 87 Michel Strogoff (Tourjansky), 202, 204 Middle class and cross-fertilization, 203–8 Minerva Films, 179, 181 Ministry of Education, 52, 195, 208, 241, 244, 248, 253, 334 n. 47 Mirror phase, 91–93, 96, 239 Misaqiyeh, Badi’eh, 240 Misérables, Les (film), 204 Missionaries, 51–52, 56, 105; American, 53–55; women, 316 n. 35 Mr. Forughi’s Journey to Turkey (newsreel), 186, 230 Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (Ohanians), 23, 104, 144–45, 151–52, 212–19, 224, 250, 271–72, 289–90 Mr. Twentieth Century (Yasami), 290, 297 Mobility: cinema and, 15, 22, 82–83; diversity and, 39; marriage and, 303; modernity and, 8, 12–13, 22 Modarress, Seyyed Hasan, 154 Mode of production: Asiatic, 312 n. 6; family, 24; industrial, 263; middle class and, 201; modernization of,

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9–10, 11–12. See also Artisanal mode of production Modernity: capitalist, 13; components of, 8; as disease, 59; displacement and, 8, 13, 21, 286; disruption and, 12–13, 16, 19; epistemic violence and, 73–79, 91, 102, 150; features of, 10; indigenous, 154; individualism and, 8, 18–19, 21, 28, 72, 114; Iranian cinema and, 1–3, 7–9, 11, 15–16, 25, 72; mobility and, 8, 12–13, 22; movie houses and, 265–66; rationality and, 8, 72; screen translators and, 124; secular, 56; sensory complexity and, 8, 12–13, 19, 24, 72, 234; sociopolitical formation overview, 9–11; stranger in metropolis and, 21; urbanism and, 28; visuality and, 91; Westernization and, 8, 11, 27–28, 95, 98, 195 Modern literature and cinema, xxxviii–xxxix Mofid, Bahman, 302 Mohammed (Prophet), 90 Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, 38, 66, 90 Mohammad Reza Shah, 12, 151, 159, 188, 189, 193, 262 Moili, Khan Nayeb, 128 Montesquieu, Baron de, 33, 73 Moose, James, 172 Moqaddam, Hasan, 284–85, 293–94 Morad, Habibollah, 145, 219 Moradi, Ebrahim, 37, 99, 188, 195, 221–26 Moradi, Robert, 75 Morin, Edgar, 168 Mosta’an, Gholamhosain, 225 Mostofi, Hasan, 142 Motazedi, Khanbabakhan, 32, 68–70, 82, 99, 137, 143, 152, 155, 182, 191, 265, 270; newsreels of, 189–93, 195. See also Tamaddon Cinema Motovasselani, Mohammad, 286 Movie houses: banning of, 153–54; boxoffice tax, 254; classes of, 154, 193, 202, 208, 246, 260; commercial,

50–62, 105, 110, 113–15, 190, 198–200, 241; conditions in, 231; construction of, 154–55; culture and, 104, 115, 226, 256; dandies and, 282–83; destruction of, xlviii, 18, 261; ephemeral, 36; ethnoreligious affiliation of, 199, 205; gendered, 113, 255–56, 263–66, 268, 275, 281; increase in, 197, 199; modernity and, 265–66; naming of, 113; open-air, 113–14, 115, 116, 198–99, 202, 261; ownership of, 230–31; perception of, 50, 153, 256–61, 283; pogo and, 254; public urination in, 117–18; regulation of, 193, 228, 245–47; sound equipment, 229, 230; spectatorship and, 93; as symbols, xlvi–xlvii; theaters and, 109, 207; women and, 18, 58, 68, 70, 137, 255–56, 263–70; women-owned, 265. See also Film exhibitions Mozaffar al-Din Shah Looking through a Telescope (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47, 48, 80 Mozaffar al-Din Shah on a Hunt (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47, 80 Mozaffar al-Din Shah Practicing Firing a Gun (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47 Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, 38, 39–44, 45, 48–49, 79–81, 95–96 Mozhdeh, Reza, 23, 37, 48, 72, 99, 145, 151, 197, 208, 209–21 Muharram Processions and Head-Cutting (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47 Multiculturalism, 33, 142 Multilateralism, 3 Multinationalism, 33, 101, 199 Murray, Wallace, 174–75 Musa Khan Etebar al-Saltaneh, 112 Musical accompaniment, 116, 225, 234–35, 264 Musical Club, 263, 264 Musicals, 20, 110, 227, 234–35, 257, 262–63 My Uncle Napoleon (Pezeshkzad), 304 My Uncle Napoleon (Taqvai), 304–5

Naderi Café, 291, 292 Nader Shah, 143 Naficy, Hamid, xl; cinema and political writings of, lxi–lxiv; cinema experiences of, xliii–xlv; early film criticism by, xlvi–xlvii, xlvii; on family republic of letters, xxxix–xlii, lii–lv; on film festivals, lvi–lxi; film influences on, xxxviii–xxxix, xlviii; filmmaking and studies of, xlviii–lii, lxii; film projector project of, xxxv–xxxviii; literature influences on, xxxviii–xlii; model school experiences of, xlv–xlvi; photography interests of, xxix–xxxv; portraits by, xxxi–xxxiv; self-portrait of, xxxiv Naficy, Said, 128, 142, 211, 217–18, 252, 263, 264 Naim, Georges, 230 Najafi, Mohammad Taqi Aqa, 129 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 14 Nanook of the North (Flaherty), 162 Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, 19–20, 39–40, 48 Nasirian, Ali, 286 Nasr, Zia Ashraf, 89, 267 Nateq, Homa, 52–53, 312 n. 9 Nation: concept of, 3; imagined, 30, 253 National anthem, 180, 192–93, 246–47, 253–54, 261–62 National cinema theory, 5–6, 23; change in, 3–4; characteristics of, 8; globalization and, 7; nation-state and, 4, 8 National culture, 16, 157, 239, 253 National Film Center, 260 National identity: cinema and, 15–16, 17, 25, 28, 71–72, 93, 156–57, 216, 236, 297; conception of, 3; formation of, 14, 28–29, 96, 104, 141, 142, 198, 216; globalization and, 308; poetry and, 145; politics and, 66; women and, 133, 266 National Iranian Oil Company (nioc), 186

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National Iranian Radio and Television (nirt), 304 Nationalism: cinema shaped by, 6, 7–8; Iranian, 7, 99–100, 152, 252; justice and, 28; secular, 201, 252 National Theater, 109 Navi, Abdollah, 258 Navi, Parviz, 258 Nazi influence, 188–89, 250–51 Neda-ye Elm (magazine), xli, xli, liv–lv Neocolonialism, 28, 55, 73, 138, 165 Network of relations, 2, 25 Newsreels, 52, 58, 143–44, 187–95, 225, 230, 332 n. 73 New-wave films, xlii, 2, 3, 10, 12, 205, 304 Nezami, Hakim, 241, 242 Niebelungen, Die: Siegfried (Lang), 112, 204 Night after the Revolution, The (Alla­ mehzadeh), 86 Night It Rained, The (Shirdel), 23 Night Mail (Watt), 180 nioc (nioc), 186 nirt (National Iranian Radio and Television), 304 Nostalgia, 12, 15, 74, 296 Nuri, Fazlollah (Shaikh), 15, 27, 38, 59, 65–66, 90, 134, 137, 256, 289 Nyman, Stephen, 174, 175 Oganiants, Ovanes, 23, 37, 48, 72, 99, 145, 151, 197, 208, 209–21 Oganov, 112, 128 Ohadi, A., 228 Ohan Film, 219 Ohanians, Ovanes Gregory, 23, 37, 48, 72, 99, 145, 151, 197, 208, 209–21 Ohanians, Zema, 213, 271 Oil films, 182–87 Okhavat, Batul, 268 Olmstead, Edna, 161 Olympia (Riefenstahl), 188–89 Omar Khayyam, 1, 143 Omid, Jamal, 194

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Opening of the National Consultative Assembly, The (Motazedi), 190 Oral traditions, 22–23, 78, 118–19, 123, 270 Orientalism: of British royals, 96; of commercial movie houses, 113; countering, 176, 194–95, 211, 319 n. 51; in literature, 97; representation in cinema of, 16, 72, 73, 78, 97, 156, 157–59, 162, 170, 239 Othering: of Arabs, 97; epistemic violence and, 73–74, 78, 178, 216; selfing vs., 78, 178, 305–6; social, 94; by technology, 86; by Western mediaworks, 16, 56, 156, 178, 239; of women, 133, 269. See also Self-othering Pahlavi period: beginning of, 167; censorship during, 10, 97, 152, 165, 247–49, 255; documentary filmmaking during, 99; fiction films during, 11, 22–23; mode of production during, 11–12; modernity and, 8; public film exhibitions during, 18. See also Mohammad Reza Shah; Reza Shah Pahlavi Pahlbod, Mehrdad, 220 Palace Cinema, 187, 202, 207–8, 228 Panahi, Jafar, 122 Parade of the Cossack Brigade, The (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47 Paramount Studio, 163 Pari Cinema, 202, 256, 265 Park Café, 291 Parnell (Stahl), 176 Parody, 286–87 Pars Cinema, 117, 119, 242 Parsi Theatre, 236 Pars News Agency, 145 Pasha, Ghazi Kemal, 229 Passion plays: banning of, 115, 201; as collective feature, 22; conventions of, 121–22; film screening and, 114–15 Pathé-Frères films, 52, 53, 57, 64, 67, 71

Patrimony, Iranian, 142 Patronage and sponsorship, 30–31, 39, 45, 49, 153, 175, 183 Paul’s Animatograph Works, 81 Pedagogical films, 102–4 Pederasty, 129 Peep shows, 119, 120 Performance and Conference Company, 109 Performance films, 47, 48–49, 72, 86, 97, 210 Perse Film Studio, 191, 210, 212, 219, 223 Persia, 146 Persian Empire, 100–101 Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 33 Persian Oil Industry, The (Kelley), 183 Pezeshkzad, Iraj, 304 Phonographs, 87–88 Photography: cinematography and, 319 n. 51; interest in, xxix–xxxv; photo­ phobia, 172–73; veils and, xxxv Physical Education Organization of Iran, 189 Piano Player (Naficy), xlix Pirnia, Hasan, 142 Pirnia, Mirza Hosain Khan, 207 Pleasure, 81–84, 95, 126, 168 pogo (Public Opinion Guidance Organization), 152, 203, 207, 244, 248, 250–55 Point, Victor, 158 Poirier, Léon, 158 Polonia Café, 291 Polyphon, 227 Pope, Arthur Upham, 143, 170; carpetweaving films of, 173–77 Postmodernism, 8 Potemkine, Georges Pavlov, 212 Poverty, 33, 74–75, 181–82, 243, 249–50 Prejudice, 13, 33, 243, 271, 273 Primitive narratives, 72 Private film exhibitions, 17–18, 32, 55–56, 64, 79, 89, 105, 133, 153 Production mode: artisanal, 10, 11–12,

21, 30–39, 104–18, 189, 208; Asiatic, 312 n. 6; family, 24; industrial, 263; middle class and, 201; modernization of, 9–10, 11–12 Product placement, 159, 212 Propaganda and Publication Organization, 152, 248 Propatria Films, 158 Protestant missionaries, 51–56, 105; American, 53–55; women, 316 n. 35 Psychic unity, 79, 91, 252 Public cinemas, 9, 18, 32, 51, 105. See also Movie houses Public Opinion Guidance Organization (pogo), 152, 203, 207, 244, 248, 250–55 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 216 Purahmad, Kumars, 24 Qaem Maqami, Alamtaj, 50, 89 Qaisar (Kimiai), 302 Qajar period: artisanal mode of production during, 11, 30; banned cinema during, 27, 104; censorship during, 60, 323 n. 22; documentary filmmaking during, 99; end of, 167; film studios during, 46; homosociality and sexuality during, 14; private film exhibition during, 17–18 Qaran’s Treasure (film), 123 Qarib, Shapur, 298 Qazvin Cinema, 280 Qazvini, Aref, 232 Qazziyeh genre, 286–87 Qestanian, Asia, 151–52, 271 Rabinow, Paul, xxxiii Racine, Jean, 205 Radio and sound cinema, 227 Radio Tehran, 227, 252, 262 Raein, Esmail, 62 Railway films, 179–82 Ramadan, 114 Ramazani, Nesta, 229 Rasputin (film), 204

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Rationality, rationalization: cinema regulations and, 245; film direction and, 24; industrial, 11–12; modernity and, 8, 13, 72; rise of, 13 Realism, filmic, 81–82, 84, 104, 222, 225, 240, 273 Realist Film Unit, 184, 186 Rearchaization, 100, 145 Redknap, Montague, 170 Refreshments, 20 Relationality and cinema, 3 Religion: conservatives vs. modernists, 37–38, 97; conversion in, 53; on moviegoing, xliv–xlv, 90–91, 102–3, 257; religious minorities, 3, 13, 23. See also Islam REM (Naficy), xlix–l, lxii Renewal Club, 178 Rezai, Abolqasem, 57–58, 61 Rezai, Haj Esmail, 129 Reza Khan. See Reza Shah Pahlavi Reza Shah in the Constitutional Assembly (Motazedi), 190 Reza Shah Pahlavi: abdication of, 164, 189, 249, 252; as autocrat, 11, 99, 152, 176, 185, 202, 230, 255; censorship laws, 182, 247, 249; cinema under, 154–55, 164, 184–85, 245, 249–50, 254, 261; documentaries on, 52, 159, 181, 187–88, 190; Engert on, 149; equilibrium policy, 179; exile of, 150, 168, 268; on Farsi as official language, 145, 199; intelligensia and, 201; live translation banned by, 115, 127; sartorial reforms of, 144–45, 148–49, 213, 234, 263, 268, 289, 295; sponsorship by, 173; on surnames, 147; syncretic Westernization of, 101, 141–42, 143, 155, 160, 163, 178, 180–81, 182, 185–86, 201, 236, 252, 256–57, 277; taziyeh banned by, 115; veil banned by, 147–48, 149, 150–51, 278 Reza Shah’s Coronation in the Golestan Palace (Motazedi), 190

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Reza Shah the Great (Ohanians), 220 Riders Crossing the River (Sani alSaltaneh), 47 Riders Exiting a Tehran City Gate (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47, 80 Riefenstahl, Leni, 188–89 Riffraff (Ruben), 176 Rio Rita (film), 228 Robert, Frederick, 81 Roland, Ruth, 206, 266 Roosevelt, Leila, 160–61 Rose, Jacqueline, 79 Rotha, Paul, 186 Round the World Trip Made by Two Girls (travelogue), 161 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 87 Ruben, J. Walter, 176 Ruhozi, 48, 110, 128, 279 Russian-British accord (1907), 74 Ruznameh-ye Iran Javan (periodical), 285 Sadra, Mulla, 37 Safai, Reza, 302 Safavi, Mirahmad, 214 Saguinian, Alek, 27, 52, 112; letterhead, 53 Sahhaf bashi Tehrani, Ebrahim Khan, 27, 32, 36, 56–61, 75–76, 77, 94, 105, 219, 280 Said, Edward, 159 Said al-Ulama, Mirza Ebrahim, 102 Sakovar Lidzeh, Grisha (Sako), 112, 209, 230 Salamander Syncope (Naficy), l–li, li, lxii Salimi, A., 194, 208 Salister, Dinshah Irani, 232 Salnameh-ye Pars (yearbook), 128 Salt, Barry, 21 Salvar, Qahreman Mirza, 280 Saminezhad, Ruhangiz, 233, 235, 240 Sanati Cinema, 69, 202, 264 Sani al-Saltaneh, Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi, 30, 32, 39, 40, 44–50,

79, 98; actualities by, 27, 46–47, 80, 98, 135–36; as dandy, 280; gendered showings by, 133; sponsorship for, 153 Sankofa, 99–100 Santa Fe Trail, The (Dearholt), 265 Santell, Alfred, 176 Sartorial reforms, 144–45, 148–49, 213, 234, 263, 268, 289, 295 Sauvage, André, 158 Schatz, Thomas, 5 Scheler, Max, 93–94 Schenström, Carl, 210 Schoedsack, Ernest B., 161–62, 165, 169 Screen translators. See Live translators; Translations Secret Society, 58–59 Secrets of the Hidden Woman (film), 206 Seddiq, Isa, 142 Seeds, appetite for, 117, 124, 215, 226, 248, 281 Selected Images from the Qajar Era (Makhmalbaf ), 47–48 Selfing: cinema and, 17, 56, 96, 98, 99, 225; othering vs., 78, 178, 305–6; spectatorship and, 216; strategies of, 97, 101 Self-othering, 40; businessmen and, 56; cinema and, 17, 72, 79, 94, 97, 99, 102, 138, 154, 178, 211, 267; male, 89; strategies of, 97, 101; violence and, 75, 268; Westernization and, 55. See also Othering Self-representation: in early Iranian cinema, 210–11, 216; empowering, 211, 216, 239, 241; national, 157; power and burden of, 95–99; Western influence on, 16, 156 Sensory complexity, 211; dandies and, 293; modernity and, 8, 12–13, 19, 24, 72, 234; modern streets and, 130; women and, 268 Sepah Cinema, 70, 113, 202–4, 205, 225, 237

Sepanta (periodical), 244 Sepanta, Abdolhosain, 20, 99, 144, 145, 197, 208, 231–33, 234, 237–45, 275 Setareh Cinema, 230 Setareh-ye Jahan (periodical), 229 Sevruguian, Emmanuel, 67 Sevruguin, Antoin, 29, 67, 105, 120 Seymour, Melvin, 166, 167 Seyyed Jamal Vaez Isfahani, 59, 61, 321 n. 10 Shadman, Seyyed Fakhr al-Din, 287 Shahanian, Salim, 230 Shahnameh (Ferdowsi), 119, 145, 240 Shahri, Jafar, 110–12, 260–61, 282 Shahrokh, Arbab Keikhosrow, 142 Shahyad Monument, 143 Shaikhi movement, 37 Shaw, George Bernard, 86 She Done Him Wrong (film), 240 Shekufeh (newspaper), 135 Shervan, Amir, 83–84, 126, 132 Shiite Islam: Ashura, 65, 144; authority of, 90; Baha’ism and, 33, 46; Constitutional Revolution and, 28, 38; Iranian Revolution and, 13; opposition to cinema in, 102–4; religious discourse in, 296. See also Islam; Taziyeh Shirazi, Abdolhosain, 20, 99, 144, 145, 197, 208, 231–33, 234, 237–45, 275 Shirdel, Kamran, 23 Shirin and Farhad (Sepanta), 241–42, 249, 274 Shoah (Lanzmann), 5 Shree Krishna Film Company, 242 Shuster, William Morgan, 134 Sidney, Scott, 112 Silverman, Kaja, 93–94 Simmel, Georg, 21 Sinema va Namayeshat (magazine), 70 Singer, Caroline, 200, 279 Skepticism, 13, 23 snh (Society for National Heritage), 142–44, 173, 176, 191, 203, 218, 241, 256–57

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Social networking, 5 Society for Applied Anthropology, 172 Society for National Heritage (snh), 142–44, 173, 176, 191, 203, 218, 241, 256–57 Sohaili, Mehdi, 288–89 Soleil Cinema, 27, 51–53, 105, 112, 194 Son of the Sheik, The (film), 243 Sony Corporation, 7 Soudavar, Abolala, 99 Sound movies: introduction of, 11, 43–44, 144, 197, 226–31, 237–38, 257; quality, 229, 230 Spectatorship: astonishment and, 40, 72, 79–89, 94, 102, 239; attendance figures, 200–201; diversity in, 38–39; early experiences of, 71–73; formation of cinema and, 17–21, 104–5, 255–63; movie houses and, 93; oral vs. visual, 78–79; pleasure and, 81–84, 95, 126, 168; selfing and, 216; viewers vs. consumers, 5; by women, 18, 89, 255–56 Speed in film, 21, 82–83, 85 Spenta, Abdolhosain, 20, 99, 144, 145, 197, 208, 231–33, 234, 237–45, 275 Spivak, Gayatri, 73 Sponsorship, 30–31, 39, 45, 49, 153, 175, 183 Stahl, John, 176 Star system, 12, 22, 60, 263 Stereotypes: bidirectional, 92; in mediawork, 96; Occidental, 16, 77, 94; Orientalist, 77, 96, 158, 194–95 Stewpot film genre, 2 Strand Film Company, 184, 186 Streets, modern, 130–32 Subnationality, 6, 13, 25 Surefrafil (newspaper), 137 Surnames, adoption of, 146 Survey of Persian Art, A (Ackerman and Pope), 173–74 Syncretic Westernization, 99–100, 102, 144; of Reza Shah, 101, 141–42, 143, 155, 160, 163, 178, 180–81, 182,

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185–86, 201, 236, 241–42, 252, 256–57, 277 Syndicat pour Chemins de Fer en Perse, 179 Tabari, Ehsan, 291 Tabatabai, Seyyed Zia, 153, 188 Tabriz Scenes (newsreel), 194 Tahaminejad, Mohammad, 188, 219, 273–74 Taher, Baba, 143 Taheri, Javad, 303 Tailenders, The (Horne), 51 Taimurtash, Abdolhosain, 142 Tajaddod cinema, 67–68, 124 Tajerbashi cinema, 105 Talberg, Frederick, 115 Talebi’s Vessel of Wonders or Ahmad’s Book (Talebof ), 87–88 Talebof, Abdolrahim, 50, 87–89 Taleqani, Yadollah, 114 Talmadge, Richard, 127 Tamaddon Cinema, 69, 114, 120, 155, 262 Taqavi, Haj Seyyed Nasrollah, 142 Taqizadeh, Seyyed Hasan, 95, 102 Taqvai, Naser, 304 Tarzan of the Apes (Sidney), 112 Tarzan the Ape Man (film), 204 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, 16, 77, 98 Taylor, John, 184–85 Taziyeh: banning of, 115, 201; as collective feature, 22; conventions of, 121–22; film screening and, 114–15 Technology: society and nation shaped by, 3; in films, 32; influence of, 28–30, 49–50; missionaries and, 56; power of films and, 86 Tehrani, Ebrahim Khan Sahhaf bashi, 27, 32, 36, 56–61, 75–76, 77, 94, 105, 219, 280 Tehran Radio, 227, 252, 262 Tehran’s Tramway (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47 Tehran University, 145

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 158 Teimurtash, Abdolhosain, 188, 223 Tejaratchi, Jafar, 115–16 Tekkiyeh Dowlat, 43, 313 n. 17 Telegraph, 29–30, 58 Television: exile, 100; public, 129 Tempest of Life (Dariabaigi), 227 Terrorism, global, 3 Thief of Baghdad, The (Walsh), 205, 264 Third Cinema, 6 Third Graduation Ceremonies of the Military Officers and Awarding of Titles (Esmailiov), 52, 194 Three Musketeers, The (film), 204 Through the Back Door into India (travelogue), 158 Tiger’s Trail, The (Ellis and Gasiner), 266 Tobacco Protest movement (1890–91), 29 Tohidi, Nayereh, xxxiii Topical Films, 186 Tough-guy films: creation of, 283; dandies in, 290, 301; as indigenous genre, 2, 297 Tough guys: code of conduct, 36; as social figure, 297; speed and, 20 Tough Guys and Gigolos (Madani), 301, 303 Toulet, Emmanuelle, 41–42 Tourjansky, Viatcheslaw, 202 Trans-Iranian Railway, 179, 180, 185 Translations: censorship and, 18, 126–27, 269; cut-in, 229; dubbing, 18, 69, 127, 226, 229–30, 307; intertitles, 18, 32, 69, 118, 119, 123, 126–27, 147, 205, 226, 229; literacy and, 127; live, 18, 54, 57–58, 69, 102, 118–28, 262, 265; voice-over narration, 123, 160, 168, 180–81, 185 Transnationality, 3, 6, 13, 72, 231 Travelogues, 16, 72, 97, 123, 133, 157–61, 162, 325 n. 51, 328 n. 27. See also Actualities Trick films, 71–72, 85

Tupkhaneh Square, 130 Tuttle, Frank, 176 Ulen Company, 179 United States Information Agency (usia), 23, 79, 172; model school of, xlv–xlvi Universal Exposition (Paris, 1900), 40–43, 79, 92 Urbanism, 10, 13, 28 usia (United States Information Agency), 23, 79, 172; model school of, xlv–xlvi Vakili, Ali, 32, 70, 112, 113, 265, 266, 270 Valentino, Rudolf, 243 Van Dyke, Willard S., 176 Van Hook, Loretta C., 54 Vartaniants, Vartan, 55, 103, 105 Vaziri, Alinaqi, 68, 227, 263 Veils: banning of, 147–48, 149, 150–51, 201, 263; cinema and, 90, 150–52, 268; photography and, xxxv; reimposition of, 18; sexualization of, 271; suppression of, 15 Vertov, Dziga, 216 Viewers. See Spectatorship Villard, Henry S., 199 Voice and identity, 78–79 Voice-over narration, 123, 160, 168, 180–81, 185 Vossoughi, Behrouz, 35–36, 298, 304 Vosuq al-Tojjar, Ardeshir Khan, 32, 67–68, 104, 105, 124, 127, 137 Voting rights, 148 Walsh, Raoul, 205, 264 Wandering Jew, The (film), 206 War films, 2 Warner Bros., 7 Watt, Harry, 180 Watts, Frederick, 170 Weaving a Persian Rug (Nyman), 175 Weber, Eugene, 282

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Wells Fargo (Lloyd), 176 West, Mae, 240 Western films, 96, 189; about Iran, 97, 156–58, 181–82; access to, 16, 72–73, 80, 93–94, 104–5; censorship of, 176; increased importation of, 199–200; Islam condemnation of, 90–91, 155; Italian neorealist aesthetics and, 6; literature-based, 204–5; media crossfertilization and, 203–8; reaction to, 152, 156–57. See also Hollywood cinema Westernization: epistemic violence and, 78; modernity and, 8, 11, 27–28, 95, 98, 195; rearchaization and, 100; selfothering and, 55. See also Syncretic Westernization Western mediawork, 16, 56, 96, 156–57, 178, 189 West Side Story (Wise), 301 Wilde, Cornel, 282 Williams, Esther, 282 Williams, Raymond, 113 Willis, C. J., 312 n. 9 Wilson, Arnold, 173 Winterset (Santell), 176 Wise, Robert, 301 Wollen, Peter, xxxiii Women: awakening movement of, 147– 52; backwardness and, 150; casting of, 222, 224, 271, 273, 304; epistemic violence and, 134; in films, 135, 271–75; gaze of, 77–78; haggling and, 15, 133, 148; liberation of, 263; male guardianship of, 148; as missionaries,

388

i nd e x

316 n. 35; as national subjects, 266; opposition by, 149; othering of, 133, 269; performance ban on, 129, 134–35; prejudice against, 271; public cinemas and, 18, 58, 68, 70, 132–38, 201, 255–56, 263–70; representation of, 133; as screen translators, 121; sidewalk segregation of, 131; spectatorship by, 18, 89, 255–56, 263–70; voting rights for, 148; women’s cinema, 2, 264–65; women’s press, 135, 148 Women Entering the Shah Abdolazim Train (Sani al-Saltaneh), 47, 136 World Bank, 4 Yasami, Siamak, 290 Yazdi, Ali, 259 Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud (Djamalzadeh), 284 Yellow Cruise, The (travelogue), 158–59 YouTube, 5 Yushij, Nima, 285 Zadeh, Fatollah, 258 Zahedian, Mehrdad, 44–45, 47 Zahir al-Dowleh, Ali Khan, 43–44, 49, 79, 109, 206 Zanjani, Eshaq, 70, 126–27 Zardoshtian Cinema, 265, 266 Zargabad Coffeehouse, 65, 128, 129 Zhaleh, 50, 89 Zirinsky, Michael, 55, 166 Zohreh Cinema, 113 Zoroastrian Theater, 207 Zurkov, Emil, 70, 112

Hamid Naficy is a 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 (2001), The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (1993), and Film-e Mostanad (Documentary Film, 2 volumes, 1979).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Naficy, Hamid. A social history of Iranian cinema / Hamid Naficy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4754-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4775-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures—Iran—History. 2. Motion pictures—Social aspects—Iran. I. Title. pn1993.5.i846n34 2011 791.430955—dc22  2011010869