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Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History

Negar Mottahedeh a
a
Literature and Women's Studies at the Program of Literature, Duke University,

Online Publication Date: 01 September 2009

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 Iranian Studies, volume 42, number 4, September 2009

Negar Mottahedeh

Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History

This essay addresses itself to the century long history of cinema in Iran, focusing on the history
of the senses as they combine with and are extended by film technologies. It argues that
Khomeini’s aim was to produce a transformed and Shi’ite Iran by purifying the sensorial
national body by means of film technologies.
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This still image (Figure 1), which captures Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s look at the
primitive motion picture camera, embeds in celluloid an index of the history of
the cinematic medium in Iran. As index, it calls forth the gaze of future gener-
ations. Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s look at the camera carries, as if auratically, the his-
torical conditions informing the coming into being of film as a cultural and
political practice in Iran.
The purchase of a motion picture camera by Muzaffar al-Din Shah during his
journey to Europe in 1900 continued the tradition of the dynastic travelogues,
diaries one could say, that captured the near, the present, and the everyday in
distant, far away places. But in doing so, the film reels from this journey also
mimetically reproduced the European tradition of voyages photographique (photo-
graphic voyages) that made their appearance in the Salon de Photographie in 1859.
Muzaffar al Din Shah’s travelogue entry on his newly purchased camera is
written against the backdrop a festival of flowers in Ostend, Belgium. It
arrests moments of visual exchange between parading European women and
himself. The scene, captured by his cameraman, Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbasi
Sani-al Saltanah, combines a mixture of decorum and titillating circumstance, a
pleasing sensuality that is palpable in this second still from one of Muzaffar al
Din Shah’s early film reels in which his Persian travel companions gaze at the
European women whom they encounter on the streets of Europe in broad
brimmed hats typical of turn-of-the-century fashions (Figure 2).
The significance of this returned look, exchanged between the Persian men and
the European women, may be lost on our generation, but early theorists of
modernity made note of a shift in perception and sometimes remarked on

Negar Mottahedeh is Associate Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at the Program of
Literature, Duke University. This is a revised version of the paper presented to the conference
“Iran and Iranian Studies in the Twentieth Century” to mark the fortieth anniversary of Iranian
Studies held at the University of Toronto, October 2007.
ISSN 0021-0862 print/ISSN 1475-4819 online/09/040529 –20
#2009 The International Society for Iranian Studies
DOI 10.1080/00210860903106279
 530 Mottahedeh

Figure 1. Still of Muzaffar al Din Shah in Europe

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Figure 2. An exchange of looks under broad-brimmed hats

“the protective functions” that began to envelope the look in response to the
“experience of shock” in metropolitan modern life.1
The shield of the look, a conspicuous armor against the close encounter
that the moderns began to experience in the crammed quarters of urban citys-
capes—in trains and on sidewalks—, seems, at least in this moment, shed in
gestures of play and conviviality in Belgium following the camera’s purchase

1
Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura”, Critical Inquiry, 34, no. 2 (winter 2008): 344.
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 531

by Muzaffar al Din Shah. The Shah writes in his diary of this exchange of looks at
festival of flowers at Ostend:

It was a very interesting festival . . . The ladies were riding the coaches with
bouquets of flowers in their hands and they passed in front of us. Akkas
Bashi was busy photographing with the cinematograph. There were more
than fifty coaches passing by, one after another, with the rhythm of music.
There was quite a crowd there. When the coaches reached us they threw bou-
quets of flowers to us continuously and we also threw back flowers to them.2

The inscription of this loaded exchange by Akkasbashi on celluloid implies a

gesture of internal labeling, an inscription, necessary for the invention of inscrip-
tive technologies marshaled to provide “the evidence of the technology’s own
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existence.”3 Like a stamp marking the birth of the film camera in the context
of Iranian history, the exchange provided for the camera’s “creative relocation,”
as Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi would have put it, “within a different textual and
political universe”—in this case within a Persian monarchic one.4 The camera
ensured in this moment, the continuity of the East –West exchange informing
Iranian turn-of-the-century travelers’ narratives and that self-reflexive mode of
thinking characteristic of Iranian modernity that figured in the figure of the
foreign envoy, the elci farangi, in the ta’ziyeh’s discursive quest to situate the
self from the perspective of a valued outsider in the modern world.5
The camera became party to the vibrant forces that had shaped the nation’s
modern identity. Yet this haunting history of film technology’s preoccupation
with the mutual exchange of glances on the anticipatory eve of modernity, was
overwritten eight decades later by the veiling of all women and the socio-sexual
Islamization of the look for the contemporary Iranian screen.

Pure Aesthetics
In his Last Will and Testament published after his death in 1989, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini articulated this move to sanctify the screen in light of
what he called the nation’s “state of self-estrangement.”6 Crucially, he attributed
this state of estrangement to the national body’s alienation from its own sense
2
Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, Safarnameh-ye Mobarakeh-ye Muzzafer-Din Shah Beh Farang. Tran-
scribed by Mirza Mehdi Khan Kashani. 2nd ed. (Tehran: Ketab-e Foruzan, [1982] 1361): 160.
3
Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era.
(Stanford, 1999): 161 –162.
4
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography.
(New York, 2001): 138.
5
In the ta’ziyeh, the elci farangi, corroborates the moral and ethical superiority of Iranian Shi’ism
over Sunni aggression. The foreigner’s certain conversion at the end of the ta’ziyeh concurrently
establishes the potency of Shi’ite Islam against Western political and industrial power.
6
Khomeini, Ruhollah, Imam Khomeini’s Last Will and Testament. (Washington, 1989): p. 47.
 532 Mottahedeh

perceptions in that these are configured by the senses’ fundamental attachment to

film technologies—the eyes to the camera, the ears to sound technologies.
Under the former Pahlavi rule, media technologies were used to transport the
seeds of Westernization to Iran. As such, Khomeini saw the nation’s estrange-
ment from its sensorium as a direct response to the preceding monarchic
regime’s submission of ownership of Iranian media to Western powers and
hence to the contamination of the national body by foreign pollutants.
By Khomeini’s logic, then, the impurities introduced into the media by the
intervention of foreign forces stained national vision and hearing under the
Pahlavi regime and linked the body of the nation to the world outside, configur-
ing the Iranian subject as a supra-national subject. The contamination that pene-
trated the national body attuned its sensorial capabilities to the needs of
foreign powers. The pollution of the national sensorium by the globalizing
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forces working through media technologies implied the weakening of the

national body and the distraction of the nation’s forces away from production
and national knowledge, even “life.”
For Khomeini, women’s bodies marked the site contamination in media tech-
nologies. They stood as the very fissures through which foreign impurities were
introduced into the nation. Produced and characterized as spectacles—“mere
objects” he called them, “possessions,” “pleasure seekers”7—women were used
by media technologies to derail and weaken Iranian society, leaving Iran suscep-
tible to other contaminants ushered by colonial invasion, imperialism, and capit-
alism under Pahlavi rule. This take on technology was not new to Iranian Shi’te
thought. Shi’ite modernists such as Jalal Al-i-Ahmad and Ali Shari’ati had attrib-
uted the “Westoxification” of the nation to contaminants introduced by Western
technologies in the 1960s and 1970s.
But, and perhaps surprisingly, in Khomeini’s discourse this contamination did
not add up to a complete rejection of the medium. Instead, such “features of
modernity” were in need of a thorough cleansing. For Khomeini, the promise
of sanctified mediating technologies was the purification and the consolidation
of the collective. Linking and de-linking scenes, shots and sounds on the film’s
two main tracks, film technologies had the capacity to open up spaces in ways
that habituated consciousness has closed to both human visuality and hearing.
As prosthetic extensions of the human sensorium and as the inheritors of the
human mimetic capacity to reproduce correspondences, film technologies
could in fact reconfigure the senses on a collective scale by bringing things
closer, by slowing things down, and by opening up spaces through a form of
playful reproduction. In doing so, the technologies of sound and vision could
create other spaces and, in 24 frames a second, detonate the very limits set on
our perceived everyday world. This is, of course, only one way in which the

7
Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, trans.
Hamid Algar (Berkeley, 1981): 264.
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 533

notion of “the optical unconscious” in Walter Benjamin’s Artwork essay can be

usefully employed in understanding the workings of film technologies.8
In the process of film viewing, the film viewer’s senses would be habituated to
modern mechanized stimuli and recalibrated by them. For Benjamin, as for
Khomeini some four decades later, this recalibration was political, even utopian.
In going through technology, the senses (the aesthesis) could become politicized
in collective and revolutionary ways.9 This capacity in film technology, as Miriam
Hansen argues, allowed Benjamin to imagine “an alternative mode of aesthetics
on par with modern, collective experience, an aesthetic that could counteract, at
the level of sense perception, the political consequences of the failed—that is
capitalist, imperialist, destructive and self-destructive—reception of technology.”10

Iranian Cinema, a Woman’s Cinema

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It was in its attempt to purge technology from imperialist and capitalist forces,
that the post-Revolutionary Iranian film industry came to produce a cinema
that is, in my view, the apotheosis of 1970s European feminist gaze theory and
a surprising expression of the feminist avant-garde’s stance against the voyeurism
of Hollywood melodrama.11
8
Benjamin’s influential “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproducibility” is here
referred to as the Artwork essay. In the Artwork essay and in the essay on photography first
published in 1931, Benjamin compares the possibilities opened up by the camera visually to the
unearthing of unconscious impulses by psychoanalysis. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Pho-
tography,” One Way Street and Other Writings (London, 1979): 243.
9
In the second version of the Artwork essay (1936), Benjamin suggests that film could become
“the most important subject matter, at present, for the theory of perception which the Greeks called
aesthetics.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
(Second Version),” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935 –1938, trans. Edmund
Jephcott. (Cambridge: 1936):, 120.
10
Miriam Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October, 109 (summer
2004): 6.
11
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989) is probably the best known of the
early feminist “gaze theorists”. Writing in 1973, Laura Mulvey argued that sexual difference constructs
the gaze of classical narrative cinema configuring both its temporal and its spatial geography, its objects
and its spectating subjects. “Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time
(editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cine-
matic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of
desire” (1989, 25). Bringing Marxist and psychoanalytic theories in conversation with current structur-
alist and semiotic theories of culture and cinema, Mulvey noted that the look in dominant cinema is sex-
ualized and is as such both voyeuristic and fetishistic. Associated with masculine tendencies, scopophilic
modes of seeing are inscribed in the film fiction, effectively constructing the heterosexual male as classical
narrative film’s addressee, its voyeuristic spectator. Focusing on the nature of the female as spectacle, she
wrote: “Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the ways she is to
be looked at into the spectacle itself” (1989, 25).
Mulvey’s best know article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, published in the influential
British film theory journal, Screen, in 1975 was admittedly a polemic, a problematic, and a provocation
that produced an infinite array of interdisciplinary discussions that continued into the 1980s and 1990s,
 534 Mottahedeh

To protect the nation from further contamination the post-Revolutionary

Islamic government established a system of modesty that it enforced through
the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance after it was established in 1982.
Attached to traditional Islamic values and confined by the enforcement of
modesty laws, women’s bodies became subject to a system of regulations that
aimed to fabricate the modesty of Iranian women into the hallmark the new
Shi’ite nation. In post-Revolutionary cinema, veiled female bodies were gener-
ated to stand, “warrior like,” against the contaminating forces introduced into
its mediating technologies under the Pahlavis, to stand against forces that film
studies refers to as the meta-desire of cinema itself, articulated in terms of
American melodrama’s dominant codes of voyeurism and fetishism.12
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Confronting Voyeurism

Modesty laws enforced the veiling of all female characters on the Iranian screen.
The ubiquity of the veil in film narratives, and more crucially in diegetic private
spaces within the narrative, signals the encoding and inscription of the spectator
in the profilmic situation.13 To characterize a woman veiled within her own fic-
tional quarters, in other words, is not unlike a gesture of looking directly at the
camera. The veil’s ever-presence, reflexively points to, addresses in fact, the presence
everywhere of an unrelated male viewer in the film theatre. The veil meets his look,
and foregrounds in this way, the looked-at-ness of the film itself, eschewing the
voyeuristic conventions of realism inherited from American melodrama.

giving shape to what is now referred to as “gaze theory,” but also to theories concerned with feminist
film and avant-garde film practice, to questions of narrative continuity and suture, to the problem of
sound and codes of editing, to reception theory, to accounts of spectatorship and subject formation,
to phenomenological approaches to cinema that addressed the participation of the body and its other
senses in experiencing films, to gay and lesbian studies of film, to studies of the star system, to porn
studies, to questions of masochism and the screen, of masquerade, femininity and masculinity in encoun-
ters with visual representations. A whole discipline emerged as a result of Mulvey’s intervention.
Mulvey’s early critical work established that voyeurism is inscribed in classical modes of spectator-
ship. It simultaneously established an oeuvre that invited a new kind of spectatorship to take shape, one
curious and driven by a “desire to decipher the puzzles and riddles” on screen. Laura Mulvey co-wrote
and co-directed with Peter Wollen six films between 1974 and 1983. “The most influential of Mulvey and
Wollen’s collaborative films, Riddles of the Sphinx made in 1977, presented avant-garde film as a space in
which female experience could be expressed.” The film was a “remarkable formalistic innovation [a
negative aesthetics], notably structured around 360-degree pans that spoke to the film’s content, and
described a mother’s search for identity.” Screenonline, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/
566978/index.html. Accessed July 6, 2008.
12
For melodrama is fundamentally “the norm, rather than the exception of American cinema,” as
Linda Williams incisively puts it: “popular American cinema is still, mutatis mutandis, melodrama”.
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson,
Princeton, 2001): 26, 16. Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: 264.
13
Hamid Naficy, “Poetics and Politics of Veil, Voice and Vision in Iranian Post-revolutionary
Cinema,” Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, (Cambridge, MA, 2003): 145.
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 535

Women’s veiling in private and especially in diegetic women-only spaces thus

equivocates direct address by the film narrative, countering the spectator absorp-
tion into scenes that coyly “let themselves be seen.” Such cinematic voyeurism, an
“unauthorized scopophila” responsive to the self-absorption of the diegesis in
dominant cinema is the condition of film viewing globally, the “peeping tom”
habit, inscribed by film technologies in human sense perception. As a gesture
of self-awareness, the veil draws a curtain on this “stolen” look once and for all.
Aware of the presence of the spectator, Iranian post-Revolutionary cinema
takes its stand against “the hermetic” and “closed system” of representation
that cuts itself off from the space of the spectator and that configures the diegetic
filmic space as a space of “self-sufficiency,” detached from the realm of the sacred.
According to Joan Copjec, the moment of self-sufficiency in visual represen-
tation, “marks the point when the ‘post-sacred world’ is installed, that is the
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point at which moral and religious certainties are at once erased and melodrama
springs into existence.”14 Post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema’s resolve in fore-
grounding the film’s looked-at-ness against the absorption of the spectator’s
look in dominant cinema, reflects the former’s continued insistence on the
sacred, and gives emphasis to its antagonistic stance against the melodramatic
and scopophilic coordinates constitutive of the commodified image.15

Melodrama: The Thingification of Culture

The Pahlavi regime’s modernizing efforts were instrumental in the establishment

of the melodrama as genre in Iran. Early Iranian silent films and, later, the film-
farsi were mimetic of the codes of Hollywood melodrama in their mode of
characterization. As Miriam Hansen has shown this was a global phenomenon
from the first sound films (in the 1920s) onwards. When we refer to the domi-
nance of Hollywood in film studies, the reference is to its aggressive industrial
strategies and its ideological effects, since, as we all know Hollywood has for
decades now overpowered screens around the globe. But “these cognitive
effects” of American cinema, as Hansen also notes, “were crucially anchored in
sensory experience and affect, in moments of mimetic identification that were
more often than not partial and excessive in relation to narrative comprehension
and closure.”16 The effects of Hollywood’s empire were economic and ideologi-
cal, but most importantly sensate and intimate.
While the processes of modernization, urbanization and industrialization as
well as social movements (such as the impact of Western feminism) shifted
both social and gender relations, modern technological developments—trains,
14
Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA, 2003): 112.
15
On the issue of the spectator’s absorption in film fiction in contemporary Lacanian psychoana-
lytic theory, see Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: 110 –111).
16
Miriam Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizon,” Film Quarterly, 54, no. 1 (fall
2000): 11 –12.
 536 Mottahedeh

automobiles, and cameras—produced “new modes of organizing vision and

sensory perception, a new relationship with ‘things,’ different forms of
mimetic experience and expression, of affectivity, [and] temporality.”17 This is
evident in the global emergence of a modernist aesthetics in fashion, in design,
in advertising, in architecture and changes in the urban environment.18 On a
global scale, the film industry translated and circulated this new sensory
culture for audiences through American films, through melodrama.19

From Silent to Sound

Publicized as a representation of the “gargantuan strides on the path of develop-

ment and progress,” Abi and Rabi, the first feature length silent film to be pro-
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duced in Iran, was enthusiastically received by its popular audience.20

Although now sometimes judged a poor imitation of a series of Danish comedies
made by Paladium Studios in the 1920s, the film was nevertheless accepted as a
recognizably national product. That it represented Iran on the path of progress
may have been an overstatement aimed to please the royal court and as such to
support Reza Shah’s campaign to construct Iran in conformity with a perceived
European modernity. This is hard to judge in retrospect; the only available print
of the film was destroyed in a fire during the screening of the film in 1932. But
what film historians have gathered about the film is that Abi and Rabi lacked a
coherent plot and consisted mainly of comic and burlesque sketches involving
two men, one tall and short, that relied on farcical ruminations, such as the
one captured by the Lumiere brothers in L’arroseur arrose.21 Still paintings by
Frederick Thalberg interrupted the motion picture to illustrate, caption, and
link scenes.
Five years after the advent of the talkies, the Russian Armenian director of Abi
and Rabi, Avanes Ohanian (Figure 3), made his second silent feature, Haji Aqa,
the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa, Aktor-e Sinema, 1932). The comedy would, or so it
was thought, guarantee investors’ return on their capital. Encouraged by this
hope, Ohanian conceived a religious character, Haji Agha who, as actor,
overcame the clerical stand against the cinema of that era (Figure 4).
The plot is simple but poignant: Habibollah Morad, a student of Ohanian’s
school, performed the role of Haji Agha as a cleric who dislikes the cinema.
17
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modern-
ism,” Modernism/Modernity, 6, no. 2 (1999): 60.
18
Miriam Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizon”: 11.
19
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modern-
ism.” Modernism/Modernity 6 no. 2 (1999): 71.
20
Abi va Rabi, dir. by Avanes Ohanian (1930).
21
This comedic mode continued into the early 1910s in the US and France. But in looking at the
case of Iran, it is important to note that this type of slapstick was being produced (in Iran) 20 years
after the standard film historical narrative says this kind of comedy had ended.
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 537

Figure 3. Avanes Ohanian, director of Abi and Rabi

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His daughter and son-in-law, both students of a film school, manage to film him
in various locations in the city. When the Haji finally sees the film, he is delighted
by his own image. He applauds himself and the cinema.
Haji Aqa, The Movie Actor was premiered at the Royal cinema on 31 January
1933. A news daily had this review of the film on the following day:

Haji Aqa, the Movie Film Actor at Royal cinema. An Iranian film made by
Iranian artists was shown last night at the Royal cinema in the presence of
dignitaries. The film had many technical flaws. It was dark and the faces
were almost unrecognizable. But, as was pointed out by Mr. Saiid Nafisi in
his opening speech, outdated equipment and the lack of negatives had
forced the decision to shoot on positive stock. The efforts of the cast, the
crew and Mr. Ohanian, deserve the highest esteem and appreciation.22

22
Ettela’at, 31 January 1933.
 538 Mottahedeh

Figure 4. Stills from Haji Agha: The Movie Actor

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Unlike Abi and Rabi, Haji Aqa, The Movie Actor failed to attract much atten-
tion. Sound film, a mighty rival to even the dominance of American films on
the international market, had just appeared on the scene. Exactly two months
and twelve days had passed since the first feature sound film, The Lor Girl
(Dokhtar-e Lor, Ardeshir Irani and Abdolhosain Sepanta, 1933), had premiered
in Tehran as a melodramatic love story that supported Iranian nationalism
under Reza Shah (Figure 5). The film created a buzz.
Golnar, the Lor girl, with her charming innocence and frightened voice was to
become the object of desire for a fictive monarch in a film about the history of
early cinema some sixty years later, in a film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf entitled
Once Upon a Time Cinema (Nasir al-Din Shah Aktor-e Cinema, 1992).

Circulating Commodities: Tough Guys and Dancing Girls

Although the Second World War brought Iranian film production to a halt,
encouraging the presence of American films on Iranian screens, the luti (or
tough guy) genre later updated and typified by Masu’d Kimia’i’s Qaisar (1969)
and Dash Akhol (1971–72) were mimetic of a new mode of organizing vision
and sensorial perception, which grappled, on a global scale, with the thingification
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 539

Figure 5. Poster for The Lor Girl

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of modern life. Helpful, pure, and selfless in the 1950s the tough guys in luti films,
became verbally abusive, rough, alcoholic types in the 1970s. The more violent
the tough guy became, the more sexualized the women became, and especially
so in the obligatory song-and-dance numbers which they performed as spectacles
and objects of pleasure for the tough guys, and through the tough guys, for the
spectator.23
23
As Laura Mulvey suggests with regards to the show girls in Hollywood films, “The device of
the show-girl allows the two looks (that of the spectator and the male character on screen) to be
unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the nar-
rative; the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined
without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing
 540 Mottahedeh

Significantly, the female stars of the luti films became circulating objects crucial
in promoting modern commodities in the market place. New Wave auteurs present
to the problematics of capitalism and imperialism inherent in these productions
insisted on recasting the binary oppositions that had developed within this genre
over the years, linking instead, the good guys with Iranian traditions and
customs, and the bad guys with secular attitudes and Western practices.24 When
the luti defended “a kin’s woman” in Kimiai’s Qaisar, for example, it was read
by some as the tough guy’s defense of Iranian authenticity, Hamid Naficy reflects.25
That the New Wave—the work of Kimiai; Dariush Mehrju’i (The Cow [Gav],
1969); Bahram Bayza’i (Downpour [Ragbar], 1970; The Crow [Kalagh], 1977);
Abbas Kiarostami (The Traveler [Mosafer], 1973); Sohrab Shahid Saless (Still Life
[Tabi’ate Bijan], 1975), Bahman Farmanara (Prince Ehtejab [Shazdeh Ehtejab],
1974)—would become representative of Iranian post-Revolution film production
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in the international film festival circuits of the late 1980s and 1990s, may in fact
owe to this “suspicion of Western influence” and the overwhelming sense of cul-
tural separateness already present in the productive discourse of its pre-Revolution-
ary films. This “suspicion of the West” translated into “Iran’s deliberate isolation”
in the years immediately following the Revolution. Godfrey Cheshire described
this phenomenon once quite deftly as, “a wariness which cuts across the political
spectrum: where hard-liners worry about the incursion of anti-religious values, lib-
erals worry about Iranian cinematic culture being molded according to Western
viewpoints and prejudices.”26 This could very well account for the emergence
and wide circulation of a national art cinema under the aegis of the so-called
“Iranian New Wave” in the mid-1980s. But it is important to emphasize, before
returning to the last decades of the twentieth century, that even if luti stories
were considered national in some respects, the filmic codes that were formative
of the tough guy genre and the film-farsi melodrama articulated “a vernacular
modernity” that had its filmic roots in the Hollywood westerns and American
melodramas shown “yek sareh” with them in urban theatres.27
This photograph taken of Tammaddon cinema in the late 1950s (Figure 6) is
a profound example of the kind of back-to-back screening practice in Tehran

woman takes the film into a no man’s land outside its own time and space.” Visual and Other
Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989): 40.
24
Hamid Naficy, “Iran,” The International Movie Industry, (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 2000):
103.
25
Ibid.
26
Godfrey Cheshire, “Abbas Kiarostami: Seeking a Home,” Projections 8: Filmmakers on Film-
making (London, 1998): 277.
27
The word yek sareh, which could be translated as “head on,” refers to a “seriality” in viewing
practice. The word developed as a result of a tendency amongst Iranian film audiences to arrive late
to film screenings. They would purchase their tickets and walk into the cinema mid-screening. They
would watch the film all the way through, and then stay to watch the beginning of the film at the
next showing. Audiences for multiple films and multiple screenings paid only a one-time entrance
fee. One could also, then, translate yek sareh as “one way.” Jafar Shahri, Tehran-e Ghadeem, Vol 1
(Tehran, 1997–98): 286.
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 541

Figure 6. Tammaddon cinema in Tehran in the late 1950s

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theatres. Tammaddon here announces Burt Lancaster in His Majesty O’Keefe

(Byron Haskin, 1954) and the singer-musician duo Delkash and Vigen in
Zalem Bala (Naughty but Sweet, Syamak Yasami, 1958). In His Majesty O’Keefe,
the British actress, Joan Rice, plays the dark-skinned Polynesian Dalabo, with
whom Lancaster dallies as he embarks on a career as a coconut oil trader after
he shipwrecks on a South Pacific Island. Here he not only finds Dalabo attractive,
but after “going native” fights off indigenous chieftans and German Empire
builders.
Coconuts are always part of the package in Delkash and Vigen films, but as per-
cussion instruments in the numerous and escalating song-and-dance numbers that
they perform to a bold, boozy, and boisterous heterosexual audience. The bar and
restaurant scenes in these films are reminiscent of Monroe’s performances in River
of No Return (Otto Preminger, 1954) and the nightclub scenes of 1950s Mexican
 542 Mottahedeh

classic Avventurera (Alberto Gout, 1950) in which love becomes a commodity for
everyday sale. Women’s fashions and hairstyles are deliberately European in
Delkash and Vigen’s Zalem Bala and in their later film Farda Roshan Ast (Tomorrow
is Bright, Sardar Saker, 1960): teased beehives and low cut dresses, shot in classical
Hollywood form, to emphasize ankles, breasts, and eyebrows. Addressing a
woman’s charity group from Qum, Khomeini spoke with derision about such
women “typical of the era of Muhammad Reza and Reza Khan,” “who copied
the European mode of dressing and the European styles, and [who] waited for
their dresses to be sent to them from Europe.” 28 That the Islamic women of
the post-Revolution era have “transcended themselves,” he declares, “is by far
the greatest of all reformations in our society.”29
True, Iranian cinema participated in the global trade of modern commodities
through its own melodramatic genres, but this trade was not limited to goods. On
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the global marketplace, Hollywood’s biggest trade was in “the mass production of
the senses.” Even the most ordinary American films, writes Miriam Hansen,
“were involved in producing a new sensory culture” attuned to the changing
fabric of everyday life, of sociability, and of leisure which the luti film genre
and the film-farsi reproduced en masse.30 It was this sensory culture that was to
become the inheritance of the Khomeini regime on the eve of the Iranian Revolution.

Constituting the National Body

The constitution of the subject, the arrangement of the subject-citizen’s disposi-

tions, the subject’s awkward supra-national positioning within the national body
became problematical for the isolationist regime under Khomeini’s rule. For him
the future of the national sensorium was in the balance.
The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance was charged with the reeduca-
tion of the national sensorium and was commissioned to inscribe a new embodi-
ment of the national-subject-as-spectator severed from the global film industry.
The “commandments for looking”—the ahkam-i negah-kardan—were instituted
as a result: “By means of the eyes they [the Shah’s government] corrupted our
youths,” wrote Khomeini. “They showed such and such women on television
and thereby corrupted our youth. Their whole objective was to make sure that
no active force would remain in the country that could withstand the enemies
of Islam so they could do with impunity whatever they wanted.”31 Whatever
they wanted indeed! In a speech given in 1980 to representatives of the world
28
Ruhollah Khomeini, “Address to the Group of Women Members of the 10th of Favardin
Charity Foundation of Qom. (16 March 1981), Highlights of Imam Khomeini’s Speeches November 5,
1980-April 28, 1981, Trans., Pars New Agency (Albany, CA, 1980–81): 57.
29
Ibid.
30
Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modern-
ism,” Modernism/Modernity, 6, no. 2 (1999): 71.
31
Hamid Naficy, “Veiled Vision/Powerful Presences: Women in Post-revolutionary Iranian
Cinema,” In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-revolutionary Iran (Syracuse, 1994): 132.
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 543

liberation movements, Khomeini refers to a process by which the East lost its
cultural identity to the West. Iranian youth were “beguiled,” “stripped,” and
“denuded” so that the West “could better plunder our wealth before the eyes
of an indifferent people.”32
Khomeini’s revolution was a prosaic matter. His was a revolution under the
skin: “You cannot see the essence of bodies but only their accidents,” wrote
Khomeini, “our eyes see color . . ., our ears hear sounds; our sense of taste
experiences flavors; and with our hands we feel the external dimensions of an
object. But all these are accidents . . . Where then is the body itself?” he asks.
“The body itself is a mystery, the shade or reflection of a higher mystery.”33

The Imaginal World

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In its mimetic play with light and shadow, the Iranian film industry was tasked to
represent another world as the reflection of that higher Shi’ite mystery. To bring
this mystery to life, the industry was to produce a body unhampered by the con-
ventions and codes of realism in dominant cinema. In this, its reconditioning of
cinematic technologies, the Islamic government attempted to summon the Na-
koja-Abad of the imaginal world and it was this world that the theocracy aimed
to establish in the empirical world as the body of the nation by means of a purified
national sensorium.
Though a mystical veil surrounds the whereabouts of the twelfth Imam, it is
said that he went into occultation from the world of sensory experience as a
young child (in 873 AD). For centuries now, he has been thought to reside on
the Green Island, a timeless place, a land of nowhere (Na-koja-Abad), a land
without coordinates. His imminent return imbues every moment of time with
significance. The Na-koja-Abad, in which the twelfth Imam resides, perhaps
along with the other imams, is self-sufficient, immune, and closed to the
outside world, at least according to the accounts of those who have seen it.
Only those who are summoned, are able to find their way to this unknown
region—-to an imaginal world that is described as both an oasis in the desert
and an island in green waters.
Historically, in the Iranian context, the imaginal world appears in the empirical
world and is perceived by the senses of the believers during the month of
Muharram. The life-giving energies of the imaginal world animate the rawzeh
and similar ritual performances such as the ta’ziyeh passion play. In the course
of the ta’ziyeh performance, a performance which recalls the early history of
Shi’ism, actors and spectators together become imaginal bodies, resurrection
bodies, that simultaneously enact the past history of Islam and its redeemed
32
Ruhollah Khomeini, “Speech Given to Representatives of the World Liberation Move-
ments (10 January), Selected Messages and Speeches of Imam Khomeini (Tehran, 1980), 91 – 92.
33
Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: 410.
 544 Mottahedeh

messianic future on an open stage, which in the course of the play comes to
belong to the no-time and no-place (Na-koja-Abad) that is scheduled to reappear
on the this-worldly plane on Judgment Day.
Constituted by the intimate, sensate collective body of the believer, ta’ziyeh’s
historical stage is the nation-as-body alive in the present. It becomes, in the
course of the Muharram ritual, the future purified imaginal body of the nation
itself. This articulation of the national sensate body that traffics the revolutionary
and spiritual history of the nation—the nation as an imaginal world, conditioned by
an ambivalence in time and space—is the very structure of post-revolution
Iranian cinema. Here we recall the no-place that is Koker and Siah Darreh,
both, in Abbas Kiarostami’s Life and Nothing More (1991), Through the Olive
Trees (1994), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999); and the all-time of temporal
compression in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (Noon o Goldoon,
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1995) and Gabbeh (1995).

Once Upon a Time Cinema: An Example

The atomistic temporality of “all-time” in contemporary Iranian cinema, its con-

flation of past, present, and future, derives largely from the motion picture’s his-
torical role in the displacement of the ta’ziyeh as popular medium of recollection
and national regeneration.34 The effects of this popular indigenous medium and
its epistemic conditioning of modern historical and inscriptive technologies
clearly informs Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s fictional history of cinema in Once Upon
a Time Cinema (1992).
While, as we recall, the motion picture camera was first introduced to the court
during the relatively short reign of Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, Makhmalbaf’s
historical film projects this event into the past to capture the life and the imagin-
ation of the monarch Nasir al-Din Shah, who, though historically unfamiliar with
the motion pictures, was, rather, known for his frivolous passions and his love of
photography. Nasir al-Din Shah was an avid photo-collector of everyday life, a
preoccupation that Jean Baudrillard rightly ascribes to the harem master.
In Once Upon a Time Cinema, the character Nasir al-Din Shah becomes obsessed
with the Lorish girl, Golnar, who was the lead character in the first Iranian
feature sound film, The Lor Girl (Dokhtar-e Lor, 1933) (Figure 5). The Lor Girl
was produced by Ardeshir Irani and Abdolhossein Sepanta under the Imperial
Film Company in Bombay in 1932 and then imported and screened in Tehran
in 1933 as a huge success. Deriving from the ta’ziyeh tradition, the temporal
34
In an address to “visiting clergy” Khomeini himself emphasizes this link between the ta’ziyeh
as a Muharram mourning play and “revival.” Here he suggests that these ceremonies were used
not to “cause weeping” but as a weapon in the political struggle against the Pahlavi’s. “With
divine insight our religious leaders aimed at consolidating the Moslem world . . . to revive and
uplift. . .” Ruhollah Khomeini, “Address to Visiting Clergy,” Highlights of Imam Khomeini’s
Speeches: 4.
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 545

compression in Once Upon a Time Cinema captures the technologies of the

Muzaffar al-Din Shah era, the pleasures of the court of Nasir al-Din Shah, and
the feature films of the Reza Shah era in the temporal frame of the imaginal world.

Nation Building through the Senses

Whatever we may think of the temporal compressions we have witnessed in

Iranian post-Revolution films, it would be wrong to describe the world from
which it derives, that is, the world of the imaginal, as an imaginary world. The
world of fantasy and imagination belong to the image world, a world that is
different in spiritual degrees from the imaginal world. The word imaginal itself
derives from the combination of the words “image” and “original” in Corbin’s
lexicography. The imaginal stands for the site of the original image.
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The logic of commodification under capitalism has introduced an image form

that is the reduction of the imaginal world to the world of the senses. Human sense
perception has as a result been corrupted by its attachment to processes of charac-
terization and production that are constitutive of the commodified image; an
image that stands as the real itself in fiction film. Purified of these processes of
commodification the perceptual faculties of the believers can, by this logic,
access the imaginal world and can call upon the sanctified figures of the Imams
residing in the no-place of Na-koja-Abad to right the wrongs let loose on the
body of the believers by its aggressors. As the numerous talks and writings of
Khomeini suggest, technologies of sight and hearing, as prosthetic extensions
of the collective national body’s senses, once purified, will enable the believers
access to the world of the imaginal—to a world outside all coordinates.
It was in response to Khomeini’s vision of technological purity that Iranian cinema
was to develop a new literacy, to which the senses and the technologies that extend the
sensorium in the realm of film production were attached. A new syntax of shot
relations signaling “nationalized” space in film would have to be constructed on
the premise of the Islamic Republic’s prohibitions on the look and its understanding
of the purified sensorial link that could bind the national body to the imaginal world of
the Shi’ite imams. The modest and averted look that came to replace the direct, desir-
ing look of voyeurism was to finally splinter and destroy the contaminants that were
said to have entered the national body, we can only presume, in that first exchange of
glances on the streets of Belgium, captured by Akkasbashi’s primitive camera.
In referring to his five shorts in the film Five (2003), Kiarostami, in fact,
suggests that the function of his film is one of audio-visual detoxification
along the lines of Khomeini’s call for the purification of vision in his anti-
imperialist talks in the early Revolutionary years: “audiences can go to see it
and rinse out their eyes with it, as if it were a drop of water.”35 Kiarostami’s
35
Kiarostami, in an interview with Miguel Mora, “Las pelı́culas buenas son las que se pueden ver
25 veces,” quoted in Alberto Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, trans. Belinda Coombes
(London, 2005): 44.
 546 Mottahedeh

purified film technologies create a different world, an imaginal world, perhaps. In

this world, bodies cast shadows as they drape clothes on lines to dry (Figure 7),
herds of sheep fill the unpaved roads (Figure 8), and baby chicks litter stairwells.
The modest look of his camera frames a world where balls appear followed by
running children, where apples roll in the dirt and get brushed off and passed
on to rest next to an elbow in a coffee shop (Figure 9 and Figure 10), and
where green hay moves as if on its own, on the back of the disembodied voice
of an “ethnic” subject (Figure 11). Time passes here like yesterday was a

Figure 7. Bodies cast shadows as they drape clothes on lines to dry in The Wind
Will Carry Us
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Figure 8. Herds of sheep fill the unpaved roads in The Wind Will Carry Us
 Iranian Cinema in the 20th Century 547

Figure 9. An apple rolls in the dirt to rest. . .

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Figure 10. . . .next to an elbow in The Wind Will Carry Us

Figure 11. Hay moves as if on its own in The Wind Will Carry Us
 548 Mottahedeh

Figure 12. Farzad’s “young” uncle in The Wind Will Carry Us

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month ago and an old villager lives to be 150 or 100 with a discount. Witness
Farzad’s “young” uncle in The Wind Will Carry Us (Figure 12). A fabulated
world appears to show technology’s utopian capacity to dream, in wonderment
of its own continued ability to capture motion in the shifting movements of
everyday life, movements that occur, not center-screen, but on the conspicuous
peripheries of repeating scenes.
We often wonder why so many of the contemporary Iranian films we see in
Western film festivals lack a narrative, a story. It was in response to this vision
of Iran as imaginal world, I believe, that Iranian film narratives became secondary
to the religious and political task of nation building—a nation building through
the senses.