“Fashioning a New National Body Through a Cinematic New: Ethnographic Documentaries of the Iranian New Wave and the Discourse of Authenticity” This essay explores the relationship between the cinematic renderings of the body in the ethnographic documentaries produced in the last two decades of the Pahlavi Era and the emergent “discourse of authenticity” during the same time. On the thematic level, then, the main track of this essay takes up a number of exemplary ethnographic documentaries (for instance, Arbaeen, Wind of Jinn, O Protector of Deer), dealing with religious rituals (Ashura, Arbaeen, and pilgrimage to Shia shrines) and directed by modernist filmmakers like Parviz Kimiavi and Nasser Taghvai and subjects them to close textual analysis. On the same register, a historical account of the development of state institutions (above all, Ministry of Culture and National Television) that functioned a supportive environment for them will be offered. Through formal analysis it will be shown, in detail, how the “pro-filmic” body of the subjects filmed, just as it has often been in the case of ethnographic films in other times and other places, leave their mark on the aesthetic qualities of these cinematic texts. This process of the materiality of the body—in its movements, rhythms, textures, sounds, silences, shades of color—affecting, in fact re-fashioning, the formal qualities of these film is of course a recurrent dynamics in the histories of both modernist as well as ethnographic modes of filmmaking, where the desire for aesthetic renewal often encounters the desire for the local and the authentic. Furthermore, on the second main track of the essay, I will situate the documentaries of the Iranian New Wave in the larger context of the ascendant discourse of authenticity articulated by the country’s leading public intellectuals—chief among them, Ahmad Fardid, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Ehsan Naraqi, and Dariush Shaygan—who, in one form or another, were calling for “cultural rootedness.” Accordingly, disobeying the customs of the discipline of Film Studies, I will seize “images” of body from the writings of these authors (from Al-e Ahmad’s Ziarat and Lost In the Crowd, for instance) and juxtapose them next to those cinematic ones, in the hope of foregrounding their correspondences.