Scholarship focusing on Iranian early cinema has been largely preoccupied with films produced in the early 1930's and their qualification as forerunners in the coalescing of Iran's national film industry. Analysis of cinema in Iran preceding this period has been limited to the introduction of cinema by the royal court and its screening for only this audience. This analysis has been mostly concerned with the evaluation of these films in terms of Western cultural hegemony. This paper departs from the extent literature insofar as it links early Iranian cinema to processes of societal transformation constituting the ethos of Iranian modernity. More specifically, I argue that cinematic space—both in its concrete and imaginary forms—was a site where emergent social practices were not just represented on screen but actively produced in space. Drawing from documents pertaining to cinema across a variety of genres (newspaper articles, film reviews and journals, travelogues, poems, and memoirs) dating from 1900 to 1935, I demonstrate how cinema was associated with notions of “national progress” and “modernity,” and employed in the construction of a normative moral national subject. Cinemas and film screenings in urban Tehran, during this period, were conceived as moralizing vehicles addressing a national audience in the process of arriving into modernity. Their (re)arrangement in the urban space furthermore, at once reflected and reinforced social boundaries and the moral geography they constituted. Finally, this paper examines the concurrent revalorization of Tehran's cinematic spaces in the late 1920's and early 1930's as sites of immorality. This competing discourse attributed moral pollution and decay to not only cinematic content but the their sites as well.