Screened for the first time outside of Iran since the 1979 Revolution, a selection of Iranian director Samuel Khachikian’s most notable thrillers were available for an international audience at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. Previously only accessible to Persian-speaking viewers, Khachikian’s films, which invented the genre of thriller in Iranian cinema, are entering new international platforms, thereby writing an alternative history for these films extending beyond the Revolution. The choices of the curators to select Khachikian’s thrillers, and to highlight the films’ corresponding female-centric narratives, parallel a scholarly movement to integrate Iranian popular films within the broader history of Iranian cinema. This paper argues that the specific curation of Khachikian’s films and their relevance to viewers in non-Iranian viewing spheres frame these earliest thrillers as representative of all Iranian thrillers. Their presentation in these international contexts constructs a history of mid-century Iranian popular cinema that appears feminist. As a result, this redefined Iranian thriller genre within the contemporary period contradicts assertions of cinema scholars that 1950s-1970s popular cinema was a misogynist, spectacle-oriented undertaking. As interest in presenting mid-century Iranian popular cinema has grown amongst artists and cinema historians, the curators for the Cinema Ritrovato festival initiated a critical conversation on the ways in which changes in places of viewing can shift the meaning of a film genre. The re-packaging of Iranian thrillers as feminist productions outside of their Iranian, mid-twentieth-century context politicizes the memory of these films as they were originally viewed in Iran - in concert with other Iranian popular films. Engaging feminist film scholar Miriam Hansen, this paper analyzes the inclusion of these Iranian thrillers within international film festivals and the festival curators’ re-reading of these films as indicative of female experiences of cinema within Iranian cinema history. This paper is based upon qualitative interviews, participant observation, and archival analysis to assess the changing history of Iranian thrillers when placed in the context of an international film festival focusing on the “rediscovery” of lost or forgotten cinematic works. Although Khachikian established a trend in thriller filmmaking in Iran, his attention to female characters and female participation in production was an outlier in an industry dominated by assumptions of a male spectator. The selective act of preserving and incorporating such films within a transnational context alters the memory of Khachikian’s films, building a nostalgia of “rediscovery” for Iranian thrillers.

During the 1950s to 1960s, melodrama becomes the privileged mode of cinematic engagement with the contradictions of the modernisation project in Turkey and in Iran. Both, Yesilcam Films and FilmFarsi, develop a number of stock characters which come to embody contradictions, anxieties, and fantasies related to modernization. Class conflict, the perceived conflict between modernity and tradition, East/West, and other binaries are mapped onto socio-culturally specific gendered characters. The cabaret dancer/ prostitute who turns into a mother, the various iterations of rebellious masculinities which occupy an ambiguous space vis-à-vis the law and morality are only few examples. Unsurprisingly, female sexuality, desire, and women's liberation often become the contested ground against which modernity is measured, and which simultaneously need to be contained. Hence, female representation oscillates between catering to male heterosexual pleasure and disturbing the patriarchal order, between reinforcing traditional masculinities and throwing the male hero into existential crisis. This paper aims to juxtapose certain gendered representations in Yesilcam and FilmFarsi, such as the various types of "fallen women" and underdog masculinities as melodramatic responses to modernization from above. I will argue, that while these characters take on very socio-culturally specific forms, they simultaneously represent moments of cosmopolitan engagement with multiple modernities beyond the nation state and its modernization project. They hereby point to transnational moments in popular cinemas which are usually understood as essentially nationally specific.

The city, with its nostalgic allure and danger, has had a prominent presence in much of the film productions of pre-revolutionary Iran from the silent films of the early 1930s to popular and arthouse productions of the late 1970s. Tehran and its filmic representations, however, have not attracted much scholarly attention. Similarly, popular cinema has been generally overlooked. The common presumption that commercial films of pre-revolutionary Iran were cheap copies of international productions with little to no artistic quality, has prompted a disregard for this cinema in socio-cultural analyses of modern Iran. This paper will examine various aspects of Tehran’s past and present as imagined in the popular films of pre-1979 Iran, to examine questions of national identity and belonging in a transnational context. Symbolic of the experience of Iranian modernity, Tehran was chosen as a defining setting in the narratives of many Iranian popular films from the 1950s to 1970s. In the hybrid genres of popular films, Tehran was at once emblematic of cosmopolitanism, novelty, and diverse interactions, and representative of decadence, westernisation, and prostitution. Film and social critics of the time considered these films—commonly regarded as “Film-Farsi”—to be artistically cheap and devoid of social critique. As this paper will argue, however, in filmic productions that drew on international cinematic trends, the popular film industry expressed Tehran in an ambivalent form to address urban anxieties, and engage with social and political debates relevant to the time. While some films situated Tehran as a modernised metropolis with transnational connections, others painted it as a city that, in the face of international cultural exchanges and rapid modernisation, was lost, along with its customs, traditions, and old neighbourhoods. Exploring the multifaceted depictions of Tehran in "Film-Farsi," I investigate the connections between the city and national identities, and the social and political implications of such representations in a rapidly changing society. The focus on the attractions and perils of the city in these films, as this paper will demonstrate, worked to evoke longing for a national past that was withering away in light of transnationalism and globalization in post-World War II era.

This paper draws on archival research in Iran and the United States, and an extensive use of digital tools to identify hundreds of instances of found soundtracks in Iranian popular cinema of the 1950s and 60s. It places the circulation of recorded sound by famous film composers like Henry Mancini, Bernard Hermann, Max Steiner, and Miklós Rózsa within a larger cultural history of the global life of midcentury design. The focus will be on the cinema industry in Iran, but the paper will draw some comparison to illustrative examples of this phenomenon in Egypt. The archival record indicates that growth of the Iranian film industry, partly out of a network of dubbing studios between 1948 and 1963, depended in large part on Hollywood distributors’ convenient blindness to the afterlives of their second-hand prints and their soundtracks. This industry was dynamic and prolific, but its legitimacy was always a source of worry due to the uncertain provenance of its source material. Focusing on the relay of second-hand film soundtracks, I argue that Iranian dubbing technology is central to understanding the creative volatility of cinema in the region. It counteracts the ideological fantasy pure circulation and simple influence. Technologies like magnetic sound striping (applied to second-hand positive prints) thrived in 1950s Iran precisely because these dubbing studios were largely unknown to producers of the original films until the early 1960s. The fact that this industrial-scale creative adaptation was foundational for a local industry that dubbed Hollywood mambo soundtracks over its noir thrillers, confounds any simple categorization of cooperation vs. competitive control over the local market.

In 1998, the 73-year-old Iranian diva Esmat “Delkash” Baqerpur (1925-2004) gave a concert tour in America. Unable to sing publicly in Iran since the 1979 Revolution, Delkash updated her star and sound image with a nostalgic twist through her international performances. In the way that her performances were framed by a longing for an earlier time in Iran, the audio-visual version of Delkash on tour emanated an “authentic” pre-1979 female identity in sync with notions of how Iran used to be. With hand-held camcorders, audience members were able to inscribe the sounds and images of elderly Delkash for time immemorial in the sonic imaginary of the Iranian diaspora. This was not the first time that a sound technology such as the camcorder mediated Delkash and her gendered identity for audiences; in 1950s Iran, Delkash and her voice reverberated across the Iranian soundscape with the help of media technologies such as the popular sound film and radio, and she was known for her “androgynous” voice and gender-bending in the film “Top Dog” (1958). Yet during her 1998 tour, camcorders helped to construct and perpetuate a version of Delkash unhinged from the complexities of the modes of gender and sexuality she had embodied earlier in her career. Despite the insights that these iterations of Delkash can provide about gender, sound technology, and nostalgia, scholars have predominantly read Iranian entertainers such as Delkash through nationally and temporally bound frameworks. Considering Delkash beyond pre/post-Revolution and national/transnational divides, this presentation seeks to understand the trans -media, -national, and -temporal presence of Delkash in Iranian sonic imaginaries through the nexus of technology and gender. I analyze camcorder recordings of Delkash’s concerts on YouTube and interviews with Delkash during and following her tour against her personae in popular cinema before the Revolution. Drawing on film scholar Jennifer Fleeger’s concept of the “mismatched woman,” I examine the way in which Delkash’s identity as an Iranian woman was mediated and expressed through sound technologies. Bearing in mind the emergence of camcorder technology and its intersection with the politics of nostalgic longings, I argue that media technologies help contribute to “deterritorialized” and seemingly “timeless” notions of the gender-national identity of (fe)male stars. In comparing these versions of Delkash, this presentation makes larger points about the political dimensions of gendered sounds – mediated through sound technologies – as they travel from local to global contexts.