This presentation introduces the case study of the Syracuse documentary mission in Iran during 1950s. The Syracuse University's Audiovisual Center produced over 100 how-to rural training films, held documentary workshops, oversaw local production of weekly newsmagazines before the arrival of television and supervised the establishment of a documentary infrastructure, audiovisual centers and institutions of media sponsorship and governance in Iran for a decade under a binational contract with government agencies of the United States and Iran and the cooperation of many American nongovernmental entities. Up to thirty-five American universities contributed to Syracuse mission with personnel and equipment, and, additionally, with packages of audiovisual training for Iranians in the United States. Furthermore, the presentation addresses the limitations and opportunities of accessing the archives today in Iran and in the United States. The Syracuse mission has only received survey treatment in existing accounts of Iranian cinema. While the archives of the Syracuse mission are held in National Film Archive of Iran, little access has been granted for a more extensive scholarly investigation and for preservation of films. The situation is different in the United States. The paper-trail archive of the Syracuse mission has recently become available publicly to scholars as part of the larger archives of the United States Information Agency (USIA, 1953-1999) at U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland (NARA II). There is, however, almost no trace of the how-to training film titles. Instead, a fairly detailed memoranda record of contracts, scripts, correspondence, reports, receipts and some photographs testify to the foundational role of the Syracuse documentary mission in nation-building through establishing a documentary apparatus in Iran. In contrast to the unavailability of how-to films, digitized copies of AKHBAR-E IRAN Series (Iran News) is becoming available almost in its entirety of 412 weekly episodes of 7-10 minutes (1954-1962) at NARA II. The production of newsmagazine series is credited to Ali Issari, the Iranian liaison with Syracuse team and the office of the United States Information Service (USIS) in Tehran. Episodes of AKHBAR-E IRAN Series provide a high quality and breathtaking documentary report of Iran during 1950s. Researching the transnational dimension of Syracuse mission in Iran makes evident that the literature on national cinema in the Middle East desperately begs detail transnational and critical genealogies that dovetail close examination of film text with authorship, infrastructure, and diplomatic bureaucracy.

My paper highlights the methodological challenges related to an ongoing project to preserve and curate material related to M. Ali Issari’s ill-fated 1970s documentary collaboration between National Iranian Radio and Television and Michigan State University. It is intended to accompany what would be the North American premiere of our newly completed preservation work at the MESA film festival. Iranian documentarian (and MSU professor) Issari designed the series to investigate Iranian history, from ancient archaeological sites through its modern city life, in a style of voiceover and radio-play reenactment reminiscent of BBC documentary. The project was an ambitious educational initiative, but it was eventually shut down as a result of protests led by student activists. The archive of this project, including 28 reels of film, three completed films, and documentation of the NIRT training seminars on MSU campus, are all housed in the Michigan State University Archive. How does one determine what aspects are valuable in an archive of failure? How might we theorize these archives as more than footnotes in cinema history? When we have a number of projects created by displaced filmmakers that have faltered or remain half-finished, is there an archival praxis by which we might pay adequate attention to them as a phenomenon? The field of orphan and nontheatrical film studies has sought out moments of media volatility or plurality with the aim not to delimit failures and crosscurrents, but to explore the ways these failures lay bare the articulations and divisions within traditions ordinarily understood as seamless. I use insights from this field in order to develop ways to engage with these cinema institutions over individual films and to address archives that are dispersed or incomplete.

This paper examines the methodological difficulties associated with conducting media historiography in the case of the Turkish Educational Film Center (EFC) during the Cold War era. The EFC was created through diplomatic collaborations between the Ministry of National Education of Turkey (MNET), the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United States Information Services (USIS). This collaboration is a compelling case to explore how the US government and UNESCO shaped the media network in Turkey and influenced the communication methods of several Turkish ministries. The difficulty of conducting this research derives from both the scarcity and attainability of materials at various libraries in Turkey and the US, causing the research process to become lengthy and expensive. Between its founding in 1952 and 1966, the EFC produced 3,000 films and 30,000 film strips, and imported over 350 films from Europe and hundreds of films from the US. Only a small handful of catalogues scattered over nonconsecutive years were archived by the National Library of Turkey. Moreover, these catalogues are incomplete and often do not provide even the essential information such as production year, sponsor and filmmaker. On the other hand, there is an overwhelming number of films and documents at the National Archives in the US to investigate the role of USIS in Turkey, making it difficult to find the relevant information about the EFC. While the digitization process has begun, only 89 EFC films are digitally available via an online educational platform developed by MNET. While this digitization of the EFC archives is incomplete, it is also based on a bias selection of films that prioritize Turkish nationalism. Some of the USIS produced and distributed films were also edited with a Turkish version, creating multiple versions of the same film. In one known case, the film was edited four times following multiple requests from the Turkish government making it difficult to track down all versions. Both the scarcity and attainability of archival materials as well as the issue of accessibility generate challenges to write a media history about the nonfiction media infrastructure in Turkey. By discussing methods and findings, this paper aims to bring attention to the existence of the EFC with the hope of expanding the scholarship of nontheatrical films and raising awareness of the necessity of preservation practices and future collaborations between scholars.