Scholars have largely theorized Iranian cinema according to spatially-fixed national and exilic cinema frameworks, and ideas of modernity conceived in American and European contexts. The first Persian talkie films such as The Lor Girl (1933) and Layli and Majnun (1937) have been entry points to discussions of modernity and Iranian cinema in the context of a nascent, territorial-nationalism in Iran. Yet all of the first Persian talkies were made in India in collaboration between Abdolhossein Sepanta, an Iranian expat living in Bombay, and Ardeshir Irani, a Parsi-community member and owner of the Bombay Imperial Film Company, and were exported to Iran after they were met with enthusiasm among the Parsi community in India. This paper interrogates the borders of the national cinema paradigm and inquires into the significance of the fact that the Persian talkies were made and successful in India. I argue that the arrival of the first Persian talkies signaled a point of rupture in the trajectory of Iranian cinema as it ended local silent film production and set the stage for cinematic exchange between Iran and India. These sound-films, which encompassed the dynamics of both Persian language and Indo-Persian cultural traditions, and introduced melodramatic and affective elements through music, fostered a transnational cine-community between Iran and India. Drawing on Bhaskar Sarkar’s translocal approach to cinema in a globalized age which conceptualizes transcultural exchange as occurring at the level of the “translocal-popular,” I examine travelogues, newspapers and compare the content of the first Persian talkie films with silent films made in Tehran such as Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (1933) in order to demonstrate how the talkie films engaged a complex network of shared experiences, fantasies, and histories among Parsi and Tehrani audiences. Even though Iran did not develop a full-fledged film industry capable of producing sound films until a decade later the first Persian talkies influenced the first domestically produced commercial sound films, and fostered a transnational cine-community whose continued existence is demonstrated in the consistent popularity of Bollywood film in Iran. In examining the first Persian talkies, this presentation adds spatial and temporal dimensions to understandings of Iranian local and global imaginations at this historical moment. In addition, in focusing on sound, it contributes to largely visual-centric scholarship on Iranian cinema, and it destabilizes the authority of American and European experiences of the coming of sound to cinema which have been theorized as universal models.

Founded by Farah Pahlavi in 1965, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (IIDCYA, or “Kanun”) today stands as a powerful production center of literature and films aimed at children in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Funded by the Pahlavi regime and oil industry in its pre-revolution years, the Kanun developed a monopoly on media produced for children and media depicting children. As is often the case with state sponsored media, one might suspect that the Kanun served as an instrument for Pahlavi-sanctioned propaganda. However, I argue that up until the Islamic Revolution the Kanun supported revolutionary activities that played a pivotal role in the Islamic Republic supporting the existence of the Kanun until today. Due to the experimental nature of its films and revolutionary methods of distribution, the institute avoided being labeled a relic of the corrupt Pahlavi period and instead has actually thrived under the Islamic Republic. Building on Hamid Naficy’s A Social History of Iranian Cinema series, this project fills in the gaps in the Kanun history by exploring how these narratives directed at children espoused a revolutionary ethos and primed the Kanun, and children’s media in general, to become a focus of the post-revolutionary government’s national ideological project. Scholars point to the potential for media to moralize its spectators as a significant interest of the Islamic Republic. Yet, overwhelmingly, the films produced at the Kanun prior to the revolution did not possess moralizing themes. Instead, artists like Abbas Kiarostami and Bahram Beizai employed neorealist aesthetics to create narratives that offered intellectually stimulating alternatives to commercial cinema, and paved the way for the Iranian New Wave. In the animation department, Nourredin Zarrinkelk produced surrealist shorts involving political commentary, while Ali Akbar Sadeghi evoked pre-Islamic mythical poetry in his works. Drawing on films made by and about the Kanun, memoirs, and trade publications, I argue that through the free exhibition of these films all over Iran, as well as the affordable ticket pricing and provided transportation to the annual International Children’s Film Festival, the Kanun prioritized the lower classes as its target audience. By making cinema available to children throughout the country the Kanun located children as critical audiences for ideological productions. This examination of the Kanun repositions children’s media producers as crucial and foundational to our understanding of national film industries.

Research on Iranian cinema privileges film as a medium and the movie theater as a site of spectatorship, and the very theoretical underpinnings of Iranian film studies assume that most viewers encounter moving images on 35mm film in a movie theater. This paper challenges that assumption by writing video technology into the history of the Iranian film industry. Specifically, I study a network of underground rental clubs that emerged between 1982 and 1993 as a result of a ban on the personal use of video technology. Other historians of Iranian cinema understand the Islamic Republic’s first decade through the policies that overhauled film production at the time. Such a vantage point, however, provides limits our view of broader movie culture during this transformative period. My research reveals that Iranians were more interested in watching Hollywood, Bollywood, and prerevolutionary Iranian movies that were available to rent underground than the films shown in theaters at the time. I argue, therefore, that underground video rental clubs transformed movie culture in Iran by facilitating robust viewership that was not necessarily limited by state control and by fostering a space wherein the commodification of movies as material objects became possible. Following the Revolution of 1979, control over film in Iran was relocated to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. As part of its consolidation of power, the Ministry banned the use of all video-related technology, including cameras and cassettes, and later VCRs and movies. As a result, videos became the domain of a black market, and bootleg videotapes and VCRs were rented alongside the sale drugs, alcohol, and illegal music. Over time a visible economy of underground video rental clubs emerged. Drawing on newspaper editorials, trade publication reports, and oral history interviews, I reconstruct this economy and explore how they shifted viewing practices. When the ban on video was lifted in 1993, the government admits that during the ban, the underground sale of bootleg movies was prolific. I argue that this underground economy became the model for the legal video clubs that developed in the mid-1990s. Because people across the Middle East acquire movies through means like illegal downloads and video stores that specialize in bootlegs, writing histories of informal distribution is urgent as a way of globalizing our view of media industries and as a way of off-setting the American and European experiences that often dominate the history of world cinema.

Popular films from the mid-twentieth century, known as filmfarsi, were once the basis for the industrialization of cinema in Iran. Following the Islamic Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, those films, essential to the economic and structural mechanics of the previous film industry, were banned in favor of a cinema promoting an idealized Islamic subject. Half a century after the earliest filmfarsi productions, these films have come to epitomize alternative viewing modes as they find new audiences amongst the global Iranian diaspora through video-sharing websites. This paper investigates the unregulated distribution between Iranian nationals and global diaspora communities through which these midcentury filmfarsi have appeared online. I position this film leakage as a means by which diasporic nostalgia is re-invoked, and globally-dispersed Iranians bridge their geographic distance through localized Internet engagement of filmfarsi viewing culture. By tracing the history of preserved filmfarsi from Iranian collectors to diasporic distributors, I argue that preserved filmfarsi, which had once been essential to Iran’s national cinema, now collapses geographic demarcations of the Iranian film industry. This industrial past finds new form in digitized filmfarsi that invigorates diasporic claims over the film tradition that had once embodied Iranian territorial nationalism and commercialism. Further, the Iranian diaspora’s reclamation of a digitized filmfarsi through the Internet becomes conveniently viewable with portable devices like laptops and cellphones thus signaling Persian-speaking communities’ personalized engagement with a longed-for and lost Iranian past. In this study, I participate in observation and interviewing of both videostore owners converting and selling filmfarsi, and diaspora individuals sharing videos and commenting on video-sharing sites. Through this method, I trace filmfarsi’s unlicensed circulation that relies upon individual actors rather than corporate distributors. Addressing diasporic filmfarsi distribution and circulation, I focus on both the physical exchange of films and the online comment- and request-culture that celebrates the availability of these banned films. While Iranian filmmakers and critics once demonized filmfarsi for pandering purely to audience demands for sex and intrigue, diaspora communities’ free circulation of the films has de-commercialized the works, allowing for a renegotiation of their cultural value in terms of nostalgia. Further, I address how individuals shape virtual communities that, as Arjun Appadurai argues, defy geographic borders of national cinemas. Although diaspora communities often function at the margins of their host society and homeland, globalizing technology allows them to reconfigure their communities putting them at the center of new technologically-engaged public spheres.