This article offers a transformationalist perspective toward globalization, emphasizing the common structural elements that connect countries over the differing positions of nations within the world’s structure. In this respect, culture and cultural products move from one form to another and from one country to another. Consequently, transfictionality, multimodalities, and glocalization as well as different matters of language, reality, place, or space are applied in Iranian Cineture (Cinema and Literature) and make them play a related role in producing, promoting, advertising, and developing global media culture. In fact, This article is an attempt to illustrate how Iranian Cinetures through global media culture is connected to the rest of the world by studying comparatively the works of Simin Daneshvar, Shahriar Mandanipour, Daruish Mehrjui, and Asgar Farhadi. In other words, this article presents how artists employ literary techniques such as irony, monologue (aside), metaphor, and metafiction to show poetic or dramatic characters within the constant connection to narratives of world literature. Moreover, this study demonstrates how the authors use cinematic techniques like cut-scenes, flash-back and flash-forward, and cinematic dialogue form to describe characters’ philosophy, state of mind, and life in relation to world cinema. Therefore, this research revolves around close readings of the selected works of the abovementioned authors and artists using contemporary and international perspectives on global media culture. Furthermore, the methodology brings together media studies and globalization to describe the process which forms and structures the global culture through Cineture narratives. Employing an eclectic approach, the theoretical point of departure in this research, thus, centers on close readings of primary sources, and it draws on several scholars (Ritzer, Giddens, Kellner, Robertson, Bordwell, Dabashi, Jahnbeiglou, Semati, and Woodward, among others) in media and globalization studies. In sum, this paper demonstrates the related roles of literature and film in the current cultural flows of globalization as well as the related functions of authors and artists in presenting and developing global media culture as cultural makers.

The Iran-Iraq war is a cataclysmic historical episode that continues to preoccupy the Iranian authors both in literature and film. Those local stories of Iran-Iraq war which aim to do justice to the traumatic event as experienced by the war’s victims, have to overcome a global double blind: trauma is an unspeakable experience but desperately calls to be expressed. What renders traumatic event largely unspeakable for the victims is what radically distinguishes it from other human experiences. Trauma is an event that is not experienced at the time of the occurrence of the original incident but one which is characterized by its incomplete registration at the time of occurrence and subsequent delayed obsessions and reenactments. Therefore, trauma is inherently experienced belatedly. The belated and insistent resurfacing of the fragmented memories, some reemerged with tremendous literality, provide the traumatic experience with a possessive or haunting quality. “To be traumatized”, therefore, as Cathy Caruth suggests, “is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.’’ Moreover, the insistent and intrusive eruption of the past into the present in trauma constitutes a unique temporality that cannot be grasped with a sequential notion of time. The victim of traumatic memory is trapped in a past that does not pass and is condemned to reenact the overwhelming horror. In order to adequately communicate these peculiarities, authors have to devise novel forms of storytelling. This paper explores the ways in which the Hossein Mortezaian Abkenar’s novel, Scorpion, and Rasoul Mollagholipour’s feature film, Mazraeye Pedari, have managed to communicate the peculiar experience of trauma. In these works, the impact of trauma is adequately represented by mimicking the symptoms of trauma and the forms it takes. Firstly, by departing from linear narrative and chronological time, these works are more faithful to the temporality of trauma. Secondly, the undecidable figures of specter or ghost that appear in these trauma narratives depict the haunting nature of trauma, and in their own turn, facilitate the disarticulation of chronological time. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the dream-like or surrealistic style of these narratives is not only a hindrance to, but is a means of, providing access to the traumatic event, and particularly, to what would remain untestifiable in a straightforward realist account, namely, the haunting nature of trauma, the undecidability of the characters’ existence and the peculiar temporality of traumatic entrapment.

During the course of Iran-Iraq war (1984–87), Morteza Avini, a zealous revolutionary filmmaker and an art critic, launched a lifelong documentary project, titled Story of Victory(Revāyat-i Fath), which was screened in five seasons in National Iranian TV, and provided a firsthand account of the daily lives of Iranian soldiers on the battlefield. Avini blends the unprecedented scenes from the daily life of Iranian soldiers during the war with a stoic, propagandistic voice filled with an overwhelmingly poetic, pious narration celebrating the culture of Shi’ite martyrdom. Through Avini’s camera lens, war appears as a spiritual journey to overcome the malaise of materialism and Western civilization. Although Islamic symbolism is present throughout Avini’s works, an attentive reader of Avini’s essays would recognize the trace of the unlikely source of inspiration: German entomologist, author, and the world wars veteran Ernst Jünger. Jünger, who had achieved name recognition by publishing his account of WWI in Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), came to notice the transformative power of photographic and cinematic during his work on two photographic books dealing with the Great War. In the 1930s, Jünger subsequently compiled two other photographic books in which he offered a collection of short extracts from written accounts of accidents, accompanied by journal photographs of shipwrecks, natural disasters, wars, and revolutions. In the course of his activities, Jünger came to the conclusion that photography by exposing self to impending modern perils opens the possibility of the rise of a new human type. Unfortunately, the connection between the mobilization efforts during the Iran-Iraq war through Shi'ite iconography and the embrace of danger propagated by Jünger and the Weimar theorists of photography has remained unexplored. This study attempts to uncover the debt of Avini to Jünger’s radical account of camera as a transformative agent in his disavowal of modern democracy and the embrace of a heroic, revolutionary identity.