DIVSocial history of Iranian cinema that explores cinema's role in creating national identity and contextualizes Iranian cinema within an international arena. The first volume focuses on silent era cinema and the transition to sound./div

"Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, [this four-volume set] explains Iran's peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran."--Page 4 of cover.

Social history of Iranian cinema that explores cinema's role in creating national identity and contextualizes Iranian cinema within an international arena.

In the fourth and final volume of A History of Iranian Cinema, Hamid Naficy looks at the extraordinary efflorescence in Iranian film and other visual media since the Islamic Revolution.

Hamid Naficy is one of the world’s leading authorities on Iranian film, and A Social History of Iranian Cinema is his magnum opus. Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, it explains Iran’s peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran. This comprehensive social history unfolds across four volumes, each of which can be appreciated on its own. Volume 1 depicts and analyzes the early years of Iranian cinema. Film was introduced in Iran in 1900, three years after the country’s first commercial film exhibitor saw the new medium in Great Britain. An artisanal cinema industry sponsored by the ruling shahs and other elites soon emerged. The presence of women, both on the screen and in movie houses, proved controversial until 1925, when Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty. Ruling until 1941, Reza Shah implemented a Westernization program intended to unite, modernize, and secularize his multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic country. Cinematic representations of a fast-modernizing Iran were encouraged, the veil was outlawed, and dandies flourished. At the same time, photography, movie production, and movie houses were tightly controlled. Film production ultimately proved marginal to state formation. Only four silent feature films were produced in Iran; of the five Persian-language sound features shown in the country before 1941, four were made by an Iranian expatriate in India. A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010

This volume brings together scholarship from both established scholars and early career academics to provide fresh insights and new research on the cinema of Iran. The book is organised around eight broad themes including cinema before and after the revolution, stylistic innovation, documentary, gender, and genre. Encompassing a diverse range of methodological approaches and disciplinary frameworks including film studies, cultural studies, and political economy, each chapter is a self-contained study on a specific topic engaging with the national and transnational history of Iranian cinema which combined provide readers with original new insights into Iranian film and filmmakers, from fiction films to art house and popular cinema. The Handbook includes analysis of the works of established filmmakers such as Bahram Beyzaie, Rakhshan Banetemad, Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as well as the output of emerging voices such as Ida Panahandeh and Shahram Mokri. Covering well-known topics as well as cutting edge ones such the sonic and visual manifestations of the urban environment in Iranian films, this book is a vital resource for understanding Iran and its unique cinematic culture.

Iranian filmmakers have long been recognised for creating a vibrant, aesthetically rich cinema whilst working under strict state censorship regulations. As Michelle Langford reveals, many have found indirect, allegorical ways of expressing forbidden topics and issues in their films. But for many, allegory is much more than a foil against haphazardly applied censorship rules. Drawing on a long history of allegorical expression in Persian poetry and the arts, allegory has become an integral part of the poetics of Iranian cinema. Allegory in Iranian Cinema explores the allegorical aesthetics of Iranian cinema, explaining how it has emerged from deep cultural traditions and how it functions as a strategy for both supporting and resisting dominant ideology. As well as tracing the roots of allegory in Iranian cinema before and after the 1979 revolution, Langford also theorizes this cinematic mode. She draws on a range of cinematic, philosophical and cultural concepts - developed by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz and Vivian Sobchack - to provide a theoretical framework for detailed analyses of films by renowned directors of the pre-and post-revolutionary eras including Masoud Kimiai, Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Kamran Shirdel, Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Meshkini, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Asghar Farhadi. Allegory in Iranian Cinema explains how a centuries-old means of expression, interpretation, encoding and decoding becomes, in the hands of Iran's most skilled cineastes, a powerful tool with which to critique and challenge social and cultural norms.

Hamid Naficy is one of the world’s leading authorities on Iranian film, and A Social History of Iranian Cinema is his magnum opus. Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, it explains Iran’s peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran. This comprehensive social history unfolds across four volumes, each of which can be appreciated on its own. Volume 1 depicts and analyzes the early years of Iranian cinema. Film was introduced in Iran in 1900, three years after the country’s first commercial film exhibitor saw the new medium in Great Britain. An artisanal cinema industry sponsored by the ruling shahs and other elites soon emerged. The presence of women, both on the screen and in movie houses, proved controversial until 1925, when Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty. Ruling until 1941, Reza Shah implemented a Westernization program intended to unite, modernize, and secularize his multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic country. Cinematic representations of a fast-modernizing Iran were encouraged, the veil was outlawed, and dandies flourished. At the same time, photography, movie production, and movie houses were tightly controlled. Film production ultimately proved marginal to state formation. Only four silent feature films were produced in Iran; of the five Persian-language sound features shown in the country before 1941, four were made by an Iranian expatriate in India. A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010

Iranian films have been the subject of much critical and scholarly attention over the past several decades, and Iranian filmmakers are mainstays of international film festivals. Yet most of the attention has been focused on a small segment of Iranian film production: auteurist art cinema. Iranian Cinema in a Global Context, on the other hand, takes account of the wide range of Iranian cinema, from popular youth films to low budget underground films. The volume also reassesses the global circulation of Iranian art cinema, looking at its reception at international festivals, in university curricula, and at the Academy Awards. A final theme of the volume explores the intersection between politics and film, with essays on post-Khatami reform influences, representations of ineffective drug policies, and the representation of Jewish characters in Iranian film. Taken together, the essays in this volume present a new definition of the field of Iranian film studies, one that engages global media flows, transmedia interaction, and a heterogeneous Iranian national cinema.

As an endeavor to contribute to the burgeoning field of comparative literature, this monograph addresses the dynamic yet understudied "intertextual dialogism" between modern American literature and contemporary Iranian Cinema, pinpointing how the latter appropriates and recontextualizes instances of the former to construct and inculcate vestiges of national/gender identity on the silver screen. Drawing on Louis Montrose’s catchphrase that Cultural Materialism foregrounds "the textuality of history, [and] the historicity of texts", this book contends that literary "texts" are synchronic artifacts prone to myriad intertextual and extra-textual readings and understandings, each historically conditioned. The recontextualization of Herzog, Franny and Zooey, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman into contemporary Iran provides an intertextual avenue to delineate the textuality of history and the historicity of texts