4 - Iranian Cinema’s “Quiet Revolution” (1960s–1970s)

Summary

This chapter examines the political and social importance of Iranian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of the socially wider discursive shift in the Iranian political culture of the period. It analyzes the “New Wave” movies produced in the two decades preceding the 1978–9 Revolution. These cinematic images and narratives, we argue, contributed to shaping the Iranian public’s perceptions of the modernization process that was taking place in their country at the time. New Wave cinema helped to influence the broader cultural transformation that we call the “quiet revolution.” The Quiet Revolution, in this chapter, refers to a “national imagination” that was fashioned in Iranian cultural institutions, as well as in intellectual circles, during the late 1960s and 1970s.