5 - Cinematic Revolution

Summary

“Our age is a martyred age” (sinn-i mā sinn-i shahīd shudah īst), claimed Masʻūd Kīmīyāyī, a prominent pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker in an interview in 1978; “[v]ery soon, those which we knew, recognised and had aged with, were swept away and were instead replaced by dance, car brands and jeans … we were the ones most affected by moving from [houses with large] backyards to apartment buildings.” Although popular cinema drew on the quotidian of Iranian life, its “entertaining” cinematic form was disapproved by many. Objections to “Film-Farsi,” which gave rise to a cinematic horizon of expectation, paved the way for the emergence of an artistic counter-culture. By the late 1950s, there was a nostalgic consensus among many filmmakers to record on celluloid a “real” image of Iran; to resuscitate the disappearing cultural norms and social relations in a rapidly changing society, also observed by Kīmīyāyī above, in a social realist cinematic language. The attempts of a group of internationally educated filmmakers to create a visual repository of the changing conditions of the country facilitated the engendering of a cinematic movement in the late 1950s that was socially and politically charged – a cinematic revolution that presaged the political Revolution of 1979.