In an attempt to surpass the genre of travelogue, three Americans—Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison—traveled to southwestern Iran to film the biannual migration of the Bakhtiari tribes and their flocks from winter to summer pastures. In Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925), Schoedsack's exquisite framing of long shots captured the vast movement of an estimated 50,000 people and 500,000 animals in desert caravans, grassy plains, icy river crossings and snowy mountain vistas. The technical requirements of Grass alone suggest its importance in early ethnographic and documentary film, but problematic elements, such as its flimsily contrived storyline and melodramatic and essentializing intertitles, have presented problems for its perceived importance in ethnographic film history and as a representation of Iran. In 1976, Anthony Howarth (with consulting anthropologist David M. Brooks and narrator James Mason) filmed People of the Wind, again following the Bakhtiari tribes along their migration, and employed cinematography emphasizing the great color and sounds of the movement of people en masse. This paper uses theoretical frameworks from visual anthropology and film theory to complicate the reading of these films, first by placing Grass within the context of the intentions and ideological imperatives of its filmmakers. This paper complicates the reading of both films, arguing that despite the fifty years of filmmaking between them, Grass and People of the Wind are actually limited in quite similar ways.

Transsexuality in Iran has gained much attention and media coverage in the past few years, particularly in its questionable depiction as a permitted loophole for homosexuality, which is prohibited under Iran's Islamic-inspired legal system. Of course, attention in the West is also encouraged by the “shock” that sex change is available in Iran, a country that Western media and society delights in portraying as monolithically repressive. As a result, Iranian filmmakers inevitably have their own agendas, which are unsurprisingly brought into the film making process—from a desire to sell a product that will appeal to the Western market, to films that endorse specific socio-political agendas. This paper is an attempt to situate sex change and representations of sex change in Iran within a wider theoretical framework than the frequently reiterated conflation with homosexuality, and to open and engage with a wider debate concerning transsexuality in Iran, as well as to specifically analyze the representation of transexuality, in view of its current prominent presence in media.

Despite being one of the pioneers of Iranian cinema's “new wave” in the 1960s, Daryush Mehrjui has maintained his position in the cinema as an influential filmmaker. He is still capable of making films which are both popular with public audiences and highly acclaimed by Iranian critics. Mehmaneh Maman (Mum's Guests), a social comedy he made in 2004, is one such film which has received little critical attention outside Iran. In this paper, the representation of “the nation” in Mum's Guests and the latter film's reception by local critics is contrasted with that of Ejareh Neshinha (The Lodgers, 1986); another popular social comedy which Mehrjui made almost two decades earlier. This comparison aims to examine the differences between the two films in the light of theories of postmodernism and globalization. It is argued that Mehrjui's representation of the nation in Mum's Guests demonstrates a more conscious acknowledgment of differences based on class, gender, ethnicity and religion; and a more inclusive approach to marginalized sections of Iranian society. The collapse of boundaries between “the local” and “the global,” as well as that of “high-art” and “low-art” are other key elements of Mehrjui's more recent film. The two films also differ in terms of their portrayal of themes such as happiness and solidarity, political/ideological conflict, and science and consumerism, which are explained with reference to the impact and consequences of globalization.

This paper analyses Iranian television production on Public Access TV channels in Germany. It is based on a broader study with qualitative interviews, hermeneutic content analysis of 40 hours of aired TV programs and a ?dense description? of the production background. Iranian immigrants were amongst the most active mother-tongue TV producers on local Public Access Channels (so called ?Open Channels?) since these were first launched in 1984. These non-commercial channels aim to make alternative themes and voices heard in the local public. However, the 9/11 attacks led to increased difficulties of access for immigrants from the Middle East, such as limited airtime and the obligation to translate programs. These measures diminished dramatically the opportunities to present Iranian TV shows on Open Channels. From the perspective of Communication Studies, this paper aims to analyse the intentions and strategies of Iranian immigrant media participation, but also the difficulties of access to the public sphere in Germany.

Unlike most manifestoes that are created as mere written documents, Avini's Ravaayat e Fath is a manifesto in motion. The voiceover is a manifesto of martyrdom woven together with laments and a poetic account of what was happening in and around the battlefields during the Iran–Iraq war in about seventy episodes. Although Ravaayat e Fath is in film format, it aligns itself with the characteristics of a formal manifesto. Ravaayat e Fath, as mentioned in Janet Lyon's account of a formal Manifesto, is “the testimony of a historical present tense spoken in the impassioned voice of its participants” and “embellishes the urgency of struggle through a variety of conventions”.

The fascination for the Western world with Iranian cinema lies primarily with the fable-like developments of its stories which often plunge us into a world of exoticism and lured us with its singularity. Iranian war cinema born during the war between Iran and Iraq is not as well distributed in Europe and films with English subtitles are difficult to get hold of. Whether it is interpreted as an anthropological document which opens a dialogue between the protagonist and the spectators, the “I” and the other, Iranian war cinema by Tabrizi, Sinayi, Hatamikia and Ghobadi, among many others, can be seen as a spiritual voyage where the soul hovers between absence and presence. In the wake of war cinema in general, one can draw parallels with mythology, the Judeo-Christian tradition, literature and art. Its function is not only didactic but cathartic, and the particularity of Iranian war cinema like no other is that it participates in the mourning process of a whole nation fighting against its own ghosts and in search of its identity. This article attempts to decipher the myths hidden behind the images presented by Iranian war cinema, paradoxically interweaving the traumatic with the aesthetic.

Based on visual representations of the Iranian presidential election crisis of 2009, this article explores the idea of a relationship between the production of images related to crisis, trauma and the legitimacy of such online visual materials. While photos and cell phone video recordings taken in urban spaces bear witness to public acts and encounters, this article explores the role that visual images play in shaping political crisis. The article concludes that the production, purchase and also circulation of such visual materials should be at the center of any further research in this domain.