Promotional Information

The first of 4 volumes in the definitive history of Iranian film

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Organization of the Volumes xxi
A Word about Illustrations xxvii
Preface. How It All Began xxix
Introduction. National Cinema, Modernity, and Iranian National Identity 1
1. Artisanal Silent Cinema in the Qajar Period 27
2. Ideological and Spectatorial Formations 71
3. State Formation and Nonfiction Cinema: Syncretic Westernization during the First Pahlavi Period 141
4. A Transitional Cinema: The Feature Film Industry and Sound Cinema 197
5. Modernity's Ambivalent Subjectivity: Dandies and the Dandy Movie Genre 277
Notes 309
Bibliography 343
Index 371

About the Author

Hamid Naficy is Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University. He is the author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, and (in Persian) Film-e Mostanad, a two-volume history of nonfiction cinema around the world. Naficy helped to launch ongoing annual Iranian film festivals in Los Angeles and Houston.

Reviews

"This magisterial four-volume work on Iranian cinema will be the defining work on the topic for a long time to come. Situating film within its socio-political context, the work covers the period leading up to the Constitutional Revolution and continues after the Islamic Revolution, examining questions about modernity, globalization, Islam and feminism along the way. It is a definitive work for our thinking about cinema and society and how issues of creativity and expression in one particular form, film, should be integrated into a wider engagement with social issues. Demand that your library buys this superb work of academic scholarship!" Annabelle Sreberny, SOAS, University of London "Hamid Naficy is already established as the doyen of historians as well as critics of Iranian cinema. This massive, detailed, as well as extremely scholarly critical history of Iranian cinema since its very foundation more than a century ago--based as it is on a good understanding of modern Iranian political and social history--is the crowning of all his highly instructive and informative works so far. Each of the volumes can be read separately as well as a part of this colossal critical narrative. To say that it is a must read for virtually all concerned with modern Iranian history, and not just cinema and the arts, is to state the obvious." Homa Katouzian, author of The Persians, Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran "Only a skilled historian who is on the inside of his story could convey so vividly the cinema's symbolic significance for twentieth-century Iran and the depth with which it is interwoven with its national culture and politics."--Laura Mulvey, author of Death 24 a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image "A Social History of Iranian Cinema is essential reading not only for the cinephile interested in Iran's unique and rich cinematic history but also for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the cataclysmic events and metamorphoses that have shaped Iran."--Shirin Neshat, director of Women Without Men