Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic

Film, since its inception, has danced in the shadows of wild political change. With early examples like the “conflict” implicit in Soviet montage theory of the 1920s and Benito Mussolini’s Cinecittà Film Studio (est. 1937), whose motto was “Film Is the Most Powerful Weapon,” the history of world cinema is also a history of violence. Third Cinema, an aesthetic movement that emerged alongside the Latin American liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, redirected this history of violence to the service of anti-imperialism, in which film was no longer just an apparatus for propaganda but also an agent of resistance and opposition. The political implications of such a project were vast, and the possibility of resistance through filmmaking fueled, and still propels, the efforts of filmmakers around the world, especially in non-Western cinemas. The Syrian Abounaddara Collective, for example, reminds us of the continuing relevance of cinema to the violent struggles that seek political change. The collective’s ongoing “emergency cinema” has sought to provide an alternative to the Assad regime’s narrative by releasing one short video of the conflict each week since the civil war began in 2011.¹ At a time of unprecedented access to visual information, as guns and cameras seem to battle for authority around the world, it is important to remember that for more than a century cinema has been ideologically and technologically entangled with the idea of revolution.

Nowhere has the relationship between cinema and revolution been more evident than in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In his first speech on returning to Iran after fourteen years in exile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution of 1978–1979, spoke unexpectedly of cinema. On February 1, 1979, after being rushed from the airport to Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, he addressed a large, captive audience and declared, “We are not opposed to cinema…. It’s the misuse of cinema that we are opposed to, a misuse caused by the treacherous policies of our leaders.”² That Khomeini would mention cinema during this momentous speech signaled its centrality to the revolution that had ousted the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980). Unlike in Latin America, however, where filmmakers such as Thomas Guiterrez Alea, Nelson Perreira Dos Santos, and Glauber Rocha were carving out a space for opposition to neocolonialism within cinema, in Iran up until that point, revolutionaries had viewed cinema not as an institution of resistance but rather as an uncomplicated imperial project, a cultural consequence of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s ties to Europe and the United States.

Movie theaters were at the center of revolutionaries’ efforts to dismantle the corruptive force of cinema. Theaters across the country were attacked and vandalized, and their patrons, hassled and harassed. In the context of this animosity toward cinema, the Cinema Rex fire stands not just as one of the most haunting events in Iran’s long film history but also as a turning point in the revolution. On August 19, 1978, as protests against the shah swept the country, flames swallowed the Cinema Rex movie theater in the southern city of Abadan. Unknown agents chained the doors shut and lit the building on fire as a full-house audience sat down to watch Masud Kimiai’s Gavazn-hā (The deer, 1974). While some patrons fled to the roof, narrowly escaping death, hundreds of others were caught in the flames and died slow, painful deaths. Immediately following this tragic incident, the shah’s government and revolutionaries began pointing fingers, each claiming the other was responsible for starting the fire and locking the doors. Although scholars, filmmakers, documentarians, journalists, and even playwrights have attempted to locate the blame for this event, no report has thus far definitively identified the motivations behind the arson. Despite the uncertainty that continues to shroud the Cinema Rex fire, this episode exemplifies the extent to which cinema and the film industry were unwittingly, and perhaps unwillingly, implicated in the Islamic Revolution.

If violent ambivalence marked society’s attitude toward cinema during the protests leading up to the revolution, then Khomeini’s speech at Behesht-e Zahra fixed the revolution’s official stance on film. “Cinema is a modern invention,” Khomeini affirmed, “that ought to be used for the sake of educating the people.”³ Perhaps inspired by Dariush Mehrjui’s Gāv (The cow, 1969), which he had praised for its ability to shed light on social plight,⁴ Khomeini, with just a few words, changed his own position on cinema and reset the revolution’s terms of engagement with the film industry.⁵ Film was no longer a vessel of encroaching American values, the embodiment of Pahlavi corruption, or even simply a mode of entertainment. Instead, it was an educational tool, and within this scheme the film industry could be reformed and incentivized to accommodate the repurposing of film.

To refashion the cultural status of film required unprecedented state control of the industry. The creation of a new cinema was gradual, as Hamid Naficy reminds us, and its creation took nearly a decade.⁶ The project included both legal and extralegal policies that enabled state intervention in every aspect of the film industry, from the training of filmmakers and access to equipment to the oversight of scripts and control over exhibition, including imported films. The state intended each of these interventions to force cinema into modeling its new vision of an idealized Islamic subjectivity. To educate society about what it meant to live in an Islamic republic was to affirm the republic’s power. These policies and the film aesthetic they sought to produce depended on the same anti-imperialist rhetoric that had fueled the revolution. Cinema in the early years of the Islamic Republic maintained revolutionary fervor and helped the new state assert its legitimacy by keeping the ideals of the revolution alive. The success of this project can be measured in Naficy’s assessment that “the Revolution led to the emergence of a new vital cinema, with its own special industrial and financial structure and unique ideological, thematic, and production values.”⁷

Today, as film festivals and distributors try relentlessly to sell us a “post-revolutionary” Iranian cinema, it is nearly impossible imagine Iranian cinema outside of the Islamic Revolution, which sought to establish new standards for filmmaking in the country almost forty years ago. But the inescapable truth of revolutions is that they are, by definition, momentary events. Despite the Islamic Republic’s attempt to leverage cinema to keep the spirit of the revolution alive in contemporary Iran, revolutions cannot last forever, and their fleeting nature challenges us to understand what happens to the relationship between revolution and cinema once the revolutionary dust has settled. In the case of Iran, how can we conceive of a history of contemporary cinema that isn’t necessarily “post-revolutionary”? What has happened in the approximately thirty years since the revolution succeeded in consolidating the Islamic Republic’s power through cinema? And what negotiations have determined the relationship between the state and the film industry during that time, especially since Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989?

Whereas scholars like Hamid Naficy and Negar Mottahedeh have determined that the revolution established new industrial and aesthetic film practices,⁸ Reform Cinema in Iran examines what happened next in the politics of cinema in Iran. Starting in the early 1990s, an intimate relationship developed between the popular reformist movement and the film industry. The two supported each other in an unlikely partnership, and as revolutionary discourse gave way to policies of reform in the political sphere, cinema began to change as well. Reform Cinema in Iran makes two central arguments in this regard: First, the film industry and the reformist movement helped shape each other, and their interactions functioned on an ideological level. The reformist movement marked a change in the political landscape and at the same time signaled a new period in the country’s cinematic history. Second, a reformist history of Iranian cinema exposes the inadequacy of the popular category “post-revolutionary Iranian cinema,” which positions the Islamic Revolution as the most transformative event in Iran’s film history. In contrast, Reform Cinema in Iran argues that discourses of reform have equally affected the course of Iranian cinema over the last three decades.

To write a reformist history of film in the Islamic Republic is not to overlook or devalue the revolution and its impact on the film industry. On the contrary, the discourse of reform in Iran, by seeking to work within the institutions of the Islamic Republic, depends on and regularly asserts the authority of the revolution. Cinematic reform, even as it attempts to position itself against the revolution, is also in constant dialogue with the revolutionary policies that established cinema as a propaganda machine within the Islamic Republic. A reformist history of film instead asks that we consider how the momentum of revolutionary cinema is reconfigured as power consolidates and the force of revolutionary ideology becomes tempered. Is cinema’s revolutionary fervor redirected in support of the state, or does it continue to provide a space for critique? When a film industry falls under state control, is a kind of engagement with politics other than resistance possible? Might collaborations and partnerships between the state and the film industry instruct us about how cultural institutions work within state control to critique political power in newly established societies?

Such institutions also became sites where political reform began both to transform film industry practices and to guide aesthetic concerns. This reformist moment in American political history coincided with a profound change in the status of cinema as the motion picture trade transformed into a full-fledged industry. The industrialization of American cinema occurred as trade attention shifted away from nickelodeons and toward narrative films. Whereas motion pictures before the consolidation of the American film industry often depended on spectacle, the need to keep paying audiences entertained drove the narrativization of mainstream films, which in turn demanded a complex industrial structure. That these changes to the industrial and aesthetic structures of cinema were occurring alongside collaborations between the motion picture trade workers and reformists demonstrates how political reform was wrapped up in the very ontology of cinema at this time, and Scott Simmon has shown how narrative films in the 1910s were thematically tied to the Progressive Era reformist concerns.¹¹

This particular moment in American film history—as so-called early cinema transformed into industrialized mass culture, short nickelodeons became narratives, and political reform gained traction in the country—functions as an early instance of reform cinema. This precedent, however, cannot accommodate the idea of reform cinema as a reaction to revolution. Indeed, any discussion that seeks to understand the fate of cinema following tremendous political change must also include Soviet cinema following the Russian Revolution of 1917, not just for what it tells us about how film industries grapple with encroaching state control and aesthetic concerns following revolutions but also for the expansive effect that Soviet film of the 1920s had on cinema worldwide. The historical and political conditions surrounding the Russian Revolution are strikingly similar to those of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Whereas in Iran the revolution immediately preceded the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the longest traditionally fought war of the twentieth century, in the Soviet case war bookended revolution, first with World War I (1914–1918) and then the Russian Civil War (1917–1922). In both contexts, political upheaval and the material realities of wartime meant shortages of resources, including specialized film crews, film stock, and electricity, and day-to-day instability simultaneously threatened and demanded leisure activities, such as the cinema.

These periods of violence following both revolutions were, despite their material limitations, also ideologically charged, and reports of early Soviet institutions encouraging revolutionary filmmakers to make imaginary “films” without any film or film equipment have become commonplace.¹² This kind of initiative, which privileged the ideological orientation of a film over its materiality, speaks to the immediate effect that the Russian Revolution had on cinema. Initially, the Russian Revolution destabilized the film industry’s material resources at the same time that it imbued it with revolutionary fervor. Vladimir Lenin, like Ayatollah Khomeini many years later, targeted cinema as an area worthy of development, stating, “Of all the arts, cinema is the most important.” The Communist Party saw the most potential in cinema because it was a new medium and therefore less susceptible to past corruption. The nationalization of the cinema in 1919 and the New Economic Policy (1917–1922)—a more open policy that sought to rebuild an economy destroyed by war and revolution—enabled the Bolsheviks to use cinema for propaganda during the Civil War. However, most of the work being done in Soviet cinema at this time was theoretical as various factions of critics and director-theorists competed to establish the aesthetic practices that best spoke the ideals of the revolution. Within this context, avant-garde filmmaking, as promoted by Aleksei Gan, Dziga Vertov, and others, reigned supreme as the premier revolutionary aesthetic. Ultimately, though, as Denise J. Youngblood notes, aside from this abstract theoretical work, “very little…happened in Soviet cinema” in the half decade following the revolution; instead, “literally everything was” left to “the future.”¹³

These five years alone, however, did not determine the nature of early Soviet cinema in its entirety. The 1920s marked an “inexorable move from organizational chaos to total centralization and from aesthetic radicalism to Socialist Realism.”¹⁴ What we witness in the post-revolutionary period is markedly different from the institutional and aesthetic structures of the film industry that we commonly associate with Soviet cinema as whole, and as Vance Kepley Jr. warns, the collapse of “revolutionary socialism” with the film industry is too “intellectually tidy” to be historically accurate.¹⁵ Instead, the transformation to a centralized film industry that—by and large—privileged a realist aesthetic grew out of economic reform policies of the 1920s and not the immediate fervor of the revolution. The film industry and institutions charged with encouraging cinema, including Goskino (1922–1924), Sovinko (1924–1930), and the Association of Revolutionary Cinematography (ARK), necessarily had to appeal to mainstream audiences in order to provide capital flow to fund future film projects. The need to reach mass audiences also spoke to the new state-determined ideological focus of cinema as an educational institution. The ability to appeal to a largely illiterate population was one of the draws of cinema for Lenin and other party members. Without being able to reach these audiences and without being able to fund itself, cinema might fail its new ideological purpose.

These concrete financial needs were in constant competition with the aesthetic ambitions of filmmakers who positioned an avant-garde style as in line with their political beliefs. While director-theorists like Sergei Eisenstein sought out a radical cinematic mode that, in their view, better accommodated their revolutionary politics, socialist realism ultimately won out as the aesthetic that would define silent and early-sound Soviet cinema. This success was tied to the economic reform policies of the time. Youngblood, for example, locates 1924 as the “turning point” in Soviet cinema as the post-revolutionary period (and its institutional disorder and radical aesthetic) gave way to what we might call a reform cinema, which was grounded in a “more realistic appraisal of the vast problems facing Soviet cinema.”¹⁶ This aesthetic mode would find forceful articulation with the advent of sound technology beginning in the 1930s. Silent Soviet cinema thereby ended in a place vastly different from where it had begun. Whereas the period immediately following the revolution was abstract and ideologically charged, a decade later it was grounded, both institutionally and aesthetically, in the practical economic concerns that had overtaken Soviet society by that time.

The history of early Soviet cinema urges a reimagining of the relationship between revolution and film by reminding us that revolutionary ideology is just one aspect of the overdetermined reforms that ultimately reconstitute film industries following tremendous political change. Yet this Soviet history does not necessarily account for the role of state control in post-revolutionary film industries. Although film historiography has long positioned Soviet cinema as the earliest example of state-controlled cinema, Lenin’s 1919 decree nationalizing cinema actually did more to decentralize filmmaking than to consolidate control over it.¹⁷ In fact, a common complaint among members of the early Soviet film community was the lack of financial and ideological intervention on the part of the Communist Party, despite the leadership’s rhetoric about the importance of cinema. The Soviet case comprised filmmakers who, despite documented political differences,¹⁸ were still committed to the ideals of the revolution and to communist rule, even as they succumbed to more moderate economic policies. Many filmmakers, for example, decried the semicapitalist New Economic Policy as an ideological failure,¹⁹ but this policy, which excluded state subvention in cinematic matters, revived the economy and cleared the way for the artistic successes of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov in the mid-1920s.²⁰

To view the absence of state control as cause for criticism rather than for celebration may strike us as incongruous with our understanding of film industries today, particularly in those cinemas where the state and filmmakers seem to be at constant odds. And, indeed, the history of early Soviet cinema does not tell us much about what happened to the resistance implicit in revolutionary cinema as it made its way through the apparatuses of state control, just as the historiography of early Soviet cinema cannot accommodate the global technological and economic flows that have consumed political turmoil since the mid-twentieth century. But to study state-controlled film industries in our current era of globalization is to acknowledge a genealogy of revolutionary cinema. From censorship in contemporary Chinese cinema to the financial backing of the film industry in the early years of the Islamic Republic of Iran, many contemporary states’ vested interest in cinema can be traced back to the cultural and political revolutions that preceded them.

In Iran the revolution that redefined state control of cinema was part of a global series of anti-imperial struggles. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, from Central and South America to the heart of Africa and onward to the furthest reaches of Asia, liberation movements redrew the borders of sovereignty on the world map as nations sought to expel colonial control and influence. These upheavals also transformed the political value of cinema, and world cinema of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s became implicated in the political movements of the time not just with its ability to educate and propagate but also in its willingness to resist hegemony by refusing to participate in economically powerful and culturally privileged film industries, especially Hollywood. Third Cinema, a theory and practice of filmmaking first coined by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, powerfully spoke to this new direction in world cinema. Solanas and Getino, in their treatise “Towards a Theory of Third Cinema” (1969), built on Frantz Fanon’s call in The Wretched of the Earth for the creation of a national culture that is entrenched in revolutionary struggle.²¹

Because early theorists of Third Cinema initially conceived of it as an instrument for anti-imperial revolutions, the movement could not be sustained forever. Just as the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s eventually came to an end, by this logic so too must the aesthetic movements explicitly tied to them. Scholars have theorized a number of models for thinking about the continued relevance and legacy of Third Cinema. Teshome Gabriel, for example, expanded the definition of Third Cinema to focus less on “where it is made” and more on how it opposes “imperialism and class oppression in all their ramifications and manifestations.”²² In this way, African American independent cinema could be just as much a part of the ideological project of Third Cinema as Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile (1975–1979). Other scholars have begun to question how the energy of Third Cinema has transformed in light of the globalization that grew directly out of the postcolonial movements of the late twentieth century. Hamid Naficy, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and others have looked to transnationalism, including diasporic filmmaking and hybridity, to examine how the critiques of power from Third Cinema have been reconfigured in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.²³

At the same time that these works construct valuable frameworks for thinking more expansively about world cinema systems, we also need fresh approaches that account for the fate of national film industries and their engagement with local and global discourses following the revolutions of the mid- to late twentieth century. Reform Cinema in Iran uses cinema in the Islamic Republic of Iran as a case study to propose a model for analyzing post–Third Cinema aesthetics that are organized nationally rather than transnationally and invested in local political and legal debates rather than just in the economic flows of globalization. Such a framework does not, however, attempt to undercut the real effect that the global movement of media has had on the Iranian film industry, nor does it attempt to devalue the cultural and financial role that international film festivals have had on film production in the country. Instead, Reform Cinema in Iran demonstrates that even those art films destined for the festival circuit found articulation in the country’s trade publications and contributed to the discourse of reform that swept through Iran at this time. The model used here, which integrates film analysis with archival sources and industry research, ultimately seeks to understand how film industries reconfigure the momentum of Third Cinema outside of revolutionary ideology. Whereas Robert Lang’s recent work New Tunisian Cinema powerfully reminds us of the continuing importance of resistance to these postcolonial cinemas,²⁴ the present book, by tracing the transformation from revolutionary cinema to reform cinema in the Islamic Republic of Iran, asks that we imagine a state-controlled postcolonial cinema that is political not just in its ability to resist but also by the very nature of its collaboration with mainstream political movements.

That theories of Third Cinema “undergird” Iranian cinema is significant insofar as it suggests the extent to which the political and aesthetic revolutions that we witness in the Islamic Republic are wrapped up in larger global trends, in the anti- and postcolonial struggles of the so-called Third World.²⁵ As much as cinema within the Islamic Republic is a national cinema, determined by unique policies, industrial structures, discourses, and filmic grammar,²⁶ it is also representative of the reform cinemas that have transformed film industries around the world. Reform Cinema in Iran thereby attends to the particularities of Iranian cinema in order to posit a reform cinema as the logical aftereffect of revolutionary cinema globally.

The history of Iranian cinema during the Islamic Republic’s first decade, as the revolution of 1979 gave way to the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988, especially spoke to the ideals of Third Cinema as the recently established state developed new economic structures and systems of control in order to resist the financial and cultural logic of Hollywood. This project was paramount because the United States had been one of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s strongest allies and revolutionary discourse collapsed American values with the monarchy’s corruption. To resist Hollywood (and other North American and European) aesthetics and structures was, therefore, to reaffirm one’s commitment to the revolution. Just as in the Soviet case, the revolution initially created instability for the film industry, so immediately following the revolution audiences depended largely on foreign imports, particularly those films that had been banned during the shah’s reign. The most popular of these films, such Guzman’s The Battle of Chile and Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966), fit squarely within the Third Cinema movement and thus gestured to the Islamic Republic’s early commitment to revolutionary cinema.

The consolidation of the Islamic Republic’s power and the escalation of the Iran-Iraq War in the early 1980s, however, demanded that the state encourage local filmmaking that would attest specifically to the Islamic citizenship that the young republic imagined for itself. From its very conception, this goal faced a number of interwoven challenges, both financially and ideologically. First, the film industry needed a supply of new filmmakers, producers, actors, and technicians who were committed to the ideals of the revolution, especially since the Pahlavi-era film industry was still associated with the monarchy’s decadence. Second, a system of “supervision” (nezārat) needed to be established to ensure that the films produced spoke to the Islamic Republic’s new value system. Finally, because audiences preferred imported films, a new financial model needed to be developed so that the film industry could start making movies that would successfully compete with foreign films. In order to address these concerns, the government institutionalized filmmaking in 1982 and 1983, when it relocated all cinematic affairs to the newly established Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Vezārat-e farhang-o-ershād-e Islāmi) and established the Farabi Cinema Foundation (Bonyād-e sinemā-ye Fārābi), a joint-stock company within the ministry that, like Sovinko of early Soviet cinema, provided funding and equipment for film projects. These two institutions implemented a series of policies that sought simultaneously to encourage and to limit filmmaking. Their initiatives included workshops to train future filmmakers, especially to make films to support war causes; financial incentive policies; and, perhaps most importantly, a rigid and systematic system of censorship that included eight steps and oversaw every aspect of filmmaking, from scripts to production to exhibition.²⁷

These policies and the film aesthetic they sought to create depended on the same anti-imperialist rhetoric that had fueled the revolution. Cinema in the early years of the Islamic Republic thus maintained revolutionary fervor and helped the new state assert its legitimacy by keeping the ideals of the revolution alive. During the first several years of the Iran-Iraq War, the film industry more or less accepted these regulations. A number of the Islamic Republic’s most successful filmmakers were trained in this model, and their early work benefited from the incentives program. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, for example, was a committed revolutionary who had been jailed for political activity before the revolution and claimed that he had never seen a film until Ayatollah Khomeini sanctioned cinema after the revolution. He received training as a filmmaker as part of the war effort, and his early films, such as Towbeh-ye Nasuh (Nasuh’s repentance, 1983), are didactic explorations into the nature of morality and the centrality of Islam to the redemption of both the individual and the nation. Makhmalbaf’s early career exemplified the Islamic Republic’s early efforts within the film industry, what we might call “revolutionary cinema,” which sought to create a new Islamicate cinema that supported the revolutionary ideology that continued to affirm the Islamic Republic’s authority at this time.

Toward the end of the war, however, filmmakers and producers began to push back against the censorship that had come to define film production. The release of Bahram Beyzaie’s Bāshu, gharibeh-ye kuchak (Bashu, the little stranger, 1989), for example, was delayed by three years because the director refused to implement more than eighty changes that the censors had demanded. When the film was finally released, it became the first film produced in the Islamic Republic to feature a female character gazing directly at the camera, a scene that challenged the modesty laws that had previously informed patterns of censorship.²⁸ And this battle between state control (e.g., censorship) and the filmmaker has come to characterize our understanding of contemporary Iranian cinema. More recently, for example, when Jodāi-ye Nader az Simin (A Separation, 2011) won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 2012, the director, Asghar Farhadi, used his acceptance speech to make a political statement. He claimed that Iranian culture had been buried under a “heavy dust of politics,” and the international response to his speech encapsulates the way in which audiences have come to understand the relationship between cinema and politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Commentators lauded Farhadi’s bravery and suggested that he might not be able to return to Iran because of his remarks.²⁹ The idea that an award-winning director would not be able to go home because he publicly mentioned politics captures the exotic appeal of Iranian cinema for international audiences. A thriving cinema has developed despite a government that seems to work against it with rigid censorship policies and an unfair legal system, and within this scheme film becomes a site of resistance, pushing back against an oppressive theocracy.

Although it might appear that the revolutionary cinema of the 1980s completely redirected itself to condemn the very state that created it, the history of the Iranian film industry between 1989 and 2011 tells a different story. During this period, film was a force in mainstream politics and not just part of its opposition. Starting in the early 1990s, an intimate relationship developed between the popular reformist movement and the film industry, and the two institutions supported each other in an unlikely partnership. This relationship is far more complex than scholars have acknowledged, and it exposes a reformist history of Iranian cinema that has been obscured by research and popular discourse that privilege the cultural effects of the Islamic Revolution over the reformist policies that emerged a decade later.

In our effort to acknowledge revolutionary cinema’s transformation into a cinema of reform, the year 1989 stands paramount both because it marked the start of reconstruction efforts following the destruction of the Iran-Iraq War and because Ayatollah Khomeini died on June 3, 1989. The end of the war and the death of the revolution’s charismatic leader signaled a new period in the young republic’s history as society suddenly faced the challenge of imagining the Islamic Republic outside of war and revolution. The urgency of wartime politics meant that most Iranians had been forgiving of strict and often invasive laws, and during the war they had acknowledged that the Islamic Republic’s need to consolidate its power in order to fight a war momentarily superseded individuals’ private liberties. The tempering of nationalist discourse following the end of the war, however, opened up new possibilities to critique the state, its rigid laws, and its failure to address the economic and social problems that the revolution had promised to solve. The opportunity to critique was further made possible by the death of Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s first Supreme Leader and the authoritative voice of the revolution. His death initiated political factionalism in Iran as competing political factions attempted to reconcile the often contradictory policies that they inherited from Khomeini’s leadership.³⁰

Political reform (eslāhtalabi) was a loosely connected political faction that emerged during this transformative moment in Iran’s contemporary history. What began as a philosophical and theological project by the likes of Mehdi Bazargan and Abdolkarim Soroush, who argued in favor of pluralistic interpretations of Shi‘i Islam,³¹ soon became a moderate political movement that broadly supported democratic reforms. The discourse of reform, a moderate move within the political system, demarcated a transformation in the epistemological value of revolution as its meaning turned away from radical politics and instead came to represent conservative policy within the Islamic Republic. In other words, the presence of political reform, which was necessarily more moderate than the utopic ideals of the revolution, relocated revolutionary ideology within Iranian discourse as a conservative stronghold rather than an articulation of the leftist, radical movement it had once been.

Reform within the Islamic Republic, since its inception in the late 1980s, has shared a special relationship with cinema and the film industry, and this unique partnership is exemplified in the career of Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, whose presidency between 1997 and 2005 marked the height of political reform in the country. Khatami, who was born on September 29, 1943, and was trained both in Western philosophy at the University of Isfahan and in a traditional seminary in Qom, was serving as the head of the Islamic Center in Hamburg, Germany, when the events of the revolution escalated. After the success of the revolution, Khomeini personally urged Khatami to return to Iran in order to serve in the new Islamic Republic’s administration. He returned in 1980 and has since held a number of high-level posts within the Iranian government, including a stint as a representative in the Iranian parliament or Majles (1980–1981), the chief of Keyhan Publishing (1981–1982), the head of Islamic Propagation (1986–1989), and the director of the National Library (1992–1997).

Khatami’s special relationship with the film industry, however, began during his two terms as the minister of culture and Islamic guidance (1982–1986 and 1989–1992), and it continued during his presidency (1997–2005). The partnership that developed between Khatami and the film industry during these periods was multifaceted and included support but also contempt, policies that helped create a globally successful national cinema but also apparatuses that controlled, limited, and discouraged filmmaking. Above all, this partnership was in fact a partnership, one that comprised negotiation, mutual support, and censure on both sides. Khatami’s first term within the ministry was particularly fraught with the emotions and contradictions that would come to define this partnership. Khatami took his position within the ministry the same year that it took on oversight of the film industry, which foresaw the political, ideological, and philosophical entanglement that would ultimately change the course of both political reform and cinema within the Islamic Republic. When Khatami assumed control of the ministry in 1982, filmmakers hailed it as “the year that love entered cinema.”³² Khatami and his team, including Fakhreddin Anvar as the deputy of cinematic affairs and Mohammad Beheshti as head of the newly established Farabi Cinema Foundation, initiated a plan to encourage quality filmmaking by sponsoring instructional workshops, creating a rating system, and offering tax breaks and other financial incentives.³³

At the same time, though, as Saeed Zeydabadi-nejad notes, the ministry during this period viewed its mission as providing “support” (hemāyat) and “guidance” (hedāyat), on the one hand, and “supervision” (nezārat), a euphemism for censorship, on the other.³⁴ On July 3, 1982, the Majles, with the support of the ministry, passed the resolution “Nezārat bar nemāyesh-e film va eslāyd va vidiyu va sodur-e parvaneh namāyesh-e ānhā” (Supervision over the exhibition of films, slides, and video and issuing their exhibition permits). This document, which would be updated and revised over the years, set the standards for film censorship in the country, and it included, among other stipulations, regulations that films and other visual media could not “disparage Islam,” “encourage corruption,” or “assist in spreading the cultural, political, or economic influence of foreigners.”³⁵ Khatami’s first term as minister of culture and Islamic guidance thereby contributed to the creation of a revolutionary cinema, one in which the ideological fervor of the revolution was privileged alongside the status of film as an educational tool.

If Khatami’s first term as minister of culture and Islamic guidance consolidated the film industry’s efforts into a revolutionary cinema, then his second term was the genesis of a reform cinema. His reentrance into the ministry, of course, coincided with Khomeini’s death in 1989, and the political landscape in Iran was undergoing tremendous change. The period between 1989 and 1992 is well documented as a golden period for filmmaking in Iran because the ministry, at Khatami’s urging, offered a looser interpretation of its duty to “supervise” film production.³⁶ During this period, some of the most controversial films in the Islamic Republic’s history made their way successfully through the ministry’s censorship process, including Bāshu, gharibeh-ye kuchak and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Nowbat-e ‘āsheqi (Time for love, 1991). Khatami would ultimately resign from the ministry in 1992, and his resignation letter cited his frustration with what he considered a “violation of all legal, religious, ethical, and secular norms…in the field of culture and art.”³⁷ Khatami’s work in the ministry between 1989 and 1992 and his resignation together signaled a major shift in his personal politics, and cinema played an important role in this development. Conservative policy makers were critical of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance during this period, and with the release of certain controversial films, such as Makhmalbaf’s Time for Love, Khatami was forced publicly to defend the films and his ministry’s decisions. In these statements, he began to articulate his emerging reformist ideas for the first time. Cinema thereby became a rallying point for early discourses of reform. Khatami’s second tenure within the ministry established the dialectical dynamic of reform cinema as the film industry benefited from but also contributed to Khatami’s evolving political beliefs.

Following his resignation from the ministry, Khatami took up a much less visible position as the head of the National Library. As a result, when he emerged as a presidential candidate five years later in the spring of 1997, he was virtually unknown. The film industry, however, had not forgotten his support during his last several years as the minister of culture and Islamic guidance, and it is not overstatement to suggest that the film industry’s participation in his campaigning efforts helped ensure his election to the presidency on May 23, 1997. That was the first year that candidates were allowed to broadcast campaign movies, and established filmmakers such as Seyfollah Dad, Behruz Afkhami, and Ahmad Reza Darvish directed movies in support of his platform and also later found success in Khatami’s administration. These efforts transformed the way that voters interacted with politicians, and they also set the precedent for a series of documentary and narrative films that explicitly represented Khatami and his reformist movement. Filmmakers not only used their technical expertise to support Khatami but also leveraged their popularity to espouse him publicly. For example, Mohsen Makhmalbaf recorded an interview with Khatami that highlighted his support. Khatami’s campaign managers released the interview two days before the election in order to heighten its impact.³⁸ Khatami’s campaign marked reform’s entrance on the screen at the same time that it signaled the film industry’s attempt to steer political change in the Islamic Republic.

Khatami’s supporters collectively became known as Jonbesh-e dovom-e Khordād, or the Second of Khordād movement, a name that referenced Khatami’s unexpected victory in 1997. The movement gave body to a reformist effort in Iran, and political reform moved from an abstraction to a critical mass of supporters who had rallied around Khatami. His campaign had sought to reset the terms of public discourse in the Islamic Republic, and Ervand Abrahamian notes that, because of Khatami, terms such as “democracy,” “rule of law,” “civil society,” “human rights,” and “citizenship” supplanted the country’s revolutionary rhetoric, which had included terms such as “imperialism,” “jihad,” “gharbzadegi” (Westoxification), “revolution,” and “martyrdom.”³⁹ This important semantic shift also signaled the changing and liberalizing cultural atmosphere in the country at the time. The terms of Khatami’s campaign were not, however, only his domain, nor were they stable or fixed categories.

The film industry became an institution that facilitated the movement of this language into public discourse, and certain filmmakers sought either to translate the philosophical underpinnings of these concepts for public audiences or to challenge or refute Khatami’s use of them. Of the concepts in Khatami’s political platform, civil society and dialogue among civilizations most captured the film industry’s imagination. Civil society, or jāme‘eh-ye madani in Persian, was the main pillar of Khatami’s political platform, but it was also the most nebulous of all his proposals. He understood the factional nature of Iranian politics at the time—the extent to which a single decision or even a word could fracture the entire political system—and, as a result, he refused to explain the term in much detail. In one particularly famous example, Khatami, in an interview with the progressive journal Zanān (Women), suggested civil society as the answer to the problems that Iranian women faced, both politically and socially; however, he never explained exactly what he meant by “civil society.”⁴⁰ In the absence of a fixed definition, the term lawlessly swept through society, open to debate. Mohsen Kadivar, a reformist theologian at the time, would argue that civil society operated in opposition to velāyat-e faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist),⁴¹ the system of governance within the Islamic Republic that Khomeini put into place to consolidate his political power. As velāyat-e faqih’s antidote, civil society became a stopgap for all of the Islamic Republic’s problems, and young people in the country understood it as the key to freedom, tolerance, and respect between citizens and the government. Within this indeterminateness, the film industry was particularly captivated by civil society as an opening to freedom of media and as a corrective to the social problems that plagued life in the Islamic Republic.

If civil society sought to reset the terms of political and social life within the young republic, then Khatami’s 1998 proposal to the United Nations for a dialogue among civilizations, or goftegu-ye tamaddon-hā, was an effort to reintegrate Iran into the international community. The United Nations was so enthusiastic about Khatami’s call for worldwide cultural exchange that it declared the 2001 the “Year of the Dialogue Among Civilizations.” The Iranian film industry was implicated in this new policy in a number of ways. In his first speech to the UN in November 1998, Khatami used film as an example of thinking about ways of encouraging intercultural understanding,⁴² and there is historical evidence to suggest that filmmakers and enthusiasts picked up on Khatami’s recommendation. The Search for Common Ground (SFCG) organized the “US-Iran Cinema Exchange” in 1999 in collaboration with Iran’s House of Cinema. The meetings to plan this exchange took place in Cannes in 1998 and 1999, and planners identified a number of events in both Iran and the United States at which Iranian and American representatives would be present. Whereas the impact of such an exchange on cultural dialogue is clear, the political exchange it facilitated is also noteworthy. As a part of the agreement, both parties agreed to facilitate entry visas, the United States agreed to waive fingerprinting for participants, and the possibility of equipment donations made through a third party was also suggested.⁴³ These successful exchanges were the culmination of Mohammad Khatami’s call to international dialogue. At the same time, Khatami’s emphasis on repairing Iran’s international reputation became a point of critique for filmmakers, who felt like he was ignoring the country’s domestic problems.

Khatami was elected president just days after Abbas Kiarostami’s Ta‘m-e gilās (Taste of cherry, 1997) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and many pundits speculated that the win at Cannes was, in part, international endorsement for Khatami. Such a reading of Kiarostami’s win shows how international film festivals and the circulation of capital that they facilitate contributed to the development of a reform cinema in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Khatami continued his support of the film industry during the course of his eight-year tenure as president. At certain points, the film industry even encountered freedom similar to what they had enjoyed during Khatami’s final years in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. During this time, a number of films that had been previously banned—most notably Davud Mirbaqeri’s Ādam barfi (The snowman, 1994), a film about an Iranian man stranded in Turkey so desperate to get to the United States that he decides to dress up as a woman in the hopes of attracting an American suitor to secure citizenship—were reissued exhibition permits. This period also witnessed new thematic possibilities within film, including explicitly political subject matter, critiques of the Iran-Iraq War, and love stories.

But films from this period did more than simply benefit from the liberal cultural policy that Khatami’s presidency encouraged; they also actively engaged the rhetoric that formed the base of his political platform. They participated in defining terms like “civil society,” “democracy,” and “rule of law” within the context of the Islamic Republic. This work was particularly important because Khatami, walking a thin political line between moderates and conservatives, never explicitly outlined what he meant by some of these terms, especially “civil society.”⁴⁴ The most common criticism that Iranians launched against Khatami during his eight-year presidency was the futility of his efforts. His reformist politics remained largely abstract, and his attempts to change specific laws failed because he faced a largely conservative parliament, especially after his first two years in office. Filmmakers also critiqued Khatami and his ineffectualness. The fact that their films were released despite this explicit political critique affirmed the moderate cultural atmosphere that Khatami sought to foster. Civil society, democracy, and even a dialogue among civilizations required freedom within media, and the film industry’s role in determining that freedom was unparalleled.

During Khatami’s presidency, films by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Masud Kimiai, and others sought to visualize a place for “a dialogue of civilizations” and the “rule of law” in contemporary Iranian society, and films by Abbas Kiarostami and Bahman Farmanara spoke to the ways in which changing technology, especially the rise of digital video, participated in the democratic ideals that Khatami’s presidency promised. Filmmakers also produced films in order to influence specific policies, like Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Alefbā-ye afghan (Afghan alphabet, 2002), which brought the plight of Afghan refugees in Iran to the public’s consciousness, particularly the fate of children who were denied access to Iranian schools because they entered the country illegally. Makhmalbaf has stated, “By showing the film to the government of Iran, during Khatami’s presidency, we managed to change the law in favor of these innocent refugee children. And as a result the following year, the door of the Iranian schools were opened to half a million of these children.”⁴⁵ All of these efforts within cinema from this period demonstrate the extent to which the film industry was ideologically wrapped up in Khatami and this discourse of political reform.

At the same time, the film industry’s entanglement with reform during this period was not just limited to discursive operations. Khatami’s presidency oversaw the rise of institutional support for cinema. For example, in 1998, just a year after Khatami’s election, reformist politicians founded the Cinema Museum (Muzeh-ye sinemā), the only museum in Iran dedicated to the exhibition and preservation of the history of the Iranian film industry. The museum officially opened its doors to the public in its current location in Ferdows Garden in 2002, and Khatami was present at its inauguration. Between 1997 and 2005, there was also a surge in cinema-related publications, including film journals and book publications, and in the eight years that Khatami was president there were more cinema-related publications than the sum total of such publications during the Islamic Republic’s first eighteen years. Together these developments marked the emergence of the robust film culture that we typically associate with Iranian cinema today.

Reform Cinema in Iran opens an archive of political speeches, religious sermons, newspaper editorials, and films that engage Khatami’s relationship with the film industry in order to establish reform cinema as the inheritor of the revolutionary cinema that determined the Iranian film industry during the first decade of the Islamic Republic. This book is organized chronologically, and it proposes a series of case studies that together tell the story of reform cinema in the Islamic Republic. Although any number of films might gesture toward Khatami and the reformist movement that he helped inspire, only those films with an explicit relationship with Khatami form the basis of the case studies that appear in this book. Such connections include representations of Khatami on screen or within the narrative, films about which Khatami made public statements, or instances of reception in which audiences made a connection between Khatami and a particular film. Each case study places archival research and, where available, industry data alongside film analysis in order to bring forward a history of reform in Iran’s contemporary cinematic tradition. Limiting the book’s empirical evidence in this manner helps clear the way for future efforts to classify or understand films vis-à-vis their relationship to reform cinema.

Iran’s reform cinema, which began in 1989 with the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the end of the Iran-Iraq War, depended on a dialogue between the film industry and Mohammad Khatami. Reform Cinema in Iran, in addition to telling the history of this transformative period of Iranian film, theorizes the visual language that developed alongside this partnership. Reform cinema in Iran was determined by aesthetic decisions that privileged the revival of mystic love, the use of Tehran as a metaphoric site of political and social reform, reconfigurations of perceptions of time, and the democratization of filmmaking with the use of video technology. To this aim, chapter 1 establishes the genesis of reform cinema in the Islamic Republic by examining the circumstances leading to Khatami’s resignation from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. This chapter investigates the case of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s controversial film Time for Love. The release of Time for Love, which openly depicts a married woman’s affair, sparked a media frenzy. Conservative religious leaders, policy makers, and commentators blamed Khatami for its release because the film had gone through the ministry’s inspection process. The criticism launched against Khatami became so severe that he was forced to respond publicly and defend his support of the film. In this chapter, I examine the debates about Time for Love as they unfolded in newspaper editorials, political speeches, and religious sermons. These debates instruct us that the film industry helped to shape certain reformist ideas in the early 1990s, and Time for Love’s appropriation of a mystic aesthetic appealed to these budding reformists. During the early 1990s, for those intellectuals who had devoted themselves to Khomeini, the revolution, and the Islamic Republic, mysticism represented a means of reconciling commitment to Islamic governance with the need to create a more flexible system for political reform.

Chapter 2 takes as its starting point the 1997 policy that allowed campaign movies for the first time, and it examines how filmmakers have represented Khatami during elections. This chapter considers two films by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad—Zir-e pust-e shahr (Under the skin of the city, 2000), a feature film that takes place during the 1997 elections, and Ruzegār-e mā… (Our times…, 2002), a documentary about the 2001 elections—and it charts Bani-Etemad’s critique of the reformist movement by analyzing her portrayal of urbanism and her appropriation of the documentary form. Before Khatami’s election a complicated process of censorship ensured that politics remained offscreen, but these films both openly represent and criticize the political system. In this way reform cinema participated in the very democratic ideals that undergirded Khatami’s reform efforts.

Whereas chapter 2 demonstrates new political opportunities that were possible within reform cinema, chapter 3 speaks to the ways in which reform cinema was wrapped up in the technological changes during Khatami’s presidency. In particular, video technology, which was banned in Iran between 1982 and 1993, gained widespread acceptance during Khatami’s presidency. Meanwhile, the proliferation of digital video at the beginning of the twenty-first century was changing what it meant to make and watch movies around the world. Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Dah (10, 2002) and Bahman Farmanara’s Bu-ye kāfur, ‘atr-e yās (The smell of camphor, the scent of jasmine, 2000) speak to this changing technology, and they play with video in order to show how this technology was democratizing filmmaking in Iran. This chapter contextualizes Kiarostami’s and Farmanara’s films by suggesting a history of video technology in Iran, one that demonstrates that the changing cultural value of video developed in tandem with Khatami’s discourse of reform.

Chapter 4 moves beyond the art-house films that typically determine the scholarship on Iranian cinema and asks how Khatami’s presidency affected popular cinema as well. A comparison between Masud Kimiai’s E‘terāz (Protest, 1999) and Qeysar (Qeysar, 1969) foregrounds a discussion about the fate of the tough-guy film, a genre popular both before and after the revolution. Scholars and film critics have suggested that Qeysar captured and perhaps even incited the violence of the revolution by celebrating vigilante justice and creating a space in which one’s moral code supersedes the rule of law. With Protest Kimiai directly addresses his earlier film, and he rewrites the narrative of violence that made Qeysar famous. Protest, which is set during Khatami’s presidency, kills its vigilante character and replaces him with a new hero, a thoughtful, sensitive man who discusses politics and thinks critically about the reformist movement. In this way, Protest announces the death of the tough-guy genre in Iranian cinema, a death initiated not by revolution but rather by the rise of the reformist movement. Because Protest both appealed to and represented average Iranians, and not just a particular class of intellectuals, it speaks to the unfolding of reform into popular discourse, and it suggests the important role that cinema played in facilitating that move.

In 2005 Khatami’s second term came to an end, and the limit of two consecutive terms precluded him from seeking reelection. His successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, espoused a hardline conservative platform that radically differed from Khatami’s moderate policies, and he immediately began tightening control over the film industry. Chapter 5 attends to the legacy of reform cinema by examining Massoud Bakhshi’s Tehrān anār nadārad (Tehran has no more pomegranates, 2007), an experimental documentary, and the music video “‘Eshq-e sor‘at” (Love of speed, 2007), performed by the underground band Kiosk, directed by Ahmad Kiarostami, and released on YouTube. Bakhshi’s film and Kiosk’s video establish that reform cinema as an aesthetic movement functions outside of the temporal limits of its political antecedent. Although both works were released two years after Khatami’s presidency ended and did not benefit directly from his cultural liberalism, they still participate in central reformist debates. Their experimentation with form further suggests that the reformist aesthetic possesses a momentum that permits it to develop and transform without explicit contact with the political movement that inspired it.