>> Speaker 1: From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:05 ^M00:00:15 >> Mary Jane Deeb: Let me welcome you to the African Middle East Division on the beginning of Spring. I know it doesn't feel quite like it, but I would like to wish you a belated happy [inaudible] but this event is framed within the lecture series for [inaudible] so welcome to the African Middle East Division, and I'm Mary Jane Deeb. I'm the chief of the division, and I'm really happy to be able with my colleague Hirad Dinavari to host this event today. Unfortunately the head of the [inaudible] section who should have been here today has not been able to come. It's due to something in the family. But the African Middle East Division, and this particular room, has hosted numerous programs, and has hosted the entire series that Hirad Dinavari, our Persian specialist, will be talking about in a minute. It's a lecture series that started after our exhibit in 2014, "1,000 Years of the Persian Book." And that was the first exhibit of its kind that highlighted the Persian collections here at the Library. And brought in hundreds of thousands of people visited them over a period of six months. And it is this way of putting forth the collections, putting forth the items that we hold, and sharing them with the public because we're sharing them not only with you here in this room, but as this program is being webcast. We're sharing this program with the rest of the world because those programs will be put on our screen, the screen of the Library of Congress, and are accessible anywhere around the globe. So if you have friends, people you know in Iran, or anywhere else, you can let them know that we had this program today. And this program is on popular Iranian cinema before the revolution, and it is presented by Doctor Pedram Partovi. The importance of this is that we do not simply bring you programs, but we bring the scholars who have studied, who have worked on these programs, who can share their experience, their expertise, their knowledge, their insights with all of us to make the collections that we hold better understood, better appreciated, by everyone. And, in a way, this is a role, the role of this division. And the role of all the divisions in the library. This division represents 78 countries. We have the whole Middle East which is rather expansionist because we are not limited by political definitions of where we stand, but rather by linguistic definitions. So Persian is spoken not only in Iran, but much further away. And in Afghanistan, in Tajikistan, and beyond. So our region goes from, you know -- from the west in Morocco, and through to the east, to Afghanistan, and northwards to the whole of Central Asia, and the Caucuses. This is just the Near East. Then we have Africa, and that is the whole continent of Africa, every single country of Africa. And then we have the Hebraic world which is -- represents not only a region, not only a place, but also the collections of Hebraic and Judaic around the world. So with this [inaudible] I will let my colleague Hirad Dinavari introduce the speaker today. Hirad. >> Hirad Dinavari: Thank you, Mary Jane. Appreciate that. Want to thank you all for coming during the workday. I know it's busy and it's lunch time and this is a [inaudible] lecture opening. Essentially every year we do our Persian book lecture series in the Spring period around the [inaudible] season, and we usher in the season and the lecture series together. Our speaker for today is Doctor Pedram Partovi who is a historian of medieval and modern Muslim -- Medieval and Muslim -- I'm sorry. Doctor Pedram Partovi is a historian of the medieval and modern Muslim world. His current research focuses on the history of youth movements, and the role in creating and destructing the political order in Iran and the greater Middle East. This project springs from his earlier work on popular Iranian cinema which is -- which in its depictions of male heroism and problematization of the effort of state agents to eliminate or to co-opt in the name of modern progress. Doctor Partovi is a lecturer, and has given many classes currently at American University, and is fluent in Persian, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, and also is familiar or is knowledgeable in French as well. And he is going to speak about the book that he has recently done on popular Iranian cinema, and I'm not going to take more time, and let him start. Thank you. ^M00:07:12 [ Applause ] ^M00:07:15 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: Well, first of all, thank you very much to Mary Jane and Hirad, and to the Library of Congress staff for inviting me. Yes. I'm going to talk a little bit about the book that I've recently published. Maybe I'll just show you very briefly where you can get it. So [laughs] it's published by Routledge. I realize it's very expensive, and I certainly don't expect you to buy it. But if you would like to read it, there's an ebook version that's $50, and in the future I've been told that there will be a paperback version as well that will be cheaper. But yes. Ask your library to buy it for their collection. ^M00:08:05 ^M00:08:10 So I want to talk about popular Iranian cinema before the Islamic revolution. Some of you might know something about Iranian cinema. There's been an enormous amount of literature about Iranian films. You may have also seen some Iranian films. But the Iranian films that we have seen, we have heard about, we read about, here in the United States are not necessarily the films that many Iranians in Iran have watched. Most critics and academics have presented the history of Iranian cinema in a very selective manner with many gaps. And from some accounts one might conclude that the Iranian cinema is no more than a few decades old, either taking shape with the establishment of the Islamic Republic or even later after the Iran Iraq war in the 1980s. What we do learn about the cinema in Iran before the Islamic revolution in these histories is often limited to a handful of pioneering films and filmmakers in the late 1960s and 1970s that supposedly paved the way for globally recognized and increasingly globally oriented post revolutionary Iranian cinema. So what I'm doing in this book is looking at what's been largely left out or dismissed in these film histories, the products of the prolific commercial film industry that first took form after World War II, but reached the peak of its popularity in the 1960s and early 1970s. We're not talking about a small number of films here. Roughly 1,000 domestic studio productions were released in Iran from the late 1940s until the late 1970s when the commercial industry essentially collapsed. ^M00:10:02 And during its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s, there were on average about 60 releases every year. Iran was also at this time undergoing rapid social and economic change coinciding with the dramatic expansion of the state's role in peoples' lives. So I try to answer a few questions in this book. And these include, why does a commercial film industry emerge at this particular moment in time? Who exactly made up the audiences of these films? What kinds of ideas, themes, and images regularly found their way in to these films? Did the seemingly formulaic elements have any links to older forms of entertainment in Iran or in the wider region or were the productions of the late [inaudible] era simply secondary copies of Hollywood titles, as their critics claimed? And if they weren't just poorly done homages to Hollywood films, then what might these films have to tell us about Iran in those final decades of Pahlavi rule? Was social and political critique part of their entertainment? How, in other words, did these films comment on the unprecedented efforts of Pahlavi elites to transform the lives of ordinary citizens? Well, we don't have enough time to go through all of the arguments in the book today. Hopefully those who are interested will go out and buy it or ask their libraries to buy it. I'm not too proud to beg. Given the lack of familiarity that non Iranians have with these films, I thought that the best use of our time today is to simply give you a sense of the unique origins of the commercial industry in Iran, and some of the things that came to define the films that domestic studios produced. I also want to address critiques of these films that have contributed to their absence from scholarly accounts of Iranian cinema. And finally I'd like to show you some clips from these films, given that so few people in America have ever come across them. But I will warn you in advance that the picture and sound quality of these clips is not great. Again, because of their poor reputations they've been largely ignored by both state and private organizations in a position to preserve them for future generations. There are some efforts being made in Iran to do something about this, but again money is always the issue. And even though there are some efforts, these are very, very limited ones. I mean there's been a sort of remarkable consensus among cultural and political elites both before and after the Islamic revolution about the poor quality and cultural inauthenticity of this cinema. Nevertheless millions upon millions of Iranians went to see these films in the theaters. They bought fan magazines every week filled with interviews and posters of their favorite film stars. I'll show you a couple of them. So this is Fardin who is maybe the biggest star of the 1960s and 1970s on the cover of one of these fan magazines. This is Googoosh who is both a film and pop music star in the '60s and 1970s and on the cover of another one of these film magazines. And Behrouz Vossoughi who is perhaps the biggest male star of the 1970s on the cover of the same film and art magazine. Well, the fans would buy these magazines from the newsstands every week. They'd obsess over their favorite stars' personal lives. They'd send in mountains of fan letters. Every one of these -- Every issue of these magazines would have pages, not one page, but pages, devoted to fan letters. Even in more recent decades these films and their stars continue to have a hold over Iranians at home and in the Diaspora. So a few years ago in 2000, in fact, Mohammad Ali Fardin died, and his funeral was held in Tehran. It was not something that was widely publicized, but thousands of people showed up to this funeral. And there are some videos of it circulating on YouTube if you want to see. And the most surprising thing to me is that many of the people, many of the attendees of this funeral, were young people, people that were born well after these films were ever released, for that matter. So we can't assume that the younger generation is totally unaware of the Pahlavi era of popular cinema. In fact, these films are very much in circulation by satellite television and home video in Iran down to the present day. Nevertheless there's a very strange culture of denial surrounding these films, especially for a certain class of Iranians. And I'm talking about the educated middle classes and above. And that's the reason why I really became interested in these films in the first place. I would ask my family members about their memories of the Pahlavi era of popular cinema, and they would laugh. And they would say, "No. No. We never saw any of those films. Those movies were for taxi drivers and porters." The uncultured. The unsophisticated. But then after a couple of minutes of talking with them they would rattle off the entire plot summaries of five of their favorite films. So it made me wonder what it was about this cinema that both attracted and seemingly repelled its audiences. And this is really what the book is about. Well, the popular commercial film industry in Iran really has its start after World War II. There wasn't much in the way of film making or film going before then. Government officials weren't terribly interested in the cinema as a potential instrument of state policy. They were far more concerned with censorship than they were with cultivating a homegrown industry. And, in fact, the few efforts that were made before World War II to establish a film industry were blocked by various government ministries. So with little in the way of domestic production, the growth of cinema halls was also stunted. I mean right down until 1940 there were no more than about 35 cinemas in the entire country. And what cinemas existed in Tehran and in a handful of provincial cities would show Hollywood films. Some European titles, and then increasingly in the 1930s and'40s Indian and Egyptian films. But these films, none of these films, were dubbed in to Persian. The lack of dubbing meant that film going was largely limited to foreign residents and the educated classes. But even if some Iranians could understand the language, for example, of these western imports, they might not fully understand or appreciate the plots or the character interactions in these particular films. Interestingly Indian and Egyptian films became a kind of life saver for many theater operators at this time. And especially the films of people like Farid al-Atrash or [inaudible]. Many, many people went to watch these movies. And for the film exhibitors, as I say, they were a sort of godsend. They were much cheaper to purchase than other films. Audiences were more likely to come and see them in large numbers. And those audiences, even if they didn't entirely understand languages that the characters were speaking, the films themselves were at least closer in their cultural sensibilities to Iranians than many of the Western films then in release. But after World War II we have a few individuals, both inside the country and outside the country, set up studios to dub foreign films in to Persian. And most of these dubbing operations were shoestring operations that paid very little for a print of an older film that was way past its release date, and at least initially used just studio staff to dub over character voices in to Persian. But very quickly these dubbing operations became more sophisticated, and the more successful outfits would carefully choose the films with Iranian audiences in mind. They came to understand that in dubbing a film they were in some sense remaking it. That their choices would help to determine its box office success or failure. The choices that the dubbing studios made might involve changing names, sometimes the relationships between the characters, changing the dialogue, even editing or reordering scenes to better suit the narrative to Iran sensibilities. So it wasn't just a change in language. It was a change in the content that wholly Iranianized these foreign films. And perhaps the best example of these dubbed films in the '50s and '60s were John Wayne features. And, in fact, some of my relatives have told me that they can't watch John Wayne in the original language because they're so used to that dubbed over voice which was often done in a sort of south Tehrani tough guy dialect. And so it just sounds strange to them, strange and alien, to listen to John Wayne's real voice. And these dubbing efforts could also extend to film songs. I mean one of the most famous of these dubbed American films was "The Sound of Music" which was renamed in Persian [inaudible] Smiles and Laughter. I'm sorry. "Tears and Laughter." So dubbing, in a sense, became a sort of intermediary step to full fledged filmmaking in Iran, and many of the local dubbing studios would eventually make the leap to producing their own films. ^M00:20:04 The term Film Farsi or film of Farsi, meaning Persian film or film in Persian, came to be used by critics, industry people, and even fans from the 1950s onwards as a term of reference for the popular commercial cinema in Iran. But before that it was used in advertisements of dubbed films to note the replacement of the film's original language with Persian. And the critics who first popularized this term Film Farsi in reference to the products of the domestic commercial industry were in a sense trying to highlight what they believed to be the negative links between these homegrown titles and the dubbed films. So, in other words, they claimed that we can't just say that the use of the Persian language in the dubbing process makes those foreign films true to the Iranian. Neither can we say that domestic commercial productions are part of our national cultural tradition just because they're made by Iranians. They are nothing more than foreign films starring Iranian actors. Well, obviously I take exception to this and other definitions of the Film Farsi as culturally inauthentic. I mean a major aim of the book is to demonstrate that Film Farsi is one of the few modern art forms in Iran that has drawn on the cultural past to make sense of the present. Interestingly the efforts of intellectuals and some state organizations, especially from the 1960s onwards, to establish what they called a national cinema often involved making films that quite consciously rejected the stylistic conventions or narrative techniques that had come to characterize the domestic commercial cinema. Instead this new wave cinema drew inspiration from Italian neorealism and, appropriately enough, from the French Nouvelle Vague, two film movements that had expressly pitched themselves against the popular Hollywood cinema of their time. And in its reliance on a post World War II European art cinema model to counter popular tastes at home, the Iranian new wave wasn't altogether that different in its inspiration and motivation than the art cinemas that were emerging roughly around the same time in India and in Egypt. And ironically I would argue that the Iranian art cinema would appear to have a far murkier provenance than the popular cinema in Iran has had. Certainly there were some foreign -- some Film Farsi titles that were nothing more than cheap knockoffs of foreign hits, and especially American ones. But more often than not the audience recognized that, and relegated those films to box office failures. The problem that I have with critics of Film Farsi is their attempt to treat the post war commercial cinema as an undifferentiated mass. There are informal and shifting definitions of what makes a good film negotiated by industry people, by audiences, throughout this late Pahlavi era. And my book focuses on the so-called good films that struck a cord with audiences, and those good films from my perspective would appear to be drawing on older native ideas and forms of entertainment. So they were not all badly made Hollywood films with just hairier actors. These were genuinely Iranian films, as far as I'm concerned. So Film Farsi became during this post war period the primary fuel for the rapid expansion of film going in Iran. There was an explosion of theater construction in the 1950s and 1960s across the country. By 1972 there were more than 400 cinema halls in Iran, roughly a tenfold increase in three decades. And there weren't even enough prints of the films to screen in all of these theaters. So theater owners would employ motorcycle couriers to ferry film reels back and forth from one cinema to another so that the same film could be shown simultaneously. In fact, there was a Film Farsi title that was made about one of these film motorcycle couriers. Well, by contrast, today there's about 250 cinemas in the entire country while the country's population has almost tripled since the 1970s. So Film Farsi would seem to be giving this growing home audience in Iran something that they quite couldn't get elsewhere. So let's take a look at some of the conventions of Film Farsi. Well, first of all, what I will say is that it's very difficult to speak of genres in Film Farsi. I mean obviously in Hollywood too genre classification can be problematic. All you have to do is go on IMDB and you'll see, you know, every film has got three or four different genres listed under it. But with Film Farsi the operative genres in Hollywood generally don't apply. It's perhaps easier to categorize Film Farsi titles by their place in time much in the way that critics and academics have categorized Japanese cinema or Indian popular cinema. So Film Farsi has mythological stories outside of history, including episodes from the so-called Iranian national epic, "The Shahnameh" or "Book of Kings" and here's one of these Film Farsi titles about a "Shahnameh" episode. There weren't many direct adaptations of mythological tales, although what I will say is that "Shahnameh" themes, narrative themes, often appear in films of this period whether they're about a "Shahnameh" story or not. So there are certainly mythologicals. There are also historicals drawing on the post Islamic history of Iran and the surrounding world. And so here's one example of that called [inaudible]. There are perhaps even fewer examples of the historical with the censorship regime at the time playing a major role in their absence. Even this film is not quite a true historical in that it's not based on an actual historical episode, although it's certainly set in Iran's past. I mean specifically in the years after the collapse of the Safavid Empire in the 18th century. But beyond that the story is all fictional. So there are mythologicals. There are historicals. But there are also what I would call socials, sorry, which are by far the largest category of films. And these films usually focused on urban family life in contemporary Iran, and its problems. And just as I just suggested, the socials are themselves not entirely dissociated in terms of narrative structure from the mythologicals and the historicals. I mean many of the socials may be viewed as a sort of modern reworking of an older tale. All three of these film categories have dramatic elements usually rooted in some kind of class or generational conflict afflicting the social circles at the center of the films. The heroes of the films, especially those set in contemporary times, were more often than not of a low social status and even involved in petty criminal behavior. And these characters were more often than not also orphans. This family handicap helped to explain, in a sense, their low social status. I mean and it's society where family times and family honor are or ironically have become at this time seemingly crucial to one's survival. There's hardly anything worse than being an orphan. And the frequent claim that only taxi drivers and porters or either the poor and the working classes watched these films was related to the class backgrounds of the film heroes, and again also questionable theories about audience identification with the characters. Of course the problem there is that the heroic image in Iran and in the surrounding world has for some time been connected up with figures whose greatest virtue has been their exclusion from and opposition to the social order. And what some would claim to be its moral hypocrisy. And those who brought to life such characters through public storytelling or improvised theatrical performances were themselves marked as social outcasts because of their lowly status as entertainers. So I mean in Iran we have a category, a social category, of people that were known as [inaudible] which comes from this Quranic reference to the people of Lot. The idea being that these [inaudible] were both socially and even sexually deviant. But at the same time more often than not they were seen as paragons of masculinity in these -- in Iranian society. So they have this sort of strange morally ambiguous, socially ambiguous role in society. Many of them were connected up with wrestling and wrestlers, and with the House of Strength or the Zurkhani, this traditional Iranian gymnasium. And many of these [inaudible] were not only engaged in wrestling, but were also entertainers. So they were the ones that put on, for example, the Ta'zieh performances, this native theatrical tradition that is inspired by the martyrdom of the Shia Imam Hussein. But by the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, the Ta'zieh had become a sort of year-round entertainment, and had also secular topics too, not just religious ones. And so what I would argue is that these young men of the streets seemingly that are connected up with wrestling and entertainment, well they make the transition to cinema after World War II. They become in a sense the heroes of this post war commercial film industry. ^M00:30:05 And so these older representations of heroism then filter in to Film Farsi along with them. So at the center of many Film Farsi titles we have a conflict between two or more antagonistic social circles. And a narrative resolution is usually achieved through the hero's sacrifice of his own personal happiness or even personal well being to preserve the family integrity of a close friend or a lover. And so these are not all feel good happy films. They're often tragic or bittersweet. And while the dominant forms of social organization may be threatened in these films, they're not generally overturned. In fact, the social marginality of many of these Film Farsi heroes serves to further highlight their commitment to the institutions of society in which they seemingly have no stake. So I mean the very fact that they're orphans, the very fact that they're sort of street toughs living on the margins of law and society, makes them all the more -- Their actions, in a sense, makes the importance of the family institution that they don't share even more important to the audience. So there's often drama. There's often tragedy at the center of these films. But the drama is often broken up or thrown in to greater contrast with comic elements and comic interludes. And these comic moments don't just lighten the mood, but they offer some kind of guarded criticism of the social order or highlight the hypocrisy of certain characters that the drama ultimately resolves. Like the dramatic elements, the kind of indirect comic critique that we encounter in Film Farsi titles itself has roots in older forms of entertainment in Iran, especially what's known as [inaudible] or black farce which is not altogether dissimilar from the Italian tradition of Commedia dell'arte. And particular actors would specialize in these comic roles in the Film Farsi era. And some of them came to the cinema from these older theatrical traditions. This is one of the more famous of the comic sidekicks. His name is Taghi Zohoori [assumed spelling]. As I say, I mean he came from a theatrical background and then transitioned to cinema. Well, all three of these film categories, of mythological, of historical and social, could also have song sequences. And song is often the medium for communicating the deepest and most intense emotions of the characters which certainly draw on longstanding poetic traditions in Iran and the surrounding world, especially the "Masnavi" epic punctuated by the intense emotions of the [inaudible] poem. And the two moods that dominate in the Film Farsi song were [inaudible] or despair and grief, and [inaudible] or exhilaration and intoxication. I want to show you two clips where this is made eminently clear. So the first one we're going to see is from a film called "Raggaseh-ye Shahr" or "The City Dancer." Here we have again the tough guy, the street thug, as the hero of the film. This particular tough guy is played by a very famous character actor of the period, Bahman Mofid, and he's surrounded by these female cabaret performers who are sort of the female equivalent of the tough guy in many of these films. ^M00:33:38 ^M00:33:43 [ Music ] ^M00:35:07 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: Maybe we've seen enough of this one. We'll move on to the next one. ^M00:35:17 [ Music ] ^M00:36:03 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: In the interest of time, I mean obviously that's definitely a downer compared to the one that we just saw before. Well, and of course I mean critics at the time saved their most cutting barbs for the song sequences in the Film Farsi titles. From their perspective, the song served as evidence of the film's narrative incoherence or as flimsy covers for the film's thin scripts. Likewise the songs were supposedly emblematic of the audience's short attention spans which required regular breaks from the narrative action. Or were simply shamelessly pandering to the simple minded audience's desire for an escape from the drudgery of everyday life in the cinema hall. And these critiques were technically correct in that many song sequences were a break from the narrative action. And did engage, one might say, in fantasy. But in doing so the songs could also serve as a peek in to the minds of the characters at the center of them. I mean the songs are a chance for the audience to engage in voyeurism, in a sense, to see people's inner thoughts and desires in a way that they otherwise would not. To see their hopes, their dreams, their fears, and so on. Well, certainly for those who have watched the popular Indian or Egyptian films of the same period, there would seem to be far more stylistic and thematic links that Film Farsi shares with those industries than it does with Hollywood. And for good reason, as we've seen. One of the biggest Film Farsi hits of the 1960s and 1970s was itself a parody of Indian cinema, and of its popularity in Iran at the time. And so I want to show you a couple of clips from a film called "Ganj-e Qarun" or "The Treasure of Qarun." And this is perhaps the most famous film of this prerevolutionary period. And in this particular scene we have this character Shirin who is played by Forouzan who is again one of the major female actors of this period who is sort of playing the role of a Hindi film starlet, we might say. Okay. To try to seduce Fardin in this scene, the male character, the main male character in this film. ^M00:38:27 [ Music ] ^M00:40:07 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: So that didn't work. She's going to try a different tack now. ^M00:40:14 [ Music ] ^M00:40:20 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: So now she's playing the role of this tough guy hero. You can imagine what his reaction will be. ^M00:40:33 [ Music ] ^M00:41:00 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: The budgets were bigger for the Egyptian and Indian films than they were for these. I mean in Turkey it's not altogether dissimilar. ^M00:41:10 [ Music ] ^M00:41:39 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: So we'll movie ahead and again this is another scene where they're sort of making fun of the Hindi film, and of the literacy, the audience's literacy, of the Hindi film as well. So this is a scene where again Ali, the character we just saw jumping around in the pool, is dressed up now as an Indian price. Or he looks more like [inaudible] than anybody else. And he's again -- His comic sidekick, we've seen this guy before. This is Taghi Zohoori dressed up like a British colonial administrator. They're going to meet with the family, with the parents, of the girl that we just saw. And he's going to try to pull off the fact that he's an Indian prince, and he's going to do it by sort of pretending to speak the language of the Hindi film, essentially. ^M00:42:30 [ Foreign Language Spoken ] ^M00:43:10 [ Music ] ^M00:43:23 [ Foreign Language Spoken ] ^M00:43:45 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: Supposedly he can't speak Persian. He spent his whole life in India so he can't speak Persian. ^M00:43:52 [ Foreign Language Spoken ] ^M00:43:55 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: And of course he's brought this comic sidekick to translate for him. Of course the parents are always saying, "Well, no. We understand exactly what he's saying." ^M00:44:07 [ Foreign Language Spoken ] ^M00:44:18 >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: So I mean the -- Maybe I want to conclude here by very briefly talking about what these films had to say about their own times, about the many changes that Pahlavi era social reforms and economic programs were introducing to people's lives. Well, this is a very complicated topic. This is a topic that I go in to in great detail in the book that we really can't -- that's very difficult to sum up in a brief presentation like this. One thing that I can say is that Film Farsi and its reliance on the cultural past for its inspiration often stood in stark contrast to the official national culture that was being formulated and promoted by modernist intellectuals and politicians of the time. But that's not to suggest that these films were somehow foreshadowing a clerically led Islamic revolution which some have claimed to be a wholesale rejection of the modernization programs of the Pahlavi regime. I mean almost immediately after the revolution many of those who were involved in the commercial film industry in the Pahlavi era were themselves banned from taking part in the revolutionary leadership's plans for a remaking of Iranian cinema. The revolutionary leadership saw Film Farsi, ironically enough, as a product of the corrupt Pahlavi era culture. And despite the long term bans on Film Farsi actors, on producers, on directors, fears of a return of Film Farsi conventions and narrative themes to the Iranian cinema has become a vigorous topic of debate in media circles in recent years. I mean there are endless articles published every year in the newspapers about the return of Film Farsi. So clearly the ideas of entertainment at the center of the films from the prerevolutionary period have retained their relevance, at least among some Iranian audiences. I mean if there's one thing that we can say about Film Farsi it's that it has been and continues to be part of an alternative national culture to the one offered up by ruling elites, whether we're talking about the Pahlavi era or about the Islamic Republican era. And this is really what the book is about, about how these films, in a sense, are formulating, putting together, an alternative national culture, an alternative idea of the nation itself in contrast to many of the things that Pahlavi era elites at the time were claiming. I think I'll stop right there. Thank you so much. ^M00:46:51 [ Applause ] ^M00:46:55 Sure. Yes. >> Speaker 2: Doctor Partovi, thank you very much for a wonderful lecture. And it's a very fascinating topic. So the question I have for you is the series of films that started to happen late '70s, things, for example, like [inaudible] or [inaudible] you know, "The Report," and [inaudible] and a number of things of that sort. Some of them are internationally, you know, won awards, but some of them didn't, but were very different in -- from the Film Farsi commercial tradition. How would you categorize that genre which is really mid to late '70s, I think? >> Doctor Pedram Partovi: Yeah. I mean there is what we might think of as a kind of realist or hyperrealist art cinema that appears in the 1970s in particular. Ironically those films are funded by state organs. Doubly ironic is the fact that most of those films were banned from screening in Iran, despite that they were funded by state organs. And we have a similar phenomena after the revolution. So I mean many of the Kiarostami films, for example, after the revolution are also funded by the government, but never seen inside the country. At least officially. And so yeah. I mean it makes you wonder. It makes you wonder, "Well, what is the intended audience here?" What is the objective here behind these particular films? And those films were quite trenchant in their critique of social ills in society, especially one film that especially comes to mind is "Mina's Cycle" which was about heroine addiction in Iran in the prerevolutionary period. But yes. I mean those films at some level were too dark, and too depressing, in a sense, for audiences to go and see in large numbers even if they were allowed to be screened in the cinemas. I mean these films have tragic moments, but they're more about, in a sense, validating -- reinforcing a particular idea of family life that the modern middle classes in the Pahlavi era believed to be at the center of national life. And this was, at some level, in contrast to, at odds with, what Pahlavi officials at the time were trying to claim. That what we're trying to create here is a modern society that's, you know, formed on -- along western lines. And so the exemplary citizen is the individual. The exemplary citizen is one that's not beholden by family ties that, you know, drag him down, in a sense. I mean this is, you know -- We're very in sociology really at its core that becomes crucial to the Pahlavi vision of Iranian society. But it's the one that most people don't buy in to. ^M00:50:03 It's one that I'm not entirely convinced that the Pahlavi regime itself bought in to, to be quite honest. And so we have these films that are evidence of that, I think in many ways. And this is what the draw of these particular films were, more than anything else, I think. Yes? Right. Right. ^M00:50:25 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:50:57 Well, I mean I -- Yeah. I mean I think that that in itself is also evidence of the audience. With that question, the answer to that question also feeds in to or provides evidence for the audience of these films. I mean many of the people that were engaged in that cinema, were behind the camera, in a sense were also part of the educated middle classes. Right. And they were making films, by and large, for the educated middle classes. I mean if we think that, you know -- Who has the time and the disposal income, for that matter, to go and watch these movies? Certainly not taxi drivers and porters. Right. Right. So, as I say, I mean it's -- It may seem strange on its face that we don't have middle class characters, by and large, as the central focus of these particular films, but I think that's part of what I would argue to be the sort of counter narrative that these films are offering to the official narrative of the state at the time. That sees, in fact, the educated middle classes, and in particular the civil servant, as the exemplary citizen. Well, I defy you to find a civil servant in any of these films. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. I defy you to find a police presence, for that matter, in any of these films. They don't exist either. You know? I mean it's all street justice more often than not that defines these particular films. So, as I say, I mean it's part of the sort of counter narrative. On its face you may come immediately to the assumption that, well, because it's all about the poor and working classes, then it must be that the poor and working classes are watching these films, but as I say, I mean historically entertainers were from the poor and working classes. So it was no different in the cinema as it was in the theater that preceded it in that regard. That's why I say, I mean, these films are very, very much a part of Iran's cultural history. Right. Oh, yes. Absolutely. I mean so, for example, the guy that made this film. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean so the guy that directed this film, Siamak Yasemi, well, first of all, he comes from a very, very learned Iranian family. He spoke several languages, including Hindi and Urdu. He spent many, many years in India. He had a degree, a university degree, in Persian literature. So I mean they know all of this stuff, in a sense. And again that's what makes all these films so strange, as I say, on their face, because they've been completely ignored. They've been seen as culturally inauthentic, but in many ways they're not. From my perspective. Yeah. ^M00:53:43 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:53:56 Well, yeah. I mean I don't know if there was some attempt to sort of create a national unity that the Pahlavi officials weren't accomplishing. As I say, I mean I think the main reason that we have lower class heroes in these films is because historically, traditionally, that's what they were. Yeah. I mean again, and not just the entertainers, but I mean most of the modern social movements in Iran have been led by these kinds of figures too. By these lower class figures, these toughs of the street, toughs, the gangsters of the streets. And they've always had this sort of morally ambiguous role. So one day they could be, you know, clubbing their neighbors on the head for protesting in the streets, and the next day they could be leading the protest. So they've always had this sort of complicated role within society, and we see that in these films too. I mean more often than not we see both poles of this [inaudible] character, the mercenary elements of them and of course also the pious and socially justice minded elements of them too or the public spirited elements of them too. Yes? ^M00:55:10 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:55:50 Well, I mean again -- Right. Right. Well, for the first question, in terms of the ratings system, there was a very rudimentary one, we might say. I mean films were rated by country of origin at the first level. So, you know, if it was a Western film or European film, an American film, only those films, for example -- Mostly those films, for example, were shown in the first class theaters. And Indian and Iranian films were, by and large, shown in the second and the third class cinemas generally during this period of time. So there was a sort of government ratings system for the theaters themselves, and that determined how much they could charge for ticket prices and so on. So that also explains the production qualities of these particular films too. And so they were getting less in terms of ticket revenues and so the films had smaller budgets than, let's say, an American Hollywood production. And then again towards the 1970s we also get age restrictions too. So in the 1970s we get increasingly what we might think of as films with, you know, definite erotic themes, sexually suggestive themes. Even nudity, for that matter. Both Iranian and foreign. And yes. There were age restrictions that were put in place to keep people under the age of 18 out of those particular showings. But it wasn't quite as complicated a system as we have in the United States. And of course I mean the ratings system in the United States really only dates back to the late 1960s. I mean this is not something that was there from the very, very beginning. And of course there were always limits on what you could do, especially for Iranian films. There was always limits on what you could do. So I mean you couldn't show or even stimulate sexual intercourse on screen. Kissing was perfectly acceptable, but I mean if you've seen, for example, Indian films of the same period, even that wasn't acceptable for those films. And so at some level people flocked to Iranian films precisely because of what the Indian films didn't show, and people flocked to Indian films precisely because of what the Indian films showed that the Iranian films didn't, for that matter. So they're sort of working together in that sense. I mean if you watch the Iranian films you probably watched a lot of the Indian films too. It was a shared audience in many ways or at least a lot of audience overlap between these two film forms. Was that all of the questions that you're -- Oh. And then post revolution. Right. Right. Right. Well, no. I mean obviously since the revolution the idea of an unrelated man and a woman sharing any kind of intimacy on screen, even touching one another, is off limits. I mean they figured out ways to get around this. So I mean one of my favorites is I was watching one Iranian television show where a son is coming back from the war front, and his mother is sitting on the couch waiting for him to come back from the war front. Well, you would imagine the first thing that they're going to do once their son arrives at the front door is hug and kiss each other. And they show that. But they don't. So the scene begins with the camera pointed at the back of the head of the mother sitting on the couch. The doorbell rings. She gets up. The camera remains stationary. But we can hear the interaction. We can hear them kissing each other. We can hear them hugging each other. So there are these kinds of limitations unfortunately since the revolution. And of course, as you might imagine, these films are completely banned. You cannot watch these movies legally. But that doesn't mean that people don't. I mean by the government's own admission, something like 70% of the population has access to a satellite television dish. Even though that's illegal. I'm sorry? Well, I mean there are peddlers in the streets that sell these movies. Yeah. I mean again you have these wide honking boulevards all over Tehran, and of course nobody's trying -- People do try to cross them. Pedestrians do try to cross these streets. But you're really taking your life in to your hands if you try to do such a thing. So they built all of these sky bridges that go over these boulevards. ^M01:00:18 And the peddler sits in the middle of the sky bridge. Nobody sees him. And he can sell his wares from there, and you know thousands of people pass him by every day. There's a huge sort of market in underground films. Yeah. ^M01:00:37 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:00:47 Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean via satellite television they're also watching these movies. There are 1,000 Persian language satellite networks now set up with a couple hundred dollars and a small studio in Los Angeles, in London, in Dubai, and they don't show the art films. They show these films. So everybody in Iran knows this cinema even if they weren't born when it was released, for that matter. So yes. I mean despite the ban, many, many people are still watching these movies. Right. Right. ^M01:01:26 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:01:35 Very few sci fi and monster for reasons that we've sort of talked about because those films require special effects. It's expensive. Most of these films were made with very, very little money, very, very quickly. So we don't get much in the way of sci fi. Not much in the way of horror films. We do get -- I mean one of the genres that sort of pops up in the 1950s in the United States or reappears all around the world, an American genre that reappears all around the world, is film noir. So we do get some film noir being made in the 1950s in Iran by the director of this particular film. Okay. An Armenian guy by the name of Samuel Khachikian. Okay. And he made a lot of sort of film noir films in the 1950s. So there were sort of odd attempts made by a few characters to make films along western generic lines. But, you know, few and far between, we might say. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah. ^M01:02:42 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:02:47 Well, I mean, you know, sometimes you watch one of these movies on the satellite network in Iran and half of the screen is covered with logos because they've taken a bootleg version of a bootleg version. And by the time it gets down to them, you know, you can hardly see what's going on on screen anymore. Yes. ^M01:03:10 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:05:03 Well, I mean the middle class is new. It's new everywhere in this part of the world. And so how do you distinguish yourself? How do you differentiate yourself from everybody else, in a sense? And culture is one way. So these movies aren't for us. They're -- And you get this kind of cultural -- culture of denial precisely because they're trying to differentiate themselves from their class backgrounds, what were once upon a time their class backgrounds. Yes. No doubt. No doubt. >> Hirad Dinavari: Thank you everyone for joining us. I just want to put a plug in for the collection at the library speaking of this period's films. About eight years ago the [inaudible] division we bought about 100 plus of all the available films' DVDs format from this period for the library. And it's being held in the motion picture broadcasting division. So we have a number of these Film Farsi genre over there in the library's collection. Thank you, Doctor Partovi, for coming out. Wonderful presentation. Thanks to everyone who came. >> Speaker 1: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.