Sensory History

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Iranian Studies

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Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History

Negar Mottahedeh

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Literature and Women's Studies at the Program of Literature, Duke University,Online Publication Date: 01 September 2009

To cite this Article

Mottahedeh, Negar(2009)'Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History',Iranian Studies,42:4,529 —548

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10.1080/00210860903106279

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210860903106279

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Negar Mottahedeh

Iranian Cinema in the Twentieth Century: A Sensory History

This essay addresses itself to the century long history of cinema in Iran, focusing on the historyof the senses as they combine with and are extended by ﬁlm technologies. It argues that Khomeini’s aim was to produce a transformed and Shi’ite Iran by purifying the sensorial national body by means of ﬁlm technologies.

This still image (Figure 1), which captures Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s look at theprimitive motion picture camera, embeds in celluloid an index of the history of the cinematic medium in Iran. As index, it calls forth the gaze of future gener-ations. Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s look at the camera carries, as if auratically, the his-torical conditions informing the coming into being of ﬁlm as a cultural andpolitical practice in Iran.The purchase of a motion picture camera by Muzaffar al-Din Shah during hisjourney to Europe in 1900 continued the tradition of the dynastic travelogues,diaries one could say, that captured the near, the present, and the everyday indistant, far away places. But in doing so, the ﬁlm reels from this journey alsomimetically reproduced the European tradition of

voyages photographique

(photo-graphic voyages) that made their appearance in the

Salon de Photographie

in 1859.Muzaffar al Din Shah’s travelogue entry on his newly purchased camera iswritten against the backdrop a festival of flowers in Ostend, Belgium. Itarrests moments of visual exchange between parading European women andhimself. The scene, captured by his cameraman, Mirza Ebrahim Khan AkkasbasiSani-al Saltanah, combines a mixture of decorum and titillating circumstance, apleasing sensuality that is palpable in this second still from one of Muzaffar alDin Shah’s early film reels in which his Persian travel companions gaze at theEuropean women whom they encounter on the streets of Europe in broadbrimmed hats typical of turn-of-the-century fashions (Figure 2).The significance of this returned look, exchanged between the Persian men andthe European women, may be lost on our generation, but early theorists of modernity made note of a shift in perception and sometimes remarked on

Negar Mottahedeh is Associate Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at the Program of Literature, Duke University. This is a revised version of the paper presented to the conference“Iran and Iranian Studies in the Twentieth Century” to mark the fortieth anniversary of

IranianStudies

held at the University of Toronto, October 2007.

Iranian Studies

, volume 42, number 4, September 2009

ISSN 0021-0862 print

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ISSN 1475-4819 online

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040529–20

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2009 The International Society for Iranian StudiesDOI 10.1080/00210860903106279

D o w nl o ad ed B y : [ M o t t ah ed eh , N e g a r] A t : 13 :44 8 S e p t e mb e r 2009

“the protective functions” that began to envelope the look in response to the“experience of shock” in metropolitan modern life.

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The shield of the look, a conspicuous armor against the close encounterthat the moderns began to experience in the crammed quarters of urban citys-capes—in trains and on sidewalks—, seems, at least in this moment, shed ingestures of play and conviviality in Belgium following the camera’s purchaseFigure 1. Still of Muzaffar al Din Shah in EuropeFigure 2. An exchange of looks under broad-brimmed hats

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Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura”,

Critical Inquiry

, 34, no. 2 (winter 2008): 344.

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Mottahedeh