Popular film and the national imagination in Pahlavi Ira

This dissertation is a study of the popular commercial cinema during the Pahlavi era in and as modern Iranian history. Critics of this cinema, more commonly known as filmfarsi(or "Persian-film"), have drawn on and contributed to an extensive post-war literature on film entertainment and mass culture, rooted in different political positions and national contexts but mostly negative in its treatment of the above. The critics have claimed that filmfarsi titles were nothing more than second-rate copies of especially Hollywood or Bollywood films that pandered to the primitive tastes of their simple-minded audiences. To the extent that the films appealed to the lowest common denominator, they could prove a detriment to cultural advance. To the extent that the products of Iranian commercial studios manipulated their audience's tastes to promote antithetical interests, they could stand in the way of broad-based political and economic advance. I argue that, on the contrary, one of the features of these much-maligned films was their articulation with the literary and performative traditions of pre-modern courtly and religious life to problematize the modernist agenda of secular nationalist elites. At the same time, it is important to note that this cinema and its audiences did not comprise yet another sign of a "nativist" or "anti-modern" cultural reaction to the Pahlavi project---one that scholars have most commonly identified with a radical reformist Shi'ism and the Islamic Revolution.;I argue that filmfarsi "representations" have framed the lives of their characters and audiences around a popular "civil religion" that takes family prosperity to be the cosmological proof of the nation and the ontological imperative of its citizens. Interestingly, film accounts of the struggle between personal and family interests in modern Iranian middle class life largely ignore Pahlavi development programs and state agents. Instead, erotic love precipitates the social conflicts represented in the films. Appropriately, social melodrama is the most prominent "genre" in filmfarsi. The conditions underlying the problem of erotic love in the films may indirectly invoke aspects of national development but the programs and their representatives are not often directly addressed in the films---perhaps at once a sign of official censorship as well as popular disengagement with official economic and political initiatives. That filmfarsi heroes have often been characters living on the margins of law and society underlines this mutual ambivalence between the state and the popular cinema. These heroes of the street, like their historical and literary models, gladly suffer exile and martyrdom for the sake of the family and, in turn, elevate their erotic love.;Unfortunately, much of what has been published heretofore on the history of commercial cinema in the Pahlavi era is not only in Persian but is often also more chronicle than history. Virtually all critiques of filmfarsi (again, largely in Persian) have analyzed the films and audiences in terms of Iranian sociology and psychology, with little attention paid to history. This study views filmfarsi as not just a "mirror" on Iranian society or on the minds of certain Iranians. Rather, it considers the films as part of a complex of practices that draw on and make up Iranian social and intellectual history. Such an approach also ensures that these films, their concerns, and techniques are not merely seen as some "irrelevant" aspect of the past but in dialogue with the popular cinema and national life even today.