Professor Hamid Naficy: Iranian Cinema 1 sku-55990821

Professor Hamid Naficy's A Social History of Iranian Cinema is listed under Performing Arts Books as sku-55990821. The four-volume social history covers Iranian cinema from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. It examines documentaries, popular genres and art films, along with production methods and the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and national identity in Iran.

Each volume can be read on its own. Volume 1, The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941, examines cinema's early years. Film arrived in Iran in 1900, three years after the country's first commercial film exhibitor encountered it in Great Britain. An artisanal industry developed with support from the ruling shahs and other elites.

Women's presence on screen and in movie houses remained controversial until 1925, when Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty. Reza Shah ruled until 1941 and pursued Westernization to unite, modernize and secularize a multicultural, multilingual and multiethnic country. The state encouraged films depicting a rapidly modernizing Iran and outlawed the veil, while dandies flourished.

It also tightly controlled photography, film production and movie houses. Film production remained marginal to state formation: Iran produced only four silent feature films, and an Iranian expatriate in India made four of the five Persian-language sound features shown in Iran before 1941.

The other volumes are Volume 2, The Industrializing Years, 1941-1978; Volume 3, The Islamicate Period, 1978-1984; and Volume 4, The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010.