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University of California Press

About the Book

Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran investigates how the cultural translation of cinema has been shaped by the physical translation of its ephemera. Kaveh Askari examines film circulation and its effect on Iranian film culture in the period before foreign studios established official distribution channels and Iran became a notable site of world cinema. This transcultural history draws on cross-archival comparison of films, distributor memos, licensing contracts, advertising schemes, and audio recordings. Askari meticulously tracks the fragile and sometimes forgotten material of film as it circulated through the Middle East into Iran and shows how this material was rerouted, reengineered, and reimagined in the process.
 

About the Author

Kaveh Askari is Associate Professor and Director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He is author of Making Movies into Art.   

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Titles

Introduction 

1. An Afterlife for Junk Prints 
   Film Traffic and Regional Influence
   Serials Out of Sync
   Ironies of Appropriation
   
2. Circulation Worries
   Sustenance: Engineering and Maintenance
   Copyright: The Public Good and Creativity
   License: Junk Prints and Affidavits of Destruction
   Obsolescence: Dubbing Technologies and Leverage
   
3. Collage Sound as Industrial Practice
   Founding and the Found
   Archiving, Assembly, and Recognition
   Temp Love, Out of Sync
   Relaying the Popular Song
   
4. The Anxious Exuberance of Tehran Noir
   The Crime Thriller as Currency in the Press
   Currency Disputes
   Aesthetic Standards and Scarce Resources
   Modularity and Fluency
   Mixed Signals of Kin and Home
   
5. Eastern Boys and Failed Heroes
   Year of The Heroes
   Failures of The Heroes
   Kimiai’s First Film Cycle
   Sponsorship, Nostalgia, and Collecting
   Under the Sign of Rio Bravo
   Coda
   
Notes
Index

Reviews

"Kaveh Askari tracks an intricate web of film itineraries that are fundamentally entangled and extend across the Global North and South. What emerges is a thick description of Iranian film culture as a dynamic site of transnational cinephilia, a playful and promiscuous love for cinema. This is an intellectually stimulating, methodologically inventive, and archivally rich work, and it will be a cherished contribution to the field of film studies."—Debashree Mukherjee, author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City

"Combining meticulous archival research on networks of media exchange with a bold argument about the limits of textual analysis, this book pioneers a method bound to transform how we read, interpret, and discuss national cinema. Rarely have I read a book that has made such an impression on me, and I have full confidence that this groundbreaking study will resonate widely across our discipline."—Michael Allan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Oregon

"A ferociously original book that breaks new ground in the field of Iranian film studies. Eschewing the narratives of nationalism that have dominated the study of cinema in Iran, Askari instead offers a rich material history of celluloid film as it meandered across and within the country’s borders. He maps the multitude of invisible laborers, processes, routes, and technologies that situated the movies in Iran in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to Askari’s rigorous research and eloquent prose, we can now see a world of cinema that was previously out of sight to international film distributors and scholars alike. Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran is certain to be a smash hit."—Blake Atwood, author of Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran

Awards

  • Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (Moving Image) 2023 Longlist 2023, Kraszna Krausz Foundation
  • SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award 2023 2023, Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Media

Kaveh Askari dicusses the growth of cinema in pre-revolutionary Iran for Roque Media