artistic value of Iranian cinema is grounded in its public domain.
Take One (Again!): The Public Artistic Value of a Cross-Cultural Cinema
In the same year when the Qajar shah and his family were relishing being featured in their private motion pictures, the first public movie theater was established in another part of Iran. With 100 seats, Cinema Soleil (Sun) started showing films to the public in the city of Tabriz. Cinema Soleil was administered by Iranian-Armenians and Catholic missionaries. An Armenian individual, Alek Saginian, established the movie house and was actively involved in its management until 1916 when it was shut down, due to lack of available films to show.3
It is remarkable that 1900 marked the implementation of both public experience with cinema, and the private production and viewership of motion pictures in Iran. This is 6 years before Mozaffar al-din shah was forced to sign and officially approve the first constitutional law in the Middle East. By 1906, Iranians managed to establish a democratic constitutional monarchy, replacing the despotic monarchy. The new constitution divided the legislative, executive, and judicial sections of government, curbing the shah’s and the clerics’ authority. In the midst of an intellectually vibrant atmosphere, the first movie theater began to show films in Tehran in 1904 by Sahaf Bashi, an educated businessman, journalist, and entrepreneur who had traveled around the world a number of times. His movie house provided a short-lived experience to male Iranian filmgoers, mostly from the elite social stratum. Since Sahaf Bashi was an ardent constitutionalist, the anti-constitutional cleric, Sheikh Fazl-allah Nouri banned cinema and the movie house was shut down by the government within a month. Sahaf Bashi was subsequently sentenced to exile and left for Karbala in Iraq. Most of the films that were screened at Sahaf Bashi’s theater were slapstick comedies and fantastical productions of Pathé. In 1924, women entered public cinemas in Zoroastrians’ Cinema that was opened by Ali Vakili. The first movie that female audiences watched was an American film, starring the famous actress Ruth Roland (Omid 1996, 29).
The initial cinema circle in Iran was a dynamic cross-cultural and cross-national society. The first theater house owners included the Caucasian-Iranian George Ismailov, Amir Khan, possibly a Kurdish-Iranian, the Armenian-Iranian Artashes Patmagerian, nicknamed Ardeshir Khan, and Mahdi Ivanov (an Iranian-Russian-British individual known as Russi Khan). The multicultural environment of the cinema society is well-represented in their choice of films. Iranian filmgoers were exposed to Russian, European, American, (and later on, to Turkish, Egyptian, Indian, and Iranian) films and news reels. The multilingual film posters of the silent era are testimonies to the cross-national public aesthetic sensibility of Iranian cinema.
The Armenian-Iranian society, especially, had a significant impact in publicizing cinema in Iran. The first filmmaker outside of the royal court, who was interested in film tourism, was the Armenian-Caucasian George Ismailov. Ismailov made his own films as early as 1909. The first film school was established by another Armenian-Iranian, Ovanes Ohanian in 1930. Ohanian made the first two feature-length Iranian films, Abi and Rabi (1930) and Haji Aqa, the Movie Actor (1933). Zuma Ohanian (Ohanian’s daughter) and Asia Qostanian (also from Armenian origins), became the pioneer Iranian actresses inside Iran.
While Ohanian was making movies inside the country, a parallel drive, financed by the Indian Iranian Parsees—who had religious and national ties to the old faith of Zoroastrianism and Persia—started making Persian films in India. Abdol Hossein Sepanta, an Iranian Immigrant in India, and Ardeshir Irani, an Indian Parsee who owned the Imperial Company in Bombay, directed and produced Persian films in India. The Lor Girl (1933), the first Persian talkie by Sepanta and Irani, became an instant hit at Iranian movie houses. The Lor Girl was screened simultaneously with Haji Aqa, the Movie Actor. The latter was a silent film with subtitles in three languages (Persian, Russian, and French), while the former was a talkie. Iranian audiences were already exposed to sound films—the first movie with synchronized dialogue was an American Musical, The Jazz Singer (1927)—but The Lor Girl was the first film in which actors were speaking Persian. Iranian filmgoers were as thrilled to be “listening” to the film as they were to be watching it.
Since the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire (550 BC–330 BC), Persian had become the common language of oral and written communication among ethnic groups who inhabited the Persianate world. Persian- and non-Persian-oriented Empires such as the Persian Sassanids (224–651) and the Turkic Seljuqs (1035–1153) adopted the Persian language as the language of the Empire. Great poets and writers in the Persianate lands, whose mother tongues were not Persian, created their masterpieces in the Persian language. In the 1930s and with the production of the first sound film in Persian, the power of words proved to be a decisive factor in the popularity of cinema among the literate, illiterate, and semiliterate filmgoers. The silent film Haji Aqa failed at the box office, but The Lor Girl continued to be screened in Tehran and provincial theaters for months. It was an exceptional success for a movie, considering that movie houses used to change feature films twice a week (Omid 1996, 50–51; 70–71). Subsequently, Sepanta and Irani were encouraged to make Ferdowsi (1934), about the renowned Persian poet, and other Persian films, such as Shirin and Farhad (1934), Black Eyes (1936), and Leyli and Majnun (1937) by an Iranian film crew in India. Persian films that were made by the Imperial Company reflected elements of classical Persian culture, Iranian folklore and the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian ethos. Stylistically, they were influenced by Indian cinema.
In the next two decades, Iranian cinema continued to be nourished by a vibrant multi-national and cross-cultural environment that was created by Russian and western educated Iranians, along with the émigré communities originating from Russia, Armenia, and Europe. The thriving cross-national culture in cities such as Tehran, Tabriz, Mashhad, Shiraz, and Abadan was projected in the selection of movies that were shown in theatres all over the country. Just as in Hollywood cinema, the immigrant culture in Iran fortified the cinematic structure of the country. The émigrés such as Vartan Hovanessian designed new movie houses (Diana Cinema in 1939 and Metropol Cinema in 1945). Another emigrant entrepreneur, Sanasar Khachaturian established the most advanced film studio, Diana Film studio, in 1950.
The Aesthetic and Artistic Value of Popular Cinema: Form-Oriented “Tehran Noir” and Formless Filmfarsi
By the early 1950s, Iranian cinema had become a visible part of public life and the most popular and accessible visual art. Cinema had no serious competition in this period: Television was yet to be launched in Iran (TV was introduced to Iranians in 1958). The traditional Ta’zieh (religious Passion Play) was previously banned by Reza shah. Other conventional performing arts such as Naghali (narrating and performing stories of Shahnameh) were small-scale, neighborhood-oriented plays that could not compete with the cinema. Likewise, modern theater was performed for a selective audience, mostly at college amphitheaters and a limited number of public theaters in city centers such as Lalehzar Avenue in Tehran. On the other hand, movie houses were spread in different parts of urban centers in large and small cities. The feature films, film series, and news reels that were shown in theater houses represented a wide variety of European, Russian, Indian, Turkish, Egyptian, and American narratives. The number of Iranian films now being produced in a hybrid artisanal and industrialized mode were rising. According to Masud Mehrabi, in 1953, 20 films were produced in Iran (1985, 60). After that, the number of national productions increased every year. As the national directors and film crew became more experienced, pictures on the silver screen became more appealing for audiences. Cinema was the number one form of entertainment for Iranians.
As Iranians were becoming better acquainted with the film stylistics of other countries and cultures, their cinematic taste was developing. By the time Samuel Khachikian made his first films in the early 1950s, a rich cinematic culture had formed among Iranian filmgoers. Iranians had turned into a cinephile nation who had seen movies by Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock (see Khoshbakht 2017). They adored European, American, and Indian performances by actors and actresses such as Ingrid Bergman, Alain Delon, Raj Kapoor, and Dilip Kumar. The genre of “Tehran Noir” was born in this cinematic milieu (Khoshbakht 2017).
Samuel