The Archive of Second-Hand Cinema: Masoud Kimiai’s Pesar-e Sharghi and the Celluloid Album

Masoud Kimiai’s Eastern Boy (Pesar-e Sharghi, 1975) offers a point from which to discuss alternative approaches to cinema historiography. The short production, sponsored by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, dramatizes the collecting, trade, and display of scrap celluloid film frames by a gang of boys as a kind of primal scene of film fandom. In this way, the film serves as part of the archive of Hollywood in Iran. It calls for an analytical approach that comingles a reading of the film with a material history of the celluloid material in it. The film’s imaginative constructions of cinema-going (an important topos of new-wave filmmaking) link up with empirical evidence from exhibition records in Iranian newspapers, from print identification of the films-within-the-film, and from interviews with people who collected film frames as children. The goal in making these connections is to expand upon approaches to the moving-image archive that are underexplored in the discipline of film studies. Moving from this question, the paper will also examine the role of the celluloid scrapbook in contemporary recollections of childhood cinephilia. These stories include Kimiai’s recollections of cinema-going as a child. If Kimiai’s childhood stories can be seen as a template for his tough-guy films, situating this particular film within an expanded archive draws attention to precisely those intersections of sponsorship, genre, fandom, and new-wave style that were essential during this period.