A Cinema Beyond-the-Nation: the Making of a Cosmonational Cinema in Iran

In the early twentieth century, Iran had become a diasporic hub for Azerbaijani, Armenian, Russian, Georgian, Ottoman Turkish, Indian, German, British and French communities, who traded, intermingled and co-existed in the urban centres of the country. To facilitate communication among such diverse communities, these groups – in addition to their native counterparts – operated sites of sociability that also patronised cinematograph screenings in their daily programs. These heterotopic spaces prompted heterogeneous interactions and provided projections of familial and unfamilial images through motion pictures, that in turn constantly territorialised and deterritorialised audiences. As such, cinema functioned as a 'space of becoming,' where boundaries of self/other, national/international and local/global shifted.
It was amidst such cosmopolitan cinematic culture that a Persian-language cinema, or what has been generally regarded as a “national (read nationalist) cinema” emerged in the early 1930s. What should, however, be of critical scrutiny is the contradiction that lies in the identification of this cinema as “national.” Surveying a number of Persian language silent and talkie films from the 1930s, namely Haji Agha, the Cinema Actor (1933), Bulhavas (1928-1933), and The Lur Girl (1933), among others, this paper suggests that the first Persian language cinema that emerged in that era was a “cosmonational cinema,” in that it drew from its preceding cosmopolitan cinematic culture (in terms of directors, actors, and logistics), as well as, transnational cinematic elements in its productions. Following Michel Laguerre, cosmonational cinema here manifests a global social field of interaction, where the cinema of homeland and diasporic sites depend and rely on each other for support. This paper, moreover, places the emergence of this cosmonational cinema in parallel to the emersion of a group of international film projects that attended to the history and culture of Persia, namely the Soviet Armenian film, Khazpush (1928), Soviet Azeri movie, Gilan's Daughter (1928), and a number of British news reels and documentaries. Such global projects constituted Iran/Persia as a zone of global ideological contestations and political conflicts. Thus, this paper contends that while the Persian cosmonational cinema imbibed and localized global cinematic elements, the international cinematic undertakings placed Iran/Persia in an ideologically-ridden global order in the early 1930s.