The Hidden Archive: Studying Popular Iranian Cinema

The prospect of hidden or secret archives excites historians eager to reveal gaps, ambiguities, or falsehoods in the 'official' record, based on the presumption that such collections must contain authoritative sources too important or sensitive to be acknowledged publicly. However, hidden archives may also contain materials that historians themselves have deemed too trivial to pursue. In the case of popular Iranian cinema, especially the successful features of the late Pahlavi era, identifying and accessing archives of films and ancillary materials in Iran and the diaspora have proven challenging, partly because scholars have generally declared its products to be of little (positive) cultural, political, or social consequence. Indeed, Leavisite attitudes towards the cinematic medium more broadly had impeded formal study for decades, shifting much of the 'responsibility' of preservation to fans and the industry. Even in the West, what little remains of the cinematic output before World War II is largely due to the haphazard and uncoordinated archival efforts of private collectors, placing substantial limitations on the scholarship subsequently produced about early cinema. In the case of Iran, official campaigns to archive the cinematic past have suffered from severe inadequacies from their very beginnings in the 1950s. Moreover, the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9 further complicated any endeavor to preserve materials related to the prolific late Pahlavi-era cinema due to its connections with the 'permissive' and `Westernizing' culture of its times, which the revolutionary leadership had claimed to reject. Unofficial collections have thus continued to figure prominently in the research conducted on popular cinema. This paper draws on the writer's personal experiences to ask the question: How can one study something that cultural and political elites have historically ignored or disavowed? It tracks the writer's journey through the hidden, personal, neglected, defaced, ephemeral, and virtual archives of popular Iranian cinema. It also points to the limitations that this incomplete and flawed catalog places on film scholarship. Finally, the paper raises questions about the future sustainability of research on popular Iranian cinema under such conditions.