Racialized Modernity and the Anthropology of Winds: Nasser Taghvai’s Bad-e Jinn

My contribution to this roundtable revolves around an interest in the simultaneous rise in ethnographic documentary and Iranian New Wave film in the 1960s. While traditional film scholarship contextualizes the Iranian New Wave through connections to modern Iranian literature, European filmic modernisms such as Italian Neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague, I argue for a more nuanced reading of the Iranian New Wave that places the movement in relation to the contemporaneous rise in government-funded salvage, or ethnographic, documentary. Anthropology’s late 20th century critical turn has revitalized the ways in which scholars think about the discipline’s methodological byproducts. Racialization is not only a methodological byproduct of anthropology, but its conditions of possibility (V.Y. Mudimbe). Ethnographic documentary, an anthropological mode of data collection, became a popular form of visually preserving traditional forms of life deemed to be decaying in the throes of modernization in mid-20th century Iran. It was also the prominent form in which New Wave filmmakers articulated the modernness of their enterprise. I argue that the sudden government-funded interest in New Wave filmmaking and ethnographic documentary sustained a racializing mode of disjunctive temporality undergirding the concept of the modern. This disjunctive temporality is evident in the different treatments of subjectivity, space, and landscape in the ethnographic documentaries and New Wave films often attributed to the same directors.