This paper examines two transregional coproductions of the 1970s: the Pakistan-Iran coproduction Jane Bond 008: Operation Karachi (Reza Fazeli, 1971), and the India-Iran coproduction Homaaye Sa'adat / Subah O Sham (Tapi Chanakya, 1972). While both films were neither box office hits nor films that have retained a significant legacy, close analyses of their audio-visual and narrative elements, alongside archival records pertaining to statist attempts to both encourage and regulate overseas distribution, yields rich insights into wider affective and material contexts of transnational collaboration and diplomacy through cinema.
Focusing on the films' negotiations of voice modulation, recording practices (e.g., playback and dubbing), and instrumentation, I note the centrality of the feminine voice and body in negotiating tensions between the (co)production of cinema as an embodiment of national culture (and language), on the one hand; and as a vehicle for envisioning and rendering a postnational world order cemented through fraternal bonds, on the other. A key intervention of this historiography unfolds as an examination of the role of voice and gender in Cold-War-era audio-visual spectacles of transnational collaboration.
In both films, the figure of the dancing singer-actress emerges as a chimera, who becomes metonymic for the contemporaneous audio-visual seductions of celluloid. By tracing the respective films' negotiations of their dual production contexts, I tie the roving bodies and voices of feminine figures within the films to the circulation of celluloid objects in a wider transregional context. What emerges within the films is a lyrical defensiveness over "B" circuits, in terms of the expressive authenticity of the song-dance form of popular cinema, as well as the border-crossing cinephilia that it engenders as an effect.
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Salazkina, Masha. "Soviet-indian coproductions: Alibaba as political allegory." Cinema Journal (2010): 71-89.
