Film arrived in Iran at the turn of the 20th Century following the first state visit to Europe of Muzaffar al-Din Shah (r.1896-1907) who, at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, encountered and was captivated by the cinematograph, and arranged for one to be purchased and taken back to Iran. Screenings initially provided entertainment for royalty and the aristocracy, but film soon entered the public domain, where it faced opposition both on religious grounds and due to political sensitivities in the period leading up to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. Despite objections, film gradually became established and by the early 1930s there were 15 cinemas in Tehran and 11 in the provinces. The significance of cinema at this time lay in its heralding a new modernity and offering a window onto other worlds and other subjectivities, something that marked it as somewhat transgressive. Indeed, many of the key players in early film production and screening were Others of various kinds: Russian and Arab émigrés, Catholic missionaries or members of religious minorities. From the very start, then, film was implicated in inscribing notions of difference and generated anxieties over questions of representation. Naficy (2011) describes local reactions to what were seen as negative representations in early films produced outside Iran which represented the country and its people as socially backward, exotic and sexualized. In response, and with particular intensity from the 1930s with the modernizing policies of Reza Shah, one finds a simultaneous appeal to the glories of the pre-Islamic Persian Empire and to Europe and North America, as forms of cultural validation and symbolic nation-building that often depended on marginalizing Iran’s internal Others.
This paper explores the role of music in exoticising processes of representing and negotiating Otherness with reference to the first Persian-language sound film, Dokhtar-e Lor (The Lor Girl), made in Bombay in 1932. From the earliest days of sound film, music offered a particularly powerful medium through which to construct otherness of various kinds. In The Lor Girl, sound allowed music to participate in the film’s narrative promoting a particular vision of nation, allowing for a sensory and affective marking of difference that was quite new and which proved particularly efficacious in marking relationships of alterity with the persuasive power to validate, and ultimately to normalise, such relations.
References
Naficy, Hamid (2011) A Social History of Iranian Cinema. Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941. Duke University Press.
