The Politics of Iranian Cinema

If there is one element of the politics of Iranian cinema that is understudied,it is that of the relationship between Iranian films and the Iranian film audience.Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad’s book, The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Filmand Society in the Islamic Republic, fills this glaring gap by providing aunique insight into how Iranian films are received in Iran; what political andsocial debates they spark; and how they form part of a larger nexus of powernegotiations between the state, artists, and film viewers. The book takes anexpansive approach to “politics,” not favoring hard politics over soft politics or vice versa, but showing how the two go hand in hand in defining the filmmakingprocess in Iran.The book’s uniqueness lies in its reliance on participant observation, inaddition to interviews, as one method of studying the Iranian film audience.Through this, the reader gets a sense of people’s reactions to the films discussed.Zeydabadi-Nejad often reproduces sections of conversation amongfilm viewers that bring to life his statements about the films’ relationshipwith the political environment. The cynicism expressed by a group of youngpeople after watching Bahman Farmanara’s 2001 film House on the Water(p. 86), for example, serves as a sharp illustration of the disillusionment withstate ideology among the urban middle class — an issue covered elsewherein the literature on Iranian cinema, but usually presented in generalized termsrather than through the prism of individual reactions found here ...