Ethnographic Films from Iran

Abstract

Iranian ethnographic films began with a focus on preserving Iran’s diverse traditions and indigenous cultures. Many of these films were salvage documentaries marked by nostalgia for disappearing traditions of rural and tribal life. The earliest film from this tradition is Grass (1925), which is about tribal migration and was made by American explorers before ethnographic films were recognized as a tradition. The impetus to preserve rural and tribal cultures first came from a group of filmmakers who were trained by a team of specialists from United States Information Service’s (USIS) film program and a team of filmmakers from Syracuse University, who came to Iran in the late 1940s and 1950s to help with development and modernization. They made propaganda and educational films that promoted industrialization, health, agriculture, and education in remote regions of Iran. They also trained Iranian filmmakers who later made actuality films, some of which could be considered ethnographic, with support from state institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and Art and National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT). The notion of what constitutes ethnographic film has been debated by scholars and filmmakers since ethnographic film was first conceived. Ethnographic film has occupied a marginal space in the academic discipline of anthropology because many films that are considered ethnographic lack rigorous scientific research and are not made by anthropologists. Many of the films discussed here are documentaries that provide detailed documentation of daily life and customs of Iranian people but most are not films made by ethnographers. Meaningful university support for the production of academic ethnographic films was and is rarely available in Iran, except during the leadership of Nader Afshar Naderi at Tehran University’s Social Sciences division in the early 1960s. He was introduced to ethnographic filmmaking by Jean Rouch and made several films on customs and traditions of Iranian tribes. Notably, his first film Balout (1968) looked at the importance of chestnuts in a tribe’s diet in the southwestern region. Besides films about tribes and Iran’s cultural traditions that have continued into the present day, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, films of ethnographic value have been made about the Iran-Iraq War and more recently about urban life. Filmmakers documented the eight-year war in a long-running television series that observed soldiers on the front lines. Finally, since the early 2000s, some independent filmmakers have made films that focus on city life, particularly documenting lives of young Iranians, or they have made personal and autobiographical films by turning the camera on their own lives.