Review: Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit, by Kaveh Askari

Abstract

Book Review| September 01 2022 Review: Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit, by Kaveh Askari Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit by Kaveh Askari Babak Tabarraee Babak Tabarraee BABAK TABARRAEE is an assistant professor of instruction and the coordinator of the Persian program at the University of Texas at Austin. His writings in English have appeared in Mashriq and Mahjar, Dibur, Iranian Studies, The Soundtrack, Cinephile, The Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, and The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Kaveh Askari, Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper. 260 pages. Film Quarterly (2022) 76 (1): 104–106. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.76.1.104 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Babak Tabarraee; Review: Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit, by Kaveh Askari. Film Quarterly 1 September 2022; 76 (1): 104–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.76.1.104 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Kaveh Askari, Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper. 260 pages. Until about a decade ago, Iranian film histories limited themselves to a double dichotomy. First, they represented Iranian cinema prior to the 1979 revolution as a constant battlefield between the highbrow art cinema—namely, the New Wave of the late sixties—and the lowbrow popular films collectively known as Filmfārsi. Second, they focused on the postrevolutionary Islamization of the cinema, which led to the emergence of an oppositional cinema in the form of both politically poignant films and a new mode of poetic realism in the works of several festival-favorite auteurs. This dominant historiographic approach underwent a considerable change in the 2010s, led by Hamid Naficy’s four-volume Social History of Iranian Cinema, along with a few other valuable monographs and edited collections: Pedram Partovi’s Popular... You do not currently have access to this content.