White Revolution on the screen; the transformation of hegemonic currents in the Iranian rural films during the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the cinematic representation of hegemonic currents in the films produced in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s. In a close reading of the mainstream, artistic and political films of the period it probes the effects of the newly established capitalist mode of production in the cinematic production. Drawing on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, it demonstrates how a new social class appeared in the country as a result of the so-called White Revolution and land reform and discusses the changing alliances of this class during the 1960s and the 1970s which contributed to the formations of hegemonic force-fields. Accordingly, this articles traces the transformation of the hegemonic processes of incorporation in the realm of cinema from the duality of residual/emergent significations through alternative practices (considering Raymond Williams’s terminology) in the 1960s to pre-emergent and later radically emergent and oppositional practices in the 1970s.