Re-envisioning reform : film, new media, and politics in post-Khomeini Iran

Abstract

This dissertation opens a multimedia archive of contemporary Iranian films, documentaries, newspaper articles, and political philosophies in order to rethink the complicated relationship between cinema and the Reformist Movement in Iran. The existing scholarship has largely reduced interactions between these institutions to modes of mutual support, noting Mohammad Khatami’s backing of the film industry during his tenure as Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance (1982-1992) and his liberal cultural policies as president (1997-2005). However, the research presented in this dissertation indicates that Iranian cinema and the Reformist Movement crucially informed one another, and the dynamics of their exchange functioned on an ideological level. More than just benefiting from the Reformist Movement, certain films and filmmakers helped to shape and articulate its emerging political discourse. At the same time, the dialogue between Khatami’s Reformist Movement and Iranian cinema have generated a unique set of aesthetic qualities that includes a revival of mystic love, the use of Tehran as a metaphoric site of social and structural reformation, and reconfigurations of perceptions of time. I examine films that were released during Khatami’s tenure as Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance, his presidential campaign and presidency in order to interrogate the relationship between film and reform and to theorize the visual language that has emerged to enunciate this relationship. I also consider a film and a music video released two years after Khatami’s presidency ended. They did not benefit directly from his cultural liberalism but nevertheless participate in central reformist debates. Their experimentation with form suggests that the reformist aesthetic possesses a momentum that permits it to develop and transform without explicit contact with the political movement that inspired it. I argue, therefore, that the Reformist Movement marked a change on the political landscape at the same time that it signaled a new trend in the country’s cinematic history. I connect innovations in film to current trends in new media and youth culture and propose a new reformist model for the study of cultural productivity in contemporary Iran, one that moves past the reductive category of “post-Revolution.”