Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution

This book sheds light on the prolific but little studied Iranian popular cinema of the 1960s and 70s. Critics generally dismiss such films, best known for their songs and melodramatic plots, as shallow, derivative entertainment. The sarcastic moniker filmfarsi (“Persian film”) was even employed to refer to the popular cinema, asserting its marginality in Iran and the international film world. Yet this book argues that many filmfarsi titles had a cognitive and emotional appeal that relied on their ability to re-articulate “traditional” aesthetic and religious ideas and forms to problematize the modernist agenda of secular nationalist elites.