In addition to the 42 books below, see the full list of Iranian history books.
Cinema in Iran, 1900-1979 (1989) by Mohammad Ali Issari
Issari's Cinema in Iran is the first English language book on Iranian cinema, tracing the history of film from the first documentary in 1900 and the first theater in 1904 to the Iranian revolution.
Iranian Cinema and Globalization: National, Transnational, and Islamic Dimensions (2012) by Shahab Esfandiary
Iranian Cinema and Globalization seeks to broaden readers' exposure to other dimensions of Iranian cinema, including the works of the many prolific filmmakers whose films have received little outside attention despite being widely popular within Iran. Combining theories of globalization and national cinema with in-depth, interdisciplinary analyses of individual films, this volume expands the current literature on Iranian cinema with insights into the social and religious political contexts involved.
Iranian Cinema in a Global Context: Policy, Politics, and Form (2014) by Peter Decherney and Blake Atwood
Iranian Cinema takes account of the wide range of Iranian cinema from popular youth films to low budget underground films. Decherney reassesses the global circulation of Iranian art cinema, looking at its reception at international festivals, in university curricula, and at the Academy Awards. A final theme of the volume explores the intersection between politics and film, with essays on post-Khatami reform influences, representations of ineffective drug policies, and the representation of Jewish characters.
Iranian Sacred Defence Cinema: Religion, Martyrdom and National Identity (2012) by Pedram Khosronejad
Over 200 Iranian feature films concentrating primarily on fighting and military operations have appeared since the 1980s and the beginning of the war between Iran and Iraq. This book presents a detailed exploration of the 'Sacred Defence cinema' established by Seyed Morteza Avini, a cinema that directly connects this war to the faith and religious belief of volunteer guardians of the revolution. Khosronejad discussed Iranian cinema at the OSU School of Global Studies and Partnerships.
Iranian National Cinema: The Interaction of Policy, Genre, Funding and Reception (2020) by Anne Demy-Geroe
This book examines transformations in the production and domestic and international reception of Iranian cinema between 2000 and 2013 through the intersection of the political markers – the presidential terms of Reformist president Mohammad Khatami and his successor, the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and filmic markers, particularly Jafar Panahi's The Circle (2000) and Asghar Farhadi's About Elly (2009). Demy-Geroe gave a lecture on Iranian cinema at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design.
Familiar and Foreign: Identity in Iranian Film and Literature (2015) by Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson
In Familiar and Foreign, Mannani and Thompson set out to explore the tensions surrounding the ongoing formulation of Iranian identity by bringing together essays on poetry, novels, memoir, and films. These include both canonical and less widely theorized texts, as well as works of literature written in English by authors living in diaspora.
Iranian Cinema: A Political History (2006) by Hamid Reza Sadr
Sadr argues that embedded within even the seemingly least noteworthy of mainstream Iranian films, we find themes and characterisations which reveal the political contexts of their time and which express the ideological underpinnings of a society. Beginning with the introduction of cinema to Iran through the Iranian monarchy, the book covers the broad spectrum of Iran's cinema.
Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (2001) by Hamid Dabashi
Dabashi examines the growing reputation of Iranian cinema from its origines in the films of Kimiyai and Mehrjui, through the work of established directors such as Kiraostami, Beyzai and Bani-Etemad, to young film-makers like Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Qobadi, who triumphed at the Cannes 2000 festival. Dabashi combines exclusive interviews with directors, detailed and insightful commentary, critical cultural context, an extensive filmography, and generous illustration to provide an indispensable guide to globally celebrated but little-studied cinematic genre.
Iranian Cinema Uncensored: Contemporary Film-makers since the Islamic Revolution (2016) by Shiva Rahbaran
Containing twelve first-hand interviews with the most renowned film-makers living and working in contemporary Iran, this book provides insights into film-making within a society often at odds with its rulers. Reflecting upon the 1979 revolution and its influence on their work, as well as the effect of their films on Iranian audiences, film-makers such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi highlight the key issues surrounding the reception of Iranian cinema in the West and also its role in the development of Iran's global image.
The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (2002) by Richard Tapper
The largely Iranian contributors to this book look in depth at how Iranian cinema became a true 'world cinema'. From a range of perspectives, they explore cinema's development in post Revolution Iran and its place in Iranian culture.
A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 (2012) by Hamid Naficy
Naficy assesses the profound effects of the Islamic Revolution on Iran's cinema and film industry. Throughout the book, he uses the term Islamicate, rather than Islamic, to indicate that the values of the postrevolutionary state, culture, and cinema were informed not only by Islam but also by Persian traditions. Naficy examines documentary films made to record events prior to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the revolution.
The Politics of Iranian Cinema: Film and Society in the Islamic Republic (2009) by Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad
Drawing on first-hand interviews and detailed ethnographic research, this book explores how cinema is engaged in the dynamics of social change in contemporary Iran. The author not only discusses the practices of regulation and reception of films from major award winning directors but also important mainstream filmmakers such as Hatamikia and Tabizi.
Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History (2019) by Golbarg Rekabtalaei
Rekabtalaei takes a unique look at Iranian cosmopolitanism and how it transformed in the Iranian imagination through the cinematic lens. By examining the development of Iranian cinema from the early twentieth century to the revolution, Rekabtalaei locates discussions of modernity in Iranian cinema as rooted within local experiences, rather than being primarily concerned with Western ideals or industrialisation.
A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941 (2011) by Hamid Naficy
Naficy depicts and analyzes the early years of Iranian cinema. Film was introduced in Iran in 1900 and an artisanal cinema industry sponsored by the ruling shahs and other elites soon emerged. The presence of women, both on the screen and in movie houses, proved controversial until 1925, when Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty. Naficy discussed his book series at the Annenberg School for Communication.
A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 (2012) by Hamid Naficy
The extraordinary efflorescence in Iranian film, TV, and the new media since the consolidation of the Islamic Revolution animates Volume 4. During this time, documentary films proliferated. Many filmmakers took as their subject the revolution and the bloody eight-year war with Iraq; others critiqued postrevolution society. The strong presence of women on screen and behind the camera led to a dynamic women's cinema.
Media, Culture and Society in Iran: Living with Globalization and the Islamic State (2007) by Mehdi Semati
Featuring contributions from among the best-known and emerging scholars on Iranian media, culture, society, and politics, this volume uncovers how the existing perspectives on post-revolutionary Iranian society have failed to appreciate the complexity, the paradoxes and the contradictions that characterize life in contemporary Iran, resulting in a general failure to explain and to anticipate its contemporary social and political transformations.
Cinema in Iran: A Selective Annotated Bibliography of Dissertations and Theses (2013) by Elizabeth J. Hester
The objective of this annotated bibliography is to provide a comprehensive listing of dissertations and theses on Iranian cinema. Each listing contains the author's name, title of dissertation/theses, degree awarded, educational institution and author abstract.
Conflict and Development in Iranian Film (2013) by Kamran Talattof and A. A. Seyed-Gohrab
The contributors to this timely volume explore the philosophical underpinnings and cinematic techniques characteristic of contemporary Iranian film. Collectively, they demonstrate how the pervasive themes of Iranian cinema—such as martyrdom and war, traditional gender roles and their recent subversion, as well as broader social policy issues—have been addressed and how various directors, including the acclaimed Abbas Kiarostami, have approached them using a variety of techniques.
Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2008) by Negar Mottahedeh
Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. In the process, the filmic techniques and cinematic technologies were gendered as feminine and the national cinema was produced as a woman’s cinema.
A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 (2011) by Hamid Naficy
Volume 2 spans the period of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule, from 1941 until 1978. During this time Iranian cinema flourished and became industrialized, at its height producing more than ninety films each year. The state was instrumental in building the infrastructures of the cinema and television industries, and it instituted a vast apparatus of censorship and patronage.
The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity and Film after the Revolution (2011) by Khatereh Sheibani
Sheibani argues that Persian poetry, fiction, painting, and other art forms all were influenced by the upheavals of the 1970s and '80s, but that this remarkable cultural revolution is best evidenced in Iranian films. She holds that film ultimately replaced poetry as the dominant form of cultural expression in Iran.
Shi'i Islam in Iranian Cinema: Religion and Spirituality in Film (2011) by Nacim Pak-Shiraz
Pak-Shiraz here highlights how many Iranian film directors concern themselves with the content of the religious and historical narratives of culture and society, sparking debate about the medium's compatibility or incongruity with religion and spirituality. She explores the various ways that Shi'i discourse emerges on screen, and offers groundbreaking insights into both the role of film in Iranian culture and society, and how it has become a medium for exploring what it means to be Iranian and Muslim after thirty years of Islamic rule.
ReFocus: The Films of Sohrab Shahid Saless: Exile, Displacement and the Stateless Moving Image (2020) by Azadeh Fatehrad
An Iranian immigrant struggling to integrate into 1970s German society, the filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944–98) has become a neglected figure in discussions of diaspora cinema. In this – the first English-language book to reflect on his work and its implications for creativity in the diasporic conditions of urban displacement – a range of international scholars provide a comprehensive account of Shahid Saless’s films and production methods.
Iranian Rural Cinema during Industrialization: Transformation of Hegemonic Spaces in films 1960-1979 (2020) by Asefeh Sadeghi-Esfahlani
This book probes the Iranian rural films produced during the period of fast modernisation from the 1960s to 1970s in Iran. As the land reform and grand process of industrialisation produced distinct modern socio-political issues in the rural over the course of nearly two decades, the growing industry of cinema actively participated in the hegemonic battles of the day as it represented the collective problematics.
Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (2014) by Hamid Dabashi
Dabashi focuses on twelve of the most important Iranian filmmakers of the past half-century—among them, such pioneers as Forugh Farrokhzad, Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, and Jafar Panahi. In his examination of their lives and their greatest works, Dabashi explains how, despite the censorship of both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic, the creativity of these filmmakers has transcended national and cultural borders.
From Iran to Hollywood and Some Places In-Between: Reframing Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2011) by Christopher Gow
Gow examines how the success of Iranian cinema and the films of Abbas Kiarostami, its foremost proponent, can be accounted for by the extent to which they fit into a pre-established notion of art cinema. Gow also expands understanding of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema by examining the links between the New Iranian Cinema and émigré Iranian filmmaking, from the uncompromising German films of Sohrab Shahid Saless, to Vadim Perlman's exploration of the Iranian experience of exile in the Oscar-nominated House of Sand and Fog.
Iranian Cinema And the Islamic Revolution (2006) by Shahla Mirbakhtyar
This volume examines the two waves of modern Iranian cinema: before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The first began about 1969, and the second started in 1984 and carried its momentum through 1997. Topics discussed include the effect of cultural mores on cinematic growth, the development of Iranian cinema as a reaction against commercial cinema and the effect of politics on the film industry
Iranian Documentary Film Culture: Cinema, Society, and Power 1997-2014 (2015) by Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri
Iranian documentary filmmakers negotiate their relationship with power centers every step of the way in order to open creative spaces and make films. This dissertation covers their professional activities and their films, with particular attention to 1997 to 2014, which has been a period of tremendous expansion. Sadegh-Vaziri explores how filmmakers engaged with different centers of power in order to create films that are relevant to their society. To focus this topic, his research explores media institutions, their filmmaking practices, and the strategies they use to produce and distribute their films.
Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution: Family and Nation in Fīlmfārsī (2017) by Pedram Partovi
This book challenges the idea that filmfarsi is detached from the past and present of Iranians. Far from being escapist Hollywood fare merely translated into Persian, it claims that the better films of this supposed genre must be taken as both a subject of, and source for, modern Iranian history. It argues that they have an appeal that relies on their ability to rearticulate traditional courtly and religious ideas and forms to problematize in unexpectedly complex and sophisticated ways the modernist agenda that secular nationalist elites wished to impose on their viewers. Partovi discussed his book at the Library of Congress.
Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance (2019) by Michelle Langford
As well as tracing the roots of allegory in Iranian cinema before and after the 1979 revolution, Langford also theorizes this cinematic mode. She draws on a range of cinematic, philosophical and cultural concepts - developed by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz and Vivian Sobchack - to provide a theoretical framework for detailed analyses of films by renowned directors of the pre-and post-revolutionary eras including Masoud Kimiai, Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Kamran Shirdel, Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Meshkini, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Asghar Farhadi.
Iranian Cinema and Philosophy: Shooting Truth (2012) by Farhang Erfani
In film studies, Iranian films are kept at a distance, as 'other,' different, and exotic. In response, this book takes these films as philosophically relevant and innovative. Each chapter of this book is devoted to analyzing a single film, and each chapter focuses on one philosopher and one particular aesthetic question.
ReFocus: The Films of Rakhshan Banietemad (2021) by Maryam Ghorbankarimi
Banietemad is one of the first female film directors in Iran. This book, the first English language study of her films and career, Iranian director Rakhshan Banietemad contains chapters by some of the most prominent scholars of Iranian cinema, as well as younger scholars with fresh points of view. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the book devotes special attention to Banietemad's understudied documentaries and films. She discussed her work at UCLA.
Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity (2013) by Staci Gem Scheiwiller
This book discusses what it means to “perform the State,” what this action means in relation to the country of Iran and how these various performances are represented. The concept of the “State” as a modern phenomenon has had a powerful impact on the formation of the individual and collective, as well as on determining how political entities are perceived in their interactions with one another in the current global arena.
The Singular Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami: Imagined Identities in Iranian Film (2020) by Hossein Khosrowjah
Through a close examination of Kiarostami's formal and narrative strategies in his films, notably Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Close-Up and Ten, this innovative book works against the grain of auteurist readings of Kiarostami's films to explore global circulation and the controversy over censorship's role in the cinema. It grounds his films firmly within the historical context of Iranian national cinema, revealing the ways in which the reception of films across multiple sites can contribute to how national narratives are articulated locally and globally.
Women in the Cinemas of Iran and Turkey: As Images and as Image-Makers (2019) by Gonul Donmez-Colin
This volume compares the cinemas of Iran and Turkey in terms of the presence and absence of women on both sides of the camera. From a critical point of view, it provides detailed readings of works by both male and female film-makers, emphasizing issues facing women's filmmaking.
The History of Iranian Cinema (1993) by Massoud Mehrabi
Revolution and Creativity: A Survey of Iranian Literature, Films and Art in the Post Revolutionary Era (2006) by Azarmi Dukht Safawi and AW Azhar Dehlvi
This study of contemporary cultural change in Iran since 1979 focuses on poetry, women's writings, film, art and painting. Revolution and Creativity was written by two leading specialists in Indian Universities, both professors of Persian and Persian culture.
A Colourful Presence: The Evolution of Women's Representation in Iranian Cinema (2015) by Maryam Ghorbankarimi
Ghorbankarimi analyzes the changes in the representation of women in Iranian cinema since the 1960s, and investigates the reasons and motives for this. She explores the changing roles of women in film production and their representation in films made between the 1960s and 2000s. Although some aspects of women's lives became stricter after the revolution, it was in the late 1980s that women took a prominent role both behind and in front of the camera for the first time.
Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (2016) by Blake Atwood
In Reform Cinema in Iran, Blake Atwood examines how new industrial and aesthetic practices created a distinct cultural and political style in Iranian film between 1989 and 2007. Atwood analyzes a range of popular, art, and documentary films. He provides new readings of internationally recognized films such as Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Time for Love (1990), as well as those by Rakhshan Bani, Masud Kiami, and other key Iranian directors.
The Films of Makhmalbaf: Cinema, Politics & Culture in Iran (2005) by Eric Egan
Mohsen Makhmalbaf's life and career have been shaped, and in a way been defined, by the Islamic revolution and the complex historical influences beyond it. Critically, vividly, and sometimes pitilessly, Makhmalbaf's films provide a mirror of Iranian history and culture, both before and after the cataclysm of the revolution. From the start, Makhmalbaf has explored the relationship between the individual and a larger social and political environment.
Cinematic Modernity: Cosmopolitan Imaginaries in Twentieth Century Iran (2015) by Golbarg Rekabtalaei
Rekabtalaei explores the genesis amnesia that informs the conventional scholarly accounts of Iranian cinema history. Critiquing a homogeneous historical time, this dissertation investigates cinematic temporality autonomous from (and in relation to) political and social temporalities in modern Iran. Grounding the emergence of cinema in Iran within a previously neglected cosmopolitan urban social formation, it demonstrates how the intermingling of diverse Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, French and British communities in interwar Tehran, facilitated the formation of a cosmopolitan cinematic culture in the early twentieth century.
A Hundred Years of Film Adverts and Film Posters in Iran (2011) by Massoud Mehrabi