Hamid Naficy
Hamid Naficy is one of the worldâ€™s leading authorities on Iranian film, and ,A Social History of Iranian Cinema, is his magnum opus. Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, it explains Iran's peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran. This comprehensive social history unfolds across four volumes, each of which can be appreciated on its own.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. A dissident art-house cinemaâ€”involving some of the best Pahlavi-era new-wave directors and a younger generation of innovative postrevolution directorsâ€”placed Iranian cinema on the map of world cinemas, bringing prestige to Iranians at home and abroad. A struggle over cinema, media, culture, and, ultimately, the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, emerged and intensified. The media became a contested site of public diplomacy as the Islamic Republic regime, as well as foreign governments antagonistic to it, sought to harness Iranian popular culture and media toward their own ends, within and outside of Iran. The broad international circulation of films made in Iran and its diaspora, the vast dispersion of media-savvy filmmakers abroad, and new filmmaking and communication technologies helped to globalize Iranian cinema.,Other volumes in ,
  ,A Social History of Iranian Cinema,
,Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897â€“1941,Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941â€“1978,Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978â€“1984,Hamid Naficy is Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University. He is the author of ,An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles,, and (in Persian) ,Film-e Mostanad,, a two-volume history of nonfiction cinema around the world. Naficy helped to launch ongoing annual Iranian film festivals in Los Angeles and Houston.,â€œHamid Naficy is already established as the doyen of historians, as well as critics, of Iranian cinema. Based on his deep understanding of modern Iranian political and social history, this detailed critical study of cinema in Iran since its debut more than a century ago is his crowning achievement. To say that it is a must-read for virtually all concerned with modern Iranian history, and not just cinema and the arts, is to state the obvious.â€â€”Homa Katouzian, author of ,The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran,â€œThis magisterial four-volume study of Iranian cinema will be the defining work on the topic for a long time to come. Situating film within its sociopolitical context, Hamid Naficy covers the period leading up to the Constitutional Revolution and continues after the Islamic Revolution, examining questions about modernity, globalization, Islam, and feminism along the way. ,A Social History of Iranian Cinema, is a guide for our thinking about cinema and society and the ways that the creative expression of film should be examined as part of a wider engagement with social issues.â€â€”Annabelle Sreberny, co-author of ,Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran,â€œ,A Social History of Iranian Cinema, is an extraordinary achievement, a scholarly, detailed work in which a massive amount of material is handled with the lightest touch. Yet it is Hamid Naficyâ€™s personal experience and investment that give this project a particular distinction. Only a skilled historian, one who is on the inside of his story, could convey so vividly the symbolic significance of cinema for twentieth-century Iran and its deep intertwining with national culture and politics.â€â€”Laura Mulvey, author of ,Death 24Ã— a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image,â€œHamid Naficy seamlessly brings together a century of Iranâ€™s cinematic history, marking its technological advancements and varying genres and storytelling techniques, and perceptively addressing its sociopolitical impact on the formation of Iranâ€™s national identity. ,A Social History of Iranian Cinema, is essential reading not only for the cinephile interested in Iranâ€™s unique and rich cinematic history but also for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the cataclysmic events and metamorphoses that have shaped Iran, from the pivotal Constitutional Revolution that ushered in the twentieth century, through the Islamic Revolution, and into the twenty-first century.â€â€”Shirin Neshat, visual artist, filmmaker, and director of the film ,Women Without Men
Cultural,Iran
A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010