Cinematic Education, Cinematic Sovereignty

Chapter 1 touched upon the importance that Iranian cosmopolitans in the 1910s and early 1920s attached to cinema as a medium for the moral edification of the public in the service of national advancement, despite the absence of a centralised cinema institution. The praising of cinema’s didactic potential in the education of children and enlightenment of society, as indicated in newspaper articles and film announcements from the late 1920s to mid-1930s, attests to a more formal approval of cinema as a pedagogical medium in this era. Just as print had transferred singular authority of individuals to texts, in the absence of a state-sponsored cinema institution, the authority of individuals was transferred to heterogeneous cinema in the early twentieth century, thus occasioning democratic imaginings in late Qajar Iran (also manifested in the Constitutional Revolution and social movements of this era). As this chapter will demonstrate, with the coming of the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–1979) and the solidification of an ideological nationalism, cinema was taken over by statist nationalism and became increasingly regulated and controlled by the state.