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The first Iranian feature, entitled Abi va Rabi (Abi and Rabi, 1930) made by Avanes Ohanians, a sixty-minute silent slapstick comedy hit the screens with direct referances to Tehran as a changed city. The film displayed images of old Tehran and compared them with the new buildings and avenues springing up all around. The film charted the progress Iran through depicting Westernised Tehranians customs and habits. The film’s two leading actors formed a comic pairing in imitation of their prominent Western counterparts similar to Laurel and Hardly. According to surviving photogrophs, they were dressed in impeccable Western attire, and came to percieved as the symbol of the New Iran. The conservatives stood against this film-and cinema-and complained that this film does not pay attention to their moral dimension, and claimed all films must be censored prior to screening, both poilitically as well as ethically! Three months later the government ratified that the Tehran council is responsible for improving public morals and combating corruption, and any part of the film that the Tehran council deems contrary to public decency and modesty will be edited out. It meant Tehran became the source of modernism, and at the same time the chapel of censorship. Haji Agha, Actor-e Cinema (Haji Agha, Cinema Actor, 1933), a silent movie made by Ovanes Ohanians accurately recored the changing socio-political conditions of the time. The fact that Haji Agha is a deeply religious man from Tehran whose son-in-law was a filmmaker reflected the antagonistic societal forces that came into play over the issue of cinema in Iran. It mirrored wider social concern. The clash between past and present, tradition and progress in Tehran reflecting what was happening in Iran. The main character armed with his rosary and hookah at the early scencer changed at the end of the film and put a Western hat on his head. His daughter was shown without a veil, her behaviour became as a typically Tehranian Westernised female. Haji Agha attacked the notion of sex as a taboo. In the ensuing Film critic and historian City Against Village When the Shah tried to replace the popular Mohammad Musaddiq, the prime minister, demonstrations ensued. Velgard (Loafer, Mehdi Raisfirooz, 1992) alluded to the feverish Tehran street demonstrations. A man sinks into addiction and gambling, abandoning his family, and got his comeuppuance when soldiers shoot him during a curfeur in Tehran. A sustained period of growth for Iranian bourgeoisie began in 1950. The sudden wealth materialized in Iranian films through Tehran as a city of chance and money. Many films alluded to poverty and showed the lives of the lower classes, such as Rozan-e-Omid (Light of Hope, Sardar Sager, 1958) where a country bumpkin who won the lottery in Tehran, found work at a slaughterhouse, then in a cabaret, and was eventually thrown into jail. The sequences depicting the poor people of southern Tehran were censored. Similarly, Jonoob-e Shahr (South of the City, Farokh Ghafari, 1958), which was a gritty, realistic portrayal of the harshness of life in southern Tehran, was banned and all copies confiscated.These films exploited the tendency of urban men and women to conform to type by imitating the hairstylis and dress. The packaging of modern men and women as sea object was another aspect of consumerism in Tehran style. It was a city without security and identity, and Tehran fom a rural perspective became associated with the West. Iranian families in Tehran based on movies splintered and it was impossible for villagers to sustain in the competitive atmosphere of Tehran. In many films of 1960 period the protection of rural family honour and integrity became a cinematic recipe. Bolleol-e Masraee (Canary Farm, Majid Mohseni, 1957) was a quintessential movie of this theme the Tehran is search as a very honest village came to Tehran in search of wealth, and challenged with keeping innocence in this big city. Canary Farm said that the only thing implicitly wrong with Iran was the spoilt sissies of Tehran. Mohseni examined the socio-political imperative through sentimentalised prism in Parastohaa be Laneh Barmigardsnd (Swallows Always Return Home, 1963). Having lost his child due to lack of proper medical facilities, he sold his land and migrated to Tehran. In the reflection of the antagonism between babour and leisure in Tehran, he worked as a labourer whilst performing in his spare time as a clown. Iran entered the 1960 with the police, military and security servicer activities. The first half of this decade witnessed the emerging guerilla conflict political groups and the security forces. Iranian audiences faced with a wave of Western-style police and crime capers in Tehran streets, and the films of Samuel Khachikian kept the crime genre vivid during this period. Boom Town and Lonely Guys Tehran through the 1960 metamorphosing rapidly with the arrival of large hotels, conferences for international dealers, European and American banks concenterating mainly on currency exchange, boutiques, cabarets, discos, foreign cuisine, school teaching dancing, ballet, piano, guitar and new magazines brought the latest fashion, Even Tehran streets renamed accordance with this wave: Kennedy Square, Eisenhower Avenue and Elizabeth II Boulvard. During this period, Iran discovered film noir as a reaction to its former passivity. In the post-white Revolution, Post-Land Reform Plan area, the social and political vision of Iranian film noir spoke to a sense of cynicism and alienation that was circulating within popular culture. Film noir was not a genre that translated exactly into Iranian cinema in terms of Western conventions of setting and theme, but rather through more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It was a politicised genre that opposed to the optimistic films of the period, and aimed to portray the dark side of Tehran urban life with emphasis on the theme of revenge. The encounter with a boom economy, with its threat of inflation, began a process of general disillusionment for many of those in search of older values in Tehran as the city of money and depression.With Masoud Kimiaie’s Gheisar (1969), a huge box office and critical success, Iranian film was take seriously of intellectual debate for the first time. It presents a decidedly dark vision of Iran. Tehran is portrayed as an inferno, inhabited by a disaffected and alienated population that is plagued by crime. When a man returns home Tehran a business trip to find his sister has been raped, he viciously turns on society itself. Gheisar’s use of camera angles, real locations of its punctuation of close-up and occasional long shots, were all galvanised into a weaker and less able to alter their own condition. Tehran both the actual background for the anti-hero – the desolation that produced him and as a symbol and extension of his brutality. He lives in a world of empty alleys, seedy rooming houses, cheap cafes, warehouses and police precincts. Even when the locales of these films were more modern places, he was seen as a foreigner holed up in some hide-out, never enjoying modern facilities. Amir Naderi’s first feature, Kodahafez Rafeegh (Goodbye Friends, 1971), is the story of three unemployed friends who, after an ill-advised but impressively executed heist, turn against each other and die one by one. This movie created a new angry young man in the shape of Saeed Raad, and provided directors with an alternative template for future filmmaking. The film brought about a kind of realism in Iranian films with emphasis on the harsh views of Tehran. This realistic trend succeeded in breaking with the domain of the typical Iranian melodramas by moving the setting into the streets, populated with everyday people. This pessimism reached a peak in Tangna (Deadlock, Amir Naderi, 1973). A pool hustler, again played by Raad, kills his rival and goes on the run, living in fear in the burnt-out sites of the city. Two of the dead man’s brothers hunt him down. The film shots of the poorest districts of Tehran infuse the film with a sense of gloom with centring on lonely, frightened people in Tehran. Deadlock is grimmer and tougher than any other movie of the period whose violence captures a rare nastiness that extended the boundaries of Iranian cinema. Its realism with its use of black and white photography and naturalistic settings, though in the final scene we are spared the true brutality and ugliness of death. Arguably the most controversial film of the decade, Ghavaznha (Deers, Masoud Kimiaie, 1975), met with immediate success. Faramarz Ghribian plays an armed robber who undertakes one last robbery for political purposes, but is shot and wounded. Fleeing with the stolen loot, he takes refuge with an old, estranged friend (Vosoughi). Deers posits a number of social issues that rested at the heat of 1970s Iran: political conflicts, armed struggle, police brutality, class division and drug addiction. The spatial coding of the film uses populist theatres and crowded poorhouses in Tehran to portray a society on the verge of explosion. Lost Youth Dreams As a result of investment in health-care facilities, most of it concentrated in cities, the population grew 33.7 million in 1976. Tehran became the largest concentration of economic enterprises as well as the biggest market in the country. It extracted money and people from all around the country, creating large made reflected the strategy of the unemployed movement’s leadership to relate the struggle for jobs to other working-class political and social concerns. The unemployed also launched a limited fundraising campaign. Contributions came largely from working people who had not lost their jobs. Significantly, the bazaar, a major source of funds during the Revolution, responded negatively. Unemployment loans, however meagre, provided immediate relief. So ling as the jobless believed they could gain ground through collective resistance, they refrained from limiting themselves to individualistic acts and survival strategies. And as long as the unemployed poor lacked any institutional setting in which they could exercise direct action, such as workplace occupation, they needed to resort to wider collective protest.In Zire Poost-e Shab (Under the Skin of the Night, Fereidoon Goleh, 1974), Tehran came to represent a prison that incarcerated men who had reached breaking point. Tehran becomes a symbol of social injustice and urban squalour. The young searches in vain for a safe haven where he can be alone with his foreign sweetheart. At the end, tired and battered, he finds himself in the only place fit for a mid-1970s hero behind bars. The leads, demonstrate the kind of amiable, gooby eccentricity the audience expected to see from characters in a commercial film, conveying little of the anger or desperation their situation seems to warrant in Tehran. By the close of the first year of the Revolution, thousands of unemployed urbanites realised that they must come to terms with their joblessness. Neither the movement of the unemployed nor the efforts of the new government were sufficient to ameliorate the situation. The stagnation of indusrty and construction, the freezing of recruitment in the state, and an annual release of thousands of urban migrants, all combined to inflate the number of those out of work. In Tehran, unemployment had jumped from 3 percent. In 1976 to some 14 percent in 1979. A year later it rose to 16.3 percent. Revolution and After The collapse of the Shah’ s regime in 1978 brought with it a temporary halt in the bureaucratic control of economic activities. The breakdown of police and municipal contorl opened the way for thousands of people to utilise own initiative in economic life. Tehran attracted the largest group of street workers, whose number is estimated at about 40,000 in 1981. Between 1981 and 1984, at the height of urban migration, when 1500 people moved to greater Tehran every day, street subsistence work like brush fire in the capital and in other cities and towns. The authorities were apprehensive about the political ramifications of this situation. Whithin these three years, about 80,000 new vendors began working in the capital providing support for an estimated 400,000 Tehranis. There were a few films that dealt with the working-class struggle in Tehran. These included Parvaz be Souy-e Minoo (Flight to Minoo, Tahgi Keyvan Salahshour, 1980), in which a asked factory worker becomes a guerilla and attempts to assassinate a member of Parliament, and Rasoul, Pesare-e Abolghasem (Rasoul, Son of Abolghasem, Dariush Fahang, 1980), concentrating on brickbumers in the south of Tehran. The message of these films was that if a man were aggressive and competitive enough, all would be his-as if the post-war era had not shattered and refuted such economic dreams. Cynicism setting from the aftermath of war was evident in Kianoosh Ayari’s Abananiha (Abadanians, 1993), based on Vittorio de Sica’s classic Bicycle Thieves of 1948. This simple but emotionally powerful story is told as seen through the eyes of a young boy from a wer-refugee family living in Tehran, and focuses on his father’s stuggle to provide for his family in Tehran during the war. The father works as a driver, using his own car, of which he is very proud. Disaster strikes when the car is stolen. Father and son set out on a desperate quest to find it, a quest that not only leads them into the bowels of Tehran, but also forces them to question their priorities and values. Ayari’s deceptively simple black and white camera work keeps us rooting for them every step of the way. The man is pitted against an entire city of nameless and insensitive faces, his plight even more tragic when seen through the tear-filled eyes of his son. The boy brilliantly symbolises the innocence the can be endangered during hard times. As these films began to accord a less important role to Iraqis, they started to depict more candidly the adverse effects of war. Masoud Kimiaie in Dandan-eMaar (Snake Fang, 1989) illustrated the harsh way of life experienced by young immigrants who had come to Tehran during the war. If this film is about the lives and loves ot the socially excluded, it is also about Tehran, whose poor areas are portrayed as a dilapidated wasteland of stagnant water and city dwellings. The atmosphere is redolent of post-war unease. Kimiaie’s achievement is to make visible the gritty lives of refugees, the unemployed and orphaned children. The attentive, indefatigable camera lingers over their faces as they people this world, forever busy, moving doggedly back and forth through the space of the film. The last half of the 1990s was a feverish time, a period in which paranoia became the norm. Kiarostami’s films had always been considered non-political, though concerned with themes of life and death, but in this period a paranoid tone crept in. With Taam-e Geelas (Taste of Cherry, 1998), the theme of death and the intellectual was further developed. In Taste of Cherry an apparently wealthy, educated man drives round the outskirts of Tehran stopping various men and asking them to perform some kind of undisclosed favour in exchange for money. He is repeatedly rebuffed. Gradually, we learn he is planning to commit suicide, and wants someone to bury him, although the audience is only given hints as to his reasons for wishing to kill himself. Eventually, he meets someone who can help him. Taste of Cherry is a complex and multi-layered story. It can be seen as a film about the dilemma of the intellectual in Iran, ar as a essay on Tehran at the end of a century - a city of refugees, unemployment, rapidly changing landscapes and silent despair.
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