In its 5000-year history, Iran (which was called Persia by the ancient Greeks) has had moments of extreme grandeur and influence, such as the sixth century-BC empire of Cyrus the Great, which ruled much of the known world. Yet it has also been periodically overrun and laid low by outside forces, including the armies of Alexander of Macedon in the fourth century BC, the Arab armies of Islam in the seventh century AD (following a schism in the new religion, Iran became the center of the new religion’s minority Shia branch), and Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes, who slaughtered as much as three-quarters of Iran’s population in the thirteenth century.
Remarkably, Iran survived all of these invasions and eventually, as was often noted, managed to absorb and refashion the cultures that ostensibly conquered it. This genius for assimilation was called upon too in more recent history when Iran was overrun yet again — by Western culture and its instruments of modernity, including cinema.
In Once Upon a Time, Cinema — a film featuring a bountiful use of symbolic mirrors — Makhmalbaf recalls that movies came to Iran at the onset of the 20th century as a royal toy, an instrument of amusement for Iran’s penultimate dynasty of shahs, the Qajars, who employed cinematographers to film little scenes of court life to show to their aristocratic circle. By 1905, though, Tehran had its first movie theater, and thereafter the novelty quickly became a favorite diversion of all classes (the beginning of this explosion coincided with Iranians’
in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11, to
import another Western innovation, representative government, an effort eventually thwarted by the intervention of Great Britain and Russia’s monarchies). The growing popularity of cinema in Iran mirrored that in Western countries, with one significant exception; for more than two decades, all the films shown in Iranian theaters were of foreign origin, most of them imported from Russia, Europe or the United States.
The movement toward an indigenous cinema was influenced by two events that took place in 1925. The first: Reza Shah, the first shah in Iran’s final dynasty, overthrew the decadent Qajars, had himself installed as the nation’s leader, and began a comprehensive program of modernization that included not only an emphasis on Western-style education, rapid indus- trialization and freeing women from their traditional roles (he banned the veil and encouraged Europe- an-style dress) but also a deliberate diminishment of the power of the clergy. The second: an Armenian named Ovanes Ohanian, who had spent most of his life in Russia and studied at the Cinema Academy of Moscow, arrived in Tehran intending to make movies and, realizing he couldn’t do so without experienced collaborators,
founded Iran’s first film school, the Cinema Artists Educational Center. attempt,
Although the subsequent efforts to make Iranian entertainment films were tentative, producing only eight features in the period 1929–37, the third of these (and Ohanian’s second) strikingly anticipates Close-Up in focusing on a film director, a family, a theft, a deception, surreptitious filming, debates over the
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