social value of cinema and the suggestion that cinema and religion might be in competition.
The story of Ohanian’s Haji Agha, Cinema Actor (1932) reflects the facts that resistance to Reza Shah’s campaign of reform was growing among adherents of the clergy and that cinema itself was identified as a modernizing force. The film’s title character, Haji Agha (an honorific given those who have completed the haj to Mecca), is a suspicious religious conservative who’s convinced that movies are evil and morally corrupt. Unbeknown to him, his flapper-like daughter is attending a film school (very much like Ohanian’s, of course) with her fiancé, who suggests to the film director in residence (presumably modeled on Ohanian) that Haji Agha would make a good subject for a film.
After Haji Agha discovers a favorite watch has gone missing, he follows the man he thinks stole it into the film school, where his actions are secretly filmed. When he’s shown the resulting film and it reveals the truth of the stolen watch, Haji Agha decides that cinema is a social good after all and gives it his blessing. (This happy ending, one might suggest, offers a fanciful version of a reconciliation between tradition and modernity that Iranians in real life have been pursuing for the last century.)
To go from Ohanian’s naïve meditation on cinema to the more sophisticated and complex ones that emerged six decades later required, first, the emergence of a solidly established commercial film industry in Iran, which happened in the years following
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World War II. Perhaps equally necessary, though, were the cultural currents indicated by the careers of two cosmopolitan Iranian friends, Fereydoun Hoveyda and Farrokh Ghaffary, who landed in Paris after the war’s end and, like other future luminaries, got their education in cinema by voraciously consuming the fare on offer at the Cinémathèque Française.
Hoveyda and Ghaffary collaborated on a short film, L’Impasse (now lost), in 1956, but it’s not primarily as filmmakers that they are known. From the early ’50s to the mid-’60s, Hoveyda served as a key critic for the seminal film journal Cahiers du cinéma, where he was known for championing the work of the Italian Neorealists, especially Roberto Rossellini (with whom he collaborated on a never-completed documentary about the history of Islam), and for advancing François Truffaut’s idea of the director as auteur.
For his part, Ghaffary went to work at the
Cinémathèque Française and for decades afterwards was involved with the international film archiving movement. But it was his pre-Revolutionary activities in his homeland that made him arguably the single person most responsible for implanting in Iran the idea of an artistic (and auteurist) cinema on the model of the Italian and the French.
Returning to Tehran in 1949–51, Ghaffary was a veritable cyclone of cinephilic activity,
writing
the nation’s first serious film criticism for daily newspapers, establishing film societies that offered showings of important foreign films, and beginning the research that would produce the first collection of
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