ABSTRACT
Watching films can rarely be free of ideological and political connotations. A thorough consideration of the relationship between the systems of film production and the modes of their reception in each historical period can radically change current canonizations of the festival-favorite Iranian films and partly redress the mostly Anglo-Western scholarship on cult cinema. The American-centric studies on cult cinema have mostly been concerned with either films as texts, or viewers as subjects of research. The Islamic Republic’s antagonistic views toward West and what was conceived as Western-inspired cultural products soon led to a halt of film import and to the ban of many pre-revolutionary films and their stars. The end of the Iraq-Iran war in 1987 and the changes in the Iranian supreme leadership in the following year promised a new era for the Iranian cinema. The technological novelty of sound film can only explain part of unprecedented success.
