ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, Iranian films have received numerous accolades and been critically praised at film festivals around the world. The films of esteemed Iranian filmmakers such as Forugh Farrokhzad, Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, and Jafar Panahi have been celebrated for their aesthetic vision, their subversion of censorship under the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic, and their notable success in transcending national and cultural borders. While Iranian cinema is heralded today for its transnational character, there has been little discussion in film history 1 about the international nature of early filmmaking in Iran. The lack of such knowledge about the emergence of filmmaking in Iran is due, in large part, to the fact that the greater part of the early footage and documentation has been lost or destroyed. Russian and Armenian filmmakers, producers, and businessmen who were either foreigners or members of ethnic and religious minorities in Iran heavily influenced the emergence of the film industry in Iran. The degree to which Russian film technology and pedagogy influenced the emergence of the film industry in Iran is apparent from Iran’s first feature film, Abi va Rabi (1930), a black-and-white silent comedy directed by Ovanes Ohanian, an Armenian who had studied film in Russia. Further, Ohanian’s second film, Hajji Agha: Cinema Actor, which was a significant departure from the imitation of foreign films, defended the importance of Iranian cinema and critiqued the role of cinema in political and religious discourse in Iran in the early twentieth century.
