In the wake of the onset of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980, the revolutionaries in Iran began to realize the corollary impact of film on social and political mobilization. The traumatic events associated with the war, including the destruction of entire towns and cities, attacks on factories and refineries, and indiscriminate bombings of civilian targets, prompted the production of a new genre of cinema in support of the soldiers defending the borders and in sympathy with the war's victims. The newly established Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) viewed this war as Saddam Husayn's aggression into Iranian territory, referring to it as the “imposed war” (jang-i tahmīlī). The Iranian military's participation was thus seen to be tantamount to a “sacred defense” (difāʿ-i muqaddas), a spiritual designation that interpreted wartime martyrdom in religious terms.
During the war (1980–88) and in its aftermath, a genre of fiction and nonfiction visual war narratives emerged with the particular aim of fulfilling the ideological purposes of the state. This genre has shown vitality, with more than 200 war films being produced over the last approximately thirty years, many of which were sponsored by the Iranian state. Early war films frequently followed a clichéd structure and propagandistic style, employed symbolism replete with common and flat revolutionary tropes, and were of poor quality in terms of their style and narrative technique. Yet the development of the genre contributed immensely to the formative stage of Iranian cinema as a whole. In fact, some of the most renown and celebrated names in Iranian cinema found their start within it, including Ebrahim Hatamikia, Muhsin Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi, and Kamal Tabrizi. Even a filmmaker like Bahram Bayzaʾi, who already enjoyed recognition prior to the revolution, reentered the cinema scene by producing a war-themed film called Bashu, the Little Stranger. The war films genre thus not only contributed to the state's campaign in support of the Iranian war effort, but also provided for the formation of a new and meaningful postrevolutionary Iranian cinema that has come to inspire international awe and admiration.
Despite its significance, the war films genre has received scant attention from scholars. This volume is the first of its kind to pay heed to the subject, and its varied and eclectic articles delve not only into the important sociopolitical dynamics of the formation of the genre, but also into issues related to trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder, gender relations, faith, aesthetics, techniques, and technology. By bringing together the perspectives of film and area studies scholars on the works of filmmakers such as Morteza Avini, Ibrahim Hatamikia, Mehdi Buzurgnia, Rasul Mulaqulipour, Shahriar Bahrani, Bahram Bayzaʾi, Muhsin Makhmalbaf, and Rakhshan Bani-Iʿtimad, the volume is able to provide analysis of the social, political, and cultural environment in which the genre of war films took shape, developed, and was distributed.
A main characteristic of this volume is that it pays considerable attention to the oeuvre of Morteza Avini, one of the first cinematographic volunteers on the war front. The editor, Pedram Khosronejad, provides a thorough biography of Avini, who was an architect by training before the revolution, began his film career as a volunteer in the Construction Jihad Organization, and later made war documentaries for state television. Ironically, Avini survived the war front only to become a victim of a landmine in Fakkeh, in the southwest of Iran, in 1993, several years after the official end of the war and just as Iranian cinema was beginning to gain international recognition. The Iranian state now supports the operation of a bookstore and publishing house, Rivayat-i Fath Press, where Avini's films and books are collected, re-produced, and distributed. A majority of these are Avini's Sacred Defense works, which in his words “were not made for entertainment, but for moral inspiration” (p. 66). It is this “moral inspiration” that Agnès Devictor deconstructs in her insightful article, which offers a deep theoretical analysis of Avini's early work, examining how faith was staged for the purpose of mobilization to war. At the end of the volume, Khosronejad supplements the detailed biography of Avini in the introduction with the first comprehensive filmography and bibliography of his works.
Another director that receives a good deal of attention in the volume is Ibrahim Hatamikia, who started his career as an early revolutionary and later evolved into a major filmmaker with a distinct style. Shahab Esfandiary asserts that both Hatamikia and Avini “were clear in their intention to distinguish their work from Hollywood and other mainstream war genres” (p. 65). In fact, Hatamikia is one of the few Iranian directors to make films that explicitly tackle issues related to the effects of veterans’ Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as they tried to re-integrate into normal urban life. In the film From Karkheh to Rhein, which Esfandiyari calls “a sign of a new era for Iranian cinema,” and then in The Glass Agency, the filmmaker shows deep and entrenched social and political preoccupations with the issues faced by war veterans. Articles by Esfandiary, Michaël Abecassis, and Sholeh Shahrokhi provide a wide array of hermeneutical interpretations of Hatamikia's works, from his early films to his later postwar ones on veterans and war families.
Along with the historical, political, and social aspects of these films, most of the volume's articles examine their spiritual, psychological, and metaphysical elements. For instance, Abecassis ascertains a psychological significance in Hatamikia's films, stating that they “portray the psychological reconstruction of Iranian people devastated and fragmented by the war. Behind the fragments lies the truth, the puzzle, the riddle which one needs to reconstruct” (p. 102). It is, however, in Sholeh Shahrokhi's article that one finds reference to the categorization of these movies as maʿna-gara, which she translates as “existential.”
One of the most important aspects of early Iranian war films is their propagandistic quality, which contributed to the public relations campaign of the Islamic Republic. In their co-written article, Reza Poudeh and Bahman Zonoozi provide a comprehensive reading of how revolutionary aesthetics constitutes distinctive characteristics of the Iranian war genre, the latter of which they contextualize within international “combat films.” The authors compare the evolving Iranian war films genre to American World War II combat films as discussed by Jeanine Basinger, who lists sixteen required features for inclusion in the category, among which are “a group, a hero, an objective, a mission, an internal group conflict, a faceless enemy, the absence of women, the typical war iconography and narrative pattern of conflicting and opposing natures, [and] death” (p. 139). Reza Poudeh and Bahman Zonoozi's analysis is complemented by Mohammad Ghanoonparvar's contribution, which provides a set of characteristics that can function as markers of a war propaganda genre. Mohammad Ghanoonparvar also offers astute readings of some of the more obscure propaganda films of the early war era.
The volume also pays heed to the place of women in Iranian cinema's war genre. For example, Pershang Sadegh-Vaziri's article analyzes representations of women in the works of Bayzaʾi, Makhmalbaf, and Bani-Iʿtimad, and in so doing deconstructs the notion that this genre of cinema is solely male-focused. Her article underscores the necessity of studying the representation of women in Iranian cinema more broadly.
Although the films under study in this volume represent an important portion of the Iranian war canon, the volume does not analyze significant box office hits such as Kamal Tabrizi's, Leily Ba Man Ast (Leily Is With Me), Masoud Dehnamaki's Ekhraji-ha (The Outcasts), and Ahmad Reza Darvish's Hollywood-style war film, Duel. These movies were all created by early revolutionaries, and they provide unique perspective on the evolution of the war genre in Iranian cinema as well as its subsequent reception.
In conclusion, it is clear that collecting and editing this volume required a great deal of effort by the editor, Pedram Khosronejad, and the scholars who contributed to it. However, the book would have benefited from better copyediting and the addition of the original Persian titles of the mentioned films. Having said that, this volume is a welcome addition to the growing collection of academic studies on Iranian cinema published in English.
