Following the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the government banned the majority of Iranian popular films from the mid-twentieth century, known as filmfarsi. Despite this purge, currently a plethora of these films are available online or through independent distributors outside of Iran. The films’ appearance online questions who and by what means these films have found new viewership. This paper seeks to understand the networks and mechanisms that have breathed new life into these discarded films through recent technological shifts in viewing practices. The constant addition of films contributing to an online archive demonstrates the continued interest of filmfarsi among Persian-speaking audiences since its unparalleled popularity in the 1950s through 1970s. Yet, the filmfarsi tradition has received little scholarly attention, and, similarly, film scholars have not considered the relevance of filmfarsi’s distribution methods. My research takes on the filmfarsi tradition in light of its reinvented iterations. In the face of widespread proscription of filmfarsi that has hindered viewing since the Revolution, these un-dead cinematic works have found new mediums for viewing, through digitization and video. I argue that the reinvigoration of filmfarsi lies outside of the physical, territorial boundaries of Iran, creating external viewing communities memorializing days past.
Viewing technological changes in cinema and archiving methods, this paper addresses the geographic and virtual spaces into which Iranian commercial film has leaked since the Iran-Iraq War. Specifically, I look to filmmaker Samuel Khachikian as a case study for understanding the broad and continued fascination with filmfarsi. While Khachikian’s appeal might have been limited as a member of the Armenian Iranian minority population, the lasting popularity of his films exhibits filmfarsi’s irrepressible reach from the Pahlavi era until today. Analyzing this prolific filmmaker identifies the avenues by which filmfarsi was exported from Iran and why it was eventually converted to video. The continued popularity of Khachikian’s crime and melodramatic films have satiated external Persian-speaking communities growing since the Revolution and war. Further, my project attends to the cultural flows of global media consumption and means of sidestepping domestic Iranian laws; the original, and even damaged, 35mm films were often converted outside of Iran into video, then digital formats, and finally, uploaded onto online platforms. With its reinvigoration, filmfarsi, a tradition targeted specifically for Iranians in Iran, fits within a globalizing cinema that reaches a constantly evolving Persian-speaking international community.
