Recently, films outside of Iran such as A Girl Walks Home at Night (2014) have been successfully marketed as “Iranian” because either their characters speak Persian or their soundtracks feature Iranian musicians. Sound, in this sense, represents a defining element of Iranian cinema. Yet, scholars of Iranian cinema tend to take dialogue and music for granted and privilege the image. From considerations of censorship and what filmmakers can and cannot show on screen, to changes that Iranian filmmakers have made in visual language, the field of Iranian film studies has overwhelmingly focused on issues related to the visual. Scholars who have considered early sound film, moreover, have done so encased within national borders, in comparison to American and European cinemas, and in answering questions framed by images. This paper brings needed attention to the role of sound in Iranian cinema by exploring the coming of sound technology and the first Persian-language talkie films in the 1930s. I examine the circumstances regarding the production of several Persian-language films, such as The Lor Girl (1933) and Leyli and Majnun (1937), that Iranian expatriate Abdolhossein Sepanta made in India in collaboration with prominent Parsi film producer Ardeshir Irani, and argue that new sound technologies contributed to the development within Iranian cinema of conventions both on and off-screen related to spectatorship, type of dialogue and language used, and musical numbers that would evolve into Film Farsi.
As Bill Nichols notes, new histories make possible the reconstruction of the wide array of possibilities offered by early cinema. Today, sound, dialogue, and music are accepted and expected parts of the cinema experience, but the introduction of sound technology presented a rupture in cinema history and placed dialogue, music, and sound effects at equal importance with images in larger questions about the purpose of film. In the context of Iran, the sound film helped contribute to the development of a particular national identity and local representation based on a blending of sound and images in contrast to that portrayed in documentary films created by foreign nationals living in Iran and imported Hollywood films. A study of The Lor Girl and Sepanta’s other work within a framework of the introduction of sound technology brings attention to language and aural components of cinema that have received less attention in scholarship despite the importance of sound in cultural traditions.
