The Little Devil Comes Home: Video, the State, and Amateur Cinema in Iran

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article studies the 1983 ban on video technology in Iran in order to place amateur filmmaking within the larger historiography of Iranian cinema. I examine debates that emerged in the country's newspapers both at the time of the ban in 1983 and again when it was lifted in 1994. I read these editorials alongside the laws and policies that took shape in response to video technology in order to understand both the government's anxieties about amateur filmmaking and the informal practices that formed around those anxieties. The history of analog video in Iran presented in this article expands video studies to include nonwestern cinemas and to address the political as well as the economic concerns of amateur filmmaking.