Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran by Blake Atwood (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran by Blake Atwood Hatim El-Hibri (bio) Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran by Blake Atwood The MIT Press. 2021. 264 pages. $35.00 paper; also available in e-book. Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran examines how videocassettes wound their way through everyday life in Iran, making a profound impact on the media landscape. The book shows how the official ban on the medium, enacted in 1983 during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) and unevenly enforced until it was lifted in 1994, led to the flourishing of informal video distribution. Author Blake Atwood presents a compelling account of the lived textures of video's clandestine-yet-ubiquitous presence through oral history—interviews with former video dealers, filmmakers, former government employees, and people from many walks of life who fondly remember video's heyday. Underground expands current debates in the study of media distribution, infrastructure studies, and the material culture of media by analyzing how this technological format negotiated, circumvented, and repurposed state policy and the affordances of the medium. Beyond the novelty of its topic—this is the first scholarly monograph on the subject in English—the book's methodological approach and conceptual framing also result in an original contribution to the literature on Iranian and Middle Eastern media. The book takes the reader into Iran's underground network through five chapters that examine a facet of its operation. Rather than a chronological ordering, the first four chapters examine a different dimension of the long decade of 1983 to 1994 (when the ban was officially in place). While each [End Page 181] chapter reflects on the contemporary moment, the final chapter is more fully focused on how this period continues to inform the present. This structure allows for in-depth consideration of how state regulations (including the lead up to the 1983 ban) impacted existing media institutions and the nascent video industry (chapter 1), the material and human working of the distribution network (chapter 2), the labor and aspirations of video dealers (chapter 3), and the effect of evolving relations between public and private spaces on home viewing and the place of the VCR and videocassettes in mediating the relationship between them (chapter 4). This is followed by a sustained examination of how the memory of the underground manifests in the cultural afterlife of videocassettes in the 2010s and is directly thematized in contemporary culture (chapter 5). These chapters are bracketed by a teachable introduction and a coda, which ruminates on the role that a non-Iranian researcher can play in entering into a dialogue with people whose lives were and continue to be directly impacted by the videocassette ban. Underground's contribution rests in its weaving together of more than forty interviews with archival sources and extensive fieldwork, situating this research historically within a transnational framing of Iran's media landscape. Chapters 1 through 4 work in parallel, allowing the book to vividly convey the lived contradictions of this normal-but-informal, common-butillegal media terrain. Atwood complicates received notions of the all-powerful post-revolutionary state in Iran through a self-reflexive oral history, which examines how interviewees utilize various narrative strategies to express their experiences. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of how formal media regulation created a space of informality that exceeded official objectives shaping even the workings of government agencies. Atwood stresses that an analytical framework centered on the question of piracy would be inadequate to account for the informal economy and culture that emerged. As explored in the first chapter, the 1983 ban was a response to the explosive popularity of an import-heavy video rental market seen to compete with state-sponsored film and television. Yet the underground network also became a way for one state employee to recirculate an archive of older Iranian films that might have otherwise passed out of general circulation. As the post-revolutionary state's agenda to foster a new cultural citizenship turned more urgent with the Iran-Iraq War, underground video became a site where many renegotiated the relationship of public and private life. Central to the book's argument...