Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History by Golbarg Rekabtalaei, and: Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit by Kaveh Askari (review)

Abstract

Inspired by Miriam Hansen’s concept of Vernacular Modernism, which elucidates how cinema as a mass cultural form can be modernist and refl ects upon its interrelation with mass culture, Golbarg Rekabtalaei and Kaveh Askari deploy the concept to investigate the socio-cultural history of Iranian cinematic modernity through their idiosyncratic approaches. Golbarg Rekabtalaei’s Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History narrates the “morphogenesis” of Iranian “cinematic modernity” in the social space and visual content that pre-revolutionary cinema off ered in the twentieth century.1 Her