Compared to many national cinemas, the study of cinema in Iran remains a relatively young field. It is no surprise, then, that much of the scholarship has concentrated on unearthing films, rediscovering film movements, and examining their relationship to history rather than studying the material history of cinema itself. Kaveh Askari’s Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran stands out from the existing scholarship by tracing the movement of cinematic objects in midcentury Iran and beyond, offering a material history of the industry and making it a timely and welcome addition to this growing field.
At the outset, the book is about the global circulation of recycled cinema and film materials through both formal and informal channels—although, as Askari shows, more often through informal ones. For that reason, the book serves as a study of the global experience of modernity. Askari discusses how different cuts of the same Hollywood films were screened in different continents and cities, producing a shared yet uneven experience of modernity. At the same time, the book turns to local experiences of modernity. In particular, it examines how films and film materials were purchased, distributed, cut, remade, and repurposed in Middle Eastern cinemas and studios, reshaping moving images according to local contexts.
Rather than treating films as fixed cultural objects, Askari follows the material traces of cinema itself. By examining the circulation of objects such as reels of celluloid, film scores, promotional materials like posters, and audiovisual technologies, he demonstrates how regional relationships and negotiations shaped film experiences by limiting or expanding access to films and film materials. The book is therefore also about the creative possibilities of cinema in Iran. An object-based cultural history reveals how Iranian film culture did not emerge solely through the production of wholly original works, but rather, a lot of times, through practices of repair, adaptation, and reuse, engineered by cinema enthusiasts.
At the heart of Askari’s analysis of midcentury film practices is the concept of relay cinema aimed to highlight “mediated communication and physical movement (8).” By investigating relay points of distribution and the channels that carried objects onward from those relay points, Askari reconstructs a global network of circulation that many scholars remain unaware of precisely because these networks are so difficult to trace, particularly for those who focus on national cinemas alone. At one point, Askari notes that the archives of Hollywood exporters effectively go dark in certain cities because they contain little information about what happens to films after they pass through particular relay points. Recovering this history is one of the book’s most impressive achievements, and a task that only a media historian of Askari’s caliber and expertise could undertake. By sidestepping a narrowly national framework and examining the midcentury global circulation of recycled or secondhand prints, he offres a set of overlooked networks that generate new historical narratives for film, media, and film technologies in Iran and around the world.
Equally significant is the attention Relaying Cinema gives to forms of labor that often remain unrecognized. Askari’s analysis allows for the resurrection of figures who have been foundational to cinematic practices from the obscurity of dark rooms, private studios, and shops, and therefore from cinema history itself. The creative labor of these figures localized global films, made them accessible to Iranian audiences, and in short, made film going and film culture possible.
In his first chapter, Askari examines junk prints—secondhand and worn-out film prints that were often dismissed by filmmakers and distributors as waste. Yet he gives these junk prints new life by tracing their afterlives upon their retirement from formal channels. As he notes, he uses the term “junk print” as one of admiration rather than dismissal. Junk prints serve an important function in the historiography of film because they combine remnants of different historical periods in ways that were not originally intended. This is evident in junk prints of popular serials such as The Tiger’s Trail (Astra/Pathé, 1919) or junks of films such as D. W. Griffith’s The Fall of Babylon (1919). An archaeological study of imported and translated prints of The Fall of Babylon, screened in Iran in the late 1920s to 1930s, demonstrates how the historical film was reframed as a local story. Rather than emphasizing the fall of Babylon, printed promotional materials celebrated Cyrus the Great’s conquest of the city, aligning the film with the nationalist rhetoric of Reza Shah during this period.
Having established the afterlives of discarded film prints, Askari next turns to the technical infrastructures that sustained their circulation. In his second chapter, Askari urges us to pay closer attention to “circulation worries”: the material care, expertise, and labor involved in maintaining and repairing imported films and projection technologies that made screenings possible. Askari reminds the reader that “Worry was material before it was emotional,” invoking the word’s archaic meaning of tearing and disintegrating (46). This concern with maintenance is exemplified in figures such as Mohsen Badi, an engineer and craftsman of cinema who studied in Paris and London before returning to Iran during World War II. Through his work developing sound recording and film duplication systems, Badi’s ingenuity at times surpassed that of prominent Western companies. The chapter also examines relay systems that relied on informal film distribution networks and copyright violations in the afterlife of prints in Iran and Iraq. In a highly technical section that may prove challenging for some readers, Askari turns to the work of dubbing for Iranian audiences, arguing that the freedom exhibitors and engineers enjoyed once a film was outside studio control allowed them to dub films and incorporate local elements such as music to appeal to Iranian audiences and sell more tickets.
Taking the sound cue from the previous chapter, the third chapter turns to the labor involved in repurposing music scores in cinema. Askari draws attention to forms of intellectual labor that often remain invisible, particularly the creation of film music collages assembled from multiple genres and national traditions. It is not the originality of the source material that interests him, but rather the creative labor involved in constructing these new combinations. For instance, the music of Esmail Koushan’s Afsungar (The Enchantress, 1953), like the film itself, draws on several non-Iranian films, incorporating music from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946), revealing the afterlives of these films in Iran. Figures such as Rubik Mansouri, a composer, music editor, and sound designer, collected and archived vinyl records and magnetic tapes from abroad to assemble collaged scores for Iranian films such as Samuel Khachikian’s The Midnight Cry (1961). These layered musical scores allowed audiences familiar with the originals to anticipate events and experience the layering in the film. Recycled Hollywood scores, like borrowed scenes and characters, helped position the industry as contemporaneous with its global counterparts, contributing to the global experience of vernacular modernity.
If the previous chapters focused on the circulation of prints, technologies, and sound, chapter 4 turns to the circulation of cinematic styles and genres. Here, Askari moves beyond long-standing accusations of “imitation” that have been directed at Samuel Khachikian’s thriller films (often dubbed “Tehran noir”). Askari takes issue with media historians’ comparisons of Khachikian to Hitchcock, arguing that such comparisons reproduce hierarchies of power through their reliance on global cinematic authority. He traces Cinema Star magazine’s posters, ads, interviews, and other publicity materials that engaged Hitchcock, his films, and crime fiction to show the transnational circulation of film noir criticism during this period. One also could read such engagements as emblematic of Iran’s postwar anxieties, shaped by rapid transformations driven by the inflow of oil revenues and the launch of the White Revolution. Khachikian’s films gain further significance within this global currency of the crime thriller, even if they were often deemed counterfeit by critics such as Houshang Kavousi. Rather than taking Iranian adaptations of Hollywood forms at face value, Askari examines the creative and intellectual labor involved in the dandyish recombination of Hollywood visual styles and characters in Iranian films. Showing Khachikian’s use of modular patterns drawn from film noir as a global idiom, Askari argues for Khachikian’s active voice in global noir, offering a compelling account of vernacular modernism.
The final chapter brings together many of the book’s central themes by examining the extended life of celluloid as it was reconfigured beyond the control and intentions of the studios through “orphaned” films. Masoud Kimiai’s Eastern Boy (1975) has an apt connection to Askari’s overarching theme of the global circulation of junk celluloid, this time through Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959), which is featured in the film and was imported and screened in Iran via the Warner Brothers Cairo office. Eastern Boy serves as a palimpsest, revealing different layers of history through Kimiai’s childhood memories and film history; its director had worked as an assistant director on The Heroes (The Invincible Six, Jean Negulesco, 1969), itself a film that borrowed from Rio Bravo. Through these multiple layers, Kimiai’s film transforms familiar international tropes and characters into a local cinematic language. In this way, Eastern Boy crystallizes the book’s arguments, revealing the afterlives of Rio Bravo in Iran through its distribution, publicity, and intellectual histories.
As is clear in this discussion, this is a history of the reshaping, shifting, and reconfiguration of cinematic materials and forms, one that resists any notion of cinema as static or fixed. Despite serving as a valuable material history of cinema in midcentury Iran, Relaying Cinema goes beyond an object-based history of film culture. It is ultimately a book of remembrance and commemoration, recovering the creative and intellectual labor that made midcentury film culture possible but that has been obscured by historical amnesia and an overemphasis on film as a singular production. It is a scholarship of care: for cinema, its material objects, its engineers and craftspeople, its music and sound, and the many forms of labor that sustain cinematic cultures. Askari’s affection for and respect for the industry radiates throughout the book.
Although Askari’s transnational approach is one of the book’s greatest strengths, it sometimes overshadows the historical specificity of the Iranian context, including the geopolitical obstacles to film transit and the concerns shaped by the era’s heightened nationalism or socialist predilections. Moreover, the breadth of the material occasionally gives the chapters a fragmented quality. Nevertheless, the book’s overarching concept of relay cinema ultimately lends coherence to its diverse case studies.
The book incorporates and analyzes a large number of primary sources and a number of underutilized archives, most notably the archives of Hollywood abroad (which deserve greater attention in studies of cinema in Iran as a transnational phenomenon), although it engages more selectively with secondary scholarship on Iranian cinema, beyond a few key works. For its object-based history of global circulation, film technologies, and film intertextuality, Relaying Cinema is a feat. It is essential reading for scholars and students of global cinema, media history, Iranian cinema, and the material history of moving images.
