A SOCIAL HISTORY OF IRANIAN CINEMA
Volume 3 The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984By Hamid Naficy
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4865-8
Contents
Illustrations,...............................................................................xiAcknowledgments,.............................................................................xiiiOrganization of the Volumes,.................................................................xxiA Word about Illustrations,..................................................................xxviiAbbreviations,...............................................................................xxix1 Transition from "Cinema of Idolatry" to an "Islamicate Cinema,"............................12 Documenting the Uprising, the Revolution, and the Emerging Opposition,.....................473 Consolidating a New "Islamicate" Cinema and Film Culture,..................................115Appendix,....................................................................................189Notes,.......................................................................................195Bibliography,................................................................................217Index,.......................................................................................235
Chapter One
TRANSITION FROM "CINEMA OF IDOLATRY" TO AN "ISLAMICATE CINEMA"
The transition from the Pahlavi-era cinema to the Islamic Republic–era cinema was slow but tumultuous, fiery, and destructive, and it offered an indelible contemporary example of the classic violence waged in all religions between idolaters and iconoclasts. While the torching of the movie houses had occurred before, what happened in the Abadan's Rex Cinema on a hot summer night elevated it into a whole new revolutionary—criminal—tactic.
* * *
Rex Cinema Inferno
On 19 August 1978, Hosain Takabalizadeh and three friends, Farajollah Bazrkar, Yadollah, and Fallah, walked into Rex Cinema, a second-tier movie house in a poor part of the city of Abadan, the site of one of the world's largest oil refineries. Each carried a brown bag that looked like the bags of mixed nuts and roasted seeds (ajil) that moviegoers customarily took into the cinemas—except that theirs each contained a bottle of high-octane airplane fuel. The men joined the spectators who were engrossed in Masud Kimiai's controversial movie, The Deer, about a down-on-his-luck smuggler and a heroin addict, characters widely interpreted as symbolizing anti-Shah revolutionaries. Halfway through the film, Hosain and Farajollah left the screening hall on the pretext of going to the bathroom; instead they doused the theater's wooden doors, the corridor walls, and the concession stand with gasoline. Apparently, all the arsonists returned to their seats so as to avoid being associated with setting the fire, except Takabalizadeh, who stayed behind to ignite the fire, which frightened him because of its speedy progress through the building. Ironically and tragically, the cinema's only emergency exit door had been locked from the outside to prevent terrorist arson. The fire quickly spread, engulfing the entire building. The mainstream press reported that of the approximately 700 spectators, 377 burned to death (Abkashak 1985:14–15); others claimed 600 deaths (Nabavi 1999). The fire, which began at about 10 p.m., "burned throughout most of the night, and the victims' cries could be heard by hundreds helplessly watching from outside the theater.... The screams stopped after the first few hours." Grief, mourning, and anger gripped the entire city. Some families bore an undue share of the calamity, having lost multiple members, among them Jafar Sazesh, who lost five of his children, and Yusef Radmehr, who lost ten children (fig. 1).
Although the Pahlavi government placed the blame on the religious zealots involved in the widening protest movement, the overwhelming public consensus held the by then discredited government responsible for engineering the fire and for the inept responses to it. In fact, the Shah's own words, broadcast before the fire, were interpreted as his foreknowledge and complicity in the upcoming disaster. Apparently referring to the burning of cinemas, which had already taken place across the country, he had stated, "While we promise you the Great Civilization, others are promising you the Great Terror." The leading cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in exile in Najaf, Iraq, was quick to refer in a message to that broadcast as proof of the government's complicity in the terror, calling the event "One of the Shah's masterpieces" of public deception, intended to make the world think that "the Justice-seeking Iranian nation is not bound by any human and Islamic values." Likewise, a prominent secular opposition politician, Karim Sanjabi, of the National Front, called it a "Reichstag fire," designed to turn public sentiments against the anti-Shah forces (Green 1982:96).
However, the leaflets and samizdats that the opposition groups issued either clearly urged the destruction of cinemas, banks, liquor stores, discos, and Westernized restaurants as representatives of the "corrupt" and "decadent" (taquti) Pahlavi cultural and economic system, or they reported such actions in glowing and approving terms. Testimonies and documents compiled after the fall of the Shah also established a clear link between the arsonists and the anti-Shah clerical leaders (Nateq 1987:17–19; Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994:145–46; Nabavi 1999). An Islamist functionary, Hosain Boroujerdi, who had been intimately involved in various revolutionary acts of terrorism that had helped bring the Islamic Republic to power, made a more serious charge. Disillusioned with the revolutionary outcome, he later turned against the regime and in a massive book-length confession claimed that the cleric who presided as judge over the Rex Cinema criminal trial, Hojjatoleslam Musavi Tabrizi, was himself one of the architects of the Rex Cinema fire and had personally directed the arsonists (Boroujerdi 2002:91–94).
Abadan and the nation were both transfixed and transformed by the Rex Cinema tragedy. The event immediately became a potent rallying cry for the anti-Shah forces and for Abadan, with its large force of skilled oil workers, which was galvanized into action and joined the protest movement. Revolutionary slogans reverberated throughout the city during the funerals and memorials, which were attended by hundreds of thousands: "The killer of our dear ones must be executed"; "No to misery, no to contempt, only freedom, freedom"; "Canons, rifles, and machine guns are powerless against us." Other movie houses had been destroyed in Tehran and Tabriz, but without casualties; it was the massive scale of the Rex Cinema crime along with the tragedy and surrounding ambiguity that transformed the destruction of cinemas into a key symbolic act against the Shah, during whose reign, as Ayatollah Khomeini claimed, Western sex and violence had turned the movies into an imperialist technology to "spray poison," corrupting people's minds and values (1981b:188).
Some postrevolution fiction films featured Rex Cinema in their narratives, notably Khosrow Sinai's city film, In the Alleys of Love (Dar Kuchehha-ye Eshq, 1990), in which a young man returns to his hometown of Abadan after the war, but is undecided about whether to resettle there (fig. 2). Several documentaries dealt with this pivotal event....
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