| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Hamid Naficy has finally rewarded readers with his long-planned and eagerly anticipated multi-volume history of Iranian cinema. The first two volumes reviewed here, covering the late Qajar and Pahlavi eras (1897-1978), were first published in September 2011. The third volume, subtitled "The Islamicate Period, 1978-1984," reached press in late spring 2012. The fourth and final volume, on "The Globalizing Period, 1984-2010," was published in November 2012. The sheer size of Naficy's undertaking signals its importance to the field and to the author. It is in many ways a life's work. In fact, the biographical preface to the first volume describes a lifelong engagement with cinema that has informed this project. Naficy presents the end product as the culmination of nearly four decades of research and writing. But his personal investment in the work is not the sole justification for it. Within its pages, Naficy forcefully makes a case for cinema's centrality to Iranian life-its images, voices, and ideas pushing and pulling a society in transition towards and away from modernity.
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