Negotiating Screens

American Movies in Iran

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by Javad Zeiny

Type

Essays

Subject

Countries > Iran

Keywords

Iran, sociology, american cinema

Publishing date

2026 (June 06, 2026)

Publisher

Independant

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 188 pages
6 x 8 ½ inches (15.5 x 21.5 cm)

ISBN

978-2-322-84086-1

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Book Presentation:
Negotiating Screens offers the first archive-driven account of American cinema's presence in Iran, spanning the period from 1925 to the present day. Moving beyond diplomatic history, the book examines film as a contested site of cultural diplomacy, economic warfare, and national identity formation. The book demonstrates how U.S. agencies such as the United States Information Agency (USIA) used mobile cinemas and training programs to promote Cold War loyalties, inadvertently acclimating Iranian audiences to Hollywood narrative forms. The author uncovers systematic economic coercion, including MGM-led predatory pricing and tariff manipulation, designed to suppress Iran's nascent film industry. The book then traces how Iranian directors selectively drew on 1960s Hollywood (Lumet, Schatzberg, Kazan) while infusing these forms with religious iconography and the working-class geography of Tehran. This process produced a distinctive Iranianized genre cinema that sustained popular appeal despite state censorship and Hollywood dominance. Drawing on Persian-language newspapers, film magazines, and oral histories, J. Zeiny reconstructs audience reception and industrial practices from below. The book also examines the gender politics of representation and the post-revolutionary ban that inadvertently catalyzed an internationally acclaimed art cinema while erasing popular film-farsi from official memory.

About the Author:
Dr. Javad Zeiny is a scholar, filmmaker, and curator specializing in film studies. He teaches at several universities in France and Switzerland and holds degrees from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), Concordia University (Canada), and Universite Paris Cite (France). His research focuses on the histories, theories, and transnational trajectories of Iranian, Canadian, and U.S. cinema and media. He has a particular interest in underexplored film traditions, including pre-revolutionary Iranian popular cinema (Film-Farsi), as well as French-language and diasporic cinemas. He is the author of seven books, including Iranian Cinema: A National Cinema Under Influences (1900-1978: Before the Revolution) (2015) and Mapping Film-Farsi: The Essential Role of Locations in Iran's Pre-Revolutionary Cinema (2025), which examines the spatial and cultural dimensions of Iranian popular film. In addition, he has published numerous articles and essays in academic journals and cultural magazines in Canada, France, and Iran. As a filmmaker, his works have been screened and broadcast internationally. For more than two decades, he has served as artistic director of the Uninvited Film Festival in Paris, an independent platform devoted to the exhibition of alternative and historically underrepresented cinemas. He is also affiliated with international research initiatives such as Archive/Counter-Archive (York University, Canada) and Cinema Iranica (University of Toronto, Canada).