Golbarg Rekabtalaei Cinematic Revolution: Cosmopolitan Alter-cinema of Pre-revolutionary Iran In the late 1950s, when Iran was witness to the withering away of social norms and everyday practices concomitant with the country’s rapid urbanization, a group of young Iranian film directors embarked upon a new cinematic trend, in attempts to screen the ethereal quotidian of Iranian life. Defining itself against what was perceived to be the “cheap” and “repetitive” commercial “Film Farsi” industry of the time, this alternative (alter-)cinema fused the local and global, by incorporating international cinematic elements in socially and politically conscious national films, and projecting them on local and international screens. Problematizing a homogeneous conception of historical time that subsumes the history of cinema into a conventionalized grand narrative of the Iranian 1979 revolution, this article works with a conception of heterogeneous historical time that first interrogates cinematic temporality autonomously and then in relation to the political history of Iran, especially the events of the 1978–79 revolution. This article explores how the distinct cosmopolitan alter-cinema of pre-revolutionary Iran was born from a cinematic rupture in the 1950s, prompted by series of critiques and professional expectations that colored the attention paid to the vernacular and quotidian in film production. Introduction “Our age is a martyred age” (sinn-i mā sinn-i shahīd shudih īst) claimed Mas’ūd Kīmīyāyī, a prominent pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker in an interview in 1978. “Very soon, those which we knew, recognized and had aged with, were swept away and were instead replaced by dance, car brands and jeans … we were the ones most affected by moving from [houses with large] backyards to apartment buildings.” 1 By the early 1960s, Iranian filmmakers and social critics had become increasingly nos- talgic for vernacular practices and familiar traditions that they perceived to be with- ering away with Iran’s rapid urbanization and economic growth during the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–79). How film directors and cinephiles aimed to screen the fleeing social norms and relations in the Iranian visual archive set the stage for an internation- ally recognized cinematic movement in the pre-revolutionary era that continues to reverberate in the contemporary Iranian cinema. Golbarg Rekabtalaei is a PhD candidate at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, at the University of Toronto. Iranian Studies, 2015 Vol. 48, No. 4, 567–589, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2014.895539 © 2014 The International Society for Iranian Studies