Kaveh Askari on Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit
November 3, 2025
In 2006, Kaveh Askari, then a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, was supposed to be doing research for what would become his first book. But something at the university’s special collections kept distracting him. The library held a complete print run of the Iranian newspaper Ettela’at. In issues from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Askari discovered advertisements for silent adventure serials that had first screened in the United States in the mid-1910s. This got him thinking, as he later told PhD candidate Farzaneh Ebrahimzadeh Holasu. “If there is a ten-year gap between when the film is initially released and when it is showing in Tehran, what is the life of that particular film?” Askari, now professor and director of Film Studies at Michigan State University, did complete that first book, Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2014). But that question lingered and would come to guide his second, Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit, published by the University of California Press in 2022.
Through comparative archival research in Iran and the United States, Askari tells a story of transnational filmmaking, promotion, and circulation that challenges conventional ideas about the chronology of film history and the object of film studies. Relaying Cinema is about film reels but also the tools with which they are adapted and translated and the ephemera, like advertisements in Ettela’at, that form the context for their reception. The book investigates, as he puts it, “the object life of cinema in Iran.” Transnational cinema functions like a relay, with the next person taking the baton and altering how it is carried, used, presented. Too often, Askari observes, the discipline of film studies has attempted to imagine that entire relay from the perspective of one leg. With Relaying Cinema, he takes readers from one leg to the next, allowing them to see the sometimes long afterlife of a film.
The reviews of Relaying Cinema, which won the 2023 Kovács Book Award for most outstanding book from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, have been glowing. Film Quarterly called it an “innovative investigation” that, while “characterized by the utmost academic rigor” reads like “an engaging sophisticated detective novel”––or perhaps like an adventure serial pulled from the archives and carried forward.
