Harry Stuart. 1934. Fine Art. Oxford: Clarendon.13 Harris, James. 1744. Three Treatises. London: H. Woodfall.
14 Heathwood, Chris. 2015. “Monism and Pluralism about Value.” In The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory, edited by Iwao Hirose and Jonas Olson, 136–57. New York: Oxford University Press.
15 Iseminger, Gary. 2004. The Aesthetic Function of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
16 Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2001. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press.
17 Lewis, Clarence Irving. 1946. An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
18 Livingston, Paisley. 2004. “C. I. Lewis and the Outlines of Aesthetic Experience.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (4): 378–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/44.4.378.
19 _____. 2006. “Utile et dulce: A Reply to Noël Carroll.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (3): 274–81. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayl005.
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Filmography
1 Coen, Ethan and Joel Coen, dirs. 2018. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Los Angeles, CA: Annapurna Pictures.
2 Public Aesthetics and Artistic Value in Iranian Cinema
Khatereh Sheibani
Cinema, as an artistic form of expression with viewership, affects cultural constituents of a society, thus it is a valuable cultural capital.1 Motion pictures, worldwide, have artistic and aesthetic values, along with communal, psychological, intellectual, political, and historical values. Iranian cinema is known for its particular artistic and aesthetic value. Many outstanding Iranian films that were made in the past 40 years seem to display a subtle, ambient, and unobtrusive sphere. Less is said in their narratives and more could be “felt” or “read” by audiences in between the lines of narrative. What are the intellectual, artistic, and aesthetic sources of this cinema? How could these low budget, auteur-based movies attract global audiences? To answer these questions, this chapter explores the public aesthetic and artistic values that motion pictures have brought to Iranian society, and to the global community. It investigates some of the most significant individuals, cultural movements, and trends that affected the public aesthetic and artistic values of Iranian cinema.
My case study on Iranian cinema demonstrates that the aesthetic and artistic value of Iranian cinema is closely tied to the intellectual, artistic, and aesthetic values of the cross-cultural values of the Persianate world in the past and present time. This chapter examines some of the most fundamental features of such values. Herein is an overview of the aesthetic evolution of Iranian cinema. The formation of a unique aesthetics in Iranian cinema helped to make it a major non-western cinema and facilitated its favorable reception in national and international film festivals and theatre houses.
Take One: The Private Artistic Value of a Royal Cinema
Iranian cinema has a rich and controversial history. In 1900, cinema was brought to Iran by two separate parties seeking totally opposing goals. The aim of the first party was private leisure and viewership among the royal elite of Tehran. The second party brought the cinematograph for public viewership and entertainment in Tabriz. This section explores cinema as a private form of leisure, acting, and spectatorship. The very first productions of local cinematic works in Iran were not meant for public interest; instead, the art of filmmaking was initiated in the secluded privacy of royal palaces.
The year 1900 also marked the dawn of modernity in Iranian society, culture, and politics. The public was getting primed to make the first Middle Eastern constitutional revolution happen in 1905. The Iranian nation was becoming more conscious of its civil rights. The changes in the sociopolitical spheres were also evident in the cultural scene. Persian arts, including theatre, fiction writing, and poetry, were reconstructed to embrace modern thoughts, ideas, and literary forms. The artists and writers of the time were preoccupied with creating socially concerned, evocative art forms in order to better reach out to public audiences (see Mirabedini 2000, 17–26). Ironically, the royal palace was concurrently obsessed with getting the latest forms of art and machinery to be used exclusively within the confines of the haram (royal residence).
In 1900, during a European tour, Mozaffar al-din shah was offered a private presentation of the cinematograph, which was invented five years before by the Lumière brothers. The shah was instantly smitten by the device. In his memoir, he talks about his unique experience of watching the “moving pictures” of rain falling on Parisian streets and the boats on the Seine (quoted in Omid 1996, 21). By the second time he was exposed to cinema, the shah was convinced that the royal haram should be equipped with a cinematograph to produce and view motion pictures. He didn’t want to be a mere consumer of the new invention. In his memoir, he emphasized that the royal palace should be able to produce movies. Thus, he ordered Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkas Bashi (the royal photographer) to buy the equipment in France to “hopefully make such [moving] pictures and show them to the subjects in the palace” (quoted in Omid 1996, 21). One month later, in August 1900, Akkas Bashi captured his first short film or actualité, featuring the shah in a flower festival in Ostend, Belgium. This is how the royal photographer, Akkas Bashi became the first filmmaker in Iran and the Middle East. The first “actor” of Iranian cinema was the ailing shah, gazing at the camera, utterly conscious of the tenacity of the motion pictures that were to outlive his reign and his life. In the second actualité, during a parade in Tehran, the shah stares at Akkas Bashi’s camera with the same zealous interest. Mozaffar al-din shah could not compete with his royal father in making creative arts,2 but he made history by ordering the production of movies in the Middle East for the first time. The first audiences of Iranian-made short films were the royal family and the ministers. Akkas Bashi made shorts about the royals and for the royals, to be enjoyed in a private theater house at the haram .
We
