The academic study of motion pictures is grounded in industrial production, distribution, and exhibition, an approach established decades before literary studies seriously took up publishing in the history of the book. More recently, “media industries” marks a shift away from “the” industry as major Euro-American companies in competition for world markets. Considered as part of the turn to “industries” plural, these three books radically alter our vantage, relocating world cinema to Bombay, Tokyo, and Tehran. They transport the reader to cinemas elsewhere, confirming a definitive break with the center/periphery model and revisiting the tensions between artistry and industry where questions of originality and the origins of cultural forms took root.
Kaveh Askari in Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran traces the distribution “relay” route from New York to Rome to Cairo to Tehran, following the traffic in secondhand 35mm celluloid film prints to tell the secret history of Iranian cinema. We...
