An Anthropology of the Iranian Film Industry: The making of The Willow Tree

Abstract

This dissertation offers a detailed empirical study of a film industry by closely following the industrial process involved in the making of an Iranian feature length film, The Willow Tree (dir. Majid Majidi, 2005). What I mean by film industry is the standardized process of making a film through various semi-independent modules that must be performed in a sequence and that are widely shared around the world. Within the dissertation, I move from the initial stages of pre-production (script writing, casting, location scouting), through production (shooting) and post-production (editing, mixing), to the final stages of distribution and exhibition in national and international markets. My concern is with process as product. This stance foregrounds the background of film production, and allows us to see the dialectical relationship between film industry as a universal process and the more particular cultural contexts within which a variety of films situate themselves. It seeks to move the analytical focus to the cultural and social contexts of filmic production and consumption and explore the links between material and ideological, industrial and aesthetic, and national and transnational dimensions of cinema's circulation. In the case of The Willow Tree, I argue that the film was not only meant to portray Islamic virtue on the screen but to subject its own industrial production to Islamic practices.