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The task of catering to such a demand fell to the lot of Filmfarsi,
Rangarang Show, and yellow journals: “vehicles” that were both the products
and the propagators of an exotic pop culture that more often than not verged on
decadence. It must be noted that, regarding these “visual” principal vehicles of
the pop culture in Iran, such a culture principally set up a predisposition for
“gazing,” “peeking” and “peeping.” Consequently, a people who, in a cultural
milieu predominantly favoring a neatly “black-and-white” epistemology with
regard to ethics during history, through the implementation of convention,
religion and sheer force, had been advised, ordered, and made to “abstain from
harem (religiously forbidden)” and to “guard their eyes,” now had their eyes
overwhelmed by a rush of formerly-forbidden scenes and colors, for which they
prudishly felt ashamed on the one hand and in which they frivolously basked on
the other.
Filmfarsi, for its immediate availability and also durability,
undoubtedly played the most important role in the spread of such decadence in
Iran. The compound term “Filmfarsi” is a well-known coinage in the realm of
the contemporary Iranian cinema, made by the eminent Iranian cinema theorist
and film critic, Houshang Kavousi (b. 1922), as applying particularly to the
popular films of the 1960s and 1970s in Iran, and in general to all those films
that are believed to contain the themes and elements of the classic Filmfarsi. As
the term usually suggests in the first encounter, Filmfarsi is a film that speaks in
Farsi, or more generally, an Iranian film. However, this interpretation is
generally misleading; for what Kavousi meant by it, ironically, was a motion
picture which neither constituted a film proper nor did it have anything to do
with the real life in Iran. Truth is, most of the Filmfarsi themes and elements
were borrowed or rather plagiarized from third-rate Hollywood or Bollywood
thrillers/melodramas.
To better understand Filmfarsi, it proves useful to briefly review its
most salient ingredients. A typical Filmfarsi usually tells a “Thief-of-Baghdad”
or a “Cinderella” story, centered on the main theme of the love of the poor boy
for the rich girl or vice versa (usually the first one holds). The boy must
necessarily come from the marginal, “nameless” populace of the “lower town,”
the girl from a famous “upper town” industrialist family. The hero boy, though
usually a witty thief or some such rascal who carouses and sings at any pretext,
is in principle manly and honest and has self-respect. He waxes eloquent about
the evils of the riches and shortcomings of the rich on the one hand, and the
blessings of poverty and happiness of the poor on the other, singing hollow
praises of integrity. He usually comes across the girl when she is about to be
raped, and, being an avowed macho, single-handedly fights the goons to save
the damsel in distress. Therefore, the girl has no other way but to fall for him.
However, there is still a host of far-fetched troubles to overcome. In the
meantime, the audience goes through a great deal of double entendre, wittily