This dissertation is a cultural history of state-sponsored film in India and Iran. I focus on the 1960s-1980s, a period during which both countries enacted sweeping development agendas, which included industrialization, the expansion of higher education, and social reforms. I engage in a comparative analysis of each state’s pedagogies of modernity through documentary, arguing that film was an integral and influential technology of development. Moving beyond previous research in both the social sciences and media studies, I consider the role of experimental and modernist aesthetics in state communications. Drawing on archival research and interdisciplinary social histories, I contend that these states invested in modernist aesthetics in service of development, and that a conscious deployment of visual culture was critical to their modernization projects. Using formal readings and discourse analysis, I demonstrate this through an examination of the cultural and institutional contexts in which state-sponsored films were produced.“Ministries of Light” examines the centrality of discourses of science and technology to development, and film’s role within and alongside them. I argue that the encouragement of modernist and experimental sponsored film was part of a broader program of state sponsorship for modernist art, architecture, and design, facilitated by elite networks of governance. I identify and define the emergence of specific aesthetic modes within these state-sponsored films, such as planning aesthetics and elemental modernism. Further, I examine the relationship between formal experimentation and the negotiation of experiences of modernity in film. New social problems of population, health, hygiene, and use of public space were centered on management of the body. State-sponsored films simultaneously directed citizens in self-management while revealing how they resisted or adapted to modern social and spatial conditions. A comparative study advances our understanding of how, and why, postwar developing nations invested in film as part of their modernization agendas. It contributes original research and perspectives to studies of both useful cinema and experimental documentary. Histories of these media in the Global South are underexamined. Focusing on these case studies decenters and globalizes histories of film’s relationship to modernity.

Creator

• Bhalla, Simran

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-z25q-nn48

Subject

• South Asian studies
• Middle Eastern studies
• Film studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_819529
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15579

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright