Document Type : Original Article
Abstract
In a sense, broader than reducing it to a genre, meta-cinema or the self-representation and self-reference of cinema, can be regarded as a dispute over the status of cinema in society. Meta-cinema is also about the relationship between cinema and society or, generally, the nature of cinema in the experience of modernity in Iran; this is because, more than anything else, cinema is the most important cultural product of modernity. Therefore, I deemed it possible to provide an analysis of the status of cinema in the Iranian cinematic society, and consequently, of modernity, by taking advantage of the meta-cinema of the Iranian post-Revolution cinema. In this article the meta-cinema of the Iranian cinema after the 1979 revolution is studied. This article aims to investigate the experience of modernity in Iran by analyzing self-references of the Iranian post-Revolution cinema. A study of some prominent meta-films of the Iranian post-Revolution cinema indicates that the following three are the forms which meta-cinema discloses about the nature of cinema and, as a result, about modernity: cinema as a threat to the order of affairs, cinema as the real alongside the everyday life, and cinema as a form which we are unable to create.
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