Zero Degree Turn: TV, Culture, and Politics in Iran

For my course on Global Media and Culture this semester, I had considerable difficulty finding subtitled television shows from Egypt, Lebanon, or Iran. I knew about Lebanese-produced Star Academy thanks to Marwan Kraidy who wrote about the show for Media Commons (link), and I even found a wonderful interview of Begum Nawazish Ali, the cross-dressing host of Late Night Show on Pakistan’s Aaj TV, on Al Jazeera (link). But I was forced to cut back on our focus on everyday life in places like Iran and Pakistan and fall back to talking about Orientalism, Hollywood, and so on. And what’s more, with exceptions like Kraidy’s recent work on reality TV and Arab modernity, and Naomi Sakr’s book on satellite TV in the Middle East, there isn’t much work on TV (in sharp contrast to, say, Iranian film).

So I was excited to read about Zero Degree Turn, a superhit Iranian TV drama about the holocaust. And the best part is, there are several subtitled episodes available online! Here’s an excerpt:

Set in wartime Paris, Zero Degree Turn tells the story of a young Iranian man who helps a Jewish family escape occupied France. Hassan Fathi, the writer, says the show is inspired by Abdol Hussein Sardari, an Iranian consulate officer in Paris who issued Iranian passports to more than 1,00o European Jews during WW-II (more here and here).

Political Bollywood: A BBC radio feature

Surfing around the Bollywood section of the BBC website, I came across a two-part radio feature called “political bollywood” that purports to…

…overturn the prevailing image of Indian films…look beneath the glitz, the glamour and the music and you will find that the medium is a canny social engineer, a purveyor of traditions and morality, and a key player in the tumultuous politics of India, the largest democracy in the world.

Beginning with an overview of film production and reception during the colonial era, the feature provides a rather good introduction to cinema in India - Phalke and allegorical/political mythologicals, cinema towards the end of empire, the introduction of sound, the studio era, socialist filmmaking, the use of Hindustani in Bombay cinema, the role of songs in articulating nationalist sentiment, and so on. The one major problem, however, is that this radio feature frames Bombay cinema as “national cinema.” Still, combined with an introductory text like Tejaswini Ganti’s Bollywood: A Popular Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, this might be a good teaching guide. Listen here.

Bollywood 101 in less than 60 min.

I am teaching an upper-level undergraduate course on Global Media and Culture, and we are currently talking about media and the construction of “national” culture(s). And I decided to use post-independence Bombay cinema as a case study. I’ve done this in the past, and it has always been a dicey affair mostly because I’ve had to cobble together film clips spanning six decades and come up with a set of (non-jargony) articles on key aspects of Bombay cinema. Given that it is only part of a larger course, this generally works out well enough and sparks some students’ interest who send me an email about how they can get films and so on. But I’ve been frustrated with the “documentaries” (e.g. Larger than Life) and news features (CBS’ 60 Minutes, for e.g.) out there because they tend to trot out some version of films-for-the-poor-laboring-masses-who-need-escape argument to explain how “different” the films are compared to Hollywood fare.

The good people at the British Film Institute must have been just as frustrated and of course, motivated by the interest in all things Bollywood. As part of the ImagineAsia series, BFI has developed a teaching guide called “Bollywood and Beyond.” In addition to pulling together clips from 1919 (D. G. Phalke era) all the way up to 1998 (Dil Se), the teaching guide includes a CD with a terrific collection of articles on a range of topics. And to make it interesting, I’m going to use this along with some clips from the Queering Bollywood site created by folks at the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore