As the Iran discussion continues (see our coverage here, here and here) I wanted to go ahead and post one of my favorite quotes that looks to the power of the Iranian people and the power of cinema to inspire hope and eventually revolution.

The quote comes from Hamid Dabashi’s “Close Up Iranian Cinema : Past, Present and Future”:

“I think much of the positive response that we see today among peoples of different cultures to Iranian cinema is due precisely to our having watched and assimilated the world through its own self-representations in our movie houses. Iranian cinema is now reflecting back to the world what we have seen, adding our own cultural color. Indian and Egyptian musicals, the American Western, the European avant-garde, Russian social realism - the spectrum of our cinematic cosmovision was global, urbane, emancipatory. Iranian cinema took the world by surprise simply because the world got a glimpse of our cinema only after it had decided the character of our culture through the prism of the Islamic revolution. These disabling circumstances and our liberating vision did not quite add up. The world wondered. But we were not surprised by the world. We watched and internalized, assimilated its vast and vociferous voices and visions from our own vision and projected them back. There was something extraordinarily liberating about the vast open-endedness of a white screen suddenly darkened, and then illuminated with colorful im/possibilities. In the cinema we were re-born as global citizens in defiance of the tyranny of the time and the isolation of the space that sought to confine us. In cinema, everything was possible, and in that possibility we defied our paralyzing limitations. The cinema revealed our hidden hopes as nation. With all the political and religious censorship that brutally limited our visual pleasures and experiences, we reveled in the rainbows of images that colored our cinematic daydreams.”