Iran's Image in Western Cinema: A Review of Tabib (Avicenna) Feature Film

Representation of "others" in Western movies has been one of the important themes in Western cinema for several decades. Calling non- Western civilization uncivilized ‘others’ has been common by the West from centuries ago based on their ideological viewpoints. The Western media began representing communism as a dangerous "other" during the "Cold War". After the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the West-- as a superior civilization-- regarded Islam and Muslims and to some extent other races and ethnicities as "Others". This paper critically analyses the film "The Physician" based on Orientalism thesis. The film is based on the novel of the same name iv by the American novelist Noah Gordon. The novel is fiction. This paper has used multi-method approach including semiotics, content analysis, discourse analysis, and technical decoding. The findings of the research show that the movie represented Islam and Iranians as wild (uncivilized and irrational) and dangerous "others". Like other Western movies, the film implied that "We" are better than the "Others"; the same as before.