Explaining the sociological components of the conflict between tradition and modernism in the Iranian family and its manifestation in the cinematographic works of the seventies (case study: two films under the skin of the city and two women)

The important cultural and social events and changes that happened in contemporary Iranian society in the seventies had a great impact on Iranian cinema. In such a way the look of the sixties cinema productions, from national and religious films which appeared in the form of holy defense cinema changed its direction towards social and psychoanalytical dramas. Meanwhile, at the level of society, the most important event was the presence of the middle class, followed by the change in the social and cultural attitudes of the people. This class tried to play a more important role in the social, political, and cultural equations of society with a modern perspective. Although the conflict between tradition and modernism has a long history in Iran, it seems to have become more intense in the seventies with the presence of this class. Adapting to this process, cinema also took a sociological look at the social problems and dilemmas caused by this confrontation, especially the family issue. This research, by looking at two prominent social films of this decade, namely, Under the Skin of the City and Two Women, aims to examine the most important social and family anomies of contemporary Iranian society from the perspective of these two films. The descriptive-historical research method is based on statistical analysis and is done by employing library studies and questionnaires. To extract the social characteristics of these two films, a suitable reading tool was needed. Therefore, the principle of coexistence and substitution of semiotics considered by Saussure was used. The findings of the research indicate that in the film Two Women, the variables of local identity reduction, the fattening of the new urban middle class, the introduction of modern identity indicators, the weakening of traditional social networks and emotional discontinuity, and the film Under the Skin of the City, the variables of traditionalism, social gap, and Class, the importance of family, marginalization, and change of society's attitude towards women, respectively have the biggest role in the correlation between the variables of the main components of the research (with a correlation coefficient of 0.806). Based on the findings, the results indicate that the achievement of modernity is the generation gap and intergenerational challenges in families.