A Study of Tradition-Modernity Confrontation in Jaheli Films, Emphasizing on Luti Types in Two movies: Laat-E Javanmard and Gheysar

Between 1958 and 1979 Iranian Cinema illustrated different types of Luti. The story that Iranian popular cinema tells of the transformations of this social group is in fact the story of how one of the most radically traditional groups confronts some of modernity’s manifestations. Like any other social group, the Luti group finds meaning within a specific social structure; what we call here the “neighborhood structure”. There is a direct relationship between the strength of this structure and the power of Luti. Modernity dismantles the neighborhood structure. As a result, the value system accompanying this structure also fades. The transformation of the Luti type is mediated through the changing values. Pre-revolutionary popular cinema is a narration of how the Luti confronted the collapse of neighborhood system’s traditional values. Based on this structural transformation and the parallel change in values, this paper studies the changes in Luti’s confrontation with modernity in Iranian Cinema, by considering two films: Laat-e Javanmard and Gheysar. The former is chosen as the first remarkable Jaheli film, and the second, as a milestone in this genre that amused the masses and the intellectuals alike. To conceptualize Luti and neighborhood structure, we use Bateson’s concept of Manhood and Tonnies’s Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy respectively.