The Changes of the Reflections on the Iranian War Cinema

This paper studies the reflection of war in the Iranian cinema and its changes over time. According to Nicholas Pronay, it has been assumed that few years after war and due to changes in social conditions, society’s viewpoint towards war changes and therefore different viewpoints about war will get a chance to appear. According to this theory, the perspective of War Cinema in the 2000s should be different from the war films before that decade. So, in this thesis the war cinema in three periods of 1981 to 1988; 1988 to 1999 and in 2000s is studied. The first two periods are explored by using literature review and results of previous studies; however, the third period is studied by analyzing selected war films using Structural Semiology. The results show that, those films produced in the first period, create heroes and epic sensations, as wartime and the conditions of a war-stricken society dictates, while the films produced in second period show mostly social impacts of war including the situation of war refugees, the veterans that returned from war, and society’s encounter with them. Comparing the results of two periods with the third one showed that a different approach has been taken in war movies produced in 2000s, when the Bae’th regime in Iraq is overthrown and the relationship between two countries is improved. Movies with peace-finding and anti-war contents with different personating of Iranian and Iraqi soldiers have been produced in this period and this is unprecedented phenomena in the Iranian war cinema.