A Narrative Analysis of the Lower Class Construction in Post-Islamic Revolution Cinema

The present study aims to describe the lower class construction in the film narratives after the Islamic Revolution in Iran and to interpret how social-political changes might have affected this construction. To this end, a narrative analysis was conducted on a number of 16 films made during the period 1981-2016 drawing upon Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of the new poor. The findings suggested that the poor were represented as victorious and valuable in the movies made in the 1980s. However, the value attached to the represented poor gradually reduced in the next decade so that they were illustrated as victims of social harms in the 1990s, as impotent people in the 2000s, and eventually as guilty people in the 2010s. The cinematic construction of these concepts tends to reproduce the dominant cultural discourses in Iran in any given decade so that, in a bigger picture, the trend of representations aligns with the consumer capitalism discourse towards the poor.