A comparative study of the influence of political discourses in the second half of the 1970s on the movie posters of "E’teraz” (Protest) and "Ajans-e Shishei” (The Glass Agency) based on semiotics

Discourse, as an influential method in shaping the objects discussed within a society, encompasses various fields, including politics. Political discourses, by dominating any given period, affect multiple existing structures such as cultural, social, and economic realms; cinema, as a cultural product, is no exception. The cinematic works of any society are not merely products of isolated individual minds; rather, they are influenced by the prevailing political discourses of that society, which need extensive promotion to convey their concepts and themes to audiences and impact their mindsets in line with encouraging them to watch the films. One of the promotional tools is film posters, which, relying on their specific language, represent the semantic and discursive system governing the creation and display of films. The present study, based on discursive semiotics and utilizing library and audiovisual resources (film posters), attempts to conduct a comparative study of the discursive and semantic systems present in the movie posters of “E’teraz” (Protest) and "Ajans-e Shishei” (The Glass Agency) to demonstrate how the political discourses in the second half of the 1990s in Iran have influenced these movie posters from a semiotic perspective. Based on the findings, the semiotic discursive systems in the posters of "Protest" and "Glass Agency" show that these posters have been influenced by both classical (principlist) and modern (reformist) political discourses, with their differences and similarities being elucidated through the explanation of the visual and narrative elements embedded in these two posters.