EXTRACCION DE ESPECIMENES DE CONCRETO POR DIAMANTINA

us when and how the change for the better in the country’s fortune took place. This juncture of the history is symbolised in filmic form by cutting from a long shot of goats grazing in the desert to a medium shot of crude oil coming out of the ground. The key players who initiated change are introduced as members of “the Western world”, following their need for oil into Iran, and the soon to be new Shah (king) of the county,

“Reza Khan” (Table 6.ii).

Shots of oil burning in massive columns of smoke in oil fields:

“The bubbling out of the foothill in the south west, was the sign underground of something that the Western world was searching for, natural crude oil. Far below the surface oil was discovered in commercial quantities”.

Reza Shah taking control

Shots of Reza Khan and some men riding on horses:

“Out of the chaos of WWI came a new leader, Reza Khan, colonel of an Iranian Cossack regiment. In 1921, Reza Khan with a handful of men marched into than a wooden plough, started to work in steel and cement, to handle tools and machinery. Rising in six thousand feet from the desert to the table land, tunnelling through the mountains, the railway took shape. Factories, schools and public buildings, whole towns were built”.

Table 6.ii: Key players in initiating change

As shown in Table 6.ii, the idea of change for betterment is constructed by introducing, on the one hand, the initiators of the change, and on the other hand, by emphasising the barrenness and the inertia of the entire setting (both by statement and by implication), reaffirming the film’s initial claim that no sign of organisation, let alone urbanisation, remained in the country. The combination of the rise of Reza Shah and the discovery of oil in Iran throughout the next sequence continues to be presented as factors that changed chaos into order, together with the emphasis on the barrenness of the land before then (Table 6.iii).

Construct Sequence

Reza Shah’s ascendance to power marked the beginning of Iran’s modern life.

Reza Shah taking salute, military fly over, tank parade:

“1937, R.S.P. takes the salute of the celebration of his March on Tehran 16 years ago. 25,000 men, a section of Iran’s big army march to celebrate 16 years”.

Roads with lorries on them:

“12,000 miles of roads link up scattered towns and villages”.

Dam with people working on it, images of massive irrigation constructs:

“Modern agricultural schemes follow roads. Freshly founded agricultural bank in Tehran organises loans for irrigation, finds money to retain

Aerial shot of area and long shots of Abadan, long shot of BP tanker at sea:

“In 16 years, in the South-west, the output of oil was raised from a quarter of a million tonnes to 10 million tonnes. A new town was built by the wells. Linking wells to the sea, pipelines ran 200 miles over mountains and desert to Abadan, the refinery town of oil port. At Abadan, the world’s largest and most modern refinery, the crude oil is broken down into … diesel and many other products. From Abadan the oil and petrol is shipped by tankers to all parts of the world. The great police, railways and passengers, ships, locomotives, ships, Tehran University followed by the picture of a ruined ancient temple:

“In 16 years the Iranians have learnt to live a new way. The feudal towns have changed into cities. Mules and camels have given way to cars and motor buses. Docks have been laid out on the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The people are taking to rail travel. In Tehran, a great national University has been settled.”

Shots of girls playing ball at school, young children and teenagers at school:

“After 1,300 years the women of Iran have been emancipated. They may go out unveiled, free to mix with other men and women and take part in the life of their country… In 16 years 5000 schools have been built.

5,000 schools to train administrators and office runners, 5,000 schools to train teachers and mechanics, 5,000 schools to train doctors and engineers”…

Liveliness is coming back to Iran where it had previously died out

Medium shot of a woman, a child, a man, cut to a powerful river, tilting up to a mighty bridge fore grounded against a blue sky:

“This great people which have kept its own soil from many wars and famines, which have kept its identity for over 2,500 years, today face the future with fresh hope and renewed vitality”.

Table 6.iii: The oil industry and Western interest

The documentary representation of the oil industry as a key player in the industrial modernisation of Iran has already been discussed in Chapter 5 of this thesis. Here, I would like to discuss the role of the other key player, Reza Shah, as represented by the film.

6.1.2.1 Reza Shah as the sole initiator of change

Reza Shah’s modernization plans, such as the huge infrastructural constructions (dams and roads in particular), agricultural schemes, and modernizing the economy, social institutions and the army, are presented as the mainstay of the Iranian modernisation.

These points are further affirmed in the voice-over commentary that “in 16 years, the Iranians have learnt to live a new way”, which refers to the replacement of an agrarian economy (rural towns, mules and camels) with an industrial one (cars and motor vehicles, docks, locomotives). The film’s perspective of progress in Iran therefore comprises several aspects of development including industrialisation, modernisation of the infrastructures, socio-economic reform and, to some extent, cultural reform (the change in attitudes toward women).

It is out of the scope of this research to address the film’s view of Iran’s development based on these reforms. It is so particularly because of the controversy about whether or not they helped or hindered the development of the country and the betterment of its people. However, it is both appropriate and necessary for this research to examine thoroughly the ways the issues of modernisation and development are framed in documentary representations of Iran, as these helped shape the general image of the country to the British, and, as I hope to show in the Chapter 7, they still affect the formation of that image to this very date.

There are two points to be observed in understanding the film’s stand on the issue of Iran’s development and modernisation. First of all, the film’s constant reference to a very particular and exact moment in the history of Iran, “16 years ago”, as the beginning of the transformation of the country has a very important discursive function. In conjunction with other representational strategies explained above, time references are frequently

made to persuade the audience that absolutely no change of any significance happened before then, hence the immensity, uniqueness and outstanding nature of the change that followed. The immensity of the task is further underlined by repeating the number of the newly opened schools, and reinforced by a montage of the long shots and extreme long shots of large scale infrastructure such as roads, dams, massive irrigation constructions, and factories. Although the development of these infrastructural elements and the socio-economic reforms under Reza Shah were immense in scale, and at times unique in application (for example the forced abolishment of women’s hejab), the initiative was hardly his. In fact, attempts at reform and modernisation had started nearly a century before. As examples of those attempts, one can point to Prince Aabbass Mirza’s attempt to modernise Iran’s army in 1820s or Amir Kabir (Prime minister from 1848-1851), who attempted to

strengthen the administration by reforming the tax system, asserting central control over the bureaucracy and the provincial governors, encouraging trade and industry, and reducing the influence of the Islamic clergy and foreign powers. He established a new school, the Dar-ol-Fonun, to educate members of the elite in the new sciences and in foreign languages (Metz, 1987).

There were also officials like Malkam Khan, who in 1858 began to suggest in essays that

“the weakness of the government and its inability to prevent foreign interference lay in failure to learn the arts of government, industry, science, and administration from the advanced states of Europe” (ibid). Under the influence of the officials such as Malkam, in 1871 the Shah agreed to

establish a European-style cabinet with administrative responsibilities and a consultative council of senior princes and officials. He granted a concession for railroad construction and other economic projects to a Briton, Baron Julius de Reuter, and visited Russia and Britain himself (ibid).

In general, towards the end of the nineteenth century, and as a result of the growing public anger at the inefficiency of the monarchy and the efforts of the intelligentsia, new ideas and a demand for reform were also becoming more widespread (ibid). This era is discussed as the period in which the idea of modernity and the politics of constitutionalism were introduced in Iran, and has been called the ‘era of awakening’

(Adamiyyat, 1972). The film’s projected image of Reza Shah as the sole and the first ever moderniser, or even a Westerniser, therefore could not help but be more misleading.

6.1.2.2 Iran’s affairs before Reza Shah

The second point about the film’s framing of Iran’s development is related to the representation of the ‘chaos’ and ‘disorganisation’ in the country prior to 1921. As seen in Table 6.ii, Reza Khan’s rise to power is described against a background of chaos apparently caused by the First World War. Historically, Iran tried to avoid entanglement in World War I by declaring its neutrality, but ended up as a battleground for the Russians, Turkish, and British, each trying to retain their interest in Iran. Iran’s chaotic situation during and after the war that was created by these imperialist interventions is conflated in the film with the chaos created in Europe as the result of its direct involvement in WWI. The imperialist rivalry in Iran was not, however, confined to the period of the war and started early in the nineteenth century, when the contemporary Qajars monarchy began to face pressure from two great world powers, Russia and Britain (Hopkirk, 1992).

Britain's interest in Iran arose out of the need to protect trade routes to India, while Russia's came from a desire to expand into Iranian territory from the north… The two great powers also came to dominate Iran's trade and interfered in Iran's internal affairs. They enjoyed overwhelming military and technological superiority and could take advantage of Iran's internal problems (Metz, 1987).

As the last years of the nineteenth century - characterized by growing royal and bureaucratic corruption, oppression of the rural population, the break down of the tax machinery, and the endemic disorder - drew to an end, public anger reached boiling point as a result of the Shah's propensity for granting concessions to Europeans in return for generous payments to him and his officials. As Metz has observed “people began to demand a curb on royal authority and the establishment of the rule of law as their concern over foreign, and especially Russian, influence grew” (Metz, 1987). After a few months of protest by the religious establishment, the merchants, and other classes the Shah was forced to issue a decree promising a constitution. In October, an elected assembly convened and drew up a constitution that provided for strict limitations on royal power,

an elected parliament, or Majlis, with wide powers to represent the people, and a government with a cabinet subject to confirmation by the Majlis. The Shah signed the constitution on December 30, 1906. The Supplementary Fundamental Laws approved in 1907 provided for freedom of press, speech, and association, and for security of life and property. According to Ann K.S. Lambton, “the Constitutional Revolution marked the end of the medieval period in Iran” (cited in Metz, 1987). The revolution was an attempt to establish both democracy and national sovereignty that was resisted by both the monarchy and the foreign powers as the establishment of Iran’s national sovereignty was perceived as a threat to foreign interest in Iran (Azimi, 2009).

In representing the country’s state of affairs right before the appearance of Reza Shah, the film avoids discussing the issue of imperialism and the Constitutional Revolution, the two very subjects crafting the course of affairs and leading eventually to the rise of Reza Shah. These two subjects that epitomise the intra-society and the inter-society dynamics shaping and directing the development of 20^th Century Iran are not recognized in the discourse of development presented in the film, which is constrained by an industrialisation dependent on Western assistance (financially and technologically) and socio-economic reform replicating Western models. In championing the cause of modernisation, Reza Shah’s reforms and Western ‘positive’ involvement - through establishing industrial enterprises that brought Iran’s natural resources to the service of its advancement- are overstated at the expense of other factors. In order to appropriate the image of pre-Pahlavi Iran to fit into this perspective, the discourse has to draw on Orientalism, omitting to present the nation’s struggle against internal oppression and foreign exploitation as a meaningful source of change. The film therefore constructs Iran as an Oriental setting, and its internal and external conflicts as a chaos that stems from the supposedly essential characteristics of the place, namely its barren landscape, its stagnant history, and its servile population who are unable to keep the society together without a powerful figure on the throne.

Dawn of Iran is one of the earliest examples of documentaries which make the role of the Pahlavi dynasty and their modernisation plans central to Iran’s modernity. A more recent

example, discussed below, is ITV’s film A King’s Revolution (Associated Rediffusion for Intertel, 1964). Starring Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the son of Reza Shah, the film presents the Shah’s “revolutionary plans” for modernizing Iran. Launched in 1963, these plans, referred to in the film as the King’s revolution, were part of an extensive reform plan including legislation for social reforms, land reform, and economic reform, a package named by the Shah as the ‘White Revolution’, and were advertised as a step towards modernization, and the ultimate long-term aim of transforming Iran into a global economic and industrial power. The White Revolution consisted of 19 elements that were introduced over a period of 15 years, with the first 6 introduced in 1963. These were 1) the Land Reforms Program, where the government bought land from the big landlords at a fair price and sold it to the peasants at 30% below the market value; 2) Nationalization of Forests and Pasturelands; 3) Privatization of the Government Owned Enterprises; 4) Profit Sharing, for industrial workers in private sector enterprises; 5) Extending the Right to Vote to Women; and, 6) Formation of the Literacy Corps fighting illiteracy in the villages. This analysis therefore examines the film’s perspective on the Shah and his reform plans, and how this perspective affects the general representations of Iran.