Absence of System Legitimacy in Iranian Cinema and a Comparison with American Cinema

Cinema has a dual function: it reflects the society and its changes, and it can create new world through which the society can see itself in another way, thereby cinema can cause social change. One of the manifestations of this duality is in cinema's relations with the state and state legitimacy. This paper presents an argument on system legitimacy in cinema with attention to the views of Weber and Habermas on the legitimacy and legitimation of rational systems.

This paper analyzes the content of several famous Iranian movies from the past decade and compares them with American cinema. The aim is to study the social characteristics of protagonists in action and political movies from a sociological perspective and analyze the way they see the society and government through issues such as: passiveness of characters, blaming the political and social structure, explosive actions, the lack of faultless characters within the system who can solve problems, and the view toward law.
Finally hypotheses about the causes of this absence in Iranian cinema are presented (including the negative behavior of the government toward intellectuals and filmmakers, the opposition of intellectuals and filmmakers to the government, effects of Marxist art on Iranian intellectuals, weaknesses in the government's monitoring and protection of effective and pro-system cinema), and the social and political consequences of this problem have been discussed.