A comparative Analysis of Sociological Situation and Cinematic Representation in Iranian Movies from the 80s: A Case Study of Deep Breath
Maryam Sadat Naghibi Esfahani, Hasan Ali Pourmand, Mahdi Keshavarz Afshar
MA student, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, maryamsnaghibi@gmail.com
Assistant Professor, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, hapourmand@modares.ac.ir
Assistant Professor, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, m.afshar@modares.ac.ir

The area of media and film is popular and related to institutions and discourses of the era. Showing the image of the society in a film has different reasons and purposes: sometimes to proselyte and sometimes to show the social reality. This paper examines the social conditions of late 1370s and the cinematic representation of these conditions in Deep Breath (Shahbazi, 2003) and explores the relationship between sociology and cinema in this movie. This film is a 2003 Iranian Crystal Simorgh winner, won a FIPRESCI Prize and had attended many festivals. The main question of the research is to explain the relationship between dominant discourse of the period and the cinematic content of Deep Breath. And to answer it, there are some preliminary questions: What is the social conditions of late 1370?/ What is the public discourse of institution of Iranian cinema in this era?/ What is the representation of Tehran’s society on the screen in the film? The hypothesis of the paper is that Deep Breath has shown a real and apposite representation of society of the period. The aim of this study is to concentrate on the film and the social conditions of the time, and to analyze how society of reformation period (1997-2005) is represented in the film, in order to access some features that show the meaning of the film in the political action of the time (as non-artistic structures). In order to study the images of Iranian society through the Iranian fiction cinema, the researchers got the concept and came to the conclusion to choose the period of study from 1997 to 2005. In Iran's reform era, the rules of production and surveillance changed, so this film is a great case study to focus on. A necessity of such research is that Deep Breath has challenging components for research because of its production date and the accusation of festival taste. The research method would be a qualitative method. In fact as a qualitative method, the methodology of this research would be textual analysis. According to the theoretical framework which is theory of reflection, the paper will also employ the comparative analysis. through a critical and objective analysis of the film and reviewing the valid reading about the social conditions of the time, the results shows that Deep Breath is completely coming from the social, cultural, historical and discourse conditions of its production date, so the mechanism of the movie is cultural and social: the film has been influenced by the sociopolitical changes and by the sociopolitical occurrences in the society. So despite some conspiracy theories which some critics associate with Iranian festival cinema, this film is reflecting strong sociopolitical content.
Keywords: Realism, reflection, discourse, Deep Breath