The Incomplete: Film, Politics, and Remember the Past
Tara Najd Ahmadi • 01.10.2026
The Newborns (1979)
In the spring and summer of 1979, Iranian filmmaker Kianoush Ayari directed and shot Tāzeh Nafas-hā/The Newborns in the streets of Tehran. Recorded with a handheld 16 mm camera, the film documents a transitional point between the Shah’s recently toppled aristocratic dictatorship (1941–79) and the implementation of the Islamic Republic that succeeded the 1979 Revolution. This intermediary time was a moment of aesthetic and political liberty, one in which revolutionaries could communicate in public through street theater, meetings, and informal conversations. With its lens turned towards Tehran’s crowded streets, the forty-five-minute documentary captures all of the political factions that participated in the 1979 Revolution. In the film, diverse groups of people debate their thoughts, compete over stages and microphones, and, at times, celebrate their victories. The film depicts a utopian freedom, unimaginable for Iranians before or after the revolution.
The Newborns is an unfinished film. By the time the film’s rough-cut made it to Channel One, Iran’s national television channel, conservative sponsors had already populated the network. As a result, the film never passed the post-production process, as it was not aligned with the organization’s new guidelines. In particular, the original sponsors of the film at Channel One were unhappy with the film’s inclusion of the crowds depicted on the streets, and although they asked for these scenes to be cut, Ayari refused. Thus, The Newborns offers a counter-history, a first-hand account of revolutionary crowds whose existence was forgotten for the past four decades.
Ayari produced The Newborns during the short intermediary political moment after the Shah’s removal and before Khomeini came to power, a time that reflected a lively and vibrant utopia. The raw-cut footage of the film, which includes music but lacks voice-over narration, was stored at Channel One’s archive, and Ayari never had access to it. In my interview with him, he mentions that after Channel One confiscated the film he never knew what happened to the original negatives.¹
Yet, every once in a while, he saw short parts of the film edited between the works of other filmmakers and broadcast on national television, without crediting him as the filmmaker. During the yearly official anniversary celebrations of the revolution, state-owned television used the shots in various compilations that invoked nostalgic images of the revolution for the broader public.
It was only in 2009 that Ayari gained access to the film, when his friend Pirouz Kalantari encountered a digitized version sold in a small film store on a street in Tehran. Kalantari purchased two copies of the VHS and shared it with Ayari. Ayari was ecstatic that the footage still existed.² With Ayari’s agreement, the film was transferred to digital format, and uploaded online through unofficial websites. Today the film is accessible on websites such as Ubuweb and Vimeo, where it has had thousands of views.³ The Newborns is an example of numerous unfinished works that have gradually come back to the public’s attention decades after their production.
In this chapter, I explore the aesthetic qualities of The Newborns to shed light on the emancipatory potential embedded in re-investigating unfinished art projects and films. Because the film remains unfinished – it lacks a voice-over narration, the editing was not finalized, and numerous overexposed and underexposed frames comprise the film – it resists easy conclusions and a sense of resolution. I will explain how this lack of closure in the work can lead to a refreshing openness for its viewers four decades after its production.
The Newborns, in brief, is the story of a wandering camera among revolutionary crowds gathered in the center of Tehran on Enghelab Street (the direct translation in English is Revolution Street). The film’s structure is built upon sequences that document the perspectives of various crowds that cannot appear as openly on the streets today: dancers, large circles of people engaged in public political and economic conversations, street performers, drug addicts, and homeless people. In the film, we can see that all of these groups gathered publicly as a result of this in-between moment when there was no effective governmental rule.
Some of the crowds that The Newborns captures are particularly unique because they presented an urban underclass that resulted from the Shah’s 1960s modernization plans.⁴ The squatters, slum dwellers, and unskilled workers filmed by Ayari represented the impoverished rural masses who emigrated to Tehran from other regional cities after the Shah’s land reform program of 1962. During these reforms, the government confiscated villagers’ lands, causing them to emigrate to cities to look for work. Land reform and subsequent modernization schemes resulted in a profound demographic change throughout the country. With a mass exodus from rural areas, Iran’s cities swelled with poor migrants. Asef Bayat explains how this urban underclass played an important role in forming the 1979 Revolution by squatting in abandoned houses or gathering in different areas of the major cities of Iran.⁵ The crowds’ unpredictable and uncontrollable mode of existence gave them the power to create changes in the city’s life despite state disapproval. Therefore, after its establishment, the new government ‘cleared’ these crowds from the streets by pushing groups such as prostitutes and drug addicts underground. The dominant presence of this urban underclass in The Newborns was in harmony with Ayari’s broader aesthetics and politics that were cultivated during his early years of filmmaking among the Iranian Free Cinema filmmakers.
Iranian Free Cinema and the ‘Imperfect’ Form
In 1960 in Tehran, the Eastman Kodak Institute founded what was at the time the Middle East’s largest film processing lab.⁶ As Iran saw the wider distribution of film and processing products during the 1960s, film became a more accessible medium for various classes, and small groups of young filmmakers formed. The Kodak Institute’s main work was processing photos and 8 mm, 16 mm, and 35 mm film negatives. However, 8 mm film could also be processed privately at home, or by sending it outside the country to Germany. This created more freedom in the production of 8 mm film, making it difficult for the Pahlavi state to control and monitor all film production. For this reason, 8 mm film became popular among young Iranian filmmakers, who established an experimental cinema collective – Free Cinema (Sinamā-ye Āzad).
These young filmmakers collaborated on innovative film projects, funded their own productions, and organized their own festivals, and they soon expanded their activities to different cities in Iran. Their collaboration was fueled, in part, by the disconnect between the common commercial filmmaking practices at the time, generally known as filmfarsi, and the Hollywood cinema available through television channels. One of the young filmmakers who worked with Free Cinema was Ayari, who was a native of Ahwaz. A city situated in the south of Iran, Ahwaz was one of the important places in which Free Cinema filmmakers were active, and 8 mm film was highly popular among them.⁷ Free Cinema’s main goal was to stay away from any form of capitalistic or dominant forms that ruled the commercial world of film distribution. The young filmmakers of Free Cinema wanted to remove all the barriers that distanced the masses from the cinema.
Scholars have written extensively about the influence of Europe and North America on Iranian cinema since its first arrival into the nation, particularly about the fascination of the late Qajar kings (1789–1925) and the Pahlavis with Western cinema and their effort to import it into Iran. Yet scholarship has overlooked these more marginal forms of filmmaking within the country, particularly in how they connected to global interventions in the cinematic world during the Cold War, including the international move towards the creation of a third cinema. Influenced by the Cuban Revolution (1959), the Vietnamese victory over the French and U.S. (1954 and 1975), and Algerian independence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, third-world intellectuals called for a ‘tricontinental revolution.’⁸ Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Frantz Fanon served as ideological inspirations for the movement, all of whom called for justice against oppressive and imperialist forces. The third-world film ideology was reflected in a series of important writings, including Cuban Julio García Espinosa’s 1969 essay For an Imperfect Cinema. In his text, Espinosa advocated for ‘low’ forms of production and asserted that the mere act of communication via cinema was more important than the quality of the final product. He argued that a cinema committed to creating change must inevitably be imperfect, from low-quality productions to incomplete products. Espinosa explained that ‘imperfect cinema’ would put an end to the modern Christian tradition that gave primacy to a so-called ’suffering’ artist, or the idea that the ‘neurotic artist’s’ work only gained value and authenticity from suffering for perfection.⁹
The third cinema theories influenced a variety of groups and filmmakers around the world, including the members of the Free Cinema, who started creating works that were highly radical both in form and content. As a result, Free Cinema filmmakers participated in more experimental and short film festivals in Europe during the early 1970s.¹⁰ By seeing works from other filmmakers who shared similar revolutionary sensibilities, they connected themselves to a global range of artworks. Developments in the Free Cinema movement were screened in theaters across the country. It was within this context that The Newborns came to life.
The Newborns (1979), figure 1.1 Opening scene with the still image of the girl.
The Newborns, a Historic Document
The Newborns starts with a controversial scene that depicts a young girl standing in downtown Tehran, holding a red book by Fatah, an armed revolutionary group in Palestine. At first, it may seem atypical that a child is advertising a guerilla act. But after the viewer’s initial shock subsides, they can see the image as a demonstration of the international revolutionary solidarity that was common across the Middle East, especially among the revolutionary left. The film’s pre-title, Summer of 1979, in Today’s Tehran (Tābestāne 1357, dar Tehrāne Emrūz), appears letter by letter on the frozen image of the girl. The words are in the bold font ‘titr’ that was used in newspaper headlines reporting important revolutionary news at the time. Both the progressive appearance of the title on the screen and the transition from a still photo to moving images reflect the cultural and political change in a revolutionary society. The opening scene highlights the act of writing, the practice of creating, and the work of naming.
Additionally, the pre-title offers the viewer a simultaneous glimpse into two distinct eras: the summer of 1979 and ‘today’s’ Tehran. It was as if Ayari was aware that the film would not be viewed in 1979, so he dated and titled the film in a way that depicts both the summer during which it was shot and the Tehran of today’s audience. The use of two time tenses, ‘that summer, in this city’ highlights changes in the city’s life over time, until today. The child’s face in the background also symbolizes an unknown future, a ‘yet to come’ in the summer of 1979. The opening scene’s incorporation of the still image implies the adaptation and reversal of a commonly employed filmmaking technique: that of freezing a moving image. A famous example of this image is the end sequence of French filmmaker François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), in which Truffaut freezes the end of the film on the image of a boy, Antoine Doinel. In doing so, Truffaut leaves the boy’s story open-ended, framing him in a permanently irresolvable uncertainty. French New Wave cinema had an oversized influence on Iranian filmmakers; thus, we can imagine that the opening sequence of The Newborns can be an homage to the famous ending of 400 Blows. Doinel’s movement ends when he encounters the ocean, which he had always dreamed of seeing. Conversely, the girl in The Newborns stands within a revolutionary ocean of people. If Doinel has doubts when he confronts the ocean, the child in The Newborns is inevitably subsumed in that ocean. Both children, however, have emotionless expressions on their faces. They are startled as they encounter the scale of what they see and stare with open mouths.
The Lack of Narration
Towards the end of The Newborns, a woman is shown speaking to a crowd gathered outside the University of Tehran, on Enghelab Street. As she speaks, she condemns the cooperation between the United States and Israeli governments in the occupation of Palestine. The woman, Zahra Khanoom (Zahra Yaghoubi), had been a well-known prostitute and madam in downtown Tehran before the revolution. Despite her checkered past, during the short period of state-less freedom, Zahra Khanoom transformed into a vocal public figure. Her elevated position in front of a large number of men who stare silently at her with fascination and confusion demonstrates the dynamism of this transitory period, evincing the way that society became more tolerant of what had been previously morally unacceptable. The camera shows medium-close-up shots of Zahra’s face and hands while she professes her anti-imperialist speech. After a long take of her speech, the audio is bleeped out. Because of the general incompletion of the film, it is unclear whether this is the result of technical difficulties or if Ayari censored her cursing. After a second of pause, the soundtrack of the film plays underneath the footage of her speech, connecting Zahra to the other revolutionaries in the film through a musical theme.
When Zahra talks about imperialist powers, her sentences often do not make much sense. Fascinated by the crowds, excited by her temporary power to captivate a large number of people, she stands on a pedestal to give a speech, but she is incoherent. She shouts and names things: Israel, America, Palestine, freedom, imperialism, enemy, us the people. Her statements lack clear and logical connections. Zahra’s breathlessness in this scene is a microcosm of the film’s speechless life.
The lack of narration to connect the visuals in The Newborns creates an opportunity for approximating oneself to the characters on the screen without the mediation of the voice-over. In fact, if Ahmad Rasoulzadeh, the narrator whose name appears in the first title of the film, had actually narrated The Newborns, our understanding of the film would be very different. But Ayari
deliberately kept Rasoulzadeh’s name at the beginning of the film. His goal was to publicize the fact that the film was censored upfront, and to let the audience know that what they see is an incomplete film.
During my interview with Ayari, he mentions that some have suggested that he should just take out the narrator’s name from the beginning of the film. This way ‘no one will know that it is incomplete,’ and thus he could circulate it widely again. But Ayari disagrees with this approach, asserting that ‘I want the film to be known as incomplete and I don’t want to hide the fact that it is censored. I think my audience will still want to see the film even though it is incomplete.’ ¹¹
The Newborns (1979), figure 1.2 Zara Khanoom talking to the crowd in front of the University of Tehran’s gates.
‘What is to be Done’ with the Unfinished?
In her study of the politics of why and how artworks were rendered incomplete during revolutionary periods, particularly the French Revolution, Linda Nochlin situates the production of incomplete works within their historical context. Nochlin ascribes a revolutionary potential to unfinished works of art produced during the French Revolution. She analyzes the representation of ruins and fragments in French revolutionary artwork and argues that these ruins are signs of the transition towards modernity because they were created in opposition to French society’s traditional definition of art. In fact, the French Revolution galvanized the eighteenth-century discourse that later considered fragments as positive rather than negative tropes. For French revolutionary artists, fragments and ruins did not symbolize nostalgia for the past. Instead, they became signs of political commitment, for they pulverized the perceived notions of repressive traditions. In other words, artistic fragments during revolutionary eras can be signs of a rebellion against tradition and a message for future generations.¹²
Additionally, Walter Benjamin looks to history and remembering as a way to complete what is left incomplete.¹³ In other words, Benjamin addresses the incompleteness of the history of class struggle and considers re-membering an act of justice towards the past. Projects that are forcibly interrupted gesture towards the historic moment that compelled their incompletion, and also point to our responsibility towards relating this history. Benjamin wrote extensively on the importance of continuity in history, and the necessity of studying history’s failures from the perspectives of the oppressed. As an example, he describes Paul Klee’s 1920 print, The Angel of History (Angelus Novus, 1920), in which the angel’s face is turned towards the past and attempts to make a ‘whole’ of what has been smashed through history. But he cannot awaken the dead as he wishes because a storm named ‘progress’ propels him into the future.¹⁴
Influenced by Trotsky, Benjamin resisted the imperialist notions of progress and modernity, and associated them with Fascism.¹⁵ Trotsky’s writings and Benjamin’s pessimistic views towards modernity formed a theory put into practice by the Iranian revolutionaries during the 1970s.¹⁶ The people’s rejection of the Pahlavis’ U.S.-led modernization agenda as well as the unjust distribution of wealth in the country led to the denunciation of a regime in the 1970s. To Benjamin, the path to a radical transformation of society was not the further acceleration of progress, but instead a rejection of its entire framework. Here, too, I argue that to understand the films and artworks produced in this period, we have to understand the part of the revolution that was an attempt to stand outside the Western paradigm of progress.
For Benjamin, it is not the machine’s movement forward that must be taken into account. He writes: ‘Some in the progressive left believe that Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely the human race – to activate the emergency brake.’¹⁷ In fact, for Benjamin it is the interruption caused by the individuals inside the train that is a critical revolutionary moment. Benjamin considers this tension as an inherent quality of revolution and the humanizing dimension of a mechanism that is supposed to push society forward through the history.¹⁸ This pause is a sign of the individual’s resistance to the norms; here also, Ayari’s incomplete film and his persistence in maintaining the current status, rather than modifying it for viewing, highlights a tension inherent in suspended and incomplete projects made during revolutionary times, and as Benjamin writes it brings ethics to society’s forward movement, humanizes it, and creates moments of critical thinking.
When we exhume these unfinished or unseen films from decades of existence in the world of perceived failure, they take on a ghostly appearance in search of a viewer. They offer a great archive of the erased history where we can look for the lost pieces of our collective memory. By drawing attention to the wounds on their body, these films inevitably invite their audience to look at the quality of incompletion as a possibility for continuing what was left aside. Each time that it is projected on the screen or viewed on a monitor, it teases and laughs at our notion of complete, failed, and forgotten.
¹ Kianoush Ayari, phone interview by the author, 29 February 2019.
² Roozbeh Sadr Ara, ‘The Formation of Urban Documentary Cinema in Iran,’ Hamshahri Magazin, Vol. 35 (October 2009), p. 79.
³ Ibid., p. 78.
⁴ Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press 1997), p. 29.
⁵ The new urban poor came with what Bayat calls ‘ingenious methods,’ such as engaging in noisy demonstrations, breaking the water pipes to direct it to the areas in which they stayed, and stealing electricity from the main city lines (ibid., p. 86).
⁶ Mohammad Sina, ‘A Review of Iran’s Documentary Cinema,’ Farabi Journal, No. 59–60, p. 132.
⁷ Ibid., p. 143.
⁸ Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (eds.), Rethinking Third Cinema (New York: Routledge 2003), p. 55.
⁹ Julio García Espinosa, ‘For an Imperfect Cinema,’ trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut, No. 20 (May 1979), pp. 24–6.
¹⁰ Basir Nasibi, Ten Years of Iran’s Free Cinema (in Persian) (Saarbrücken: Cinema-ye-Azad 1994).
¹¹ Ayari, interview by the author.
¹² Linda Nochlin, The Body In Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames & Hudson 2001), p. 8.
¹³ It is the importance of the historic validity of an event that Walter Benjamin highlights when writing on the necessity of revisiting the past as an inevitable path towards winning the fight against the Fascist German state. For Benjamin, studying the historic moment goes hand in hand with fighting the enemy and the ruling class. See, Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (London/New York: Verso 2006), p. 25.
¹⁴ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books 2007), p. 257.
¹⁵ As Michael Löwy writes, many of Benjamin’s texts suggest a correspondence between modernity, or progress, and a hellish damnation (Löwy, Fire Alarm, p. 59).
¹⁶ In fact, many revolutions that fought against networks of power and exploitation in colonized countries such as Algeria and Indochina were moments when the colonized resistance responded to the exploitation of the colonizer under the name of progress and modernity.
¹⁷ Löwy, Fire Alarm, p. 67.
¹⁸ In ‘On The Concept of History,’ Benjamin describes a chess machine that always wins against its opponent only because a hunchback is hiding inside the machine. The hunchback is the soul of the machine who controls the mechanical movements and pauses, just as the train’s travelers have the power to create a pause in its forward movement (see ibid., p. 26).
REFERENCES
Bayat, Asef, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press 1997).
Benjamin, Walter, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books 2007), pp. 253–64.
Espinosa, Julio García, ‘For an Imperfect Cinema,’ trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut, No. 20 (May 1979), pp. 24–6.
Guneratne, Anthony R. and Wimal Dissanayake (eds.), Rethinking the Third Cinema (New York: Routledge 2003).
Löwy, Michael, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (London/New York: Verso 2006).
Nasibi, Basir, Ten Years of Iran’s Free Cinema (in Persian) (Saarbrücken: Cinema-ye-Azad 1994).
Nochlin, Linda, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames & Hudson 2001).
Sadr Ara, Roozbeh, ‘The Formation of Urban Documentary Cinema in Iran’ (in Persian), Hamshahri Magazin, No. 35 (October 2009), p. 79.
Sina, Mohammad, ‘A Review of Iran’s Documentary Cinema’ (in Persian), Farabi Journal, No. 59–60 (July 2006).
Original article published in Counter-Memories in Iranian Cinema, edited by Matthias Wittmann and Ute Holl, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 21–30.
Thanks to Tara Najd Ahmadi and Edinburgh University Press for granting permission to republish this article.
