Representation of the Role and Position of the Cleric in Iranian Cinema after the Revolution

Due to the role of the clergy in the historical events of the contemporary century and especially their holding political positions after the Islamic Revolution, this group has found a special place and is in the spotlight. Some filmmakers, influenced by social space, have made them the subject of their artwork. This research seeks to answer the question of how the individual and social image of the clergy was reflected in post-revolutionary cinema?

The statistical population of this research is six films “Under the Moonlight”, “Lizard”, “Freeway”, “Gold and Copper”, “Three Aliens and “Scandal 2” which use Norman Fairclough discourse analysis method, data, conversations And the scenes of the mentioned films have been analyzed. After the studies, it is explained how “Scandal 2” was formed in the context of the fundamentalist current and five other films influenced by the reformist current, and the signs and concepts related to post-revolutionary Iranian political currents such as “tolerance”, “belief in government” “Secular”, “religious modernity” and … in connection with the reformist movement and “the centrality of the lower classes of society”, “adherence to Islamic norms”, “use of Islamic knowledge to guide the people” and … in connection with the fundamentalist movement They show explicitly and implicitly.

In general, two different interpretations of the films in question can be made: one refers to the broad responsibilities of the clergy in today’s society, which has not yet been provided, and the other is the theory of separation of religion from politics equal to Christian culture, because in these films the clergy is sometimes a priest. It is approaching that in today’s world, it does not have a spiritual influence and position in Islam, but only plays a role in a small part of the individual life of human beings and has no special social and political role. Then, in this article, referring to the concept of secularization from Peter Berger’s point of view, it gets closer to the main concept of research. In the following, after expressing a kind of religious lifestyle that has been portrayed in Iranian religious cinema, he deals with the pathology of the image of the clergy from the point of view of filmmakers and explores the need to portray the clergy in Iranian cinema. In the end, he examines these works from the perspective of the method of religious analysis of the film and examines the signs and symbols of these works, and while talking about the personality of the clerics of these works, the aspects of secularization in their appearance. It enumerates and examines these dimensions of secularization, which are mostly below the secularization of norms.