Blake Atwood

American University of Beirut, Sociology, Anthropology, & Media Studies, Faculty Member

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Papers by Blake Atwood

Precarity and Possibility: Government Intervention and Informal Media Work in the Middle East

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2023

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"A City by the Sea: Uncovering Beirut's Media Waste," Communication, Culture & Critique 12, no. 1 (Spring 2019)

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"The Little Devil Comes Home: Video, the State, and Amateur Cinema in Iran," Film History 30.1 (Spring 2018)

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“When the Sun Goes Down: Sex, Desire, and Cinema in 1970s Tehran,” Asian Cinema 27. 2 (October 2016)

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“Home Video and the Death of Cinema: Notes from the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990,” Post Script 35.3 (Summer 2016)

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"Tehran's Textual Topography: Mapping Youth Culture in Contemporary Iranian Literature," ALIF: Journal of Comparative Poetics 35 (May 2015)

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"Sense and Censorship in the Islamic Republic of Iran," World Literature Today 86. 3 (May 2012)

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Books by Blake Atwood

Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran

MIT Press, 2021

For over a decade, videocassettes were officially banned in Iran. But even analog media technolog... more For over a decade, videocassettes were officially banned in Iran. But even analog media technologies like the videocassette are surprisingly difficult to control. Rather than curtail the circulation of videocassettes, the ban inspired a vibrant video-based movie culture that operated at the margins of state regulation. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ordinary Iranians took up the work of copying and distributing movies on video, as the informal circulation of videocassettes stretched to almost every imaginable corner of the country. Based on a corpus of oral history interviews, Underground tells this story in all its trials and tribulations: the harsh regulatory policies that created such an underworld; the video dealers who broke the law to establish elaborate home-delivery services; the intimate connections that people formed with videocassettes and with each other; and the lengths that everyday Iranians went to access cinema at a time of profound political and social change.

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Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press, 2016)

Iranian Cinema in a Global Context: Policy, Politics, and Form, ed. Peter Decherney & Blake Atwood (Routledge, 2013)

Persian of Iran Today, Volumes 1 & 2 (University of Texas, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2013 and 2015)

Journal Special Issues by Blake Atwood

Special Issue "Home Video & Media Texts", Post Script 35.3 (Summer 2016).

by Richard Nowell, Jindriska Blahova, Ishita Tiwary, and Blake Atwood

Despite exerting an almost unprecedented influence on audiovisual cultures across the globe, home... more Despite exerting an almost unprecedented influence on audiovisual cultures across the globe, home video has inspired a relatively narrow range of scholarly enquiry. On the one hand, media theorists and historians have tended to consider how this multifaceted phenomenon facilitated changes to the structure and organization of national film industries, especially that of the United States. On the other, they have examined the responses of stakeholders such as fans, moral watchdogs, and state institutions, especially in the United Kingdom. By contrast, apart perhaps from hardcore pornography, comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which home video shaped the texts the media industries crafted and disseminated; not only films but also movie marketing campaigns, companies’ brand identities, and works of professional criticism, to name but a few. As a consequence of these tendencies, home video has come to occupy something of an exceptional position in media historiography insofar as it has yet to provoke the type of sustained, multidirectional analyses rightly devoted to other technologies and means of delivery, such as television, widescreen, multiplexing, DVD, and new media like the internet and mobile telecommunications. By shifting attention from industrial structures and the dynamics of various forms of critical reception toward home video’s affect on texts produced by the culture industries, this issue of Post Script hopes to contribute to the larger task of deepening understandings of the economic, aesthetic, and social impact of arguably the most important change in content delivery and consumption of the late twentieth century.

Contents

Peter Alilunas, “'Shot Live on Videotape': The Televisualization of Adult Film, 1978-1982".

Ishita Tiwary, "Screening Conjugality: The Affective Infrastructure of the Marriage Video".

Johnny Walker, "Reliability, Quality, and a Reputation for Great Entertainment:
The Promotional Strategies of Britain’s Early Video Distributors, Beyond the Video Nasties".

Julia Knight, "High Hopes for Video: The UK Independent Film and Video Sector’s Engagement with the Videocassette".

Jindriska Blahova, "Finding a Suitable Home for Video: Video and the State in 1980s Czechoslovakia".

Blake Atwood, "Home Video and the Death of Cinema: Notes from the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990".