Company Cinema in Abadan — A History (by Abbas Baharloo)

Taj Cinema in Abadan

Commissioned by me and originally published in the now defunct Underline magazine, this piece by the prolific (and Abadani) historian of Iranian cinema, Abbas Baharloo, sheds light on a lesser-known and nonetheless very significant chapter in the history of film culture in pre-revolutionary Iran. — EK

 

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company ushered in a ‘golden age’ of cinema-going in Abadan before nationalisation in 1951. Overseen by the Company, however, popular entertainment and propaganda were mixed, and screenings did little to bridge social divisions. 

By Abbas Baharloo

 

Many years ago now, Abadan was a city that welcomed immigrants and a place where many settled. Its population was made up of people from many different Iranian and international cities; Isfahanis, Shirazis, Baluch, Kurds, Lors, Arabs, and Azeris lived alongside Britons, Americans, Indians, and people from Rangoon in Burma. At the time Abadan was a bustling city and a vibrant centre of all sorts of cultural and artistic activities. There were leisure clubs; modern cinemas; libraries housing books and other publications in Persian, English, and Arabic; theatre, photography, and gardening associations; concerts of Iranian and foreign music; lectures on literature, music and painting, and sporting competitions. Despite all this, in Abadan doors were not always open to everybody. The prominent Iranian filmmaker Nasser Taghvai, born in Abadan in 1941, remembers it thus:

“For all of its modern history, Iran has been under the influence of the policies of foreign powers. Perhaps in many of Iran’s cities and townspeople haven’t experienced the bitter taste of colonialism, but the country’s policies have followed those of colonial powers. Because of its oil, the Khuzestan region attracted the colonisers’ attention earlier than elsewhere. This colonial connection created social relations and an atmosphere of a type that was not so visible in other parts of Iran. In my birthplace, Abadan, there were neighbourhoods where the British and high ranking officials of the oil company lived, and those of us who were not company employees were banned from entering them; there were cinemas we didn’t have the right to go to, as they were only for the Americans and British and Europeans who worked in the oil facilities of the south. Of course, there were also cinemas reserved for Iranian blue and white-collar workers. Everything had been organised on a class basis, and of course, we who had no-one in the oil company found these places closed to us.” [1]

In a country where there has always been a passion for cinema, it is no small thing for the doors of a theatre to be closed to a film lover.

Taj Cinema from another angle

There were temporary halls for film screenings in the industrial city of Abadan from the moment the great Abadan oil refinery was built and opened by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in 1912. In fact, the British agents of APOC were the first people to establish places for film screenings, showing shorts in their original language to their employees and foremen using projection equipment brought from Britain. For the most part, these films were both educational and entertaining, and it was not only the locals but even the company’s Iranian and Indian workers who were barred from these private screenings. Gradually, however, with the approval of APOC’s British board, newsreels, health information, and propaganda were broadcast in their original language for the public in densely populated city neighbourhoods, using automobiles and mobile projectors. Although people did not follow much of the content of these films, they gathered in great crowds every time they found out where a screening would take place locally. The mobile cinema first showed films in the village district of Qarantineh (Shatit) and afterwards in the great courtyard of the Razi High School.

A company cinema in Abadan, circa 1920s

As the building works and preparations for the refinery came to an end and the time to make profits from it approached, the agents of APOC established the Gymkhana Club, a private leisure and sports club large enough to accommodate about 1,000 British company employees. This was alongside all the other arrangements they had made for the employees’ well-being, such as magnificent houses planted with trees, a hospital, and large shops in the leafy district of Berim, close to the residences of the heads and high ranking employees of the company. It was at the Gymkhana Club that screenings of instructional and propaganda films took place. The club, whose very name locals found strange, was equipped with lecture halls, billiard tables, a bar and a refectory, and most of the British employees spent their leisure hours there, well into the night. The Gymkhana Cinema was an open-air summer cinema. In the early 1950s, its name was changed to the Berim Summer Cinema, and again in the 1960s to the Abadan Oil Cinema.

In setting up the Gymkhana sports and leisure club, the aim of Sir John Cadman, chairman of APOC, was to create a sort of ‘British nucleus’ in the oil-extracting regions. Moreover, through membership in the club and participation in social and above all sporting activities the British company employees would preserve their ‘modern ultra-democratic spirit’ and be able to put up with the ‘instability’ and difficulties of life far from home. Everything at the club was thus designed to preserve and reproduce the feeling of being British in the south of Iran. And of all the different activities available, filmgoing was the most popular:

‘[It brings] familiar scenes of home, bringing back vividly and clearly happy memories of leave and youth… Give an Abadan audience a picture of Piccadilly, with the roar of the traffic and the occasional hoot of a motor horn rising and they ask for nothing more… Some people in Abadan prefer the cinema to mail day.’ (APOC Magazine vol. 5 no. 1, January 1929, p. 46)

In 1926 APOC’s board, which had established the Neilson Cinema as well as well-equipped clubs for the company’s British employees throughout the oil-extracting areas of Khuzestan, issued a proposal to use the cinema not only as a source of entertainment but also as a powerful propaganda tool. In the late 1920s, the first large hall for film screenings was built in a leafy Abadan district, with handsome wooden benches that seated large numbers of people.

There were also a large number of Indian workers in Abadan, who like the British often felt homesick, and for that reason, the Indian Club was built for them. This club was equipped with a lecture theatre, sports facilities, a screening room, and a large restaurant serving Indian food. Mainly Indian films were shown at the club. There was a Korg piano underneath the cinema screen where an Indian officer who had learnt the piano in the Royal Navy sat and improvised melodies based on the scenes being shown on the screen above.

The finest of Abadan’s cinemas was the Taj (‘Crown’) Cinema, where building work commenced before the Second World War. This cinema had a very particular appearance on account of the employment of red fire-resistant bricks (known in Iran as ‘London bricks’). It was opened to the public even before its interior decoration was completed in 1944. With room for 1,178 people, it was considered the best-equipped cinema in the Middle East, and only executives, managers, and high-ranking employees of the oil company used it. The cloth-covered seats were comfortable, and the lighting, sound and acoustics were all to the highest international standards. Architects who have studied the plans have described its façade as being like a sitting lion, reminiscent of the oil company’s logo.

The weekly programme of Company cinemas in the 1950s

As the refinery grew, and the volume of oil either refined or exported as crude likewise increased, the number of employees also expanded, and the company’s British board – ostensibly to demonstrate its opposition to any form of class discrimination, but in reality in order to preserve that discrimination – established a number of separate clubs and cinemas for its Iranian and Indian employees, both white and blue-collar. In the Arya Park there was the summer cinema of the Iran Club; the cinemas of the Abadan Club in the Bahmanshir area, with a 700-seater winter cinema and an area for 1,500 people to attend summer screenings; the Bahmanshir summer cinema originally established for Indian company employees living in the poor neighbourhood of Kofisheh, with a capacity of 900 people; and the cinema at the Pirouz (‘Victory’) Club with a capacity of about 700, located in the Pirouzabad district.

There is no need to be reminded that the oil company signed film production contracts with a number of Hollywood studios: Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Columbia, 20th Century Fox, United Artists, and Walt Disney. As a result, some films were premiered simultaneously in London and at the Taj Cinema and other oil company employee cinemas. The films were screened free from oversight or censorship on the part of the Iranian authorities. However, in 1971 the Abadan Office for Culture and Art succeeded in obtaining some authority over film screenings. Moreover, until the revolution, most films shown in company cinemas, except at the Bahmanshir Cinema, were shown in their original language.

Screening times were announced every Wednesday afternoon in the company’s publication Mash'al (‘Torch’), and listings specified on which days a film would be shown in its original language, and on which days a dubbed version would be shown. Likewise, there were always one or two pages directed at cinemagoers, with summaries of plots and information about the directors, actors and cinematographers for each film. Exactly the same information was broadcast the same day on the company radio station, Abadan National Oil Radio. Screening times and locations for the oil company and private cinemas were also listed in the Daily Newspaper, and [noted literary figures] Najaf Daryabandari, Dr Hamid Notghi, Ebrahim Golestan, and Mahmoud Fakhr-Daei wrote commentaries and reviews of these films.

As employee wages were low, cinema tickets were very cheap. For instance, from the 1930s up until as late as the Iran-Iraq War, admission at the Bahmanshir Cinema was only 3 or 6 rials – 3 rials for a seat at the front or 6 to sit farther back or near to the projector. The two sections were separated by an iron railing.

The Taj, Bahmanshir, Abadan, and Pirouz cinemas remained open and active after the revolution, until a few days before the start of the war with Iraq. In recent years the Taj Cinema has been up and running for the public just as it used to be, and now shows contemporary Iranian films.

Ruins of Bahmanshir Cinema after the Iran-Iraq War

 
With the nationalisation of the oil industry in Iran, the golden age of cinema in Abadan came to an end, and yet this end was merely the beginning of the road for people like Abadani director Nasser Taghvai, whose films helped bring modern cinema into being in Iran. It would be hard to argue that the active cinema culture in Abadan did not play a role in fostering talents such as his.
 
 

Notes:

1 Quoted in Abbas Baharloo, Introducing Nasser Taghvai (Tehran: Qatreh Publishers, 2004), p. 20.

Translated by Philip Grant