In this talk, I examine how sound moves beyond the cinematic screen, shaping how national cinemas are formed and contested over time. Rather than treating film sound as something contained within the text, I follow sound as it circulates across cinema and media infrastructures. Focusing on mid-twentieth-century Iranian and Egyptian commercial cinemas in dialogue with Indian cinema’s regional circulation, I show how the movement of sound, and especially the embodied labor of female performers, both stabilized and unsettled claims about national cinema. I conclude by briefly gesturing toward a second project on contemporary media in the Persian Gulf, where listening to sound infrastructurally offers a way of understanding how labor and mobility are organized within global cinema today. Taken together, these cases argue for sound as a method for writing cinema and media history that is attentive to circulation and the uneven conditions of preservation.
I am a scholar of film and media in and between the Middle East and South Asia. My research and writing focus on contemporary and past media interactions between these regions through questions of sound and infrastructure.