Urban spaces, flânerie, and the crisis of modern Iranian identity in Kamran Shirdel’s the Morning of the Fourth Day (1972)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8244875 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Javad Nematollahi (0000-0002-2575-9924, Tarbiat Modares University), Asghar Fahimifar (0000-0002-9397-6269, Tarbiat Modares University, corresponding author), Alireza Sayyad (0000-0003-2092-9012, University of Art) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 1-26 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for Cultural Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1479-7585 • E-ISSN: 1740-1666 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14797585.2026.2645197 |
| OpenAlex | W7138919346 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
Kamran Shirdel’s The Morning of the Fourth Day (1972), a seminal yet understudied work of Iranian New Wave cinema, extends the director’s documentary critique of Pahlavi modernisation into fiction through a reflexive and formally experimental mode. This article reads the film as an inquiry into urban spectatorship under uneven modernisation, arguing that Shirdel transforms Tehran into a visual field of commodities, screens, and circulating desires. Bringing together Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle, Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s discourse of gharbzadegi, Georg Simmel’s account of metropolitan perception, and Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur, the article shows how the film links consumer desire, urban drift, sensory overstimulation, and cultural alienation. Through close analysis of Amir’s movement through the city, as well as of specific formal devices – freeze-frames, abrupt insert montage, film-within-film reflexivity, and staged photographic space – the article argues that Shirdel’s cinematic form itself becomes a critique of modernisation as image-regime. The Morning of the Fourth Day thus emerges not simply as a narrative about alienated youth, but as a docu-fiction continuation of Shirdel’s contrapuntal politics: a meta-cinematic exploration of modern Iranian identity as a crisis of spectatorship, performance, and misrecognition.
Identity (music · Identity crisis · Morning · Narrative · Islamic Studies and History · North African History and Literature · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
The Political Economy of Modern Iran
Visual Culture
Window Shopping
Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran
Streetwalking on a Ruined Map
Processes of a Transformation of Young Drivers’ Responsibility for Health—Carpe Diem
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Tehran
Pahlavi Iran and the Politics of Occidentalism
Benjamin, Cinema and Experience
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |