Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran (2021) is Blake Atwood’s second book on Iranian cinema. His first, Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (2016), laid the foundation for a groundbreaking examination of the relationship between cinema and political reform in Iran. Building on that work, Underground offers an insightful exploration of the role videocassettes played in shaping the cultural and media landscape of post-revolutionary Iran. Spanning the years between the 1983 ban on videocassettes and the eventual lifting of the restriction in 1994, Atwood’s work reveals how an underground network of video distribution flourished despite the state’s efforts to suppress it.
The book stands as an influential contribution to the fields of Iranian studies, combining archival
research, oral histories, and theoretical engagement to paint a comprehensive picture of this secret
media culture. Atwood’s work is particularly innovative in that it challenges conventional media studies, which often focus on formal, state-approved media practices, by emphasizing the importance of informal, underground systems. Through this exploration, Atwood unearths he reveals the cultural and political significance of media technologies operating outside the purview of official regulation.

Overview of Themes
Underground (2021) engages with a range of themes, including the intersection of technology, censorship, and social practices in Iran. The book’s central argument is that the informal video distribution networks that emerged in response to the ban on videocassettes not only challenged state control but also fundamentally reshaped Iranian cultural life. It illustrates how underground video became a space where public and private boundaries were renegotiated, alternative modes of cultural exchange took shape, and cinema, spectatorship, and social practices were meaningfully influenced. Atwood’s analysis contributes to the growing field of infrastructure studies by exploring how informal networks underpin cultural survival in restrictive regimes. This focus aligns with the groundbreaking work of Brian Larkin in Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (2008). Larkin’s study examines how media technologies, introduced by colonial regimes in Nigeria, intersected with local social formations, producing unique modes of leisure and cultural expression. Atwood’s and Larkin’s works both underscore the role of informal networks in shaping cultural survival within constrained environments, whether through underground videocassettes in post-revolutionary Iran or the circulation of Hindi films in Muslim Nigeria.

One of the most significant contributions of the book is its expansion of the concept of the “underground.” While underground media is often associated with oppositional or countercultural movements, Atwood broadens this definition to include ordinary, quotidian practices that emerge in response to official regulation. This expansion invites comparisons with other clandestine media cultures, such as samizdat literature in the Soviet Union or underground music and film exchanges in other authoritarian contexts, offering a global perspective on informal media infrastructures. In this sense, Atwood challenges traditional media studies, which tend to focus on Western media practices, and offers a new lens through which to view the materiality and distribution of media in non-Western, restrictive environments.

Chapter Summaries
Banned: video goes underground
The opening chapter sets the stage by examining the state-imposed ban on videocassettes in 1983, triggered by the perceived threat that the burgeoning video rental market posed to state-sponsored cinema and television. Atwood explores how this prohibition paradoxically fostered the growth of underground video distribution networks. These networks became a crucial part of everyday life in Iran and reshaped the boundaries between public and private spaces. The chapter establishes the book’s central thesis by arguing that informal media infrastructures emerged in response to state censorship.

Underground network: collectivity and the videocassette infrastructure
This chapter delves into the informal networks that facilitated the circulation of videocassettes into Iran, with particular attention to the embodied labor of male distributors and the covert transportation of tapes into private homes. Atwood reveals how these underground networks relied on infrastructural invisibility, with individuals negotiating with state authorities to avoid detection. The chapter underscores the human labor and risks involved in sustaining these clandestine media infrastructures.

Video dealers: the work of informal media distribution
In this chapter, Atwood examines the figure of the filmi—the video dealer—who played a central role in the underground media economy. Atwood reinterprets the conventional image of the video dealer by presenting them as cultural laborers who not only distributed media but also curated it. Drawing on oral histories, Atwood shows how filmis used their expertise to recommend videos to customers, often enhancing the viewing experience with additional content like music videos. The chapter highlights how video dealers navigated the informal economy and how their work contributed to the broader cultural landscape of Iran during this period.

Home video: pleasure, peril, and private space
Atwood examines how underground video distribution influenced personal memories and social practices in this chapter. With theatergoing becoming dangerous due to wartime conditions and increased state scrutiny, many Iranians retreated to their homes, where videocassettes offered an alternative form of entertainment. Atwood also addresses how the material imperfections of the tapes such as poor audiovisual quality became integral to the enjoyment and cultural significance of home viewing. The chapter emphasizes the role of memory in preserving the underground network and its cultural impact.

Video matters: remembering the underground
The final chapter moves into the 2010s, where Atwood examines how the memory of the videocassette underground continues to resonate in contemporary Iranian culture. Drawing on films like Tehran Taxi (2015), 50 Kilos of Sour Cherries (2016), and Sperm Whale (2015) as well as memoirs and social media, Atwood shows how the underground media landscape is remembered and rearticulated in today’s cultural discourse. The resurgence of films that depict the figure of the filmi and the 1980s lifestyle, with plots reflecting that era, has led many critics and audiences to view these movies as an evolved version of filmfārsi—the popular Iranian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Worker-Poet and the Filmi: Emancipation and Resistance

In Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran (2021), Blake Atwood offers a compelling account of how informal media infrastructures emerged in response to the Iranian government’s ban on videocassettes in the 1980s. Atwood’s focus on these underground networks challenges conventional media studies that often prioritize formal, state-controlled media systems. His exploration of informality goes beyond the mere existence of subversive practices; it engages broader theoretical frameworks, particularly Jacques Rancière’s (1989) idea of the worker-poet.

Atwood’s work presents underground video dealers, or filmis, as central figures who navigate the blurred lines between the official and the unofficial, the sanctioned and the subversive. This positions the filmi as a cultural laborer operating outside the formal boundaries of the media industry. For Atwood, the filmi, by curating and distributing films in a context of censorship, embodies Rancière’s (1989) concept of the worker-poet. In The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989), Jacques Rancière challenges traditional labor history narratives that focus solely on economic struggles, class consciousness, or political movements. Rancière highlights the importance of workers not as passive subjects of economic conditions but as active creators of meaning and culture. Rancière’s reframing is emancipatory because it asserts that the working class, regardless of their social or economic status, possesses the capacity to disrupt hierarchical systems of thought that traditionally separate intellectual labor from manual labor, and has the potential to resist the capitalist system of production.

Similarly, Atwood argues that the filmi is not merely a distributor of films but an active participant in renegotiating public and private spaces, shaping cultural life in ways that challenge both the state’s control over media and the conventional roles of cultural producers. He shows how many of these filmis from the southern neighbourhoods of Tehran drew on their involvement in underground video networks to navigate and explore new social and cultural landscapes. For instance, the act of distributing films often required them to traverse the socioeconomic divides of the city and gain access to upper-middle-class homes in northern Tehran. These encounters provided opportunities for the filmi to practice and acquire forms of cultural capital otherwise inaccessible within their own social strata.

This dynamic complicates traditional understandings of cultural labor by showing how informal practices like video dealing can function as mechanisms for social mobility and self-transformation. In Atwood’s analysis, the filmi emerges as a figure who navigates Tehran’s cultural and class divides, dissolving the distinctions between the formal and the informal, the rebellious and the authorized, thereby crafting an “aesthetic of blips and blurs” (p. 76) that reshapes the contours of post-revolutionary Iran’s cultural landscape and positions viewers in opposition to the state.

Despite some similarities between Atwood’s work and Rancière’s, their approaches are ultimately distinct, and referencing Rancière in this context appears ineffective. Rancière’s work is focused on uncovering the emancipatory potential within the lower social classes, while Underground (2021) does not seem to recognize such potential. Both works address groups outside the bourgeois class and explore, through narratives from below, how these groups’ struggles involve asserting their constructed identities. This is often achieved by challenging the bourgeois claim to ‘culture,’ essentially transgressing established boundaries. However, the workers Rancière discusses and the filmis in Atwood’s analysis are fundamentally different groups, making any comparison between them problematic.

First, the social and economic position of the filmi diverges significantly from that of the worker-poet in Rancière’s framework. Rancière’s worker-poets are situated firmly within the industrial working class, subject to structural constraints like the control of time and subjection to the rhythms of factory labor. Their poetic practice breaks down the division between manual and intellectual labor and affirms a collective agency that seeks to reclaim control over production. By contrast, filmis work within the informal economy and hold a more ambiguous class position. They do not produce new cultural forms but distribute and consume existing ones within the circuits of capitalist exchange. Their actions may challenge censorship, but they do so by facilitating circulation rather than by transforming the structures of cultural production.

Atwood’s reading of the filmi does not fully account for the radical potential of everyday life as theorized for example by Lefebvre and the Situationists. For Lefebvre (1984), everyday life is both the site of domination and a terrain of possible transformation; a dialectical space where resistance may germinate. Yet Atwood stops short of exploring how the filmi might embody this potential. Instead of disrupting the dominant order, their distribution practices inadvertently enable capitalist adaptation, as evidenced by the later institutionalization of media circulation through entities like the Visual Media Institute. I draw on Laclau’s (1996) account of emancipation to clarify this point.

The limited disruptive capacity of the filmi becomes more apparent when viewed through his emphasis on the need to articulate antagonisms that confront and destabilize hegemonic structures. Rancière’s worker-poets enact such antagonisms through their redefinition of labor and authorship. Filmis, however, remain embedded in the logic of capitalist circulation. While they create moments of resistance within a censored landscape, they do not forge new political identities or reconfigure media power relations. Their actions remain within the bounds of the existing system rather than constituting a break from it.

Thus, framing the filmis as worker-poets overlooks a key distinction: whereas Rancière’s figures reimagine both production and political subjectivity, the filmis operate as intermediaries who reproduce, rather than transform, the conditions of cultural consumption. Atwood’s interpretation, while insightful, ultimately lacks the theoretical depth needed to grasp the emancipatory stakes highlighted by scholars that I have used here such as Lefebvre, Laclau, and Rancière. The filmis’ interventions, though courageous, do not culminate in a reorganization of power or a redefinition of cultural authorship.

Second, while Atwood aims to foreground daily practices and everyday forms of resistance to distance himself from dominant narratives of state-sponsored censorship in Iranian media studies, his analysis remains rooted in a conception of censorship as a coercive mechanism that restricts freedom of expression. In my view, this framework implicitly draws on a de Certeauian understanding of power—one in which resistance consists of tactical maneuvers enacted within the constraints of a dominant system. By framing resistance in this way, as reactive and contingent rather than as a proactive assertion of equality or a radical reconfiguration of the cultural order, this perspective risks reinforcing the very power of the state it seeks to critique. Atwood’s framework, shaped by this de Certeauian logic, positions state-sponsored censorship as the central force dictating the limits of cultural expression. For example, he describes how the Islamic regime sought to align all citizens with its totalizing ideology, prescribing religiosity and controlling what people wear, watch, and consume (Atwood, p. 5). This leads him to cast the underground as inherently political, always defined in opposition to the state. This oppositional binary is precisely what Rancière challenges in his account of the political, which emphasizes equality as a disruptive principle that cannot be fully captured within state logics.

Atwood’s interpretation of resistance aligns with mainstream views on Iranian cinema, which often depict Iranian filmmakers as artists constrained by the state’s repressive and ambiguous censorship rules. For example, Devictor (2002, p. 71) suggests that filmmakers employ “tricks” to bypass censorship and convey their messages. Building on this understanding, it seems that Atwood argues that every aspect of society, if it is not already, has the potential to become a space for negotiation. This interpretation suggests that resistance in daily life is not an abstract or intellectual endeavor, but rather is embedded in simple, ordinary actions such as walking, talking, cooking, and reading. According to de Certeau (1998), daily tactics—the actions of consumers—stand in contrast to strategies, which are the actions of corporations or state powers, both aiming to control time and space. In my opinion, following this philosophy of resistance in everyday life empties the concept of resistance of meaning, as it suggests that anything—even watching a movie—can be considered resistance without necessarily triggering political agency. Additionally, it limits our understanding of censorship and the ideological apparatuses of the state.

Underground practices can be political, but they are not necessarily always in opposition to the state. According to Narges Bajoghli (2019), the regime itself produces “underground” films to create new structures of knowledge and distort production processes in a society where audiences no longer trust formal cultural products but instead turn to alternative, informal ones. It is important to note that “illegal films” in Iran do not always originate from being hidden in the luggage of travelers coming from abroad. The structure of underground film culture is far more complex, extending beyond the actions of ordinary people to involve powerful agents and institutions.

For instance, streaming websites in Iran, which offer a wide range of films, are connected to banking systems for payment processing. In recent years, this has raised concerns about the relationships between these sites, gambling platforms, and Iranian banks. This connection highlights the political economy underlying this type of censorship in Iran. Based on my personal experience, I have witnessed how insiders at major governmental media institutions, who are authorized to purchase films for state-run TV, can circumvent censorship by distributing these films through “illegal” networks. Similarly, ordinary staff working in the archive sections of government institutions can copy and distribute state-owned materials within society.

Despite all this, the research conducted by Atwood in Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran is a significant and thought-provoking contribution to media and Iranian studies. Atwood’s focus on the informal infrastructures of media distribution provides a new perspective on Iranian cultural history. The book’s innovative use of oral histories and its engagement with broader theoretical questions about media materiality and circulation make it a valuable resource for scholars and students alike. For those interested in the intersection of media, politics, and culture, Underground is a must-read that opens up new areas of inquiry in the study of media informality and transnational distribution.

References
Atwood, B. (2021). Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran. MIT Press
Atwood, B. (2016). Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic. Columbia University Press.

Bajoghli, N. (2020). Iran Reframed : Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic. Stanford University Press,. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503610309

De Certeau, M., Giard, L., & Mayol, P. (1998). Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2: Living and Cooking (1st ed.). University of Minnesota Press.

Devictor, A. (2002). “Classic tools, original goals: cinema and public policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979-97).” In The New Iranian Cinema : Politics, Representation and Identity, by Richard Tapper . London: I.B. Tauris.

Laclau, E. (1996). Emancipation(s). Verso.

Larkin, B. (2008). Signal and noise media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lefebvre, H. (1984). Everyday life in the modern world. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351318280

Rancière, J. (1989). The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Temple University Press

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