The book at hand is a study of Iran’s experience of modernity through cinema from its inception in Iran in the early 1900s to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iranian modernity in the early twentieth century was inadvertently tied to socio-cultural and political conditions that evoked cosmopolitan practices and experiences – conditions that cinema, as a modern technology and space that allowed for the interaction of cultures and transformation of identities, intensified and transfigured in the decades that followed. As a history of cinematic modernity, then, this book offers a promising way to link cosmopolitanism to the ethos of modernity in Iran. “Cinematic modernity” is a term that I use to denote the kind of modernity that was shaped by the technology of cinema, the space that it fostered and the visual content that it projected. It is also used to highlight the societal transformations that allowed for cinema’s transfiguration (both in its filmic content and spatial form), and the imaginations that cinema’s morphogenesis conjured from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1970s.