Self-conception of the audience in the cinematic atmosphere of sacred defence cinema

The eight-year war with Iraq has received much attention by cinema media activists, and they have depicted the themes of sacred defense in their works, both during the war and now after many years since that event, and it is attempted to represent and protect this epic of people. Making various works in the field of war genre bears witness to this claim. Some audiences imagine themselves as the main characters while watching the film. The audience gets immersed in the film and sometimes empathizes with the hero of the film and likes to build and advance the narrative of the film based on its own beliefs and desires. This viewer behavior between his real self and his favorite self, which is performed by the hero or the main character of the film, has created a special interactive relationship, and self-image. Replacing the viewer "himself" with "another" who is the hero of the film has existed in different periods of cinema style and various theorists have written about this topic, but it has been less studied and investigated in the field of sacred defense films. The researcher examines the situation and position of the audience in the filmic atmosphere of the sacred defense cinema. Thus, the main problem of the study is to analyze the function and role of the sacred cinema in creating an interactive relationship and replacing the audience's self-image with the other image and the main actors in the film space. The research method is qualitative based on the hermeneutic phenomenology method and based on collecting data from library sources, audio and video archives as well as unstructured interviews and purposeful sampling. The findings of the research show that the cinema of sacred defense has had various ups and downs due to economic, social conditions, extreme or negligent personal decisions of some managers, but because its subject is being inspired by the society and imagines a part of the national history of the people, its works have survived and have attracted audiences of different age groups, even those who have not experienced the war. Different generations of the sacred defense cinema have perceived the communication messages that are sometimes far from the goal that the filmmaker has referred and acknowledged, and sometimes it has been consistent with it, and the main cause is the conscious self-image of the audience. Sacred defense cinema has its effects on the perception of the audience and provides a fluid space for him to search for his beliefs and desires. Being affected by various contexts and circumstances, the audience sometimes watches it in order to escape and forget the problems and imagine their hopes and dreams in the course of the film, and sometimes they are affected by the event of the film and make their true selves based on it. This behavior creates a two-way and interactive relationship. The result indicates that the audience's self-perception is affected by identification, empathy, self-reflection, identification, self-awareness, immersion, agency, and otherness, which has been performed by various expressive methods in the historical periods of Iran's sacred defense films.