The story of cinematic traffic between Lahore and Tehran, particularly during the period of its short-lived heyday in the long sixties, is largely that of a failed experiment—the more so as such exchanges were carried out along official lines; however, a re-examination of this elusive archive, with attention to counter-publics and libidinal economy, and especially with an eye towards antecedent, mediality, and intelligibility, promises to paint a far more complex picture. This presentation takes as its starting point André Bazin’s theorization of CinemaScope’s function as a kind of “cauterization” (cautérisation). The overblown yet mysterious arrival at Lahore of “Shahscope,” we argue, embodied a similar ambition in its attempt to mean more than it could possibly reveal.