Posted: April 24th, 2025

Film Studies 1000-word literature review (Iranian Cinema)

Topic:   

· To what extent has auteur theory informed scholarship on Iranian cinema?

Focus on:

– Abbas Kiarostami and his films, his minimalist style, use of non-professional actors, and philosophical explorations of reality and fiction.

– 1000 words

-Use the template below and follow the instructions

– Academic writing of literature review

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Research Topic: To what extent has auteur theory informed scholarship on Iranian cinema?

Literature Review:

1

000 words. This is where the main text of your assessment goes.

Original text of paraphrased content: At the end of the literature review, please include a copy of the exact text that you paraphrased. This will allow us to assess how well you have paraphrased.

Bibliography: This must be formatted according to either the MLA, Chicago or Harvard style guide. Be sure to pay attention to correct formatting including punctuation, use of upper and lower case and italicisation etc. Note that the Library catalogue has a ‘Citation’ option that you can use, but you MUST double check each citation for accuracy and correct formatting, including italicisation of correct details. You must be very precise to demonstrate your attention to detail.

· For each source, you should identify the central argument, methodology, scope and main examples/case studies.

· Compare and contrast the arguments and perspectives of each author.

· Give an account of what you have learnt about the topic from each source.

· Include at least one direct quote from each source. These must be correctly referenced including page number(s).

· Paraphrase a passage (2-3 sentences) from one of the sources in your assignment. The passage you select should be either the author’s main argument or conclusions. This must be correctly referenced including page number(s). At the end of your assignment, you must include the passage that you have paraphrased exactly as it appears in the original source. This is separate from the main text of your assignment.

· Provide a full bibliography formatted according to either MLA or Harvard referencing style.

1

© Kelly Houck

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy, by
Mathew Abbott. Edinburgh University Press,
2016, 176 pages.

Kelly Houck

Mathew Abbott’s book, beautifully adorned with a now iconic still from The Wind Will

Carry Us (Bād mā rā khāhad bord, 1999), explores the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s
later films through the framework of film-as-philosophy. The book offers an analysis of cinema as
a medium of serious philosophical production through a chronological case study of Kiarostami’s
films, beginning in the introduction with Taste of Cherry (Ta’m-e gīlās, 1997). Abbott draws on
the work of philosophers ranging from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Noël Carroll, as well as Middle
Eastern scholars such as Hamid Dabashi, to investigate the real theoretical work Kiarostami’s films
accomplish. Throughout the text he weaves two major threads of inquiry: what happens to reality
when we screen it, and how film creates problems of knowledge. Abbott argues that film does not
merely illustrate preexisting philosophical ideas, instead, cinema carries out a specific kind of
thinking.

The book’s primary concern lies in the philosophical problems, questions and abstractions
that Kiarostami’s films formulate, complicate, and negotiate. The central problem Abbott explores
is Kiarostami’s characteristic technique of interrupting the viewer’s relationship with the film, and
how these moments of interruption function. The author investigates how the filmmaker harnesses
technology and directorial techniques to confuse, but ultimately reinforce, the relationship of the
spectator to the screened image. Abbott argues that these moments, where the filmmaker abruptly
disorients the viewer and upsets their claims to knowledge, rather than separate the viewer from
the film, actually pull the viewer in further. Another major point the author explores is what he
terms the relationship of the real to the fake, invoking and assessing Kiarostami’s insistence on his
ability to record truth. Specifically, he examines to what extent the filmmaker’s deliberate switch
to video at the end of Taste of Cherry, and its use throughout ABC Africa (2001) enables him to
emphasise the spectator’s awareness of the medium and film’s ability to make claims about truth.

Abbott is not interested in delineating Kiarostami’s vision of the world, nor the defining
aesthetics of his oeuvre. Instead, Abbott’s attraction to Kiarostami’s filmography lies in what he
clarifies as the filmmaker’s ability to “draw a particular kind of philosophical significance out of
narrative and characters, and to render philosophical commitments and fantasies with significant
political and cultural purchase” (13). In the book’s seven chapters, the author explores the way
Kiarostami’s films embody film-as-philosophy, beginning with a first chapter on The Wind Will

Carry Us and ending with Like Someone in Love (2012). By moving through the filmmaker’s body

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of work in a chronological manner, Abbott is able to document the progression of his
experimentation with directorial techniques, and each film’s relationship with its predecessor and
successor. In each chapter, Abbott focuses on one film and one central philosophical idea, using
Kiarostami’s methods to consider, confuse, or push existing philosophical debates further.

Throughout the book Abbott returns to the ideas of belief and scepticism, considering the
claims to authenticity and truth suggested by the use of documentary footage, and even expressed
by Kiarostami himself in interviews. The Wind Will Carry Us provides the perfect basis to an
opening chapter for a work on film philosophy, as the film’s meta-narrative quality engages
essential questions concerning the viewer’s belief in the images the filmmaker presents. As Abbott
aptly demonstrates, the protagonist’s unfulfilled quest to document a premodern traditional ritual
brings the question of the nature of belief to the fore. The film prompts the viewer to reflect on the
impulse to accept the images presented in documentary footage as true, and furthermore to believe
in that truth. Namely, that even a documentary film purporting to show the authentic, true qualities
of its subject has been framed by a filmmaker with a specific goal in mind. Abbott, citing Gilles
Deleuze, concludes that ultimately, “what the filmmaker wanted, and what we wanted along with
him, is not necessarily belief itself, but the belief that others believe” (38). In the case of Ten (Dah,
2002), the use of technology at first seems to render belief in its narrative almost imperative, as
the directorial presence is seemingly absent. However, Abbott accomplishes a deeper reading,
suggesting that in actuality, “we are not called upon to believe in the content of the film … yet nor
are we simply asked to suppose it imaginatively” (71). Instead, Kiarostami leaves the spectator
suspended somewhere in between.

The relationship between distance and absorption is another of the book’s major themes.
The author identifies the opposition between distancing a viewer from a film and drawing a viewer
into a film as one of the fundamental concepts that Kiarostami complicates. In his analysis of
Shirin (2008), Abbott draws on Michael Fried’s work on absorption and theatricality (89–96). In
Shirin, the camera focuses on the faces of Iranian actresses as they react to a film depicting the
epic of Khosrow and Shirin, which the spectator cannot see. For the author, Kiarostami’s fixation
on the women’s faces as they watch a film relates to Fried’s argument that photography of
audiences in a cinema creates a distance between the photographic and filmic experiences.
However, in Abbott’s view, Kiarostami does not create that distance, because, “Shirin reflects on
the problematic status of cinematic absorption with cinematic means” (89–90; emphasis in the
original). This assertion leads the author to an intriguing, original thought: that we should consider
“cinematic absorption without presupposing it is a function of illusion” (94). In the introductory
and concluding chapters, the author cites the ending sequence of Taste of Cherry as the essential
example of his films’ theorising on distance and absorption. Taste of Cherry ends with the abrupt
insertion of the film crew into the shot, which seems to violently thrust the spectator out of the
viewing mode established by the film up until that point, yet simultaneously implicates the
spectator deeper into the viewing process. Roger Ebert famously detested the film, commenting
that the ending sequence constituted “a tiresome distancing strategy to remind us we are seeing a
movie”. Abbott takes a different stance, noting that, for Kiarostami, playing with such distancing
techniques is “fundamental to his own directorial strategy” (144).

In many instances, Abbott pushes back against popular readings of Kiarostami’s films in a
productive way. One case concerns orientalist and antiorientalist readings of The Wind Will Carry

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Us. He rejects Hamid Dabashi and Azadeh Farahmand’s critical readings, whom Abbott sees as
dismissing the film for “deliberately performing an ethnographically inclined Third World
exoticism” (39). Abbott astutely complicates their readings, by clarifying that their real critique
concerns the film the protagonist is making rather than the film Kiarostami is making. While the
author agrees there should certainly exist space to think critically about the mechanisms bringing
Kiarostami’s particular brand of Iranian cinema onto the international art cinema stage, he suggests
that, in this case, such criticisms should be reevaluated. In another case, he contests Alberto Elena’s
reading of ABC Africa in terms of a reality–fiction dichotomy, wherein Kiarostami’s self-insertion
into the frame should be understood as an interference. Instead, for Abbott, Kiarostami’s interest
lies in recording the landscape as it is, rather than making a statement about the competing
objective and subjective interpretations of documentary film.

The structure that Abbott chose for his book is strategic and straightforward. The author
presents seven concise chapters, each claiming one film as its central subject through which he
parses the philosophical concepts at hand. By selecting a film-by-film structure, the book functions
as a chronological reading of Kiarostami’s later career, charting the course of the filmmaker’s
cinematic, philosophical, and technological interests. A possible alternative structure would have
been entirely thematic, wherein the author could examine concepts that Kiarostami raises and
molds across multiple films together in one space. With a thematic approach, one could engage in
a deeper reading of the issue of faces and bodily indexes that figure heavily in Shirin, and also,
rather memorably, at the end of ABC Africa. One could also examine more closely the Derridean
notion of Kiarostami’s signature (32–33), i.e. long, winding, rural roads, which protagonists
traverse in films like The Wind Will Carry Us and Where is the Friend’s Home (Khāneh-ye dūst

kojāst?, 1989). Yet another possible route would be technology’s role in constructing the
metanarrativity present in Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, and Close-Up (Nemā-ye

nazdīk, 1990). Though, certainly, Abbott would not be the first scholar to comment on these issues.

The author’s selection of films, though justified, deserves comment. Despite the fact that
Kiarostami had been making films since the 1970s, this book takes the 1997 release Taste of

Cherry as its starting point. The effect of such a choice on the popular perception of Kiarostami’s
films must be acknowledged, for two reasons. First, by situating his first Cannes-awarded film as
“a kind of watershed in his artistic development, definitively marking his arrival as a great
filmmaker” (2), the book risks replicating patterns of auteurist thinking and upholding structures
of taste-making rooted in elitist viewing practices. This risk is particularly relevant in the case of
global filmmakers, because of the significant power of the European gaze as a mediating force of
film festivals (Wong 122). In the case of non-Western films, Bill Nichols sees film festivals as
akin to museums or tourist sites, drawing Western spectators in with the promise of an almost
ethnographic experience (19). Second, by excluding his pre-1997 films, the book ignores films
focusing on child protagonists, suggesting that films about children cannot do the same caliber of
philosophical work as films focusing on adult protagonists. Though he occasionally references
some of these films, like Life and Nothing More (Zendegī va dīgar hīch, 1992), their exclusion
implies that films about children are less important, valuable, or intellectually productive. Of
course, Abbott’s justification that the films made from the 1970s through 1990s have been studied
to a greater extent than his more recent films is valid. Yet, these older films would have served as
productive case studies for the methodology employed in this book.

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This text would serve scholars of media studies, philosophy, world cinema, and even the
casual Kiarostami fan interested in theoretical approaches to film. For students of Iranian cinema,
Abbott’s approach will be refreshing, intriguing, and rewarding. A minor complaint is that
occasionally the author dwells too long on plot description; the third chapter in particular suffers
from an unnecessary amount before delving into an argument. In addition, Abbott’s training as a
philosopher naturally conditions his approach to the material. For example, scholars of Iranian
cinema will notice the absence of Persian-language sources. The author makes a concerted effort
to include English-language scholarship from Iranian-Americans, but Iranian, Persian-language
sources would certainly add valuable perspectives to the work. Minor criticisms aside, Mathew
Abbott has crafted a wonderful book with which he brings Iranian cinema further into the fold of
serious film-philosophy study.

References

ABC Africa. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, MK2 Diffusion, 2001.

Close-Up [Nemā-ye nazdīk]. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Celluloid Dreams, 1990.

Dabashi, Hamid. Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future. Verso, 2001.

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited, Inc., translated by Samuel Weber and

Jeffrey Mehlman, Northwestern UP, 1988, pp. 1–23.

Ebert, Roger. “Taste of Cherry.” RogerEbert.com, 27 Feb. 1998, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/taste-

of-cherry-1998.

Farahmand, Azadeh. “Perspectives on Recent (International Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema.” The

New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity, edited by Richard Tapper,
I.B. Tauris, 2002, pp. 86–108.

Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. U of

California P, 1980.

Life and Nothing More [Zendegī va dīgar hīch]. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Facets Multimedia

Distribution, 1992.

Like Someone in Love. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, MK2 Productions, 2012.

Nichols, Bill. “Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival

Circuit.” Film Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, Spring 1994, pp. 16–30.

Shirin. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, MK2 Diffusion, 2008.

Taste of Cherry [Ta’m-e gīlās]. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Zeitgeist Films, 1997.

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Issue 15, Summer 2018, pp. 147–151

Ten [Dah]. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, MK2 Productions, 2002.

The Wind Will Carry Us [Bād mā rā khāhad bord]. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, MK2

Productions, 1999.

Where is the Friend’s Home? [Khāneh-ye dūst kojāst?]. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Facets

Multimedia Distribution, 1987.

Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk. Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen.
Rutgers UP, 2011.

Suggested Citation

Houck, Kelly. “Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy by Mathew Abbott.” Book Review.
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 15, Summer 2018, pp. 147–151.
www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue15/ReviewHouck .

Kelly Houck is currently a PhD student in Persian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Her research focuses on Iranian cinema and the emergence of children’s media in Iran in the
twentieth century. She teaches Persian at the beginning and intermediate levels.

ACTA UNIV. SAPIENTIAE, FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES, 6 (2013) 91–108

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and
Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry:

Two Faces of Orientalism

Alan S. Weber
Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (Doha, Qatar)

E-mail: alw2010@qatar-med.cornell.edu

Abstract. British director Michael Powell (1905–1990) and Iranian director
Abbas Kiarostami (1940–) share several technical similarities in their film-
making, most notably an interest in the visual language of still
photography, painting and other visual arts, specifically light and colour.
They also often comment on the art of film-making and the subject position
of the audience as voyeur within their films. With respect to Orientalism –
the philosophical and cultural construction that the West overlaid on the
East – Powell and Kiarostami can be profitably compared. Powell appears
to have accepted uncritically the notion that the East could be
characterized by exotic and sensuous otherness, an attitude that is revealed
in his approach to The Thief of Bagdad (1940) as escapist fantasy and
Black Narcissus (1946) as a farewell to India. Kiarostami, on the other
hand, a “real Oriental,” not only rejected the Orientalist paradigm (while
simultaneously drawing on its original language and symbols), but also
refused to respond to it in the way that other Muslim artists, particularly in
the post-Iranian Revolution period, consciously attempted to build a non-
western cinematic art. His Taste of Cherry (1997), however, does draw on
some of the same cultural elements that were borrowed and distorted by
the European intellectuals who promulgated the Orientalist and
postcolonial world-view.

Keywords: Orientalism, Michael Powell, Abbas Kiarostami, post-
colonialism, painting and film.

Introduction

Michael Powell’s 1940 fantasy film The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas
Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry (1997) are two seemingly incongruous films
originating in different cultures and different time periods. Powell’s work,
noted for its advanced special effects, is sensational in stereotypical Hollywood

DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2014-0006

92 Alan S. Weber

terms, propelling the viewer to emotional highs and lows through rapid action,
special effects, panoramic camera shots and angles, and Oriental exoticism.
Kiarostami’s muted and introverted masterpiece, on the other hand, although
eschewing plot twists and narrative movement, appeals to the senses also, but
in a strikingly different manner. Juxtaposing these two films illuminates several
facets of Orientalism: Powell’s film participated in constructing an
unproblematic 20th century British Orientalism, while the famous negative
critical reaction of Chicago film critic Roger Ebert to A Taste of Cherry revealed
western Orientalist misconceptions about eastern and Muslim concepts of time,
death, place and suicide. Both films, however, share a profound interest in two
aspects of “otherness:” the Thief’s transportation of the audience through
history and physical space (a de-centred fantasy world of “long ago” with flying
genies and flying carpets, based on the imaginatively transfixing power of the
1001 Nights; and Kiarostami’s portrait of the alienation of spirit of a man who
has chosen to no longer live in the world). Both films draw on a complex
symbolism of sensuality. Also, the films are linked stylistically and technically
by the self-reflexivity of the directors and a distinct interest in the framing
techniques of still photography and painting: these technical aspects in both
filmmakers are intertwined with the semiotics and semantics of their art.

Development of Powell’s Orientalism

Powell began his film career in 1925 working for Irish director Rex Ingram
(not to be confused with the American actor of the same name who stars as the
genie in The Thief of Bagdad) after a brief unsuccessful career in banking. In
1924, Ingram filmed The Arab in North Africa, a work that may have influenced
Powell. The hero Jamil, a soldier in the war between Syria and Turkey, learns
he is the son of a Bedouin tribal leader. He defends a mission school of orphans
from being handed over by a fearful village leader to the Turks who want to
slaughter them. The film draws on one aspect of imagined Arab identity
common in films of the time: the “noble savage” stereotype of the hero Jamil.
Also the portrayal of Turks as bloodthirsty and cruel harkens back to the
English proverbial saying “as cruel as a Turk.” In these Orientalist films of the
1920s 40s, historical, documentary, or cultural realism was never considered,
and the plots are often simply romantic Western narratives transposed to
eastern settings. As Michalak observes, “this genre includes movies such as The
Thief of Bagdad (1924), Kismet (1920, 1930, 1944, 1955), and The Wonders of
Aladdin (1961), which present the Arab world as a fabulous land of snake
charmers, monsters, great wealth, half-naked women, harems, flying horses and

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry 93

the like. In this genre, “Bagdad” is a projection of American fantasies, a place
where Western taboos are violated and where even the laws of physics are
suspended for flying carpets, magical ropes and cloaks of invisibility”
(Michalak 2002, 12).

Michalak’s analysis is complicated by the fact that both Arabic story-telling
and lyric, such as the Alf layla wa layl (1001 Nights) and the ghazal, have had a
profound impact on western literature and narrative structures. These films
were often, as was the case in Douglas Fairbanks’s earlier Thief of Bagdad
(1924), accompanied by lavish and expensive props and thousands of costumed
extras. The sets for Fairbanks’s Thief were estimated to have cost 2 million
dollars, an enormous sum for the time. Thus the nexus of East/extravagance/
fantasy/otherness/sensual beauty is clear throughout these films shot in
mythical eastern settings, primarily highly ornamented indoor sets [Fig. 1]. The
art form of film itself in the early part of the 20th century, due to its novelty,
communicated otherness by its very nature, especially considering the rarity of
international travel at the time for the average person. Film could transport
audiences to the exotic East. The wildly popular Rudolph Valentino film The
Sheik (1921) also reinforced Orientalist visions of the East and racial taboo: the
lusty Sheik abducts a white woman, but is depicted with sympathy for his
bravery and nobility. We learn at the end of the film, however, that he is in fact
the son of a British father and Spanish mother and was adopted by an Arab
tribe after his parents’ death. Thus racial barriers and stereotypes are left intact
instead of being violated. The film enacts a subtle emotional movement in the
audience from unease and mild shock at the vibrant, colourful and violent
Sheik, to growing sympathy and tension, and then an affirmation of western
identity and western values when the Sheik’s origins are revealed.

During the first period of Powell’s career, he occupied himself in various
roles as actor and stills photographer, a position that clearly influenced the way
he viewed the art of film itself, as a moving tableau. In 1928, he met Alfred
Hitchcock and was hired to produce the still photography for Hitchcock’s silent
film Champagne. Powell’s later Hitchcockesque production Peeping Tom
(1960) would have seriously damaging consequences for his later career. The
film narrates the crimes of a video-voyeur who films his victims as he murders
them, continuing Powell’s interest in the filmic eye that first arose in The Thief
of Bagdad. As Roger Ebert points out, Peeping Tom shocked both viewers and
critics because “it didn’t allow the audience to lurk anonymously in the dark,
but implicated us in the voyeurism of the title character” (Ebert 1999). Similarly
Powell in the Thief of Bagdad draws the audience in to create the narrative, in
the sense of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief:” the director asks the

94 Alan S. Weber

audience to participate in the fantasy, colours, exoticism and otherness of
Powell’s imaginatively constructed Bagdad.

A strong parallel between Powell and Kiarostami is the self-reflexiveness of
their art: both directors signal to the viewer in some way that they are
consciously making film and that the audience is a voyeur. Powell’s Peeping
Tom showed this very explicitly, much to the chagrin of its critics. A favourite
technique of Kiarostami, which he used in A Taste of Cherry and Ten (2002),
involves dual-mounted cameras inside a car recording the points of view of
driver and passengers as they observe one another. In another of his films,
Shirin (2008), the entire action involves camera cuts to the faces of famous
Iranian actresses as they themselves are in a movie theatre watching the scenes
of the classic Persian love story Khosrow and Shirin.

Light, Colour and the Orientalism of Powell

The Thief of Bagdad (1940) was produced by Alexander Korda and directed
by Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, and Tim Whelan. The cast included Conrad
Veidt as Jaffar, Sabu as Abu, the Little Thief, June Duprez as the Princess, John
Justin as Ahmad, and Rex Ingram as the Djinni. The plot is told in flashback (in
the recursive narrative style of The 1001 Nights) by the blind King Ahmad,
whose kingdom has been seized by his evil Vizier Jaffar. He befriends Abu the
Little Thief and together they experience a series of adventures. Due to wartime
interruptions, production of the film was transferred to Hollywood for finishing
by Alexander, Zoltan and Vincent Korda, as Ludwig Berger had been effectively
sidelined due to disputes with Alex Korda. Unfortunately, Powell did not speak
at length about the production of the film in the two volumes of his
autobiography, but the production values and vision of the film can be
reconstructed within the context of his other films, specifically Black Narcissus
(1947) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

Powell came to age and maturity during the period of two world wars and a
devastating financial depression which greatly sapped England’s financial and
spiritual resources, creating several “lost generations” of men. The first half of
the 20th century, interrupted by a brief “roaring twenties,” was a time of
austerity and rationing which necessitated a stoicism and denial that has
became a stereotype of the modern British character (“keeping a stiff upper
lip”). Thus to provide psychic balance in British society, some form of escapism
was needed, and the motion picture fulfilled this role well. Thus Oriental
themes, themselves a form of British escape from the puritanical Victorianism
of the 19th century, collided felicitously with a desire to forget about war,

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry 95

casualties, and the lack of material goods. Interestingly, The Thief was one of
two films sent to then U.S. ally Russia during WWII to entertain children.
Russia even more than its western European allies was suffering food shortages
and massive casualties from the Hitler offensive.

The basic thesis of Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978) posited a
constructed binary between East and West – Orient and Occident – pervasive in
western literature, art and politics, which always situated the West in a superior
ontological position. While the West was vigorous, intellectual, disciplined,
ordered and moral, the East was feminine, sensual, corrupt, exotic and always
“other.” For Sir Richard Burton, who translated both erotic and pornographic
eastern works such as the Kama Sutra, Arabian Nights, and The Perfumed
Garden, Orientalism resided in imaginative discourse, fantasy, and the
sensuality of the harem and seraglio. For European visual artists such as
Goodall, Ingres, and Hunt, Orientalism was embodied by rich saturated colour,
intricate costumes and sensual female nudes [Fig. 2]. It is this last facet of
Orientalism which most impacted Powell and the set designers and art directors
with whom he worked, such as Alfred Junge, many of whom were specifically
trained as painters and graphic artists.

Powell claimed credit for the enormous eye that appears on the bow of the
ship that enters the harbour in the opening scene of The Thief (Christie 1994,
33), mimicking the standard film countdown symbol and announcing wittily
the motif of the visual [Figs. 3 4]. Other related themes of seeing and eyes
include the blindness of Prince Ahmad (both literal and metaphorical, as he
doesn’t see the treachery of Jaffar until it is too late), illusion and reality with
the appearance of the Djinni, Jaffar’s hypnotic powers, and Abu’s theft of the
All-Seeing Eye.

Powell lived before the CGI special effects revolution where action and
movement, such as in Star Wars, Dune, and more recently Lord of the Rings, would
become a central feature of fantasy and science fiction film; yet Powell made
extensive use of special effects in The Thief and Black Narcissus. Just as today the
purpose of special effects is to create other worlds, Powell and Korda were aiming
at a completely fantastic experience, a world that the British mind associated
specifically with the Orient. Powell’s description of the prop created to film Abu
within the Djinni’s large palm provides some hint of the extravagance of the set
properties: “When Abu is seen in the hand of the Djinni, that hand was a model of
a real hand and was some forty feet from the wrist to the tips of the fingers. This
required seven tons of clay to manufacture and was made in sections to fit over the
machinery which allowed the hand to open and close in a realistic manner. When
the whole hand was completed, it was sprayed with over a hundred coats of rubber

96 Alan S. Weber

cement which took the place of the skin and masked the joints as it opened and
closed” (Powell and Pressburger 2012).

In Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), heaven is portrayed as a black-
and-white efficient and humourless bureaucracy devoid of love by using a
special Technicolor Monochrome process, while scenes shot on earth appear in
full Technicolor. Through an error, the main character, airman Peter Carter,
who has been marked for death, ends up on earth and falls in love instead of
being conducted to heaven by the French psychopompus “Conductor 71.”
When Conductor 71 returns to earth to retrieve Carter and bring him to heaven,
he looks around and says “One is starved for Technicolor up there. What a
night for love.” The quip clearly establishes the connection between colour,
love and earthly pleasures. In the 1940s, black and white film held its own
against Technicolor in part because it was an expensive proprietary process:
Technicolor could add up to 25% to an entire film budget. Thus a director
needed to make a considered and conscious choice to use Technicolor, and
therefore it became a significant film element in and of itself; this is how Powell
approached the use of colour in his films, as another tool in the expressive
toolkit. What Powell did in The Thief, and this is more evident in the luxurious
colour tableaus of The Red Shoes (1948) and Tales of Hoffman (1951), was to
heighten and direct the narrative through emotions created by colour, and also
in part through music [Figs. 5 6]. Thus Technicolor was by its nature perfectly
suited to the earlier visual arts tradition of Orientalist painting, which equated
rich colours with the sensuality of the East.

Director Martin Scorsese, who has been strongly influenced by Powell, has
made a similar observation: “there was something very special and unique about
the English use of Technicolor […] and that became something else, and that had
to do a lot with emotion; it had more to do with painting”1

1 The source of the quotation is a documentary by Craig McCall: Painting with Life
(2000).

[Figs. 7 10]. Scorsese
also pointed out elsewhere that “Michael [Powell] always felt that the only true
authentic genius of film making was Walt Disney” (Black Narcissus, DVD
Commentary). One of Powell’s favourite films was the richly animated Disney
film Fantasia. The Thief, according to Powell’s autobiography, represented an
important watershed for Powell and Pressburger (The Archers): “the Archers
thought in colour from the Thief of Bagdad onward” (Powell 1992, 39).

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry 97

Orientalism in Black Narcissus (1946)

Black Narcissus (1946) tells the tale of an Anglican nunnery established in
the Himalayas housed in a former harem. The British nuns fight against a non-
Christian culture represented by the sensual Indian dancing girl Kanchi (Jean
Simmons). The local British agent Dean (David Farrar) delivers the line:
“they’re like children” when speaking of the Indian villagers, without any irony
whatsoever. The same line is echoed later by Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr),
who tells Dean: “We all need discipline. You said yourself, they’re like
children. Without discipline we should all behave like children.” These lines
again represent a standard British colonial view that Europe represents a more
disciplined and advanced state of development than eastern nations, and that
eastern peoples are impulsive and child-like. The title of the film derives from
the name of the perfume that the foppish young Indian General (played by
Sabu) wears, emphasizing the frivolity and narcissism of the native ruling
classes. The whole film, in fact, can be interpreted as a study in the differences
between East and West, since it appeared in theatres only a few months before
Britain withdrew entirely from the Indian continent in 1947. As the nuns leave
the nunnery in the final scene, the audience feels that two distinct cultures that
could never meld together or understand one another have finally parted ways.

Viewers are often surprised to learn that Black Narcissus was made entirely
in England, using an indoor and outdoor set at Pinewood studios as well as one
English botanical park containing Himalayan plants and trees. The stunning
vistas are all mattes, glasses and backdrops painted by a talented team of
landscape painters directed by Alfred Junge [Figs. 11 12]. Powell commented
on the role of colour in the symbolism and narrative structure of Black
Narcissus: “Our mountains were painted on glass. We decided to do the whole
thing in the studio and that’s the way we managed to maintain colour control to
the very end. Sometimes in a film its theme or its colour are more important
than the plot” (Powell 1986, 42). Powell also noted that “in my films, images
are everything” (Powell 1986, 169).

Jack Cardiff won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography and Alfred
Junge won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction for Black Narcissus.
Cardiff, the subject of two documentaries by Craig McCall (Cameraman: The
Life and Work of Jack Cardiff [2010]; Painting with Life [2000]) was very much
interested in painting, particularly the artists Vermeer, Rembrandt and Van
Gogh. Powell equally appreciated the interconnections between painting and
film: “I had learnt from Vincent Korda on The Thief of Bagdad the value of a
painter’s eye” (Powell 1986, 407). Powell’s team was actually known for

98 Alan S. Weber

introducing and developing new Technicolor techniques (despite the objections
of the Technicolor company, which was sometimes dictatorial about the use of
its process), because “in the early days, [Technicolor] had been talking down to
technicians, art directors, and cameramen who worked in black and white [….]
but now they were dealing with painters, which was a very different thing. The
painters knew enough about the technical possibilities of the process,
particularly people like Jack Cardiff […] and they were able to tell Technicolor
where to get off” (Powell 1986, 668).

Thus Powell’s floruit coincides with an instrumental period of film history in
which black and white and colour film were nearly on the same terms before
colour would come to dominate modern mainstream film production. Clearly
Powell and his associates Jack Cardiff and Alfred Junge were pushing the
technical boundaries of the Technicolor process and colour schemes in general
to create a film element that elicited meaning and emotion and that could
compete in importance with acting, dialogue, music score and narrative. In
Powell’s “Orientalist” films The Thief of Bagdad and Black Narcissus, these
colour elements as well as spatial techniques borrowed from the graphic arts,
could simultaneously convey a sense of the otherness of film itself, and its
escapist and fantastic dimensions, as well as a thematic and philosophical
vision of the profoundly “other” Orient. Powell’s Orientalism was probably not
a conscious stance, but merely a product of his social environment, especially
in the light of the many pro-British films verging on propaganda that he made
during and after the WWII period (49th Parallel, 1941; The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp, 1943; Battle of the River Plate, 1956). Although he drew some
ire for sympathetically depicting a Nazi deserter in the 49th Parallel, these films
never question fundamental British values, or call into question Britain’s sense
of cultural superiority.

The Neo-Orientalism of Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran in 1940, the year that the Thief of
Bagdad appeared in theatres. Similar to Powell’s interest in photography,
Kiarostami’s interest in form, light, and colour led him to study graphic design
and painting at the Tehran University College of Fine Arts. He is also a noted
still photographer. His first work involved making television commercials in
the 1960s. His first film Bread and Alley (1970) featured a child protagonist, a
recurrent feature of his work. He directed a number of films in the 1970s and
80s including the Koker Trilogy films (1987 94), which are set in the northern
Iranian town of Koker, the site of a devastating earthquake in 1990. Kiarostami

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry 99

himself, however, did not conceive of the films as a trilogy. Kiarostami is
sometimes grouped with a set of directors who created what is dubbed the
Iranian New Wave Cinema. His work first achieved notice by European
audiences at Locarno in 1989 and A Taste of Cherry (1997) won the Palme d’Or
at Cannes.

Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry appears to ignore the Orientalist viewpoint
altogether in that he does not sentimentalize, or romanticize his main character
Mr. Badii, or set him in opposition to western values or norms – Kiarostami
clearly does not want to make political film through this particular narrative.
There is no pandering to western tastes in the way that, for example, Orhan
Pamuk has been skewered by Turkish intellectuals for telling the West in his
novels what the West wants to hear. A great deal of postcolonial art in the Arab-
speaking world has been plagued by this burden of emphasizing specifically
what is unique and non-western about Islamic culture, instead of simply
presenting the fullness of the fabric of Muslim life as it exists in lived
experience.

Kiarostami, however, does draw on a native tradition of sensuality in Persian
love poetry for his symbols and set of signs which the 19th century French and
British Orientalists would also appropriate, distort and magnify, and apply to
all of Eastern culture itself – i.e. Sir Richard Burton’s interest in eastern
pornography, Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat as a carpe diem masterpiece, or the
Cordoban courtly love manual The Dove’s Neck-Ring by Ibn Hazm. However,
these works were clipped deliberately from the complex cloth of medieval
Islam and displayed as evidence of the East’s addiction to pleasure and the
harem, and the East’s feminine weakness in the face of the West’s superior
military technology and intellectual resources. They also provided an erotic
escapism from the sexual repression of Victorian society. Specifically, the
cherry of the title of Kiarostami’s film symbolizes the Old Turk’s reconnection
to worldly existence and pleasure after an attempted suicide much like Badii’s
desire to end his own life.

The sensuality of Kiarostami’s cherries forms an undercurrent in classic
Persian and Sufi poetry, particularly Rumi, who would be well known by most
educated Iranians. There are also references in Kiarostami’s work to the Persian
poet Omar Khayyam, made famous in English by FitzGerald’s translation of the
Rubaiyat. The critic Dissanayake has pointed out the concern that both Rumi
and Kiarostami share about the act of making art, which Powell also signals to
the viewer of his films: “One important point of similarity between Rumi and
Kiarostami, to my mind, is the fact that both of them comment reflexively on
their chosen media even as they communicate experiences through them. In

100 Alan S. Weber

other words Rumi’s poetry shows signs of meta-poetry while Kiarostami’s films
show signs of meta-cinema” (Dissanayake 2012).

Cherries appear numerous times in Kiarostami’s poetry, and can symbolize
youth, sexuality, and freedom from restraint, as in his Poem 28:

The old nun
dispenses advice
to the young nuns
amid cherry trees (2001, 28)

and Poem 180:
The little bud
announced itself loudly
from inside its hard sheath of cherry wood (2001, 180).

Light and Colour in Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry
(1997)

Interestingly, Kiarostami suffers from hypersensitivity to light and can often
be seen wearing sunglasses in public. A Taste of Cherry contains numerous
scenes that have obviously been composed solely around the organizational
motif of a myriad of finely gradated shades of colour, shadow, and shape.
Moreover, colour in Kiarostami, as in Powell, establishes mood, emotion and a
unique symbolic language. For example, most of A Taste of Cherry was shot in
the hills surrounding Tehran in autumn producing a dry, spiritually parched
and end-of life nuance which parallels Badii’s own weariness with his
condition. Elena alerts us to the significance of the pervasive brownish yellows
in the shots: “an ochre, yellow earth – the colour of desperation and depression
in Persian tradition–is ever-present as a recurring motif that constantly suggests
the idea of burial, or the burial sought by Badii, a simple minute figure, shut
inside his car, crossing these lands” (Elena 2005, 128). Critic Laura Mulvey
believes that Kiarostami was in essence attempting to cast the landscape as
another character in A Taste of Cherry: “the landscape is both bleak and
beautiful. Kiarostami shot the film in autumn to take advantage of the
metaphorical significance of the season of dying, but the terrain has its own
distinct character, almost like a constructed mise en scène” (Mulvey 1998, 5).

A constantly used shot in A Taste of Cherry consists of dusky sunlight
bouncing off Badii’s car windshield, which reflects colours of dry dirt, dead
leaves, rust, a gravel pit, and faded washed-out longshots of the city. The
consonance of these colours is so striking that the director is clearly asking us to
reflect on a world that for Badii is inexorably turning towards the colour of

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry 101

earth [Figs. 13 16]. During the film Badii appears to fade in and out of existence
through the interplay of direct sunlight with reflected or translucent light as his
connection to life grows more and more tenuous. These are not the rich and
dark primary colours of Orientalist painting. The washed out effect, which is
also paralleled by shots of Badii seen through the hazy reflections of a window,
in essence distances the viewer from Badii; we are not allowed to feel pity for
him or ever to know the reason for his quest of self-annihilation [Fig. 16]. That
this is all a conscious and crafted technique becomes obvious in the much
criticized final scene, in which Kiarostami the film maker and the actors
(including the soldiers) are revealed filming in the hills where much of the
action has taken place, but in the green of springtime. In the final scene, bright
colours in the blue-green spectrum appear, in shocking contrast to the dominant
earlier earth tones [Fig. 17]. Also, the appearance of the soldier/actors joking
and playing around recalls Badii’s fond reminiscences of his time in the army,
when he felt connected to his fellow man and part of a bigger whole as opposed
to his current state of alienation which pursues him throughout the film.

Kiarostami’s interest in light and colour as the dominant elements of the
landscapes in both his films and still photography, which convey a non-
romanticized and non-Orientalist realism, has been perceptively analyzed by
Ishaghpour: “The cinematography of Kiarostami is essentially stark – without
choice of expression, emphasis, virtuosity or gesticulation on the part of the
photography, and without the picturesque, effect or strangeness of nature. All
signification (imaginary, poetic or symbolic), all romantic reverie or egotistical
impulse is removed from his work in the face of a nature which has nothing of
the sublime, of the resplendent, of the surprising, the sombre, the abysmal, the
horrible, the terrible or the grandiose or incommensurable. His is not a wooded
nature, a land in gestation, fat and chthonian, but the dry land of the Iran of the
high plateaus with their immensity, the grey of the mountains, and rarity of the
vegetation, its dry air and without atmosphere and clarity which accents the
brevity of contours of the abstract and immaterial” (Ishaghpour 2000, 17).

Kiarostami himself has explicitly spoken about the importance of light in A
Taste of Cherry. In the penultimate scene of Mr. Badii in his self-dug grave, the
moon rises and his face is illuminated by lightning flashes: “But life comes from
light. Here, cinema and life merge into one another. Because the cinema, too, is
only light […]. The spectator has to confront this non-existence which, for me,
evokes a symbolic death” (Kiarostami, quoted by Mulvey 1998, 8). Kiarostami
thus reveals his belief in the centrality of light as existence – and the parallel
between the image on the screen and life itself – both the entire film and the
individual scene of Badii’s death make it clear that Kiarostami’s statement is
not a superficial metaphysics, or a stylized profundity tossed off for critical

102 Alan S. Weber

consumption, but a deeply held conviction of an artist who has mastered so
many genres of visual art.

A Critical Misinterpretation of A Taste of Cherry

American film critic Roger Ebert seems to have got it terribly wrong, and his
misinterpretation of A Taste of Cherry is instructive. He appears to be disturbed
by the lack of plot or action (despite his protestations to the contrary): “I am not
impatiently asking for action or incident. What I do feel, however, is that
Kiarostami’s style here is an affectation; the subject matter does not make it
necessary, and is not benefited by it […]. The film is such a lifeless drone that
we experience it only as a movie” (Ebert 1998).

Paradoxically, the film is tense at times (for example, as the Kurdish soldier
trapped in Badii’s car attempts to divine Badii’s possibly sinister intentions),
but not driven by dramatic tension or the type of Hollywood-style action that
Ebert yearns for: the film is emphatically not about suicide, even though the
entire story revolves around Badii’s search for someone to cover over his grave
after he has killed himself with pills. For Western audiences, “will he or will he
not commit suicide” is a real question that could propel the plot or subplot of a
movie. However, this is not a real question for a Muslim audience, since suicide
is strictly haram and not a subject for debate since in Islam it represents one of
the questions that has long been resolved by ijma’ or consensus, and therefore is
no longer open to further legal reasoning. A Muslim knows that Badii’s three
Muslim passengers (the Kurdish soldier, the Afghani seminarian, and the old
Turk) will be expected to dissuade him from his deed, and the audience will
even know what arguments they will use on Badii. Therefore, the film cannot
be “about suicide” for a Muslim audience, so instead they are left with a
powerful portrait of a man driven beyond despair, intent on his mission of self-
harm, and the inexorableness of his will. Thus the drama strikes at some of the
most primal emotions of the audience witnessing pure human disintegration
since in the end they learn nothing about Badii the individual or Badii as a
Muslim in crisis. This purity of emotion is again neatly presented
contrapuntally in light, landscape, and form in the same way that Powell
manipulated these visual elements on the screen.

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry 103

Conclusion

Powell in The Thief of Bagdad and Black Narcissus presents an
unproblematic and traditional British Orientalism replete with 19th century
notions of the East as sensual, feminine and exotic. Powell could not bridge
East and West in his oeuvre due to his historical and cultural circumstances
(the East would always remain exotic for him), but Kiarostami does seem to
homogenize and blur life and art, and not so much counteract or respond to the
cultural constructions imposed on his society by Orientalism, but merely to
create an Iranian art situated within traditional Persian culture, and to suggest
the similarities between his characters and a universal everyman. This impulse,
to see his Iranian subjects and characters as both products of culture and history
and simultaneously as archetypes, flies in the face of Orientalism which insists
on difference and racial stereotyping.

One seemingly conscious anti-Orientalist feature of Kiarostami’s films
(including A Taste of Cherry) is the choice of male protagonists, and the lack of
gratuitous sexualisation or sensualisation of his female characters. The two
major roles that women could play in western Orientalist film circa 1920 1960
were either thinly clad seductresses (harem and seraglio girls) or beautiful
objects of the male protagonist’s desire (also dressed in revealing clothing).
Kiarostami’s Ten, on the other hand, a film which revolves around a female taxi
driver and her female passengers, presents a wide range of non-sexualized
“every woman” types, including the taxi driver’s sister, a pious old woman, and
a prostitute. Kiarostami has been praised for his daring reinterpretation of
Iranian women in his films by providing portraits of the full breadth of female
experience, including the other roles they play outside of family and child-
bearing.

Ironically, a stark realist in one sense, Kiarostami plays with some of the
same Orientalist discourse and semiotics that Powell could not transcend, in
his use of colour and light as a medium to explore the ethereal (avoiding the
richness, saturation, and density of colour that Orientalism would employ as
shorthand for the senses and fleshly worldliness). Both Powell and Kiarostami
demonstrate a fixation with both colour schemes and fixed visual elements,
such as form and framing, as a source of meaning, a recognizable feature in
many of their films probably ultimately related to their mutual interest in still
photography, painting and graphical arts.

104 Alan S. Weber

References

Christie, Ian. 1998. Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger. London: Faber and Faber.

Dissanayke, Wimal. 2012. Modern Iranian Cinema and Classical Persian Poetry.
Sunday Observer. http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2012/05/27/mon02.asp (last
accessed: 04.04.2013).

Ebert, Roger. 1999. Peeping Tom (1960). Sun Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.
com.

Ebert, Roger. 1998. Taste of Cherry. Sun Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/
apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980227/REVIEWS/802270309/1023

(last accessed: 04.04.2013).
Elena, Alberto. 2005. The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami. Trans. Belinda Coombes.

London: Saqi.
Ishaghpour, Youssef. 2000. Le réel, face, et pile: Le cinéma d’Abbas Kiarostami.

Tours: Farrago.
Kiarostami, Abbas. 2001. Walking With the Wind: Poems by Abbas Kiarostami.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard Film Archive.
Malton, Thomas? 1803. Arabic Life. Steve Art Gallery LLC, USA.
http://www.intofineart.com/htmlimg/image-47649.html.
Michalak, Laurence. 2002. The Arab in American Cinema: From Bad to Worse,

or Getting Better? Social Studies Review 42 (Fall): 11 17.
Mulvey, Laura. 1998. Kiarostami’s Uncertainty Principle. Sight and Sound vol.

8 no. 6: 24 27.
The Powell & Pressburger Pages. 2012. Ed. Steve Crook. Fascinating Trivia.

http://www.powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/40_Thief/Thief00.html
(last accessed: 04.04.2013).
Powell, Michael. 1992. Million Dollar Movie. New York: Random House.
Powell, Michael. 2000 [1986]. A Life in Movies. London: Faber and Faber.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Scorsese, Michael. 2001. DVD Commentary on Black Narcissus. New York:

Criterion Collection.

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry 105

List of Figures

Figure 1. Douglas Fairbanks’s Thief of Baghdad (1924) was noteworthy for the
cost of the lavish sets and costumes, and certain special effects (flying horses,
flying carpets) were imitated in Powell’s Thief of Bagdad (1940). Figure 2.
Typical British Orientalist painting: possibly Thomas Malton, 1748 1804.

Figures 3 4. The eye of the opening scene of The Thief of Bagdad prepares the
viewer for a visual feast of Technicolor and special effects.

106 Alan S. Weber

Figures 5 6. Emotion created by colour in The Red Shoes (1948) and evidence
of Powell’s visual imagination rooted in still photography framing techniques
(i.e. visual S-curve recommended in standard photographic manuals).

Figures 7 10. A sequence from the Thief of Bagdad (1940) seen as a series of
Orientalist tableaux. A comparison of Figure 9 from the Thief with the
Orientalist painting (circa 1880 90) in Figure 10 by French artist Philippe Pavy
reveals the similarity of Powell’s procession with the common Orientalist motif
of the colourful entrance of a notable person on an animal accompanied by
elaborately dressed attendants.

Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry 107

Figure 11. The outdoor backdrops in Black Narcissus were paintings. The
landscape paintings are so realistic that even modern viewers are astonished
when they learn that it was not filmed in the Himalayas. Figure 12. The actual
set used in Figure 11 at Pinewood Studios, London.

Figures 13 16. Consonance of earth tone colours in A Taste of Cherry
suggesting spiritual dryness and death. Figure 16. Typical shot of Badii in A
Taste of Cherry alienated from himself and the viewer – slowly disintegrating
into shades of light and mirroring the colour of earth.

108 Alan S. Weber

Figure 17. Kiarostami and cast in A Taste of Cherry revealed in the final scene
in spring colours.
Figure 18. Another symbolic use of colour in A Taste of Cherry: Badii
spiritually trapped in his monochrome car looks outward to a brightly coloured
garden while photographing a happy couple, establishing psychic distance
between the two worlds.

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434 Reviews

films. Many have made excellent points about the place of these films within taste cultures,
about the nature of horror film viewing, about the way that horror films challenge dominant
social institutions, and about the relationship of the body to horror cinema. However, no
one has placed these films in a rich historical context to examine how the films comment
on contemporary social issues. Lowenstein does just that.

Jon Kraszewski is an assistant professor in the Department of Communciation at Seton Hall
University. He completed his Ph.D. in Communication and Culture at Indiana University in 2004. His
essays have appeared in journals such as The Journal of Film and Video and The Velvet Light Trap
and in anthologies such as Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (eds. Susan Murray and Laurie
Ouellette; New York University Press, 2004).

The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, by Alberto Elena.
London: SAQI Books, 2005

JASMIN TAHMASEB McCONATHA

Alberto Elena’s The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, presents a comprehensive overview of
the career of this famous Iranian filmmaker and director. In this work, Elena, a film scholar
working in Spain, has written an evocative book about Kiarostami’s life in the cinema.
Originally published in 2002, this updated volume is an English translation of the original
Spanish text. Divided into seven chapters the book attempts to present “a coherent image
of the director and his films” (10).

Film evolved as a medium in pre-revolutionary Iran. Hundreds of theatres depicted a
variety of films from the West as well as those made in Iran. In the past two decades Iranian
films have received worldwide acclaim. During the 1990’s, at the height of international
interest in Iranian films, those of us with an Iranian background who live in the Diaspora
flocked to see Iranian films, especially those of Abbas Kiarostami. Abbas Kiarostami is
one of the most controversial pre- and post- revolutionary Iranian filmmakers. He began
his film career in 1970, a time when Iranian cinema moved from Filmfarsi to more serious
films. He was a pioneer in this early period of Iranian films, films that tend to focus on
the complexities of contemporary life. In a career spanning more than 35 years, Abbas
Kiarostami has produced a variety of high quality films.

Because of his contributions, Kiarostami is an important cultural figure in contemporary
Iran. Low ticket prices and the lack of other forms of public entertainment have a prompted
the popularity of the cinema in the country. In Iran, as in many other societies, film has
become one of the few forms of cultural critique, a way for people to participate in an
ongoing moral discourse. Contemporary Iranian films tend to draw on the moral and
religious contours of social fear, cultural anxieties, personal tragedy, and the importance of
self reliance in difficult circumstances. Elena points out that, despite restrictions, Iranian
filmmakers produce 60 to 65 films per year. In fact there are not enough cinemas in Iran to
show the numerous films that are widely produced (147).

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How does Kiarostami fit into this theatre of Iranian cinematic creativity? According to
Elena, Kiarostami has addressed the human condition in the manner of cinema-verité, stories
of everyday life combined with cinematic poetry. Given the numerous restrictions placed on
films in post-revolutionary Iran, especially on films depicting the lives of women, Iranian
filmmakers have focused much of their attention on the stories of children. Kiarostami is
no exception. He has struggled to depict the lives of his characters with simplicity and
sincerity. One of his greatest films is The Traveler (1974). It is also his first feature film and
one of his greatest films. The film also has “the novelty of being the first Iranian film shot
using live sound” (27). Kiarostami introduces a recurrent theme in his work, the complex
world of childhood. In the film a young boy, Ghassem, lives in difficult circumstances: his
family is insensitive to his needs, his overwhelmed teachers are more oriented to discipline
than to teaching, and Ghassem struggles to enjoy the simple pleasures of childhood, in this
case viewing national soccer matches. The film follows Ghassem’s attempt to make his
dream come true. He goes to great length to achieve his desire, he deceives his friends,
his mother, and he even steals money to pay for bus fare to Teheran, in order to attend the
match. Although Ghassem feels riddled by guilt, he nevertheless undertakes his journey, a
journey that ultimately does not satisfy (27).

Elena explores the symbolism that infuses Kiarostami’s films. Kiarostami’s work,
according to Elena, is both idiosyncratic and participatory. Indeed, Kiarostami has tendency
to “achieve a creative collaboration with an attentive audience” (189). Stylistically the films
are, according to Elena, unaffected and uncomplicated. But as in life, the author points out,
the “simple” films are filled with unexpected diversions. As the author acknowledges in
the preface, this volume is highly interpretive and does not present a neutral view of
Kiarostami’s oeuvre. Elena is most assuredly a devoted fan of Kiarostami. Elena’s devotion
is consistent throughout the text. In the various chapters of the work, the author attempts,
using cited interviews with the film director, to discover clues from Kiarostami’s personal
life that may have inspired the director’s work in film. He also tries to unveil the highly
idiosyncratic symbolism that runs through Kiarostami’s cinema. In the end, the reader
is led to believe that Kiarostami’s works are structured in a way that ensures a palpable
connection between the filmmaker and his audience. There can be, it should be noted, no
greater critical praise.

Elena’s specific descriptions of Kiarostami’s films (e.g. Through the Olive Trees, The
Wind Will Carry Us), follows a predicable structure. He begins by describing the staged
development of each film and follows with an exposition of the technical aspects of the
film’s production. The focus of these expositions tends to be more descriptive than critical.
On several occasions, the author emphasizes, both explicitly and implicitly, the secretive
nature of Kiarostami’s work. By the end of the work, Elena laudably attempts to pull
together seemingly disparate data from Kiarostami’s life and practice to form a larger
picture of the director’s collected films.

Elena, for example describes the development of an unofficial trilogy of Kiarostami
films (i.e. Where is the Friend’s House, Life and Nothing More. . ., and Through the Olive
Trees). The intertextuality of the putative trilogy devolves from the presence of the same
actors as well as the continuous blurring of fact and fiction. In his unofficial trilogy of
films, Elena demonstrates how Kiarostami violates classical narrative style. His films often
feature uncertain endings, and, like Vertov and Truffaut, he tends to expose filmmaking as a
constructive, fictive art, to his audience. In Taste of Cherry for example, the main character
(who is presumably dead) states explicitly to the audience: “The film is over”. Kiarostami
also follows the minimalist tradition. His backdrops often are natural settings as opposed

436 Reviews

to constructed sets. In the films, dialogue is often punctuated by silence. Characters central
to a film’s plot purposefully avoid one another.

Kiarostami’s films, which, to reiterate, tend to blur the line between fiction and fact,
often focus on the importance of thinking critically about social life. Both of these tendencies
are evident in Taste of Cherry (1997), one of Kiarostami’s most popular post-revolutionary
films. The film’s unsettling narrative and its uncompromising imagery leaves audiences
feeling uncomfortable and anxious. The film focuses on a man who wants to commit
suicide, a shameful transgression in Islam. We follow the man as he tries to find someone
willing to bury him after his suicidal death. The protagonist offers several people badly
needed money to bury him. Should these folks accept this “blood” money to feed their
children or should they, rather, adhere to the tenets of Islam? The palpable moral tension of
this film established Kiarostami as a major filmmaker, an artist whose works were worthy
of critical reflection—and worldwide acclaim.

Through his descriptions and analysis Elena presents a well-informed work. The author
cites many sources to support his interpretations. The text also demonstrates the author’s
knowledge of historical Persian culture and to some extent his awareness of contemporary
Iranian society. This knowledge helps to shed light on what motivates Kiarostami’s
creativity. Despite Elena’s informed ruminations about Kiarostami’s personal life and his
films, the question: “Who are you Mr. Kiarostami?” remains somewhat unanswered.

Elena rightly suggests Kiarostami’s work is deeply rooted in Persian culture—
especially Persia’s highly celebrated classical poetry—Hafiz and Rumi, among many others.
In addition, the abstract nature of his films parallels the abstract contours of both pre
and post-Islamic Persian art. In Persian culture an important distinction is made between
the presentation of the public and private self. Walls shield our homes from the outside
inspection. Accordingly, outsiders rarely find out what is going on inside the walls of the
Persian household. What’s more, family members are expected to maintain the code of
privacy, those who do not disrespect the honor of the family. It is not surprising to learn
that Kiarostami’s personal story is inconsistent and enigmatic. It is, after all, based upon
public presentations. The private man, it would seem, remains hidden behind the walls of
his personal fortress, all of which is central to being a Persian.

The great strength of Elena’s The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami is that it is a closely read
analysis of the director’s films. It is, in other words, a kind of retrospective of Kiarostami’s
oeuvre. As such, the work brings attention to what has been an under-represented and
partially understood in the director’s body of work. Elena does discuss the significance
of Kiarostami’s works in the development of Iranian film. But as a reader, I wanted more
comparison and more linkages to the works of other past and present Iranian filmmakers.
Had Elena added one additional chapter that discussed more generally the discourse of Iran
film, this elegant retrospective text would have acquired more of a sense of immediacy.
The author might have stressed a bit more centrally how Kiarostami’s evocation of parable,
his neo-realism, his concern with desire and seduction shaped his idiosyncratic style.
He might have also analyzed a bit more thoroughly how Kiarostami’s use of film as a
kind of direct discourse about the power of cinema—films about films– has inspired a
younger generation of Iranian filmmakers, filmmakers who have captured the imagination
of audiences throughout the world.

The question of “who is Abbas Kiarostami?” though provocative, is less interesting than
the question of “how has Kiarostami influenced the development of the cinema in Iran?”
We will never fully know the secrets of Kiarostami’s persona, but with the publication
of The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, Elena has taken us a step closer to understanding
Kiarostami’s signal contribution to the development of Iranian as well as world cinema.

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Jasmin Tahmaseb McConatha is a professor cultural and developmental psychology at West
Chester University of Pennsylvania. She has lived in Iran, Europe, and the United States. For the past
fifteen years she has conducted research and written extensively on the effects of cultural change and
transformation on the life experiences of men and women in middle and later adulthood.

Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity by Edward
Dimendberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2004

PHILIPPA GATES

Film noir has provided film criticism with an inexhaustible source of debate over the past
three decades as critics have attempted to prove, define, detail, and analyze a corpus of
films that shared a common, darker view of American society in the 1940s and 1950s in
contrast to classical Hollywood films of the same period. Whether you define it as a mood,
style, cycle, movement, or genre, film noir has been explored from a variety of critical
perspectives including poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and genre criticism. Just
as it seemed that there was nothing left to say about film noir, Edward Dimendberg has
produced a compelling new study that offers an interesting perspective from which to
consider the films that compose the cycle (as he defines it) of film noir—their relationship
to the cities in which they are set.

Previous studies have explored film noir’s relationship to the European film movement,
German Expressionism, which preceded it and the coming to Hollywood of German
filmmakers with their darker, more critical, and highly stylized vision of society. Instead,
Dimendberg’s study explores noir’s relationship to other cultural movements, specifically
the American metropolitan experience and related cultural influences—architecture, urban
space, photography, and mass media. As Dimendberg notes,

Few commentators neglect the significance of the city in films noir, generally
explaining the metropolis as a transplantation from crime fiction, a visual motif,
a determinant of ambience or mood, or an element of narrative causality, and
seldom deviating from the explication of visible detail. More rarely do the
travel to the extracinematic precincts of geography, city planning, architectural
theory, and urban and cultural history. Though frequently analyzed in relation
to political conflicts of postwar America, film noir has often been studied in
isolation from the geographic dynamics of the period. (9)

Some studies have explored the idea of space in film noir but Dimendberg moves
beyond the question of setting—urban vs. rural, New York City vs. Los Angeles—and,
instead, interrogates the relationship of the city space to the narrative, characters, and
themes specific to noir through a discussion of the films along with the architecture, urban
planning, and changing reality of America’s big cities. His focus in not an abstract or general
idea of “the city” and its place in noir but the very representation of New York and Los
Angeles—particular shots, angles, and composition—that recur in noir films. Dimendberg