To what extent has auteur theory informed scholarship on Iranian cinema? Focus on: – Abbas Kiarostami and his films, his minimalist style, use of non-profe

© Kelly Houck

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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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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.pdf. 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: [email protected]

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

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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, fantas

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