In a 1992 essay called “The Status of Islamic Art in the Twentieth Century,” Wijdan Ali makes the familiar argument that industrialization has caused traditional arts in the Islamic world to decline (in the quantitative and qualitative senses of the word) as they were replaced by Western forms.[1] Though I have reservations about Ali’s somewhat nostalgic tone that seems to romanticize the past even as she looks to the future, I agree with her that contemporary artists of the Islamic world do not adopt Western forms so much as they adapt them, changing the content of these forms and re-contextualizing them to reflect their culture.[2] Cinema, for instance, has become a powerful artistic tool in many Islamic countries that not only expresses cultural values but has also been used to pose themes inherited from traditional arts in a new medium. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the thriving film culture of Iran, whose relation to classical Persian art is the subject of this essay.
The general argument of my essay is that Iranian cinema must be examined in the context of classical Persian arts, an orientation that will guarantee a more nuanced understanding of Iranian film culture as the inheritor of various artistic precedents. More specifically, my essay locates thematic and aesthetic influences of Persian painting in the works of writer and director Abbas Kiarostami with the hope that the interpretive framework established in this essay will provide a theoretical and methodological template for future research.
The structure of my essay is simple. First, I analyze the scholarly discourse surrounding Iranian cinema. In this section, I argue that Western scholars often unfairly minimize the Persian cultural and artistic context of Iranian cinema either to emphasize Iranian cinema’s indebtedness to Western cinema or to emphasize the socio-political context of the films. Both courses of inquiry have successfully framed often enlightening discussions, but they are both limited: the former rejects Persian cultural and artistic explanations for central thematic and aesthetic choices and unduly favors the predominance of European and American culture, while the latter is too often exploited as a platform for polemical arguments that distract the reader from the ostensible subject of the discourse. Ultimately, neither course of inquiry is able to adequately elucidate the major thematic and aesthetic concerns of the films. Thus, this section seeks to reorient scholarly discourse by presenting compelling parallels that deserve further examination.
In the second section, I take as a case example the films of Abbas Kiarostami, a renowned filmmaker often credited with introducing Iranian cinema to the global film scene as well as initiating many of the major thematic and aesthetic trends in contemporary Iranian cinema.[3] I build upon the argument established in the first section by demonstrating how studying Persian painting can provide a practical entry point into interpreting Kiarostami’s films, which are sometimes seen as impenetrable or deliberately ambiguous to many filmgoers.
NOTES
[1] Muqarnas 9 (1992), 187.
[2] Ibid., 187-188.
[3] Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 11.
