Reading the Films of Kiarostami with the Help of Persian Paintings
I chose Abbas Kiarostami for the analysis that follows because his international reputation puts him at the forefront of Iranian cinema (at least as it is represented in Western academia). As to whether or not this is because the auteur-making machine of Western academia chose Kiarostami to fill a particular niche as the elected representative of Iran’s particular brand of Iranian cinema, as Cheshire has suggested,[1] I have no interest in taking a definite stance on this issue. Suffice it to say, Western scholars have taken a greater interest in Kiarostami than his contemporaries, and more research exists on Kiarostami than for any other single Iranian filmmaker. I freely admit the disingenuousness, though, of separating Kiarostami from his context within Iranian cinema, but I only do so with the goal of positioning Iranian cinema as a whole as the inheritor of traditional Persian art; I do this by positioning Kiarostami as the inheritor of one such art—Persian painting.
In this section, I will examine four aspects of Kiarostami’s cinema: elements of his films often cited as examples of postmodernism, his portrayal of human figures, his use of location and physical space, and his use of symbol. At each turn, I find major links between Persian painting and the films of Kiarostami.
Authors like Dabshi have noted themes in Kiarostami’s films that are typically identified with postmodernism, including dialectical intertextuality, defamiliarization and “resignification” of the world, dehumanization, using “instruments of de-sedimentation without constituting a metaphysics,” and so on.[2] But I would be cautious to ascribe too much power of influence to postmodernism in this case, for as other authors have realized, Persian painting contains many of the same themes. For instance, in the closing chapter of his fascinating biographical/critical portrait of the filmmaker, Alberto Elena argues that trends toward intertextuality can be located within the Persian miniature tradition,[3] while Mir-Ahmad-e Mir-Ehsan goes so far as to say, “Kiarostami is the inheritor of an eastern art tradition which foregrounds deconstruction and multiple narration…This magical terrain is the real source of his fascination with non-linearity and multi-spatial narration…”[4] Similarly, I would add that trends toward “defamiliarization” and “dehumanization” can be taken as an extension of the tendency toward abstraction characteristic of Persian miniatures. This analysis is central to dislodging Western art as the cultural touchstone of Iranian cinema and repositions Persian art as the locus of Kiarostami’s influence.
If Western assumptions about the way art should be read are thus found unreliable, an exploration of the uses of the human figure and physical space in Persian paintings would be helpful. Grabar and Natif note that in Persian paintings, figural representations can be neatly separated into three distinct classes: first are the “active agents…involved in some concrete and discrete action,” who are to be recognized as such by key physical identifiers (such as, Grabar and Natif suggest, specific gestures or certain personal effects); second are the “attendants,” who serve to draw focus to the active agent(s) and sometimes serve some instrumental narrative purpose; finally, there are the “witnesses,” who are simply observers of the action and serve no narrative purpose other than focusing the viewer’s attention on key parts of the scene.[5]
A key point that I see here is that human beings cannot be considered isolable in Persian paintings, for human beings are understood through the relationships the artist establishes in the world of the painting. In Kiarostami’s films, then, characters should not be considered apart from their interactions with other people but must be contemplated through their interactions on screen.
Another way human beings are understood in Persian art as well as in Kiarostami’s films is through their relationship to the physical space surrounding them. On the use of location in Kiarostami’s films, Elena writes that the films exhibit an “aversion to interiors that is so characteristic of Persian art”;[6] though interior spaces are not entirely excised from Kiarostami’s films (nor are they, for that matter, entirely excised in Persian paintings), human beings are usually expressed in public, social contexts. Similarly, film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum notes of Kiarostami’s masterful film Taste of Cherry, “[T]he fact that the film is set exclusively in exteriors…inflects our sense of solitude with an equally strong and unbroken sense of being in the world…[The film] perceives life itself almost exclusively in terms of public and social space.”[7] Both authors here suggest that the relationships between human beings and their location become crucial components to a holistic reading of Persian paintings and Kiarostami’s films.
Kiarostami’s use of location as a reflection or even extension of his characters must lead to a discussion of his use of symbol. It is important to note here that “symbol” as an artistic concept is not sui generis but is differently defined and constructed in various cultural contexts. Therefore, Cheshire contrasts the Western notion of symbolism, which he argues is now heavily influenced by modernist assumptions about the function of symbols in art (that is, each symbol corresponds to a discrete meaning, and thus works of art are meant to be decoded), with a Persian cultural notion of symbolism, which stresses the importance of the interrelationship of a network of symbols that operate on multiple levels of meaning simultaneously; as such, Cheshire points out, “The author doesn’t so much create these meanings as arrange the spaces and conditions for them.”[8] In other words, the reason Kiarostami’s films can be difficult for many Western filmgoers to understand is because Western filmgoers, especially those with little or no background in art criticism, have normative expectations about how works of art are to be read. But I would argue that it is not so much a question of cultural conflict as it is an issue of nuance, of approach.
One way to untangle this profusion of cultural knots is to hearken again to Persian painting. Grabar and Natif note that through the collection and coalescence of both “completed compositional units” and “the smallest visually perceived units of meaning” (which the authors refer to with appetizing semiotics jargon “syntagm” and “morpheme” respectively), we can gather the intention of the painters: “The placement, articulation, and relationship to each other of these two types of components organize the image and create visual statements.”[9] Thus, in “reading” Kiarostami’s films, I argue that the best approach would be to first identify the “completed compositional units” and their isolated building blocks and observe their interaction. Only then, after understanding the complex interrelationships of “syntagms” and “morphemes,” is the question of “meaning” approachable.
In conclusion, I want to stress again the central importance of constructing an internally coherent and externally functional methodology for discussing and understanding Iranian cinema. I have attempted to construct such a methodology by using traditional Persian art as a conceptual frame. In divergence from scholars who have focused their discourse erroneously on the influence of world cinema, I have shown that Iranian cinema has social and artistic functions that are distinct from those in the West; in divergence from scholars who focus their discourse on the political and social context of contemporary Iran, I have argued that Iranian cinema can also be understood through its aesthetic and thematic precedents in Persian art. Though limitations on length have not permitted me to apply this methodology in any systematic fashion to Kiarostami’s films or other contemporary Iranian films, I hope the methodology I have constructed will be of use in future research on Kiarostami on the one hand and will positively influence scholarship on contemporary Iranian cinema on the other.
NOTES
[1] 8.
[2] Dabashi, 49-51.
[3] The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, translated by Belinda Coombes (London: Saqi, 2005), 186.
[4] “Dark Light,” in Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema, Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 113.
[5] Grabar and Natif, 173. In Kiarostami’s films, the same classification can hold, but with one important asterisk: while the first and second groups are retained, the third category, that of the “witnesses,” is mostly replaced by the (external) audience of the film.
[6] Elena, 160.
[7] “Abbas Kiarostami,” in Abbas Kiarostami, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 31-32.
[8] Chesire, 12 (emphasis original).
[9] Grabar and Natif, 180.
September 12, 2011
September 5, 2011
Toward a Genealogy of Iranian Cinema (Part 3)
Despite the close relationship Dabashi establishes between classical and contemporary art, Dabashi also argues that there is a fundamental tension that makes Iranian cinema signal a clear break from classical Persian arts. Dabashi argues, in terms clearly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”[1] that cinema marks the first time in Iranian art when human beings were portrayed as “historical” beings “as opposed to the eternal Qur’anic man” that characterizes traditional Persian art (especially painting); cinema, Dabashi argues, liberates itself from these requirements and therefore should be read as a primarily political medium.[2]
However, I think Dabashi’s analysis is inspired by a misapplication of Benjamin’s theory. For while Benjamin certainly argues, in unequivocal terms, that film destroys the potential for “aura,” filtering Iranian cinema through Benjamin’s Marxist ideological lens has some limitations since “art” in classical Persian culture did not necessarily fulfill the same social function(s) as it did in Europe.[3] A careful look at Benjamin’s vocabulary establishes its limited utility: Benjamin identifies “aura” principally with the sense of “distance” between the piece of art and its viewer, as well as the perceived value of a work of art’s “uniqueness.”[4] My research, however, has revealed that Benjamin’s notions of “distance” and “uniqueness” are not even essential aspects of Persian art, especially not in Persian painting.
Benjamin explains what he means by “distance” in a helpful footnote: “The essentially distant object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image…The closeness which one may gain from its subject matter does not impair the distance which it retains in its appearance.”[5] For Benjamin, mediums such as painting force the spectator into a subordinate role since she must always be aware of her removal, her otherness, from the complete, self-contained work of art; however, the most obvious tension between Benjamin’s “distance” and Persian painting is that a Persian painting is rarely seen as a complete, self-contained work.
Typically, each painting functions as part of a narrative series and thus depends upon the text (the narration in poetry or prose), the context (the position of this image as one in a series), and the reader’s interpretation of the gestures and actions of the figures and the landscape in which the painting is set.[6] Persian painting, in most of its forms, does not subordinate the viewer but rather brings the viewer into critical interaction with the painting. As for “uniqueness,” it is important to note that the discourse surrounding artistic representations of the created world in Islamic societies is distinct from that in Christian (and post-Christian) Europe. In Priscilla Soucek’s enlightening essay on the place of portraiture in Persian culture, she argues that the “subordinate status” of human-made images (“when compared to the larger framework of God’s creation”) had to be established within intellectual circles to give artists the ability to produce painted portraits.[7] In that sense, it was the very lack of “uniqueness” in Persian painting—coupled with the necessary creative limitations of the artist—that ensures its place in society.[8]
If “distance” and “uniqueness” are not essential aspects of Persian art, and indeed they do not seem to be, then Benjamin’s theory (and by extension Dabashi’s analysis) of cinema as a globalized instrument of political provocation is problematic. Instead, I again find a more nuanced perspective in Godfrey Cheshire’s essay: “Where Westerners tend to view cinema as a fullness, an art-in-itself composed of and historically supplanting previous forms…much about the Iranian stance seems to posit it as an emptiness, a place where the older forms temporarily intersect and display the possibilities of their combination.”[9] In other words, while authors like Benjamin and Dabashi see the advent of cinema as a potentially devastating blow to the ability of art to distance itself from its viewer and confront its viewer with a tyrannical, ineluctable sense of its own uniqueness, Iranian culture has utilized cinema with a different conception of the uses and purposes of art—and, therefore, with markedly different thoughts about the possibilities of cinema.
I locate some of those possibilities in the films of Abbas Kiarostami. In the following section, I will briefly provide an interpretive framework of Kiarostami’s films by arguing that Persian painting, with its already noted lack of “distance” and “unique” understanding of “uniqueness,” has had a considerable influence on Kiarostami’s work, and that Kiarostami may have acquired many of his thematic concerns and aesthetic sensibilities from exposure to Persian art and the cultural discourse surrounding it. As such, his work (along with Iranian cinema) needs to be reassessed by mainstream Western academia to ensure an accurate understanding of the source of those themes and aesthetics.
NOTES
[1] Translated by Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-252.
[2] Dabashi, 15.
[3] Furthermore, Benjamin seems to imply that it is not some essential quality of film itself that makes it disjunctive from classical art, but it is the possible social function of film—its utilization as an instrument of political discourse is what signals a break from classical art (231). A closer reading of Benjamin, however, shows that he has doubts about the ability of film to successfully transform itself into a thoroughly politicized medium despite its revolutionary potential: “So long as the movie-makers' capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (231). It is also necessary to remember that Benjamin’s essay, though a powerful piece of art criticism, is a reaction to and critical reinterpretation of what he saw as “the doctrine of l’art pour l’art’”—art for art’s sake, the “theology of art” (224).
[4] Ibid., 223.
[5] Ibid., 243, n5.
[6] Oleg Grabar and Mika Natif, “Two Safavid Paintings: An Essay in Interpretation,” Muqarnas 18 (2001), 176.
[7] “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000), 107.
[8] To prevent myself from being misread, I do not mean to suggest here that Persian painting is not powerful and evocative, for it certainly is. I only suggest, in disagreement with Dabashi and Benjamin, that painting and classical arts as a whole do not need to fill this kind of hegemonic role; the social phenomena we call “art” have various functions, which are differently defined in various cultural milieus and periods.
[9] Cheshire, 10 (emphases original).
However, I think Dabashi’s analysis is inspired by a misapplication of Benjamin’s theory. For while Benjamin certainly argues, in unequivocal terms, that film destroys the potential for “aura,” filtering Iranian cinema through Benjamin’s Marxist ideological lens has some limitations since “art” in classical Persian culture did not necessarily fulfill the same social function(s) as it did in Europe.[3] A careful look at Benjamin’s vocabulary establishes its limited utility: Benjamin identifies “aura” principally with the sense of “distance” between the piece of art and its viewer, as well as the perceived value of a work of art’s “uniqueness.”[4] My research, however, has revealed that Benjamin’s notions of “distance” and “uniqueness” are not even essential aspects of Persian art, especially not in Persian painting.
Benjamin explains what he means by “distance” in a helpful footnote: “The essentially distant object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image…The closeness which one may gain from its subject matter does not impair the distance which it retains in its appearance.”[5] For Benjamin, mediums such as painting force the spectator into a subordinate role since she must always be aware of her removal, her otherness, from the complete, self-contained work of art; however, the most obvious tension between Benjamin’s “distance” and Persian painting is that a Persian painting is rarely seen as a complete, self-contained work.
Typically, each painting functions as part of a narrative series and thus depends upon the text (the narration in poetry or prose), the context (the position of this image as one in a series), and the reader’s interpretation of the gestures and actions of the figures and the landscape in which the painting is set.[6] Persian painting, in most of its forms, does not subordinate the viewer but rather brings the viewer into critical interaction with the painting. As for “uniqueness,” it is important to note that the discourse surrounding artistic representations of the created world in Islamic societies is distinct from that in Christian (and post-Christian) Europe. In Priscilla Soucek’s enlightening essay on the place of portraiture in Persian culture, she argues that the “subordinate status” of human-made images (“when compared to the larger framework of God’s creation”) had to be established within intellectual circles to give artists the ability to produce painted portraits.[7] In that sense, it was the very lack of “uniqueness” in Persian painting—coupled with the necessary creative limitations of the artist—that ensures its place in society.[8]
If “distance” and “uniqueness” are not essential aspects of Persian art, and indeed they do not seem to be, then Benjamin’s theory (and by extension Dabashi’s analysis) of cinema as a globalized instrument of political provocation is problematic. Instead, I again find a more nuanced perspective in Godfrey Cheshire’s essay: “Where Westerners tend to view cinema as a fullness, an art-in-itself composed of and historically supplanting previous forms…much about the Iranian stance seems to posit it as an emptiness, a place where the older forms temporarily intersect and display the possibilities of their combination.”[9] In other words, while authors like Benjamin and Dabashi see the advent of cinema as a potentially devastating blow to the ability of art to distance itself from its viewer and confront its viewer with a tyrannical, ineluctable sense of its own uniqueness, Iranian culture has utilized cinema with a different conception of the uses and purposes of art—and, therefore, with markedly different thoughts about the possibilities of cinema.
I locate some of those possibilities in the films of Abbas Kiarostami. In the following section, I will briefly provide an interpretive framework of Kiarostami’s films by arguing that Persian painting, with its already noted lack of “distance” and “unique” understanding of “uniqueness,” has had a considerable influence on Kiarostami’s work, and that Kiarostami may have acquired many of his thematic concerns and aesthetic sensibilities from exposure to Persian art and the cultural discourse surrounding it. As such, his work (along with Iranian cinema) needs to be reassessed by mainstream Western academia to ensure an accurate understanding of the source of those themes and aesthetics.
NOTES
[1] Translated by Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-252.
[2] Dabashi, 15.
[3] Furthermore, Benjamin seems to imply that it is not some essential quality of film itself that makes it disjunctive from classical art, but it is the possible social function of film—its utilization as an instrument of political discourse is what signals a break from classical art (231). A closer reading of Benjamin, however, shows that he has doubts about the ability of film to successfully transform itself into a thoroughly politicized medium despite its revolutionary potential: “So long as the movie-makers' capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art” (231). It is also necessary to remember that Benjamin’s essay, though a powerful piece of art criticism, is a reaction to and critical reinterpretation of what he saw as “the doctrine of l’art pour l’art’”—art for art’s sake, the “theology of art” (224).
[4] Ibid., 223.
[5] Ibid., 243, n5.
[6] Oleg Grabar and Mika Natif, “Two Safavid Paintings: An Essay in Interpretation,” Muqarnas 18 (2001), 176.
[7] “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000), 107.
[8] To prevent myself from being misread, I do not mean to suggest here that Persian painting is not powerful and evocative, for it certainly is. I only suggest, in disagreement with Dabashi and Benjamin, that painting and classical arts as a whole do not need to fill this kind of hegemonic role; the social phenomena we call “art” have various functions, which are differently defined in various cultural milieus and periods.
[9] Cheshire, 10 (emphases original).
September 2, 2011
Toward a Genealogy of Iranian Cinema (Part 2)
Contextualizing Iranian Cinema (Part 1)
When discussing Iranian cinema, most scholars make much of the fact that Iran originally acquired the medium from Europe and therefore focus on the supposed influence Western cinema holds over contemporary Iranian filmmakers. Godfrey Cheshire is a scholar who takes a different approach: in an excellent essay on the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, he attacks the shortsightedness and superficiality of the comparisons many scholars make while arguing for an alternate approach that emphasizes “Iranian context” before the context of world cinema.[1] Western scholars are probably more comfortable assuming a Euro-American source of Iranian cinematic vocabulary, which goes some way toward explaining why so few professional film critics are willing to entertain the notion that the cultural context of these films might have more influence in shaping the outlook of Iranian filmmakers than the art house classics many filmmakers from Iran have likely never even seen.
Perhaps in response to Cheshire’s call, recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in the study of Iranian political and social issues for their relation to contemporary cinema,[2] but this seems to me to be a similarly shortsighted approach, since it deemphasizes the importance of history and the possible influence of forms of art specific to Iran—namely, Persian painting. To Cheshire’s concerns, then, I would add the limitations of focusing only on current events to explain all of the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Iranian cinema. In what follows, I want to sketch a rough genealogy of cinema in Iran that will uncover some of the cultural and artistic roots of its contemporary expressions in Iran today.
Hamid Dabashi, expatriate scholar of Iranian studies, has authored several books devoted to Iranian cinema—its historical development as a distinct medium and, just as importantly, its genealogy. In Close Up, a key text in Iranian film studies, Dabashi notes key similarities that relate Iranian cinema and its visual vocabulary to Iranian still photography of the late nineteenth century forward; he writes, “The historical antecedent of these pictorial representations of frozen realities was Persian court painting, and the narrative miniatures that illustrated the classics of Persian prose and poetry…”[3] But cinema, Dabashi also notes, is a medium open and accessible to a mass audience, so it also finds commonalities with coffee house narrative paintings and other forms of illustrated public storytelling.[4] Ultimately, though cinema is a transnational medium and therefore subject to cross-cultural, comparative analysis, it has been incorporated in a distinct way into an already-existing set of artistic mediums with a complementary set of guiding aesthetic assumptions.
The relationship between classical Persian art and cinema today that Dabashi proposes finds a reasonable explanation in what the French social anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus (though Dabashi himself never uses this term). In this case, I would suggest that there exists a set of acquired aesthetic sensibilities and tastes common in Persian culture, which is reflected in its art; certain commonalities, thematic and aesthetic, link contemporary Iranian film to photography in Iran and further back to its court paintings and coffee house illustrations and so on.[5] Dabashi’s argument, once modified this way, allows a new appraisal of Iranian cinema as a whole—not merely as the product of (or response to) Western globalization and cultural imperialism, but as a form of art that is (though borrowed from the West) re-conceptualized and re-contextualized by Iranian artists even as it is assimilated into the interrelated network of Iranian art. We should not be surprised, therefore, when motifs in classical Persian art are echoed in contemporary cinema—for example, when the subjects of Persian miniatures are reflected by filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami—for what else would Iranian films reflect first but Iran?
NOTES
[1] “How to Read Kiarostami,” Cineaste 25.4 (2000), 9.
[2] See, for instance, Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002).
[3] Dabashi, 15.
[4] Ibid., 15
[5] For Bourdieu’s most eloquent explication and application of habitus, see Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The discussion on pages 72-95 (“Structures and the Habitus”) is particularly useful. Bourdieu, of course, sees habitus as being applicable to much more than only art, but for the purposes of my essay, which is a work of art history rather than social anthropology, I prefer to use a more limited definition of habitus than Bourdieu’s and define it rather simply as a set of embodied aesthetic sensibilities and tastes.
When discussing Iranian cinema, most scholars make much of the fact that Iran originally acquired the medium from Europe and therefore focus on the supposed influence Western cinema holds over contemporary Iranian filmmakers. Godfrey Cheshire is a scholar who takes a different approach: in an excellent essay on the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, he attacks the shortsightedness and superficiality of the comparisons many scholars make while arguing for an alternate approach that emphasizes “Iranian context” before the context of world cinema.[1] Western scholars are probably more comfortable assuming a Euro-American source of Iranian cinematic vocabulary, which goes some way toward explaining why so few professional film critics are willing to entertain the notion that the cultural context of these films might have more influence in shaping the outlook of Iranian filmmakers than the art house classics many filmmakers from Iran have likely never even seen.
Perhaps in response to Cheshire’s call, recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in the study of Iranian political and social issues for their relation to contemporary cinema,[2] but this seems to me to be a similarly shortsighted approach, since it deemphasizes the importance of history and the possible influence of forms of art specific to Iran—namely, Persian painting. To Cheshire’s concerns, then, I would add the limitations of focusing only on current events to explain all of the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Iranian cinema. In what follows, I want to sketch a rough genealogy of cinema in Iran that will uncover some of the cultural and artistic roots of its contemporary expressions in Iran today.
Hamid Dabashi, expatriate scholar of Iranian studies, has authored several books devoted to Iranian cinema—its historical development as a distinct medium and, just as importantly, its genealogy. In Close Up, a key text in Iranian film studies, Dabashi notes key similarities that relate Iranian cinema and its visual vocabulary to Iranian still photography of the late nineteenth century forward; he writes, “The historical antecedent of these pictorial representations of frozen realities was Persian court painting, and the narrative miniatures that illustrated the classics of Persian prose and poetry…”[3] But cinema, Dabashi also notes, is a medium open and accessible to a mass audience, so it also finds commonalities with coffee house narrative paintings and other forms of illustrated public storytelling.[4] Ultimately, though cinema is a transnational medium and therefore subject to cross-cultural, comparative analysis, it has been incorporated in a distinct way into an already-existing set of artistic mediums with a complementary set of guiding aesthetic assumptions.
The relationship between classical Persian art and cinema today that Dabashi proposes finds a reasonable explanation in what the French social anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus (though Dabashi himself never uses this term). In this case, I would suggest that there exists a set of acquired aesthetic sensibilities and tastes common in Persian culture, which is reflected in its art; certain commonalities, thematic and aesthetic, link contemporary Iranian film to photography in Iran and further back to its court paintings and coffee house illustrations and so on.[5] Dabashi’s argument, once modified this way, allows a new appraisal of Iranian cinema as a whole—not merely as the product of (or response to) Western globalization and cultural imperialism, but as a form of art that is (though borrowed from the West) re-conceptualized and re-contextualized by Iranian artists even as it is assimilated into the interrelated network of Iranian art. We should not be surprised, therefore, when motifs in classical Persian art are echoed in contemporary cinema—for example, when the subjects of Persian miniatures are reflected by filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami—for what else would Iranian films reflect first but Iran?
NOTES
[1] “How to Read Kiarostami,” Cineaste 25.4 (2000), 9.
[2] See, for instance, Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002).
[3] Dabashi, 15.
[4] Ibid., 15
[5] For Bourdieu’s most eloquent explication and application of habitus, see Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1977). The discussion on pages 72-95 (“Structures and the Habitus”) is particularly useful. Bourdieu, of course, sees habitus as being applicable to much more than only art, but for the purposes of my essay, which is a work of art history rather than social anthropology, I prefer to use a more limited definition of habitus than Bourdieu’s and define it rather simply as a set of embodied aesthetic sensibilities and tastes.
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