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.
