and the main connotation is sexual knowledge, a la Adam and Eve. Plainly, the father keeps his daughters locked up because he doesn’t want their purity spoiled by the boys playing in the street, just beyond that barred gate.
As a statement by an adolescent female director about the sexual dynamics underlying the patriarchal controls still at work in many societies that haven’t surmounted their medieval roots, The Apple is surely
a landmark work in world cinema. One of the richest of Iranian chimeric films, it strikingly meshes fiction and documentary in a seamless blend while also giving us another variation on the familiar cinema- as-mirror theme: In one image of a father and daughters, we see imprisonment and tyranny. Yet in its beyond-the-frame reflection — the collaboration of Samira and Mohsen Makhmalbaf — we glimpse the contours of a new Iran, liberated by the powers of art and knowledge.
not e s 1 — Godfrey Cheshire, “Iranian Cinema: Notes on the newest New Wave,” Film Comment, Mar.–Apr. 1993.
2 — Johann Christoph Bürgel, The Feather of the Simurgh: The “Licit Magic” of the Arts in Medieval Islam (New York and London: New York University Press, 1988), p. 138-139.
3 — Oleg Grabar, Mostly Miniatures: An Introduction to Persian Painting (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 141. 4 — Bürgel, p. 140. 5 — Bürgel, p. 141.
6 — Titus Burckhardt, The Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art (Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1987), p. 117.
7 — Cheshire, “An Iranian Film of Simple Moral Vision,” New York Press, Jan. 31, 1996, p. 28. 8 — Ibid.
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