This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
version of himself. Finally, the lushly sensual quasi- documentary Gabbeh (1996) used the rug-weaving of Iranian nomads to construct a multi-leveled allegory about cinema and art as means of personal and social self-expression.


After Through the Olive Trees (which he said he hadn’t intended as part of a trilogy), Kiarostami turned away from films about filmmaking, even though his next feature, Taste of Cherry (1997), seemed to continue the autobiographical thread of his previous two movies (the suicidal protagonist isn’t identified as a filmmaker, but could be). Instead, he gave assistance to his former assistant Jafar Panahi (who is seen in Through the Olive Trees, playing of course the assistant director). Kiarostami wrote Panahi’s feature debut, The White Balloon (1995), which became the Iranian cinema’s first international art-house hit and launched its director toward writing and filming The Mirror (1997), a droll allegory of cinema (with Panahi briefly playing himself) that seemed to come straight out of the Kiarostami playbook. Coincidentally or not, around


the same time Makhmalbaf also began working through a surrogate, as it were, when his 17-year-old daughter Samira directed The Apple (1998), a quasi- doc about cinema, patriarchy and social control that Makhmalbaf wrote and edited.


With the international success of The Apple and the launch of Samira Makhmalbaf’s career in 1998, the Iranian cinema’s chimerical decade seemed to reach its high-water mark. Iran would remain identified with films about film and ones that meshed documentary and fiction thereafter, but from the onset of the new century forward, these elements belonged more to the cinematic background than to the foreground, except occasionally when political and/or personal exigency prompted their return. Such was the case of Panahi’s This Is Not a Film (2011), in which the famously banned filmmaker turned his camera on himself to register the frustrations of his internal exile. Like Hossein Sabzian in Close-Up, Jafar Panahi had looked to cinema as instrument of liberation but ended up, in effect, its prisoner.


6


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36