This Week: Through the Olive Trees (1994)

• Director: Abbas Kiarostami• Country: Iran• Movement: Iranian New

Wave/Neorealism• Formal Focus: Acting/Editing • Why Are We Watching This?

– Kiarostami is hugely influential across the world

– It’s a slow, meditative style of directing that we haven’t seen yet

– Discussion of censorship/cultural conditions of filmmaking

Three Frames for UnderstandingThrough the Olive Trees

• I. Pastoral Aesthetics

• II. Trauma and Repetition

• III. The Male Gaze

• Characteristics of pastoral art: – Thematic:

• Humans living easily and harmoniously with nature

• Nature as a place of leisure and erotic fantasy . . .

– Spatial: • Integration of humans in

landscape• Human actions/lives seem

tiny in comparison to nature

– Time: • Time slows . . . defined by

natural, not human, events. • Nostalgic, Elegiac

orientation to history

II. 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake

• Nearly 100,000 homes destroyed

• 40,000 people killed

• 500,000 left homeless

Trauma and Repetition

• Notion that we unconsciously repeat and act out past trauma and loss . . .

• . . . but also that talking about a traumatic experience can have a healing effect.

Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy• Where Is the Friend's Home?

(1987)– A boy’s quest to return his

school friend’s notebook

• Life and Nothing More (1992)– The director of the first film

tries to find the child actor, who may have been killed in the 1990 earthquake

• Through the Olive Trees (1994)– A film depicting a romance that

develops during the “making of” the second film, Life and Nothing More.

III. The Male Gaze• Iranian Cinema presents a “dynamic

alternative . . . to dominant Hollywood cinema, which is famously centered on a voyeuristic gaze” (Virdi).

• In this film:– Male gaze—both Hossein’s and the

director’s—not recognized or returned

– The film subverts voyeuristic, sexualizing gaze, but also draws attention to conditions of censorship that control the gaze.

– The power dynamics of the gaze here are not just male/female, but also wealthy/poor, urban/rural, educated/uneducated.

• Quote: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/Virdi-review/index.html