ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s, Iranian cinema has found wide-scale attention and acclaim on the international art-house scene. While there have been some notable detractors—including Roger Ebert, David Denby, and Andrew Sarris—many critics have found one group of these films to be notable for their presentation of otherwise simple and straightforward stories that, as Godfrey Cheshire describes, “are unusual in seeming to mean far more than their face-value, literal contents at first reveal.” 1 For example, with each subsequent film in Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Koker Trilogy,’ we engage with a concentrically expanding diegesis in which the fictional space and action of an earlier film is depicted as contained within the supposedly real space and action of the latter. The second film of the trilogy, Life and Nothing More (1992), concerns a filmmaker searching for two of the young actors who performed in the first film, Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987). The second film is set a few days after the devastating earthquake of June 1990, and takes place around the town of Koker, where the first film was shot. The filmmaker never actually finds the boys, but throughout the film he speaks with survivors of the quake—including a young newlywed couple—as they all attempt to continue the routines of daily life in the face of great personal and material loss. This newlywed couple is then prominently featured in the third film, Through the Olive Trees (1994), which is ostensibly about the filming of their scene from the second film. The newlyweds are revealed to be a fictional couple, but the man is smitten and continually proposes as the woman struggles over whether she will take on the role of the very wife that she is supposed to be performing. In Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror (1997), a headstrong little girl named Mina attempts to find her way home from school through the city of Tehran without knowing her full address or even basic directions. Partway through the movie, the actress playing Mina—Mina Mohammad Khani—quits the film we have been watching and decides to go home, with Panahi surreptitiously continuing to film her documentary-style as she herself now attempts to navigate through Tehran with neither her home address nor directions.
