Index
28 April 2010
Lifting the curtain on New Iranian Cinema
Dr Adrian Danks.
The cinema of the world has introduced its audiences to unique methods of interpretation and visual presentation.
Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami has become one of the Middle East’s most well-known filmmakers for his signature “frame within the frame” cinematography and his merging of documentary and fiction.
Dr Adrian Danks, of RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication, has researched Kiarostami’s seminal work, Close-up, a film which exemplifies this method of cinematic narrative by telling the story of a man who impersonates a famous and well established director in order to gain acceptance into a middle-class family.
The film includes the documentation of the man’s story by Kiarostami himself and thus blurs the lines between documentary and fiction. The end of the film features a meeting between the fictional man and the real-life director whose identity he had, for a time, assumed.
"There is something more profound and fundamental about the way in which Kiarostami - and a number of other Iranian films and filmmakers - incorporate 'reality' into their work," Dr Danks said.
"In a film like Close-up, it is indeed fascinating to learn about the close correspondence between the things we see represented and the reality of the situation.
"By fusing together so radically documentary and fiction, character and actor, film locations and actual places, the distinctions between things as they are and how they are represented becomes profoundly and almost vertiginously blurred."
This style of cinema is not, however, unique to Iran, as Dr Danks explains.
"I don’t think this style of filmmaking is uniquely Iranian - it is in fact one of the key traditions of world cinema.
"The most obvious precedent for the New Iranian Cinema is Italian neo-realism - a form made possible by specific cultural, social and technological conditions.
"This movement’s reliance on only partial scripting, actual locations, relatively open-ended narratives and characterisations, a mix of professional and non-professional actors, utilisation of specific developments in filmmaking (such as more mobile equipment), all have their correspondences in the New Iranian Cinema - and are an avowed influence according to Kiarostami."
Dr Danks’ work on this area can be found among a growing number of publications listed in the RMIT Research Repository.
Want to improve your repository "strike rate"? Have your full-text content added to your existing repository records, by contacting Repository staff at repository@rmit.edu.au.
