this week: through the olive trees (1994)
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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
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