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This Week: Through the Olive Trees (1994)

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

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This Week: Through the Olive Trees (1994)

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  1. 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

  2. Three Frames for UnderstandingThrough the Olive Trees • I. Pastoral Aesthetics • II. Trauma and Repetition • III. The Male Gaze

  3. 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

  4. II. 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake • Nearly 100,000 homes destroyed • 40,000 people killed • 500,000 left homeless

  5. 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.

  6. Kiarostami’sKoker 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.

  7. 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 arenot 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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