The Cinema of Kiarostami: An Immodest Reading

Produced under the strict rules of the Iranian modesty system, Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema emerged as one of the finest in film history. How did his films slip by the censors and acquire such a wide appeal? My brief answer—immodest given my status as an outsider who

pretends to take her cues from the director’s own work—is that Kiarostami was a master of the art of the lie. The long answer will take us through discussions of the act of veiling, the nature of the image, and the questions of shame and sexuality—all of which rely on some form of flimflam.

Joan Copjec is a professor at Brown University in the departments of Modern Culture and Literature and Middle East Studies. She is the author of Read My Desire (MIT Press & Verso’s Radical Thinkers series); Imagine There’s No Woman (MIT Press); and Cloud: From Paris to Tehran (MIT). She was a long-term editor of the art journal October; editor and co-founder of the Lacanian journal Umbr(a); as well as editor of the book series S at Verso Press.

Join us again the day after the lecture for a screening of Abbas Kiarostami’s TASTE OF CHERRY (1997), followed by a discussion with Joan Copjec and Omnia El Shakry (History).