The Frames That Unframe: Abbas Kiarostami’s Method of Decreation in 24 Frames

Abbas Kiarostami Introduction In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the national cinema of Iran emerged in response to an Islamic injunction against the voyeuristic male gaze that generated a new cinematic syntax, which amounted “to a refusal of the scopophilic codes embedded in the Hollywood tradition, and result[ed] in the introduction of distancing elements that acknowledge the presence of the spectator.” 10 The term “displaced allegory” here intimates the fact that the film-making conditions can be traced on a formal level in films made subsequent to the 1979 revolution.11 Mottahedeh further notes that the self-reflexive allegorization of cinema in Iran is particularly concerned with stylistics and is “a second-level message that could certainly accompany the narrative but that would necessarily arise on the level of form rather than from the ideological ground of the film narrative’s content.” A house window, a car window, apertures in rocks, etc. function as frames within the frame of Kiarostami’s camera. Kiarostami’s 15th shot is suffused with a growing tension between the pensive stillness of the figures who have their backs to the camera, gazing at the Eiffel Tower as the daylight grows dim, and the purpose-driven pedestrians who move in and out of the frame (see fig. 2).