Abbas Kiarostami and a New Wave of the Spectator

Western references of Kiarostami’s work are often over-estimating the influence of the Western Cinema – especially Modernism, the New Waves, Godard, Bresson – on his films. But self-reflexivity and minimalism here have more to do with the eastern ornamental mode, symbolic iconography and tradition of deconstruction. A close analysis of the issue of spectatorship (and, moreover, that of the woman as spectator) in this self-effacing cinema will show how gaps and even a lack of visual stimuli are turning the image into a mirror reflecting the spectator ‘written into’ the very texture of these films.