| Popis: |
Michelle Langford proposes a new close reading or, better, close listening of Kiarostami’s film experiment. As is well known, Kiarostami’s adaptation of the classical Persian tale of Khosrow and Shirin completely withholds the images of the story, allowing us instead to watch the faces of 114 actresses – all Iranian except one – as they themselves watch the film that we only experience acousmatically. While Kiarostami’s self-reflexive attention to the act of watching has engendered a significant amount of scholarship that focuses largely on questions of vision, gender, and spectatorship, Langford focuses on the off-screen sounds, voices, and music, demonstrating how Kiarostami circumvents the hegemonic privilege of vision, which allows him to completely ignore the censorship guidelines. Langford argues that by rendering the love story acousmatically, Kiarostami makes audible a veritable ›blind spot‹ in Iranian cinema: romantic love, a figure that has been almost completely effaced in post-revolutionary cinema, returns as a counter-memory, »one that reactivates the traces of an epic-poetic tradition and in doing so challenges the hegemony of censorship« (p. 147). The counter-memories nest in the »richly allusive interstitial space between sound and image« (p. 163), encouraging affective listening and giving a sonic body to the woman’s desires. |
