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

3. Three Frames for Understanding Through the Olive Trees I. Pastoral Aesthetics II. Trauma and Repetition III. The Male Gaze

4. 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

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

7. 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.

8. Kiarostami’s Koker 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.

9. 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 are not just male/female, but also wealthy/poor, urban/rural, educated/uneducated. Quote: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/Virdi- review/index.html