Abbas Kiarostami, Global Art Cinema and the Material Imagination of Earth

Abstract

This article examines the multiform appearance of elemental earth in the 1990s films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, including Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, Taste of Cherry, and The Wind Will Carry Us. Its aim is to consider the elemental aspects of global art cinema, arguing that art cinema treats elements intermedially. Art cinema’s alliance with the elemental has been comparatively overlooked given its associations with the cosmopolitan sites of global modernity, but this essay asserts that modernism is as much geophysical as geopolitical. I read Kiarostami’s films as staging encounters between human action and elemental agency; they set their characters in agonistic relation to the seismic movements and obdurate resistance of the earth. Drawing on elemental philosophy, this article demonstrates that the existential questions regarding life and death in Kiarostami’s filmmaking are oriented toward the earth (as ground, stone, and dust).