Laura Mulvey’s Still-Moving Dialectic on the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami*

Laura Mulvey is best known for her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) that was a significant contribution to Film Theory, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. In the essay, she criticized the role of patriarchy in Hollywood cinema. Mulvey questioned the dominance of Patriarchal gaze in Hollywood Cinema regarding Lacan’s Gaze Theory. She pointed out that the feminine presence in Hollywood movies tends to work in favor of male gaze rather than the flow of the story line. In Death 24 X a second: Stillness and The Moving Image (2006), she moves on from her early essay that focused on the pleasure and relations of power involved in the act of looking, to an interest in the impact of new technologies of spectatorship that allows the viewer to slow down and freeze movement of images. Mulvey states that the conversion of recorded information into a numerical system broke the material connection between the object and image. This connection is the result of the film’s photographic basis and is shared with the medium of photography. Therefore, the relationship between Cinema and Photography comes to the fore. Mulvey confronts the fundamental paradox of cinema that is the emergence of an illusion of movement from the stillness of a series of photographs. This paradox was noted earlier by Jean Epstein as well. But Mulvey presents this paradox through some concepts of psychoanalysis namely Trauma, the Uncanny, and the Real. In addition, she reflects on the dialectic between indexicality in celluloid Cinema and algorithms of digital imaging. Mulvey is the first person to link Abbas Kiarostami’s Cinema to the Lacanian concept of the Real. She explains that Kiarostami’s unrepresented tragic earthquake is the same as the manner of the Real which is invisible, but has a significant presence. She argues that the tragic earthquake which destroyed the village is left intentionally unseen, unrepresented by Kiarostami in the following two films. The lack of any kind of representation leads into a situation where the traumatic event is invisible and unquestionable exactly in the same manner as Lacan describes the order of the Real which is not always accessible to direct experience. In addition, representation of the gaze is considered the result of the style of a filmmaker who is best known as a self-reflexive filmmaker. This article discusses the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami through a Psychoanalytic perspective based on the contradiction of stillness and movement in Mulvey’s film theory. The main issue to discuss is that how Mulvey considers the cinema of Kiarostami as delaying and immobilizing, while his use of car and consequently movement is a prominent feature of his cinematic style. The result is that Kiarostami’s cars respond to a relational understanding of space in mobility and breaks away from the conventions of representation in which space is considered fixed and consequently carries specific and symbolic meanings. However, the sense of mobility emerged from a wandering car ends up to stillness through repetition and return that affect the spectator’s memory.