Investigating the Interaction between Story and Narrative Discourse in Abbas Kiarostami's Cinema, with a focus on the Movie Certified Copy

Studying the interaction between story and narrative discourse as a theoretical model in the field of narratology, from the beginning of the 20th century until now, has become one of the accepted and efficient methods in the analysis of story narratives. This pattern, which is formed by dividing each narrative story into two thematic and expressive substructures, places each narrative components in one of these two spectrums and then studies the relations and interactions between them. In this article, an attempt has been made to analyze Abbas Kiarostami’ cinema, especially the film Certified Copy through the interaction between the story and narrative discourse. The importance of the analysis of Abbas Kiarostami's cinematic works is that these works do not always follow conventional storytelling traditions and patterns, and by using measures such as: minimal plots, excessive use of spoken description in characterizing and convergence of the role of the narrator and the character; makes itself possess different narrative characteristics. Answering the question that how these features distinguish Kiarostami's films from the major works of Iranian and world cinema, will be the main motive of this article. In spite of all the numerous and diverse researches that Kiarostami’s cinema has attracted due to its national and international prestige, these studies mostly investigate the semantic and poetic aspects, but the analysis of his films from the perspective of narrative mechanisms has been neglected to a large extent. In this research, firstly, the distinct narrative characteristics of Kiarostami's cinema, in general are described. Then, more specifically, the film Certified Copy from four interactive aspects, namely: plot and theme; character and characterization; temporal occasions between story and discourse, the voice of narrator and point of view are analyzed. The results obtained from these analyses indicate that Kiarostami's cinema always tends towards a kind of integration of the story in the narrative discourse, in such a way that in most of his works it is not possible to distinguish a clear border between story and narrative discourse. This point is manifested in the most obvious way in the case of the movie Certified Copy, to the point that the thematic goal of the film, that is, the inability to distinguish between the original and the copy; or between reality and fantasy, comes into existence through this fusion of story and narrative discourse. The more specific consequences of such a tendency in Kiarostami's films, on the one hand, lead to the formation of a kind of “Author Cinema”, This author cinema is strongly related to the filmmaker's humanism and worldview; also, his stylistic and aesthetic interests, and on the other hand, he emphasizes the active role of the audience in terms of participation in recreating the narrative of films. In general, it can be said that Kiarostami's cinema is more faithful to the narrative discourse in the film than it is to the story. In other words, the life of the story depends on the life of the narrative discourse and not the other way around.