Where Is Abbas Kiarostami?

When Abbas Kiarostami suddenly passed away in July 2016, he was already an iconic figure in world cinema—and his reputation as a master filmmaker has only grown since. In this book, celebrated scholar Hamid Dabashi offers a new way of looking at Kiarostami's artworld, one that questions the very idea of film philosophy. Dabashi's authoritative account of the philosophical resonances of Kiarostami's oeuvre offers an iconoclastic critique of the field's Eurocentrism and, in vivid prose, makes the case for a new method of appreciating the work of this essential figure. The result is a provocative perspective on the totality of Kiarostami's legacy that, with deep roots in Iranian aesthetic and Persian poetic and philosophical traditions, overcomes film's provincial preoccupation with its Western heritage and charts a new path forward for film-philosophy.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of many books, among them Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema and The End of Two Illusions: Islam after the West.

Contents

Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Where Is Abbas Kiarostami? 

1. Mirror of the Invisible World 
2. Aesthetic Alienation 
3. Between Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic Reasons 
4. The Foreign Familiarity of Rereading Reality 
5. Toward a Critique of Postcolonial Aesthetic Judgment 
6. Surfacing of a Semblance of Subjectivity 
7. The Aesthetic Formation of a Nomadic Pilgrim Subject 
Conclusion: When the Earth Is Shaken and People Wonder Why 

Notes 
Filmography and Selected Works 
Index