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Towards a Deterritorialized Nomadism: The Transversal Role of Children in Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) and Life and Nothing More
Abstract:
<p>Abbas Kiarostami made his reputation in the pre-revolutionary era making children’s education films for the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Although Kiarastomi’s films during this period weresympathetic to the plight of schoolchildren under the repressive regimes of both the Shah and the Ayatollah, it was only in his semi-documentary features such as <i>Where Is the Friend’s House? </i>(1987)<i> </i>and<i> Life and Nothing More… </i>(1992) – the first two films in the so-called ‘Koker trilogy – that Kiarostami utilized the role of children as a dynamic spatial and temporal vector that transformed established social and ideological hierarchies. As Ronald Bogue describes the phenomenon in <i>Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics</i>, ‘The transverse way is the path in between, the diagonal across the grids of horizontal and vertical coordinates, the zigzag of a line of continuous variation. Its time is that of the <i>entre-temps</i>, the meantime or meanwhile, and its space is the middle, <i>in medias res</i>, always underway among things. The transverse way connects by affirming differences, constructing transversals that set the incommunicable in communication. Its transversals are agents of transversality, forces with the social and political function of bringing forth group subjects and inventing a people to come.’ . In Kiarostami, it is the children who act as the catalyst for such a transversality, breaking down the co-ordinates and hierarchies of education, culture and geography to create a process of poetic and ethical becoming.</p>
Keywords: Kiarostami, film, Deleuze, transversality, children
Authors:
James Craine, California State University, Northridge; Submitting Author / Primary Presenter
Colin Gardner, University of California, Santa Barbara; Co-Author (this author will not present)
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Towards a Deterritorialized Nomadism: The Transversal Role of Children in Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) and Life and Nothing More
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