Vision and “Sur-vision”: Intermediality and Alterity in the Frames of Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema, often compared to Italian neorealism, oscillates between documentation and fiction. Kiarostami’s worlds, replete with a complex network of incomplete and self-reflexive frames, create a new site for perception, reflection, and intervention. This paper studies the intermedial aspect of Kiarostami’s cinema in “The Koker Trilogy” (1987; 1992; 1994), Close-Up (1990), and “Taste of Cherry” (1997). It explores how these moving images are shaped by the specific context of Iranian cinema and how they turn to reshape it. First, it examines Kiarostami’s framing techniques, which expand Iranian cinema and its engagement with Western visual conventions. Then, it analyzes the aesthetic of frame incompletion, which creates a negative dialectic between visibility and invisibility through contrasts like movement and stillness. The paper argues that these films, through their wandering mobility, resist a fixed sense of continuity and self-identity. Kiarostami’s frames remain self-consciously aware of the principles of narrative cinema to challenge modes of cultural production that promote universality of visual images and uniform ways of seeing the world.