Joan Copjec (Brown University): A Cinema of Subtraction
Abbas Kiarostami referred to his own work as a “cinema of subtraction.” This paper attempts to understand this description through an examination of his films alongside the work of the Islamic philosopher, Henry Corbin, and the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. It argues that Lacan misspeaks when he contends that he is not a realist in the medieval sense and suggests that the neo-gnosticism of Islamic philosophy is a credible recursor of Lacanian psychoanalysis.