Repetition and Return

Abstract

Kiarostami’s cinema is marked by an ability to change that affects both the form and the content of his films. In 2002, Ten marked a new turning point: for the first time, a woman was the central focus of a Kiarostami film and his use of digital equipment radically transformed his style. I want to look back at the way his cinema changed across the three films set in Koker. The second and third Koker films develop with a looping narrative strategy in which a return to the past enables a move into the future. In the process, the spectator is engaged in an unusual way, forced to move backwards and forwards across the films not only through remembering but following a twisting path of reassessment and re‐understanding earlier images and stories in the light of Kiarostami’s changing cinema.