Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran

A theoretical examination of veiling, shame, and modesty in the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami through the lenses of Islamic philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, Joan Copjec examines the films of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The key to these films, she argues, lies in the image of a fragile yet sheltering tree that appears in several of his films. This simple image depicts a central concept of Islamic philosophy, which is known as the “Cloud” or the “Imaginal World.” It designates the place out of which all the things of this world manifest themselves and “covers,” or veils, that which must remain hidden.

The concept of the Cloud plays a significant role in defining: (1) the unique nature of the Islamic God, who is not a creator or father; (2) the nature of the image, which assumes a priority and a greater power than it is elsewhere accorded; and (3) the nature of modesty, shame, and sexuality.

Copjec walks her readers through the thicket of Islamic philosophy while demonstrating how its abstract concepts produce what audiences see on screen. The most ambitious aspect of the book lies in its attempt to demonstrate the inheritance by psychoanalysis of a new notion of knowledge, or gnosis, formulated by Muslim thinkers, who radically redefined the relation between body and thought.Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Cinema of Subtraction

Part 1: Straight Shots
Chapter 1: The Imaginal World and Modern Oblivion: Kiarostami’s Zig-Zag
Chapter 2: The Vertigo of Origins
Chapter 3: From the Cloud to the Resistance
Chapter 4: Battle Fatigue: Bodies and Resurrection

Part 2: Pillow Shots
Chapter 5: May ’68. The Emotional Month
Chapter 6: The Censorship of Interiority
Chapter 7: The Sexual Compact

Notes
Index“Copjec’s luminous Cloud serves as that portal through which the light of Kiarostami’s cinematic oeuvre shines. A lustrous contribution to the field of cinema studies!”
—Negar Mottahedeh, author of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema

“Out of the enigma of Kiarostami’s cinema comes this groundbreaking book. With characteristic brilliance and analytic precision, Copjec rethinks the ontological status of the image. Reading Cloud is nothing short of an epiphanic experience.”
—Omnia El Shakry, author of The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern EgyptJoan Copjec is Professor of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. She is the author of Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists and Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (both with MIT Press). She was editor of the S book series at Verso, as well as editor of October and editor and cofounder of Umbr(a).