The Image Wars and Kiarostami's Zig Zag

One of the signature images of the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most distinguished director, is that of a path sig zagging across the landscape. This paper argues that that path -- a figure of what Henry Corbin,friend and colleague of Lacan, named the "imaginal world" -- opens a new chapter in the study of Islam, and of cinema.JOAN COPJEC is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and formerly the Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Read My Desire (soon to be reprinted in Verso's "Radical Thinkers" series); Imagine There's No Woman; andof the forthcoming book on Kiarostami tentatively titled, "Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran."