World Cinema Goes to Italy. Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010)
World Cinema Goes to Italy. Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010)

Summary/Abstract: The issue of the relationship between the original and its copy as thematised in Kiarostami’s film Certified Copy (2010) has been discussed in many articles so far. Instead of engaging itself in a philosophical argumentation, the present article rather proposes a close analysis of visual strategies not only reflecting the conceptual framework outlined by the title, dialogues and narrative features, but above all revealing the first “European” film of Kiarostami as a “copy” of some paradigmatic European films. Following Laura Mulvey’s term of “gender-specific storytelling”, used apropos of Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1954), I will focus on the “gender-specific gaze” identifiable in both the Rossellini and the Kiarostami film. I will argue that this latter, together with an elaborated use of “frames” so typical for the Western visual culture, is responsible for a sophisticated imagery ultimately reflecting on the fragile borders between reality and its illusion, an issue of unprecedented actuality in the age of the digital and new media.

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