Lo schermo che guarda, ovvero il senso di 'Shirin' per la sala

The Screen Watching or Shirin’s Sense for the Movie Theater Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2007) is a film that reflects, in a profound and original way, upon the life of the movie theater and upon the closely interconnected relationship between the actor’s gesture and the spectator’s gesture. It is in fact a film entirely built around the idea of ​​shooting, systematically in close up, a group of female spectators attending the representation of "Khosrow va Shirin", a famous traditional Persian poem of the twelfth century written by Nezami Ganjevi, in a specially recreated movie theater. However, the peculiarity of this meta-specta(c)torial operation is to be found in the decision of the Iranian director never to show the reverse shot of what they are watching, restricting himself to conveying only the sound of the drama and some luminous reverberations. As a "scene denied", only the emotions that color the faces of the female spectators and the semantization of the voice-off inform us about the performances that take place on the unseen screen. There is more: perhaps the European public does not know it, but the entire audience of Shirin is composed of a group of stars of the Iranian cinema and television, thus used to acting and not silently witnessing the performances of others. Within this complex play of mirrors, the essay reflects upon the short circuit created in Kiarostami’s film between actor’s gesture, faceification of forms, presentification of the audience, the acousmatic force of the absence of images, the lability of stardom and above all the discursive centrality of the filmophanic dimension of the film.