Kiarostami: What is an Image?

In the history of cinema, a small number of directors have been treated as if their work stood for cinema itself. Abbas Kiarostami is one of these. Yet while his films foreground the act of cinema, they also address questions of reality to which the “neorealist” label cannot respond. To existing attempts to analyze his films in this light, we will add a principia domestica. Our question is this: how is it that the mystical, Islamic background from which Kiarostami invents is able to respond to current debates about reality in compelling, modern terms?