In Venice recently I was sitting in a cinema gazing at other people watching cinema. But I wasn’t a bored viewer checking out the audience around me. I was watching Shirin, the new feature film by Abbas Kiarostami, and the audience I was looking at was up there on the screen.

The film begins with illustrations that summarise the story the onsceen ‘audience’ will be watching. It’s Khosrow and Shirin, an epic by the Persian poet Nezami, about a love triangle between an Armenian princess (Shirin), a Persian king (Khosrow) and a sculptor (Farhad). Before they meet, Shirin and Khosrow fall in love with each others’ portraits.

After the opening sequence, close-ups of women audience members follow one after another. Their heads are covered and they are absorbed in this epic that we, the other audience, can only hear. The women are mostly young and very beautiful and even the older women are striking. Given this parade of beautiful faces we might consider what it means to fall in love at first sight.

But there is, of course, artifice at work. The women are all actresses (the flower of Iranian stage and screen and – jarringly – Juliette Binoche), and they are not watching a film. Instead they are acting while looking at a device that simulates changing light on faces. The technique is very effective, sometimes picking out a haunting face behind the main subject.

In the Observer I described Shirin as “refreshing” in comparison with the more narrative-driven films in Venice. A colleague asked me what I meant; what he was getting at was that Shirin is the kind of work more typically found in galleries. He also mentioned a blog item by the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones: “A painting is worth a thousand moving images”.

Jonathan Jones’ opening line was, “I wish art galleries would stop turning themselves into TV lounges.” He had visited H-Box, an artists’ videotheque, and experienced “nausea”. Video installations, he complained, are “routine, dull and so popular… [they’re] swallowing up the time we should be giving to proper art”. Unqualified to comment on “proper art”, film critics should be asking if we should be arguing for a countermove. Should cinema become more like art galleries?

Art and film critics face a blurring of the boundaries between their disciplines. Jones’ chief irritation is that people don’t spend as much time looking at paintings as they do at the explanatory videos about artists and/or the work, but his use of the phrase “proper art” reveals how he regards most video art. As someone in favour of repeated viewings of the best cinema, I can understand part of Jones’ frustration, though to compare paintings with films (or video art) is to compare never-changing with the ever-changing – allowing for changes of light and ageing, it’s only our perception of artworks that changes.

One of the arguments made in favour of screening the moving image in galleries is that the gallery removes cinema’s passivity of consumption. (Although Jones seems to be saying that screenwatching in galleries has become too comfortable.) At the same time the proliferation of digital screens in a wider range of film venues has promoted a more casual attitude to watching movies. Perhaps only the desire to get our money’s worth sometimes keeps us in our seats.

So where is the best place to see a work like Shirin? Part or all of it has been shown in a gallery, and Kiarostami made a short version, Where is my Romeo?, as part of the Cannes 2007 Chacun son cinéma package (the audience in that version was watching a Hollywood adaptation of Romeo and Juliet). To a viewer steeped in Christian art traditions, Shirin’s shifting portraits of veiled women can’t help but remind them of the Madonnas in art galleries. Yet to the cinephile, Kiarostami’s concentration on the close-up links Shirin to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, to Garbo as Queen Christina and to many of Ingmar Bergman’s forensic portraits.

Is this not a fruitful interchange of subjects and perspectives? I believe so. The plurality of digital media gives film-makers more options. From a film critic’s perspective it’s hard to tell if video art can remain at the forefront of fine-art practice. What the film critic can say is that the cinema-production world ought to be more available again to film artists because so many talanted film-makers come from that direction. Yet I can’t see cinemas showing much that doesn’t have a narrative, as Shirin fortunately does. It’s cinema’s dilemma, not fine art’s, that large numbers of people love art only if it’s on show where they can walk away from it.

Nick James

*Full text can be found: Sight & Sound, November 2008, Vol.18, p. 5

Prepared by: Zane Krūmiņa