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The Iranian cinema is perhaps the most self-reflexive of all national cinemas. Though it owes much to the development of Italian neo-realism, the Iranian cinema today is not just an extension of its predecessor's concerns about cinematic truth but a formal inquiry of the nature of cinema and the "truth" that lies within and outside of art. Jacques Rivette's groundbreaking "L'amour fou" already sets the stage in 1968 when he investigated the symbiotic relationship betwen art and life by using two different film stocks, 16 and 35 mm., to represent "reality" as it unfolds in front and behind the camera respectively.

In Moshen Makhmalbaf's 1996 masterpiece "A Moment of Innocence" twenty years separates a key moment in time and the recreation of it. The incident occurred when Makhmalbaf was only a youth who participated in an anti-Shah demonstration which led to the stabbing of a policeman and his imprisonment for the next five years. In an attempt to recapture this moment Makhmalbaf decides to a make a film within a film casting all the original participants (including the policeman) to play themselves as mentors to their younger selves, (i.e., actors) guiding and instructing them in the making of this "fictional" documentary.

It is not surprising that non-professional actors are employed here to both maintain a semblance of reality and to keep cinematic distortion at bay. But paradoxically, the young non-professional actors chosen to play Makhmalbaf and the policeman of their youth are as similar as they are dissimilar from their counterparts, thus, setting the stage for exploring the many tensions that exist between past and present, art and life, cinema and reality. This type of casting not only blurs the line between fiction and reality but also the distinction between documentary and narrative filmmaking.

The preoccupation with the phenomenological aspects of the cinema is as much the focus of this work as is the dramatization of the event leading up to the pivotal moment, then and now, reconstructed as a memory film as well as a product of the filmmaker's imagination to help correct an incident that only becomes clear to everyone involved after twenty years have elapsed. This celebrated moment which occurs at the end of film effectively captures the past by placing it in the present context much as if past and present suddenly converge and share the same space and time, thereby allowing us to see loss and recovery unfold simultaneously. That lost moment is now regained twenty years later through art's ability to heal and transform Makhmalbaf and his crew--thus altering the "reality" of life. The final shot is both life-affirming and referential because it so eloquently evokes the cinema's first prominent use of the freeze frame in Truffaut's "400 Blows"--if only to remind us just how far the cinema has come along. Like Truffaut's autobiographical based character Antoine Doinel the cinema has indeed grown up.

In the fall of 1994 "Pulp Fiction" became an overnight sensation. Critics all over hailed it as an American masterpiece--an instant classic that generated so much excitement that it immediately spawned a generation of Tarantinos and Tarantinites in its wake. In order to understand this phenomenon we need to turn our attention to the current state of the American cinema and compared it with the last three decades. In the seventies the American cinema enjoyed what is arguably its golden years when it produced such masterpieces as "McCabe & Mrs Miller", "The Godfather", "Badlands", "Chinatown", "The Godfather II", "The Conversation", "Taxi Driver", "Nashville", and "Manhattan". In the eighties the number of masterpieces dwindled to just three films. Apart from "Raging Bull" the best films were also the most underrated: "Cutter's Way" and "Dangerous Liaisons". In the nineties the American cinema declined so precipitously that the closest thing to a masterpiece, if any, was arguably Robert Altman's "The Player". So when "Pulp Fiction" opened it was not difficult to see why the public readily embraced it as a masterpiece. It was as if the American pride was at stake and that Tarantino was perhaps the man who could restore the public's faith in the cinema again. Does Tarantino really deserved this kind of attention? Maybe. But is he a major talent? I think not. Tarantino's talent is somewhat suspect when one considers just how much of his own "Reservoir Dogs" resembles Ringo Lam's "City on Fire". Was this homage or just plain theft? In "Pulp Fiction" the main characters end up pointing their pistols at each other in close proximity. This classic gun-toting mexican standoff was of course gleefully appropriated from John Woo--another favorite of the director's.

In "Jackie Brown" Tarantino, this time, turns his attention on Pam Grier and the black exploitation cinema of the seventies. But the end result of what he hopes is hip and soulful feels more like a white man's attempt to ape the moves and rhythms of someone black. Soul train on film it is not. "Jackie Brown" is rhythmless, sluggish, and shapeless. It is evident that he needs a more disciplined editor to trim the excess fat.

It is not that Tarantino is without talent. He certainly has a good ear for street gutter and writes dialogue that is appropriately foul, abrasive, and wickedly funny. But Tarantino's fondness for the lowlives, the B movies that he grew up on, is pure pulp not art no matter how good his craft is. His ludicrous screenplay for "From Dusk to Dawn" clearly suggests that what he truly loves is trash--which is enough to make one wonder if there is more to "Pulp Fiction" than all the clever chatter about redemption and the like. To put it another way, Tarantino is less than the artist he purports to be: he is a shrewd trickster, a consummate showman who is only too eager to dazzle us with his bag of tricks. Consider the scene in which the bag of money is switched in "Jackie Brown". Tarantino offers us three different viewpoints of this sequence but adds nothing significant to what we already know. It is an editing "trick" he had learned so well in "Pulp Fiction". But when the smoke clears it is unlikely that anyone will be gullible enough to believe that the LAPD would not arrive early to prepare their sting operation. It is the audience who will be left holding the bag. There is no doubt that when a man of Tarantino's talent decides to aim this low you can bet that he will surely hit his mark.

"Shakespeare in Love" is ostensibly made for the MTV generation. Plodding and cloying, this shaggy dog comedy panders to the quasi middlebrow audience: it goes out of its way to reward those who are able to identify anything that resembles an Elizabethan in-joke. Call it a self-esteem booster or plain I- know-something-you-don't-because-I-took-English-Lit-101. Whatever the case, the film readily sacrifices wit for farce, and assumes an ill-fitting disposition that calls for tentative and clumsy attempts at bowdlerizing Shakespeare for the common age. It is little wonder that Joseph Fiennes plays Shakespeare like an irascible buffoon--a device that will firmly keep him in the Hall of Fame alongside Porky and the entire cast of Animal House.