Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

In his chapter "On Magic Realism in Film," Fredric Jameson identifies three shared features of magic realist films which ultimately contribute to a visual experience that rescues the image from the commoditization found in postmodern or so-called nostalgia films. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1996 film Gabbeh, is the story of an old couple who summon the appearance of a young woman during their daily rug-washing ritual. Fantastical elements exist comfortably alongside the rational world, and, indeed, a close examination reveals that Gabbeh exemplifies much of what Jameson considers to be the essential shared traits of magic realism. Jameson identifies the use of color in magic realist films to be "the source of a particular pleasure, a fascination" (p. 130), and what is most immediately striking about Gabbeh is indeed its bold use of largely primary colors. All the women depicted in the nomadic Iranian tribe wear colorful robes, and the elderly woman and the young woman, Gabbeh, are explicitly linked by the similar bright blue robes they wear. A good deal of attention is devoted to the process of gathering and boiling flowers to make dye, and then of threading the colorful yarns into the gabbeh that the women weave to tell the stori