1 Driving into the Void: Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry By Hamish Ford Abstract This article explores Abbas Kiarostami’s Ta'm e guilass/Taste of Cherry (1996) as arguably the most problematic of the director’s films for dominant Western, particularly Anglophone, accounts of his cinema. First introducing the special challenges brought about by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker’s distinct formal devices, the article’s select analysis of Taste of Cherry begins by considering its heightened use of the car as both a perceptually destabilising space and ethically slippery cinematic mechanism. I then home in on the crucial and rarely addressed construction-site sequence, notably its expansion of space and stretched temporality, and explore how this aesthetic centerpiece (or epicentre) of the film fundamentally impacts an understanding of the subsequent and much more commonly quoted ‘taste of cherries’ monologue. Finally I approach the famous ending, with reference to prominent critical readings, before offering an alternative description and emphasis that stresses the movement from celluloid through sheer black and into pixilated analogue video, highlighting how this extraordinary transformation affects our experience of an already, if thus far subtly, reflexive work. Often dominated by discussion of its ending, multiple published accounts of the film describe a hopeful, religious, or utopian vision of social-political reconciliation and/or cinema’s redemptive power. I offer Taste of Cherry as one of the most subtly and confronting negativity-engaging films produced over the last four decades.