Features of New Wave Iranian film, in particular the works of legendary Abbas Kiarostami, have been classified by some as postmodern.In Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001), Hamid Dabashi describes modern cinema and the phenomenon of [Iranian] national cinema as a form of cultural modernity. According to Dabashi, “the visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur’anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.”