SubStance

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) opens with a series of long takes of a car winding steadily down a road in the Iranian countryside. In other words, it opens with a sequence which, to anybody who knows Kiarostami's work, will be immediately recognizable as typical of it: Life and Nothing More (1992) returns repeatedly to such sequences, and ends with one; such sequences turn up in Through the Olive Trees (1994) and Taste of Cherry (1997); the protagonist of Where is the Friend's Home? (1987) is too young to drive, but we see him from a distance meandering in a similar pattern on more than one occasion (and sequences of the same type return in Certified Copy (2010)). As with the other sequences, the opening of The Wind Will Carry Us is beautiful, intriguing and, with its muted semi-screwball feel, kind of funny. By the time of the film's release, however, the car on screen was bringing this cinematic history with it. Thus there is something self-aware or even self-effacing about these opening images: Kiarostami is referring here, both seriously and playfully, not only to his previous works but also perhaps to himself, and to the by-then internationally recognizable figure called "Kiarostami." So if Jean-Luc Nancy is right to say that such long aerial takes are Kiarostami's "signature" (Evidence of Film, 10)—that "a person or a car's zigzagging path on the background of an unchanging landscape traverses, like a single trajectory, five movies [...] and turns into an emblematic summary of all the films" (24)—then this is complicated here by a certain irony. Indeed it would be possible to read the reflexivity of these images as playfully mocking Kiarostami's own signature, and thus perhaps as problematizing the very notion: Kiarostami doesn't let us forget that we are watching one of his films, and pokes fun at us, and at himself, in reminding that fact. This is to say that in the opening sequence of the film Kiarostami cites his own signature, with all the epistemological and metaphysical complications that such a gesture entails. Yet this self-effacing gesture is not simply ironic, and it is not in spite but also partly because of its extreme reflexivity that the opening sequence of this film in particular is so beautiful, intriguing, and gently funny. After all, gestures of self effacement—ironic nods to the mediality of cinema—are perhaps [End Page 165] as typical of Kiarostami's films as are long aerial takes of meandering cars. If Kiarostami is citing his own signature, then that is also his signature. Thus I want to disagree with Nancy when he writes that "there is no room for reflexivity" (18) in Kiarostami's cinema. Yet I also want to agree with the intuition that appears to be guiding Nancy's statement. For what's remarkable about Kiarostami's films is how his relentless problematization of the real, his dogged insistence on the mediality of the image, does not leave us in some Baudrillardian hall of mirrors, or quasi-Derridean free play of significations: if the opening sequence of this film is an example of "intertextuality," it is not because Kiarostami is spruiking some pop postmodernism. Rather, in problematizating the category of representation in this way, Kiarostami has been able to raise the question of the real in a new and profoundly affecting manner. His repeated attempts at turning our attention to the medium itself, to the very fact of film, do not produce a Verfremdungseffekt. Or if they do, this distancing is bound up with the powers of the films themselves. Note that this is not really paradoxical: my argument is that what Kiarostami shows is how the real can be evoked—or "evidenced," to use Nancy's term—precisely by undermining our attachments to the philosophical picture and cinematic frame of representation.

Close-Up (1990) can help explain what I mean. It is about real events: impersonating Mohsen Makmahlbaf, Hossein Sabzian conned a Tehrani family into letting him film their domestic life; he was eventually...