Abbas Kiarostami

Abstract

This essay begins by offering a reading of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy (2010), in which we are unable to decide whether or not the couple we see there is married. But rather than coming down ourselves on one side or another, we ask why it is that their love for each other might be expressed only through their game-playing. And we follow this confusion between the real and the artificial throughout Kiarostami's career – from the “lie” that structures social reality in Where is the Friend's House? (1987) through the character Sabzian's “confession” in Close-Up (1990) and beyond. We argue that it is in its putting together of the real and the fictional that Kiarostami's cinema at once continues and marks a break with Italian Neo-Realism and with usual conceptions of the “spiritual.” In Kiarostami's cinema, the spiritual is not to be opposed to the real or the represented, but is only to be seen through them. That other world is here, just as the afterlife is now.

Keywords:

• Spiritual in film
• Neo-Realism
• Iranian cinema
• Abbas Kiarostami

Notes

Notes

With thanks to Lisa Trahair.

1 For a review that only briefly considers the alternatives, see Stanley Kaufman, “States of Being,” New Republic 242.5 (2011): 18–19; for one that considers them at greater length, see David Denby, “End Games,” The New Yorker 14 Mar. 2011: 65–66.

2 See, for example, Philip Kemp, “Certified Copy,” Sight and Sound 20.9 (2010) 48.

3 See Aaron Cutler, “Certifying the Copy,” Cineaste 36.2 (2011) 12.

4 See, for example, Antoine De Baecque, “Le Réel a tremblé. Et la vie continue,” Cahiers du cinéma 461 (Nov. 1992) 30–31.

5 Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Evidence du film: Abbas Kiarostami (Brussels: Gevaert, 2001) 60.

6 Ibid. 26.

7 Ibid. 18.

8 On the Iranian response to Through the Olive Trees, see Alberto Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami (London: SAQI, 2005) 116; for a Western response, see Stéphane Bouquest, “Au travers des olivieres” in Abbas Kiarostami: Textes, entretiens, filmographie complète, ed. Laurent Roth (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1997) 132.

9 Extremely interestingly in the context of Certified Copy, Emmanuel Burdeau points out that “if the other Hossein, the one of Through the Olive Trees, desires to marry Tahereh, it is also true that in the interior of the fiction that the stand-in for Kiarostami directs [Life and Nothing More], they are already married” (“Le Mort en ce jardin: Le Goût de la cerise d’Abbas Kiarostami,” Cahiers du cinéma 518 (Nov. 1997) 65).

10 See, for example, Elena: “Obviously, the self-referential component of the film is very evident … But the richness of this reflexivity does not at all obscure our previous judgement about the real nature of Kiarostami's interests in Life and Nothing More” (Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami 107).

11 Laura Mulvey, “Kiarostami's Uncertainty Principle,” Sight and Sound 8.6 (1998) 26.

12 See on this Gonül Donmez-Colin, “Life is Nothing But …,” Celluloid 21.1 (1999) 8–9; Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003) 29.

13 “La Mort en ce jardin” 65.

14 Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: BFI, 2001) 72.

15 Ibid. It is interesting that Kiarostami repeats this in almost exactly the same terms:

Throughout this movie [The Wind Will Carry Us] it was a challenge to see if we could show without showing, to show what's invisible, and to show it in the minds of the viewers rather than on the screen. There was a desire to go against what everyday entertainment movies do – the trend of showing an audience to the point of being pornographic … I feel that whenever the viewer has the impulse to turn his head or avert his eyes, these are the unnecessary scenes that have been presented. My way of framing the action actually makes the viewers sit up straighter and try to stretch their necks so they can see whatever I am not showing (Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami 114–15). For an essay comparing Kiarostami and Kieślowski, see John Caruana, “Kieślowski and Kiarostami: A Metaphysical Cinema” in After Kieślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski, ed. Steven Woodward (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2009) 186–201.

16 Fright of Real Tears 77.

17 Ibid. 62.

18 See Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami 131.

19 Cited in Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996) 20.

20 On this “trembling,” see Jean-Marc Lalance, “Le Goût de la cerise d’Abbas Kiarostami,” Cahiers du cinéma 514 (June 1997) 22; and Adrian Martin, “Abbas Kiarostami: The Earth Trembles,” Art Monthly Australia 168 (Apr. 2004) 6. And, of course, behind both of these lies Luchino Visconti's Neo-Realist masterpiece La terra trema (1948).

21 For an example of this, see Hajnal Király, ‘Abbas Kiarostami and a New Wave of the Spectator,’ Film and Media Studies 3 (2010) especially 140 on the “doubling” between the actresses and the film.

22 A.O. Scott, “Sampling Realism's Resurgence,” New York Times 10 Sept. 2008: E1.

23 L’Evidence du film 18.