Introduction: Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film Taste of Cherry follows the middle-aged Badii as
he drives around the outskirts of Tehran trying to enlist strangers in the task
of helping him commit suicide. His plan is to take sleeping pills and lie down
to die in a grave he has dug on a hillside. He wants someone to come by the
next morning to fill it with earth or, if he is still alive, help him out.
As is quite typical of Kiarostami, the nature of Badii’s plan is revealed
piecemeal through his conversations with the people he encounters.1 The
first exchange is with a man he overhears on a public telephone haggling over
money, and who rebuffs him with a threat before he has time to make his
offer (apparently mistaking Badii for someone cruising for sex). Then Badii
encounters a man picking through trash for plastic bags to sell, refusing his
proposition before really hearing it because, he says, he won’t know how
to help. The next exchange – which takes place after the opening titles –
involves a young Kurdish soldier. Badii picks him up and drives him to show
him the hillside on which he wants to die; when they arrive, the soldier runs
for it. Badii encounters his next would-be assistant in the form of a security
guard watching over what looks to be a quarry; he refuses Badii too, saying he
cannot leave his post. Now Badii tries to convince the Afghan guard’s friend;
the young man – a seminarist – is disturbed by Badii’s plan (“My hands do
God’s justice. What you want wouldn’t be just”). A bizarre and unsettling
sequence then ensues: Badii steps out of his car and wanders around the
quarry, staring with vacant intensity as mounds of dirt are dropped by earth-
movers and rocks are conveyed and sorted by large machines, the images and
sounds all taking on a strangely sickening material quality.2 After becoming
almost entirely enveloped in a cloud of thick orange dust, Badii returns to his
car at the urgings of a worried worker. When he closes the door we are sur-
prised to see him start speaking to a passenger. As we soon realise, however,
there has been a startling temporal shift – Badii is no longer at the quarry,
but is parked near his grave, and is speaking to a new character, who has
agreed to help him die. They discuss the specifics of the plan and come to an
agreement regarding payment. But the man also tries to convince Badii not

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 2 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

to kill himself. He tells Badii that his troubled relationship with his wife once
led him to decide on suicide: he travelled out to a mulberry plantation with
the intention of hanging himself from a tree, but found his rope wouldn’t
hold; he climbed the tree in order to retie it, brushing his hand against some
mulberries; he tasted them; he looked up to notice the sunrise; he decided not
to kill himself. It is unclear what effect the story has on Badii. Later, we see
him in his apartment getting dressed to leave, and he heads out to the hillside
in a taxi.
As Badii lies in his grave, a storm brews overhead; cloud blocks out the
moon and, save the light cast by four flashes of lightning, all goes dark for a
minute and a half (yet not all is silent: after forty-five seconds, the rain starts).
At some stage during the darkness there is an infamous cut in which film
switches to video, and when light returns we find that the scene has changed
dramatically. It’s greener (as Michael Price points out,3 the season has
changed: now it looks like spring). We see a film crew with cameras and other
equipment, and find that Badii is no longer in his grave, but walking up the
hill with a cigarette. He hands it to another man who, we soon see, is actually
Kiarostami himself. The two engage in what appears to be idle conversation,
and we hear Louis Armstrong (it is the only non-diegetic music in the movie).
We are then treated to a remarkable handheld sequence mostly featuring
soldiers at ease, and which includes the young man who ran in fear. It is like a
curtain call, except the movie isn’t over: it has just changed in a beguiling way.
I take it as the paradigmatic instance of Kiarostami’s characteristic
gesture (and in that sense, as a kind of watershed in his artistic development,
definitively marking his arrival as a great filmmaker). In such moments, one’s
claims to knowledge – to tell the difference between the real and the fake,
the authentic and the artificial; to claim a basic level of insight into a film’s
characters, their motivations and eventual destiny; to understand the meaning
and dramatic stakes of what one is watching – are paralysed by the emergence
of a disorienting reflexivity. Yet this disorientation is not simply a distancing:
in certain important respects – and this is part of what is remarkable about
it – it draws the viewer more deeply into the films. In the case of Taste of
Cherry, the ‘reveal’ at the end does not cancel or even dampen my response
to the movie. If Price is right to say that it gets the audience waking from its
“two-hour slumber” – that now it “has to rise and account for itself”4 – then
this accounting is no Brechtian chore: with its colour and sudden music, the
scene throws new light on the rest of the film; we wake bewildered, but with
fresh eyes. There is something affirmative about Kiarostami’s gesture, which
is especially pronounced given the film’s grim plot.5
Consider 1990’s Close-Up. It is about real events: impersonating Mohsen

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 Introduction 3

Makhmalbaf, Hossein Sabzian conned a Tehrani family into letting him

film their domestic life; he was eventually found out, and put in jail under
suspicion of planning robbery. Kiarostami not only gained permission to
film the trial (and indeed to ‘recreate’ it afterwards in the court room6); he
also arranged a re-enactment of the deception that led to it, filming Sabzian
in the family’s home pretending to be pretending to be Makhmalbaf.7 In the
final scene of the film, the viewer has difficulty finding firm ground: we watch
Makhmalbaf and Sabzian meeting from the perspective of what is supposedly
a hidden camera; Makhmalbaf is miked up, but the sound cuts out as they ride
a motorcycle to the house Sabzian deceivingly entered. Yet the final shot is
a close-up of Sabzian’s face from an entirely new angle; the ‘hidden camera’
theatrics are revealed as just that. But this does not take away from the scene,
or make Sabzian’s gesture – he arrives at the door with a pot of flowers – less
striking. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes:

In this film, what could have been the story of gentle madness or a denun-
ciation of the cinematographic illusion leads to the contrary in the end . . . a
return to the real that a progressive fading away of the movie signals . . . a
bunch of red flowers, explicitly chosen for their color, stands out against the
blue-grey of the noisy street . . . 8

The complexity of the set-up, in which the real and the artificial nearly become
indistinguishable, does not detract from the gesture. Rather, it heightens it
(after all, part of the sweetness of the act of giving flowers is bound up with
the fact that its status as a gesture is so clear).
We could also turn here to the Koker Trilogy.9 The narrative of 1987’s
Where is the Friend’s Home? turns on a mix-up: Ahmad, the eight-year-old
protagonist, mistakes his classmate Mohammad’s exercise book for his own
and takes it home from school. Knowing that Mohammad – who has recently
drawn their (authoritarian and cruel) teacher’s ire for failing to do his home-
work – is in danger of expulsion if he fails again to complete it, Ahmad sets
off in search of his house in order to return the book. The simplicity of the
film is part of its appeal, but it prefigures the crucial problem of Kiarostami’s
later cinema: the question of the real and its relation to the fake (a relationship
complicated by the film’s ending, in which Ahmad gets Mohammad off the
hook by copying his own work into his book10).
On hearing the news of the earthquake that devastated northern Iran in
1990, Kiarostami travelled with his son to the town of Koker – where parts
of Where is the Friend’s Home? were shot – to try and locate his two child actors.
Kiarostami was unable to find the boys, but returned some months later

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 4 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

to make 1992’s Life and Nothing More, a semi-fictional feature about a direc-
tor and his son (played by Farhad Kheradmand and Buba Bayour) visiting
Koker after the quake in order to track down two child actors.11 The film is
remarkable for its handling of the disaster, which it never sensationalises, and
for how it tracks what happens to the ordinary in such exceptional circum-
stances. One of the film’s most interesting scenes involves a young couple
who had decided to get married shortly after the earthquake – a scene which
then became crucial in 1994’s Through the Olive Trees. This film depicts the real-
life romance that unfolded between the two non-actors during the filming of
Life and Nothing More. Kiarostami arranges a re-enactment of their courtship
featuring one of the original cast members, who plays himself falling in love
while playing himself in a fictional romance. Meanwhile the actor who played
the director of Where is the Friend’s Home? in Life and Nothing More is now cast
as himself playing his original role, while another actor plays the real director
of the 1992 film. It is impressive that these reflexive games never collapse
into knowing irony or detached, cerebral mannerism: at its heart the film is
a story of quixotic love told with tenderness and gentle humour.12 As Nancy
acknowledges, the meta-cinematic element itself only “introduces a new
story, neither more nor less effective than the first one, just showing another
angle of what is real and therefore many-faceted”.13
So the question is clear: how do these techniques – which in theory should
produce distancing, alienation, ostrananie, Verfremdungseffekt, etc. – manage to
draw us further into the films? How is it that, in Chris Lippard’s phrase,14 the
real in Kiarostami is both disappearing into the distance and getting closer all
the time? And what does this say about the so-called ‘suspension of disbelief’
and its alleged role in our absorption in movies? As I show in this book,
asking these questions opens fundamental problems in the philosophy of
cinema. What is film’s connection to the real world? What happens to reality
when we screen it? How does film create problems of knowledge? Might
it help us solve them? How can film make moral or political claims on us?
What is the difference between documentary and fiction? How do fictional
films move us, when we know that happens in them isn’t real? What is a
film genre, and what does it mean to claim a film as a member of one? What
does it mean to say that a film is ‘philosophical’? Is there a way of supporting
the idea that films can do philosophical work? As I hope to show, thinking
through Kiarostami’s recent movies will allow us to shed new light on these
questions. This book uses philosophy and the films of Kiarostami for their
mutual illumination, turning to the Iranian director in an attempt at finding
and clarifying a form of cinematic thinking.15
Stanley Cavell’s writings on the philosophical (and cinematic) problems

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 Introduction 5

of scepticism will play an important role here. His best-known book – The
Claim of Reason – is remarkable for the obsessive way in which it follows up
on these problems, yet it does so without the intent of solving them. Part
of the uniqueness of Cavell’s work (although he is also indebted to Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger on this) consists in this very particular
understanding of the nature and function of philosophy: unlike so many of
his Anglo-American contemporaries, Cavell does not think it should be con-
cerned primarily with the task of defending sets of beliefs about how it is with
the world, or trying to justify our claims to know it. Instead he takes the task of
philosophy to be a therapeutic one. The implications of this are difficult and
far-reaching, but what’s particularly relevant for us is the connection between
philosophical therapy and the problems of modern scepticism, which Cavell
sees as running more deeply into ‘ordinary’ or ‘non-philosophical’ life than
we tend to assume. Cavell is following the later Wittgenstein, but in a way that
complicates him. Here is a passage from the Philosophical Investigations:

But can’t I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack conscious-
ness, even though they behave in the same way as usual? – If I imagine it now
– alone in my room – I see people with fixed looks (as in a trance) going about
their business – the idea is perhaps a little uncanny. But just try to keep hold
of this idea in the midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street
say! Say to yourself, for example: ‘The children over there are mere automata;
all their liveliness is mere automatism.’ And you will either find these words
becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of
uncanny feeling . . . 16

Wittgenstein is right: we tend to forget such sceptical worries in ordinary

life. But the uncertainty that makes it impossible for a philosopher simply to
dismiss such a sceptical problem plays itself out in far more mundane situa-
tions: in the fear and feeling of being unintelligible to another, such that one’s
words do not mean what one thinks they do, or do not mean at all; in the
feeling that another self can be or become opaque to one, such that the other
is unintelligible and/or impossible to respond to rightly; in the possibility that
the way one takes the world, and so the way one lives, could be misguided
or fantasmatic in some fundamental sense; in the potential for insanity that
subsists within some or all of us (insanity is actually internal to philosophy
for Cavell, and Wittgenstein too: not through the blunt claim that philosophy
is insane, but in the sense that it is haunted by a sort of linguistic madness).
Crucially, these can all be framed as problems of knowledge, experiences of
not being able to know.

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 6 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

Obviously Descartes is important here (the above quote from the

Investigations chimes, I presume deliberately, with the Second Meditation’s
worry about hats and cloaks covering clockwork machines17). And of course,
Descartes does reach certainty after negotiating his sceptical quagmires,
famously finding his Archimedean point in the indisputable fact of his own
existence. He goes on to try and save the rest of our knowledge by proving
the existence of God. Descartes’s idea is that God is good, and wouldn’t
subject us to life in a world where our claims to knowledge are ungrounded.
Yet of course, if we think the ontological proof of God fails, then we are
left in a difficult spot. We get the self – the one certainty of the Cartesian
system – but without all the extra claims that would ‘reconnect’ that self to
the world and other selves outside it. One might say, then, that the certainty
that Descartes gave us was ambiguous. He found us a little piece of firm epis-
temological ground, but in doing as he bequeathed to us (or discovered for
us) a potential for absolute isolation, for entrapment in subjectivity (to push
the above metaphor a bit too far, we might say that we’ve been marooned on
little Cartesian islands). As Cavell puts it: “At some point the unhinging of
our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and
our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity became what is present
to us, individuality became isolation.”18 As this passage makes clear, Cavell
sees this problem as inherent in modernity, as the age in which the criterion
of knowledge takes on new significance. It is as though we find ourselves
trapped by the demand for certainty it sparks. He says we have suffered a

fall into skepticism, together with its efforts to recover itself, events recorded
variously in Descartes and Hume and Kant and Emerson and Nietzsche and
Heidegger and Wittgenstein . . . It is in modern philosophical skepticism
. . . that our relation to the things of the world came to be felt to hang by a
thread of sensuous immediacy, hence to be snapped by a doubt. The wish
to defeat skepticism, or to disparage it, has been close to philosophy’s heart
ever since.19

To summarise a little violently, for Cavell, modern philosophical scepticism

is simultaneously correct and confused: correct because it intuits that the
human relation to the world is epistemically unassured; confused because it
takes this as a problem to be solved. The former claim is ontological; it is what
Cavell calls the “truth of scepticism”.20 The latter claim is historical; it is that
philosophical modernity is characterised by a rage to know. This rage sees us
distort the truth of scepticism: by raging against it, we fail to acknowledge it;
we come to take it as a deficit in our knowledge. This is why the philosophical

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 Introduction 7

task for Cavell is not to solve the problems of scepticism, but to reorient us in
relation to them, to loosen their grip by transforming our sense of them. The
task is to own up to the fact that “the human creature’s basis in the world as a
whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing”.21
What is the relevance of this for film? Cavell sees it as both alleviating and
exasperating scepticism. The key claim in The World Viewed, which was Cavell’s
first monograph and which, as William Rothman and Marian Keane point
out,22 can be strikingly inexplicit in its treatment of these issues, is that film is
a “moving image of scepticism”.23 What Cavell means is that film draws part
of its power from the sceptical threat: film finds itself naturally drawn to the
depiction of (the implications of) our lack of epistemic assurance.24 If this is
true, it is not just in virtue of film’s purported status as ‘the’ modern art form,
but because of how the camera can seem to take on the basic standpoint of
the sceptical theorist, viewing the world from a detached position, recording
events happening before it in a way that makes its own connection to those
events seem ambiguous (yet at the same time, raising a nearly unshakable
thought: that what happens in front of it just is ‘real’ in some sense of the
word). On the one hand, photography, film, and video seem to be indexical:
we use them to tell us things about what happens (think of CCTV, footage
from which can happily stand in court). We tend to feel that this ability to
record the real is a function of the automatism of photographic apparatuses:
the fact that they – unlike say, paintbrushes – produce images of the world the
nature of which is wholly or strongly dependent on what actually happens in it,
rather than on what their makers want to depict.25 On the other hand, coming
up with a successful philosophical account of this feature of photographic
media is very difficult.26 For isn’t our sense of a particular image or scene’s
bearing a direct relationship to the real a function of artistic or directorial fiat
as much as of its having automatically reproduced reality? Doesn’t this under-
mine the key condition we had in mind: that photographic apparatuses record
what happens regardless of the wills of their human users? What about the
case of digital video files, which are not the results of literal imprints of light
on film, and which can be manipulated easily with computer software? And of
course, from bitter experience we know that being surrounded by images of
the real does not bolster as much as undermine our conviction in it (think of
arriving at a tourist destination only to find it appears less vibrant than in the
images you saw of it online). This is part of why Cavell can read the films of the
Hollywood golden age as working in a sceptical register – arguing for instance
that “the overcoming of skeptical doubt can be found in all remarriage
comedy . . .”27 – and finding in them real philosophical depth: this is the case
in virtue of the tendencies of the medium. For Cavell, we go to the movies to

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 8 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

experience a reconnection to the world, a connection we feel has been severed

in modernity. Cinema simultaneously screens the world before and from the
viewer; it presents an uncannily literal version of the truth of scepticism. Film
allows us to view the world, to take views of it. Film toys with, undermines, and
restores our confidence in it. As Cavell writes: “The basis of film’s drama, or
the latent anxiety in viewing its drama, lies in its persistent demonstration that
we do not know what our conviction in reality turns upon.”28
Think here of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the experiential effects
of technologies of reproduction, which stems from broader quasi-Marxist
claims regarding the historicity of not only experience but sense perception
as well. Benjamin puts it clearly:

Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods,
so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organ-
ized – the medium in which it occurs, is conditioned not only by nature but
by history.29

This comes in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’,
where Benjamin famously claims that “what withers in the age of the techno-
logical reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura”30 (where ‘aura’ is
something like the authentic presence of the original, and its being embedded
in a fabric of tradition). The idea is that our ability to make copies of artworks
rips them from their social contexts, which allows for their wider dissemina-
tion while simultaneously undermining our faith in originals and the very idea
of authenticity. I want to make a quasi-phenomenological point in order to
connect this to Cavell’s claims about film. It is that one’s memories of events
can be infiltrated by the images we produce of them. I have had the experi-
ence of finding that some of my vivid ‘memories’ are not really memories at
all. It is the experience of going through family photos or videos, or perhaps
of looking at photographs of a holiday: one realises that something one has
taken as a memory is actually a memory of a photograph or video recording.
This isn’t to say that there is no real memory, but rather that one’s memory
has been infiltrated and even supplanted, and cannot be accessed without
the mediation of that image. The media of photography, film, and/or video
can get inside one’s experience in this way (I also think here of the studies
which have shown that people who grew up in the age of black and white
film reported dreaming in black and white, while more recently people have
reported dreaming in colour31). In Vertigo, W. G. Sebald writes of Stendhal’s
shock when he came to realise that one of his most vivid memories had been
infiltrated like this:

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 Introduction 9

Beyle writes that for years he lived in the conviction that he could remem-
ber every detail of that ride, and particularly of the town of Ivrea, which he
beheld for the first time from some three-quarters of a mile away, in light
that was already fading. There it lay, to the right, where the valley gradually
opens out into the plain, while on the left, in the far distance, the mountains
arose . . . It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago,
looking through old chapters, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto
d’Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in
the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being
so, Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects
seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories
completely, indeed one might say they destroy them.32

With characteristic scholastic horror, Sebald hits here on a common experi-

ence, and perhaps we could say that in the twentieth century this problem
became endemic (and that now it is practically impossible for us to avoid it by
refusing to purchase engravings of fine views). Of course, the problem also
works in reverse (this is the sense that most interests Benjamin): seeing an
image of something before actually encountering it can influence our experi-
ence of, and distance us from, the object in question. The easy example is the
Mona Lisa: one might say that it is now impossible really to see this painting
(this is almost literally true, in that it attracts massive crowds of tourists, many
of whom, interestingly, will be taking photos of the painting), that there is
a disappointment that comes with encountering it, a feeling of not having
encountered the real thing. Photographic and cinematic reproductions of
reality have a paradoxical effect on us: they simultaneously offer us views of
reality, of the world as it is in itself, while also working to remove those things
from us, making an unmediated experience of reality impossible. The ubiq-
uity of images characteristic of our culture is both a cause of and response to
our desire for reality; in being given what we want, we are distanced from it.
The pleasures and anxieties of film and photography are bound up with how
they purport to solve problems of knowledge while simultaneously exasperat-
ing them.
These understandings of philosophy and film allow me to pitch the idea
of ‘film as philosophy’ in a particular way. Like Paisley Livingston, I think
there are reasons to be dubious of certain of the claims that have been made
for film-philosophy. I am unconvinced, for instance, of the full philosophical
usefulness (if not the accuracy) of the idea one finds, for example, in Julian
Baggini33 and Jerry Goodenough34 (and also with a more pedagogical slant
in works by Chris Falzon35 and Mary Litch and Amy Karofsky36): because of

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 10 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

its imagistic, narrative, sonic, and other powers, film is able to present ideas
with greater affective force than written texts have often been able to achieve;
thus films can provide an important supplement to philosophical argument,
helping to illustrate – or even provide a certain kind of experiential evidence
for37 – philosophical theses. This notion (which often relies on a rough and
ready version of Wittgenstein’s say/show distinction38) is itself somewhat
Platonic, relying as it does on an opposition between artistic mythos and
philosophical logos (even as it gives it the contrary evaluative spin, regarding
the affective powers of cinema as something to be welcomed rather than
rejected39); thus it flirts with admitting that the medium specific propensity of
film is just to provide an affective accompaniment to ‘real’, in principle discur-
sively paraphrasable, philosophical work, and so maintaining the distinction
between thinking and feeling that film-philosophy, in its most compelling
moments, has promised to overcome. Unlike Livingston40 (and others such
as Thomas Wartenberg41), however, I am also wary of the idea that a film’s
philosophical interest is to be found in the ideas or problems with which its
directors and/or writers have imbued it.42 First and most obviously, such
intentionalist theories tend to raise problems of authorship (problems that
are particularly intense in the case of the inherently collaborative process of
filmmaking); secondly, and as Damian Cox and Michael Levine point out,43
restricting ourselves to this notion effectively shuts down the possibilities
that arise as a direct result of what exceeds authorial intention, those aspects
of a film which call out for philosophical reflection not because but in spite of
what a director or writer may have intended (Taste of Cherry actually presents
a useful example: given the film’s title and Kiarostami’s handling of the final
conversation, it may be plausible to imagine the director himself ‘sides with’
the man who tells the humanistic story about mulberries – yet this is perhaps
not the most interesting way of understanding what the film has to say and
show philosophically); third and most importantly, this understanding of the
film-philosophy relationship does not get at the specifically cinematic nature of
cinematic thinking (as Livingston himself is very happy to acknowledge). To
put all this another way: I want to regard film as having more than the mere
capacity to illustrate – or provide an affective (or simply more entertain-
ing) supplement to – philosophy, yet I want to resist the notion that film’s
philosophical power consists in its ability to present theoretical content that
could itself be fully paraphrased in written philosophical discourse. Cinematic
thinking is a specific kind of thinking (and it really is thinking).
This would seem to commit me to what Livingston has influentially called
the ‘bold thesis’ in the philosophy of film: “the conjunction of the idea that
films can make an original contribution in philosophy, and the idea that this

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 Introduction 11

contribution can be achieved primarily if not entirely through means exclu-

sive to the cinematic medium”.44 And this would, in turn, seem to pin me on
the horns of the dilemma he claims it raises:

either support for the bold thesis depends on a claim about a cinematic con-
tribution that cannot be paraphrased and so can be reasonably doubted, or
it rests on a contribution that can be paraphrased, in which case the clause
about medium specificity is betrayed.45

For Livingston, the idea that has been so attractive to film-philosophers –

that cinema has a special propensity for thought – is actually the Achilles heel
of their entire programme. If the thinking that goes on in film is specific to
the capacities of the medium, then how could it be made discursive? And if
it can’t be made discursive, then what use is it to philosophy, whose medium
is language? The film-philosopher who wants to insist on medium specificity
will end up committing himself to a kind of obscurantism, insisting on some
ineffable experience of thinking that takes place exclusively in films. And as
Livingston says, “it is fair to ask whether such appeals to experience can offer
good grounds for believing that a significantly new idea, general thesis, or
argument has emerged”.46
Yet of course, it is possible to question Livingston’s characterisation of the
‘bold thesis’, which smacks of philosophical entrapment. One of his explicit
targets here is Stephen Mulhall, whose On Film is in some ways a foundational
text for the programme of film-philosophy, at least as it has been practised
over the past decade. Perhaps the first thing to note is that Mulhall does
not formulate his own understanding of film-philosophy quite as ‘boldly’
as Livingston implies he does. Here is one such formulation from Mulhall’s
book (and which Livingston himself quotes):

I do not look to these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and

arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as them-
selves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking
seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers
do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its orna-
mentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action—film as
philosophizing.47

It is a provocative passage, but look at the descriptions of film-philosophical

practice: Mulhall writes of film as ‘evaluating’ and ‘reflecting on’ philosophy,
as ‘thinking seriously and systematically’, and of ‘philosophy in action’.

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 12 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

Compare this with Livingston’s query as to how, given the condition of

medium specificity and the problem of paraphrase, we could ever really
know whether a film presents a ‘new idea’, ‘general thesis’, or ‘argument’.
Livingston, as is clear enough, is working with a relatively traditional idea of
philosophical work, understood as the articulation and defence of arguments
regarding how it is with the world: philosophy as theory building. Mulhall,
on the other hand – and this is part of his own inheritance from Cavell – has
a broader and in many ways subtler notion of it.48 In the reply to his critics
included in the most recent edition of On Film, he asks: “must our acknowl-
edgment of reason’s claims on us always take the specific form of giving
reasons in support of our opinions or our ‘symbolic representations’ (which I
take to mean something like our ‘view’ or ‘vision’) of the world?”49
Now we can see the ambiguity in Livingston’s term ‘original contribution’.
If an original contribution is a new theory or argument for a particular view
of the way things are, then it is pretty easy to see how the bold thesis found-
ers; however, things are far less obvious if ‘contribution’ could mean, say, an
instance of therapeutic philosophical practice founded on “the wager . . . that
we can inhabit our life of and with language otherwise”.50 Here it is worth
invoking Mulhall’s useful distinction between philosophy understood as the
provision and assessment of reasons for and against particular views, and
philosophy understood as reflection on the very “shared space of thought” in
which disagreements arise in the first place. “Sometimes”, he writes,

we want to, or need to, or simply do, reconceive that space, by finding a new
way of thinking about the topic – one that reorients both participants to the
dispute by altering their sense of what stances are available to them with
respect to its topic.51

Such a conception of philosophy should deflate the bold thesis and shift the
terms of the debate on cinematic thinking. The problem of paraphrase will
no longer seem so intractable, as we are no longer committed with the same
force to the idea that there is some philosophical ‘content’ to be found in
a particular film (a content that will have to be ‘translated’ into language in
order to become properly philosophical), the previously so intuitive notion
that a philosophical film must been seen as proposing new ideas or theses
that it is the film-philosopher’s job to discover and somehow translate. Yet
we can remain committed to a version of the thesis of medium specificity,
holding that the kind of thinking that can happen in films remains specifically
cinematic – and indeed that this is precisely why it is of such interest to phi-
losophy, why the creation of film somehow seems to have been “meant for

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 Introduction 13

philosophy”.52 I should emphasise that this must be understood as a type of

philosophical practice: the therapeutic contribution of a film is not a content
to be extracted and paraphrased but something the film does, something it
achieves on and with us. Bringing this out in philosophical writing is a matter
of attentive description: rather than capture in language the new idea or
theory a film has put forward, the task is to give an elucidatory account of the
work the film has done on one in provoking, rebuking, and deflating sceptical
theorising.
This is not to deny the importance of narrative and character; nor is it to
ignore the political and cultural contexts of films. It is simply to say that these
are not the domains in which the medium specific philosophical propensity
of film does its work. And this, of course, is not to deny that these domains
can be philosophically salient. It is just to say that when they are, this salience
is not medium specific (because of how it deploys narrative and character,
some novels have profound philosophical significance, but they are less
equipped for the type of philosophical work that films can carry out).53 In
the following pages, then, I will make a number of arguments regarding the
philosophical salience of narrative and character, as well as the political and
cultural contexts of Kiarostami’s films. My claim will be that, by following up
on the connection between film and problems of knowledge, Kiarostami is
able to draw a particular kind of philosophical significance out of narrative
and character, and to undo philosophical commitments and fantasies with
significant political and cultural purchase. This requires interpretive accounts
of narrative and character, as well as philosophically attentive description
of a film’s philosophical effect. (The exception that proves the rule here is
Five, which does away with narrative and character, thus isolating the anti-
theoretical philosophical propensity of film with particular clarity.)
It may seem that saying film has a medium specific philosophical propen-
sity born of its relationship to reality implies accepting old-fashioned and/or
implausible claims regarding the nature of cinema. In particular it may seem
to require accepting a strong claim regarding the essence of film, of the neces-
sary and sufficient conditions of something’s being a film – necessary and suf-
ficient conditions which, moreover, would have to be located in the physical
nature of the cinematographic apparatus (whether in cameras, film stock, or
whatever), and its attendant capacity to record what happens automatically.54
But my account of the philosophical propensity of film relies on no such
claim. It relies on our beliefs and practices regarding film and its relationship
to reality. More specifically, it relies on the fact that film has a problematic
relationship to reality: that we (sometimes) treat cinematic images as though
they possess an indexical relationship to what happens, yet cannot come to

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 14 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

a convincing general account of precisely how and why. Imagine a world

where our beliefs and practices regarding cinematic images have changed so
substantially that we no longer regard them as bearing any significant relation-
ship to reality, any tendency to record what happens in it (though I would
suggest it is more difficult than many seem to think, perhaps one can imagine
such a state of affairs emerging out of the pressure of digital technologies).
In such a world, there would not be film-philosophy in my sense, because
film would not provoke sceptical or anti-sceptical theorising. So this account
relies on the tension between film and reality, such that if the tension were to
be released, it would no longer stand. This is why I do not take this account to
trouble my claim to be doing anti-theoretical philosophy. The account does
not require a convincing overarching theory of the relationship between film
and reality. On the contrary, it relies on there being no such theory.
Some may wonder what is left for philosophy if it pulls out of the game
of theory building. And to certain ears, the above claims about how it can
reorient us, transform our sense of the possible, or open up new paths for
thinking may sound a bit romantic, woolly, or even empty. Part of what I
want to demonstrate in this book, then, is exactly what an explicitly anti-
theoretical film-philosophy can do. Kiarostami’s films do not really present
a “systematic vision of the world”.55 Rather, the thinking we can bring out
of them is deflationary or even destructive: it wants to get us reflecting on
our very desire for an overarching vision (and, one might say, get us looking
instead). I will not be trying to unearth a robust philosophy from Kiarostami’s
films as a whole or any of his films in particular; instead I want to think with
his films about the practice of philosophising itself, about what it can and
can’t achieve. Throughout this book, I want to remain open to the possibil-
ity that film may actually challenge or even rival philosophy, and thus – like
any true rival – that it could provoke philosophy into changing itself. The
philosophical significance of film consists less in its ability to make a positive
contribution to philosophical theorising than in how it challenges, beguiles,
goads, and resists it. And this general tendency or power of cinema, I hope
to show, has been exploited in a fascinating, charming, and often devastating
way by Kiarostami.56
I say ‘devastating’ in part because philosophical therapy carried out in the
spirit of Wittgenstein must be distinguished from what could be called consola-
tion. It is very easy to caricature (whether intentionally or otherwise, whether
as a detractor or supporter) the motivations and stakes of philosophical
therapy. To console is to give solace – to soothe or to comfort – and espe-
cially to alleviate grief or disappointment. Kiarostami’s films are not consol-
ing in this way. Indeed the films achieve what they do precisely in virtue of

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 Introduction 15

their capacity to disappoint, setting us up with a desire they end up liquidating.

Yet they do not simply show us how to come to terms with our epistemo-
logical limitedness, or how to adjust to the fact that we will never find the
philosophical peace we seek, or whatever. The disappointment in question is
not simply the result of having what we want withheld – our being shown that
we’re not going to get it – but of a demonstration that we didn’t really know
what we wanted, because what we (thought we) wanted was always already
chimerical. It is not that we do not need or can do without the purchase on
reality we were seeking (that we should happily remain sceptics, or at least
get used to it), but that it is unclear what it would mean to get such purchase
in the first place, and so that the sceptic’s words (and those of his opponent)
do not make the sense he thinks they do. This explains why the destruc-
tion is enlivening and freeing. At the risk of paradox, we could describe it
as a destruction that destroys by not destroying, or in Wittgenstein’s terms,
as a destruction that destroys only Luftgebäude (literally: air-buildings).57 In
this context, the problem with consolation is that it leaves intact – assumes
the meaningfulness and solidity of – the structures in which it offers
solace.
What does it mean to say the sceptic’s words do not make the sense he
thinks they do, or that philosophical therapy works by destroying what we
had wrongly thought was meaningful? There is a tradition in Wittgensteinian
philosophy in which claims like this are deployed with great self-assurance,
where philosophers become something rather like nonsense cops, bent on
policing authoritatively the border between sense and meaninglessness. In
his attack on Cavell – which, it should perhaps be said, appears not to have
been made in bad faith – Malcolm Turvey takes the philosopher to task for
his understanding of Wittgenstein. Specifically the critique centres on Cavell’s
claims about scepticism, which Turvey says he sets up as “an underlying
principle of all of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy”.58 Now in a certain sense
Turvey is perfectly correct, as Cavell does think problems of scepticism are
basic for the later Wittgenstein. But this is not necessarily the same thing
as saying, as Turvey wants to say Cavell does, that it is an Urphänomen in
Wittgenstein’s own sense of the term: a “preconceived idea that takes pos-
session”59 of the person using it, such that it comes to “describe any and
all phenomena, whether or not such phenomena are suitable candidates for
such a description”.60 For Turvey, Cavell’s fixation on problems of scepticism
actually demonstrates just how untrue to Wittgenstein he is, for the aim of
his later philosophy was to break our attachments to full-blown theorising of
this sort. Now this is roughly fair, as far as it goes, as an account of the later
Wittgenstein, but it is not fair to Cavell.

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 16 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

Turvey’s critique appears to turn on Cavell’s phrase ‘the truth of scepti-

cism’, which he interprets uncharitably and quite literally to mean something
like ‘scepticism is true’. But it should be obvious that Cavell does not mean
it like this; a better way of understanding it would be to say that Cavell uses
‘the truth of scepticism’ similarly to someone using a phrase like ‘there is
truth in every joke’ or ‘well, there may be a grain of truth in that’ (Turvey
also writes of Cavell’s tendency to refer to scepticism as ‘undeniable’, once
again crudely equating this with ‘truth’ tout court). It is not that ‘scepticism is
true’ is true; rather, it is that scepticism contains a grain of a truth that it ends
up distorting, which is that the human relation to the world is epistemically
unassured, or (put another way) that our relation to the world as such is “not
one of knowing”61 (if you want to push the metaphor further, imagine an
oyster which, irritated by a grain of sand, secretes calcium carbonate around
it in an attempt at quarantining it: the grain remains, but it has become
unrecognisable). If scepticism is undeniable, it is not because it is true, but
because it is beguiling and (in certain contexts, particularly philosophical
contexts) seemingly unshakable – and so impossible to deny satisfactorily.
Of course, this is not to say that ‘scepticism is false’ is true either, for the
very attempt to deny that scepticism is true already cedes too much. Turvey
writes:

it is very hard to find anywhere in Wittgenstein’s later writings – and certainly

in the Investigations – where Wittgenstein argues that scepticism is either ‘true’
or ‘false’ (or a combination of the two). And the reason why it is so hard, I
suspect, is because Wittgenstein’s overwhelming and repeatedly stated (and
enacted) concern in his later writings is with questions of sense and meaning,
not with making arguments about what is true or false.62

Once again, this is fair enough as an account of Wittgenstein, but all of it is

also true of Cavell, whose own overwhelming and repeatedly stated concern
is with sense and meaning over truth and falsity, too. The difference between
Turvey’s Wittgensteinianism and that of Cavell hinges on the nature of this
concern: for Turvey, it appears, the task of the therapeutic philosopher is to
know the difference between sense and nonsense, and call out the latter when
he sees it (hence his own dismissals of Cavell’s lapses into alleged senseless-
ness); for Cavell things are more complex. As Conant writes in an article on
Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein:

according to Cavell, what the early Wittgenstein calls the logic of our lan-
guage and what the later Wittgenstein calls grammar is not the name for a grid

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 Introduction 17

of rules we lay over language in order to point out where one or another of
its prescriptions are violated.63

For Cavell, there is no pre-determinable set of criteria that we can apply to

sentences in order to sort the meaningful from the meaningless. Further, we
cannot simply dismiss scepticism as nonsense and expect it to go away – in a
sense, we have to start by taking it seriously, and in particular by acknowledg-
ing the hold it has on us, which cannot be loosened so brusquely. Conant
describes the reader of Wittgenstein as moving from “a psychological experi-
ence of entertaining what appears to be a fully determinate thought . . . to the
experience of having that appearance (the experience of there being any such
thought) disintegrate”.64 What Turvey’s approach ignores, we might say, is
the first stage in this process: the reader has to entertain genuinely a sceptical
thought if its disintegration (or as I have termed it, liquidation or destruction)
is to have force. This is why Cavell writes in the way he does (and Turvey is
not alone in finding him opaque), why he spends so much time in The Claim
of Reason entertaining thoughts that, by Wittgensteinian lights, we may have
to regard as properly meaningless. Yet this is also true of Wittgenstein’s own
writing, and in particular of the role of the interlocutor in the Investigations,
who responds again and again to Wittgenstein’s statements with incredulity,
defiance, and disbelief, never satisfied with the philosopher’s procedures.
Yet the interlocutor plays a crucial role in the book; he is more than a foil;
he gives voice to the disquietudes that grip philosophers, oscillating between
certainty and defeat. As an example, consider the interlocutor’s exasperation
during one of Wittgenstein’s famous excurses on the concept ‘game’ (where
he shows that we cannot delimit the set of necessary and sufficient conditions
for gamehood): ‘‘But if the concept ‘game’ is uncircumscribed like that”, the
interlocutor responds, “you don’t really know what you mean by a ‘game’.”65
The aim, as usual, is that the reader will come to recognise herself in the
interlocutor here: that he says precisely what the reader cannot help but think.
This is why it is not enough simply to dismiss scepticism as nonsense. The
reader must come to see just how seductive nonsense can be, how inclined
she is to entertain it. As Mulhall writes, “[w]hat Wittgenstein detects in his
interlocutor’s impatience is the influence of a false necessity”;66 we need to
do something more than simply point out the falsity in order to loosen the
sense of necessity. This is what both the Investigations and The Claim of Reason
are designed to achieve. It is also what I take Kiarostami’s films to achieve.
To be fair to Turvey, he does identify a potential problem in his attack
on Cavell. This is not the place to construct a full defence of Cavell’s phi-
losophy, but the problem is worth acknowledging, because it is one that

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 18 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

could conceivably be raised against my own programme in this book. It is

that it is possible to be disingenuous in one’s claim to be doing non-doctrinal,
anti-theoretical philosophy. This, I take it, is really at the root of Turvey’s
criticisms of Cavell: for the former, the latter claims to be forgoing theoretical
commitments, yet his work – and this may seem especially true of The Claim
of Reason – appears to advance a theory of scepticism. Obviously very much
hangs on just how we interpret the word ‘theory’ here. Cavell does not claim,
and I do not claim, to be doing philosophy without advancing any general
claims at all. Indeed, partly following Cavell, I want to advance a number of
claims about philosophical scepticism: that it contains a grain of truth; that we
have a tendency to deny and, as a result, distort this truth; that this tendency
takes a virulent and desperate form in modernity; that film, because of its
specific features, has a particular capacity to provoke sceptical theorising; that
for this very reason film, at least some of the time, can provide a singularly
powerful rebuke to such theorising; that film can thus be regarded as doing
real philosophical work. The point is that these are claims about the limits
of – and the unacknowledged forces driving – philosophical theorising. Saying
that scepticism has a deep hold on us, that sceptical or anti-sceptical theorising
leads us to speak or write words that lack purchase on the world, or that film
has a special relationship to sceptical problems, is not the same as advancing a
full-blown sceptical theory (or a full-blown anti-sceptical theory). This is how
I understand Wittgenstein when he writes that “[i]f one tried to advance theses
in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone
would agree to them.”67 The remark strikes as counterintuitive because we are
used to philosophers debating each other endlessly; it implies that philoso-
phers who take themselves to be advancing theses are not really doing so at all,
and so must instead (unbeknownst to each other, and presumably themselves)
be speaking emptily. If this claim is itself a thesis, then it is a thesis about
philosophers, not a thesis of the type philosophers mistakenly take themselves
to debate – which is to say, not a thesis in philosophy. Wittgenstein does not
argue against philosophical theses or philosophical claims to truth, but rather
wants to show, through philosophical analysis of a different and non-theoretic
sort, that they are not substantial enough to debate in the first place, not
solid enough to pit oneself against. This is a way of explaining why Mulhall
expresses such disappointment in certain of the replies to the first edition
of On Film, writing that “even those responsive to its concerns tend not to
engage in any detail with the specific readings of particular films that make up
the bulk of the book itself . . .”.68 If one claims to be doing film-philosophy
non-doctrinally – and to have identified in certain films non-doctrinal insights
of deep philosophical significance – then the real weight must be placed on

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 Introduction 19

one’s engagements with the films themselves. The proof of the claim, in other
words, will be in the doing – and the doing, by its nature, must be attentive
to the specificities of the individual case. “It is not that philosophy is to be
brought as such to an end”, Cavell writes, “but that in each case of its being
called for, it brings itself to an end”.69 My readings of Kiarostami’s films get
their bearings from certain (sceptical) philosophical problems, but they are
not meant simply to show how the films illustrate those problems – they are
not primarily interpretive in quite that way. I want to account philosophically for
what happens in them, and for what happens to those problems in them.70
This means attending to how each film calls for philosophy, and its end, in its
own way. The dissolutions of sceptical problems I want to claim these movies
achieve will never be fully binding or definitive for philosophy: all they can
do is repeatedly bring it to its own limits. Yet this repetition is neither com-
pulsive nor monotonous. By their nature as anti-theoretical, the philosophical
achievements of these films are irreducibly specific.
In Chapter 1 I turn to 1999’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami’s first
(and perhaps best) film after Taste of Cherry. This movie – which follows a
filmmaker and his crew as they try to make a documentary in Siah Dareh, a
village in Iranian Kurdistan – intensifies Kiarostami’s trademark reflexivity,
following up complexly on the question of what it means to document reality
on film, and problematising our desire for the exotic and the authentic. This
is an especially interesting move given that Kiarostami was rapidly gaining
recognition in ‘the West’ when he made the movie; it is particularly relevant
for me as a white, English-speaking philosopher claiming to have found
something important in the work of an Iranian filmmaker. Extending and
critiquing Nancy’s work on Kiarostami, I argue that the unsettling power of
this film stems not from its ability to return us to some (purportedly) pre-
modern experience, but from how it undermines modernity’s fantasies about
itself (and indeed about pre-modernity). It thus provides a subtle but decisive
rebuke to orientalist tendencies on display in the international reception of
Kiarostami’s films, as well as the claims from some Iranian critics – including
Hamid Dabashi and Azadeh Farahmand – that they deliberately perform a
kind of exoticism. Kiarostami’s cinema presents an education in looking, in
seeing things differently. It can help us think what it would be to stop waver-
ing between a fantasy of unmediated access to reality and horror at finding it
lacking.
After finishing The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami made two feature-length
movies on video: ABC Africa in 2001, and Ten in 2002. The films stand out
among his works because of how political they are. At the same time, these
films are marked by an idiosyncratic blend of the factual and the artificial,

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 20 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

documentation and experimentation: they are neither ‘mockumentaries’ nor

‘docudramas’, yet they are far from being traditional documentaries. ABC
Africa, to which I turn in Chapter 2, is about the AIDS crisis in Uganda and
its devastating effects on children. As I try to show, part of the philosophi-
cal interest of the film consists in how it refuses standard tropes of political
documentary cinema and the conceptual vocabulary of much of documentary
theory. Indeed Kiarostami claims to have discovered the video camera’s
capacity to record ‘absolute truth’ while making ABC Africa – a surprising
claim that I want to make sense of. While deeply reflexive, the movie is not
content merely with demonstrating the partiality of the documentarian’s
claim to truth; rather, it works to dissolve metaphysically inflated oppositions
between subjectivity and objectivity, partiality and neutrality. This allows it to
evoke a rare kind of solidarity.
I turn to Ten in the third chapter. Working through the political complexi-
ties of Iranian society via stunning performances from non-actors playing
themselves, Ten is interested in a particular kind of moral claim: one that
emerges out of Kiarostami’s crafty handling of questions regarding the reality
of what happens in the film. Through a series of intrusive formal techniques,
Kiarostami creates a sense of intense realism while troubling the very cat-
egory, such that the viewer is consistently unable to say whether or not what
is conveyed on screen is real or staged. Are we watching people playing roles
or going about their daily business? Is what is said scripted or unscripted? Are
the situations depicted on screen real, or has Kiarostami arranged them? The
film evokes the ordinary with a singular intensity: not through (the pretension
of) eliminating artifice, but through a complex foregrounding of it. It can help
us clarify the connection between moral claims and propositions, imagina-
tion, and belief.
In Chapter 4 I turn to 2003’s Five. Shot on digital cameras, the movie
is split into five episodes, each (or so it seems) consisting of a single long
take. At first blush, the film appears to add weight to the canonical reading
of Kiarostami as a filmmaker concerned with the dignity and drama of the
quotidian. I do not reject this reading, but refine it by following up on the
questions Five raises about its own status: what was arranged here, and what
was genuinely ‘discovered’? Further, what is the difference between arrange-
ment and discovery, the staged and the natural? What is contemplation in
cinema, and what is its relation to realism? Complicating Roland Barthes’s
notion of punctum and Michael Fried’s concept of theatricality, I argue Five’s
foregrounding of artifice allows it to achieve a certain kind of realism: one
attentive to the non-epistemic nature of the claim reality makes on us.
Chapter 5 is about 2008’s Shirin, the final instalment in the experimental

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 Introduction 21

period that opened with ABC Africa. It consists almost entirely of shots of
the faces of women as they appear to watch a film in a cinema. The women
seem intently rapt in the film they are apparently watching: an adaptation of
the twelfth-century Persian tragedy Khosrow and Shirin.71 Working to clarify
how Shirin treats absorption, I want to bring out the grounds and stakes of
a provocative claim by Fried regarding cinema and theatricality. Connecting
Fried’s argument to a central idea from Negar Mottahedeh’s remarkable study
of the visual logic of Iranian cinema – that a significant (albeit unintended!)
effect of rules regarding modesty and the depiction of women in Iranian film
has been to render it a “woman’s cinema”72 – I develop an account of how
Shirin upsets sceptical fantasies of voyeuristic spectatorship.
Chapter 6 turns to 2010’s Certified Copy. This relatively (and deceptively)
‘mainstream’ film – which begins with a lecture on the importance of repro-
ductions of works of art – raises philosophical questions regarding love, mar-
riage, reality, and artifice. It shows the relationship between these questions
and film’s connection to problems of scepticism, specifically in this case the
problem of other minds. Inviting while simultaneously refusing the possibil-
ity of our taking it as a member of what Cavell has called the ‘comedy of
remarriage’, Certified Copy also asks what it means for a film to be a member
of any particular genre, and of the remarriage comedy in particular. With this
reflexive aporia – as well as its deliberate narrative incoherence and refusal to
answer basic questions regarding the protagonists – the film leads the viewer
into an epistemological impasse. Yet from here we can perhaps be granted a
new perspective on scepticism, and the loss it seems to figure.
The final chapter turns to 2012’s Like Someone in Love. Against Gilles
Deleuze’s claim that the task of modern cinema is to restore our belief in
the world, I suggest that modern scepticism stems not from a lack of belief,
but more fundamentally from a kind of belief in belief. Drawing on John
McDowell’s recent work, I develop an account of cinematic absorption that
does not rely on the idea that, to be moved by cinematic images, we must
somehow be led to entertain their propositional content. The problem with
such a claim is not simply that it falsifies our relationship to cinematic images:
it is also that it falsifies our relationship to reality. The film follows a Japanese
call girl as she develops an unlikely relationship with a man old enough to be
her grandfather. It finishes abruptly. It shows that that our relation to the film
image is not primarily one of supposing, believing, imagining, or knowing,
but something uncannier.
It was not feasible to treat all of Kiarostami’s features, so a word is in
order regarding my choice of films. There are three reasons for my decision
to focus on his recent cinema. First and least interestingly, it has allowed me

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 22 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

to write about movies that – simply in virtue of their recentness – have been
given less attention in the extant English-language literature on Kiarostami,73
and which the reader will find easier to obtain. Second, there is the fact that
treating films made sequentially – rather than chopping between different
moments in Kiarostami’s career – allows me to do greater justice to the
links between them, and so to the iterative process of inquiry at the heart of
the filmmaker’s project. I alluded to the aesthetic commitment motivating
the third reason earlier in my discussion of Taste of Cherry, when I described
its infamous coda as a kind of watershed. Without wanting to discount the
significance of a masterpiece like Close-Up, the films of the Koker Trilogy,
interesting works from the 1980s such as such as ’83’s Fellow Citizen or ’89’s
Homework, or remarkable pre-Revolutionary films like 1977’s The Report, it
may be worth distinguishing between an ‘early’ and a ‘mature’ Kiarostami.
By ‘early’ I have in mind all those works leading up to and including Through
the Olive Trees; by ‘mature’ I have in mind those works from Taste of Cherry
onwards. Taste of Cherry can rightly be regarded as crucial not only because
of its inherent brilliance and importance but because of the light its coda
throws on the filmmaker’s wider project. It definitively shows he is interested
in something much more than rehashing neo-realism in an Iranian context.74
Indeed this is why it so divisive: it is an aesthetic point of no return after
which we can no longer simply regard his films as poignant studies of the life
and struggles of ordinary Iranians. Complicating these tendencies, it shows
the depth of Kiarostami’s interest in the philosophical enigmas that turn up
in the act of filming the world.

Notes
1. The in-car dialogues that form the core of the film were never carried
out between the film’s actors; rather, the scenes were filmed separately,
with Kiarostami himself standing in (or really, sitting in) for Badii or the
relevant passenger, working in a partially improvised fashion to lead his
interlocutors in conversation (see Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas
Kiarostami, 31–2 and Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume
4, 191–2; Kiarostami would use a similar technique again in The Wind
Will Carry Us (see Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, 36
and the interview with Kiarostami later in the book (111)). Apparently
Kiarostami also used another method for the sake of greater naturalness
and realism: terrifying the actor playing the young soldier by hiding a
gun in the glovebox, before asking him to open it (109). Yet we should
probably be a little careful of such stories: in an interview with Indiewire

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 Introduction 23

in 1998, Kiarostami told Anthony Kaufman that he had him discover a

knife covered in pomegranate juice! Kiarostami said there:

Whatever reaction you see from him is a true reaction. Including when I
wasn’t telling him what we wanted him to do. Including one time where in
the dashboard of the car, I told him, “Could you give me a box of chocolates
from the dashboard,” and there was a knife in there with some pomegranate
juice on it, so he thought we had killed someone – so that was how we got the
kind of horrified reactions you see from him in the film. (‘Abbas Kiarostami
Speaks about Taste of Cherry’)

As Alberto Elena notes (see The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, 13–16),

Kiarostami seems to like making misleading – or at least, inconsistent –
statements in interviews.
2. Hamish Ford ably captures the strange horror of this scene:

An absolute evacuation of hopefulness and immobilising lack of purpose is

suggested, more abstract than embodied despite the always ‘real’ nature of
the entirely unglamorous portrayal of ‘being-in-the-world’ on screen. The
sequence is most centrally suggestive of ruins through an enormous and poetic
opening out of the symbolic death imagery already so strong in the film, reach-
ing a point of self-conscious plasticity. Here are a flood of images more clearly
than ever now intimating entropy and earthly material burial: the unusually
bold and clear shadow-play on the dust-covered quarry wall of Badii’s body in
spectral form being eaten up by the earth-moving machinery; our observation
of his gaze, first from outside then entering it as a point-of-view shot, into a
grilled trap through which fall rocks in a seemingly random and ‘meaningless’
process; the human shadow-figure now explicitly cast across, and therefore
associated with, the vertiginous ground of rubble, bars and invisible abyss; the
dominance of autumnal oranges and browns thanks to the ubiquitous dusty,
‘lifeless’ earth; and finally, the almost complete envelopment and gradual disap-
pearance of our human figure as the air fills with yellow dust, coming to erase
Badii and then the camera’s entire field of vision. (‘Driving into the Void’, 13)

3. Price, ‘Imagining Life’.

4. Price, ‘Imagining Life’.
5. As Rosenbaum puts it:

Though it invites us into the laboratory from which the film sprang and
places us on an equal footing with the filmmaker, it does this in a spirit of

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 24 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

collective euphoria, suddenly liberating us from the oppressive solitude and

darkness of Badii alone in his grave. (Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas
Kiarostami, 30)

6. See Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, 87–8.

7. As Dabashi puts it (in a book named after the movie):

The spectator is . . . put in the bizarrest of situations, a succession of fact and

fantasy, in which one knows one is watching a fiction (Kiarostami’s Close-Up)
that is based on fact (Sabzian’s real story) that is based on fiction (Sabzian
pretending to be Makhmalbaf) that is based on fact (Makhmalbaf as a leading
Iranian filmmaker) that is based on fiction (Makhmalbaf making fictional
stories in film) that is based on fact (the reality that Makhmalbaf transforms
into fiction). (Close Up, 67)

8. Nancy, The Evidence of Film, 22.

9. Though the term is widely used by critics, Kiarostami rejects it. See
Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, 107–8; see also Cheshire, ‘Taste
of Cherry’, which notes that Kiarostami sees the grouping as arbitrary
because it is based on an “‘accident’ of place” alone; see also the remark
in Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, 23.
10. The film presents a number of these ontological mix-ups of type and
token. For example, Ahmed also mistakes a pair of trousers on a washing
line for an identical pair owned by his friend, and encounters a man who
shares his friend’s name but turns out not to be his father.
11. Here is Kiarostami on the making of the film:

In June 1990, an earthquake of catastrophic proportions jolted northern

Iran, killing tens of thousands of people and causing unbelievable damage.
Immediately, I decided to make my way to the vicinity of Koker, a village
where four years earlier I shot Where Is the Friends House? My concern was to
find out the fate of the two young actors who played in the film but I failed
to locate them. However, there was so much else to see . . . I was observing
the efforts of people trying to rebuild their lives in spite of their material and
emotional sufferings. The enthusiasm for life that I was witnessing gradually
changed my perspective. The tragedy of death and destruction grew paler and
paler. Towards the end of the trip, I became less and less obsessed by the two
boys. What was certain was this: more than 50,000 people had died, some
of whom could have been boys of the same age as the two who acted in my
film (the two boys at the end of this film may be taken as substitutes for the

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 Introduction 25

original pair). Therefore, I needed a stronger motivation to go on with the

trip. Finally, I felt that perhaps it was more important to help the survivors
who bore no recognizable faces, but were making every effort to start a new
life for themselves under very difficult conditions and in the midst of an envi-
ronment of natural beauty that was going on with its old ways as if nothing
had happened. Such is life, it seemed to tell them, go on, seize the days . . .
(quoted in Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, 92–3)

12. Elena’s wider discussion of the trilogy in The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami is
invaluable (see 92–117).
13. Nancy, The Evidence of Film, 26.
14. Lippard, ‘Disappearing into the Distance and Getting Closer All the
Time’.
15. I have borrowed this phrase from Robert Sinnerbrink and his excellent
New Philosophies of Film.
16. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §420; 107e.
17. See Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 100.
18. Cavell, The World Viewed, 22. Rothman – who writes on Cavell on film but
who is arguably (and perhaps for this reason) one of the most effective
interpreters of his philosophy of scepticism – puts it like this:

The ‘unhinging of our consciousness from the world’ is a historical event

and also a mythical event, like the biblical fall from grace, the social contract
(or, for that matter, Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage). Picture it as a spiritual and
psychological and political cataclysm that presents us with a new fact, or a
new consciousness of an old fact, about our condition as human beings. We
now feel isolated by our subjectivity. It is our subjectivity, not a world that we
objectively apprehend, that appears present to us. (‘Film, Modernity, Cavell’,
320)

19. Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 245.

20. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 241.
21. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 241.
22. Rothman and Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed, 261.
23. Cavell, The World Viewed, 188.
24. This chimes with a claim from Philipp Schmerheim: that “the very
process of filmmaking as well as the ontological constitution of the
film medium already raises questions about the relation between the so-
called ‘reality’ of filmic worlds and the (physical) reality their creator and
spectators are a part of” (Skepticism Films, 8). Alongside this ontological

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 26 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

claim, Schmerheim offers another explanation for contemporary mani-

festations of the sceptical impulse in cinema, arguing they are responses
to “the manipulative power of digital technology, computer-generated
imagery, and comprehensive control of worldwide information flows”
(11).
25. André Bazin gives voice to this intuition in one of his remarks on paint-
ing: “No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to
an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast
a shadow of doubt over the image” (‘The Ontology of the Photographic
Image’, 12).
26. For a survey of various attempts at developing such an account in the
philosophy of photography, see Costello and Phillips, ‘Automatism,
Causality, and Realism’.
27. Cavell, Contesting Tears, 90.
28. Cavell, The World Viewed, 189.
29. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility’, 255 (original emphasis).
30. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility’, 255.
31. The experimental philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel is interested in the
vagaries and inaccuracies of the reports we make of our subjective
experiences. In ‘Do People still Report Dreaming in Black and White?’
Schwitzgebel tried to replicate findings from studies in the 1940s and
1950s which showed people reported dreaming in black and white, and
found an increase in reports of coloured dreams. Instead of taking the
reports at face value, however, he concludes that subjects must be mis-
taken about this feature of their dreams. Whether this is right or not, the
change calls out for explanation.
32. Sebald, Vertigo, 8.
33. Baggini argues for this in ‘Alien Ways of Thinking’, his sympathetic yet in
some ways highly critical review of Mulhall’s On Film. He writes:

Film, like philosophy, can represent reality to us truthfully in such a way as

to make us understand it better or more accurately than before. Film can
achieve this through fictions which can include non-literal modes of repre-
sentation such as metaphor, whereas philosophy usually achieves the same
goal through more literal modes of description.

34. Goodenough develops such an understanding of film-philosophy in his

introduction to his Film as Philosophy collection. One of his examples is

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 Introduction 27

Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, which he claims refutes Cartesian

scepticism “not by telling us, not by demonstrating the falsity of a propo-
sition involved or the invalidity of a logical move, but by showing us, by
showing us solipsism in action” (‘A Philosopher Goes to the Cinema’,
25).
35. See Philosophy Goes to the Movies, which Falzon bills as “an introduction
to philosophy that turns to films in order to illustrate and discuss philo-
sophical ideas and themes” (1).
36. See their Philosophy through Film, which introduces a series of problems
in philosophy on the basis of the idea that “a film . . . may be used to
present philosophical positions and arguments in a way that is both rigor-
ous and entertaining” (2).
37. This is how Baggini understands the philosophical power of Kurosawa’s
Rashomon. He claims the film

demonstrates the possibility of what might, simply described, seem impos-

sible, and in showing it in the context of a story that is all too believable
– all-too human in its moral and emotional projection, fallibility, and self-
serving bias – it provides evidence that this is actually the way the world is.
(‘Alien Ways of Thinking’)

38. Baggini writes: “Philosophy thus says while film shows, its form of
showing being distinct from more literal forms, such as demonstration”
(‘Alien Ways of Thinking’). Goodenough puts it similarly in reference to
Blade Runner:

Film leads us into the lives of the replicants and the humans, and makes us
realise that the former are closer to our real life than the latter, and thus it
tells us something about ourselves and our world. (It approaches the problem
cinematically via Wittgenstein’s insistence on showing rather than telling.) (‘A
Philosopher Goes to the Cinema’, 23)

39. This is clear enough in Goodenough’s account of Blade Runner:

Blade Runner does not just make us intellectually aware that the replicants
satisfy many possible conditions for personhood. Rather, by sharing this
portion of their lives, by seeing their quest for life, the way they relate to each
other, by comparing it with Deckard’s job of termination, we must inevitably
come to feel for them, anger, fear, lust at one particular point, and, at the end,
perhaps a profound pity and admiration . . . The film allows us to perceive

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 28 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

and to feel, to experience what is happening at a deeper and more persuasive

level than any mere written account could manage. (‘A Philosopher Goes to
the Cinema’, 4; original emphasis)

40. For Livingston, “some film-makers indeed use the cinematic medium to
express philosophical ideas of sufficient complexity to be of interest in
the context of philosophical teaching and research” (Cinema, Philosophy,
Bergman). He cashes out this claim with a detailed and quite compel-
ling reading of Bergman’s project in later chapters (see 125–200). For a
powerful critique of Livingston’s intentionalism, see Sinnerbrink, New
Philosophies of Film, 129–31.
41. Wartenberg writes: “When I say that a film philosophizes, it is really a
shorthand expression for stating that the film’s makers are the ones who
are actually doing philosophy in/on/through film” (Thinking on Screen,
12). However, he also allows that film is capable of carrying out a type of
thinking that is specifically cinematic. In particular he argues films have
the ability to set up thought experiments, writing for instance of “film’s
deployment of widely recognized and quite standard philosophical tech-
niques – most notably the thought experiment – to justify seeing the
artform as capable of philosophical thinking” (136).
42. In Philosophy of the Film, which was written well before the current wave
of scholarship on film-philosophy, Ian Jarvie puts this slightly differ-
ently. He argues that a film’s philosophical content is not to be found
on the level of authorial intention but rather in the culturally inherited
philosophical presuppositions that are unwittingly installed into it via its
makers. He writes:

Why do writers, directors, etc. put philosophy on to film? The answer is

simple: they do not. Philosophy puts itself in their films. That is to say, behind
such a work there always lurk the personal or cultural presuppositions about
reality, morality, etc. implicit in our thought and action. One job of philoso-
phy is to expose and to criticize those presuppositions. (26)

43. See Cox and Levine, Thinking Through Film, 13–15.

44. Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, 4–5.
45. Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, 5.
46. Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, 23.
47. Mulhall, On Film, 3–4.
48. See Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 141.
49. Mulhall, On Film, 89.

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 Introduction 29

50. Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall, 112. Sinnerbrink finds another way
out of Livingston’s dilemma, insisting (surely with great plausibility) that
film-philosophers can be understood not as paraphrasing the philosophi-
cal content of films, but as advancing philosophical interpretations of them
(see New Philosophies of Film, 132–5).
51. Mulhall, On Film, 90.
52. Cavell, Contesting Tears, xii.
53. This is a way of differentiating my account of film-philosophy from more
expansive and pluralist accounts developed by authors such as Sinnerbrink
and Steven Rybin. For Sinnerbrink, resistance to the idea of film-philosophy
is indicative of a “too-narrow or reductive conception of what counts as
philosophy”, and an overly “hierarchical” understanding of the “relation-
ship between philosophy and art” (New Philosophies of Film, 117). Following
Mulhall, he argues films can contribute to philosophy through

questioning, reflecting, or disclosing through vivid redescription salient

aspects of a situation, problem or experience, typically through the artful use
of narrative, performance or cinematic presentation (montage, performance,
visual style or metafilmic reflection). Film contributes to questioning or
rendering problematic the background assumptions that we draw upon in
framing specific arguments or making philosophical claims, whether on gen-
erally recognized themes or on what we might understand film to be. (133)

While I find these claims compelling, my account of film-philosophy

insists more trenchantly on medium specificity. On Sinnerbrink’s
account, it appears it is not easy to draw a strong or qualitative distinction
between the philosophical contributions of films and the philosophical
contributions of (say) novels, insofar as both can “disclose novel aspects
of experience, question given elements of our practices, and open up
new paths for thinking” (141). This is not to say that Sinnerbrink neglects
medium: for him it seems that cinema’s immersive and affective quali-
ties grant it particular philosophical powers too, by making its world-
disclosures more engaging and so potentially more transformative. Once
again, I find nothing to disagree with here (except to say that novels can
also be immersive and engaging). But I am arguing that cinema has a
distinctive philosophical propensity born of its connection to problems of
knowledge, and its tendency to provoke and rebuke sceptical theorising:
a deflationary propensity that can work in concert with the transforma-
tive aesthetic and philosophical potentials of works of art in general.
Rybin develops an account of the philosophical significance of

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 30 Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

Malick’s cinema in similar terms. Citing Sinnerbrink’s claim that Malick’s

work calls upon film-philosophers “to experiment with the aesthetic
disclosure of alternative ways of thinking and feeling, acting and being,
in our relations with nature and culture” (Sinnerbrink, ‘Re-enfranchising
Film’, 43; quoted in Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, xix),
Rybin writes: “In Malick’s films, traces of other possible ways of doing
and making, and of thinking and feeling, open up for his dedicated
viewers an engagement with the philosophical ways of thinking and
feeling and doing and making, that we bring to the screen” (xix). It is
notable that, in setting up these claims, Rybin weakens the condition of
medium specificity. He writes:

Works of film-philosophy almost always buttress their analyses of favoured

filmmakers with speculation on the nature of the film medium, and philo-
sophical aesthetics, more generally, often aims at situating artistic mediums
through their timeless essences. But film, an inherently unstable object,
resists such efforts. (xvii)

As I argue in the next paragraph, there should be no problem with

making strong claims regarding medium specificity while accepting that
media ‘essences’ are not timeless, stable, or ahistorical.
54. For a fascinating treatment of these and related intuitions, see Doane,
‘The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity’. Doane writes:

indexicality has become today the primary indicator of cinematic specific-

ity, that elusive concept that has played such a dominant role in the history
of film theory’s elaboration, serving to differentiate film from the other arts
(in particular, literature and painting) and to stake out the boundaries of a
discipline. (129)

55. Falzon, Philosophy Goes to the Movies, 12. In this respect, Kiarostami’s films
are unlike those of someone like Ingmar Bergman, which (as Livingston
shows quite convincingly) can be read as the creations of a filmmaker
who was concerned to articulate a particular philosophical worldview
(see Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, 125–60).
56. This is to say that Kiarostami’s movies

‘resist theory’, evoking an experience that is aesthetic and reflective . . . Such

films communicate an experience of thinking that resists philosophical trans-
lation or paraphrase; thus they are films where we encounter what I am calling

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 Introduction 31

cinematic thinking in its most intensive and dramatic forms. (Sinnerbrink, New
Philosophies of Film, 142)

57. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §118; 41e.

58. Turvey, ‘Is Scepticism a “Natural Possibility” of Language?’ 119.
59. Wittgenstein, quoted in Turvey, ‘Is Scepticism a “Natural Possibility” of
Language?’ 118.
60. Turvey, ‘Is Scepticism a “Natural Possibility” of Language?’ 118.
61. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 45.
62. Turvey, ‘Is Scepticism a “Natural Possibility” of Language?’ 123.
63. Conant, ‘Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein’, 63–4.
64. Conant, ‘The Method of the Tractatus’, 423.
65. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §71; 29e.
66. Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 82.
67. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §128; 43e.
68. Mulhall, On Film, 88.
69. Cavell, ‘Declining Decline’, 263.
70. Wittgenstein:

we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypo-
thetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and
description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light,
that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. (Philosophical
Investigations, §109; 40e)

71. The film had a precedent for Kiarostami: Where is My Romeo?, a short he
made for the 2007 Cannes-commissioned anthology To Each his Own
Cinema. This film uses the same technique, yet here the women are appar-
ently watching the final scene from Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.
72. Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories, 5.
73. The filmography included in Abbas Kiarostami, the book co-authored by
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, concludes in 2003; the
one included in Elena’s The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami concludes in 2002;
Nancy’s study of the Iranian director was completed in January of the
year 2000; few academic articles have been published to date on Shirin
and Certified Copy; at the time of writing none have been published focus-
sing on Five or Like Someone in Love; the only article focussing exclusively
on ABC Africa was an earlier version of the chapter included in this book.
74. Kiarostami’s cinema has often been read in neo-realist terms. For one
important recent example, see Weinberger, ‘Neorealism, Iranian Style’.

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