Driving into the Void: Kiarostamis Taste of Cherry

By Hamish Ford

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

> Introduction: Responding to a cinema half empty

Ta'm e guilass/Taste of Cherry

When we tell a story, we tell but one story, and each member of the audience, with a peculiar capacity to imagine things, hears but one story. But when we say nothing, its as if we said a great number of things. ... Its necessary to envision an unfinished and incomplete cinema so that the spectator can intervene and fill the void, the lacks. ~ Abbas Kiarostami The evidence of cinema is that of the existence of a look through which a work can give back to itself its own real and the truth of its enigma (which is admittedly not its solution), a world moving of its own motion, without a heaven or wrapping, without fixed moorings or suspension, a world shaken, trembling, as the winds blow through it Cinema is truly the art in any case the technique of a world that suspends myths. Even if it has put itself in the service of myths, at the limit, it finishes by taking them away ~ Jean-Luc Nancy1

Abbas Kiarostamis films are deeply paradoxical in their impact when it comes to
both spectatorial affect and critical response. In one sense, the great Iranian directors work can be seen as passive in declining to offer us the kind of narrative, thematic, emotional, conceptual, psychological or subjective material we often expect a feature film to more fully provide. However, this apparent modesty, or even variable sense of lack, is far from benign. Rather, it is driven by quietly impactful lacunae that enable and generate space for a rather more active and violent force the challenges of which are faced and co-authored by the viewer. Here lies the films insidiously radical aesthetic form and experiential affectivity, the impact of which creeps up on us, curls back, and lays out alternative possibilities at every increasingly vertiginous turn possibilities then undermined by another elliptical image, cut, or sequence. Clearly, ellipses in Kiarostamis films 2

do not work in the name of linear narrative economy as with classical narrative form. Rather than the transparent glue that holds the narrative and believable fictional world together with what would otherwise be a spatially disparate and perceptually disorienting series of shots, in this cinema between-shot holes and within-shot stretching make up the films destabilising power and generative energy, their difficulty and creative challenge. Defining non-commercial diasporic and what she calls intercultural cinema in her book The Skin of the Film, Laura Marks writes of a choice in which the image is held open to those possibilities of expression that are both threatening and enabling through what she calls moments of thinness, suspension, and waiting. Such moments, however, are not encounters with a dreadful void but with a full and fertile emptiness. (Marks, 2000, p. 29) While the films Marks addresses are mainly produced and consumed outside the art cinema networks of production and distribution through which Kiarostamis work has largely appeared in the West (his gallery installation videos are another matter), her words effectively describe the combined challenge and opportunity it offers. Viewers of Kiarostamis films are confronted by a sense of threatening and enabling openness caused by a paradoxically substantial thinness and emphasis on surface where clear depth and content are often expected, produced by spatial and temporal conditions that enforce waiting and confusion. It is also notable that, like many of Kiarostamis own most ardent supporters, Marks stresses fertile emptiness over a dreadful void. As this article will go on to suggest, however, the spectators enlarged role with Kiarostamis cinema is arguably generated by a quietly affective and layered violence that in enabling initial and ongoing viewerfilm participation also constantly threatens afresh to unravel the particular idea/film being forged or gleaned, experienced or co-created. Since the 1990s, a select but vocal group of world cinema critics in the West have addressed and celebrated the formal and perceptual challenges of Kiarostamis films. It is largely on such grounds that his work has often been seen as demonstrating the ongoing viability of challenging feature-film cinema, with Europe perhaps no longer at the forefront of innovation.2 However, despite frequently comparing Kiarostamis films to those of Europes art-house heyday (most commonly Italian Neorealism, but sometimes aspects of 1960s modernism as well), there are often notable differences between the critical reception of formally and conceptually challenging Western cinema and Kiarostamis work. It is my experience that the more confronting impact and potential outcomes of the 3

Iranian directors films as prompted by their formal challenges are commonly papered over in critical accounts so as to assert a life-affirming cinema in a way that offers us positive lessons or meditations, providing an ethically and even spiritually heightened mode of thought and experience. And all this, importantly, as emanating from a non-Western, plus when it comes to mainstream media and politics commonly demonised source. Writing of some philosophers who profess rationality and dialectical method, Nietzsche suggests in Beyond Good and Evil that at bottom they are driven by an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of inspiration most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen (1966, p. 12). Such a tradition may find one of its diverse incarnations in the world of film interpretation, especially when it comes to the affirmational, liberal discourse resulting from a common desire to see depth of a loosely spiritual or metaphysical kind in the work of non-Western filmmakers. This article is motivated both by a desire to write about Kiarostamis Ta'm e guilass/Taste of Cherry (Iran/France, 1996), which I consider to be one of the richest and most remarkable films to have emerged in the last three decades, and by a kind of cognitive dissonance experienced when consulting the Anglophone critical literature devoted to it. There are, naturally, critical responses I find exceptional, most particularly Jean-Luc Nancys 2001 book devoted to Kiarostamis work, Lvidence du Film, which provides the epigraph quotes above. I shall regularly return below to draw from Nancys text, which is both fascinated by the cultural and aesthetic otherness of Kiarostamis cinema and yet also performs diverse and layered if often impressionistic readings of the films, all the while maintaining an interest in the way their radical openness brings forth a hidden violence when it comes to myth and belief, making for a cinema without a heaven or wrapping (Nancy, 2001, p. 44). Another source that emphasises very effectively the destabilising power of Kiarostamis work without prescriptively closing off its subversions is an article on Iranian cinema by Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn entitled The Open image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema. Originally appearing in a 2003 issue of Screen and since republished, this essay offers a very useful account of the relationship between post-war European and recent Iranian cinema, stressing the heritage of what the authors call poetic 4

realism. The result, Chaudhuri and Finn suggest, is an open image that while offering myriad different interpretative potential also subtly undermines efforts to affirm one determinate narrative meaning so that the films, particularly their endings very importantly, as I shall argue below always escape any singular hermeneutics (2003, p. 42). In what follows, I pursue where such questions may lead in Kiarostamis most radical work. Such an analysis hopefully enables a celebration of Taste of Cherrys underlying force, its conceptual and aesthetic impact and subversions, in the process noting some consistent patterns of interpretation within English-language critical responses that no matter how high quality, genuinely well intentioned and useful the given example might often be often come across as presenting Kiarostami and his films through the mist of ethico-political and spiritual desires or dreams.

> 1. Ethically enlightened vision, or abstract provocation

Zire darakhatan zeyton/Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami, France/Iran, 1994)

Bad ma ra khahad bord/The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami, Iran/ France, 1999)

Kiarostamis cinema offers immense interpretive possibility. The films thereby, however, also in theory at least provide a different kind of pressure on criticism to demonstrate an increased heterogeneity of responses. Taste of Cherrys remarkable gaps enable enormous room in which the viewer can indeed is quietly yet resolutely asked to follow through and co-author different ideas and entire films. Following the words contained in the epigraph quote above, the filmmaker details this process by highlighting how the void, the lacks can force the viewer into a new, more openly creative role that transcends singular authorship (Kiarostami in Nancy, 2001, p. 88). The radical and ambitious implications, Kiarostami suggests, are to see a diversity of recounted films:

My belief is more in a form of art that seeks to create differences, a divergence amongst people, rather than a convergence with everyone in agreement. This way, theres adversity in the thinking and reactions. Each one constructs his or her own film, whether one fits in with my film, or defends it, or opposed oneself to it (ibid.).3 While Kiarostamis Western admirers regularly highlight his films potential for creative co-authorship, the role of the auteur remains strongly intact. Critics typically treat the director himself, within and beyond the given film, as a sagelike author who holds the key to such elusive films ultimate meanings and purpose. Written accounts of this cinema are thereby both less diverse than one might expect and dont necessarily emphasise the authors self-limiting role (despite his real-world emphasising of it in interviews). If the spectator plays an immensely important part in shaping and coauthoring Kiarostamis films in a genuine act of liberation away from the singular author-God, this enlarged responsibility is intimately bound up with a quietly affective and layered violence that enables such initial and ongoing egalitarian spectator-film relations yet that also constantly threatens afresh to unravel the idea/film a particular viewer is forging, gleaning, experiencing or cocreating. This is never clearer than in critical interpretation of the films many remarkable endings. It is commonly asserted within the critical literature, for example, that in the famous final image of Zire darakhatan zeyton/Through the Olive Trees (1994) an increasingly long shot in which a teenage boy runs into a grove of olive trees, then a clearing, in pursuit of a girl with whom he has been trying to speak throughout the preceding film that the boy at least succeeds in conversing with the girl for the first time, or even that he also attains some verbal assertion of love. Such readings of the final scene, featuring in every response to the film I have read (usually accompanied by heavy emphasis on the fact that one of the many strands making up the labyrinthine narrative of the preceding film concerns the dogged love of a poor boy for a girl outside his class) are exemplified by Spanish writer Alberto Elena in his book on the director.4 He argues that the films formal layering, notably its very complex reflexivity both within the film, which is first introduced on screen by a film director, and beyond it via many references to the other two films comprising Kiarostamis so-called Koker trilogy5 should not cloud our basic recognition that the film is above all ... a love story. (Elena, 2005, p. 107) However, overlooking this prescriptive elision of the films reflexive strands, even if we do choose to read Olive Trees and its final image this way, any

positive impetus associated with what becomes a classical denouement should perhaps be also rather troubling, considering all we have seen and not seen. In interview Kiarostami has offered that the final shot of Olive Trees can be understood as a dream-image something quite impossible within the social reality essayed throughout the film (its very impossibility reflecting critically upon the real world) and less ultimately suggestive of an escapist or Romantic movement. As always with Kiarostamis interviews, however, it is important to note the context of the discussion. In keeping with the idea that there is no incorrect reading of the film as the viewer or critic is its very powerful co-author, the director is remarkably receptive to the particular agenda of his conversational partner and their interpretative and ideological predilections. Kiarostami raises the above idea while talking to critic David Walsh, who while himself also downplaying the formalist radicalism of the films through the desire to stress a determinedly secular, socialist reading offers a usefully materialist analysis otherwise quite unusual within Anglopohone Kiarostami commentary. Characteristically, the director proves highly responsive to his questioners line, describing the wilful nature of Through the Olive Trees final image that is in part strikingly inconsistent with what has gone before, concluding the discussion on a cautionary note: [I]f you follow the story you see that the situation in the film is so complex, its not possible for the couple to get together. Because the social norms and customs are very powerful and ingrained, and they cause a problem. But I didnt want to have a very bleak ending to the film. So I added in my own dreamlike ending. Im reminded of this sentence of Jean-Claude Carrires: we should continue dreaming until we change real life to conform to our dreams. So the ending of the film is more dreamlike rather than something that is possible in reality (Kiarostami, qtd. in Walsh, 1994). In the face of such discourses, it is always important to return to the film. I would suggest that in this case we are confronted with an image that is in fact increasingly non-representational, despite having started with an apparently transparent medium shot of two recognisably human figures. Olive Trees final shot is a particularly notable example of what Chaudhuri and Finn call the open image so characteristic of Iranian cinema at its most developed. On the one hand, they argue, such an image performs a universalising gesture by often raising the story to the level of archetype and myth and thereby leaving the specifics of the narrative behind, while at the same time revealing the political implications of what we have seen. Yet on the other, as a result of this 7

move towards abstraction the image also transcends or possibly undermines any singular narratively determinant meaning (Chaudhuri and Finn, 2003, pp. 49-50). Here, I would suggest, the on-screen appearance and form of Olive Trees purported denouement with its final shot is a very tenuous and quietly subversive one indeed. Like the entropic pixels comprising Thomas final blownup photograph of the body in a London park in Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), the human figures at the end that Chaudhuri and Finn see as disappearing into almost invisible dots in the distance (2003, p. 49) for the viewer become minuscule and abstract binary black-and-white specks on an expansive green field. The will to make universalising thematic pronouncements strongly beckons for the critic at such moments, yet we can also try and face the very real material shift into overt abstraction and the possible destruction of referentiality. Once these two dots meet on the field of green, following the few moments in which the characters they are assumed to represent pause to speak despite being no longer clearly human, figuration having been destroyed by temporal and graphic undulation the boy dot starts to run back in our direction, whereupon the film ends. Despite its social drama being finally reduced to or possibly even transcended by a flattened play of pointillism, colour, texture, movement, and stretched space and time (the final shot is very long both in distance and duration, allowing maximum modulation of thematic framing and textural delineation), the film is most commonly described as having a happy ending in the form of rather classical-sounding epistemological and narrative achievement and closure.6 Admiring critics often see other, equally hopeful and even more ambitious readings than those concerning love attained at the end of Kiarostamis films. Perhaps most commonly, we read that the central character experiences some kind of ethical transformation in the final minutes. This is often an urban-based figure associated with the media industries and therefore closer to the directors own cultural and economic class, as well as that of likely most Western viewers watching the film, than the local extras onscreen. Responses to Kiarostamis remarkable 1999 film Bad ma ra khahad bord/The Wind Will Carry Us provide a good example. According to most writing on the film available in English, this film charts the gradual, ethically transformative journey of an initially self-centred TV producer from Tehran named Behzad as a result of his elliptical and frustrated encounters with the people and environment of a remote Kurdish village while he waits we eventually glean for an old woman to die so that his crew can film an exotic local indigenous death ritual. By the final scene, having seemingly missed 8

both death and ritual but snatching some quick photos of the mourners as he flees (his camera crew have already given up waiting and left, taking the filming equipment with them), the protagonist has supposedly learned a valuable lesson in the eyes of prominent critics just as the average viewer, in being more culturally aligned with Behzad than with the mysterious villagers, can also learn something through the filmmakers reflexive rendering of an especially elusive story. Much-quoted French Kiarostami scholar Alain Bergalas account of this conclusion reads, at least in English translation, as the apogee of this kind of reading: The treasure that Behzad jokingly told the boy when they first met that he had come to the village to search for is without a doubt what he has by this time found when he throws the bone into the river. But it was not, of course, what he came looking for. Now he has found a new way of looking at the world, one that is free of all impure motivations and from utilitarian mentality, open to whatever might happen unexpectedly on the uncontrollable fringes of vision, ready to accept the enigma of otherness (Bergala, qtd. in Elena, 2005, p. 159; emphasis added). Bergalas work is not at the periphery of the Kiarostami literature.7 His words exemplify prominent Western critical and scholarly responses to this and other films by the Iranian director that characteristically seek to affix a positive message to what I see as a much more radically ambiguous and subtly subversive cinema. The myriad destabilising formal elements are commonly discussed and engaged for their potential breaking down of unethical, politically conservative, or alienated modern subjectivity, but as somehow not also threatening a supposedly more ethically advanced mode of being-in-the-world that is attained, even if sometimes modestly, by the male protagonist in the final moments. Elena suggests that, taken on its own terms, Taste of Cherry requires a major rethink of what he sees as the positive, lyrical and sensual humanism of Kiarostamis previous work, even suggesting that it might have a corrective effect on our understanding of the directors oeuvre (2005, p. 132). With the films physically intimate yet also psychologically distanced portrayal of its protagonists apparent death-drive through an apparent desire to end his life, Elena writes, the shadow of death opens up wide-ranging philosophical considerations and perhaps shows us the true nature of Kiarostamis concerns (ibid). I certainly agree that Taste of Cherrys genuinely dark tonality, combined with a slippery formal radicalism featuring unrelenting mise-en-scne, should bring about a reassessment of the directors work. But this is less due to the film 9

being starkly different per se, and rather for its more sustained emphasis on elements that are perhaps more easily suppressed or bracketed when it comes to the other films. This caution notwithstanding, and irrespective of Elenas own ultimate reading of the film that veers away from this initial move, it seems that prominent critics have often largely read even this most confronting of Kiarostamis works as they have the others: by seeing an ethically and spiritually enlightening vision, in fact now often via a more metaphysical dimension with the overt treatment of death. In an interview with the filmmaker, the influential US critic and Kiarostami enthusiast David Sterritts line of discussion exemplifies such an approach. So this film also seems to concern a quest to somehow get beyond the physical, he suggests, even if the means have to be very negative, and it relates again to the tension between the material and the spiritual. (2000)8 In writing from the materialist West, critics such as Sterritt and Elena often reference Kiarostami as an inheritor of Persias spiritual and progressive, ethically inquiring artistic and philosophical traditions. Throughout his book, Elena sets out to be particularly sensitive to this Persian context long predating the present-day Iranian nation-state, in opposition to what he says has often been a too general and Eurocentric reading of Kiarostamis films. He also, however, importantly asserts that the director unmistakably advocates the need to transcend the weight of tradition and a paralysing social inertia. (2005, p. 77) Such emphasis and subsequent caution brings to the surface a rather tricky but hardly unfamiliar problem facing Western critics, a kind of liberal Orientalism. Constructive emphasis on cultural context can also bring with it a desire to see and affirm cultural verities much older, more stable and quite possibly enlightened than our own, and applied much more generally than we would if examining an object of Western culture. Cultural tradition and liberal politics can be the dual, sometimes contradictorily desired qualities sought in foreign, non-Western films. If some writers assert the ethico-political potential of Taste of Cherry for its subversive in the sense of being progressive properties, the very complex and ambiguous nature of the films treatment of metaphysical belief itself is far less often followed through in such discussions.9 While the films subversion of the things a liberal critic wishes to see undermined is drawn out effectively in many written interpretations, there are some progressive but also perhaps spiritual or even religious values such readings dont seem to want undermined.

10

> 2. Undermining space, the gaze, politics

Ta'm e guilass/Taste of Cherry10

Kiarostamis use of cars is central to his increasingly particular treatment and spatial staging of relations and themes that, despite what initially looks like a starkly minimalist canvass, exponentially resonate across personal, sociopolitical, cultural and philosophical planes. The filmmakers 2001 film Ten is the minimalist-yet-maximalist apogee of this in being entirely comprised of ten singleshot scenes recorded by a DV camera mounted on the dashboard of the middleclass protagonists Land Rover as she drives through Tehran. Kiarostamis cinematic fascination with cars is more than a creative way to get around the issue of how to show authentic human interaction between male and female characters within a notionally private space and still abide by post-revolutionary Iranian cinemas censorship restrictions when it comes to the representation of women.11 This culminates again in Ten where we finally get a genuine female protagonist in a Kiarostami film who can be shown believably dealing with family and friends while still wearing a headscarf because technically in public. The car, in which many of us spend a lot of time, is a quintessentially banal and uninterestingly quotidian object, machine, and environment. Yet at the same time, it is also very strange. Reaching a pre-Ten extreme in Kiarostamis cinema with Taste of Cherry, which utilises the car from both inside and out to generate a notably more 11

complex orchestration of the gaze and perspective, this is a uniquely liminal zone. Neither truly private nor public, the space of the car is in this film characterised by a greatly exaggerated physical intimacy associated with the former yet as operating within as a partially sealed-off presence, and voyeuristically gazing upon, the latter through the cinema-like frame of the windscreen. Banal yet forcing us to watch the world and sometimes our own relationships with and within it afresh, the car in Kiarostamis films is at once a material reality, a slippery private/public zone, and a metaphorically generative yet also paradoxical space. Certainly in one sense at least, Mr Badiis Land Rover in Taste of Cherry encapsulates one mans horrible alienation and hermetic isolation from the world in housing his very grim mission and enabling a metaphorically rich journey through the dusty hills outside Tehran. Yet at the same time it is a highly contingent site of intimate, very awkward but also potentially enlivening, social interaction. The strongly contrasting nature of the claustrophobic shots taken within the car (even where we can see the expansive countryside through the windows we are aware of the confronting closeness of the human being before us in front of the camera), and the long shots showing it as a camouflaged earthycoloured mass moving through the landscape, illustrates Kiarostamis tendency to reduce or even transcend human drama by staging it as abstract aesthetic event. (In this sense, such long shots are related to the final image of Through the Olive Trees.) Combined with a remarkable but entirely undemonstrative performance by non-professional actor Homayoun Ershadi (a friend of the directors) as Badii, this means that although frequently sharing a very constricted space with him, the viewer spends many long minutes at a stretch looking upon a protagonist from very close quarters that nonetheless remains psychologically inaccessible. This is emphasised in the film with every cut enhanced, rather than lessened, through repetition from the claustrophobic interior car shots to exterior long shots. Inside and outside, (pseudo-) private and public, personal-dramatic and world-abstract: such apparent contrasts mark the film throughout, in turn collapsing them, punctuated forcefully by Kiarostamis trademark elliptical editing. With our protagonist largely mysterious, what kind of world do we see beyond the car both through the Land Rover windows and from long-distance shots? For most of Taste of Cherry, as many critics emphasise, Badii drives through physically and figuratively barren looking land, as he traverses what looks like circular mazes of roads across dusty foothills neither urban nor properly rural, 12

neither fully industrial nor agrarian. In their analysis of the film in light of Gilles Deleuzes account of post-war European cinema, Chaudhuri and Finn describe the way Taste of Cherry is a prime example of Iranian cinemas interest in what they call the labyrinthine topology of the liminal space where equally barren city and rural environ meet The circuitous quest [of Badiis Land Rover] makes even the most concrete places fleetingly uncanny both for the character and for the viewer. (2003, p. 45) The genuine ambiguity of this doubly liminal space both inside the car (in its murky private/public dissolutions) and outside (neither city nor country, but also unstable in terms of texture and line, including figureground distinctions) makes for genuine challenges to criticism. In light of its perspectival challenges, how to describe and analyse what we see in the film the vision of a world it shows without overly limiting Taste of Cherrys impact? For influential US critic and long-time Kiarostami supporter Jonathan Rosenbaum, the relentless exterior mise-en-scne is crucial for the way it marks our sense of solitude with an equally strong and unbroken sense of being in the world. Consequently, though this film unfolds inside the most private space imaginable the dark recesses of an individual consciousness bidding farewell to life it perceives life itself almost exclusively in terms of public and social space, which is the space not only of the car on the road but of an audience in the cinema (2003, pp. 31-32). This operation, wherein the thematic suggestiveness of hermetic solitude is charted on the field of social and worldly space, both on-screen and spectatorially, comes together first with the cars gradual meanderings and then the final, very reflexive sequence of the film (to which I return below). The public is first gazed upon in the film from within Badiis space as we accompany him for a long time while he cruises around looking for someone to help him in a still mysterious mission, through the protection of his personal screen-window. The private/public distinction is then further complicated with a series of tenuous, and tense, fragmentary conversations Badii tries to start with people outside the safety of the car through the window. A more integrated, if very claustrophobic, social arena is then established within the artificial, hermetic space of the car interior itself, the usual quasi-domestic nature of which is opened up (despite the private, hidden trauma of its driver) once Badii lures the first passenger into his domain, a nervous young soldier with whom he tries to bond. The paradoxical form of the films address that Rosenbaum describes the worldly staging of this unique internal drama is here first calibrated. It will only concentrically 13

expand, fold back, and generate layers of complexity as the film develops. (In the films final sequence, the social-world staging and process, and possibly even liberation, can be seen as imagined in cinematic terms, as Rosenbaum suggests, so that the film charts a gradual traversal through material and increasingly virtual public space.) Productively opening up Taste of Cherrys complex formal and conceptual layering, in one reading at least the above approach as exemplified by Rosenbaums evocative writing can encourage the positioning of the film within a long history of art cinema in which characters and their psychological states completely colour our view of the on-screen world itself. While Rosenbaums stress on real-world space as the site on which the story unfolds is important, what depth generates the energy of Badiis crisis? In fact, more than denying us psychological access to his thoughts or problems through performance, Badii is barely a character at all. Yet we have a thematic presentation, somehow finding appropriate performative and filmic form, which is nonetheless about interior crisis as such while showing us a resolutely outside or material image-world. Nancys comments when describing the lack of psychological depth given to the figure-characters in Kiarostamis 1991 film Zendegi va digar hich/And Life Goes On... are very applicable here: Interiority is avoided, it is voided: the locus of the gaze is not a subjectivity, it is the locus of the camera as camera obscura which is not, this time, an apparatus of reproduction, but a locus without a real inside... The image, then, is not the projection of a subject, its neither its representation, not its phantasm: but it is this outside of the world where the gaze loses itself in order to find itself as gaze (2001, p. 64). The viewer is left with a seemingly contradictory presentation of inwardness without a compensatory and hence grounding or causational sense of onscreen subjective psychology. With no protagonist with whom we are asked or encouraged to relate, the address becomes abstract and elusive. This is made all the more powerful and confronting for interioritys having been avoided or, perhaps even more appropriately, voided a process that turns the gaze away from the notion of a singular subjectivity. Again the viewer is offered the role of supplying her or his part of the event by filling in the negative weight of interiority as suggested by the evocative yet elusive images, which are even more affective for their abstraction and reflexivity in making use of the films autonomous gaze. This is the key, I believe, to its subtly radical presentation of dark thematic elements: the refusal of a transparent, privileged engagement with 14

Badiis psyche as means to existential or dramatic interest. Instead we have a slippery, quietly reflexive and epistemologically disempowering objective gaze showing us the outside of the world the colours, texture and shapes within which lies the rendering of a highly abstracted interior. For Nancy, this drama of the gaze without a clear owner or psychologically persuasive author becomes very important as played out through the framing of the gaze/s within the car space in Taste of Cherry, the immensely reflexive dimensions of which are made clear when he calls it the looking box in conversation with the filmmaker: The car window doubles the screen. Theres also the drivers gaze when driving ... very often looking at the road, straight in front of him. And your camera shows that this man is speaking to the person next to him while looking in front of him in a direction where we cant see anything. Even when the passengers are looking at the driver, there are few exchanged glances, no shot reverse-shot (Nancy, 2001, p. 92). Emphasising the gaze without clear on-screen subjective intentionality, and yet the mechanics of which are demonstrated for us on screen as involving a screen that means people do not tend to look at each other but rather at the real world out there, opens up the issue of through whose gaze we are seeing. Kiarostami responds to Nancys above comments by directly invoking the viewers role: Its a way, for me, to appeal to the viewer. Two people are acting together, but what about our gaze? (in Nancy, 2001, p. 92) The knotty issue of how to see and explain Taste of Cherrys troubled protagonist, emphasising his problems through existential interpretations or using his journey as a metaphor by which to read motifs in Persian art and culture, has caused interesting tensions beneath the surface of the critical literature. This is particularly so when it comes to discussion of the films presentation of a privileged and myopic central character very familiar from within various national art cinema traditions. Critic Michelle Goldberg even seeks to interpret, or cynically justify, the film as a lovingly mocking gaze on the moody existentialism of Western cinema. ... [It] so fully encapsulates what American audiences expect of foreign films that it seems almost quaint until its ironic last sequence. (1998) Although as always with Kiarostamis work this is a feasible, if certainly glib, reading, to take Badiis apparent self-obsessed gaze as a starting and indeed end point, no matter how ironically we can read its framing, is a serious limiting of the film, avoiding its disempowered rendering of said gaze (and thereby potentially its psychological and political privileging) from the start. It is 15

precisely those which appear on the surface to be hermetic stories and images that often reveal the richest and more complex historical makers, irrespective of purported authorial intention. Laura Marks writes that intercultural films rely on idiosyncratic, personal narratives, because these provide a slim thread back into the strata of history. (2000, p. 30) More importantly, perhaps, a focus on Badiis self-obsession also risks sustaining an extremely imprecise description of the films enactment of the gaze as exercised, interrogated and subverted by Kiarostamis camera. Even when apparently sharing Badiis point-of-view, looking through his windscreen, or the gaze of his passengers in the car as they talk to him, the viewer becomes gradually aware of a predominant filmic self-consciousness Nancys locus of the camera as camera obscura that entirely transcends, and problematises, any psychological privileging of the protagonists gaze, and therefore internal processes. In addition to a lack of over-the-shoulder shots typical of the classical shot reverse-shot format alluded to above by Nancy, with the characters rarely if ever appearing to look at each other, we are also usually denied images that seem to be conceivably through the protagonists eyes. As Laura Mulvey (2002, pp. 258-260) and others have pointed out, one dogged formal-thematic consistency in Kiarostamis cinema is an overall denial of the gaze as we are used to being given it, a refusal of protagonistic control of vision and access to vision per se, hence a blocking of knowledge and power over what we watch and therefore what we claim to know about what it is that we see. For Nancy, while Kiarostamis cinema disempowers the epistemologically penetrative gaze, this does not work to merely invoke off-screen space: When we meet someone, he is coming from somewhere and going somewhere. But those places, over there, remain out of reach, always beyond a new hill, a new bend in the road. Yet they are not really offscreen: there is no cinema less inclined to exit the screen or the field than Kiarostamis. Everything gathers in the lenss field in a precise way: a tight, almost narrow framing, focusing ones attention, or a wider framing and long shots filling the image with objects in the distance that are sufficiently removed and facing us so that there is no need to step back (Nancy, pp. 50-52). The confusion, Nancy suggests, is because Kiarostamis screens bear much less resemblance to a theatre displaying scenes from a table or a demonstration than to a hollowed-out passageway where pictures slip through, a passe-partout [passkey] in framing, or a device allowing still pictures to pass through a slide 16

projector. (Ibid, p. 42) Innovative formal elements of Taste of Cherry and other Kiarostami films, wherein everyday space is filmed in a way that seriously decentres and undermines the gaze, have been mined extensively by critics for political and ethical precepts to match. If Kiarostami problematises the gaze in its traditional voyeuristic function and pleasures, his films constitute not only aesthetic but also potentially political subversion. However, to lean too heavily on a politically desiring hermeneutics may in fact inadvertently limit the films impact upon political questions and assumptions. This can occur through a kind of prescribed position that seeks to assert that this is a socially engaged cinema, the critic continuing a war of words with both Iranian and Western critics who describe Kiarostami as merely making escapist and exotic intellectual films for the western festival circuit.12 Even if Taste of Cherry can be read as a subtly political and engaged work, one shouldnt have to justify such a film through its allegedly progressive (in the US context, liberal) politics. To consistently do so may make its potential impact decidedly more conventional, even bland, when it comes to ethico-political but also aesthetic, conceptual, and philosophical implications. Many critics put a lot of store in the importance of Kiarostamis tendency toward politically imbued auto-critique via his films tendency to feature privileged characters that travel through terrain peopled by much poorer figures and whose initial arrogance and gaze is gradually undermined. Rosenbaum writes that in Taste of Cherry both the film camera and Badiis on-screen Land Rover are middle class instruments of entitlement and access (2003, p. 20). This is certainly a notable thematic aspect of the film. But politically-infused readings of Kiarostamis work often go much further in describing an ethically advanced critique of middle class urban privilege in a poor country taken globally, interpretations that naturally cast Iranian class equivalents and the developed West alike in a very dim light. Michael Price sees this as itself an explanation for Badiis suicidal thoughts, writing that his Western-produced Range Rover is an index of the concept of Occidentosis that has been theorised to entrap and depress the people of Iran, based on the almost unavoidable saturation of western influence. Perhaps Badii puts himself through a modern version of self-flagellation (2001). The most prominent and perhaps rigorous political interpreter of the film is David Walsh. He points out that even if Kiarostami doesnt moralise per se (as some accounts of the work almost make it sound), it is clear that only someone like Badii can materially afford such a journey as he indulges existential anguish in the face 17

of others with much more pressing problems and actual subsistence-related work problems (Walsh, 1998). Irrespective of the extent to which we might concur with this kind of analysis, such interpretations can in fact paradoxically play into the hands of those who claim Kiarostami is a precious, self-obsessed filmmaker. In emphasising auto-critique in the films, assumptions and desired outcomes are easily cemented in particular when it comes to a Western critical address that can come across as at least in part offering a guilt-laden emphasising of the privileged artist-subject protagonist in other words, the character closest to us so that the work can be asserted as politically acceptable. Taking a more integrated and less ethically tortured approach to these questions is Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa. Writing from the perspective of a Persian scholar working in the West, she brings together elements common to more politically anguished readings before going on to question some common assumptions therein. [I]t seems significant, Saeed-Vafa writes, that when Badii lingers in a dusty construction site perhaps to contemplate what it means to be buried hes asked to move by a construction worker. This interaction suggests that his fantasy of hell is the reality of the construction workers job (2003, p. 67). It is clear from his elliptical interactions with the films minor characters, both those who enter his car and commence a discourse and those who exchange a single line of dialogue or merely just a mutually impassive gaze with Badii from outside the car, that everyone has their problems in fact, likely often more pressing and material ones than his, whatever they might be. However, rather than condemn or highlight his privileged position and problems as the ethical and thematic key to the film, Saeed Vafa asserts that Kiarostamis vision of alienation in fact breaks the stereotype of the Western world about Iran whereby it is assumed alienation is entirely a western phenomenon resulting from advanced capitalism (2003, p. 68). Rather than critiquing the kind of self-obsessed mind-set Badii emanates as emblematic of Western-aligned selfishness to be scorned in favour of a more ethically enlightened gaze upon the suffering others that surround him, Saeed-Vafas analysis asserts that with political and class issues taken on board, plus cultural detail and context the myriad challenges of a meaningful life and world are far from limited to western subjects or privileged locals.

18

> 3. Tough time stretching and ellipsis

All of these tensions come together in the remarkable construction-site or, perhaps more accurately, quarry sequence that I see as being at the very heart of Taste of Cherry. The films at first quietly radical formal elements are perhaps most forcefully etched with this near-wordless centrepiece, and then later even more strongly in the transition to the video epilogue. While the famous ending has been extensively analysed by critics and theorists, the quarry scene is never really addressed in any detail. Although such a significantly placed sequence takes up a full 6 minutes of nearly wordless screen time and precedes a massive elliptical cut that jarringly, and only in retrospect, serves to introduce the second major character in the film, critics at best mention all of this in passing. The spatial locale that dominates the scene provides for the films most intense and expressive use of mise-en-scne, working again (like the Land Rover) both as convincing material reality and heavily symbolic space, but now with the interior-exterior opposition or hybrid of the car-world distinction completely overcome, or exploded and confrontingly out in the open. Saeed-Vafa again draws significant and rare attention to the sequence in the process of addressing the tendency for Western viewers to separate the historical-political from the personal-existential. She highlights Kiarostamis metaphorical use of ruins in his work, suggesting depression as familiar in Persian imagery and storytelling but 19

also an image that can be historical as well as personal that evokes a collective memory of destruction brought about imperialistically and internally as well as a sense of despair and loss. (Saeed-Vafa, 2003, p. 59) However, as opposed to the earthquake-devastated countryside in And Life Goes On..., here the ruins are not the result of a specific one-off historical and material catastrophe but rather an association brought about by the dust and on-going construction or maintenance of the vaguely industrial world as abstractly presented in images of an apparently quite pointless or even horrific procedure. Here both space and time are more immediately felt than anywhere else in the film so that Badii and the viewer are faced up close with a distinct and properly vertiginous environment. Sergei Eisenstein once wrote that landscape is a complex bearer of the possibilities of a plastic interpretation of emotions. (Qtd. in Lefebvre, 2006, p. xii) We can certainly read Badiis crisis into the sequence, although its unexplained nature makes this less than entirely satisfying. Rather, and more in keeping with Eisensteins principles, prime human presence and would-be emotional state remain opaque and now even more plastic as projected on and by the surface of this barren world. 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-inthe-world on screen.13 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, reaching a point of self-conscious plasticity. Here are a flood of images more clearly than ever now intimating entropy and earthly material burial (some of which are replicated as stills above): the unusually bold and clear shadow-play on the dust-covered quarry wall of Badiis 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 disappearance of our human figure as the air fills with yellow dust, coming to erase Badii and then the cameras entire field of vision the image at the very top of this article.14 Very powerful as these symbolic elements are, even uncharacteristically forceful and quite explicit for Kiarostamis cinema in many ways, the sequences 20

importance is not limited to its striking evocation of depression and the deathdrive as framed within an environmentally and experientially arid, quasiindustrial world. We are also forced to watch such images, without any ongoing forward movement, for a considerable duration at the slowed-down epicentre of an already very leisurely and narratively miserly film. The sequence thus not only presents a man seemingly at his death-facing nadir and hopelessly detached from humanity, as gazed upon from and within the outside, but also the material of both death and film: time. In offering us this meditation on staring into the abyss as forced by temporality, however, the film doesnt necessarily forego more worldly or political implications. Just as the undeniable truth of time is forced upon both Badii and us in its death-aligning role, the site and interaction of this sequence also thrusts into view the real, ugly materiality or shit of history, ethics and politics upon which all culture is necessarily enabled. As we interpret his movements, the onscreen figure can be seen as coming face-to-face not only with intimate mortality, and perhaps some nihilistic truth, but also the price others and the world itself have had to pay for his privileged existence including, perhaps, the ability and time to perform the kind of crisis he undergoes. The affective materiality in equal partnership with abstract, unrelenting space here is slowness or, more specifically, stretching. It is the scene containing the least narrative justification and movement, where both space and time are even more apparent and impactful. This is due in part to the almost complete absence of dialogue, but also a real expansion of the films tendency towards opening up the confronting space of the film, now without any foreground interest of a face in medium-shot conversing or listening in Badiis car and the thematic discussion contained within the monologues. Gilles Deleuzes notion of the time-image (1989) has offered an influential way to philosophically approach the question of time in films where it is allowed some real power in particular post-war modern filmmaking primarily in Europe, starting with neorealism in Italy then developed by filmmakers such as Antonioni, Resnais, Godard and Ozu in Japan.15 While I dont wish to focus the present analysis to fit Taste of Cherry into the theoretical prism of Deleuzes notion of the time-image, some brief comments can help frame the apparent impact of time as confronted in the quarry sequence by both the on-screen subject and spectator.16 In Deleuzes description, the time-image subject is simultaneously challenged, subverted and energized, ultimately forced into a new kind of thought and engagement with the world. Temporal affect is here not conscious in the 21

cognitive sense; however, neither does the idea invoke the unconscious per se. Deleuze elucidates the kind of thought that time can prompt as not being a hermeneutic process of mechanistic, conscious or dialectical activity allied to cerebral activity and movement, nor one of clear recollection and identity reinforcement.17 While we might feel or see images presenting a kind of depression or devastation in the quarry sequence, we are no closer to Badii or his problems than at any other time in the film. Deleuze writes of the foregrounding of time in the cinema that it creates a [a] purely optical and sound situation [that] does not extend into action, any more than it is induced by an action. It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable. It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities (1989, p. 18). This transforms the subject from doer into seer, so that the character has become a kind of viewer. ... [T]he situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. (Ibid, p. 3) Such newly activated thinking in the face of time here, explicitly, the abyss and death can be seen as occurring via what Deleuze calls monstrous, chaotic, or creative mechanisms (ibid, p. 125), which respond to, partake of, and create in partnership with, temporality. In the audience, presented with Kiarostamis striking space-time images such as the quarry sequence, we can read all this into what we see, but of course it is really our own troubled yet at the same time creative thought processes generating, in partnership with the film as made, such a process. However, while seeming to generate or energize such active and creative thinking, the challenges to its own power and viability such thought brings about, and by extension to the subject that purportedly owns such cerebral machinery, are immense.18 There is a more explicitly phenomenological dimension to the sequence too. French existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenological vision of subject and world dictates that at the centre of consciousness lies an emptiness [that] is observable only at the moment when it is filled by experience. We do not ever see it, so to speak, except marginally. It is perceptible only on the ground of the world (1964, p. 41). Merleau-Ponty offers the paradoxical possibility that the very emptiness can come to be marginally seen on the ground of the world momentarily perceived by the seeking viewer in the world as viewed, energized both by desire and the co-dependent relations of subjects, 22

objects and world. The generative, creative nature of this process in the context of cinema is such that the viewer-subject can feel they have perceived glimpses of a characters (empty) interior consciousness, less through the classical form of close-ups and performed expressivity as via juxtapositions of bodies with places and things: a spatial configuration brought about by yet reaching beyond intentionality. The challenges of a stretched temporality, here a radically teleological version of time that further enforces the eschatalogical thematic and aesthetic force of the quarry sequence, are then doubled or further complicated by an apparently opposite kind of temporal impact. Marking the end of the quarry scene, so rich with affective power and conceptual suggestion, with the off-camera slamming of Badiis passenger-side car door we experience what turns out to be a truly extraordinarily cut. In opposition to the elongated, stretched time of the preceding sequence, here we have the other extreme of a temporality-enforcing image characterised by fragmentation and lacunae. And this cut is one of Kiarostamis boldest ellipses. A quintessential example of the directors deceptively violent formal choices, this single edit as presaged by the enormous slowing down of the prior sequence has a quietly shocking impact such that we seem to have missed the most potentially exciting moment in the film. Even once we later glean that there has been a substantial excision of narrative information the crucial meeting of the second major character and the moment when someone finally agrees to help Badii with a truly macabre quest (to bury his body once he is dead) both left on the metaphorical cutting-room floor the epistemologically destabilising effect of the enormous lacuna is itself then elongated in the proceeding shots. It takes another significant stretch of time before we actually see to whom Badii is now talking as he resumes his four-wheel drive journey across the dusty hills. In a narratively much more violent version of the slightly earlier scene in which we only get to see an Afghani security guard in oblique long shot when he talks to Badii until he has virtually left the film, whereupon we belatedly get a big facial close-up of this very minor character just when we dont expect it as he gazes after Badiis Land Rover driving away, this new and immeasurably more important character isnt even glimpsed in long-shot (remaining invisible in Badiis car) for what seems like an enormously long three minutes. And our for now complete denial of visual access to the crucial new figure is felt all the more through his immediately apparent centrality to the films seemingly rejuvenated

23

narrative logic and drama in the form of a monologue the man begins to regale us with on the soundtrack.

> 4. Beyond humanism

Just as Anglophone critical responses seldom substantively address the quarry sequence, the radically elliptical auditory arrival of the character in the film that will speak the most lines is also only ever really mentioned in passing. This is most notable when compared to the extensive discussion of the ensuing monologue by this man we eventually learn is Bagheri, a Turkish teacher and taxidermist. So with the previous, most destabilising minutes of the long quarry sequence skimmed over in most discussions of the film, Bagheris affirmational taste of cherries speech, nearly always emphasised by critics way beyond its role in terms of screen time, is thus effectively if problematically decontextualised. Overlooked is its crucial placement within the film immediately following the remarkable stretching-and-ellipsis I have described above. Critical accounts that acknowledge Taste of Cherrys dark tonality and philosophical challenge usually do so by means of describing a road necessarily travelled but ultimately transcended by means of Bagheris monologue (often

24

working as a prescriptive pointer to reading the films final sequence). Peter Keough provides a good example when he writes: Taste of Cherry does not resolve the philosophical problem, but [Kiarostami] does provide one of the most harrowing, luminous, and ultimately uplifting depictions of the human spirit in extremis on film. ... And the taste of the title fruit itself, [is] a taste one of Mr. Badii's passengers insists once saved him from suicide. It's only after considering the alternative, Cherry suggests, that life's savour can fully be appreciated. Or after experiencing a masterpiece like this film (1998). With such an interpretive emphasis, Bagheris speech apparently articulates the films central thematic discourse in charting a move from depression, death and potential nihilism into the light of a well-earned carpe diem affirmation. If we see the film as essentially a seize-the-day hymn to life encapsulated in this secondary characters words, then it is a fairly simplistic humanist gesture and overall experience indeed. However, such a reading only in fact potentially emerges within a single scene in the film and only if read out of context. To weigh so heavily on the message of this monologue is not only to overlook the other social interactions we see and the majority of the films running time, it also marginalises the possibly contradictory formal-thematic impact of the immediately preceding quarry sequence. To push the centrality of Bagheris monologue also disavows the films myriad formally reflexive elements here and throughout, including the directors tendency (as discussed above in regard to the final shot of Through the Olive Trees) to invoke the notion of a dream when offering what seems like a hopeful conclusion or message commonly at or near the end of a film. The shocking ellipsis and delayed reaction through which Bagheri visibly enters though the soundtrack, in one of Kiarostamis treatments of the image as a limited view of the world can be seen as inaugurating his very existence in medias res. This makes his monologue and message come across, I think, as Taste of Cherrys most fantastical or dream-like sequence, at least until the even more striking cut into the films video coda. While some critics emphasise the taste of cherries speech as the ultimate message of the film, others have pointed out how problematic it is to invest in such a balm-dispensing message. Walsh argues that many writers often take the safest reading of the film. It is complacently described as humanist... [The] story about the mulberries is interpreted by some to mean that the film simply invites audience members to open themselves to the rudimentary pleasures of life. (1998) 25

Perhaps unsurprisingly given his own investment in radical politics, Walsh sees here less a change your outlook message (conservative or apolitical because requiring us to accept the world as it is, that the problem is always within us rather than society) and rather more an invocation of change the world itself. Irrespective of how persuasive we find such a reversal, Walsh asserts a more interventionist understanding of the films multi-faceted challenge on the realworld plane. Going beyond the usual liberal stance compatible with the political, ethical and cultural ambitions of the class commonly writing about the film, he concludes: This is a film that any existing regime would find disturbing. (ibid.) Whether Taste of Cherry offers any revolutionary political impetus is certainly debatable. But if we broaden Walshs concern to include philosophical precepts, discourses or regimes, the films radicalism becomes more apparent. The subversive power of Badiis negativity is not just that he seems suicidally depressed: the characters lack of psychological depth (and hence problematic status in terms of believability and our emotional investment in his experience and fate) enables this figures performances and presence to undermine, in concert with the films quietly subversive form, any position. In this way he could no more easily accept Bagheris thesis than embrace that of an earlier passenger in the film, a young Afghani seminarian who asserted moral and theological arguments against suicide. In contrast to overinvestment in Bagheris monologue, taking on board its context the preceding sequence, but really also the rest of the film in all its elusive aesthetic and conceptual challenges Taste of Cherry can be seen as leading away from the humanism commonly ascribed to Kiarostamis work often via established comparisons with Italian neorealism and non-first-world realist cinema such as that of Bengali director Satyajit Ray.19 Rosenbaum begins to acknowledge this problem when writing of a troubling ambiguity when it comes to the directors working method that interferes with the image of Kiarostami as a simple humanist which generally means a blood brother of Vittorio de Sica or Satyajit Ray (1997). He highlights in particular Kiarostamis deceptive shooting strategy for Taste of Cherry whereby the director filmed improvisatory conversations in his car alone with each actor (ibid.). (The director confused the soldier into thinking he himself was planning suicide, asking the young man to get some chocolates out of the glove-box when in fact there was a gun in there, filming his shocked reaction.) This reveals another, much more elusive and ethically challenging side of the Iranian directors famous breakdown of fiction 26

and documentary beyond epistemological slippage (Rosenbaum, ibid.). Even if I think Rosenbaum goes on to read the film, its ending in particular, in a still too clearly life-affirming way (albeit a very virtual, cinephilic vision of human life), as Ill discuss below, his above caution throws a different and productively undermining light on the taste of cherries message when it comes to any recognisably humanist presentation or argument. Just like every other car-based interaction in the film, Bagheris much-quoted lines are delivered neither to Badii the fictional character nor to the actor playing him but rather to Kiarostami himself (literally and figuratively in the drivers seat), his microphone and camera. Likewise, for shots where we see Badii driving from the passengers seat, the passenger is the filmmaker and his filmmaking apparatus. In its unusual production methods, which both completely denude any conventionally fictional qualities the film might otherwise suggest and are at best ethically slippery or even manipulative, this is an insidiously provocative, subtly reflexive, and troublingly ambiguous performance transcending on/off-camera distinctions and film indeed.

> 5. Repetition, slippage, death

27

Including and beyond his interest in filming characters within and from outside cars as they drive through a landscape, Kiarostamis interest in repetition reaches an apogee of philosophical richness and visual expression with Taste of Cherry. Elena points out that the films aesthetic allure as wrought from what sounds like fairly minimal or even unpromising material prompts many symbolic readings with spiritual or even metaphysical overtones, but goes on to add that those fruitful journeys of initiation of the directors previous films no longer seem possible. Badiis journey is a journey into the void... [Kiarostamis] famous sensualism seems to have given way to a cruel nihilism. (2005, p.126) Elena describes this newly nihilistic oriented film-world and gaze thereupon as comprised of imagery featuring bare, sometimes beautiful (such as when Badii Bagheri drive through a valley featuring groves of trees) and but often desolate surroundings where nothing seems to grow, dry lands taking up all the frame without much sky, with a stark outer-suburban development or barren industrial site sporadically in view. The ochre, yellow earth the colour of desperation and depression in Persian tradition is ever-present, Elena writes, as a recurring motif that constantly suggests the idea of burial (2005, pp. 128-9). In broadranging discussion throughout his book, Elena calls on rich quotes from the filmmaker describing cinemas secret power as a kind of disturbing yet potentially generative or productive violence that amounts to a rather Nietzschean-sounding aesthetic event involving the necessary destruction of all presumed truths and morality. In my opinion, Kiarostami has said, cinema and all the other arts ought to be able to destroy the mind of their audience in order to reject the old values and make it susceptible to new values. ... Religion points to another world, whereas art points to a better existence. (qtd. in Elena, 2005, pp. 192-3) Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil: To recognise untruth as a condition of life that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. (1966, p. 12)20 While the filmmakers various statements in interviews can be utilised by critics to underline his progressive or even subversive intent so that hopeful visions of the future might emerge in contrast to the current socio-political real (both in Iran but perhaps the West too), Kiarostamis words also suggest philosophical and aesthetic interests that can be seen as radical in ways not easily recuperable through conventional ethical and political positions. Elena suggests that Taste of Cherrys power ultimately lies in tackling a controversial issue: that 28

of religion in defining morality, here through the issue of suicide, concluding that the film thereby opts definitively to reject any external code of authority. (2005 p. 135)21 Constantine Santas argues that suicide provides both the films dramatic impetus and its cross-cultural relevance through the treatment of taboo: Kiarostami opens up the eastern (as well as the western) mind for centuries fixated on the idea that it is wrong to commit suicide. Kiarostami's concept resembles in some ways John Keats's negative capability, a well known literary term used by a poet who imagined his own death. Both the West (Socrates/Bible) and the East (Koran/the Imams) have placed a stern prohibition on the concept of suicide as a legitimate option in human life. ... [Badii] is determined to carry out his plan though the viewer still hopes he will change his mind at the last moment; that creates suspense, and that is why this movie is so good (2000). As with the implications of Walshs point about the films radical impulses discussed above, irrespective of the individual writers own preferred interpretation and ultimate argument, this idea ought theoretically to be no less troublesome for political ideologies and moral systems outside the Iranian and religious contexts, and likewise not limited to undermining a clearly conservative politics. Here lies the potential limit-point impact of the film: It is no-ones friend, compatible with no affirmational political, moral or spiritual system. Taste of Cherrys suicide theme has been mainly discussed via a sensitive treatment of Islamic morality and Persian cultural traditions, but much less for the uncomfortable moral and metaphysical violence it might inflict on moderate liberal Western religious and secular beliefs. Throughout the various cultural, religious and moral treatments of the films suicide theme, discussions tend to focus on the films famous video coda and skip addressing what comes right before it: 25 seconds of black screen interspersed with fragmentary close-ups of Badii in his grave illuminated by lightening, followed by a full 65 seconds of complete black during which the soundtrack slowly transforms from night-time sounds, to silence, then the noises of a spring day and the calls of soldiers and a film crew getting ready for an audio take. Kiarostami has nevertheless suggested this in-between sequence is in fact very important, saying the shot in total darkness needed to be prolonged so that audiences would be confronted with this void, which for me refers to the symbolism of death. [They have] to look at the screen and see nothing. (qtd. in Elena, 2005, p. 138)22 Nothingness is at the very least equally a challenge and a constant threat as it is an opportunity. More precisely, they necessarily go together. 29

A journey into the void be it through the idea of suicide, death, taboo, political or existential alienation is subtly calibrated from the very start of Taste of Cherry. This is often through the extensive and slippery combination of silence and heavily restricted vision. Elena details the films audio and visual denials to show how truly miserly the director is in revealing commonly desired information when it comes to narrative feature films. It is 3 minutes until Badii speaks, 20 minutes until we see the outside of his car, and 25 minutes until we glean what he is trying to do (Elena, 2005, p. 125). But rather than negative restriction, this lack of showing and telling us what we are used to immediately or soon learning in fact works to suggest much more: how large the world really is once the audio equivalent of off-frame data attains foreground status, and when we are faced with a vision track that seems determined to defer or deny us story information and knowledge, instead offering incalculably more. The distinction between our story and that of the broader world, both on- and off-screen, collapses in the process. Across Taste of Cherrys vertiginous audio-visual layering, its restrictions and connected opening onto the imposing enormity of the pro-filmic world both inside and beyond the limitations of the frame, viewers are provided with both heavily foregrounded yet also immense space and time as co-passengers on and co-authors of Badiis strange journey. But what is the ultimate destination?

> 6. The End violent video, reflexive limit

30

Readings that see the film as some kind of hard-earned celebration of life usually cohere in discussion of Taste of Cherrys deservedly famous ending. But while a substantial amount of words have been devoted to these final minutes, such quantity has again not been necessarily matched by diversity of interpretation. For this viewer, the ending is one of the most startling conclusions to a commercially distributed feature film of the last four decades, fully justifying extensive written appreciation and analysis. Beyond a concern for commonly held assumptions driving prominent critical responses amounting to an unnecessarily restricted field of interpretation, I share most other Kiarostami enthusiasts committed attachment to this remarkable conclusion.23 For the codas most striking and radical implications to be approached, however, it arguably needs to be situated within the context of the immediately preceding images and entire film. After Rosenbaums description of the immense solitude the film evokes with a commendable scepticism about simple humanist interpretations in light of Kiarostamis technique of having each actor quite literally alone with him and the camera for most of the film shoot, his view of Taste of Cherry then seems to shift. Describing the exhilarating camaraderie of the epilogue (Rosenbaum, 1997), whereupon Badii or Homayoun Ershadi, the actor playing him is seen walking through the now less dusty, suddenly flower-covered springtime hills and offering Kiarostami a cigarette, Rosenbaum extols a vision of community lacking in the rest of the film (ibid.). In later comments elsewhere, Rosenbaum further elaborates on his idea of the viewer as being able to breathe a sigh of relief at the films end thanks not to any narrative conclusion as such but through the magical powers of a distinctly cinematic resurrection, dream or recovery (depending on our reading of whether Badii really kills himself or not) that the cinema uniquely offers a truly joyous and liberating power that enables a renewal of public and social space (2003, p. 32). Rather than shocking in any real way, in this light the ending is essentially a reflexive expansion of the films phenomenological openness and sense of possibility within and despite the existential, social and material challenges it shows. Michael Price goes a lot further than Rosenbaum in stressing an unambiguously positive movement of transformation in the films final minutes such that Badii becomes aware of the choice of life (2001) via a clearly metaphysical, in fact religious, framing. The extent of Prices reading warrants extensive quotation: 31

But then as we see the soldiers frolic and rest, we feel some sort of life connected to and coming from death, a cycle of joy emerging out of sorrow... Part of the film's reason for ending on a 'rebirth' is the closing of the distance between these seemingly disparate worlds, encouraging us to know them both, imaginatively and experientially. So, by blurring the lines between beginning and ending, actor and non-actor, life and death, all worlds slip into one. ... If an Islamic martyr lives forever, Badii's cinematic existence comes into play. Like an Islamic martyr, in the form and body of the film, he does not technically die and his existence transforms from a physical embodiment to some sort of image intended for interpretation. When an audience confronts his image outside the ditch in a new visual environment, the entire perspective of his existence must be retroactively reinterpreted. The film elevates him into a new figure, a lesson and not a person, while at the same time revaluing him from the status of actor back to the status of regular person (Price, 2001; original emphasis). Even if most critics acknowledge that this is Kiarostamis darkest film, Prices elaborate account exemplifies a commonly tenacious desire to sustain a familiar overall characterisation of the directors work per se as literally offering us lessons for a more ethically aware and spiritually enlightened life, here invoking overtly religious language to describe what we see.24 As usual, the filmmaker himself can be highly quotable in support of the given position. Discussing Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami has said that hopefully, as I show in my films, a time will come when soldiers will have flowers in their hands as opposed to guns. I go on with that hope. (qtd. in Mahdi, 1998)25 The diversity or otherwise of its critical interpretations notwithstanding, part of the brilliance of Taste of Cherrys coda, I think, is that when closely examined it conjures up very contradictory trajectories indeed. Chaudhuri and Finn describe well the genuine strangeness of the films ending in a way that allows for both positive and rather darker readings while also transcending such distinctions: [T]he fuzzy imaging of the video reality seems far stranger than the tangible diegetic reality of the preceding narrative; instead, the intrusion of this uncanny real marks a shift to the poetic. ... The coda evoking dream or dj-vu is not a recollection or flashback but a merging or shortcircuiting of past and present... (2003, pp. 52-53). While the video sequence looks starkly documentary-like in its hand-held style and heavy pixelated surface, the starkly low-resolution form also somehow evokes the shimmering, ethereal character of a dream sequence that puts the real-world material and philosophical facts of the preceding film into stark, perhaps even bleaker, relief. These suggestive concluding minutes have inspired many writers 32

to see a kind of film heaven in which Badii is finally integrated into a utopian social community for Rosenbaum, that of filmmaking coming together in the name of sublime virtual creation. As I suggested earlier, Bagheris mysterious in medias res appearance, and then his magical homespun-yet-mythical story, is the logical precursor to this dream-like mode within the film a fantastic, and therefore not really believable, vision within a film already characterised by its epistemologically troublesome rendering of the gaze. An impossible dream actually makes plain the truly devastating film-reality. Whether we see a dreamlike vision, with the contrasting interpretative possibilities this can generate, or the much more explicit and less sublime incarnation of documentary reality, the tensions simmering beneath the surface of the film and its interpretation come to a head with this startlingly reflexive final sequence. But perhaps the question of exactly what reality it is we are seeing here is a secondary order of debate, one that should be informed by a more immediate, sheer experiential fact for the viewer: the meditative, superbly shot 90 minutes of 35-milimeter film has on the other side of a long black-screen gap been replaced by truly nasty pixellated video. While most writers naturally address the fact of the films sharp turn towards a more explicit reflexive mode in one way or another, it is very striking how uniform seems the critical desire to frame this process as enabling a positive ending. Steven Erickson provides one of the less fanciful examples, writing of the video sequence: Its a distancing effect, distracting us from the issue of Badiis suicide by reminding us that were watching a film, but it wouldnt be particularly remarkable if it stopped there. Its also a new beginning. After involving us in the story of one mans isolation and desperation for 90 minutes, it suddenly shows us some of what was lacking from his life: playfulness, an openness to natural beauty, (possibly) meaningful labour. Additionally, after the rigid formal structure that the film follows for most of its length, the looseness of the hand-held videography comes as a relief and a release. We may never know whether Badii lived or died, but we do realize the richness of the life going on around him (and, implicitly, us). If Taste of Cherry itself is a funeral march, this final scene shifts it into a new, slightly more upbeat key and rythmn (1999, p. 54). Rosenbaum appears to deny, or at least downplay, the unsettling affect of the reflexivity while appropriating it to another end, by asserting a celebratory cinematic referencing as offering an emancipatory impulse. He writes:

33

The most important thing about the joyful finale is that it's the precise opposite of a distancing effect. It does invite us into the laboratory from which the film sprang and places us on an equal footing with the filmmaker, yet it does this in a spirit of collective euphoria, suddenly liberating us from the oppressive solitude and darkness of Badii alone in his grave (Rosenbaum, 1997). Although offering different emphases on social and cinematic forces and outcomes, critical advocates of the film like Erickson and Rosenbaum essentially position the ending as utopian.26 While the above readings are representative of quality mainstream critical writing on the film and its remarkable conclusion, in my experience this is not how most viewers take the sequence. Rather, the video coda does not initially come as a relief and a release as Erickson suggests, such that neither social nor cinematic resurrection is detected as suggested or achieved. I have viewed the film multiple times with friends, colleagues and students, many of whom were able to go along with Badiis dark but also perhaps grimly sublime and certainly poetic journey as the film unfolds. At least partially able to invest and contribute some emotional or psychological depth to this figure despite Kiarostamis miserly attitude towards subjective resonance, such viewers report being slowly engaged by the philosophical richness of the film and its meditative tempo right up until when Badii lies in his makeshift grave. After the film, a common sentiment (as with the results of Kiarostamis Italian test screenings, in which he reportedly cut the video sequence) is that the film should have ended with the timeless primordial imagery of clouds and lightening, wind and nocturnal noises on the soundtrack. These viewers say that they would have ultimately applauded a dark but compelling piece of art cinema. However, when it comes to the coda they report being offended, even appalled, when the poetic abyss of Badiis grave and the ensuing blackness gradually transforms into jarring and horribly degraded hand-held documentary video: a truly shocking incursion of lo-fi filmmaking flying in the face of the previous tripod-mounted celluloid images so rich with colour and texture. It comes across, these viewers suggest, like a dagger in the heart of an initially reluctant but gradually evolving engagement with the film and its mysterious central story.27 Such spectatorial responses as I describe, gleaned from extensive postscreening discussions both in and beyond the university classroom, represent a very understandable account of the films affective impact during and in light of an actual screening experience. Yet these kinds of responses to the famous coda 34

have never to my knowledge been entertained in the copious literature devoted to its interpretation.28 Perhaps the secret of Taste of Cherrys radical power lies somewhere in this sizeable lacuna. At the very least, I would suggest, the violent affect of its conclusion needs acknowledging. Genuinely difficult or confronting cinema needs to be addressed in light of such reportage, especially where these facts might contradict our assumptions or preferred theoretical reading of a given film. After all, it is in the spectatorial realm where the film ultimately happens even more clearly so when it comes to Kiarostamis elusive, half-made cinema that encourages or enforces substantial creative contributions from each viewer. On the treatment of life in the face of death as treated in And Life Goes On... Nancy writes: There is no resurrection: there is only one life, and nothing but life, and that it continues and discontinues continuously. ... [D]eath is a suspended continuity by means of which life is what it is: a life that continues to the very end. Art makes up immediate reality, to make evidence visible or, more precisely (because the film is not life), to make visible that there is (il y a) this evidence and this justice (2001, p. 74). Although there seems to be a consistent critical desire to redeem the darker potential of Taste of Cherrys conclusion by framing it as a spiritual/religious, social or cinematic utopia, for this particular viewer the ending is the most shocking moment in Kiarostamis oeuvre where epistemological and philosophical foundations are violently yanked from beneath us. Of course, modernist films from all over the world and different historical periods remind us in myriad ways that we are watching a movie. Yet Kiarostamis gesture in the final minutes here is more than a recent example of self-reflexivity emanating from a non-Western context. To my knowledge, no other film has jumped starkly from an elusive, non-prescriptive meditation on the death-drive rendered through exquisite 35-mm compositions only at its literally and figuratively darkest and most sublime moment to so viciously assault the viewers painstakingly developed engagement with a jump into such heightened reflexivity, here via the truly horrible aesthetics and conceptual impact of degraded analogue video footage that shows the man we thought was on his way towards death now calmly wandering around the location of his burial, and in a different season, waiting for filmmaker and crew. Especially if not taken by a vision of heaven, some logical but troubling questions very likely plague the viewer at this unique moment, perhaps most strikingly concerning the temporality of the sequence. Are 35

these images from after the previous grave scene, indicating a narratively happy outcome, or are they excerpts from amateur video showing an undisclosed (seemingly contradictory) period of the films manufacture? In this sense, the scene enforces what has been implicit throughout: niggling issues relating to the films hermeneutically destabilising framing of the multiple possibilities of vision and sound; that there are always myriad stories and frames to potentially tell and show; the importance of time and its insidious power. Which/what film do we see being shot in the last scene? While the different interpretive implications of these final images can be debated as suggesting a narrative conclusion, a dream, fantasy or utopian vision, the powerful first impression upon watching Taste of Cherry today is perhaps that a cheap behind-the-scenes cinema direct-style documentary has slipped from the DVD extras into the proper film text itself.29 As I have suggested, there are myriad, often subtly reflexive elements throughout the preceding film, notably the various ways Kiarostami draws our attention to the camera through its apparent lack of power to show us what we expect to see, framing, cutting and foregrounding the slippery and quietly violent temporality of the image. However, if a viewer can watch the film seeking to ignore these elements, the video coda completely destroys any successfully negotiated, hard-fought spectatorial relationship. Rather than evoking a kind of mythical, collective endeavour or dream/world of collective life and community, in my experience this ending is much more likely at least on an initial encounter to have a decidedly negative effect on an audience. What Rosenbaum calls a joyful finale is joyful mainly, or even exclusively, for those who are heavily and I would argue perhaps Romantically invested in the production, cultural discourse around, and open metaphysical or virtual suggestiveness of moviemaking in this way almost offering a replacement for religion. Saeed-Vafa again plays an informative and clarifying role here, emphasising the suggestive non-realist trajectory of the coda but along rather more grounded lines. She emphasises the increased power Kiarostami has in the video section by privileging his own role and the escapist fantasy of control: If the fictional part of the film ends with Badii lying in the grave, submitting himself to death and despair, the documentary sequence shot on video shows another possibility of order, which is more liberating and reflects Kiarostamis freedom to create as he instructs his army of extras and crew. The most important thing may be that neither possibility is 36

conclusive significantly, a brief sequence in total darkness separates the two because the meaning is ultimately left to the viewer (Saeed-Vafa, 2003, p. 76). This response also seems to frame the ending in loosely positive (if less fanciful) terms, as evoking the very fact of a films creative coming-into-being irrespective of how grim its contents may be. This is, I would agree, one of its most striking impacts. However, while drawing attention to authorial creativity and imagination, the long history of modernist art makes clear that the move towards reflexivity also highlights the more authoritarian aspects of such power in asserting a dominant relationship to the reader or consumer of a text, while at the same time demystifying the techniques behind such power (the emperor both at the zenith of his/her creative audacity yet concurrently revealed to have no clothes), and thereby putting it into crisis as well as the notion of a bounded subject per se. The cinematic event is in this way revealed as essentially cocreated between the viewer and the film itself, with notions of intentional authorship left in the conjectural shade and presumed subjectivity itself undermined. For long-standing investments in the creative genius of a singular subject in the form of an author-God, this is a depressing suggestion indeed, but seen in another light nothing could be more hopeful, liberatory, or creative. It is indeed notable that Saeed-Vafa frames the power of authorial control as in many ways a fantasy, an illusion rendering, via inherently reflexive framing, a kind of deluded utopianism when it comes to both the filmmaker as ethical seer or teacher (as so many critics seem to see Kiarostami, treated in very traditionally auteurist terms) therefore also audience and critical investments therein, and cinema per se. Offering a properly secular account both vis--vis religion but also secular replacements such as authorship of the final minutes, Saeed-Vafa enables us to really see both the films genuinely modern nature and its confrontingly staged prompting of the knotty, and still unresolved, issues of authorial dominion. This all serves to highlight well different viewers spectatorial and hermeneutic problems in explaining such a radically enlarged reflexive intervention into their film: strange, spectral yet clearly marked as material (analogue video) images on the other side of the black.

37

> Conclusion: Driving into the void, twice

Commenting on Kiarostamis cinema as a whole, Nancy emphasises exactly what many critics seem to underplay or disavow in the directors work, even his darkest and perhaps most substantially reflexive film: [T]he image is always closer or further away than anything that could fix a point of view and it is therefore not possible for the spectator of the film to identify with a certain point of view: it is a true model of what Brecht called distanciation, and that names nothing but the essence of the spectacle insofar as the spectacle is nothing spectacular ... only the gaze as carrying forward, a forgetting of the self, or rather: (de-)monstration that there will never have been a self (soi) fixed in a position of spectator, because a subject is never but the acute and tenuous point of a forward movement (avance) that precedes itself indefinitely. The subject has no project, it does not lead what is called a quest (there is no grail here, not because there would be nothing to hope for, but because hope is something else than a draft drawn on a future that can be expected, hence imagined: to the contrary, hope is confidence in the image as that which precedes, always). (Nancy, 2001, pp. 67-68) All this reaches an apogee point with Taste of Cherrys coda, especially when considered in context with the preceding images. What makes both ending and film so radical for this particular viewer is a double negation that enforces the forgetting of filmic and spectatorial points-of-view and subject positions thanks to a forward movement comprising images that, far from enabling the protagonist to carry out a mythic quest narrative, instead as characterised by a properly subversive reflexivity or distanciation always preceding the human action insidiously eat such linear intentionality out from within. The resulting eradication of grail teleology for the protagonist shorn of a project might, as Nancy suggests, ultimately enable genuinely hopeful movement in keeping with the ambiguity and complexity of the world that provides it and in which the film lives. The impacts of any faith in such a vertiginous and epistemologically violent 38

image are, however, confronting and immeasurably violent indeed. The evoking of a double negation, the suggestion with which I now conclude this article, then, both marks a kind of limit-point devastation and the key to Taste of Cherrys properly energising and infinitely rewarding vision, should we care to accept its challenge. The first negation is the literally and figuratively dark movement that Elena described as Badiis journey into the void (2005, p. 126), culminating with our elusive protagonist lying down in his makeshift grave followed by total darkness while the gradually transforming atmospheric nocturnal sound-world persists and changes, reminding us of reality beyond the verifiable realm of the visible. For some viewers amenable to depressing art cinema, this can become very thematically and perhaps existentially resonant. For such a viewer, however, the video epilogue that interrupts the poetic darkness commits a completely unexpected assault. If the 35-mm journey into the void, both material and figurative, has been made bearable and perhaps sublime due to its meditative tone, philosophical suggestiveness, and aesthetic seduction, then the arrival of green-tinged, heavily pixellated and clearly analogue video is truly awful. Here lies the second negation, which arrives out of the circular abyss of Badiis journey that seems to end when he closes his eyes lying in the hillside self-made grave, sporadically illuminated by lightening, before the screen goes genuinely pitch black. Yet the subsequent video images are without warning. This second blow, which curls back upon the already confronting experience of a very complex nihilistic address, cements in an unexpected way Taste of Cherrys layered devastation and challenging openness. We might be able to deal with driving into the void once. It is, after all, a not unfamiliar cinematic, cultural or philosophical journey. But the second, now explicitly reflexive video incursion only serves to undermine and even offend any acclimatised hermetic comfort we might have built up: an engagement so vulnerable to being cut down by moving images here importantly, those of hand-held analogue video truly vertiginous potential. In the late Nineteenth Century, Nietzsche called the most dangerous of all errors so far ... Platos invention of the pure spirit and the good as such. Crucially, he continues, the fight against Plato ... [or] the fight against the ChristianEcclesiastical pressure of millennia for Christianity is Platonism for the people has created in Europe a magnificent tension (1966, p. 2). It is my contention that a tension between inherited desire for asserting at least a sense of 'the good', or even perhaps 'spirit', and a more sceptical and critical tradition is played out in 39

prominent critical responses to Kiarostami's cinema, with the former somehow prevailing after a necessary journey through radical ambiguity, darkness or despair. Taste of Cherrys conclusion can be read as suggesting heaven in mystical or religious terms, alternatively as a more secular social or cinematic vision of cinema offering utopian potential for a new, virtual vision of community and world within which somehow a recognisably human subject and ber-subject in the form of an author survives apparently unscathed. The effect of this kind of restorative movement, however, is that the films challenges thereby amount to a productive and rather traditional dark night of the soul: a crisis or journey into the void undertaken so that doubt and disbelief can be overcome and ones faith (whatever that may be) renewed, enabling social reconciliation and spiritual or ethical redemption. Naturally the film is open to such conventionally defined positive readings. But it is striking that such a genuinely ambiguity-riddled film has received such consistent critical interpretation. The starkly different trajectory I have traced out in this article chimes more closely with Adornos infamous notion that black is the ideal for any art genuinely engaged with modern experience (1983, p. 58). This entails the intimate consideration and aesthetic rendering of an appropriation-resistant negativity that can at best partially be enacted by the material work and the engaging but self-consciously fragmentary subject, bringing about what Adorno describes as a tremor generated by the works presence within and rendering of often horrific social reality through the formally reflexive appropriation of materials (ibid., p. 346). To me, Taste of Cherry can be both experienced and understood as genuinely radical and unique in this sense. It is a work, or event, able to generate a deceptively complex, initially insidious and with its remarkable conclusion finally more direct and devastating engagement with a negativity intimately connected to cinemas unique material and conceptual power, violence, and creative potential for provoking truly challenging but genuinely hopeful futures. Hamish Ford

40

Works Cited Films Baad mara mhahad bord/The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarostami, France/Iran, 1999) Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, UK/Italy/USA, 1966) Il Deserto rosso/ Red Desert (Antonioni, Italy/France/USA, 1964) Namay-e nazdik/Close-Up (Kiarostami, Iran, 1990) The Straight Story (David Lynch, France/UK/USA, 1999) Tam-e gilas/Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, France/Iran, 1997) Ten (Kiarostami, France/Iran/USA, 2002) Zendegi va digar hich/And Life Goes On (Kiarostami, Iran, 1991) Zir-e Derakhtan-e Zeytun/Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami, France/Iran, 1994) Books and articles Bransford, Stephen (2003) Days in the Country: Representations of Rural Space and Place in Abbas Kiarostami's Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees and The Wind Will Carry Us, Senses of Cinema, Issue 29 (November-December 2003), online. Chaudhuri, Shohini & Finn, Howard (2003) The Open image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema, Screen, Vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 38-57. Cheshire, Godfrey (1997) The Iranian Who Won the World's Attention, The New York Times (September 28, 1997), online. Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elena, Alberto (2005) The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, London: SAQI Books, in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation. Erickson, Steve (1999) Taste of Cherry, Film Quarterly, Vol. 52, no. 3 (Spring 1999), pp. 52-54. Farahmand, Azadeh (2002) Perspectives on Recent (international Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema, in Richard Tapper (ed.) The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity, London & New York: I. B. Taurus, pp. 86-108. Ford, Hamish (2003) Antonionis Lavventura and Deleuzes Time-image, Senses of Cinema, Issue 28 (September-October 2003), online. ----- (2006) The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, by Alberto Elena, Senses of Cinema, Issue 38 (January-March 2006), online. ----- (2008) Difficult Relations: Film Studies and Continental European Philosophy, in James Donald and Michael Renov (eds.) Film Studies Handbook, London: Sage, pp. 164-179. 41

----- (2011) A story that tells us as much about Australia as Iran, ABC Drum (18 October 2011), online. Foucault, Michel (1999) Nietzsche, Freud, Marx (trans. Robert Hurley), in James D. Faubion (ed.) Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 2, New York: New Press, pp. 269-278. Goldberg, Michelle (1998) Iranian Ironist: Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry is One Step Ahead of the Critical Game, Metro (May 14-20, 1998), online. Hampton, Howard (2000) Lynch Mob, Artforum (January 2000), online. Keough, Peter (1998) Burial detail: Abbas on the Abyss in Taste of Cherry, Boston Phoenix (April 30, 1998), online. Lefebvre, Martin (2006) Landscape and Film, New York: Routledge. Mahdi, Ali Akbar (1998) In Dialogue with Kiarostami, The Iranian (August 25, 1998), online. Marks, Laura (2000) The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964) The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences, in James M. Edie (ed. and trans.) The Primacy of Perception and other Essays, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 12-42. Mulvey, Laura (2002) Afterword, in Richard Tapper (ed.) The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity, London & New York: I. B. Taurus, pp. 254-261. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2001) Lvidence du Film/The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami (trans. Christine Irizarry, Verena Andermatt Conley & Mojdeh Famili), Bruxelles: Yves Gevaert Publishing. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1966) Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Walter Kauffmann), New York: Random House. Price, Michael (2001) Imagining Life: The ending of Taste of Cherry, Senses of Cinema, Issue 17 (November-December, 2001), online. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (1998) Fill in the Blanks, Chicago Reader (29 May, 1998), online. Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz & Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2003) Abbas Kiarostami, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Santas, Constantine (2000) Concepts of Suicide in Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, Senses of Cinema, Issue 9 (September-October 2000), online. Sterritt, David (2000) Taste of Kiarostami, Senses of Cinema, Issue 9 (SeptemberOctober 2000), online.

42

Walsh, David (1994) Human beings and their problems are the most important raw material for any film, World Socialist Website (October 1994), online. ----- (1998) Despair, Hope, Life, World Socialist Website (April 1998), online. Notes
Both epigraph quotes are from Jean Luc Nancys Lvidence du Film. The first is Kiarostami in conversation with Nancy (2001, pp. 84 & 88); the second is Nancy (2001, pp. 44 & 78). 2 In the UK Laura Mulvey has described Kiarostamis work as almost saving the notion of art cinema (2002, see especially pp. 255-256, 260-261), meanwhile in the USA over a long period Godfrey Cheshire has asserted a similar point. Upon Kiarostamis triumph at Cannes in 1997 in co-winning the Palm DOr for A Taste of Cherry (the other winner was Imamura Shoheis Unagi/The Eel) Cheshire described the film, its maker and Iranian cinema per se in the New York Times as welcome signs of a reemergence of art-house film culture, at the time seen as in serious trouble in the West. [T]he film's victory at Cannes also seemed to indicate a widespread feeling, in the year the festival celebrated its 50th anniversary with a special award to Ingmar Bergman, that if the grand traditions of the art film are on the wane in much of the world, they remain very much alive in Mr. Kiarostami's Iran, wrote Cheshire, adding that his movies not only evoke such parallels; they also seem to infuse the beleaguered art-film traditions with fresh urgency. (1997) 3 This sometimes comes across as an ethical precept for Kiarostami: that he has no more right to interpret his films than viewers (or interviewers), who he hopes come up with diverse responses and resulting films, suggesting also that his authorship is literally superseded by that of the viewer. I do not like this arrangement where there is a dichotomy between me, as the storyteller, and the spectator, as the one sitting there and watching the story as such. I prefer to believe that the spectators are much more intelligent and actually see it as unfair that I get the chance to captivate them for two hours telling them the story, ending it the way I say it must end and so on. So I actually want to give them more credit by involving them and distributing the sense of belonging (Kiarostami, qtd. in Mahdi, 1998). 4 See Ford (2006) for a detailed feature review of Elenas book. 5 The other two films that make up a sort of fictional reality pre-existing Through the Olive Trees are Khane-ye doust kodjast?/Where is the Friends House? (1987) and Zendegi va digar hich/And Life Goes On... (1992). 6 In a productive discussion of the self-reflexive elements in Kiarostamis 1990s work, Stephen Bransford claims that knowledge is somehow, despite everything, finally achieved here rather than being further undermined, due to the films multi-strand form when he describes this final image as an understanding achieved by the director (both the on-screen director character in the film and Kiarostami himself behind the camera), the epistemological attainment of which presumably is then passed on to the films viewer and interpreter. It's not until the end of Through the Olive Trees, Bransford writes, when Hossein and Tarereh's scene is complete, that the director begins to understand what's happening between the two. (2003, endnote 3) 7 Elena concludes his long discussion of The Wind Will Carry Us, despite often raising other interesting potential lines of inquiry, by very explicitly presenting Berlagas passage as the best understanding and condensation of the films thematic trajectory available (2005, p. 159). 8 The interest a critic like Sterritt shows in affirming Kiarostamis work as beyond the physical and the spiritual, interestingly resonates with the directives of the newly empowered hard-line Islamic authorities following the Iranian Revolution. Elena writes that once the fundamentalists gained control of the government, filmmakers were encouraged to produce a so-called mystical cinema, with [Andrei] Tarkovsky being at the top of the list of suggested models. (2005, p. 54) This dovetailing of interests between liberal (as opposed to leftist) Western critics and the hardline Mullahs is striking. Despite the presumably substantial differences Sterritt would have with the post-revolutionary Tehran regime, behind his comment and many other similar suggestions from interviewers and critics possibly lies a kind of jealousy for a more religious culture. 9 Meanwhile, within and outside Iran Kiarostamis detractors claim his cinema to be apolitical as taking insufficient issue with the social problems resulting from a conservative and theocratic state. A good example of this well-worn debate, which is not primarily the concern of this article, can be found in the critique of Kiarostamis work by Azadeh Farahmand (2002, notably pp. 99-101) and then
1

43

Mulveys (2002) response to Farahmands criticism as seemingly aimed at both filmmaker and his intellectual Western enthusiasts (Mulvey presents herself as a quintessential case) in the same volume. 10 All remaining images are from Taste of Cherry. 11 Women must always cover their hair on film even when inside the family home, despite that in reality they would not do so. Some filmmakers in recent years have tried to circumnavigate this rule by giving the female protagonist a very short buzz-cut, until the arrest of actor Marzieh Vafamehr in 2011 for her appearance with a nearly-shaved uncovered head in Granaz Moussavis My Tehran for Sale, a 2009 Australian film shot in Iran. Never intended for release there, the film came to the belated attention of Iranian authorities due to its local circulation on pirated DVD. After being sentenced to a year in prison and 90 lashes, Vafamehr was released four months later following Australian and international criticism. (For my response to the film which only achieved any level of public awareness in Australia upon Vafamehrs arrest see Ford, 2011.) 12 See Farahmand (2002, pp. 93-104) and Hampton (2000) for examples, from an Iranian living in the USA and an American film critic respectively. Howard Hamptons January 2000 Artforum polemic, in which he describes Kiarostamis films as exotic foreign fodder for Western intellectuals, is motivated by what he sees as the excessive praise given to Kiarostami by US critics Kent Jones, Jim Hoberman, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. He says Rosenbaum has double standards in calling David Lynchs The Straight Story (France/UK/USA, 1999) propaganda for its apparent affirming of conservative traditions while Kiarostamis relationship to the theocratic political environment in which he works is underplayed. (See the March 2000 issue for letters from Jones and Rosenbaum, plus the response from Hampton.) 13 Although we are with this film following the actions of a singular subject, the abstract presentation and resonance of his condition is such that, although operating in a very different cinematic and ideological context, we can see another incarnation of the emphasis in Einsteins cinema and writing on emotion and overall condition as transcending individual psychology. 14 This shot where the immobile, seemingly dejected Badii and camera is slowly engulfed by dust generated from the earthmovers recalls the moment when Giuliana is erased from the image by fog in Antonionis Il Deserto rosso/ Red Desert (Italy/France/USA, 1964). In both cases, there is a kind of perfect overlapping of external physical forces and as read by the viewer internal crisis, whereby a highly abstractly drawn subject is both invaded by the exterior world and yet also drowning in their own self-obsession and resulting alienation. Giuliana cannot see or hear her friends as she stands on the polluted Ravenna quay, and it takes some moments before the worker can rouse Badii back into social engagement so as to make him leave the construction site. In both cases, environmentally destructive material and economic practices are the sites for presenting subjective breakdown and death-imagery. Others have made the Antonioni connection, if suggesting a neater fit and more clearly expressionist aesthetics. Steve Erickson, for example, writes of Taste of Cherry: The land itself looks ready to give up. Its an emblematic use of landscape, worthy of Antonioni... simultaneously a real landscape and a projection of Badiis mental state. (1999, p. 53) I would again emphasise that we get very little actual sense of Badiis mental state, seemingly even less than with Giuliana (though Antonionis film is far less conventionally expressionist than might first appear). Nevertheless, any sustained comparison between Antonioni and Kiarostami needs qualification on a whole host of levels, not only culturally but also aesthetically and conceptually. Besides the moment I describe above, in which highly abstracted and to some extent universalised as opposed to psychologically well-delineated or convincing visions of a crisis-ridden subject are presented, I would only overall point to the two filmmakers common tendency to radically and insidiously decentre and undermine cinemas epistemological power, if through very different aesthetic modes. In general terms, Chaudhuri and Finn argue the point well when they write that Antonionis post-neorealism is perhaps a more useful aesthetic and conceptual comparison than the famous and more humanist 1940s Italian cinema (irrespective of the question of direct influence or the myriad differences) due particularly to the disempowering of the gaze, its lack of clear identification, and subtle reflexivity (Chaudhuri & Finn, 2003, pp. 44, 45, 51). 15 See Ford (2003) for critical application of Deleuzes concept of the time-image to Antonionis 1960 film Lavventura; and (2008) for an in depth discussion of the relationship between Deleuzes philosophy of the cinema and Film Studies. 16 Chaudhuri and Finn use Deleuze as a useful means by which to elucidate the formal challenge of both Iranian and previous European cinema. They suggest that in light of the controversy surrounding

44

the (a)political trajectory of the New Iranian Cinema, through its disabling of sensory-motor linkages the time-image here can be seen as having political implications. (2003, p. 43) I concur that this is indeed possible, however Western left-liberal desires to see conservative political regimes and modes of subjectivity unravelled can blind us to the possibility that our own political idealism might be threatened by the formal challenges Deleuze describes, even if he too does not always follow this through. Deleuzes discussion of post-war European time-image cinema can cause a certain prescriptive ethico-political reading around the idea of becoming severed from regressive being. I agree that critics who suggest Iranian cinema is apolitical are frequently too restrictive about what a political cinema can be, but likewise that there is no singular politics or political effect that can be deduced from the films if we are to give them their full radical affect and philosophical potential. 17 Deleuzes designation of pre- and inter-war movement-image films (1986) encompasses both Eisenstein and Griffith i.e., the great practitioners and theorists of early modernist and classical cinema, irrespective of ideology. 18 In Deleuzes account this is due to the time-images disallowing temporal sheets of past and present time from falling into identity-reinforcing, linear alignment (1989, p. 98-125). The brains immense ability to create and conceive of new possibilities is in place with this formulation but all the while at the mercy of its unavoidable partner, time. This means that thoughts ability is in one sense immense, but in a way that is as threatening to the classical subject as Enlightenment and Cartesian thinking is supportive of it. 19 Chaudhuri and Finn point out that although children are common in Kiarostamis cinema of the 1990s (largely excepting Taste of Cherry), as with the famous late 40s neorealist films, this narrational and figural tool is often a means of further opening up the gaze, which has the effect of adding ambiguity as to who or what is controlling it (although we often presume to be sharing the childs point of view in his/her role as a witness function, there are actually very few close-ups of the face controlling such gazes in Kiarostamis films) more than a means to sentimental humanism. For this reason, they write, as Deleuze suggests, the role of the child, who mostly looks on in wonder or confusion while not being able to intervene, becomes significant. In this development, where the childs gaze and the pure optical and sound image meet, neo-realism is clearly the crucial turning point (e.g., Rossellinis Germany Year Zero and De Sicas Bicycle Thieves). It is a development which will be vital for some of the most powerful open images in New Iranian Cinema and helps to explain its many child protagonists (Where Is My Friends House, The White Balloon, The Apple) in terms other than those of sentimental humanism. (Chaudhuri & Finn, 2003, pp. 45-46) 20 There is an interesting extra connection with the reception of Nietzsches own work here too, as he continues to be a both enabling and potentially problematising figure for the progressive or radical discourses that often invoke his writing. 21 Of the theme of suicide on the film, Kiarostami asserts that it was less important than bringing up the idea of death and taboos per se, and that suicide is a central taboo across cultures. The movie should be viewed, he suggests, as a way of discovering taboos and dealing with them. Why are they there? (qtd. in Akbar, 1998) 22 Although certainly more powerful and relentless in this film, Kiarostami has long been interested in evoking a void, or a sense of nothingness, including its troubling and undermining power. Early in his masterly Close Up (1990), just at the point where the viewer is searching for narrative impetus and thematic focus, we watch a very long sequence in which a bored taxi driver waits outside a house (within which, we only realise right near the end of the film, the real action is happening) then kicks an empty can down the street, following which we watch the cans slow progress to its final resting place. Discussing the film, Kiarostami describes constantly hunting for scenes in which there was nothing happening. That nothingness I wanted to include in my film. Some places in a movie there should be nothing happening. (qtd. in Elena, pp. 88-89) Why there should be such scenes is open to debate; I offer my own interpretive arguments throughout this article. 23 Particularly so in light of rumours that Kiarostami was thinking of excising it following the films initial screening at Cannes. He did apparently authorise some playful test screenings with the video coda removed in Italy, and the shortened version played there for a time after proving more popular. 24 Discussing what he calls Nietzsches critique of ideal depth in The Dawn of the Day, Foucault writes: [W]hen one interprets one can trace this descending line only to restore the glittering exteriority that was covered up and buried. For if the interpreter must go the bottom himself, like an excavator, the movement of interpretation is, on the contrary, that of a projection, of a more and more elevated

45

position, which always leaves depth above it to be displayed in a more visible fashion; and depth is now restored to an absolutely superficial secret... To the extent that the world becomes deeper under our gaze, we perceive that everything that elicited mans depth was only childs play. (2001, p. 273) 25 Characteristically responding well to Sterritts statement about a quest to somehow get beyond the physical, even if the means have to be very negative, Kiarostami addresses the films portrayal of the suicide issue and its perhaps surprising religious reception. Different viewers have different opinions about that movie, he says. Committing suicide is forbidden in Islam, of course, and is not even spoken of. But some religious people have liked the film because they felt that, just as you said, it shows a quest to connect with something more heavenly, something above physical life. The scene at the end, where you see cherry blossoms and beautiful things after he's died, has that message that he has opened the door to heaven. It wasn't a hellish thing he did, it was a heavenly transition. (qtd. in Sterritt, 2000) The ethical and political challenges or potential problems with such a positive response by religious viewers in Iran are immense and not neatly compatible with left-liberal readings. In addition to the problematic idea of calling upon a works author as any more qualified to interpret the film than anyone else, as well as taking into account the directors own assertion that he only makes 50% of the film, we should also recall that in interview he has asserted many different readings including the idea addressed above, that such a vision might well be a willed dream or image completely impossible within the traditional economic and moral codes in which the film is set (Kiarostami, qtd. in Walsh, 1994). 26 Michael Price (2001) again offers a religious-inclined reading, while Elena (2005, pp. 134-143) gives so much space to covering the various critical approaches field that he seems to hedge his interpretive bets. 27 In addition to watching it with friends and colleagues, over many years at four different Australian universities I have lectured and moderated class discussions on the film. 28 Chaudhuri and Finn certainly do not elide the endings challenges, and approach its strangeness without recourse to positive heaven metaphors and the like, in an excellent brief analysis as a move into the poetic. The verite coda does not assert, in Brechtian fashion, that the foregoing film is just a representation, they write, because the fuzzy imaging of the video reality seems far stranger than the tangible diegetic reality of the preceding narrative; instead, the intrusion of this uncanny real marks a shift to the poetic. The switch from night and death to day and life, far from resolving the narrative, creates an ambiguity, an openness, as if we are now watching images of life after death whether or not our central ... character actually died or not. Following the blacked out image, the temporal relation between the coda and the preceding narrative is thrown into confusion, as is the relation between diegesis and meta-diegetic documentary. The coda evoking dream or dj-vu is not a recollection or flashback but a merging or short-circuiting of past and present, forming a [Deleuzean] crystal image. (Chaudhuri and Finn, 2003, pp. 52-53) A fine account, this description does not seek to approach the films fundamental affective and conceptual assault on the viewers engagement such as is described in my experience. 29 The question of context is also notable here. Taste of Cherry emerged during cinemas centenary celebrations, which also marked much death of cinema talk in regard to the role of video and digital technology within filmmaking and exhibition, and the same year the revolutionary medium of DVD emerged as a new digital means of domesticated film distribution, exhibition, consumption and finally production.

46