Abbas Kiarostami, Filmmaker of Alignment

Overture: Kiarostamian Cinema

For children who cannot voice their distress

What is a great filmmaker? It is someone who strikes a unique new balance of his own, hitherto unknown, between the fundamental postulations of cinema.

When Kiarostami’s films began to gain traction in France – around the time of Where Is the Friend’s House? in 1987 – the talented Iranian newcomer was associated with the resurgence of an older school of “modern” cinema that was then disappearing in the West. An unexpected renaissance in an unexpected country, Iran, of a cinema bound up with the revelation of things, with the epiphany of the real – in short, a “Bazinian” cinema. We wanted to believe that an heir to Rossellini had arisen in Tehran and congratulated ourselves without seeing beyond the blinkers of our own nostalgia. It was Close-Up which allowed us to take the true measure of the filmmaker’s richness and complexity. This film shot on the fly which announced itself as a documentary, almost a daily report, but was also a dizzying mental construction, closer to Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1971) than to Rossellini. A filmmaker whom people had previously imagined as having wisely chosen his aesthetic and moral camp – ontology, or the truth born from the capture of reality – suddenly revealed himself to be a filmmaker occupying the great divide between what are commonly held to be the two most contradictory postulations of the cinematographic gesture: capturing the world’s reality, letting it reveal its meaning, or on the contrary imagining the world as an abstract, labyrinthine, vertiginous, false-bottomed construction, and shaking the very idea of the “reality of reality”. In under two decades, this unique stance, which no previous filmmaker had adopted with such conviction and rigour, made Kiarostami one of the most singular of contemporary filmmakers and one of its greats. There is undoubtedly a Kiarostamian method. A previously unknown fusion of documentary and fiction, simplicity and system, cerebral cinema and the raw capture of the real, reality and abstraction, realism and fantasy, physics and metaphysics, tradition and the avant-garde, East and West. Kiarostamian cinema is its own new continent on the cinematic map. Exploring it is perilous, full of traps and trompe-l’œils. It is the seeming simplicity of this cinema that makes it truly rich and complex.

Abbas Kiarostami: Filmmaker of Alignment
A great filmmaker is often haunted by several figures about whom he never ceases to flit, who impose themselves on him and on his cinema as the fundamental matrices of his representation and of his philosophy of the world. The great matrix of Kiarostamian cinema is the figure of alignment.1 It is at the same time a construct of the script which can generate many fictions, a poetics of cinema and a response to the question: how can one be Iranian?

Birth of a Filmmaker: The Bread and Alley
Kiarostami’s first short film, The Bread and Alley, contains the seed of his cinema to come, already being based on this figure of alignment which will become central to his work. An ordinary child from Tehran, in whom every little (or large) Iranian can recognise themself, heads home along a familiar daily route in the labyrinthine streets of his neighbourhood. He is on a modest mission: to bring home bread for the evening meal. An unexpected obstacle diverts him from his journey: a dog which terrorises him and traps him at a crossroads. Barely has it begun when the film stalls and action halts in favour of a long pause contrary to all principles of classical dramaturgy. The story must stop to make the world visible: the lost and anxious child’s perceptive tremor enables us to cast a sharp eye on this ordinary crossroads as though we are seeing it for the first time. The child simultaneously cries and yawns, trapped in a no-win situation that seems to threaten the playing out of the film itself. Then, at the far end of the depth of field, tiny on the screen, an old man rocks up and advances towards the camera. This shot will prove decisive for Kiarostami’s dawning realisation that it is necessary to be firm in one’s convictions, and that style is neither a question of fashion nor an ornament. That day he decides to film in a single, very long take, the man’s journey from the depth of the image to the camera, which is to say the child’s point of view. His film crew, who fear that the scene will be deadly dull, doubt his competence as a debut filmmaker and advise him to cut the scene. Kiarostami holds firm, despite being affected by the remarks of the “professionals” on the crew, and later analyses the simple reasoning which gave him the courage to persist. Thus is born a cinematic conviction:

“Camera movements are always difficult for me but, at that time, I reasoned: when we wait for a long time for someone coming from far away, we never stop looking at him. We wait for him to arrive because he is not an ordinary passer-by, he is so critical to us that we fix our gaze on him and don’t cut the shot. Strange cuts, whose aim I don’t understand, have never been to my taste, like those cuts into eight or ten shots that don’t let you see the scene. Sometimes reality itself tells us that we shouldn’t cut the film, and that to get close to people one doesn’t necessarily need to bring the camera closer. One must wait, allow oneself the time to see things properly and discover them. Sometimes the close-up doesn’t mean you’re up close; on the contrary, it engenders distance. I saw that all the rules we had learnt in books didn’t work in practice with what we had in front of us.”2

Taking advantage of the fact that this man is heading in the direction of his house, the child waits for him to pass and follows in his wake, only a few metres behind. It’s the first alignment in a Kiarostami film, and one already bearing all the hallmarks that were to become a matrix of his cinema. As soon as the boy is back in motion thanks to this alignment with the old man, Kiarostami sets his shots to happy music, as if musically accompanying the resumption of movement after the threat of paralysis that his film had momentarily faced. But the old man, who wears a hearing aid, splits off and goes home, unconsciously breaking the alignment and the possibility of motion for the young boy, who finds himself at zero point, again immobilised by the threat of the dog. Since no salvation is forthcoming, the child decides to throw the dog a hunk of the family loaf, a sort of sacrifice for the greater good, and to profit from the enemy’s diversion to overcome the obstacle. The strategy is successful – even more than he might have hoped because it’s the dog, now, who happily attaches itself to the child and follows him in a loping rhythm accompanied by tinkling and gay medieval flute and tambourine music. Fear has turned into the joy of no longer being alone and the imaginary enemy has become partner and ally.

Arriving at the door of his house, the child rings the bell. A woman comes to let him in, and the door shuts on the dog which lies down outside the house. The film might stop there on a semi-happy ending: the child has overcome a difficulty and the anxiety that accompanied it, has just discovered the virtues of alignment, and has finally fulfilled his mission of bringing back bread for the night. Everything suggests that he has made progress, taken the first step towards gaining autonomy. But the camera stays in the street, at the end of which one sees another boy of the same age arrive, holding a bowl of milk. When he gets to the dog, everything starts again, he takes fright and the filmic image freezes on his tense expression.

This ending constitutes the “political” aspect of the film. This story isn’t as trivial as it seems. It’s not one child who must conquer his fear, coming up with the solution of alignment for himself, but every little Iranian – and, for each one saved, how many are lost?

The Four Characteristics of Kiarostamian Alignment 
First characteristic: an alignment is a pairing of purely mechanical forces. An immobilised being can break inertia and get moving again if he manages to co-ordinate with an object, an animal or a person that is also in motion. It’s an opportunity to seize when the time is ripe, entering a rhythmic synchrony which releases the blockage.

Second characteristic: alignment requires no complicity between the two figures, it is not an alliance (which would necessitate a minimum of intersubjectivity), even if it can become one, but a pure question of dynamics. One understands now why the old man had to be deaf: he will never know that he has served as the driving force of a random alignment and that he has helped the boy to temporarily resolve the deadlock he was in. One can therefore co-ordinate with anything and anyone: with someone who isn’t aware of it, with a food tin (in the credits of the same film), with an object without a soul (a spare tyre in Solution One), with a ball, with a classmate (Homework), with an enemy (in Where Is the Friend’s House?), or with a stranger (Taste of Cherry, Ten).

Third characteristic: alignment, for Kiarostami, is a matter of rhythm, of musicality, of fluidity, of formal delight – of pure cinema, in short. Alignment, for Kiarostami, is always something very cinematographic, a synchronisation of two rhythms which allows things to advance. In general, as soon as an alignment is put into place in his films, the music starts and creates harmony. Everything happens as though, to enter the alignment, events were guided by a music of the spheres and so, even if one is still in unknown enemy territory, one is in a safe place, temporarily saved, protected by the music and by the alignment itself.

Fourth characteristic: an alignment is reversible. The aligned object can become, as here, the one with whom the other aligns themselves. Roles are substitutive in the marriage of dynamic forces which constitutes the alignment.

Variations of a Founding Figure
Kiarostami often cites this poem by Mawlana:3 “You are my polo ball / running before the stick of my command / I am always running along after you, / though it is I who make you move.” It is perhaps the best definition of alignment according to the filmmaker, also recalling Godard’s definition of his relation to actors: “I run behind someone, and I ask him something. At the same time, I’m the one who organised the race.”

The purest form of alignment is the subject of Kiarostami’s happiest short film, Solution One. A man who gets a puncture on a mountain road finds himself in the plain, his tyre repaired, and tries to hitchhike back to his car. But no one picks him up, time passes, and the situation seems hopelessly stagnant, as with the crossroads scene in The Bread and Alley. He ends up leaving on foot, rolling the tyre in front of him, like a child’s hula-hoop, at first resigned, then amused, and finally exultant. Many children with hula-hoops will be captured in the documentary footage of Kiarostami’s future films. Here, between this man and his tyre, in this mountain landscape, begins one of the most jubilatory alignments in the history of cinema, accompanied by joyous and triumphant music. The tyre seems to be at his beck and call, a flick enough to set it back on the right track. It obeys him and guides him at the same time. It seems to exempt the man in its wake from all effort. A contagious euphoria comes over the man, the montage and the viewer. Caught in the jubilation of the alignment, he goes so far as to refuse the help of a kindly motorist. The tyre will end up moving into the correct position, quite by itself, in front of the static car which will be able to get moving again. A triumph for the fluidity of the alignment over the entanglements of rugged reality. It is the most beautiful of the films about happiness – the same happiness which will come over the director and his editor when the film miraculously finds its rhythm after weeks of heavy-handed fumbling.

In Where Is the Friend’s House? Ahmad curiously finds the force and energy to brave the forbidden and go to Poshteh by aligning himself with an enemy – an exploiter who salvages finely wrought old wooden doors and sells them on again in the city, the very same man who rips a page out of Ahmad’s friend’s precious school notebook to keep his crook’s accounts. It’s by placing himself in the wake of the donkey which carries this evil man that he discovers sufficient momentum to take the forbidden, Z-shaped path. Rousing music provides a jubilant accompaniment to this unexpected alignment in which the man unwittingly becomes the driving force. Later in the film, Ahmad enters a binary, reversible alignment with the carpenter. At first it is the boy who aligns himself with the old man in the village streets, looking for the eponymous house, but once night falls it’s the old man, tired, who aligns himself with the child impatient to return home.

At the start of Taste of Cherry, a man is visibly looking for someone to align with, but we don’t yet know the reason: to watch over his death, which is fixed and technically prepared, but which he needs a second actor to stage. In a way the film is the casting of this post-mortem scene where the sidekick comes to check that Mr. Badii is indeed dead and covers him with earth. But the filmmaker only gives us the key to this idée fixe in the 25th minute of his film. Until then, he films the feverish void of a quest for alignment, without defined object, to which the viewer can lend all sorts of nebulous interpretations: gay cruising, a serial killer looking for their next victim, a journalistic investigation, a hunt for cheap labour…

Five years later, in Ten, it’s a young woman from a comfortable background who traverses the streets of Tehran in her car. But her outing is aimless, without an idée fixe. She aligns herself dispassionately with various temporary passengers. Some are part of her life (of her storyline). With others, by contrast, it’s chance, and her availability, which leads to them sitting next to her in the car, in an alignment that is much more random but just as important to her, if not more, than the one she has with her own son. She has much to learn from these strangers, whose lives are a mystery and whom doubtless she will never see again. In the initial script, where this woman was a psychoanalyst, the alignment was based on the analyst/analysand dynamic. In the finished film, these alignments are reversible: each of the two characters finds their groove and is revealed to be both analyst and analysand.

The man in The Wind Will Carry Us, a filmmaker, is hampered by compulsory professional ties to his assistants, whose impish, feather-brained ways recall land-surveyor K.’s helpers in Kafka’s The Castle. Kiarostami never shows us these “helpers” who quickly become an additional encumbrance and moral burden for his double. As soon as the latter arrives at the village/castle, he aligns himself with a child and together they ceaselessly roam the village streets, which are, as in certain Escher drawings, simultaneously above and below, floor and roof. This alignment is paradoxical: it’s the adult, here, who aligns himself with a child, and this alignment, unlike the one that binds him to his assistants, is voluntary. It will be broken unilaterally by the child who has understood that this man, who desires the quick death of his elderly relative, is driven by animosity. From this breaking point onwards, the seeker will be the adult, who will have to finish the work of conscience that he has undertaken with respect to his profession, morality and identity alongside someone else (the old doctor). Right after the landslide, when a man’s life is in danger, what most preoccupies the filmmaker is little Ahmad’s refusal to get in the car and go to school. It is the child who has become the master in this initiatory relationship and who informs the adult: “Now I can do no more for you, it’s your turn to find your truth.” A situation akin to the carpenter in Where Is the Friend’s House?, who abandons the child on the square’s threshold, at night, so that the child can travel alone down the path of error (to find his friend) and so discover the real, more inventive solution: to repair his fault by doing the much-mooted homework for two.

Happily for the man who has been abandoned by the child, chance and the script will set an old sage, the doctor (who has a clear family resemblance to the old carpenter from Where Is the Friend’s House? and the taxidermist from Taste of Cherry), upon his path. This final, fateful alignment will be a lifesaver and will allow him, in extremis, to save his soul. In all three instances, it’s a matter of disentangling oneself a little, at the end of the journey, from the idée fixe, and of focusing on the world once more to avoid losing touch with reality, even if there is a fine line between the idée fixe and paranoia.

Yet ultimately, for Kiarostami, the initial alignment is in the service of the idée fixe. If one is quite alone, brought to heel by the pressures of the outside world, over-receptive to all its noises and dangers, in a porous relationship with the world, one is threatened. The world is so enigmatic that as soon as one exits familiar territory one risks being terrorised, lost, paralysed. To be able to move again, a trifle is enough, but it’s essential to find it. Kicking the tin can, as in the credits of The Bread and Alley, means that one need no longer cross the whole expanse in its infinity, that it stops being frightening as soon as one reduces it to a two-metre gap. The obsession or idée fixe is basically the same thing in Kiarostami’s films: it’s necessary to construct a small mental bubble and keep to it. Above all one must not look forwards nor backwards, to the horizon of the Law, to take small steps in the direction of one’s desire, all the while protected from the world’s threats and dangers by the alignment.

To align oneself is not to help, it’s purely to set in motion two dynamic forces, where intention and the moral point of view play no role, and whose efficient operation has no need for intersubjective relationships. Moral connotations would transform the alignment into a relation of mutual aid and assistance. But is this conscious form of alignment really superior, in Kiarostami’s eyes, to the purely mechanical and rhythmic kind we have just been discussing? Nothing could be more uncertain. The filmmaker in And Life Goes On, who represents one side of Kiarostami, is in no hurry to go to the aid of those who are struggling in a region upset by an earthquake. He professes to have a bad back to avoid helping an old lady extract her carpet from the rubble. He ultimately behaves in an egotistical manner during this journey in a land of suffering: as a man who observes, even a pure spectator. Right at the end of the film, he doesn’t spontaneously stop to help the man with a bandaged eye who is carrying his gas canister. A whole complex interplay of mechanical alignments between this man and the car will be required before the driver finally decides to help him, witnessed by non-human eyes that observe them from the top of the hill.

What Is an Auteur?
What is a true auteur? It’s not a filmmaker who imposes his obsessions on his work, but someone who finally encounters his haunting images in the world without even looking for them, like a gift from reality. It’s Buñuel falling into the rawest, most archaic reality – the deprived region in Las Hurdes – via images which he had invented from scratch in his first surrealist films. Proof by reality is the best, most intimate proof for a filmmaker, perhaps the only one that counts. It was while shooting a documentary, Homework, perhaps the most moving of his films, that Kiarostami encountered the proof by reality that this question of alignment, which was key to his fictions, was the right one to understand Iran’s situation at the time. Near the film’s end, the director literally “stumbles” upon an unforeseeable alignment, in reality: that of a very disturbed little boy who becomes poignantly distressed each time the classmate he has chosen to align himself with (a gentle and angelic being, smaller than him) moves a few metres away or walks through the door of the classroom in which Kiarostami is interviewing them. The question of alignment ceases to be that of an auteur – something that he might work upon, and which might work upon his imagination as a creator – but comes back like a concrete block of reality, unexpected, insistent, undeniable. Kiarostami “takes advantage” of this alignment, which he did not need to invent, to guide the distressed child, whose pedagogy has been motivated by cruelty, to progress step by step until he starts to overcome his anxiety under the camera’s gaze.

Such luck – to encounter one’s favourite subject by chance in reality – must be earned. Such grace can only come to a filmmaker who believes in a cinema stronger than his own mastery.

• 1Translator’s note: the French noun “agencement” is primarily used in a spatial sense – typically to do with architecture and the layout of elements. While it might be deemed untranslatable, “alignment” preserves these spatial connotations; to note, however, that it is not used here to suggest agreement, another of its senses in English; as Bergala writes, Kiarostamian alignment need not indicate accord or desire, and can be purely mechanical.
• 2Abbas Kiarostami, Petite bibliothèque des Cahiers du Cinéma, 1997, 30.
• 3The poet Mawlana Djalal Od-Din Rumi (1207–1273) wrote a considerable body of poetry in Persian, including the Mystic Odes.