“Death is part of life, instead of making life part of (or parted from) something other than itself. Death is neither the opposite of life nor the passage into another life: it is itself the blind spot that opens up the looking, and it is such a way of looking that films life (as it appears at the ending of Taste of Cherry), a way of looking through which we have to look but that is not to be seen itself, that is not of this order (as The Wind Will Carry Us shows). For that reason, death is also always close to birth: in Life and Nothing More, a baby in a hammock cries, surrounded by a clump of trees seeming to guard his life, and in The Wind Will Carry Us a birth occurs following a pregnancy. Perhaps all this is always about the birth of a glance, at each instant, each shot, whether this glance looks at an image, stares at a face, a landscape, orthe sky’s blue screen with the trail of an airplane high up running across it (in A Taste of Cherry).”
Jean-Luc Nancy1
“This ambiguous comic masterpiece could be Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest film to date; it’s undoubtedly his richest and most challenging. [...] Kiarostami contemplates the power adhering to class, gender, age, and education; the film reflects ironically on his own ethical relationship to the poor people he films, and it’s arguably his first since Report (1977) that tries to deal with the role of women in Iranian society. It’s also a gorgeous, Brueghel-esque treatment of landscape and architecture (the village, clinging to a mountainside and marked by declivities and intricate interweavings, is a marvel in itself) and a series of reflections on Persian poetry as well as animal and insect life. You have to become friends with this movie before it opens up, but then its bounty is endless.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum2
The Wind Will Carry Us With It
In my small night,
what mounting regret!
wind has a rendezvous
with the trees’ leaves
in my small night,
there is terror of desolation
listen! do you hear
the wind of darkness howling?
I watch breathless
-ly and wondrously this alien happiness
I am addicted to my own hopelessness
listen! listen well!
can you hear the darkness
howling? – the dark hell
-wind scything
its way towards us?
in the night now, there is something
passing
the moon is red restless and uneasy
and on this roof – which fears
any moment
– it may cave in –
clouds like crowds of mourners
await to break in rain
ruin
a moment
and then after that, nothing.
behind this window, night shivers
and the earth stands still
behind this window an unknown
something fears for me and you
you who are green from head to toe!
put your hands
– like a burning
memory into my loving hands –
lover’s hands!
entrust your lips – your lips
like a warm sense of being! –
entrust! – your lips to the caresses of my
– loving lips – lover’s lips!
the wind will carry us with it
the wind will carry us with it
Forugh Farrokhzad3
- 1Jean-Luc Nancy, Abbas Kiarostami: L’Évidence du film / The Evidence of Film (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 18.
- 2Jonathan Rosenbaum, “The Universe in a Cellar. The Wind Will Carry Us,” Chicago Reader, 7 December 2000.
- 3Forugh Farrokhzad, The Wind Will Carry Us With It [This poem is recited in The Wind Will Carry Us.]
