T’am e gilass

EN

“Motion is the opening of the motionless, it is presence insofar as it is truly present, that is to say coming forward, introducing itself, offered, available, a site for waiting and thinking, presence itself becoming a passage toward or inside presence. Thus, in one of the small sequences of Taste of Cherry, the man who is waiting to acquaint himself with death sits on a hill at dusk, and from there he overlooks an urban landscape studded with tall buildings in progress and high cranes, and one of those begins to swivel, a sole slow element moving, with the twilight as background. This brings to mind some questions on the means to obtain this image: did anyone communicate with the crane by telephone or was it a matter of waiting for a propitious moment? Yet these distanced thoughts do not leave the film: they are part of the look that the filmmaker rouses and drives with the arm of the crane. They set this gaze in motion toward the film itself and inside of it. One could say that they turn the looking into a filming gaze and it is as if Kiarostami ceaselessly fitted the spectator to the film, not in order to teach a technique, but to open his or her eyes onto the motion that looking is.”

Jean-Luc Nancy1

• 1Jean-Luc Nancy, Abbas Kiarostami: L’Évidence du film / The Evidence of Film (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 30.