Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Chess of the Wind
1976 · Mohammad Reza Aslani · Chess of the Wind on Sightlines
Outside, at the fountain in the courtyard, the washerwomen are doing the laundry and talking about the family that owns them. Water, wet cloth, hands. They are gossiping, and they are correct. They can see the whole arrangement of the house behind them: who wants what, and what they will do to get it. Inside, in rooms lit by oil lamps and composed like Dutch paintings, the people who actually own the place cannot see past the next hour.
Mohammad Reza Aslani sets those two spaces against each other and never announces which one holds the film's intelligence. He doesn't have to.
The first lady of the house is dead. What's left of the family circles her heiress, a young woman who cannot walk, and every one of them wants what the dead woman left behind. In outline this is a Gothic thriller and you can watch it as one; it's tense and it's mean. But the plot doesn't account for the film's strangest quality, which is that the beauty is frightening. Every frame is gorgeous. None of it is safe. Deleuze is useful here for one precise reason: he gives you a way to say what a beautiful image is doing once it has stopped being decorative and become a symptom.
Start under the brocade. Deleuze had a name for films where the setting is furniture and manners while the thing actually moving people is appetite. The visible setting he called the derived milieu; what shows through it he called the originary world, a condition rather than a place, a world of raw drives where the only verbs are wanting and taking. Films built this way he called impulse-images, and he assembled the concept partly out of Buñuel. The Exterminating Angel is one of Chess of the Wind's clearest debts: a bourgeois party sealed inside a mansion until the manners rot off and the guests become a pack.
Aslani inherits that structure and changes the temperature. Here the manners never come off. The predation is conducted in full dress, with tea and correct forms of address. Wolves in brocade is the entire design, and the point is that the originary world isn't hiding underneath the Qajar interior. It is the Qajar interior. The camera holds still and lets you work that out yourself.
Such films have a shape, and Deleuze called it a slope. The impulse-image descends: degradation and exhaustion, an irreversible drift toward death, where each move costs more than it wins. Once this film starts down, nothing in it recovers. The masters devour each other and get smaller doing it.
Now the other inheritance. Visconti's The Damned is in this film's bloodline, a rich family annihilating itself over an estate and staging the process as opera, and Visconti is where Deleuze located the crystal-image: an image so composed that the present and its own reflection can no longer be pulled apart, a world playing itself back. Crystals come in states. The one Visconti keeps filming is decomposition, an aristocratic order perfectly arranged, still observing all its forms, rotting from the inside. Chess of the Wind is that in Qajar dress. The dynasty is finished; the house is a form outliving its content. Aslani shot it three years before a revolution swept the whole order away.
Here is what I think Aslani found, and it is his own. Buñuel's naturalism and Visconti's decomposing crystal had always been two different kinds of film. Aslani discovered they are the same room at two temperatures. A class dying of its own refinement and a pack eating itself are one subject with two vocabularies, and if you keep the composition still enough, both are legible at once.
Then there's the woman in the chair. Deleuze's central division runs like this: in the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts on it, and the action closes the circuit. In the time-image that circuit breaks, and the character can only look and listen, because nothing they could do would answer what they have seen. He called that figure the voyant, the seer.
Chess of the Wind makes it anatomical, which almost nothing else does. The person at the center of the inheritance cannot move her legs. She is the film's watcher by body rather than by temperament.
And Aslani does something with that I can't name a precedent for. He doesn't abolish the action-image, he splits it and hands the halves to different people. The acting goes to the predators. The seeing goes to the woman who can't act. The maid moves through the gap between them, a servant who can both see and move, which in this house is the only real power going. Losey's The Servant sits right there in the lineage, a master-servant inversion played out inside one building, and Aslani reworks it with the stakes pushed to the bone.
Aslani was a poet and a documentarian steeped in Persian painting, and it shows: the film is built frame by frame, each one settled like a picture before anything is allowed to move in it. Deleuze's term for this is the closed set, a composition treated as a complete system where every included thing has been decided. Dreyer's Day of Wrath taught this film its stillness, that Vermeer-like patience with candle and window light. Bergman's Cries and Whispers taught it chamber heat, a household of women in a saturated palette. What Aslani adds is that the lamplight turns predatory. Deleuze, following the expressionists, described light working against shadow until objects take on a life that isn't organic. In a Vermeer, lamplight is domestic. In this house it gives the walls an appetite.
Nothing settles, because Sheyda Gharachedaghi's score won't allow it: scraped strings, ceremonial percussion, sound arriving from no locatable point in the room. Kwaidan had already shown what happens when painterly horror is set against dissonant modern music, and Gharachedaghi's does the same work here. It declines to tell you how to feel about a scene, and so it leaves you alone in there with it.
Which brings the washerwomen back. Deleuze uses the word dividual for a collective filmed as one unit of feeling, a single body with many mouths. That is the chorus at the fountain. And from Brecht he takes the gest, a posture that exposes a social relation without anyone explaining it. Servants watching masters: the whole film is an arrangement of who is permitted to look and who is permitted to move. Its gest isn't a speech. It's a sightline.
Then the hardest one. Late Deleuze argued that modern political cinema cannot address a people that already exists; it works in the absence of one and has to help invent it. The people are missing, he wrote. Chess of the Wind is cruelly literal about this. It screened once in Tehran in 1976, to a hostile house. It was banned after the revolution. The negatives ended up in a junk shop and stayed there until 2014. A film that read its country's class structure with total clarity had nobody to show it to for forty-four years. The washerwomen who understand everything are the audience it never got.
So the usual question — what did it influence — has a wound in it. A buried film seeds nothing. What happened instead is rarer and worth naming: when the World Cinema Project restoration surfaced it in 2020, the influence ran backwards. Settled dates moved. Every history of the Iranian New Wave written before then was wrong about what had been possible in Tehran in 1976, and wrong in the worst way, about a film it had no way of knowing existed. Deleuze's genealogy of cinema runs straight through Buñuel, Dreyer and Visconti, and this film belongs in it on the merits. He never had the chance. That's why nothing tagged on this reading can be called canonical, and the gap between applied and canonical here isn't a scholarly nicety. It's a junk shop in Tehran.
Film is a discourse and films are its chapters. But the discourse is also a shipping system, and this is the proof of what that costs.
Watch it once for the plot. Then watch it again for the sightlines: who can look, who can move, who can do both. Notice how often the camera has taken up a position a servant would occupy. And keep the courtyard in mind while the house destroys itself inside, because that is where the film leaves its question standing. The house eats itself. The washerwomen go on washing. Aslani declines to say whether that's an ending or the start of something, and in Tehran in 1976, three years out from everything, nobody could have known either.
Concepts in play
- crystal-decomposition — A Qajar noble house still observing all its forms while its remainders devour each other over the dead matriarch's estate; the lineage debt to Visconti's The Damned (dynastic self-annihilation in decadent period staging) names the exact state of the crystal.
- originary-world — Wolves in brocade: the Qajar interior is not a cover over the predation but its actual medium, a structure inherited from The Exterminating Angel, where a sealed mansion turns a bourgeois cast into a pack.
- entropy / degradation — Masters devouring each other with nothing recovered; the class-warfare plot tightens into an irreversible descent rather than a resolution.
- voyant — The paraplegic heiress sits at the center of the inheritance and can only watch the household circle her — the seer made anatomical rather than temperamental, while the acting is handed to the predators around her.
- the closed set (cadre) — Interiors composed like Vermeer by lamplight by a director steeped in Persian painting; the static pictorial tableau staging inherited from Dreyer's Day of Wrath, held inside a single-location chamber.
- expressionism — Candlelit Gothic menace: a light-and-shadow gradient that gives the house itself a predatory, non-organic life, sharpened by the stylized painterly horror inherited from Kwaidan.
- dividual — The washerwomen at the courtyard fountain, a chattering Greek chorus filmed as one collective body of commentary and feeling rather than as individuals.
- the-gest — Servants watching masters: the film's postures and permitted sightlines expose the class relation without any dialogue having to state it.
- people-are-missing — One hostile Tehran screening in 1976, a ban after the revolution, negatives lost in a junk shop until 2014 — a film of total class clarity with no people to address for forty-four years; the washerwomen who understand everything are the audience it never reached.