Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Wind Will Carry Us
1999 · Abbas Kiarostami · The Wind Will Carry Us on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Behzad run to his car whenever his phone rings. (structure)
Every time the phone rings, Behzad drives up the switchbacks to the hilltop cemetery, the only place with reception, and takes the call standing among the graves.
Payoff: A man drives to a graveyard every time he wants to hear a human voice, and the film lets that be funny before it lets it be sad. In the reading: vector (line of the universe). The reading calls the winding road up to the cemetery a vector, a shape that usually delivers a character to a decisive act.
Watch how small Behzad looks against the hills. (camera)
Kalari's camera holds Behzad at a great distance, a small figure moving across honey colored hills, and rarely moves in close enough to let you own his face.
Payoff: Keeping its distance is not a lack of intimacy. It is the film refusing to let you possess these people too easily.
Notice how many voices you hear but never actually see. (staging)
Behzad's own film crew, the man digging in the hillside ditch, and others drift through the film as voices from a doorway or a hole in the ground, never shown.
Payoff: Presence here is mostly implied and kept just outside the frame, so absence becomes the film's main way of building a world. In the reading: out-of-field-relative. The reading calls this a relative out-of-field: a space just past the frame that a pan could reach, but the film never does.
Listen for wind and birdsong instead of any music. (sound)
The film has essentially no composed score, so its soundtrack is the ambient life of the village, wind, animals, birdsong, disembodied voices drifting from unseen rooms.
Payoff: The wind of the title is literally the film's music, doing work a composed score would otherwise be doing for it.
Notice how long an ordinary drive is allowed to run. (cutting)
Kiarostami cuts sparingly, letting a drive up the hill or a conversation through a doorway play out at close to its real length instead of trimming it for pace.
Payoff: You are made to wait the way Behzad waits, at something close to the actual speed of a real day passing. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). Deleuze calls these unhurried stretches dead time: the ordinary simply held rather than cut away as filler.
Once you have seen it
Notice the dying woman is never once shown on screen. (staging)
The old woman the whole crew is waiting on could technically be reached by walking into her room at any point, and the film simply never goes there.
Payoff: Her dying is treated as something the film refuses to contain in an image, not just a scene it happens to skip.
Watch Behzad recite a poem to a woman we barely see. (sound)
In the cellar, Behzad recites Farrokhzad's poetry to a young woman milking a cow in near darkness, and the lamp shows almost nothing of her while the recitation carries the entire scene.
Payoff: The poem becomes the only real portrait you get of her, since the image is deliberately withholding almost everything else.
Notice the final gesture involves Behzad and a bone. (structure)
In the closing moments, Behzad tosses a bone into a moving stream and watches it carried off by the current, a small physical action that closes out all the waiting before it.
Payoff: The gesture turns the film from morbid waiting toward the ordinary current of a life still moving forward.
Carry this in: Watch the road up to the cemetery. Every trip up it is the only place a human voice actually reaches him.