Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Wind Will Carry Us
1999 · Abbas Kiarostami · The Wind Will Carry Us on Sightlines
A phone rings, and a man runs. Down in the village there is no signal, so every call sends Behzad scrambling into his Land Rover and up the dirt switchbacks to the cemetery on the ridge, where reception is good. He takes his calls standing among the graves. Below him, out of sight in a hole in the ground, a man is digging a trench for the telephone line. It is funny the first time. It stays funny. Then, somewhere around the fourth ascent, you notice what you have been laughing at: a man who drives to a graveyard in order to hear a human voice.
Behzad is a media man from Tehran. In the Kurdish village of Siah Dareh he is only ever "the Engineer." He has come with a small crew and a cover story about buried treasure. The real errand is worse than treasure-hunting. An old woman is dying, and when she dies the village will perform a mourning ritual of great extravagance, and they intend to film it. So they wait. The waiting is the film.
Most movies run on a simple circuit: someone perceives a situation, acts, and the act changes the situation. Deleuze called that the movement-image, and it carried cinema through roughly the first half of its life. Behzad is stuffed with intentions. He has a deadline, a crew, a vehicle, a phone, a plausible lie, and a knack for getting villagers to tell him things. None of it touches the one variable his entire project depends on, which is whether an old woman's heart keeps beating. He cannot act on that. He can only hang around.
Deleuze had a name for the images that show up when the circuit breaks: pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns. You look, you listen, and there is nothing to do with what you perceive. And he had a name for the person left standing in that condition: the voyant, the seer. This is worth insisting on, because without it the film can look like whimsy — city man among charming villagers, nothing happening. Something is happening. Once action stops converting perception into results, what fills the frame is time, unspent, not being used up by a plot. Kiarostami's cut is spare and durational; he lets a drive up a hill take as long as a drive up a hill takes. Deleuze called those stretches dead time, temps mort: the everyday simply held. In another film they would be the offcuts. Here they are the material.
The deeper invention is what Kiarostami does with the edge of the frame. Deleuze sharpened an old piece of film grammar into two terms. The relative out-of-field is the space next door: the room a voice comes from, the road just past the frame line. A pan would get you there. The absolute out-of-field is something else — a sense that something exists beyond the image which no camera move could reach, because it is not elsewhere in space so much as another order of thing. Kiarostami runs both at once, systematically. His colleagues are relative: they are in that house, their voices drift through the doorway, he shouts at them, and we never once go in. Youssef in his ditch is relative too, a voice and a scrape just below the lip of the hill. The dying woman is the other kind. She is technically in a room up the lane, and the film could walk in any time it liked. It never does, because her dying is not a location. It is precisely what this entire apparatus — Behzad's, and Kiarostami's — has been arranged not to contain.
The film's most beautiful scene is built the same way. Behzad goes down into a dark cellar where a young woman is milking a cow, and while he waits for his milk he recites Forough Farrokhzad, whose poem gives the film its title. The lamp shows us almost nothing of her. Deleuze's term for a voice like this — not trading information with a visible partner but performing, testifying, legending — is the speech act. The poem becomes the only portrait of her we get. And across the whole film, sound is doing work the picture declines to do: wind, birdsong, animals, bodies you hear and never meet. Image and soundtrack stop confirming each other and start telling parallel stories. That audiovisual disjunction is why the film feels dense rather than empty; you are constantly assembling a world out of what reaches your ears.
Place this against André Bazin and you can see the size of the step. Bazin loved neorealism because the camera let reality stand there uncarved — deep focus, real streets, real faces, ambiguity preserved. Kiarostami takes the method whole from Bicycle Thieves: real village, non-professionals playing versions of themselves, duration instead of plot mechanics. Then he adds a clause Bazin never wrote. Some things should not be shown at all, and the viewer's itch to see them is itself the subject. The film makes you impatient for an old woman to die so you can get your ritual. Then it lets you sit with having wanted that.
Even the signature Kiarostami shape gets emptied out. Deleuze called a zig-zag trajectory across disconnected spaces a vector, a line of the universe, and in the action film it exists to deliver someone to a decisive act. The winding road between village and ridge is that shape exactly, and it delivers nothing. Up for the call, down for the wait. Mahmoud Kalari's camera holds Behzad as a speck on a honey-colored hillside and refuses the close-up, which is not modesty. Close-ups would let us own these faces the way Behzad wants to own their grief.
The debts are specific. Antonioni's L'Avventura proved a withheld payoff could become the subject, and L'Eclisse taught the durational hold on a place after the people have receded. Bresson supplies the ethics: Diary of a Country Priest refuses to dramatize its deathwatch, and Au Hasard Balthazar gives Kiarostami the blank non-professional whose interiority the camera is not granted. And the closest ancestor is Iranian — Farrokhzad's The House Is Black, which laid recited Persian verse over documentary observation and showed him that a poem could carry an image the camera will not take.
This was Kiarostami's last feature on 35mm. Within two years he had put the camera on a dashboard and made Ten, and the reduced apparatus he was moving toward is already here in embryo, in a film whose crew we never see. What it left behind is a working proof that a movie can be organized around its missing center, that patience is a form and not a shortage of one — the mode critics would later file under slow cinema.
A man keeps driving up to the graves to take his calls. It is the only place in the film where connection works. Watch it again and ask what, exactly, you are waiting for.
Concepts in play
- out-of-field-absolute — The dying old woman whose expiry the crew awaits is never shown; the film's dominant formal signature is the refusal to cut to her, so the event the entire enterprise depends on exists only as something the apparatus is arranged not to contain.
- out-of-field-relative — Behzad's colleagues are heard as voices drifting from a house he keeps entering but which we never see inside, and Youssef digs in the deep telecommunications ditch just below the frame line, present as a voice from an adjacent, reachable space.
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The whole dramatic mode is a study in waiting: the event the crew needs cannot be caused, so Behzad's scheming, driving and small talk resolve nothing and he is left to look and listen at the village's everyday life.
- the seer (voyant) — The Engineer arrives as an agent with a project, a crew and a deadline, and spends the film as a watcher and eavesdropper — worldly, impatient, gradually unsettled — with no act available that could touch the old woman's dying.
- dead time (temps mort) — Kiarostami's own spare, durational cutting favors long takes that play in near-real time — the drive up the hill, a conversation conducted through a doorway, the slow business of daily village life — stretches that advance no action.
- audiovisual disjunction — With so much held off the visual track, disembodied voices, wind, birdsong and animal sound construct a world larger than the image; the soundtrack continually gestures toward the space the picture withholds, and the film forgoes non-diegetic score entirely.
- speech act (acte de parole) — In the cellar sequence Behzad recites Forough Farrokhzad's poetry — the source of the film's title — to a young woman milking a cow whom we barely see; the verse performs rather than converses, and stands in for the portrait the image refuses.
- vector (line of the universe) — The zigzagging road between the village and the hilltop cemetery is Kiarostami's signature winding-road form, repeated every time the mobile phone rings, and it links the two spaces without ever delivering a decisive act.
- symbol — The only spot with mobile reception is the graveyard on the ridge, where a man is forever digging an unseen ditch for the telephone line — one object and place condensing the film's relation between modern connection and death.