Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Through the Olive Trees
1995 · Abbas Kiarostami · Through the Olive Trees on Sightlines
Two figures crossing a green field, so far off you could cover them with a thumb. One is following the other. He has been following her, in one form or another, for the length of the film. The camera stays where it is, high up. It does not move in. It does not cut. There is no reverse shot, and whatever is finally said down there is said at a distance the microphone cannot reach. Then it ends, and you are left doing arithmetic with two white specks.
Everyone calls that ending a withholding. I'd call it the only honest place the film could stop. Kiarostami spends the whole picture building a machine that refuses to know more than a person standing on that hill would know, and the last shot is that machine running at full power.
Start with the nest, because the film is a nest. Kiarostami is restaging the shooting of one scene from his own previous feature, And Life Goes On, made in the region the Manjil–Rudbar earthquake destroyed in June 1990. In the scene, a young man and a young woman exchange a few mundane lines. The young man is Hossein, played by Hossein Rezai, a mason. The young woman is Tahereh. Off camera, Hossein is actually in love with Tahereh. He has actually proposed. She, or her family, actually refused him, on grounds of class and literacy. So the film-within-the-film gets shot, take after take, while a real courtship runs in the breaks between takes, using the production as its cover and its occasion.
Deleuze split cinema in two, and the split is useful here for a blunt reason: it names exactly what Kiarostami took out. In the movement-image, the grammar of most films ever made, a person perceives a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. Perception converts into doing. Watch Hossein instead. He acts constantly. He pleads, argues, follows, reasons, works the crew for chances to stand near her. None of it converts. Tahereh gives him no answer the film lets us hear, and we are handed no result against which to measure his effort. Deleuze's word for a person in that condition is voyant, a seer: someone whose seeing has been cut off from their hands. Mohammad Ali Keshavarz, the one professional in the cast, plays the director, and his job is mostly to watch, wait and adjust. We are doing the same thing. The film puts us in the seer's chair.
What fills the vacancy is time. This film is made of dead time, Deleuze's temps mort: stretches where nothing advances and the ordinary is simply held. Waiting for the light. Riding in the truck. Standing around while somebody fixes a detail of the scene. In a normal production these are the offcuts. Here they are the film, because they are the only place the real story can happen.
The ground has stopped being a setting, too. Deleuze called such a place an any-space-whatever: rubble, half-standing houses, terraces that dwarf whoever walks them, no longer functioning as a stage for action. Kiarostami films people as small marks on that terrain, which does two things at once. It measures the courtship against the scale of what happened here, and it insists the courtship still matters.
Now the idea that organizes everything. Deleuze called it the crystal-image: an image in which the real thing and its reflection can no longer be told apart, and the two keep trading places. Usually he means mirrors. Kiarostami's mirror is a film crew. In a single frame you will see the fiction being staged, clapperboard and director and crew adjusting a shot, and at the edges or straight through the middle, the performers' actual lives leaking in. Hossein says his lines as a character. Between takes he says nearly the same things as himself, to the same woman, on the same hillside. Which one is the real one? Not a trick question, and not a puzzle with a hidden answer. Hossein is using the fiction. It is the one arrangement in which a poor illiterate man gets to speak at length to a girl whose family has refused him, with a director requiring the two of them to keep playing the scene.
And then the takes repeat, which does something Deleuze called crystalline description: a description that builds its object and then quietly replaces it. That fragment of And Life Goes On dialogue, said again, said again, said again, stops pointing back at the scene it came from. It becomes material. A groove worn between two people. Something they can both hold on to precisely because it isn't true.
The man doing the holding is inventing himself out loud. Fabulation is Deleuze's term for people caught in the act of legending themselves, making a story of who they are that becomes true in the telling. Hossein's monologues are the reason this film has an engine at all. He wants an educated wife. He turns over the reasoning that says the illiterate should marry the illiterate, and he does it with the unpolished conviction of somebody who has thought about it while carrying bricks. He is not reciting a script and he is not confessing to a documentary. He is arguing his case into a camera, and the camera's presence is what gives the argument its force. Deleuze's phrase for that fusion, borrowed from Pasolini, is free indirect discourse: the film's vision and the character's vision running through each other, so that the camera speaks for Hossein without putting words in his mouth. There is a director inside the film and a director outside it, and neither one is quite the author of what Hossein says.
Place this against Bazin and you can see the addition. Bazin's defense of neorealism was ethical before it was aesthetic: the long take and deep space leave the world's ambiguity intact and make the viewer do their own looking, instead of a cut doing the looking for them. Rossellini's Paisan used the actual inhabitants of the actual places. De Sica's Bicycle Thieves sent a non-professional through real streets after a lost object. At home, The Cow (1969) had already put village realism and untrained faces at the center of the Iranian New Wave. Kiarostami inherits all of it and makes one move nobody had made: he puts the apparatus inside the realism. Not as irony, not as a wink. As the subject.
His lineage is unusually literal. Where Is the Friend's House? (1987) established the zigzag hill path, the child, the real Gilan village. And Life Goes On (1992) invented the director-surrogate who drives back to a place he once filmed. Through the Olive Trees recurses one level further and dramatizes the making of a scene from that. Close-Up (1990) had already worked out the method: restage real events with the real people who lived them. Here he extends it to a man replaying his own courtship. Each film eats the one before it. Two years later the approach won the Palme d'Or with Taste of Cherry.
Back to the field. Watch the walk itself: Hossein at a fixed distance behind Tahereh, through the olive terraces and out onto the grass, carrying the whole class relation in a posture, with no dialogue about it. Deleuze called that a gest, an attitude that exposes a social relation the story never has to state. And the decisive words, when they come, are not in an adjacent space you could cut to. They are nowhere in the film's geography at all. Deleuze's absolute out-of-field is exactly this: a beyond that cannot be located in space. So the image loses its self-evidence and becomes something you have to decipher, which is what he named a lectosign. Two dots moving on grass. You read them like handwriting, and what you read is your own estimate of whether a persistent poor man ever gets what he asks for.
That is what the film did to narrative, and it was not a small thing. The ending is not ambiguous in the fashionable sense of supporting several readings. It is an ending handed to the audience as work. Kiarostami's invention was to turn the refusal to cut into a moral position and then rest an entire feature on it.
Watch it again and put your attention on the gaps between takes. Then, in the next film you see, catch the moment a camera cuts in for a reaction shot, and ask what that camera thinks it is entitled to know. Kiarostami's answer, held for one long minute above a field in Gilan: exactly as much as a person standing here.
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Within one frame Kiarostami shows the fiction being staged (director, clapperboard, crew adjusting a scene) while the performers' real lives leak through at the margins; Hossein plays 'Hossein' opposite the woman who really refused him, so the take and the courtship become indiscernible and keep exchanging places.
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — Hossein Rezai, a non-professional mason, replays his own courtship on camera and delivers unrehearsed monologues about wanting an educated wife and about the reasoning that the illiterate should marry the illiterate — a real man inventing his position out loud inside a fiction.
- lectosign (the readable image) — The final sustained take from a high vantage: two figures dwindling to specks across an open field, no cut-in, no reverse shot, the decisive words inaudible. The image gives up its sensory-motor self-evidence and has to be deciphered by the viewer.
- crystalline description — The same fragment of dialogue from *And Life Goes On* is performed again and again, take after take, so that editing becomes a study of variation and failure; the line stops referring to its original scene and becomes material in its own right.
- the seer (voyant) — Hossein pleads, argues and follows continuously, and nothing he does produces a visible result; Mohammad Ali Keshavarz's director figure mostly watches, waits and adjusts. The dramatic tension is deferred to an ending that may not answer it.
- absolute out-of-field — The refusal to let the audience hear the decisive words in the final shot: the outcome is not in an adjacent space the film could cut to, it is nowhere locatable in the film's geography.
- dead time (temps mort) — The narrative is 'less an arc than an accumulation of takes, waits, and conversations' — the breaks between takes, the truck, the ambient noise of a working set, where the actual drama occurs.
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The earthquake rubble and half-standing houses of the Gilan region, with terraced olive groves, are treated as structuring elements rather than backdrop, dwarfing the figures Kiarostami films as small marks on the terrain.
- free indirect discourse (political) — A director-surrogate inside the film and Kiarostami outside it; performance drawn from real personalities by repetition and patience so that 'acting is inseparable from being', the camera speaking for Hossein's class argument without scripting it.
- the gest — Hossein's pursuit of Tahereh at a fixed distance down the slope and through the olive trees: a posture that carries the class-and-literacy refusal the film never argues directly in that scene.
- the time-image — Duration, repetition and open-endedness replace conventional plotting; the decisive editorial gesture is the *absence* of a cut, converting the whole film into a build-up whose resolution is denied.