Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Life, and Nothing More…
1992 · Abbas Kiarostami · Life, and Nothing More… on Sightlines
4 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 how far back the camera sits on the switchback road. (camera)
Kiarostami and cinematographer Homayoun Payvar hold this distance throughout, turning cars and people into small marks against vast rubble and green hillside.
Payoff: The scale keeps the disaster and the recovery bigger than any one person's effort to fix it. In the reading: vector / line of the universe. The switchback road stitches disconnected places together with no action attached, what the reading calls a vector.
Listen for the car radio: news bulletins and football commentary. (sound)
The soundtrack stays almost entirely diegetic, engine noise, wind, survivors talking, and this radio. There is barely any composed music.
Payoff: The radio keeps the wider world's ordinary hum, a match still to be played, running alongside private grief.
Notice how many conversations happen through the car's open window. (staging)
Kiarostami frames survivors from inside the car, at the edge of the windshield, as they carry water or pause to answer questions.
Payoff: The car becomes the film's real stage, a mobile point of view that never fully enters the wreckage it studies.
Watch the director's face as he asks questions with no clear answers. (performance)
Farhad Kheradmand plays the role watchful and still, listening more than acting, while the boy beside him and the survivors carry the film's texture.
Payoff: His stillness is the film's real subject, a man whose looking cannot change what he sees. In the reading: the seer (voyant). The reading calls this kind of watchful character a seer, someone whose sight is disconnected from any power to act.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the switchback road and listen to the radio. Kiarostami keeps the camera far back and the sound real, so nothing gets sentimentalized.