Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Life, and Nothing More…
1992 · Abbas Kiarostami · Life, and Nothing More… on Sightlines
Men who have lost everything are hauling a television aerial up onto a heap of rubble, because the World Cup is on and there's a match tonight. Kiarostami films it from a distance and lets it run. No score, no cutaway to a stricken face, no nudge toward either absurdity or uplift. It happens on a hillside in Gilan a few weeks after an earthquake killed tens of thousands of people, and then the film drives on.
The premise is a errand. A film director — played by Farhad Kheradmand, not by Kiarostami himself — drives from Tehran into the quake zone with his young son to find out whether the two boys who acted in Where Is the Friend's House? survived. (The son in the passenger seat is no accident: Kiarostami had worked since 1969 inside Kanoon, Iran's institute for children's media, and children are his habitual way into a world.) The roads are blocked. Villages are gone. He asks everyone he meets. He never finds out, and the film ends anyway.
Most writing about this film reaches for "humanist" and "simple." Both true, both useless — they don't explain why a film with the plot drained out of it is so hard to look away from. Deleuze is worth borrowing here for a blunt reason: he gives precise names to what Kiarostami removed.
Classical cinema runs on a circuit. A character takes in a situation, and what they see arms them to act, and the act changes the situation. Deleuze called that the movement-image, and its engine is that perceiving converts cleanly into doing. Now put a man in a Renault in a place where the ground itself has moved. What can he do? Look. Ask. Offer someone a cold drink. Nothing he perceives converts into anything he can do about it. Deleuze's name for a scene where the circuit snaps and only seeing is left is a pure optical situation — an opsign — and the person it happens to is a voyant, a seer. Not an agent. A witness with no lever. Kheradmand's watchfulness isn't understatement for its own sake; it's the exact performance of a man whose sight has been disconnected from his hands.
That's also why the film grips. We spend an hour waiting for the errand to pay off, which is a habit the movement-image trained into us. Deleuze had a term for the postwar shape Kiarostami is using: the balade, the trip or stroll that transforms nothing. Bicycle Thieves — squarely in this film's ancestry — runs on a missing object propelling an ordinary man through real streets. Kiarostami keeps the shape and deletes the payoff. A bicycle is findable in principle. The boys become a question the film quietly stops asking, because the road handed it a better one. The cutting helps: transitions withhold, scenes start late, and you assemble the world from fragments and hearsay, exactly as the driver does.
The terrain does the rest. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has stopped functioning as a stage for action — bombed-out, fragmented, connected to nothing. He was thinking of postwar Europe; an earthquake zone is the same proposition made by geology. Roads end. Detours multiply. Kiarostami's Koker is a set of disconnected pieces, joined only by driving.
And by one particular line. In the action-image, Deleuze describes the vector or "line of the universe": a zig-zag trajectory that stitches unconnected spaces together, classically the western's ride across country. Kiarostami inherits the line and empties the action out of it, so what's left on screen is the line itself. The switchback hill road, drawn across a green slope, with a car on it the size of a fingernail.
Which brings you to the last shot. Homayoun Payvar's camera sits across the valley and holds, for minutes, while the car labours up the zigzag, stalls, and eventually — having picked up a man walking the same road — crests the hill. This is dead time in Deleuze's sense: duration held long past the point where anything is being advanced, until the holding becomes the content. It's also his Open, the Bergsonian idea that a frame isn't a container but an aperture onto a whole that keeps changing. The car nearly disappears into the green twice. What the shot tells you isn't he made it. It's that the hill, the other traveller, the match on the radio and the rebuilding all carry on regardless of whether this particular errand succeeds. The one passage of Western classical music in an otherwise strictly diegetic film arrives here, and lands because nothing preceded it.
Now the part that makes the film stranger than its reputation. The director is an actor. The survivors are real survivors playing versions of themselves. Two years later, Through the Olive Trees would fictionalise the making of this film. Deleuze's crystal-image describes a shot where the actual thing and its reflection trade places too fast to separate them; his usual example is a mirror. Here the mirror is the production. And what the roadside encounters produce is fabulation — Deleuze's word for people caught in the act of legending themselves. A survivor answering questions through a car window isn't giving testimony and isn't performing a script. It's a third thing: someone composing an account of their own life while the camera runs.
This is where the theory earns its keep, because it sharpens an argument with Bazin. Bazin's case for neorealism was that the long take respects the ambiguity of the real and refuses to pre-chew the event. Rome, Open City gave Kiarostami the method outright: actual ruins, non-professionals, history's damage as the set. Paisà gave the episodic drift across a wrecked country. Umberto D. gave the nerve to hold on nothing happening. Journey to Italy gave him the car as a mobile confessional carrying people through a landscape that undoes them — and it's the film where Deleuze locates the birth of the time-image, which makes the Rossellini Prize this film won at Cannes in 1992 almost too neat. But Bazin's realism rested on the camera not lying. Kiarostami keeps the truth and drops the claim. He shows you the staging, and the encounter gets more honest, because admitting the fiction is how he declines to convert other people's grief into drama he owns.
So: the aerial on the rubble. Deleuze's gest is a posture that lays bare a social relation rather than illustrating a feeling. That's what the antenna is. It doesn't show you transcendence or denial. It shows you that appetite comes back before mourning is finished, and that nobody involved finds this remarkable. The man isn't being brave. He wants to see the match.
Kiarostami's specific invention is the car — not as a location but as a complete film form, with the windshield as frame, the cabin as sound booth, the radio as the world's out-of-field hum, and the drive as the basic unit of scene. What he did to narrative is harder and rarer: he detached forward motion from resolution and made the withheld answer structural rather than suspenseful. And he rewrote what a disaster film can be by refusing the disaster entirely, filming only the week after. The Iranian New Wave reached the world through this door.
Watch the last shot again, with a clock. Count how long you go on believing the film is about whether the car makes it up the hill. Then ask what the title is actually offering. Life, and nothing more. Consolation, or the plainest refusal of consolation anyone has filmed? Kiarostami doesn't say. He holds the shot until the car is over the crest, and the hill is still there.
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The director drives into a landscape where roads are severed and villages destroyed; he can only look, ask questions through a car window, and listen to the radio. Nothing he perceives converts into an act that changes the situation.
- the seer (voyant) — Farhad Kheradmand's 'understated, watchful presence' as the director-figure — a witness who endures and observes rather than an agent who resolves; the search never produces an answer.
- the voyage/balade form — Quest-as-pretext: the search for the two boys supplies forward motion but is never resolved; the film's subject shifts from 'who survived' to 'how one lives on.' The inherited search-quest of Bicycle Thieves with the payoff removed.
- weak links / elliptical linkage — 'Transitions frequently withhold information, so that the viewer, like the traveling director, must piece the world together from fragments and hearsay'; scenes run past the conventional cut point.
- any-space-whatever: disconnection — Blocked highways, ruined villages around Koker and Poshteh, rubble that is no longer a stage for action — the film's geography is a set of disconnected fragments joined only by driving.
- vector / line of the universe — The zigzag hillside road revisited from Where Is the Friend's House?, filmed from across the valley with the car reduced to a speck crawling the switchbacks — the action-image's zig-zag trajectory retained after the action has been drained out of it.
- dead time (temps mort) — The final extreme long take held for minutes on the car struggling up the hill, stalling, picking up a walker, cresting; and the general editorial rhythm that 'trusts duration over incident.'
- the Open (the changing whole) — The closing shot framed from across the valley so the car nearly disappears into the green slope; compositions that 'consistently subordinate the human protagonists to the terrain,' plus the radio tethering private grief to the World Cup and the wider world.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — The director is played by Farhad Kheradmand rather than Kiarostami; survivors play versions of themselves; Through the Olive Trees (1994) then fictionalizes the making of this film, creating the 'hall-of-mirrors structure across the three films.'
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — Non-professionals — 'genuine earthquake survivors playing versions of themselves' — answering the driver's questions in lightly fictionalized versions of their own situation; performances that 'feel less acted than caught.'
- the gest — Survivors rigging antennas on the ruins to watch the World Cup, and others rebuilding and marrying amid the wreckage — postures that expose the actual relation between ordinary appetite and catastrophe rather than dramatizing grief.