ACTA UNIV. SAPIENTIAE, FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES, 13 (2016) 127–141 DOI: 10.1515/ausfm-2016-0018 Subjects and Objects of the Embodied Gaze: Abbas Kiarostami and the Real of the Individual Perspective Zsolt Gyenge Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (Hungary) E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. It is widely accepted that Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema revolves around the representation of the gaze. Many critics argue that he should be considered a late modernist who repeats the self-reflexive gestures of modernist European cinema decades after they were first introduced. The present paper will contradict this assertion by investigating the problematic of the Kiarostamian gaze and analyzing the perceptual side of the act of looking. I will argue that instead of focusing on the gaze of the spectator directed towards the filmic image, he exposes a gaze that is fully integrated into the reality to be captured on film. The second part of the paper will explain this by linking the concept of gaze to the Lacanian concept of the order of the Real. Finally, I will contextualize all this by discussing the Iranian director’s position between Eastern and Western traditions of representation. Keywords: Abbas Kiarostami, gaze, Jacques Lacan, perception, the Real. Since Jean-Luc Nancy’s famous book on Kiarostami entitled L’évidence du film (Nancy 2001), the gaze of the Kiarostamian camera has become the center of most analysis focusing on the Iranian filmmaker. Several facts, such as that his mise- en-abyme is operated not only within a film, but through multiple works; that in some cases a film director is the main character of the movie; that a film crew, sometimes Kiarostami himself, is present in the diegesis; and finally, the fact that he shoots fictions and documentaries alike make obvious that the problem of the gaze oriented towards the reality to be represented has to be discussed. As Frédéric Sabouraud explains: “[i]n a certain way everything is gaze in Kiarostami, because his system […] is based not only on the perception of reality through the vision that has the character of it, but also on the vision of the spectator facing the images” (2010, 75). The gaze is central to the Iranian director’s work, which is 128 Zsolt Gyenge also confirmed in his 2008 film, Shirin (Nancy’s book appeared years before this film).Shirin constitutes an extreme moment in Kiarostami’s oeuvre as it presents the pure gaze, the embodied gaze without object,1 focusing on the act of looking as an isolated event (Grønstad 2013, 29). The gaze is a complex issue in Kiarostami’s cinema, largely because it is a governing principle that operates on at least two levels. Firstly, some of his films are linked together by a number of references, this is the case, most obviously, of the Koker trilogy, where the second and third films invoke the previous ones.2 Together with the many incidents (Sabouraud’s term) that take place in Kiarostami’s films, and which destroy the illusion of fictional representation,3 this approach should be considered as a self-reflexive gesture intended to enhance the viewer’s consciousness of the act of viewing. When analysing Kiarostami’s cinema, one might ask: if it is based on this self-reflexive approach, should he not simply be considered a late modernist (in the same way as Haneke), who is merely emphasizing the overwhelming presence of the medium decades after this idea became popular in arthouse cinema? In what follows, my argument will prove that this is not the case, especially due to a second level of representation of the gaze. I agree with Nancy, who states that “[Kiarostami] is not interested in the film about the film or in the film, he is not investigating the mise-en-abyme” (2001, 27). Though Kiarostami frequently reminds us of the fact that we are watching a 1 Shirin (2008) is a ninety-minute experimental film in which we only see close-ups of faces watching and reacting to a cinema screen during the projection of a traditional (though non- existent) Iranian film. We do not get to see a single image of the film within the film, we are forced to deduct the story based on the sounds and dialogues, as well as the emotional reactions of the viewers. 2 The Koker trilogy is one of the most sophisticated examples of this kind of quoting a film within a film. The second movie, entitled Life, and Nothing More… (1992) presents a film director who revisits the region where his previous film was shot, and where an earthquake took place between the two shootings. Obvious references to the title, poster and protagonist of the first film are made during the quest. In the third film of the trilogyThrough ( the Olive Trees, 1994) we watch the way in which the second film was made, how the casting took place in the village, what conflicts arose between the amateur actors, etc. Furthermore, this third film begins with a short monologue by the actor playing the director of the second film, who declares that, of course, he is not the real director of Life, and Nothing More…, just an actor. This is made very clear at a certain point in the film, when the characters pass the crew of the second film, who are shooting a scene, and where, for a very brief moment we can glimpse Kiarostami himself, who – according to the diegetic world of the third film – should not be there. 3 Sabouraud calls them incidents because they are disguised as small, unintentional glitches. Think of the scene in Life, and Nothing More… where Mr. Ruhi tells the child that, in fact, he was made to look older in the film, and that the house that he presents as being his home is actually not his. The same happens in Close-Up (1990) when, by the end of the film, the real Makhmalbaf finally meets the protagonist: the sound equipment apparently breaks down and we are unable to hear their dialogue. Subjects and Objects of the Embodied Gaze: Abbas Kiarostami... 129 film, what is much more important is that he places the gaze at the center of the represented reality. Kiarostami’s cinema is not about the constructed nature of cinematic representation, but about the constructed nature of reality itself. This is best shown by the fact that we can grasp another level of the representation of the gaze which is equally important in Kiarostami’s films, and which Sabouraud only partially mentioned when discussing a character’s vision of reality (I refer the reader back to the quote on the previous page). It is important to understand that Kiarostami not only speaks about the characters’ vision but that his films are organized to make visible and to expose a gaze that is capable of constituting, of forming the world itself. Thus, instead of the multiplicity of interpretations, it is the formative power of the gaze that comes to the foreground. Through the inclusion of the gaze of the camera and the director’s gaze in both the narrative and visual composition of his films, and the combination of the formal aspects of documentary and fiction, Kiarostami creates a representation of reality that is able to grasp this invisible, yet so essential side of reality that is related to the formative power of the web of gazes within it. Most scholarship focusing on Kiarostami’s approach to reality and the mediation between documentary and fiction is convinced that this attitude reveals a certain disbelief in the representational capacities of film in general, and of documentary in special. On this point, Frédéric Sabouraud writes: “[t]his is a strange fiction, that seems not to believe in the documentary take […], but at the same time gives the impression to distrust like hell a fiction […] that is risking to destroy the essence, the truth of the scene” (2010, 36). In my view, it is not disbelief in the medium itself that we experience here, as Kiarostami is a devoted fan of cinema. Rather, we are facing a different understanding of reality – an understanding that considers the gaze to be not only part of the medium, but fully integrated into the reality that is being captured. In this sense, the gaze is not only the subject, but also the object of perception, which is exactly how Merleau-Ponty conceived it, and to some extent, Lacan and Sartre as well.4 At the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perception is that “my body simultaneously sees and is seen,” so my body is part of the world, of the things that it observes, and this results in a primordial 4 At the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perception is the idea that my body simultaneously sees and is seen, so my body is in every sense part of the world, of the things that it observes. And thus, the act of seeing originates from the world, the medium of things. This is what phenomenology calls chiasm, chiasmatic structure: that who perceives is in the very same moment perceivable, exposed to the perception of the world he observes. Chiasm is about the interconnected nature of the seeing subject and the seen object. And this results – according to him – in a primordial subjectivity: we simply cannot transcend our embodied, material and irreducible relation with the world (Merleau-Ponty 2002 and Merleau-Ponty 1964). 130 Zsolt Gyenge subjectivity: we simply cannot transcend our embodied, material and irreducible relation with the world. Thus, the act of seeing originates from the world, it is what phenomenology calls chiasm (Merleau-Ponty 2002 and Merleau-Ponty 1964).