Читать книгу Abbas Kiarostami's Cinema of Life - Julian Rice - Страница 8

In the words of Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, Kiarostami “wasn’t just a filmmaker, he was a modern mystic, both in his cinema and his private life,”^[1] and according to Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and Michael Beard, translators of Walking with the Wind, his volume of poetry published in 2002, Kiarostami “places the human inside the natural, often pointing to hints of a grand design just outside the human reach, [sharing] the heritage of Persian mysticism [where] Nature is not only animate but animating.”^[2] For Kiarostami, nature is the paramount object of meditation, and even in an answer to a practical question, such as why he chose to stay in Iran when other directors had left or, as in his case, had their films domestically banned, his choice of a metaphor eschewed patriotism while expressing love for his nation’s land and culture: “When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground and transfer it from one place to another the tree will no longer bear fruit. And if it does the fruit will not be as good as it was in its original place. This is a rule of nature. I think if I had left my country I would be the same as the tree.”^[3]

Though Kiarostami generally limited spiritual expression to his work, he responded courteously to a New York Times interviewer who tautologically asked, “As a Shiite Muslim, are you religious?” Kiarostami adroitly replied, “It’s a very private question but if you insist I will answer it. I am not politically religious, but I have some beliefs.”^[4] Six years later, however, in an extended interview with Geoff Andrew, a critic he personally knew and trusted, Kiarostami made a rather startling statement in reply to being asked if the treatment of sex in Certified Copy was “embarking on new territory” in comparison to the films made and set in Iran: “Yes and no. This is nothing to do with censorship or Iran being a Muslim country, because I’m not Muslim.” He went on to explain that he didn’t disapprove of couples kissing in public, though he thought that private activities were inappropriate for cinema, but the prefatory statement was surprisingly frank.^[5]

At the end of Homework, Kiarostami highlights the “Oh Lord” prayer to the Creator of the “moon and the sun, all the mountains, hills, and oceans, the beautiful and colorful trees, beautiful wings for the butterfly, nests for the birds . . . snow and rain, heat and cold.” In his films and especially in his poetry, Kiarostami follows the Sufi preference for discovering God directly through His “art,” the evidence of Creation rather than through ritual or doctrine: “In the shrine / I thought one thousand thoughts. / When I left / snow lay everywhere.”^[6] In a longer poem, he praises the Creator’s work in terms of its loving result, but at the same time, he questions the simultaneous injustice of the world. Each verse begins “The more I think about it / the less I understand,” followed by four benevolent completions, two harsh ones, and two mysteries: “why snow is so white,” “the discipline / and splendor of spiders,” “why mothers / so love their children,” “why dogs are so loyal,” “why the hands of the poor are rich with calluses,” “why truth is bitter,” “why the galaxy / is so big,” and “ why we should be so afraid of / death.”^[7]

In his 1992 film And Life Goes On (alternately titled Life and Nothing More), Kiarostami poses these questions in several key scenes. The film is a poetic re-creation of a trip Kiarostami and his young son undertook to northern Iran after a 1990 earthquake killed fifty thousand people, among whom he feared might be the two now-twelve-year-old boys from the village of Koker featured in Where Is the Friend’s House? which he had shot there four years earlier. In a traffic jam of vehicles bringing relief supplies, the Kiarostami proxy, an unnamed film director driving with his ten-year-old son Puya, is advised to turn off the metaphysically symbolic “main road” by a truck driver who remarks, “I don’t know what crime this country has committed to be punished by God like this.” The theme is taken up when the director stops on a mountain upgrade to pick up an elderly man carrying a heavy toilet tank back to his village. He turns out to be the man who played the wise old door maker in the previous film, and though he is clearly different from the character he played, he represents a variation on the same stoic wisdom.

In an interplay of language and image, the initial view of the ascending road is rocky and gray as the man explains that he doesn’t know what happened to the boys because the road from his town to Koker has been blocked, though the news may be bad because where he lives many have died and most have “lost everything.” But the car passes through an area of green trees as the conversation turns simultaneously comic and profound. After the director asks why the man would buy a toilet tank in the near absence of water, the man replies, “For me, it’s indispensable. The ones that are living still need this valuable piece of porcelain.” A shot of his hand out the passenger window holding the toilet tank in place on the car top punctuates the director congratulating his humble courage, just before the man begins a series of thoughtful reflections.

After they pass the parallel image of a black-robed woman walking with a heavy bundle on her head, the following exchange is a fairly explicit statement of belief in a God who confers life, virtue, and beauty generally but does not reward, punish, or even regard individuals: “Sometimes I think that if so many innocent people lost their lives and I am still alive, the Lord is with me.”—“You must be a pious man.”—“Pious? Don’t misunderstand me. What has occurred is that this disaster has been like a hungry wolf that attacks and goes devouring the people he passes and letting the others live. This is not the work of God. He wants his servants. That’s how I see Him.”

But if the old man does not question God’s justice, then the film raises the question indirectly when he complains that the director not only made him look older in the film, but he also had to wear a hump on his back: “I didn’t like it. It pinched me, and it wasn’t fair. What kind of art [or God] makes people look older and uglier? Art means beautiful and happy things that touch you. Art should rejuvenate people, not make them decrepit. To continue, being alive is also an art. I suppose it’s the most sublime art of all, don’t you think so?” The beautiful scenery along the road in conjunction with the words constitutes the film’s central message. People are not truly alive until they learn what to love and value. And the progression from a serene acceptance of mortality in the previous film to an indomitable will to live in the character’s next incarnation creates the simultaneous sense of wholeness and holiness that And Life Goes On conveys.

After they agree that people don’t know how to value their peaceful moments before a disaster or until they become old, the old man concludes, “If they gave us the opportunity to live our lives over again after we died, surely we would know how to take better profit of it all.” But as the director emptily says, “That’s true,” the truism is qualified by the simultaneous image of two children about the age of the boys in Where Is the Friend’s House? While one climbs a tree, the other is busy pounding something as if imitating the relief effort. Achieved wisdom is only a stage in an endlessly repeated cycle that includes the terrible and the beautiful, inexplicable injustice and persistent love. In Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, an elderly country doctor quoting Omar Khayyam to a chastened journalist says that he prefers the pleasures of this world to promises of the next, but unlike Khayyam, who emphasizes religious futility and carnal pleasure, the doctor attributes the nature he praises to the “generosity of God.”

That generosity is not diminished for Kiarostami by natural disasters, and Puya (having absorbed the old man’s hungry-wolf comparison) tells a woman who laments that it was “God’s will” that one of her children died, “God does not kill his children; the earthquake killed them. The earthquake is like a mad dog who attacks whoever is nearest.” During his son’s conversations and explorations, the director is shown sitting on the steps of the house where they are staying, looking around as if he were taking in the serene beauty of the place rather than the results of the devastation.

As he looks upward toward the right, the camera reveals Kiarostami’s painstaking selection and arrangement of the mise-en-scène. Standing, still untouched, next to a pile of ruins, the house is extraordinarily beautiful, with deep, radiant blue railings and posts supporting the roof. In front of the intricately carved vertical parts of the balcony stands a row of eight flowerpots with living plants on the outside of the ledge, a sign of God’s generosity that needs active human nurture to survive, as indicated by an empty bottle in the center. The idea is complemented by a clean white sheet hung out to dry in the wind against a background pile of building debris. These are images of work that serves body and soul with no regard for status or reward.

The fictive director appears to be moved by what he sees. Now he looks the opposite way at a green hillside seen through an opening between unfinished wooden posts. Above this frame-within-a-frame, we see a swath of green grass, while at the bottom we see the tops of green and silver trees. As in much of Kiarostami’s work, ineffable spiritual experience is suggested by passing through a frame or leaving an enclosure that is sometimes enhanced by the rare use of music. A largo passage from a horn concerto begins as the camera moves through the frame onto the hillside, where twittering birds accompany the music.

The image conveys a relationship between nature and art, in which human art is as natural and spontaneous as the songs of birds, an idea that recurs in the director’s later work. God needs human beings as much as nature needs art, and all things given life by the Creator require human nurture. As the music continues, the camera returns to the woman of the house, who has lost her husband and one of her children, continuing the work of recovery. As she emerges from the doorway and leaves the film frame, the camera holds on a shot of the open door with white and yellow grass beneath it and a bare tree branch to its left sprouting green buds at the top.

The director steps back inside the doorway’s frame, and the camera cuts to a popular print of a nineteenth-century painting of an old Iranian peasant with a long pipe, sitting next to a table with a glass of tea, a teapot, and a plate of food. An irregular vertical crack extends through the painting from the wall below it and into the wall above. The crack enhances the painting in the context of harmonizing God and man, nature and art, giving it a resonance it would not otherwise have. The continual cry of a white rooster accompanying the horn concerto aurally integrates nature, while a cutback to a close-up of the director begins a sequence that helps viewers to realize that they can actively alleviate rather than simply sympathize with the suffering they observe.

With the music still playing, the director passes the doorway that the woman had previously entered. At first she is unseen when they begin to converse: “Madam, that carpet weighs a lot and has a lot of dust. You alone will not manage.”—“I don’t have anyone. My husband stayed under the debris.”—“And your neighbors?”—“Each one has his own problems.” Then the director goes inside, symbolically passing through the frame-within-a-frame into actively participating in “real life.” Holding on the image that has no human actors, the camera moves left to a close-up of the previously seen withered branch with greenery at the top. We hear him say that his back is very bad. Then, through the doorway, we see him trying to drag the rug: “It’s impossible. I can’t move it.”

But the frame in which he speaks is symmetrical and beautiful, bordered with a small green bush on the left and white triangular containers on the right. As he and the woman together manage to drag the carpet, the rooster comes to the center of the doorway—the frame within the frame—and standing in profile begins to flap its wings, crowing loudly, as if to lend courage. Once again, nature and art work together, and whether or not he can move the rug, his impulse to help is what matters. Love, even between strangers, remains possible, and though he does not find the boys he is looking for in the course of the film, he discovers that empathetically observing others evokes the best in himself.

The director’s active entrance into the scene reflects an earlier exchange with the elderly man who had explained that he moved into this house when his own was destroyed by the earthquake. When the director observed that at least this house survived, the old man replied, “Yeah, that’s right. The movie has become reality.” The line ironically rejects cliché happy endings, where the good and innocent are ultimately rewarded in this world or the next. Instead, Kiarostami accepts the inexplicability of tragic events and focuses on the endurance of beauty, love, and the “generosity of God” extolled by the country doctor in The Wind Will Carry Us.

In that film, the wise old man rejects the otherworldly emphasis in Christianity and Islam by quoting Omar Khayyam: “They tell me she is as beautiful as a houri from heaven! Yet I say that the juice of the vine is better. Prefer the present to these fine promises. Even a drum sounds melodious from afar.” The subtitled translation is less directly subversive than Edward Fitzgerald’s generally respected nineteenth-century English version, which instead of turning down the metonymic houri rejects Paradise altogether. The quatrain immediately follows the Rubaiyat’s most famous passage:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Some for the Glories of This World; and some

Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;

Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,

Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!^[8]

In interviews following Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami extolled Khayyam’s quatrains as a “constant eulogy of life in the ever-present face of death.”^[9] In actuality, Khayyam’s eulogy of life stems more from a fear of the alternative than from the immersion in nature that inspired Kiarostami. For Khayyam, nature and other human beings are consolatory pleasures, existing only to muffle his obsession with death.

According to Iranian American scholar Hamid Dabashi, Fitzgerald’s “exquisite translations” of the Rubaiyat accurately mirror the poet’s hedonism but fail to convey the danger of a system of law and rule based on religious revelation:

Central to Omar Khayyam’s philosophical disposition, as best evident in his poetry, is the fragility and tragic pointlessness of being. The moon will shine many nights, and we will not be here anymore; there is no beginning or end to this world, and no one knows what we are doing here—theologians, philosophers, mystics, and scientists all sing their own amusing tunes. The clerical establishment in particular obviously did not like these ideas, nor did he care for them, and there are reports that he in fact would go out of his way to scandalize their hypocrisy.^[10]

Actually, Fitzgerald’s translations extend well beyond recommending hedonistic indulgence to directly undermining bedrock beliefs. In regard to cosmic justice under “that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, / Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die, / Lift not your hands to It for help—for It /As impotently moves as you or I.” And on the discrepancy between Divine justice and inborn defects, a “vessel of ungainly make” bitterly complains, “They sneer at me for leaning all awry: What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?” And for those that “after some TO-MORROW stare, / A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries, / ‘Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There.’” And “Of threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! / One thing at least is certain—This Life flies; / One thing is certain and the rest is Lies; / The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.” And most blasphemous of all, “The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d / Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn’d, / Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep /They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d.”^[11]

Most of Khayyam’s nature tropes exist solely to lament human mortality: “The Rose that blows about us” delights in tossing the “silken Tassel of [its] Purse” into the garden to produce more roses, but the “Worldly Hope” of human beings, whether it “turns [to] ashes” or “prospers,” is as ephemeral as “Snow upon the Desert’s dusty face”; “Golden Grain” is joyfully flung “to the Winds like Rain,” but “to no such aureate Earth are turn’d / As, buried once, Men want dug up again.” In a notable jibe at pantheism, the rose is reddest when it blooms “where some buried Caesar bled,” and every “Hyacinth the Garden wears / Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head,” and so the reader is mockingly urged to lean lightly on the herb-lined “River’s Lip [bank], . . . for who knows / From what once lovely Lip” the herbs have “sprung unseen.”^[12]

In Kiarostami’s view, however, elements of negativity in Iranian culture are less likely to stem from skeptical poetry than from its history of religious war and colonial exploitation. During a Q&A after a 1998 screening of Taste of Cherry at Ohio State University, a professor observed that Iranian culture is often said to emphasize the “negative aspects of life like death and fatalism.” In reply, and thinking perhaps of Shiism in particular, Kiarostami attributed the negativity not to Iranian culture but to “Islamic culture where the crying and grief, in which Muslim people have been historically engaged, are very significant. These elements have carried the religion through time and are part of what keeps Islam alive.”^[13] He made a similar distinction in 1997 in a Cahiers du Cinema interview with Serge Toubiana:

We have a two-speed religion: one, behind the times, where the search does not exist; another, more developed, where the search does indeed exist. Mystical Iranian poetry appeals precisely to the idea of the journey of initiation as a path to learning, and it is really the Iranian culture in all its richness that contains this idea, not the religious culture. Religion has merely followed in the wake of Iranian thought.^[14]

However, Iranian thought in the work of the great national poets is vibrantly diverse. A quatrain in the Rubaiyat has the poet sending his soul “through the invisible / Some letter of that After-life to spell,” only to discover upon the messenger’s return that “I Myself am Heav’n and Hell.”^[15] While Khayyam located an illusory God in the human imagination, the great Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar (1145–1221) found a real God in the human heart. Though their tones and messages are diametrically opposed, both are infidels in the eyes of the kind of conservative Islam that still rules countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Sometime after the publication of The Conference of the Birds (1177), Attar was stripped of his property and banished on a charge of heresy, and as his English translators Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis point out, reading the poem makes it “not difficult to see why.”^[16] Instead of pleasing God through ritual prayer and glorying in His presence after death, the poem is an allegory of a quest by individuals to achieve divine union while they are still alive. The premise is irreverent in that, for all Muslims, Muhammad was the last human being to hear directly from God and was therefore the “seal” of a prophetic history beginning with Abraham and continuing through Moses and Jesus.

Attar’s story begins when a thousand birds, each representing a separate species, set out in search of their king, the Simurgh. They must pass through seven valleys to reach Him: the Valley of Quest, the Valley of Love, the Valley of Understanding, the Valley of Independence and Detachment, the Valley of Unity, the Valley of Astonishment and Bewilderment, and the Valley of Deprivation and Death. After an arduous journey, only thirty birds are able to endure the traumatic loss of individual identity necessary to reach the Simurgh. But before they meet their God, who would within the rigorous monotheism of Islam be a distinctly separate entity, their Hoopoe leader tells them that the Si (which means “thirty”) combined with murgh (which means “bird”) exists within them.

This kingdom of God within is not easily realized because only thirty of the original thousand birds are able to authentically discover this union in themselves. Those who do must be willing to annihilate both ego and conscious control in the final valley: “The seventh Poverty and Nothingness— / And there you are suspended, motionless, / Till you are drawn— / the impulse is not yours— / A drop absorbed in seas that have no shores.” And in contrast to the suicidal Mr. Badii of Taste of Cherry, who wants to kill himself because he loves nothing, the fulfilled Sufi seeker is motivated only by love: “True lovers give up everything they own / To steal one moment with the Friend alone.”^[17]

Attar does not decry group prayers meant to bring believers to God in the next world and strongly recommends them as necessary for the few willing to risk loss of self in the here and now. Early in the quest, he warns against deterrence from both rigid believers and rigor-lacking “ecstatics.” These phony gurus may trick the seeker into thinking prayers can be bypassed, but the Hoopoe says the seeker should pray through good times and bad until the soul’s transformation spontaneously occurs: “Pray in despair and when your goods increase, / Consume your life with prayer, till Solomon / Bestows his glance, and ignorance is gone.” And, the Hoopoe adds, be prepared to defend this pearl of great price once it is attained: Why expose this treasure to “those whose blindness claims it is unreal?” It is better to “die deceived by dreams than give / [your] heart to home and trade and never live.”^[18]

For Kiarostami (especially in the films that depict nature), a scene that may seem to be just an establishing shot or mere background is most likely to convey the film’s deeper vision. By making nature more sacred than religiously revealed truth, Kiarostami affirms the ecumenical message of the Sufi poets. Attar describes how a Sufi saint, “cast down by grief” (possibly brought on by the sectarian zeal of his society), felt relief upon passing a Jewish cemetery, where he was overheard saying, “These souls are pardoned and go free: / But this is not a truth that can be taught.” Summoned to explain himself before “angry judges” in a religious court, the saint’s explanation might have led to imprisonment or even execution in his time, as well as in a modern-day theocracy: “Your government / Accuses them; their pardon’s heaven sent.”^[19]

In his old age, Attar was visited by an admiring young poet who was to become more widely known for centuries to come, in and far from Iran. Through the free poetic translations of Coleman Barks, Jelaluddin Rumi (1207–1273) has become one of the most widely read poets in the United States.^[20] Without discrediting Barks, Omid Safi, director of the Duke University Islamic Center, points out that two of his most quoted lines—“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. / I will meet you there”—are far more pointed in the original, where rightdoing is religion and wrongdoing is infidelity. Safi asks us to imagine the fate of a modern Muslim scholar who dared to say that the “basis of faith lies not in religious code but in an elevated space of compassion and love. What we, and perhaps many Muslim clerics, might consider radical today is an interpretation that Rumi put forward more than seven hundred years ago.”^[21] It is this concept of a “space” elevated above clerical authority that would most offend Iran’s theocratic regime.

In interviews, Kiarostami repeatedly described his function as a director in terms that are analogous to the view of God portrayed in And Life Goes On:

There’s a Rumi poem [that] goes something like this: You [the actors] are like the ball subject to my polo stick; I set you in motion, but once you’re off and running, I am the one in pursuit. Therefore, when you see the end result, it’s difficult to see who’s the director, me or them. Ultimately, everything belongs to the actors—we just manage the situation. This kind of directing, I think, is very similar to being a football coach. You prepare your players and place them in the right places, but once the game is on, there’s nothing much you can do.^[22]

Whether or not viewers believe in God as the “Friend” or the “Beloved,” as He is called by Sufi poets like Attar and Rumi, the beauty of the world and the fact of human kindness manifest a pervasive love that yields to destruction when fearful cultures shut them out. Two years after Kiarostami said that all his films were essentially about the same thing, he described the main theme of The Wind Will Carry Us as opening the “eyes of the heart as wide or wider than those of the body.”^[23] The film creates that effect through the unusual device of having its socially driven protagonist pretentiously quote well-known poems to feel superior until he may finally feel them and perhaps become a better man.

Rumi, too, in the words of Coleman Barks, addresses the “mystery of opening the heart, [a thing] you can’t say in language.”^[24] Though Barks writes “versions” of previous translations rather than working directly from the Persian, his work has touched the hearts of millions. Hamid Safi praises him for retaining core Islamic elements, noting that Rumi’s poetry ranks second only to the Koran “in shaping the imagination of Muslims.” He adds that Rumi was not the only one in his time to express the “push and pull between religious spirituality and institutionalized faith” but that he did so “with a wit that was unmatched.”^[25]

Certainly, Rumi was not religious in a way Khomeini or Khamenei would approve. Neither was Kiarostami, who boldly stated that he was “not Muslim.” However, Kiarostami repeatedly stressed his “deep roots in the heart of Persian culture,”^[26] and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Michael Beard, the translators of Kiarostami’s poetry volume Walking with the Wind, hint at the impetus behind Kiarostami’s disavowal: “Like Rumi, the poet of the largest questions in all of Persian poetry, [Kiarostami] reaches out to the world rather than focusing on any local topic. His thinking is cosmopolitan, humane, and global.”^[27]

Barks offers a corresponding reason for his widespread readership: “Just now, I feel there is a strong global movement, an impulse that wants to dissolve the boundaries that religions have put up and end the sectarian violence. It is said that people of all religions came to Rumi’s funeral in 1273. Because, they said, he deepens our faith wherever we are. This is a powerful element in his appeal now.”^[28] Like Kiarostami, Attar and Rumi lived in a time of devastating wars. Attar died violently when the Tartars swept into his hometown of Nishapur in northeastern Iran, while in 1220, when Rumi was thirteen, he and his father fled Genghis Khan’s invasion of their home region of Balkh in present-day Afghanistan and traveled to Konya in Anatolia (modern Turkey), a location dangerously close to major battles of the Crusades.^[29] Though Rumi’s inward turn is biographically attributed to his all-consuming love for the wandering mystic Shams of Tabriz, the outward clash of beliefs and ethnicities must have intensified his Sufi quest to merge with the ultimate “Beloved Friend.”

With similar desires to replace creed with direct experience, Makhmalbaf said (in his 2012 documentary The Gardener, shot in Israel) that if religion is the cause of war, it would be better to have no religion at all, and Kiarostami was grateful for life and nothing more in the wake of wars and natural disasters. Both follow Rumi’s bold sentiments in “Only Breath,” where the poet eschews religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Zen); geographical or metaphysical identities, whether natural or ethereal; and descent from Adam and Eve or any other origin story and asserts that he belongs only “to the beloved,” as He reveals himself in the physical breath of life.^[30]

In a 2005 interview where he avoided overtly stating the spiritual themes implicit in his films, Kiarostami reiterated Rumi’s intent to speak of and for humanity in general:

All the different nations in the world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life, still have one thing in common, and that is what’s inside of all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human beings, we wouldn’t be able to tell from those X-rays what the person’s language or background or race is. Our blood circulates exactly the same way, our nervous system and our eyes work the same way, we laugh and cry the same way, we feel pain the same way. The teeth we have in our mouths—no matter what our nationality or background is—ache exactly the same way. If we want to divide cinema and the subjects of cinema, the way to do it is to talk about pain and about happiness. These are common among all countries.^[31]

For Kiarostami, absolute value derives from directly communing with nature rather than on communal belief. Rumi, too, found salvation in plant, animal, and human physicality as evidenced by such poems as “Spring Is Christ,” where plants are martyrs rising from their shrouds, the holy spirit is the wind, the trees are Mary, and divine love makes itself known through sexual love.^[32] Just as Kiarostami suggests through his unprecedented cinematic forms and in such films as The Traveler, Where Is the Friend’s House? and Through the Olive Trees that only disobedient children can break free of stunting traditions and social tyranny, Rumi counsels readers to invent their own myths rather than accept the revelations of others.^[33] Worshippers should seek God in the immediacy of love rather than the distanced reverence of worship because there is no hierarchy of the spirit. God is not superior to the angels, and the angels are not superior to human beings. To bow to God, Rumi says, is like bowing into a mirror because the only reality is God.^[34]

But if the Rumi reader or Kiarostami viewer should listen only to God or commune directly with nature, what good is the mediation of art, as a student pointedly remarked during a 2012 workshop in Spain by quoting a line from Rumi: “When a blind man sees, he doesn’t need a walking stick.” Kiarostami responded that while Rumi used words as his medium, he uses a camera, and the artist’s experience of beauty can’t “expand” to others without words and pictures. He added that Rumi was too “exceptional” to be a model and that he “as a small person” continues to look for “this walking stick to go easily on this path.”^[35]

This exchange about the relation between poetic art and the unsayable reality it can only suggest evokes a distinction made by scholar William Chittick between religious prophets and Sufi saints: “The prophets are those people who have received a message from God for a whole community. The saints are those who follow one of the prophets and attain to the state of human perfection to which the prophet calls mankind.” In this sense an artist, especially a cinematic artist, can be more like a prophet, one who, as Kiarostami said in his Spanish workshop, transfers “something from someone who has seen to someone who hasn’t.”^[36]

Chittick elaborates on the initiatory power of the prophet to contain his vision in outward forms that the believer then follows. Sufis seek union with God, but they also rely on respected guides and established rituals, such as the dervish dance, to realize their quest. The Sufi saint reaches the Beloved as an individual following a prescribed form, while Rumi and Kiarostami continually forge new forms to suggest new avenues of attainment. Rumi, Chittick points out, does not presume to be a prophet because for him the “basic truth and preeminence of Muhammad’s teachings are largely unquestioned” and therefore “his real emphasis is upon the importance of the saint, for he holds that the prophets and saints are of one substance; [and] almost anything said about the former applies also to the latter.”^[37] Chittick may be right about the way Rumi felt, but the motivation to practice his art belies a complete reliance on Koranic revelation, and for Kiarostami, a self-professed non-Muslim, the cinematic content was a creative synthesis of traditions, while the forms, for the most part, were experimentally unique.

As Hamid Dabashi has shown in his comprehensive 2012 survey The World of Persian Literary Humanism, transcendence of theocratic forms is an essential feature of Iranian culture. Since the seventh-century Muslim conquest, except for the first thirty-nine years of Mongol rule (1256–1295), Islam has been the state religion of Iran. During the entire Mongol dynasty (1256–1353), however, Buddhism and Christianity were equally important, and regardless of ruler over the nation’s long history, Persian literary culture has remained a “narrative institution unto itself, irreducible to any metaphysical certainty that is Zoroastrian, Manichean, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Gnostic, agnostic, or above all Islamic in origin and destination—though all these religious traditions, in one way or another, lend their mores and metaphors to its creative and effervescent making.”^[38]

Kiarostami admired “movies and art [that] take us away from daily life to another state, even though daily life is where this flight is launched from. This is what gives us comfort and peace.”^[39] In Ten on Ten, he laid out an artistic credo that rejected exciting moments in favor of enticing the viewer to reflect on himself and the surrounding world in a spiritual way: “In this cinema, the most important subject matter is human beings and their souls. Man and his complex inner problems are paramount, whereas in presently fashionable cinema, technique, special effects, and exciting storytelling are more important.”^[40] And though he admitted in another interview that “every movie should have some kind of story,” he preferred movies that “didn’t attract me or make a lot of sense while I was looking at them, but [included] moments that opened a window for me and inspired my imagination.”^[41]

His own practice long predated this advice, especially in Where Is the Friend’s House? where the images of windows and doors comprise a symbolic frame that opens only for “children” brave enough to be disobedient. This fictional film was shot after but released before Homework, the documentary that severed ties between Kiarostami and the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, but it is more subversive than Homework in ways that the authorities were too dense to grasp. While the children in Homework have been effectively bullied into lying and submission, unanimously saying they prefer homework to cartoons, the eight-year-old protagonist of Where Is the Friend’s House? learns to disrespect the values of most of the adults in his society. By rejecting the power and wisdom of adults over children, Ahmad Ahmadpur symbolically rejects the theocratic structure of modern Iran, ultimately at the end of the film taking his inspiration directly from God rather than through the self-serving mediation of human authority.

The opening scene where a teacher tries to dutifully condition his second-grade students into knee-jerk submission recalls Kiarostami’s antiwar haiku: “One hundred obedient soldiers / entering the barracks. Moonlit night. / Disobedient dreams.”^[42] This revolution of the mind and heart can best be achieved in adult viewers by returning them to the time when social demands began to replace the creative impulses that make most artists imperfectly adapted to dictated thought and routine work. Kiarostami hoped his films would unlock creative potential by helping viewers to rinse their culturally clouded eyes:

My aim is to give the chance to create as much as possible in our minds, through creativity and imagination. I want to tap the hidden information that’s within yourself and that you probably didn’t even know existed inside you. We have a saying in Persian, when somebody is looking at something with real intensity: “He had two eyes and he borrowed two more.” Those two borrowed eyes are what I want to capture—the eyes that will be borrowed by the viewer to see what’s outside the scene he’s looking at. To see what is there and also what is not there.^[43]

Symbolism is the tried and true method of awakening the interpretive imagination, and as Elena points out, Kiarostami crafted Where Is the Friend’s House? into a “parable with deep philosophic meaning,” in which the streets, houses, and outdoor locations of small mountain towns were carefully reconstructed to create an inner rather than an externally “real” setting.^[44]

Doors, the film’s most prominent symbol, illustrate a technique used to stimulate the imagination. They represent a means of conception that can either trap viewers within the frame or awaken their curiosity to escape by sensing what is outside or, correspondingly, what lies beneath the social surface in the human soul. Alfred Hitchcock famously used a closed door to heighten suspense because the spectator would fear an unimaginable horror more than a depicted one. Kiarostami opens Where Is the Friend’s House? with a closed door to make viewers imagine what Ahmad feels and is beginning to think because cinema typically falls short of literature’s ability to enter the mind of an adult, much less a child. Though the film ostensibly concerns a child’s anxiety over a homework assignment, homework itself becomes a metaphor for what children learn outside of school and what adults may learn to see once their social blinders have been removed. Where Is the Friend’s House? is the first film where Kiarostami makes extensive use of the zigzag road to suggest that the most valuable parts of life, signified in general by the film frame, lie outside the straight-ahead field of vision.

The film’s opening image illustrates what Kiarostami meant when he said that we can always sense more than we can conceive. He uses a closed blue-gray metal door to represent the limits of our conditioned perceptions and a din of childish voices to represent the authentic feeling thoroughly socialized adults have repressed. Normally, Kiarostami said, “people [who] come to the theater [have] been trained to stop being curious and imaginative and simply take what’s given to them.” Instead, the viewer should be given an opportunity to imagine “what’s outside the field of vision,” and because showing a concrete image is inherently limiting, “the only way out of this dilemma is sound.”^[45]

Thus, the inner life of an eight-year-old child, which is normally ignored, immediately becomes the thematic subtext by having children’s voices precede their appearance. Sound is used to convey essence throughout the film, and therefore the first of a collage of adult authority figures who loom over the film is introduced by the sound of the teacher’s loud footsteps cutting into the joyful chaos before he enters the door and is actually seen. The initial placement of the camera outside the closed door puts the adult viewer in the place of the initially unseen teacher, in the conventional world outside the still-sensitive vision of the children, which the rest of the film helps to recover.

Although the teacher is a handsome young man in his early thirties, his first words are comically authoritarian: “Who has told you to sit down? Sit down!” Then he walks from the blackboard to close a hinged mullioned window with vertical bars, a key symbol of confinement. His next statement is also unintentionally comic—“As soon as I am late, you show me you don’t know how to behave.”—because he spends the rest of the scene berating the students for being tardy or not turning their homework in on time. But he tears up the on-time sheets of one boy because they were not in the workbook, which would allow him to trace week-to-week progress. Then he holds up the workbook of Ahmad Ahmadpur, the film’s hero, as the proper example. The sequence is important because it subtly predicts that Ahmad has the discipline to persist and ultimately make a rebellious decision based on cumulative knowledge of the adult world he encounters, a type of homework the teacher did not intend.

The lateness motif is a metaphor for Ahmad’s development as an individual who initially persists in following the rules until he realizes before it is too late how to circumvent them. By the end of the film, Ahmad has learned to use rather than follow rules. The teacher, however, is unwittingly raising a generation of slaves, a social imperative in most societies, even the often-idealized rural one depicted in the film. As in any society, children are fed and nurtured, but they are also trained to follow rules that benefit the society as a whole, even when those rules stifle individual feeling.

When Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh, Ahmad’s friend, falls in the schoolyard, Ahmad reveals an instinct to nurture by taking him to the pump and pouring water on his skinned knee, and as soon as he returns home, his mother sends him to get the baby’s bottle and diaper. Ahmad’s home is a microcosm of a society where everyone is so busy that their whole identity has become a function of their work. In one shot of the mother hanging out sheets to dry, all we see are hands over the top of the sheet, and later in the film we see a man so completely covered by the load of hay he carries that he looks like a walking haystack, a shot repeated in The Wind Will Carry Us.

As Ahmad rushes about to complete his chores, the camera briefly cuts to a shot of his grandmother watering beautiful flowering plants in a row of vases on the balcony railing. Ahmad has absorbed a strong instinct to nurture from his teacher and his family, but he will not remain statically docile like the plants. Throughout the scene, a rooster crows as if to foreshadow Ahmad’s awakening, and the baby cries as a sign of the need for help that Ahmad will desperately try to give Mohammad when he discovers that he had accidentally brought home his friend’s workbook after he fell in the schoolyard.

Mohammad had forgotten to bring his homework to school on two previous occasions, and he faces expulsion if he fails a third time. But when Ahmad repeatedly tells his mother he must go to the nearby town of Poshteh to return the book, she ignores him at first, then angrily tells him to do his homework and go play. When he still persists, she forcefully orders him to his assigned corner in a small alcove, where he is repeatedly pictured between two confining posts next to a tall samovar as if he had become the usefully productive item society wants individual workers to be: “Don’t move from there! Otherwise I will smack you so hard! Do you hear me?”

But Ahmad’s empathy for his friend gives him courage. When his mother exasperatedly asks where Mohammad lives and Ahmad says “Poshteh,” she says that’s too far from their town of Koker and accuses him of lying. As children are expected to be predictable at school and at home, so adults are expected to mindlessly carry on work that benefits the society as a whole and that has little to do with “human beings and their souls,” the subject Kiarostami wanted his films to address. Until Ahmad meets the equivalent of a Sufi guide midway through the film, his only adult role models at home are versions of society’s average Joes: a father who fills his leisure time with media distraction (a radio that mostly receives static) and a grandfather who apes the societal leaders who bully everyone below them. When Ahmad sneaks out of his house at dusk, carrying the notebook and the pen that become his weapons of liberation, he runs past the grandfather sitting on a bench with a crony. The grandfather, wearing thick glasses to signify his socialized limitations, asks, “Is that our Ahmad? What is he going to do in Poshteh?”

But Ahmad has now embarked on the zigzag road that signifies a spiritual quest, where the wisdom gained is not from achieving the goal but from absorbing unexpected experience along the way. While the unhelpful adults Ahmad encounters are mostly impediments to further growth, Kiarostami uses sound to convey the inner essence of the boy’s character. The sound of a steady, slow drumbeat begins just as Ahmad leaves his house. It continues as he runs back past the cradle to get the pen, and the cradle that he is leaving is visually noted when he passes it again on the way out.

Once outside, the film’s only musical theme begins as Ahmad’s continual running is accompanied by a steady up-tempo drum, intermittently punctuated nonmelodically by a plucked stringed instrument. The use of only two instruments expresses a child’s simplicity, while its steady pace connotes the strength of his soul. There is a subtle, repeated, up-and-down phrase that puts the sound in harmony with the up-and-down rolling hills, and its pleasing sound also matches the beautiful scenery of the barren country dotted by trees, with a small piece of blue sky still visible in the lengthening shadows. Ahmad is on the right track.

But that frequently does not seem to be the case because he passes through a series of setbacks that become daunting through their sheer accumulation. The first shot in Poshteh is a closed wooden door on the right and a stairway leading through an archway on the left. At the top of the stairs, Ahmad comes out onto another street, where he asks a “walking haystack” if he knows where Mohammad lives. The voice in the haystack says he doesn’t know, leaving Ahmad to inquire at the next house. Kiarostami makes his point about dehumanizing work by having the camera stay on the man who emerges and sits down as if his load had been exhaustingly heavy.

This is the life most of Ahmad’s schoolmates will inherit regardless of the kind of work they are suited to do. Their role as domestic animals who serve the powers that be is indicated after Ahmad ascends to the next level, where a cow emerges from a dark passage, which he then runs through. Suddenly a sheet drops down in front of him, and the woman on the balcony above asks him to throw it up to her. But he can’t throw it high enough, and he is already learning that one place is like another place. As an adult, her placement on the balcony exaggerates her power over Ahmad and her indifference to his concerns, and after reaching down to take the sheet to give to the neighbor who dropped it, she has no similar help to offer a lesser person who is not her peer.

Here, as at home, adults have made work their priority. The woman’s indifference to the child’s plea does not match the beauty of the flowers she waters and the beautiful split-level door next to where she stands. It foreshadows the only creative person Ahmad will meet. Unlike the many closed doors he passes, the sides of the top half are swung open and the bottom half has an intricate geometric design of holes that can admit and emit light. And while the woman may take the door maker’s craft for granted, like the cinemagoer who ignores these carefully selected details as mere background, Kiarostami’s camera wants us to look for the beauty that surrounds us on his film’s zigzag path as well as on our own.

Ahmad repeatedly encounters people who can’t really see him because they are blinded by hardship, necessity, or their own concerns. A boy he recognizes as a classmate walks up carrying a heavy metal can that he can barely manage. He knows where Mohammad lives but can’t take Ahmad there because he has to deliver the milk. In the first scene, the same boy had told the teacher he was sitting on the floor because his back hurt. Now again, the obstacles facing Ahmad’s attempt to make friendship more important than work are symbolized when the boy says that Mohammad lives on a steep street with a staircase in front but that there are many streets and houses like that. They are inhabited largely by people who have lost their souls.

The motif of laundry representing the deceptively cleansed surface recurs when Ahmad enters a white stone courtyard where a child’s pair of trousers hanging on a line looks like Mohammad’s. As he touches the pants and calls his name, the loud cry of a cat recalls the crying baby at home and the maturity of his intent to prevent his friend’s pain as he had by rolling up his friend’s trouser leg to soothe his wound in the schoolyard. No one answers when he calls up toward the balcony, “Nematzadeh! I have your book!” And the silence is meant to ask the viewers, too, What have you learned from your education? What have you learned from your life?

When he touches the empty pants again, the cat cries in seeming sympathy with the pain Ahmad fears his friend will suffer. When Ahmad knocks on the neighbor’s blue-gray door, the same cold color as the one to his classroom in the opening shot, an elderly lady with a cloth covering her face opens the door part way. She says she is sick and that he should go away, but her sickness and her “mask” represent those of societies at large, both the rural one of Koker and the urban ones of Kiarostami’s viewers. First, she says no one lives next door. Then she says the pants belong to the grandson of the lady who lives there. The cat cries again when she curtly tells Ahmad to just go away.

But everywhere Ahmad goes in the adult world begins to look the same to the viewer, if not yet consciously to him. Status based on occupation rather than kinship, actual or metaphorical, rules these people’s lives. Because Ahmad is eight years old and almost everyone he meets towers over him, low-angle shots of the adults exaggerate their indifference to his intense effort to prevent another person’s pain. A contrasting conversation that he overhears on another street makes the point. It begins with a woman saying angrily, “And he comes yesterday evening to ask my husband to help him.” When the other woman asks, “What is his profession?” the first answers, “Waiter. He was working three years, but then his boss sold the shop and told him that he had to go away. But since he is my husband’s cousin, he told him that he had to help him.”

At this point Ahmad ascends a stairway toward the sound of the same self-elevated voice, which now sneers, “He barely has money to eat.” Receiving no answer to his knock, Ahmad enters the ironically bright royal blue door where the lady who was speaking is shown running water into a basin: “Who are you looking for, kid?” So far, he has made no direct progress toward his goal, but he has been learning far more than he bargained for. Wherever he turns, he is met by adult figures who can only do the laundry—that is, endlessly attend to the social façade—so it is no real surprise to us that the woman tells him that Mohammad and his father have gone to Koker.

Actually, “Who are you looking for, kid?” is one of the film’s most resonant lines because Ahmad is on an unwitting quest to discover the house of the Sufi Friend in himself and through someone else he had not hoped to meet. That person is the antithesis of his grandfather, the first person he encounters when he returns to Koker. And in order to live with people like that (as Kiarostami had to live with the Iranian censors), the first thing to learn is to invent self-preserving fictions. Ahmad is also learning that kinship is where you find it, not in blood relations (or, for that matter, in shared ties of religion, nationality, or social class).

The grandfather has automatic cultural authority over Ahmad, and the interaction that ensues is solely to bolster that authority, which is the way of the world in most structured human groups. First, he asks Ahmad where he is going. Ahmad lies, “To buy bread.” Then he asks what the boy was doing in Poshteh, and when Ahmad explains he was trying to help a friend, the grandfather is not only as indifferent as his mother had been, but he also bypasses this concern for human solidarity to assert personal power, much as the leaders of many countries have betrayed their religious and revolutionary ideals.

The grandfather’s expressionless face and thick glasses are a visual sign of conditioned surrender to those who presume to play God. All the grandfather knows are variations of omnipotence versus submission, a religious imperative in conservative Islam. First, he demands that Ahmad get his cigarettes, and when the boy, who is in a hurry to help Mohammad, replies, “They may run out of bread,” the grandfather assumes a threatening tone: “I do not want to have to repeat it!” The contrast between bread, which supplies communal nourishment, and cigarettes, which are a self-gratifying addiction, parallels the antithetical values that different kinds of people instinctively embrace.

The kinship connection to which the grandfather is oblivious is suggested when his sensitive-faced companion offers him a cigarette. The grandfather refuses it because he has only learned to respect self-esteem based on the little power he can muster:

I have my own. That was not my point. I want the kid to be educated so that he grows up to be a good man. When I was little, my father would give me one cent a week and beat me every fortnight. And sometimes he would forget to give me the money on purpose, but he would never forget to give me a smack so that he would make me a strong man. And you saw how my grandson behaved. I had to repeat my words to him three times. And we want him to be educated properly, to be a good citizen, because if he is lazy, he will not be useful to society.

The grandfather’s companion exposes the practice of using morality and injustice as an excuse to exercise power: “If he listened to you, would you still hit him?”

The grandfather’s response reveals how the social order crushes independent thought and expels empathy for peers in favor of identifying with the absolute power that has crushed them, a power frighteningly projected into a punishing, judgmental God. The pattern is passed down from generation to generation. Those who hold power and those who submit to it all signify an omnipotence that can destroy natural kinship. Ahmad retains an instinct to nurture that has died in the socially conditioned grandfather:

Find a good excuse to beat him every fortnight so that he won’t forget. I used to work with an Iranian engineer building roads. After a while, two foreign engineers arrived. They looked at the road and said that it was improperly built. The Iranian engineer said it could be fixed with sand and gravel. The foreigner said we had to completely redo it to make it five centimeters higher so that it would match the contract. When he was leaving, I asked the Iranian engineer, “Why is my salary 6,000 tomans, and they receive 12,000?” He said the other workers would carry out orders immediately but that I had to be asked twice.

The use of foreign in the reminiscence is a way of universalizing the situation, and the next sequence shows that the pernicious drive to replace interhuman connection with status is not confined to a particular social system. A door salesman riding a donkey arrives from Poshteh to collect money from the grandfather’s friend. The door salesman is ruthless and exploitive, the polar opposite of the door maker Ahmad eventually meets, and the two together comprise concepts of the egocentric God of fear versus the generous God of creation. Like the diversionary salesmen of religion or cinema, the door salesman promises relief from vulnerability and death. After he collects from the previous sale, he turns to another elderly man and pushes his product as a way to “keep out the cold.”

The man reveals himself to be an independent soul who is not easily conned: “I like being cold. I already have doors.” The ensuing sequence is metaphorically metaphysical: “Come on, grandfather. With these doors your name will be remembered forever. Everyone will say those doors belonged to a great man.”—“After I die, what do I need them for?”—“Do you only think about death?” The subtext reminds the viewer that people acquire status symbols so that they can forget about death. The failure of these illusions of immortality is suggested by the salesman’s mode of transportation: a donkey that carries him from small village to small village as a comic variant of the monotonous urban journeys of freeway drivers in modern cities. The practice is ancient and spiritually fruitless; only the products and their mode of distribution have changed.

The addiction to security symbols is reinforced when Ahmad returns without the cigarettes. The grandfather is furious because the child’s apparent disobedience reminds him of the social impotence he felt after he had been accused of disobedience decades earlier. Again, Kiarostami advises, the only way to deal with people obsessed with power is to fool them. Once again, Ahmad tries to escape one boss’s wrath by saying he is dutifully serving another: “But I won’t have time to go to the bakery.” The salesman interrupts to beg and then simply takes a sheet from the notebook that represents Ahmad’s dedication to his friend: “But it’s Mohammad’s. I have to return it.” The grandfather intervenes—“Give it to him!”—unconsciously supporting the structure of a state in which power, seminally wielded by an enforcer God, is then filtered down to the inhabitants of each social level in the highest available form, from supreme leader to abusive parent.

The salesman then forcibly takes the book away, teaching Ahmad and the viewer how culture and education are routinely co-opted and moral ideals are discarded when they are not useful: “I’ll only take one leaf. The teacher won’t find out.” Culture’s practical use is underscored when the salesman grabs the book again after giving it back so that he can use it as a prop to write up his order. When Ahmad overhears that the salesman is from Poshteh, he excitedly asks if he is Mr. Nematzadeh and if Mohammad is his son, but the salesman’s single mission excludes noncommercial connections, and without a word he jumps on the donkey, which he accelerates with a whip as he returns home from a another day at the office. The drum and stringed instrument that accompany Ahmad’s two journeys to and from Poshteh resume as Ahmad intrepidly pursues the mounted man, and although we know he will never catch him, that failure may over time be the hero’s salvation. Out on the rolling hills dotted with small trees, Ahmad moves beyond the social trap where, in a brief intercut, his grandfather sits hopelessly rooted.

Back on the multileveled streets of Poshteh, the salesman urges the donkey up a flight of stone stairs, past a beautiful light brown wooden door unlike the mass-produced metal ones he sells. Then, at the end of a second street, he ascends more stairs to a third level, signifying the compelled social ascent that societies whip their children to attain but that Ahmad and the film avoid and reject. The fate of those who are not so lucky is seen when Ahmad descends two levels to discover the donkey tied outside a building. The salesman emerges carrying half of a heavy door, followed by a child carrying the other half. The child is the same age as Ahmad, but he has already been reduced to a beast of burden, the mindless role that he as laborer or salesman will be forced to play.

As a person transformed to a function of his work, the boy is only a variation on a social type. He tells Ahmad that his last name is also Nematzadeh but that there are lots of people in Poshteh with that last name and that he doesn’t know Mohammad Reza. In the larger sense, this child and many others need help, but as the unnamed director in And Life Goes On discovers, you can’t save everyone or even selected individuals. You can only help or be helped by the people you are given the opportunity to reach, when and if they are ready.

The work motif culminates when the boy, holding his wrist as if sore from lifting, tells Ahmad to ask for Mohammad’s house at the blacksmith factory, a second beast of burden reference to subtly indicate the role of laborers in societies that ruling elites falsely promote as classless with impartial justice under civil or religious law but with equality in name only. The friend who can spring him from this trap is not the little boy he seeks but the version of the spiritual Friend he soon meets. The sequence begins in a dark street, where Ahmad hears the simultaneous sounds of blacksmith tools and sheep bleating, the docile herd at their unrewarding work. But he also hears the sound of a saw behind a wooden window cover, topped with a pattern of rectangular holes. It is the door maker, busy at his solitary task. Ahmad knocks on the door, and raising the window cover, an old man answers him in the first kind adult voice he has heard since the film began: “What is it, son?” The kinship term is important. His grandfather had only called him Ahmad. The door maker tells him he knows where his friend lives and will show him the way.

Without realizing it, Ahmad has just met the best friend he will ever have. Friend capitalized is one of the names for God in the Persian poetic tradition. It occurs, for example, in the Rumi poem “Departure,” in which the traveler is reminded by the poet as “friend” not to be diverted from seeking the “Friend” at the end of his life’s journey: “O heart, toward thy heart’s love wend, and O friend, fly toward the Friend, / Be wakeful, watchman, to the end.”^[46] As in Attar’s Conference of the Birds, the goal is not to find a kingly Friend outside of oneself but to actualize that creative love in one’s own heart. As Kiarostami put it in an interview, “The journey forms part of our culture, and it is linked with mysticism; for us what is really important is not the goal we wish to attain but the path we must travel.”^[47] He added that the zigzag path represents desire, and the fulfilment of desire is never at the end of the path but always present along the way after one’s eyes are opened. Thus, the tree on the hill that Ahmad repeatedly passes and that he and the untutored audience are unlikely to notice while they are still spiritual children is a “symbol of friendship.”^[48]

As Elena points out, Kiarostami “created” the tree and the hill on a previously bare promontory, and they are two of the key “words” to his cinematic poem inspired by an actual poem by Sohrab Sepehri, one of Iran’s most respected modern poets. “Address,” in Elena’s words, “openly subscribes [to a] tradition of mysticism, of remote Sufi inspiration.”^[49] It begins with a rider searching “through the false dawn twilight” for “the House of the Friend.” A passerby “with a branch of light in his mouth” points to an aspen at the end of a “garden lane more green than God’s dream.” At the end of “that lane which appears behind adolescence,” the rider should turn first to “the flower of solitude” and then stop at the “foot of the mountain of eternal myths,” where a “transparent fear will envelop” him. But then, “in the intimacy” of that “flowing space,” the rider will see a “child who has climbed a pine tree to pluck a chick from the nest of light, and from the child [he] will ask: ‘Where is the House of the Friend?’”^[50]

The poem tells its readers, as Kiarostami tells his viewers, to escape the “false dawn” of socially conditioned experience and to recover their souls by entering a spiritual place that is “more green than God’s dream” and beyond the established eternal myths. “More green than God’s dream” implies that there is a transcendent spiritual experience in the natural world more authentic than the “eternal myths” of a supernatural God that in Attar’s Conference of the Birds lead straight to the final valley of Poverty and Nothingness. This place exists only in the human heart, but to find it, Sepehri and Kiarostami say, one must recover the sensibility of childhood, “the land which appears behind adolescence,” and abandon the bleating sheep, as Ahmad does when he meets the door maker, whose creative power is inseparable from the “flower of solitude,” which he will bequeath to Ahmad. The old man and the boy are in rapport because one is a presocialized child and the other is a postadult child, like Sepehri’s guide who plucks another child “from the nest of light” before that light has dissipated into the darkness, where most of the adults in Koker, Poshteh, and everywhere else live.

The old man is not the Friend, but he is one who directs others to the Friend, the traditional function of the Sufi saint. Speaking about the wisdom of Puya, the fictional director’s young son in And Life Goes On, Kiarostami said, “In Eastern philosophy we believe that you need a guide before you set foot in unknown territory,” and even though his father “has the steering wheel,” Puya is the “real guide” because instead of talking about the tragedy, he talks about “what interests him.” He accepts the “illogic and instability of the earthquake” and “just moves on.”^[51] Ahmad’s guide is more advanced than Puya because he not only retains an active appreciation for what he encounters but he also is able to transmit love and appreciation through his highly refined art. And in order to acquire that art, he has long cultivated the “flower of solitude” that he passes on, eventually in the symbolic form of an actual flower, to a boy whose persistent love promises recognition.

Because he is the maker of many uniquely varied doors and windows, the door maker symbolically perceives existence from a Godlike point of view. As an agent of God’s creative power and in this sense merged with God like a Sufi saint, he is a maker of all frames outside any particular one. In “Doors without Keys,” Kiarostami’s photography exhibit of doors from different times and places, he had intended to take his viewers outside their cultural frames so that they could sense and feel a transcendent message. He reminded them of conscious limits at the end of the exhibit with the placard that read, “We are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it is inside a frame,”^[52] but on another occasion, he told interviewer David Sterritt that he wanted his viewers to “borrow” eyes that he himself had borrowed (from poets like Rumi or Sepehri) so that they might see “what’s outside the scene [they’re] looking at. To see what is there and also what is not there.”^[53]

Some hostile Iranian journalists, thoroughly immersed in their social roles, sensed that Kiarostami was rejecting the limitations of vision that constituted the only world they knew. One said the director didn’t look at human beings as equals “but from high above them with dark glasses . . . arrogant, emotionless and calculating.” Another said the film “lacked any real audience.”^[54] They may have been angry because they sensed that their own seemingly real worlds were being discarded as the film necessarily discards those of the teacher, the grandfather, and the door salesman, and so on.

When the old man first appears, he is leaning out his window, emerging from a frame, to help Ahmad make new connections. Just after he and the boy begin to walk down the street, they meet a woman aggressively selling apples. Their exchange echoes that of the door salesman’s failure with a prospective customer, supplemented by the biblical connotation of generalized temptation: “Buy some apples.”—“I don’t have teeth to bite apples.”—“Then for your son.”—“He’s not my son.”—“For your grandchildren.”—“I don’t have grandchildren.” The brief sequence contrasts relationships based on the cash nexus to those based on empathy and between obligations based on gene pool ties versus those based on intuitive rapport with an unexpected stranger. This was the legendary connection between Rumi and his Sufi companion Shams of Tabriz, who mysteriously disappeared because (some speculate) Rumi’s jealous son ordered his death. Thereafter, Rumi spent years searching for Shams, until he realized that the love he imagined in one person or even one external God had been and always would be within himself.^[55]

As the door maker and Ahmad walk toward Mohammad’s house, he shows the boy the best examples of his work, just as Kiarostami takes the viewers away from their anxious goals to show them what’s worthwhile in the course of the journey rather than at its imagined end. Though the door maker is not God, he sees the world as Kiarostami imagines God views his creation. The door maker knows Ahmad’s father and everyone else in Koker and Poshteh because he has made their doors and windows. That is, there is a single source for all cultural beliefs, though power-hungry “salesmen” (like the biblical Satan) are always striving to divide them. The Sufi quest of Kiarostami and other spiritual artists takes children beyond their social fathers (supreme leaders, presidents, etc.) and merge them with the creative source. The deviation of hierarchical societies from an original loving purpose begins to be suggested when the door maker says they are changing the doors and windows he had made, and nobody asks why.

He walks very slowly, as Kiarostami paces his films, to advance the inquiry and to try to calm the caught-in-time rush his immature audience habitually feels: “They have heard that iron doors will last a lifetime, but how long is a life?” and then to relativize even the longest physical life span, he asks eight-year-old Ahmad his age. Life is fully lived and metaphorically extended when it is lived in a fully realized present, the state a craftsman achieves when he is intent on his work. This is the immortality the old man intuitively tries to transmit because Ahmad is approaching the “fall,” when the existential joy of being alive is about to be replaced by the gnawing drive to be safely better, to be as gods who are invulnerable but who create nothing.

Cain’s “city” is the biblical consequence of the poisoned apple: “My nephew also was exactly eight when his father took him to the city.” In films like Close-Up, Ten, Crimson Gold (the script he wrote for Jafar Panahi), and Like Someone in Love, Kiarostami elaborates on the urban trap where people are isolated from a spiritual source. Even if they visit a museum or go to a film, most people are too focused on some immediate goal to appreciate what the old man shows Ahmad.

Just before they begin walking together, we see a close-up of the old man’s front door, an object so beautiful that it suggests more than aesthetic skill. The upper section, which comprises more than half the door, is carved in a pattern, with spokes radiating from a circle in the center to the borders of a tilted square. This suggestion of creative power emanating from a single source has been replaced by the mass-produced metal doors that represent the work of the city. The door maker says that he and his brother made this particular door forty-five years ago, but the brother had a wife and children and needed more money, so he moved to Tehran. The door maker himself has been to Tehran twice and wants no part of it.

As they pass a striking stained-glass window with a white, orange, and blue-gray oval pattern, the door maker speaks as if he were God lamenting human indifference to His loving work. People striving to enhance their material security forget to enjoy what has been freely given. It is a kind of Cain-and-Abel division. Cain built the first cities as places where envy and competition have replaced kinship: “It saddens me when I see them leaving these windows and doors which I built with so much effort to go to the city,” and the idea of recovering kinship connections is implied when he adds, “I’d like to know where they take the old doors when they replace them.”

Although Ahmad impatiently wants to reach Mohammad before nightfall, the old man stops at a public basin, reflecting the film’s cleansing purpose: “Wait, I want to wash my face, and after we’ll continue.” The cleansing precedes the introduction of Sepehri’s “flower of solitude,” which the old man now offers and which is the film’s final image. For Kiarostami, art is not an end in itself but a means of referring the viewer back to the source of all creative power. For him, nature is always more beautiful than art, but art is the best way of helping people to see it: “Come wash your face.”—“I’m in a hurry.”—“We’re almost there. Your friend’s house is right there. What good water! Spring water! Here take this flower, and put it in the book. Don’t lose it. You must watch over it.”

Ahmad urges the old man to hurry because “it’s getting really late,” but as a metaphor of growth, it is already too late for some spectators and never too late for others. The boy worries about the immediate future as he puts the flower in the book, suggesting that viewers who do not get the message now may receive its benefit later. But for the time being, the boy must become accustomed to the fears and adversities that threaten every human life. When they reach Mohammad’s house, the audience might be expected to breathe a sigh of relief. Night has now fallen, and Ahmad hesitates to enter the pitch-black entrance to a stairway: “You go through here; it’s the first door to the left.”

Thunder begins to growl, the wind blows a small piece of paper in circles, and a tethered donkey paws the earth. Ahmad enters the passage and runs back out. The old man asks, “Don’t you want to give him the book?” and assures him that he will wait so that they can return together. Ahmad tries again and runs back down, still holding the book, indicating that he is not ready to overcome his fears and reflecting the failures of humanity in general to accomplish a higher purpose until they are ready to stop fearing the unknown.

As a culture-transcending artist, all Kiarostami can do is to continue to quell the divisive fears of an immature humanity by directing their attention to ongoing love. The frames now balance images of black shadows and light from the streetlamps, as the two walk back together: “Let’s go through here. I can show you the doors and windows I have made.” But again, the artist’s adversary is always the demands of the powers that be. Ahmad won’t pause to look because he is afraid his mother will scold him for being late. Continually passing through the balanced frames of light and darkness, the viewer who is ready to forget about being late may briefly admire the stained-glass windows with their patterned ovals of color and the light-emitting designs on the carved doorways, but Ahmad, like other immature viewers, can’t help but complain that the pace is too slow. The sounds cease after they ascend a lighted stairway, where Ahmad impatiently stops: “Why are you standing there?”—“You are very slow.”—“When I was your age I used to run from place to place.”

The old man offers comfort, a cover for the cold, which Ahmad refuses because his fear of “being late” again prevents him from accepting the gifts that life has to offer. Guiding the unready requires more than words, and the old man says he can go a little faster if he stops talking, which is fine with Ahmad, as it is with viewers waiting to see where an “inscrutable” filmmaker is “going with this.” So the boy runs ahead into the darkness but quickly reappears when a frightening sound sends him running back: “What’s the matter Ahmad?”—“The dog is barking.”—“That’s why we have to walk together.” Once again, the exchange resonates with the need for human kinship and spiritual guidance that people feel rather than outwardly profess, but the old man knows there is no way of directly transmitting this feeling: “You go on your own. I’ll watch you.” The line echoes the many expressions of Kiarostami’s belief in hands-off directing that he has stated in interviews, such as the previously quoted reference to Rumi’s polo ball, and that he reflexively portrays at the end of Through the Olive Trees (see chapter 9).

They part when they reach the brightly lit stairway of the door maker’s house. Ahmad gathers his courage and runs off in the darkness, and ascending the steps, the old man casts a huge shadow on the lighted stone wall as he approaches his door. The camera cuts to the woodgrain of a very old wall, which turns out to be inside his apartment, part of an outer layer that has worn away. The rest of the interior has the effect of a sanctuary, one simultaneously human and divine, while outside the dog still barks his warning. The camera suggests that what he represents is partly hidden. His body is seen only up to his shoulders as he enters the door and while he slips out of his street shoes and into a pair of slippers.

On the wall, there is a photograph of a woman dressed in black, someone he has loved and lost, and when he looks out the window and turns his head to each side as if looking for Ahmad, the image shows that though he lacks an omnipotent power to protect, his love remains constant. The dog’s barking, too, is constant, but its continuity makes it less alarming, something to be taken for granted in every human frame. Outside all frames, the artist can only plant seeds and hope that they will flower.

An abrupt cut to Ahmad shows him physically safe at home but still in mental turmoil. In place of the old man’s voice offering help, we hear the sound of his father’s radio, and a cut to the father shows him fiddling with the dial, trying to resume the soccer broadcast that has just cut out, a primitive version of adults depending on television or the internet to fill the void during respites from routine work. He wears a gray shirt and gray pants, but he sits next to a chest of brown wood with an elaborate, studded-metal pattern, something interesting and beautiful that someone else took time to make and that is the antithesis of the blank distraction the father embodies. Outside, however, the wind whistles, blocking the radio signal and foreshadowing the spiritual force in Ahmad rising to destroy the conditioning that binds him to social rules that have kept him from helping Mohammad by finding himself.

As the sound of the wind increases, he refuses to eat the food his mother brings, again signaling the inner revolution he is about to launch and that is not explicit until the following scene. But here, the sounds of the outer storm express the fearful last stage of social departure, experienced by most people at a later age. The mother questioning his rejection of the food—“What is it? You don’t like what you got?”—applies to everything his journey has taught him about the adult world, and now, without the old man, he has no one to advise him. The mother repeatedly demands, “Come eat; do you hear me?” but Ahmad quietly refuses, “I don’t want to,” because he is learning to know what he can no longer swallow. Then she orders him to go to bed, a variation on the shutting down of consciousness that authority demands, but Ahmad protests that he has to do his homework, which by now becomes a symbol of how some children learn to go beyond their assigned tasks and thoughts.

And so his mother says he should do it on the other side of the house because the adults want to sleep, to remain in darkness, while Ahmad, like the old man, remains in the light. He kneels to pick up his notebooks as his father puts the radio on the shelf and passes without looking at his son and his grandfather sits on the sofa, looking down in a stupor. The mother, wearing gray like the father and looming up over the boy, unlocks the door from a lock too high for Ahmad to reach so that he can go through a doorway into another room, where the steady mechanical whistle of the radio has been replaced by the mysterious respiration of the wind.

The camera enhances Ahmad’s impulse to heed an inspiration from a spiritual rather than a social source by staying on the family briefly after the boy leaves the room. The mother’s shadow remains visible near the door as we hear only the sound of her carrying dishes, the entire identity of one who is no longer a full person because her life has been consumed by work, while the grandfather, the most unattractive figure in Ahmad’s world, still sits immobile to the right of the frame, unable to extend his mind or feelings beyond the traumatic intimidation that defines him. Kiarostami uses this technique throughout the film, keeping the camera on a person or symbolic object to leave a cumulative impression on Ahmad and the viewers.

Then the camera cuts to Ahmad, kneeling down in his room. Upon a second viewing, we know what the film does not immediately disclose: that he is copying his own homework into Mohammad’s notebook. The sounds of the storm signify the broken barriers, even though his mother returns with the tray of food and in an uncharacteristically gentle voice uses the kinship term for the first time: “Have your dinner, my son. And when you finish, turn off the light and go to bed.” But by this time, Ahmad cannot be stopped by cajolery any more than he could be by threats. He will not ingest the world to which his family has been assigned.

The storm blows through the open doors of his window, a sign of the breakthrough that liberates him to act independently. The wind becomes very loud, and a shot out the window shows the washed sheets that the women have been working on so hard whipping around on the line. All the work of society can be destroyed in a war or natural catastrophe, but the inculcation of rigid, soul-freezing ideas can also be destroyed by a natural process in the creative child. While the wind turns the pages of the notebook next to the one he writes in, Ahmad is moved to copy the homework on his own. Another shot out the window shows one of the sheets fluttering on the ground, a visual image of unquestioning obedience torn from Ahmad’s soul.

Outside, the mother quickly and efficiently removes sheets from the line, saving them from the storm as Ahmad moves to save his friend from expulsion, the small child’s ultimate fear of social wrath. As on the Poshteh street, the sound of a dog, now howling instead of just barking, conveys the fear of a similar fate for Ahmad if his crime is discovered. He looks up with an alarmed expression before another cut to the flailing sheets outside. At the limits of his fear, he has reached a point of transformation, where thought and action come from a mysterious source, whether we want to call it God or the unconscious mind. Just before Attar’s thirty chosen birds can reach the Simurgh, the God within themselves, their Hoopoe leader tells them they will be suspended in the valley of Poverty and Nothingness until, “with an impulse that is not theirs,” they are “absorbed in seas that have no shores.” For this moment of fearful transformation, eight-year-old Ahmad must allow himself to be possessed by a mind beyond the one society admits.

The sequence moves from Ahmad’s alarmed expression to a close-up of a white sheet, which his mother picks up, followed by an abrupt cut to the backs of boys in the classroom facing a white wall that matches the sheet. On the proverbial blank page of their being, children are drilled into perpetuating their nation’s narrative. Here, in a culture premised on religious obedience, the submission to authority is extreme. When the teacher enters, everyone quickly rises. He tells them to sit without looking at them and opens a vertical window on the left so that half of it swings out, a visual cue of what Ahmad has done. After the storm, light and fresh air stream in. At first, the teacher seems to be in an amiable mood, but tension rises when one boy arrives late and another rises to announce, “Ahmadpur is not here.” Thematically, the line applies to more than Ahmad’s physical absence. The risk is heightened when the teacher snaps, “I told you not to speak unless you are spoken to,” and a disaster appears imminent, when the camera cuts to Mohammad putting his head down on his desk as we hear the other boys getting out their notebooks.

When the teacher begins to check the homework, his words emphasize that if even minor rules are broken, the rulers will notice: “Ghassem Hoiat! Why did you write pedestrian with two s’s. The word pedestrian is written with only one s. Is that clear?” The particular word refers back to Ahmad’s repeated circular journey, in which he defied his parents and now defies the teacher. The ensuing dialogue indicates the unrelenting obligations these children will increasingly face, some of them in conflict with each other. The teacher asks one boy why there is a stain on his notebook, and the boy explains that his hands were sweating after working with his father on the farm, but instead of sympathy, the boy receives a rebuke: “You need to remember your first obligation is education. And afterward you can help your father on the farm and your mother at home.”

The sweating hands also connote fear. What will happen to Mohammad, and where is Ahmad? The tension rises when the teacher reaches a boy who has not done the assignment and again, when he comes to the boy we had seen carrying the heavy door in Poshteh, who says his back hurt too much to do his homework. As before, the teacher says he can let it go only twice, and we know that for Mohammad it will be the third and final time.

The teacher now turns toward a knock on the door, and Ahmad enters. The teacher says, “You didn’t come from Poshteh,” referring back to the first scene, where boys from Poshteh were given a few extra minutes not to be marked tardy because their town was further from the school than Koker. But the line is nicely ironic because Ahmad has actually been to Poshteh twice the day and night before. So when Ahmad sits down next to Mohammad, he already has one strike against him. He puts the notebook in front of Mohammad just before the teacher arrives at their desk. The tension is at its peak when the teacher demands Ahmad’s notebook and Ahmad hands him Mohammad’s instead: “This is Nematzadeh’s.”

For a moment it looks like all is lost, but after the teacher quickly glances at Ahmad’s notebook, the camera cuts to a close-up of his pen passing over a page of Mohammad’s, and we realize that he hadn’t looked at Ahmad’s long enough to notice anything identical. Then, flipping through Ahmad’s pages, he appears not to see the film’s key symbol. At the very moment the old man’s flower is briefly exposed, the musical theme that accompanied Ahmad’s circular journey softly begins. The film’s final words—“Very good. Well done, boy.”—redefine virtue by transferring it from obedience to rebellion and from the law to the heart. The journey music during the closing credits is a final tribute to the persistent love that eludes a demanding God to find the Friend.