SPIRITUALITY== 
 

 To be sure, Kiarostami, in spite of what is ultimately a humanistic (and decidedly terrestrial) response to the questions raised, all the same proceeds from a position that respects such immaterial concepts as the soul and an afterlife. Cinema, because of its material ontology, is seemingly predisposed to eschew questions that are spiritual in origin. At times, the very concept of the spiritual seems to be contradicted by the medium itself, given that it has no inherent means to confer the metaphysical. This too is a place where Kiarostami’s contribution cannot be underestimated. In no way would it be overstating the case to say that The Wind Will Carry Us provides a template by which a filmmaker can communicate metaphysical reality. The limits of the frame, the material representation of a space in dialogue with another that is not represented physically become metaphors for the relationship between this world and those which may exist apart from it. By limiting the space of the mise-en-scene, Kiarostami expands the space of the art.  

 Asked in a 2000 FILM COMMENT interview if there are any other directors who might be working on a “similar wavelength,” Kiarostami responded in a manner that reveals his own understanding of The Wind Will Carry Us as a spiritual work: “Hou Hsiao-hsien is one. Tarkovsky’s works separate me completely from physical life, and are the most spiritual films I have seen­what Fellini did in parts of his movies, bringing dream life into film, he does as well. Theo Angelopoulos’ movies also find this type of spirituality at certain moments. In general, I think movies and art should take us away from daily life, should take us to another state, even though daily life is where this flight is launched from.”  

 While this work exemplifies a certain conception of spiritual representation on film, this does not exactly account for its connection to those artists that Kiarostami mentioned. Fellini aside, the mature work of these filmmakers share a similar pacing with The Wind Will Carry Us; in films like Flowers of Shanghai, Stalker, and The Traveling Players, the relatively slow or deliberate movements have the potential to affect the viewer on a supra-emotional level, which is to say in manner analogous to music, that the viewer’s physical processes can be affected by the excessively slow rhythms, on a level beyond the intellectual or emotional—it’s almost possible to conjecture that one’s heartbeat and breathing slows in concert with the languid images onscreen. The viewer’s experience of the film thus is less mediated, his or her connection more direct, and in this way perhaps more spiritual.  

 Clearly insufficient as significant anecdote or standard drama, the film’s spare narrative has the opaque, insinuating allure of allegory, or veiled confession. That, during filming, Kiarostami himself occupied the off-camera seat in every conversation we see, suggests the filmmaker revisiting his own struggles with inner darkness. Yet if we read the seminarian as “religion” and the taxidermist as “natural philosophy” we glimpse a debate that galvanized Iranian philosophers of the Middle Ages, and, in Kiarostami’s handling, can be parsed as a subtle argument against theocracy. Or, perhaps this is another Kiarostamian film-about-film, with Badii standing for a fading form of auteur cinema whose final act is its own erasure.