To See or Not to See: A Wittgensteinian

Look at Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up

Elizabeth Hope Finnegan, D’Youville College
(ehfinnegan@gmail.com)

Abstract:
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect-seeing, and Stanley Cavell’s notion of
aspect-blindness, allow us to situate Abbas Kiarostami’s quasi-documentary
Close-Up (1990) as a radical revision of the genre that fundamentally challenges
our assumptions about truth and representation in documentary film. Considering
the film through the lens of Wittgenstein’s and Cavell’s philosophies of seeing
puts pressure on the ethical dimension of the process of seeing as it is both
enacted by and represented in the film. Kiarostami brings to the foreground the
intransigent aspects of documented reality and unsettles certain aspects of the
documentary process. In doing so, he reveals our blind spots about what we think
documentary film does, or ought to do. Close-Up blends layers of the real:
part documented present and part re-enacted past, the film recreates the story of a
real group of people who become actors playing themselves, re-enacting the story
for Kiarostami’s camera, repeating all of their “ lines ” exactly (or perhaps not so
exactly) as they recall them. Is this film a documentary? Is it fiction? Where is the
“ real, ” and what is the truth? Is “ truth ” ever representable? For Kiarostami, as for
Cavell, these questions of representation become ethical questions. With each
unraveling of a layer of reality, Kiarostami reveals a new aspect and a new
opportunity for his “ characters ” – and his audience – to see (or to fail to see) it.

Keywords: Abbas Kiarostami; Ludwig Wittgenstein; Stanley Cavell; aspect-seeing;

documentary; ethics; truth

Film-Philosophy 22.1 (2018): 21–38

DOI: 10.3366/film.2018.0060
f Elizabeth Hope Finnegan. This article is published as Open Access under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence
(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial
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 Film-Philosophy 22 (2018)

In the opening sequence of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik,

1990), we learn everything and nothing about the film we are about to
see. We learn everything about the nature of cinema and nothing about
the protagonist. We learn everything about the power of the camera
to withhold and nothing about its power to construct a whole. We learn
everything about the plot and nothing about the story.
This introductory sequence sets up three motifs which I will puzzle
through with the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect-seeing
and Stanley Cavell’s reading of our relationship to cinema as grounded
in questions of knowledge, especially the kinds of knowledge linked to
seeing and being seen. First, Close-Up repeatedly withholds from us that
which we would most like to know. Kiarostami’s cinematic strategies
ensure that we know that there is always more going on than the camera
will allow us to witness, and thus our experience of the film is often one of
frustration. Second, our protagonist, Hossein Sabzian, is notable above
all for the ways in which others see or (more often) fail to see him. He
is defined in this film, we could say, by the extent to which others see
him or are blind to him. Third, the theme of performance, and the tension
between the idea of truth and our practices of truthfulness, are central to a
paradox at the heart of this film: why exactly are we so drawn to this story
of an impostor, and how does Kiarostami use Sabzian’s story to explore
the paradox of our twin desires: a longing for a cinema of “truth,” and a
simultaneous delight in the deceptions inherent in the very apparatus of
cinematic storytelling? What is it that we are “seeing” when we go to a
film: a copy? A lie? A trick? Kiarostami’s film offers us a cinema that is
all of these and far more as well; Bernard Stiegler has suggested that
the “reality” of Kiarostami’s films is the reality of fiction, “as if reality only
realized itself fully and truly while fictioning” (2014, p. 41).
Close-Up navigates a somewhat disorienting transformative space
in which directors become lawyers, judges become actors, actors
become the parts they play (and vice versa), and the film itself refuses
to conform to the conventions of fiction or documentary genres. The
film both demonstrates and complicates Cavell’s claim that a film “must
acknowledge, what is always to be acknowledged, its own limits: in this
case, its outsideness to its own world, and my absence from it. For these
limits were always the conditions of its candor, of its fate to reveal all and
only what is revealed to it, and of its fortune in letting the world exhibit
itself ” (1979, p.146). Close-Up pushes its audience to recognize their
absence from the filmic world even as it simultaneously invites them to
participate in the construction of that world. Kiarostami seems to defy us
to determine what precisely is being revealed at all – if anything – just as
he throws our very ability to do so into question. The limits of cinema are,

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 A Wittgensteinian Look at Kiarostami’s Close-up

perhaps, the mirror of our own human limits – our outsideness to one
another, or (and) to ourselves. If one aspect of what Kiarostami is doing
with his storytelling techniques is to hold that mirror up for us, another
aspect is to remind us what we are doing when we are looking at a film in
the first place – what we are doing when we look.
Close-Up follows the trial of an unemployed film buff in Tehran who
impersonated celebrated Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and was
befriended by a well-to-do family while pretending to write a film
featuring them. Kiarostami persuaded all the major people involved in the
real-life events to portray themselves in the film’s reenactment of those
events, eventually bringing the real Makhmalbaf together with his
impersonator in the film’s final scene showing the protagonist’s release
from prison. All that said, I have just told you nothing about the “real”
story of the film, that is, what seems to have prompted Kiarostami to make
the film in the first place; what seems to have prompted him, we might
say, to see Sabzian as a subject for (of) a film.
As a pathway to the “real” story, I want to return to the opening scene.
We begin with what ought by almost any formula to be the climax of the
story: the arrest of Hossein Sabzian for the impersonation of Makhmalbaf
and the alleged defrauding of the family. In a deliberately anti-climactic
approach, Kiarostami puts us inside a cramped taxi with Mr. Farazmand,
a reporter who hopes this story will boost his paper’s ratings and make
his name as a journalist. As Farazmand explains the story to the
driver, the driver gets lost, stops repeatedly to ask for directions, and
shows no interest in the reporter’s tale. The visual style of this scene,
a reenactment starring the real Mr. Farazmand, sets up a consistent style
for all of the reenactments of the film: it is presented almost entirely in
shot-reverse shot, with virtually no two-shots. Thus we are almost always
seeing only one person’s point of view at any given time, while the other
point of view is withheld from us. When the cab driver stops to ask for
directions, we see either only the driver asking, or only the person being
asked; we see either inside or outside of the car, never both at once. Inside
the car, the camera cuts from one person to the other, so we never have
a real sense of the space of the car or of the shared perspective of
the characters. In this way, we are always (literally) cut out of one side of
the story.
All of the reenactments depicting the action leading up to the trial are
shot in a similar style, always withholding one point of view. Our
awareness is tantalized by the impression that the other perspective exists
just outside of the frame; we know it is there – we are simply denied
access. When we arrive at the Ahankhahs’ home, this tension between
what we are shown and what we are denied intensifies. While the reporter,

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Farazmand, followed by the police, goes inside the house, we stay outside
the gates with the camera and the cab driver.
One of Close-Up’s most striking stylistic features is the complete absence
of cross-cutting and parallel action. Cross-cutting creates the illusion of
connection between characters and spaces and thus creates a dense
narrative web. The narrative and spatial coherence of this narrative web
permits us to immerse ourselves seamlessly – and passively – into the
story. This is the magic (the lie, we could say) of film; nearly every
narrative and even many documentary films since the early 1900s uses this
basic vocabulary of storytelling. In his refusal to use this familiar
technique to construct his cinematic space, Kiarostami signals a departure
from the cinematic story spaces we may be most comfortable in. He is not
“exhibiting the world” to us in a way that allows us to imagine this
cinematic space as continuous with our own, to fantasize that with our
godlike eye we can sweep walls aside, see through closed doors, overhear
private conversations; in Kiarostami’s cinematic universe we are mere
mortals, obliged to wait outside the gates with the hired help.
As the primary narrative action of this opening scene no doubt ensues
inside the gates, beyond our view, we are forced to loiter with the camera
as the cab driver picks flowers out of a pile of trash and, in a playful
moment, kicks an empty aerosol can down the street. In what is perhaps
the most compelling shot in the film, we are treated to a long take of this
can rolling slowly down the hill, the camera patiently staying on the can
until it comes to rest against the curb. We do not learn until later that this
is a reenactment, not “real life,” so to speak, being observed as it unfurled
organically before the camera. And yet even then we do not know if
this shot is a reenactment of what the driver actually did at the time, if
we are seeing a real action repeated as a fiction, or if this is Kiarostami’s
interpretation of what he might have done as he waited, bored and restless
in the sunlight. As Stiegler has pointed out about the reenactment
sequences in this film, Kiarostami persists in reminding us that “human
life is always already a cinema” (2014, p. 43).
And yet this long take of the rolling can nonetheless breaches the
boundary between documentary and narrative seeing; staged or unstaged,
reenactment or cinema vérité, what we cannot deny is that the camera is
documenting, in real time, the fact of a blue can gleaming in the sunlight,
clattering sedately down a sunlit road. Any narrative space that has been
constructed is punctured; the can rolls right through it like a boulder
crashing through a piece of paper scenery in a stage play.
This power comes from the way the can almost returns our gaze from
the screen. It has questions for us: is it inside or outside the world of the
story? Where do we, the audience, stand in relation to the can? If we are

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outside of the film, are we somehow in the world of the can? The can is
undeniably on film, but it is not clear that it is inside the film. The can
turns the film, we might say, inside out. Rather than exhibiting the world
(real or fictional) to us, Kiarostami takes pleasure in attending to the
world’s flotsam, and does so at the expense of character development
and narrative construction. In a move designed to rupture any shred of
insideness we might still be nurturing after our unsettling introduction to
Close-Up’s narrative space, the long take of the rolling can sets us politely
but firmly outside both conventional documentary and conventional
fiction with a “No Admittance” sign posted on the door.1
Meanwhile, as the can rolls downhill, we know something else is going
on – presumably the major action – and yet we are not allowed to see it.
Like standing before Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, we do not
know where we are supposed to look. Kiarostami refuses to give us the
drama we expect because the drama gives us the illusion of being inside,
immersed into the story; but the truth is that cinema always puts us
outside. This is a relentlessly deceptive film, but it obligingly undermines
its own fabrications, one after the other.2 And as we peel the layers of
its deceptions, we uncover the kernel of its truthfulness: Close-Up tells
the truth about cinema itself, the truth that flickers in the light of the
projector – that its reality, and our presence within it, is a kind of spell.
And yet this dream, this spell, is, also, real. Its reality, as Rex Butler has it,
“does not so much expose the truth behind appearances as impossibly
trope or allegorize the fiction that reality stands in for, something that
cannot be shown, or if it is shown cannot be it, but only stands in for it”
(2012, p.72). In this way Kiarostami holds film accountable, as Cavell puts
it, “to the condition of its candor” (1979, p.146).
Later in the film, we witness a second reenactment of the same action,
but from the other point of view – Sabzian’s, inside the house. But even as
it may seem we are catching up, just as before, the camera withholds
everything from us. We know more now about what is happening on the
level of plot, so Kiarostami withholds from us the pleasure of seeing
everything put tidily together. Instead, we see yet another incomplete
picture. This time we know the car is arriving somewhere off camera, but

1. This is not to suggest that Kiarostami is inventing this idea; the question of blurred
boundaries between truth and fiction has been raised by documentary scholars and
filmmakers at least since the decline of Direct Cinema in the 1990s. Bill Nichols (1994)
writes, “ What counts as knowledge is not what it used to be ” (p. 96).
2. Jonathan Rosenbaum (2003) has pointed out that Kiarostami “ foreground[s] some of
the implicit contradictions of his own deceptiveness in the pursuit of documentary
truth ” (p. 14).

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all we see is Sabzian waiting uncomfortably; meanwhile, Mr. Ahankhah

confers behind closed doors with Farazmand, and the son, Mehrdad,
pretends to get ready for their next rehearsal while anxiously casting
glances out the window. When the police finally enter and handcuff
Sabzian, the scene is strikingly anticlimactic. This is all we missed, earlier,
while standing outside? The rolling can offered more drama than
the arrest. As we will see shortly, Kiarostami saves all of the drama,
the tension, the character development – everything we expect from a
fictional narrative – for the trial scene; that is, the scene in which film
itself is put on trial.
Like the arrest sequences, the final scene of the film also deliberately
withholds information from us or, at least, complicates our ability to
make knowledge claims about that information. In this scene, Sabzian is
released from prison and, as a surprise, Makhmalbaf himself is there
to pick him up to take him to the Ahankhahs’ home for a reconciliation.
The scene is staged to look like cinema vérité; we follow the action at a
distance (from within a car), with buses and pedestrians getting in the
way of the camera and obstructing our view. Even the camera car’s
windshield is artistically shattered, fragmenting and refracting the image.
To make matters worse, at this moment of genuine emotion,
Makhmalbaf’s lavalier microphone seems to be malfunctioning,
dropping out every other sentence or so. But it is just too much of
a coincidence that both the windshield of the car was broken and that
the sound was failing; that is one too many obstructions to be believable.
Kiarostami may be shooting documentary footage in real time – shooting,
in other words, a scene as it unfolds beyond his directorial control – but
he is still manipulating that reality by compromising its representation,
as if to suggest that the only way to capture the real is by literally failing
to capture it.
In fact, Kiarostami admitted later that there was no problem with
the sound; he did not like Makhmalbaf’s dialogue with Sabzian: as he
recounted, “the fake director was too real and the real director was
too fake ” (Cronin, 2015, p.27). Consequently, Kiarostami invented the
dialogue in the camera car about the sound problems and added that later
to create an explanation. Looking back on his decision, Kiarostami asserts:
“Today I consider it one of the most important moments in any of my
films, especially whenever anyone complains because they want to know
what Makhmalbaf and Sabzian are saying to each other. The audience has
been primed, pushed to think about things beyond the frame of the film.
They want to know what lies off-screen, which means they have to fill in
the gaps themselves ” (Cronin, 2015, p. 28). Whether real or invented, the
obstructions Kiarostami throws in our path are there to interfere with our

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 A Wittgensteinian Look at Kiarostami’s Close-up

expectation of cinema as an immersive experience. Instead, he directs

our attention to the difficulties of seeing, of hearing; to the ephemeral
moments between people that are lost to every sweep of the clock’s
minute hand.
This concluding scene of Close-Up scene points, devastatingly, to the
difficulty of seeing any kind of complete picture at all. Every experience
we have is fragmented – if not by a shattered windshield or a (faked) faulty
microphone, then by our inability to stitch all of the relevant perspectives
together into one coherent whole; to organize the timelines into a clean
linear storyline; to invisibly cut the action seamlessly together to erase all
time but story time; or to expand or collapse space at will. Despite the
spell we fall under in the dark, we do not live in films. But this film comes
alive for us precisely as it comes apart, the way our own sound and vision
come apart, under the pressures of real time, real space, real friction.3

Seeing Sabzian
In his discussion of aspect-seeing in the Philosophical Investigations,
Wittgenstein uses the example of Jastrow’s duck-rabbit to demonstrate
that some people can only see one aspect – either duck or rabbit – and
cannot experience the “dawning” of an aspect as it shifts from one
figure to the other (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 194). The dawning of an
aspect is “not a property of the object, but an internal relation between
it and other objects ” (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 212). Seeing an aspect is a
very special kind of seeing; it is an experience in which something
changes, but that change, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in the world,
but in ourselves4. The object does not change, but the person looking at
the object is able to recognize another dimension or “aspect ” of it.
Here “seeing ” is meant not metaphorically, but quite literally.
Seeing connections between things is almost always a matter of seeing
an aspect of a thing or a person that was always there but which we had
not (yet) noticed. Wittgenstein asserts, “The aspects of things that are

3. Although there is no doubt that Kiarostami is transgressing boundaries here, within the
field of documentary studies, the issue of authenticity has been at stake at least since the
1960s, especially since the rise of new camera and sound technologies in the late 1950s
that allowed for greater mobility and smaller crews. Further, the relation between film
and audience and audience reception have been cited as crucial in determining
authenticity. See, for example, Brian Winston (2005); Michael Renov (ed) (1993); Bill
Nichols (1991).
4. “ The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings. ”
Julius Caesar I. ii. 141–142. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. The Pelican
Text Revised 1969. Ed. Alfred Harbage. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

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most important to us are hidden from us because of their simplicity

and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always
before one’s eyes)” (1958, ·129). The phrase “seeing-as ” dramatizes
visual perception as an ethical act because the language of seeing, of
vision, is also the language we use to describe a kind of moral reasoning.
“Seeing-as” is a recognition of the claim that what we see makes on us;
we are responsible for, and to, what it is that we are able to see (and
likewise what we fail to see – even if “it is always before one’s eyes”). The
moral dimension of this idea lies in the implications for what it would
mean to suffer from “aspect-blindness, ” or the inability to experience
the dawning of an aspect.
Wittgenstein explicitly connects the ability to see an aspect with the
use of language. He compares the two: “What would you be missing if
you did not experience the meaning of a word?” (Wittgenstein, 1958,
p. 214). What is missing for us if we suffer from aspect-blindness would
be what Cavell calls our “attunement with one another ” (1979, p. 46).
Failing to see the dawning of an aspect in (or of) another is a failure in our
responsiveness to that person. Our seeing-as does not change the person.
Instead, we are changed.
Aspect-blindness – what Cavell calls “soul-blindness” – is not the
failure to interpret but to see (1979, p.378). It is not that I fail to see
an aspect of you that allows me to draw the “right” conclusion (that you
are human and not a robot, or that you are suffering, as Sabzian says
he suffers), but that I assume that I need criteria to draw any conclusion
at all. Aspect-seeing is not contingent on criteria; our “attunement ”
requires only that we open our eyes. Aspect-blindness is “what comes
between us” that prevents me from seeing the humanity of another
(1979, p. 369). And so to experience the meaning of others – to offer
our responsiveness to them – is to experience the meaning of their
suffering.
The story of Hossein Sabzian as depicted in Close-Up is the story of how
he has been seen and not seen by others. Almost every character in this film
suffers from aspect-blindness with regard to Sabzian; we could say that
Kiarostami’s attunement to Sabzian’s humanity – his suffering – provides
the filmic evidence of these lapses. William Day explains that a “tribe” of
aspect-blind people would regard “any disagreement over the look of
an object ” as “evidence that they were seeing different objects ” and
that therefore “their language-game here would be similar to ours when
we speak of seeing hallucinations, dream-images, phantasms, etc. Such
objects, in other words, would not exist for them” (Day & Krebs, 2010,
p. 207). In a sense, Sabzian-as-Sabzian does not exist for the Ahankhahs.
There is only Makhmalbaf and faux-Makhmalbaf. They see Sabzian as

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though he is a completely new, unfamiliar person; they cannot put the

aspects together. Kiarostami alone stitches the two together with his
truth-telling cinematic deceptions.
Close-Up shows us what it means to see in and through cinema. This is
a surprise given that the style of the film’s cinematography and editing
are constantly working to undermine our expectations of what kind of
film we are watching (documentary? surveillance? home movie? biopic?).
When Kiarostami visits Sabzian at the prison in order to interview him, for
example, the camera set-up is hardly standard practice for documentary
coverage. The scene is shot in a single long take, a slow zoom into a
close-up of Sabzian’s face. All of the characters see Sabzian differently.
Whereas Farazmand sees him as a scoop that will bring him fame, the
family sees him as a fraud who humiliated them, and the legal system sees
him as a criminal, Kiarostami sees him simply as “someone interested
in cinema.” When he asks Sabzian why he confessed if he did not believe
he had committed fraud, Sabzian replies, “Because what I did looks like
fraud from the outside. ”
The zoom shot, like the close-ups in the courtroom for which the film is
named, is Kiarostami’s way of showing us how to see Sabzian-as-Sabzian;
as the lens approaches him, we approach the moment in which we can
experience the dawning of an aspect we had not seen. The shot in the
prison begins with Sabzian in a wide shot, visually imprisoned between
doorways and windowsills. Sabzian’s wan, haggard face seems to glide
toward us as the zoom incrementally flattens the space and reduces our
sense of depth. His striking features, abstracted by the final framing and
telephoto lens, appear hieratic, even transcendent: a painted quattrocento
saint in a panel illuminated by Piero della Francesca.
We have not seen Sabzian this way before; and here he is, asking us to
think about how things look from the outside at the moment Kiarostami
ushers us in as close to inside as inside can be; the magnification is so
intense that we can see the film grain emerging in response to the low light
and the long lens. We are seeing the film revealing itself, its own physical
and chemical structure, in Sabzian’s face. Kiarostami wants nothing to
come between us and our seeing, not even the film itself. This final
extreme close-up gives us a chance to recognize that the film medium does
not stand between us but rather reminds us of our fundamental
outsideness to and separateness from one another, and thus of the
urgency of acknowledging and responding to what we see in another, or
what we see another as. Here, in this insistent evidence of the materiality,
the fragile body of the celluloid itself, we can find the “candor” of
cinema – and of Kiarostami. In this way the filmmaker moves beyond what
Butler argues “cannot be shown” – and to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that

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what cinema shows is itself.5 The candor of film, then, is not merely
revelatory, but self-revelatory.
If the style of the prison scene is unexpected, that of the trial scene
is even more so. It is unclear what or how much is happening in real
time; although the trial is presented as though it is straight documentary
footage, Kiarostami admitted that some of the trial was restaged
(Benbrahim, 2010; Cheshire, 2010). The cinematography and editing
reflect this. The scene opens with a shot of the slate, a gimmick usually
reserved for experimental fiction films; the slate reminds us that we are
seeing not a trial, but a film about a trial. Further, the slate’s suggestion
of multiple takes invokes fiction rather than documentary filmmaking.
Immediately this unsettles the documentary authority of the film and
filmmaker. What are we watching? The entire film, from the rolling can to
the slate in the courtroom, seems a perpetual alternation between a
documentary-aspect and a fiction-aspect. Are these aspects reconcilable?6
In a radical departure from the uncomfortable version of shot-reverse-
shot editing he uses in the reenactments, here Kiarostami uses traditional
Hollywood continuity editing to seamlessly move between “characters. ”
Thus, the trial is edited like a conventional fiction film, designed to make
camera and editing invisible and narrative immersive.
But – and of course there is a but – Kiarostami undermines this invisible
power of the continuity editing style before it has even begun to exert its
power; at the beginning of the trial scene, he explains that he is using two
cameras, and discusses exactly what he will be using them for. Addressing
Sabzian, he shows him the lenses and explains that he will use a zoom lens
to capture moments of the trial and testimony, but a special close-up lens
on Sabzian for the duration.
With this on-camera explanation of his filming strategy, Kiarostami
destroys the very cinematic illusion that he then proceeds to create, as
though posting a warning label on a dangerous substance he has every
intention of distributing. The director – and by extension the viewer – is
implicated at every moment in this film, and none more than during this
trial. Whatever is at stake here in this courtroom is now at stake for us as

5. “ ‘ A picture tells me itself, ’ is what I’d like to say ” (1958, · 523).

6. Regarding the commonality of fiction and documentary in terms of storytelling, Brian
Winston (2005) points out that John Grierson argued for using a “ treatment ” for
documentary and differentiated between documentaries and other non-fiction forms by
the element of storytelling embedded in documentary, as opposed to an educational
film or newsreel (pp. 107–27). However, he maintains that the narrativity of
documentaries is “ no marker of fictionality ” and should not be confused with fiction
(p. 25).

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much as it is for Kiarostami, because he has reneged on the original deal

of the cinema – the illusion – and let us in on the backstage of his craft.
In fact, the filmmaker even participates in the proceedings to the extent
that he questions the defendant, apparently by arrangement with the
judge. Kiarostami’s questions shift the investigation of the trial away from
Sabzian’s crimes to one of the social role of cinema, raising questions
about the relation between art and ethics.7 But there is another layer
of deception to Kiarostami’s cinema: the claim with which he sets up
our understanding and expectations of what we will be seeing – the use
of two cameras – is another lie. As if in counterpart to the manufactured
technical difficulties of the “reunion” scene between Sabzian and
Makmalbof, the strategy for shooting the trial scene changed as a result
of unintended consequences. As Kiarostami explains:

For the trial scene, I planned on having three cameras inside the
courtroom…. Almost immediately, one of the cameras broke and another
was so noisy I had to turn it off. We ended up having to move our single
workable camera from one spot to the next, which meant missing a
continuous shot of Sabzian…. We ended up recreating most of the trial
in the judge’s absence. The occasional shots of [the judge] that I inserted
into Close-Up, to make it seems as if he had been present the whole time,
constitute one of the biggest lies in any of my films. (Cronin, 2015, p.8)

Like a psychological thriller, Kiarostami’s film constructs so many

twists and turns that grasping the “truth” of what we are seeing
seems impossible. Stiegler describes Kiarostami’s techniques, such as the
reconstructions, as “false lies,” as a way to account for these cinematic
layers (2014, p. 41). However, if we consider this strategy not as revealing
truth (even the truth of a lie), but instead the aspects of film itself to which
we have been carefully trained to be blind, our perspective may shift
from a binary mode (truth/lie; reality/fiction) to a multi-dimensional
mode, a kind of cinematic string theory.
All aspects of Sabzian that we have been privy to in the film are woven
together into the trial scene: how the family sees him, how his mother sees
him, how the reporter sees him, and how he sees himself. But when

7. It may be that a documentary filmmaker is just what is needed to address aspect-

blindness. Bill Nichols (2008) contends that in recent years, documentaries have to
some degree undergone a “ paradigm shift, ” a new “ form of knowing [that]
presupposes finding the means to bring to a condition of visibility that which has
escaped notice ” (p. 35). To a degree, Kiarostami’s project in Close-Up is also to make
visible “ that which has escaped notice ” – to cure (what is perhaps) our tendency
toward aspect-blindness.

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Kiarostami explains how he will capture all of these aspects and obligingly
shows us his cinematic legerdemain, he reveals that this smooth, seamless
“whole” has been manufactured by the apparatus of filmmaking. So on
the one hand Kiarostami uses invisible cutting to create the illusion
of immersive presence for us in a documentary sequence where our
expectations lead us to think that we are outside of an objectively
observed reality. On the other hand, he subverts that immersive illusion
by reminding us of “film’s outsideness to itself, and [our] absence from it”
when he discusses what equipment he will be using and why, thus
returning us to the realm of documentary “reality” – but it is, we are now
all too aware, a deeply destabilized “reality.” We are in a no-man’s-land,
neither fiction nor documentary but some sort of hybrid creature of
Kiarostami’s own invention.
Kiarostami appears to invent this hybrid form of cinema in
collaboration with Sabzian, who agrees to the alleged arrangements,
saying to the director, “You are my audience. ” Throughout the trial, it
seems that Kiarostami is the only person who genuinely sees Sabzian.
Those attending the trial can only see themselves projected onto Sabzian;
their solipsism precludes any chance for them to see Sabzian as anything
other than a fraud. They see only what they have lost: the reporter
sees his own chance for a story; the judge sees a young man with a
family to support; the Ahankhahs, eventually, see a fellow unemployed
Iranian who would “lead an honest life if he found a proper job”; only
Kiarostami listens to what Sabzian actually has to say for himself under
the watchful eye of his close-up lens. The fact of this lens – if not its “true”
intention – is borne out by the footage.
The family, the reporter, and the judge never recognize the dawning
of the aspect of Sabzian-as-filmmaker. Perhaps the family, for example,
are too much in the grip of resentment at the loss of the promise of a new
identity as actors in a film. In what are almost the final words of the film,
Makhmalbaf, having brought Sabzian to the Ahankhahs’ home for a
reconciliation, says to Mr. Ahankhah, “Mr. Sabzian has changed. Please
see him in a new light.” He might as well be speaking for the film
itself, and, as if in agreement, the film freezes on a frame of Sabzian in
profile. Holding the pot of purple flowers he has brought the family, he
emerges again as that sacerdotal visionary we saw in the prison scene, his
face rendered blissfully into the grain of the freeze frame with the credits
rolling over him like water.

Performance and Truth(fulness)

So much depends upon the way we see, for example, an empty can rolling
slowly down a sunlit city street on an autumn afternoon or a man sitting

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obediently in a courtroom, accused of fraud. One might be extraneous

to the film or the centerpiece of a film; the other might be a con artist, or
merely an artist. Cavell argues that seeing-as has to do with:

my relation to my words and with the point at which my knowledge

of others depends upon the concepts of truthfulness and interpretation.
Empirical statements that claim truth depend upon evidence; statements
that claim truthfulness depend upon our acceptance of them. My acceptance
is the way I respond to them, and not everyone is capable of this response,
or willing for it. I put this by saying that a true statement is something we
know or do not know; a truthful statement is one we must acknowledge
or fail or refuse to acknowledge. (1979, p. 157)

In the wake of Cavell’s account: what did the Ahankhahs “know” (and
when did they know it)? They “knew” that it was Makhmalbaf they met,
and yet they did not know it, because it was not he (empirically, they were
wrong). Then they “knew” it was not Makhmalbaf, it was Sabzian, a fraud
(empirically, they were right). This is what they knew. But they were blind
to the dawning of the aspect of the real Sabzian, who was always truthfully
a man full of passion for cinema. They were not attuned to the music of
his passion, though they themselves were caught up in their own desire
to be part of the world of film. They failed spectacularly to acknowledge
his account of himself, his claim that while legally he is guilty, morally,
he is not. Perhaps they are not capable of acknowledging his claim;
perhaps such acknowledgment is too much to ask of them, exhausted
by the humiliations of unemployment and disenchantment with their
post-revolution government (Akrami, 2002).
Cavell’s argument suggests that in order to become his fantasy self
(Makhmalbaf), Sabzian must renounce himself as Sabzian. According
to Cavell,

To satisfy the wish to act without performing, to let our actions go out of
our hands, we must be willing to allow the self to exhibit itself without the
self’s intervention. The wish for total intelligibility is a terrible one. It means
that we are willing to reveal ourselves through the self’s betrayal of itself
(1979, p. 159).

In his desire to become Makhmalbaf, his real desire is to become his true
self; he sees his true or best self as Makhmalbaf. But in following his
desire, in performing his true self, he betrays himself both literally and
figuratively.
First, Sabzian is caught, because his deception betrays him; he betrays
himself as Sabzian, as a false Makhmalbaf. Second, he reveals Sabzian, the

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man who wishes to be Makhmalbaf, the man who, in a sense, is

Makhmalbaf, because Makhmalbaf’s films have become so much a part of
him that he has changed his aspect as an element in a chemical experiment
changes its color. It is both true and false that Sabzian is an impostor.
When he asks Kiarostami to bring Makhmalbaf the message that
The Cyclist is “a part of [him],” I think we must take him at his literal
word. When, standing at the gate of the Akhankahs’ home in the final
scene, he seems confused about whether to announce himself as Sabzian
or Makhmalbaf, I think we must take his confusion as genuine.
Kiarostami himself becomes a kind of lawyer during the trial, pressing
Sabzian to reveal himself – to make himself intelligible. Sabzian describes
the way he began to almost believe he was the famous director; after
a certain point, he no longer felt he was acting: “I really became this
new character. ” In fact, one of the points against him is that he tried to get
the family out of the house by insisting that they go see The Cyclist. They
believe his plan was to burgle the house while they were out. But at the
trial, he continues to talk as though he really believes he is Makhmalbaf:
“I wanted them to see me as a director who is aware of people’s sufferings
and difficulties. A director who is modest enough to mix with ordinary
folk…A director should have humility.”
As Sabzian talks, it is clear that he is speaking from the perspective of
a director. When he talks about The Cyclist, he seems to believe he made
the film. And for Sabzian, the role of a director is to deeply see and
acknowledge the suffering of his subjects, and to render that for his
audience so that it becomes a part of them. The film screen becomes the
conduit between director and audience, a site of exchange that travels
in both directions.
Kiarostami asks Sabzian a series of questions about the nature of his
performance during the trial: his performance as Makhmalbaf, and his
performance as Sabzian. He asks, “Now, having played this part, do you
think you are a better actor than a director? ” Sabzian replies, “I think
I could express … all the suffering I felt deep inside me. I like to think
I could get all these feelings across through my acting.” Kiarostami: “Are
you not acting for the camera now?” Sabzian: “I’m speaking of my
suffering; that’s not acting…For me, art is the extension of what you feel
inside…I believe that my experience of hardship…can give me the
grounding I need to be a good actor. That way I act well and I express my
inner reality.”
Kiarostami thus establishes that Sabzian saw the experience of
becoming Makhmalbaf not as an impersonation but a performance;
Sabzian explains that “playing a director was a performance in itself. ” In
what sense, then, does Sabzian make himself intelligible as Sabzian?

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 A Wittgensteinian Look at Kiarostami’s Close-up

In what sense has he revealed himself, if what he is revealing is itself an

actor playing yet another role? Intelligibility, as Steven Affeldt has pointed
out, is deeply bound up with the morality of speech and action; our
intelligibility, he argues, is rooted in our willingness to reveal ourselves
to others (1998, pp. 277–8). Paradoxically, by his very impersonation,
Sabzian is so revealed.
In its reenactments, the film coopts the family into dubious territory;
though Mehrdad has condemned Sabzian for playing a role, they all
willingly become actors, performing the roles of themselves. The film thus
makes it almost impossible to claim or to identify authenticity or to
recognize reality even if and when it is captured in real time. Kiarostami
cryptically makes acting the centerpiece of the documentary scenes;
meanwhile, he shoots the reenactments as though he is recording a work
of experimental street theater. Both at the level of performance and at
the level of the cinematic apparatus of camera and editing, the film
unravels every thread it spins out for us to follow through the labyrinth
it has built.8
And so the film presents us with a paradox: Sabzian is truthful although
he is not telling the truth when he claims to be Makhmalbaf. We see
this truthfulness revealed in the prison scene when he asks Kiarostami
to tell Makhmalbaf that “The Cyclist is part of me”; Sabzian’s identity and
consciousness are constructed in large part by the art and films he reveres.
In fact, his claim that the family would be in a film that he directed
also came true. Kiarostami tells the story that on the first day when they
went to film at the Ahankhahs’ house, Sabzian began to cry and said he
was too ashamed to do it; he had lied to them and pretended to be
a filmmaker. Kiarostami said to him, “No, you didn’t lie. You told a truth

8. Prior to the emergence of Direct Cinema in the 1960s with its insistence on non-actors,
no narration, and no interaction between filmmaker and participants, documentary
films had used many of the conventions of fiction films: repeating or reconstructing
actions to get multiple takes, cross-cutting action, using narration and music to increase
emotional impact, and even using actors. But the Direct Cinema filmmakers, insisting,
with Richard Leacock (1963), “ We don’t cheat, ” rejected this (Richard Leacock in
Labarthe & Marcorelles, p. 26). They couldn’t, however, do away with editing: films
were “ aspects of what happened in the presence of the camera ” (Richard Leacock cited
in Leven, 1971, p. 163) or “ a fair reflection of the experience of making them ”
(Fredrick Wiseman in Leven, 1971, p. 322). Kiarostami’s reconstructions and
disingenuous accounts of his camera or sound choices, then, are not necessarily a
departure from, but rather a continuation of, a complex and contested relationship
between the constructed and the observed that has characterized documentary film
from its inception.

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that was beyond reality. You told them you’re a filmmaker. That wasn’t
a lie. You said one day you’d bring your film crew to film here. Well, we’re
your crew…and you’re the director” (Benbrahim, 2010).
Sabzian told a truth that was beyond reality: and it is a truth that we, the
audience, activate with our acknowledgement of it. We are part of this
truth: the film is before our eyes, looming on the screen, and we cannot
refuse it. If Sabzian has committed a crime, we are his accomplices; if he is
a filmmaker, we are his audience.

Skepticism, Fiction, and Reality

On the subject of cinematic reality, Cavell writes that

The basis of film’s drama, or the latent anxiety in viewing its drama, lies in
its persistent demonstration that we do not know what our conviction
in reality turns upon…The moral of film’s image of skepticism is not
that reality is a dream and not that reality confines our dreams. In screening
reality, film screens its givenness from us; it holds reality before us,
i.e., withholds reality before us. We are tantalized at once by our subjection
to it and by its subjection to our views of it. (1979, pp. 188–189)

Rather than either telling a dramatic story or “documenting ” that story,

Close-Up seems driven to investigate cinema itself, and our expectations of
it: our expectation of the withholding of reality, our anxiety that we are
somehow right to refuse our attunement to one another, somehow safer,
that our outsideness to film replicates and even validates this refusal.
Cavell’s claim that we “do not know what our conviction in reality turns
upon ” rings doubly true in the case of Close-Up. This film holds its
withholding before us and delights in reminding us that reality is beyond
our grasp, that what we are seeing is what the camera shows us and
nothing more – but nothing less, either.
What Close-Up reminds us is that our notion of reality is based so
much on convention that a filmmaker is forced to rely on convention to
either represent reality or to make it invisible; to call our attention to it
or to attend to its destruction. We are not even convinced that the
characters themselves have any insight into reality to offer; as Kiarostami
himself puts it, “Neither party was living in reality. Both were looking
for a dream” (Benbrahim, 2010). If they were looking for a dream, they
found themselves inside a film, perhaps the only livable alternative.
The distinction between film and dream is not the only confusion
here. Blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction, director and actor,
and even director and audience, Kiarostami describes himself as the
audience for his own film. In an interview, he recalls the first screening
of the film, when he sat at the back with the audience and watched the

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 A Wittgensteinian Look at Kiarostami’s Close-up

whole film, something he had never done before with any of his other
films. He says,

I didn’t pay attention to when the audience left the theater. I was not aware
of who came in, who laughed, who didn’t. I had turned into a viewer myself.
I had lost sight of the importance of the audience at that very moment,
which is something I care about and I get upset anytime someone walks out
of one of my films. I tend to think the film is no good. But I watched this
film as a mere viewer without caring about other people’s opinions.
(Akrami, 2002)

Why did this film have the effect of turning the director so completely
into a rapt viewer? Perhaps because Close-Up so resolutely resists
categorization, because it incites slippage between genres and invites
border crossings of all kinds, the director was liberated by the realization
that the sum of what he had made was greater than the part he had
played in it; and that his part had been as audience as much as director,
both inside and outside of the film. Kiarostami is Sabzian’s director; but
Sabzian is also Kiarostami’s director. In telling a truth that was beyond
reality, Sabzian freed Kiarostami to see his own film as a member of the
audience, to lift his eye from the camera to the screen, to subject himself
to it and to subject it to his view.
And what does Kiarostami-as-filmmaker-slash-viewer free us to see?
What does Close-Up, in its intransigent resistance to genre categorization,
to cinematic conventions, and even to the boundary between makers,
actors, and viewers, finally do for us, and demand of us? Kiarostami turns
the medium of film back on itself, putting cinema itself, as Bernard Stiegler
suggests, on trial. In his refusal to meet our expectations about what
a documentary should look like, Kiarostami effects the destruction of
the very illusion that the apparatus of film is designed to create: the
illusion of continuous space, time, and motion; and with it all, the illusion
of an eternal here and now.
By subverting his use of continuity editing through colliding
documentary and fictional techniques in the trial scene, and by
frustrating our expectations in the reenactments through his withholding
tactics, Kiarostami makes transparent the masquerades of film, pulling
back the curtain on each of his own illusions to remind us that we are
never inside because there is no inside. Film’s outsideness to itself – and
to us – is the very condition of its presence to us, and ours to it. Our
communion with the world of film is a communion of solitary voyagers
in the dark; our togetherness itself is a function of our outsideness to one
another. In its subversive insistence on seeing-as instead of simply seeing,
Close-Up seeks not to subsume us into itself but rather to render our

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isolation – from the film, from one another, and from ourselves –
intelligible. That is, the film unites us through not merely representing,
but by manifesting, our intrinsic loneliness. In every frame, this film lays
bare the reckoning we must make when we enter the theater: like it or
not, we do not lose ourselves in cinema – we find ourselves in it.9

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell. European Journal of Philosophy, 6(1), 1–31.
Akrami, J. (Interviewer). (2002). Interview with Abbas Kiarostami. Close-Up, Facets DVD.
Iran: Kanoon.
Benbrahim, T. (Interviewer). (2010). Interview with Abbas Kiarostami. Close-Up,
Criterion DVD. Iran: Kanoon.
Butler, R. (2012). Abbas Kiarostami. Angelaki 17 (4), 61–76.
Cavell, S. (1979). The World Viewed, Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cheshire, G. (2010, June 22). Close-Up: Prison and Escape. Current. Retrieved from
www.Criterion.com
Cook, D.A. (2008). A History of Narrative Film. 4th Edition. New York: WW Norton &
Norton.
Cronin, P., ed. (2015). Lessons with Kiarostami, ed. New York: Sticking Place Books.
Day, W. (2010). Wanting to Say Something: Aspect-Blindness and Language. Seeing
Wittgenstein Anew. William Day and Victor Krebs, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Nancy, J-L. and Conley, V. A. (1999). On Evidence: Life and Nothing More by Abbas
Kiarostami. Discourse 21(1), 77–88.
Nichols, B. (1978, Spring). Fred Wiseman’s documentaries: Theory and structure. Film
Quarterly 31(3), 15–28.
Nichols, B. (1994). Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Saeed-Vafa. M., and Rosenbaum, J. (2003). Contemporary Film Directors: Abbas Kiarostami.
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Stiegler, B. (2014). On Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up. PARRHESIA 20, 40–48.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations, Third Edition. Trans. G.E.M.
Anscombe. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

9. Thanks to David LaRocca for his valuable assistance with this essay.

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