Jean-Michel Frodon
'Jean-Luc Nancy on the Roads of Art and Thinking'
_Le Monde_, August 17, 2001


Jean Luc Nancy
_L'Evidence du film: Abbas Kiarostami_
Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001
170 pp.

At first, this book appears as a strange object. _L'Evidence du film_
is written in four languages: French, English, Persian, and pictures.
The latter -- a set of screenshots in the middle of the book --
echoes the 3 others: a text from the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on
Abbas Kiarostami's work, an older text by Nancy on one of
Kiarostami's movies (_And Life Goes On_), and an interview between
the French philosopher and the Iranian film director. Altogether,
this is a fascinating object.

It is a pleasure to see such audacious enterprise, attempting to
think freely without the traditional references of specialists. In
that respect, Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us of Kiarostami's characters
who find their personal path with strong ethics, an unstoppable
desire and to a total openness to the world.

The two texts from Jean-Luc Nancy establish the specificity of the
esthetical modernity personified by Abbas Kiraostami. These texts
defined this modernity as an alternative to post-modern mannerism --
showing the possibility of a creation based on a relation to reality.
Reality can generate creation because it is motioned by the artistic
gesture, the film composition 'true presence, presenting itself as
offered, available, presence which itself is a passage towards or
inside presence'.

Beyond the importance of the director of _Close-up_ and _And Life
Goes On_ in contemporary art (not only cinema), the book highlights
his unique position. The modern move of looking (shaped by the way
characters look their way through Kiarostami's scripts) allows a
construction of the visible and the invisible very different from the
traditional western concepts. Nancy reveals a relation between the
continuum and the discontinuum as a constitutive part of being:
'being is not something, it is continuing. It is not continuing
beyond or underneath moments, events, singularities and individuals
-- which all are discontinued, but in more original kind of way:
through discontinuation itself, without melting it into a continuum.
It continues to discontinue, it discontinues to continue.' Nancy
notes the natural affinities between such being and the film object
-- a continuum of separate pictures and distinct frames, to state how
much cinema is well positioned to think this relation.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this theory lies in its
faux-pas, when Nancy loses himself in a simplistic analysis of one of
the movies or when he allows conventional notions on picture in his
writting. It is surprising that Abbas Kiarostami himself, who always
pays attention not to appear as a theoretician, comes with more
concrete words to rescue the philosopher from the dead ends he locked
himself in. Throughout the interview -- requested by the director
after he read Persian translations of the texts -- Kiarostami
emphasises the nature of picture as a territory of the unseen, and
defines in some sharp formulas the strategic, political, and
esthetical importance of the position of the spectator.

The greatest charm of this book may be in seeing this reverse logic
where the artist takes the philosopher on the paths of thoughts that
he himself opened. This is exemplified in the courage of Kiarostami
when he explains the logic of triple points of view at the basis of
film direction, a denial to totalitarianism of all forms.

Translated by Laurent Kretzschmar