transfeminine glint:
Digital Veils, Reflective Resurrection, and Chance Encounters with an Esoteric Real
Digital Veils, Reflective Resurrection, and Chance Encounters with an Esoteric Real
2023
Following several seconds of a chalkboard announcing the film’s title – First Case, Second Case – the chalk-marked Farsi script is replaced in miniature by the inscribed heading of a film slate closing before the face of a teacher who stands with his back to a silent classroom. We are watching a movie. After the central, importantly off-screen, rhythmic disturbance of the classroom’s silence – as the punished boys file into the hallway – the hum of a film projector gives way to Kiarostami’s voice seemingly addressing us: “Your child is one of these students.” The staged scenario has now been removed to the projector screen, before which the addressees bask in the image’s glow; we are watching a documentary? Even in his earlier, shorter, relatively didactic explorations, Kiarostami seems to assert an understanding of film as intrinsically corrupting any singular perception of reality. The announced fiction of the classroom scene evolves into a presumption of documentary fact to be gleaned from the postured interviews; all the while we, the viewers of this film, have been interpolated as interviewees, subject to the immersive full-screen scenario at the film’s start and, in effect, invited to consider our own response to the two cases which are to follow.
This attitude towards the audience, crystallized in Kiarostami’s self-proclaimed intention of releasing “half-made films,” opens up generous, generative space for viewers to locate themselves in the worlds on-screen. Thus, I consider it important to foreground the specific context of my individual experience of the director’s work: a majority of the films which I will discuss I have watched for the first time within the past few months, all formats entirely digitized with varied resolutions years after Kiarostami’s death, and coinciding with the nascence of my ongoing gender transition. Any heightened resonance with explorations of digitality and femininity later in the director’s career feels indebted to my individual subjectivity as a viewer of these films within this specific context. Though I am typically hesitant to approach another’s work with this level of vulnerability, it feels particularly important and relevant in my understanding of Kiarostami’s filmography, invoking a parasocial identification with the director in our shared experience as humans, artists, and lovers. Through these films – encountered in a way which Kiarostami could never have anticipated – I have glimpsed an internal excess reflected across car windows and TV screens, a retrospective recognition of the Other projected onto an experience of the world with others, and, ultimately, a resurrected drive to make, love, and be. In this post-digital confrontation, the auteur’s expansive career narrates the simultaneous individuation of a subject and transition to a globalized digital condition, processes marked by a consistent privileging of esoteric realities and an aesthetic impulse towards poetic possibility.
While Kiarostami’s films refuse narrative linearity – in many cases, by design – posthumously considering the broad trajectory from narratives centering young boys to those with adult-woman protagonists selfishly parallels my own recognition of a transfeminine subjectivity. Paramount to these earlier films’ elucidation of selfhood are the philosophical notion of friendship and the presence of a drive or passion, especially for images. Addressed most directly in 1987’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, friendship is revealed not as a quality or mode of relation, but rather as an esoteric condition of otherness. As Ahmad travels twice to Poshteh in search of the eponymous friend’s home, propelled by an internal excess enabling his drive to return the notebook, the Where of the film’s title is stripped of geographic locality as the winding, repeated path back to Ahmad’s own home illustrates a journey inward. This non-being of, or failure to locate, Mohammed’s house disrupts the causality of a journey with a named destination; from the nothingness of this impasse, Ahmad’s ethical imperative urges the invention of something new. Drawing on this esoteric excess which enables his capacity to act in friendship, Ahmad is inspired to complete Mohammed’s homework alongside his own to prevent impending punishment from their teacher. Within this lie lies so much truth, highlighting not only the condition of an education system interested in the eradication of difference (exemplified by the easily-confusable homogeneity of the students’ workbooks and expected conduct) but more importantly the reality of a shared experience of the world through the friend.
Just as Ahmad is driven, ultimately, to lie by an internal desire to do right by Mohammed, Kiarostami’s first feature-length film illuminates Qassem’s passion for soccer as determining an internal ethics – arguably an esoteric real – oriented in opposition to imposed authority. From the opening scene in The Traveler, a vibrant sense of community and joy enabled by this shared passion for soccer is developed in stark contrast to the rigidity of the classroom and mundanity of life at home. Driven by a desire to watch a soccer game in Tehran, Qassem sets out to raise money for his ticket by whatever means necessary and, in a characteristically poetic turn, offers to photograph his classmates with a broken camera. Here, Qassem’s passion capitalizes on the other boys’ desire to have an image as they line up with invariable excitement in search of photographic evidence of their own being (this power of the image seems central to the director’s approach towards cinema). Undoubtedly, instances of passion throughout Kiarostami’s films might be read as mirroring the director’s own passion: that which informs a reason for making art, a response to the space of nothingness opened in acknowledgment or pursuit of an internal otherness. Following this logic, it seems natural that the first protagonists which exceed categorization as young boys are actors portraying the director of the film, demonstrating Kiarostami’s confrontation with his own subjectivity as filmmaker.
In the above cases of Qassem and Ahmad’s drive/ passion, as well as in First Case… and various other instances throughout Kiarostami’s career, lying is heralded as containing immense imaginal potential and worth. Rather than simply negating an exoteric construction of laws and morals, here, lies – as if dreams – assert an interiority of the subject. The lie central to Sabzian’s legal case, which became the subject of Kiarostami’s seminal 1990 docu-fiction film Close-Up, furthers the director’s burgeoning explorations of the nature of reality as it relates to cinema through a deep reverence for Sabzian’s individuation and the conditions which made his lie necessary. Drawn to Sabzian’s story by a shared passion for the art of cinema, Kiarostami sets out not towards a Sisyphean attempt to capture the reality of Sabzian’s case and legal proceedings, but rather uses film to produce a new reality which outlives any diegetic real contained by the filmic frame. As a kicked can rolling across the pavement gives way to a printer publishing the story of Sabzian’s arrest – superimposed with the film’s title and credits – there seems to be an immediate acknowledgement of a device “constructing reality” inherent to the medium of film. In this way, film always occupies an imaginal position between reality and fiction, never able to faithfully reproduce a pre-existing reality but rather constructing a new reality esoterically contained within the film. Here, the innate complexity of the camera-reality relationship mirrors the subjects’ relation to themselves not only in recreating the scene of the arrest, but also in the more general splitting of the subject, affording the development of an interiority. Even when removed from the context of the film, Sabzian’s lie – impersonating the Iranian director Makhmalbaf – reveals a fundamental desire to be someone other than himself, or who he is told that he is. The further doubling of the subject enacted by the curious directorial choice to have the actors portray themselves opens space within this split to take action – or make a film – which creates a new reality. The objective past of Sabzian’s arrest is rewritten collaboratively through the reenactment with the Ahankhahs and, in granting his subjects this opportunity to search for a new truth in their relation to self, Kiarostami joins film with reality and enables the externalization of a malleable, esoteric real.
Just as cinema occupies imaginal space alongside dreams in its removal from perceived reality, the potential of film as an extension of Aristotelian poetry – said to oppose history in its provision of something to dream about or aspire to – strengthens not only the role of desire but the imaginal value of the lie. Ahmad’s forgery illuminates the space of a friend within, informing a desire to protect Mohammed from punishment by taking action, while Sabzian’s impersonation reveals a desire to be other than himself and, through Kiarostami, action is taken. In retroactively contemplating the importance of lying, I can’t help but draw a connection to a specifically-trans experience of survival: within the dissonance between a perceived (exoteric) and embodied (esoteric) experience of gender, the lie emerges as intrinsic to gendered performance. Whether to protect oneself from harassment by performing an assigned gender or, through an external perception of trans expression, being read as impersonating the other, “non-real” gender, the experienced necessity of the lie – as is developed before Kiarostami’s lens – seems particularly resonant to this instinctual refusal of the self as other. As I have attempted to argue so far, Kiarostami’s films invite viewers to travel inwards, often alongside the films’ protagonists, and explore the otherness inherent to their subjectivity. In situating my experience of Kiarostami’s filmography within my experience of transfeminine individuation, I hope to demonstrate the power his movies hold in allowing viewers to better “know” themselves. From the intersections of these mediated (filmic) and embodied (otherwise-transfeminine) confrontations with selfhood, Sabzian’s desire to be other than himself – informing the lie of his impersonation – evokes an experience of transness as importantly taking action to realize, or externalize, an esoteric reality. As Kiarostami’s production of Close-Up produced reality itself – bringing Sabzian’s dreams, as well as that of the Ahankhahs to be in a film, into reality – any steps towards actualizing an internal understanding of gender (starting hormone replacement therapy, transitioning socially, changing one’s name, among a myriad of other actions which might be taken in pursuit of gender affirmation) reveal new truths and demonstrate the subject’s agency in constructing reality. Mirroring Kiarostami’s gifts to Sabzian – a reduced sentence and an opportunity to pursue a career as a filmmaker – Kiarostami’s consistent respect for an esoteric reality gives viewers the opportunity to imagine change both on- and off-screen.
A notable exception to the lineup of protagonists granted a psychological interiority comes in the 1997 Taste of Cherry, a film which, in my experience, exists as an important point of transition in the director’s career. The careful attention afforded Sabzian’s subjectivity by 11 hours of footage shot within the courtroom is starkly contrasted by Badii’s enigmatic drive towards death. Any reasons as to why Badii wants to take his own life are importantly withheld, such that viewers of the film are unable to identify with him as we might with other characters in Kiarostami’s oeuvre. Despite the nothingness of Badii’s interiority, his drive, or desire, to die remains intact. The actuality of his affliction – existing in opposition to an esoteric nothing – informs his determined, repeated path between Tehran and the hillside grave. The only lapses in this fatalistic orientation towards death come in the symbolic recognition of beauty.
After moving through the desolate landscape uninterrupted for a majority of the film’s runtime, Badii’s third passenger, Mr. Bagheri, is the first to suggest an alternate path. “I don’t know this road,” Badii resents. “I know it. It's longer, but better and more beautiful.” As Badii stops the car and redirects following his signal, the taxidermist shares of his own attempted suicide, here providing a context (marital tensions) which Badii’s own drive lacks. Absence – in Badii’s psyche, a landscape drained of vitality/ color, a cast devoid of women, and an end without formal resolution – presents itself once more as an opportunity to create something new. Mr. Bagheri’s story relates an experience of rediscovering the beauty of the world, an experience he seems eager to share with Badii when pointing towards the “more beautiful” road. Though it is not worth speculating that Mr. Bagheri’s evocation of life’s beauty absolves Badii, in his silence, of the desire to end his life; it does produce a noticeable – even if unintelligible – shift within him. After confirming the plan for his burial with Mr. Bagheri, Badii’s attention strays for the first time from the path towards his grave: a contrail glows pink, slicing through a pale blue sky; children in multicolored sweaters jog the perimeter of a soccer field below; the rich blush of a setting-sun silhouettes the Tehran skyline as a crane pivots slowly in the foreground. In these final moments of daylight before Badii lays to rest in the hillside grave, beauty seeps back in as he seems to find peace in his approaching death. Within these specific scenes of beauty reside, also, an invocation of new beginnings, or of life to come.
Continuing this reading provides a potential direction for parsing the film's final scene, following Badii’s presumed death marked by several minutes of near-total darkness. The low roar of thunder and rainfall fades seamlessly into the chirping of birds and insects punctuated by the rhythmic cadence call of soldiers marching in the distance. As the darkness lifts we are met with an entirely new world: abstracted by a digital grain reminiscent of early 2000s home-video (a nostalgic aesthetic recalling childhood in my own experience of the scene), the lush, oversaturated greens and yellows of the Iranian hillsides glow in the morning light of late-spring. Beyond the imaginal potentials enabled by the blurring between actor and character, the resurrected-body – Badii – elevates death alongside transition as ultimate experiences of not-being. Refusing the essentialization of imposed markers of identity, a psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality as illuminating a non-alikeness to oneself liberates the subject, allowing them to take action and change themself. Within this framework, gender transition joins suicide in their shared potential for agential rebirth or reaffirmation of identity. The resurrected body is also different from its physical or material form, a shift present more abstractly in the doubling inherent to the filmic production of an image: a representation of a pre-existing reality, split from its referent at the moment of photographic capture. Here, an additional layer of alteration demarcates a material transition in Kiarostami’s filmmaking practice as Badii is reborn through digital video. This scene of resurrection in which Badii and his gravesite return – importantly – changed, reads as Kiarostami welcoming a new era of film marked by a radical shift in technology; a newborn opening their eyes onto the digital contemporary. Despite moving away from the Bazinian indexicality of the celluloid frame, an impression of this final scene – in viewing the film more than twenty years after its initial release – arises as being paradoxically “more real” than the rest of the film preceding it. Perhaps unique to a perspective accustomed to a lived condition of digitality; the metacinematic reveal of the film crew, Kiarostami, and a resurrected Badii; coupled with the aesthetic language of handheld camera movements and poor resolution; retroactively establish an entirely new visual lexicon of digital indexicality. From the death of film comes the birth of the digital, from a dead name comes new life.
Whether a clever response to location-restrictive modesty enforcement or out of mere fascination with the possibilities of framing a landscape (and subjects) trapped somewhere between interior and exterior space, Kiarostami’s interest in the car as a vehicle for moving a camera through the world predates the director’s epochal transition to digital video. First thoroughly explored in Life and Nothing More in its capacity for expanding the scope of the viewer’s look into the world on-screen, the car – and driving – has become a central motif throughout the filmography of Kiarostami. Where Life and Nothing More introduces the potential of the car window for enabling an exoteric view onto the world beyond the glass during Kiarostami’s “traumatic” reckoning with the earthquake in Koker, the role of the car in Badii’s drive towards death is most significant in its illumination of an esoteric condition of nothingness; space generated by the empty passenger/driver seat during the shooting of long conversations on the winding hillside roads prevents Badii from visually establishing a connection, or being together, with his passengers throughout the film. In the director’s first feature-length film shot entirely on video, the interior of the car returns – once again transformed – and seems to reach a theoretical extreme in its methodical construction of space and narrative modularity. Mirroring the stylistic shift in Italian Neorealist films aided by the introduction of then-new 16mm technology, the reduced footprint of digital cameras allows Kiarostami to further remove himself from his half-made films. In Ten, two cameras mounted to the car’s dashboard approach a total elimination of directorial presence and contain the countdown of sequential scenes to the space of the car’s front seats. Important to this technological shift is the ability of the actors – or more specifically, for the first time in Kiarostami’s career, predominantly (entirely?) actresses – to experience the esoteric space of the car together.
Following a lineage of films featuring boys pursuing esoteric journeys largely alone, the first – or “tenth” – scene of Ten opens with a “boy,” Amin, riding in the passenger seat of his mother’s car; the female protagonist – a presence notably absent from Kiarostami’s films to-date – is withheld from view for the 15-minute duration of their ride. From the tension of the mother and son’s heated dialogue arises, almost instantly, a sharp examination of a specifically-feminine interiority. Towards the apex of their argument, the unnamed driver profoundly asks: “A woman has to die so as to be able to live?” Continuing in the language of death explored in the final scene of Taste of Cherry, this invocation of resurrection seems intrinsically tied to a broader exploration of subjectivity in the films of Kiarostami. Once more, with Ten, digitality seems to access new heights in the expression of esoteric realities through an unflinching elucidation of varied experiences of womanhood in Tehran. Scene 9 – as marked by a digitally-transposed film leader countdown that punctuates the film in sync with the shutting of the passenger-side door (a blurring of digital/analog signifiers which furthers Kiarostami’s career-spanning investigation of the camera-reality relationship in the “capture” of an image; sonic and visual confluence in these moments invokes the closing of a camera’s shutter) – opens with the driver’s sister waiting in the passenger seat in silence. The harsh backlight completely abstracts the view through the car windows, furthering the disembodiment of the car’s interior from the world it is situated within and effecting the ontology of a close-up through this relative neutralization of the setting. The scene becomes uncomfortable with anticipation as we watch her fidget, bite her lip, fan herself and adjust her scarf in apparent discomfort, all while expectantly looking through the windshield onto a world withheld from our view. Car horns, sirens, and people passing by reveal sound as our primary point of access to the world “beyond,” enacting the development of a feminine interiority through a structural move which becomes the basis for Kiarostami’s 2008 Shirin. The following scene is one of two in Ten which, for its duration, withholds the passenger from view, suggesting a significance in the way in which the protagonist is able to experience the world and understand herself better through the conversations with her various passengers. In this scene, the disembodied voice of the older woman urging her to go to the mausoleum and pray takes on the connotation of an exoteric influence from some form of spiritual advisor, retroactively informing the driver’s internal experience of spirituality and search for something within as discussed with the passenger first met in scene 6.
Before returning to a discussion of scene 7, I would like first to point out the noticeably-degraded resolution of the copy of Ten which I have had digital access to. This visual aesthetic, coupled with a consistent delay in the appearance of subtitles throughout, serve as subtle, subconscious reminders of the film’s broader context as it was introduced to me: having been banned in Iran after its release at the Cannes Film Festival. Upon rudimentary research (performed as I am writing this with the intention of confirming the film’s having been banned upon release), I have found through Ten’s Wikipedia page more information regarding allegations from the lead actress, Mania Akbari, accusing Kiarostami of abuse as well as plagiarizing footage. Additionally, Akbari expressed that none of the women in the film had been compensated for their participation, and considering all of this, requested that the film not be shown at subsequent screenings. Undoubtedly, this provides additional context as to why the film seems more difficult to find than Kiarostami’s other work, and has thus affected my specifically-digital mode of access. Although it remains outside of the scope of this paper and the points I still hope to address, I do feel that it is important to at least hold space for recognizing these allegations and their dissonance with my initially positive reading of the film and Kiarostami’s work in general.
With an initial experience of the scene noticeably impacted by the aforementioned misalignment between the dialogue and English subtitles, scene 7 opens with an exchange expressing a confusion of gender:
-You thought I was a man?
-What did you think?
Because of this delay, in rewatching the scene I still can’t quite separate who is mistaking whom for “a man;” in addition to being the second of two passengers whose face is withheld from our view, this is one of the few scenes in which we don’t see or hear the passenger getting into the car. Nonetheless, this confusion of gender/ mistaken identity feels important in introducing the investigation of feminine sexuality within the scene, as well as – ironically – my experience of the film from a specifically transfeminine perspective. The passenger, who it soon becomes clear is a sex worker having likely mistaken the driver as a potential client, fends off the driver’s attempts at conversation – “Pretend I’m a man…” – with “I’m not working in that field yet.” Though the passenger is likely hidden from view because of the controversial subject matter, their spirited back-and-forth becomes predominantly relevant in its elucidation of the driver’s own experience of sexuality in her conversation with the sex worker. Through tongue-in-cheek reference to clients answering calls from their wives with “I love you,” the passenger insinuates that the driver is “in the dark” to assume that her husband is faithful. In this scene, as in the scene with the older woman, the driver being in frame for the entirety of the scene develops a sense of emphasis on her experience of self through others: a unidirectional influence responding to confrontations with embodied sexuality and spirituality outside of herself. In the other scenes, her femininity or broader interiority is understood moreso as an experience of or with others, furthered by an establishment of relation as mother, sister, friend, or stranger. In a subsequent scene with her son, the driver mentions her occupation as an artist and photographer, revealing not only the role that work can play as an experience of self, but also furthering Kiarostami’s investigation of art more specifically as a means of responding to or illuminating an esoteric reality.
The second to last scene, and arguably the emotional climax of the film’s countdown, sees the return of the passenger from scene 6, once more, changed. No longer strangers (having connected earlier over their shared internal experiences interfacing with religion and spirituality) the two women exhibit an understanding of one another reflective of requisite internal developments in their respective subjectivities. Almost immediately, the passenger reveals that her boyfriend no longer wants to marry her, adding: “the hardest part for me is admitting that it’s hard.” As the driver attempts to console her, validating the difficulty of “losing” and recognizing the added insult of there being somebody else that he is thinking about, she interjects: “Are you modest? Why is your veil so tight? It doesn’t suit you.” The camera again rests on a close-up of the passenger as she begins to loosen her veil and then hesitates, staring blankly into the nothingness beyond the windshield. Slowly, she inches the scarf back, revealing to the driver that she has cut her hair. “Am I hideous?” she asks immediately through a simultaneous smile and approaching tears. For the remainder of the scene, she struggles to find words to respond – “Why did you do it?... Why are you crying?” – but in these spaces of silence it is evident that the two women truly understand and see one another. As the driver wipes tears away from cheeks raised in a self-aware smile, there is a clear recognition, and acceptance, that no words could do justice in describing the joy felt in making this decision for herself. Through this agential mode of feminine expression, she takes action to move an esoteric experience of self into an exoteric projection of selfhood. Mirroring a transfeminine experience of physically actualizing an esoteric reality, this realization of self allows for a shared moment of esoteric feminine understanding. “He’s gone. Have you changed?” the driver asks. After more silence, she looks up and ends: “But I’d like him to be here.” With this expressed dissonance, a difficulty in sitting with conflicting internal realities (joy in an experience of selfhood separate from her romantic partner, as well as a feeling of loss and longing for mutual dependence), this deeply moving scene moves beyond the development of a uniquely feminine interiority. In their largely non-verbal emotional exchange and ability to recognize the other through difference, the two women’s shared experience of self suggests a specifically feminine way of being, together.
After my first screening of Ten, I happened upon current information about the cast and discovered that the person who played Amin in the film, Amina Maher, has since become known in Iran for her work as a trans-feminist artist and activist. Through this chance encounter with the actress’s Wikipedia bio, the film has – retroactively – taken on an entirely new dimension of significance in its portrayal of a transfeminine-adolescent mother-daughter relationship. In situating my experience of Kiarostami’s filmography intentionally alongside my own gender transition, I have found ways to identify and locate myself within his films with notable introspection regarding my own experience of adolescence as “boyhood.” During a class discussion of Ten, the character of Amin was heralded as embodying a “patriarchal tyranny” which strengthened his significance as the only male-presenting character in the film. In returning to notes that I took the first time I watched Ten, before discovering the contemporary reality of Amina’s transfeminine existence, I specifically noted a sense of identification with an experience of childhood anger which I have, in retrospect, attributed to my own adolescent suppression of a non-normative gender identity. In that moment, “Amin’s” rage towards his mother felt eerily reminiscent of my own irritability riding in the passenger seat of my father’s car, feeling resistance towards a similar shift in marital status. Now, in reconsidering the context of these scenes in which Amina was shot, unknowingly, in the passenger seat of her actual mother’s car (Mania Akbari), the presence of a latent transfeminine subjectivity is further inseparable from my reading of the film. Specifically, in the scene where Amina speaks of her father presumably watching pornography on the TV at home, this childhood confrontation of sex and sexuality through encounters with one’s parents reveals an understanding of sexuality – or a broader coming “into being,” an experience of self – as an experience of, with, or through another.
In its digital afterlife, Ten lives on with its characters/ actresses as films often, too, stay with their viewers. The opening scene of Amina’s short-film Letter to my Mother begins with a borrowed scene of her pre-transition, adolescent self in Ten – the film, now, acting as an unconscious document of her own experienced childhood. Throughout, my emphasis on the “chance encounters” specific to the digital context of my experience of Kiarostami’s work intentionally borrows the language of love to highlight the difficulty and complex significance of how I have experienced and located a deeper understanding of myself – and by extension, a transformed perception and way of navigating the world – through these films. Particular resonance with the director’s later work is furthered by a confluence between the digital medium, the digital encounter, and the digital context of contemporary experiences of transfemininity.
My entire awareness of and exposure to non-normative sexuality and other modes of embodied identity, topics entirely absent from institutionalized Western education systems, originated online. Specific to my experience growing up, an increasing dissonance between my esoteric and exoteric experience of self – retrospectively, a rift between bodily development and access to perceived femininity – coincided with my connection to any recognition or understanding of myself moving progressively inward and online. This phenomenon, shared with nearly every trans person I have spoken to who has recognized or begun addressing their transness within the last decade, suggests a contemporary condition of transdigitality. Lacking access to points of affirmation or community IRL facilitated an experience of individuation and selfhood-construction with social media as the sole mode of accessing like-minded community and information regarding non-normative ways of identifying. As it became less possible to identify with my physical, bodily self, I subconsciously constructed an esoteric image of myself disembodied and relocated into an online persona and the physical/ digital products of my own visual production. My experience-of-self resided entirely online and only found a mode of physical expression through my practice as a visual artist. In retrospect, as I pushed myself towards making work which felt important and meaningful to myself and a world that I wish to see around me, I unconsciously developed an archive of my own atemporal experiences of and confrontations with gender and sexuality that lived importantly outside of myself until just this past year.
In recognizing my process of transitioning as a tangible, experiential resurrection; the movement of my esoteric, digital awareness of transness to an exoteric, physical projection onto my embodied self has located its own reflection in the visual language of Kiarostami’s two films produced outside of Iran. Continuing the narrative trajectory of the director’s exploration of the visual potential offered by framing with car windows, the space of the car is transformed once more as the digital camera moves now beyond the window/windshield, allowing the coexistence of multiple ways of being or seeing the world on and through a simultaneously transparent and reflective surface. Just as higher digital contrast in Ten resulted in the abstraction/ erasure of the world outside of the car, the visual capabilities of the digital camera in Certified Copy usher a transcendental shift in the poetic visuality of Kiarostami’s now-famed driving sequences. Accompanying returning themes of mistaken/indefinite identity, fiction producing reality, and the individuation of an esoteric subject, Certified Copy introduces the digital veil – a close-up, surface, or image – as a means of achieving intricate visual compositions which further highlight the conditions of a subjective interiority. The car scenes, instead of serving as a window onto an internal reality, now act as a surface onto which an exoteric perception of the world is projected, producing a specifically-digital veil which paradoxically reflects/ refracts, obstructs/ abstracts, and elucidates the presence of an other-/ nothing-ness beneath its spectral throw.
In the final feature-length film released during Kiarostami’s lifetime, Like Someone in Love, the digital veil reaches its purest form of visual expression. The enigmatic, transient nature of Akiko’s identity throughout the film subverts any individual, ontological categories of being and foregrounds the omnipresent off-screen as containing a negative excess. Confirming Kiarostami’s intentionally-sparse aesthetic sensibility as indicating an esoteric constraint, sexuality remains elusive outside of the regional context of Iranian modesty, protected – or veiled – in its presentation throughout Like Someone in Love. Of particular note, the bedroom scene central to Akiko’s meeting with Mr. Watanabe is completely withheld, alluded to only through a reflection of Akiko’s own shadowy figure sitting bedside on the blank TV screen in her client’s bedroom. Here, I am reminded of the black screen of Badii’s death, a nothingness through which – especially when viewed on a digital screen – viewers are confronted with a literal reflection of our own image, asking us to look inwards, confronting ourselves and that which cannot be known. Recalling the young boys’ desire to possess their own image in The Traveler, the dark, digital screen assumes the ontological qualities of a mirror; the screen is highlighted as a spectral surface situated in a world shared with its viewer and emanating perceptual access to an on-screen world. Throughout the film, Akiko’s image and likeness are continually called into question: upon entering Mr. Watanabe’s apartment, she tells of her own experience searching for her resemblance in the painting hung on the wall; a search enacted once more as she looks at an image of Watanabe’s family resting on a side table; a search transmuted by the denial of her own image in the magazine advertisements. Exhibiting a non-identity with herself, Akiko looks like herself, which is to say other than herself (the “real” image always contains an otherness in its separation from the referent). Chance returns, here, in viewing confrontations with oneself and others as being constitutive of an identity and worldview.
Borrowing Alain Badiou’s definition of love as “a rebirth of the self through the prism of difference [emphasis added],” transfeminine resurrection is transposed onto the spectral surface, elucidating a dehiscence which enables the construction of a new self. The declaration of love transforms chance into destiny retrospectively (a joking working-title for this essay was “Becoming Trans with Kiarostami,” emphasizing the inseparability of my chance encounter with his films and my recognition/ acceptance of transness). In retrospect, my reckoning with a transfeminine self-understanding as a layered, atemporal/ aspatial, digital experience of a world reflected onto me is mirrored in the kaleidoscopic artificial starscapes of city lights resting, as a veil, upon the image of Akiko riding in the backseat of a taxi, listening to her grandmother’s denial of her exoteric projection of selfhood in a phone-booth advertisement. Through the tension, or dissonance, of recognizing this simultaneity in absolute being and non-being; viewers – alongside, through, or as Akiko – confront the confluent, intersecting, illegible facets of an interiority contained beneath and beyond the veil of our corporeal form. In viewing Kiarostami’s films posthumously, the worlds on-screen, off-screen, and impossibly yet importantly somewhere between the two merge into a single, reflective, transparent pane. Should one happen to encounter the generative realities enveloped by these digital veils, an esoteric self-image emerges upscaled and sharpened, pixels imbued with the glint of an unknown.
This attitude towards the audience, crystallized in Kiarostami’s self-proclaimed intention of releasing “half-made films,” opens up generous, generative space for viewers to locate themselves in the worlds on-screen. Thus, I consider it important to foreground the specific context of my individual experience of the director’s work: a majority of the films which I will discuss I have watched for the first time within the past few months, all formats entirely digitized with varied resolutions years after Kiarostami’s death, and coinciding with the nascence of my ongoing gender transition. Any heightened resonance with explorations of digitality and femininity later in the director’s career feels indebted to my individual subjectivity as a viewer of these films within this specific context. Though I am typically hesitant to approach another’s work with this level of vulnerability, it feels particularly important and relevant in my understanding of Kiarostami’s filmography, invoking a parasocial identification with the director in our shared experience as humans, artists, and lovers. Through these films – encountered in a way which Kiarostami could never have anticipated – I have glimpsed an internal excess reflected across car windows and TV screens, a retrospective recognition of the Other projected onto an experience of the world with others, and, ultimately, a resurrected drive to make, love, and be. In this post-digital confrontation, the auteur’s expansive career narrates the simultaneous individuation of a subject and transition to a globalized digital condition, processes marked by a consistent privileging of esoteric realities and an aesthetic impulse towards poetic possibility.
While Kiarostami’s films refuse narrative linearity – in many cases, by design – posthumously considering the broad trajectory from narratives centering young boys to those with adult-woman protagonists selfishly parallels my own recognition of a transfeminine subjectivity. Paramount to these earlier films’ elucidation of selfhood are the philosophical notion of friendship and the presence of a drive or passion, especially for images. Addressed most directly in 1987’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, friendship is revealed not as a quality or mode of relation, but rather as an esoteric condition of otherness. As Ahmad travels twice to Poshteh in search of the eponymous friend’s home, propelled by an internal excess enabling his drive to return the notebook, the Where of the film’s title is stripped of geographic locality as the winding, repeated path back to Ahmad’s own home illustrates a journey inward. This non-being of, or failure to locate, Mohammed’s house disrupts the causality of a journey with a named destination; from the nothingness of this impasse, Ahmad’s ethical imperative urges the invention of something new. Drawing on this esoteric excess which enables his capacity to act in friendship, Ahmad is inspired to complete Mohammed’s homework alongside his own to prevent impending punishment from their teacher. Within this lie lies so much truth, highlighting not only the condition of an education system interested in the eradication of difference (exemplified by the easily-confusable homogeneity of the students’ workbooks and expected conduct) but more importantly the reality of a shared experience of the world through the friend.
Just as Ahmad is driven, ultimately, to lie by an internal desire to do right by Mohammed, Kiarostami’s first feature-length film illuminates Qassem’s passion for soccer as determining an internal ethics – arguably an esoteric real – oriented in opposition to imposed authority. From the opening scene in The Traveler, a vibrant sense of community and joy enabled by this shared passion for soccer is developed in stark contrast to the rigidity of the classroom and mundanity of life at home. Driven by a desire to watch a soccer game in Tehran, Qassem sets out to raise money for his ticket by whatever means necessary and, in a characteristically poetic turn, offers to photograph his classmates with a broken camera. Here, Qassem’s passion capitalizes on the other boys’ desire to have an image as they line up with invariable excitement in search of photographic evidence of their own being (this power of the image seems central to the director’s approach towards cinema). Undoubtedly, instances of passion throughout Kiarostami’s films might be read as mirroring the director’s own passion: that which informs a reason for making art, a response to the space of nothingness opened in acknowledgment or pursuit of an internal otherness. Following this logic, it seems natural that the first protagonists which exceed categorization as young boys are actors portraying the director of the film, demonstrating Kiarostami’s confrontation with his own subjectivity as filmmaker.
In the above cases of Qassem and Ahmad’s drive/ passion, as well as in First Case… and various other instances throughout Kiarostami’s career, lying is heralded as containing immense imaginal potential and worth. Rather than simply negating an exoteric construction of laws and morals, here, lies – as if dreams – assert an interiority of the subject. The lie central to Sabzian’s legal case, which became the subject of Kiarostami’s seminal 1990 docu-fiction film Close-Up, furthers the director’s burgeoning explorations of the nature of reality as it relates to cinema through a deep reverence for Sabzian’s individuation and the conditions which made his lie necessary. Drawn to Sabzian’s story by a shared passion for the art of cinema, Kiarostami sets out not towards a Sisyphean attempt to capture the reality of Sabzian’s case and legal proceedings, but rather uses film to produce a new reality which outlives any diegetic real contained by the filmic frame. As a kicked can rolling across the pavement gives way to a printer publishing the story of Sabzian’s arrest – superimposed with the film’s title and credits – there seems to be an immediate acknowledgement of a device “constructing reality” inherent to the medium of film. In this way, film always occupies an imaginal position between reality and fiction, never able to faithfully reproduce a pre-existing reality but rather constructing a new reality esoterically contained within the film. Here, the innate complexity of the camera-reality relationship mirrors the subjects’ relation to themselves not only in recreating the scene of the arrest, but also in the more general splitting of the subject, affording the development of an interiority. Even when removed from the context of the film, Sabzian’s lie – impersonating the Iranian director Makhmalbaf – reveals a fundamental desire to be someone other than himself, or who he is told that he is. The further doubling of the subject enacted by the curious directorial choice to have the actors portray themselves opens space within this split to take action – or make a film – which creates a new reality. The objective past of Sabzian’s arrest is rewritten collaboratively through the reenactment with the Ahankhahs and, in granting his subjects this opportunity to search for a new truth in their relation to self, Kiarostami joins film with reality and enables the externalization of a malleable, esoteric real.
Just as cinema occupies imaginal space alongside dreams in its removal from perceived reality, the potential of film as an extension of Aristotelian poetry – said to oppose history in its provision of something to dream about or aspire to – strengthens not only the role of desire but the imaginal value of the lie. Ahmad’s forgery illuminates the space of a friend within, informing a desire to protect Mohammed from punishment by taking action, while Sabzian’s impersonation reveals a desire to be other than himself and, through Kiarostami, action is taken. In retroactively contemplating the importance of lying, I can’t help but draw a connection to a specifically-trans experience of survival: within the dissonance between a perceived (exoteric) and embodied (esoteric) experience of gender, the lie emerges as intrinsic to gendered performance. Whether to protect oneself from harassment by performing an assigned gender or, through an external perception of trans expression, being read as impersonating the other, “non-real” gender, the experienced necessity of the lie – as is developed before Kiarostami’s lens – seems particularly resonant to this instinctual refusal of the self as other. As I have attempted to argue so far, Kiarostami’s films invite viewers to travel inwards, often alongside the films’ protagonists, and explore the otherness inherent to their subjectivity. In situating my experience of Kiarostami’s filmography within my experience of transfeminine individuation, I hope to demonstrate the power his movies hold in allowing viewers to better “know” themselves. From the intersections of these mediated (filmic) and embodied (otherwise-transfeminine) confrontations with selfhood, Sabzian’s desire to be other than himself – informing the lie of his impersonation – evokes an experience of transness as importantly taking action to realize, or externalize, an esoteric reality. As Kiarostami’s production of Close-Up produced reality itself – bringing Sabzian’s dreams, as well as that of the Ahankhahs to be in a film, into reality – any steps towards actualizing an internal understanding of gender (starting hormone replacement therapy, transitioning socially, changing one’s name, among a myriad of other actions which might be taken in pursuit of gender affirmation) reveal new truths and demonstrate the subject’s agency in constructing reality. Mirroring Kiarostami’s gifts to Sabzian – a reduced sentence and an opportunity to pursue a career as a filmmaker – Kiarostami’s consistent respect for an esoteric reality gives viewers the opportunity to imagine change both on- and off-screen.
A notable exception to the lineup of protagonists granted a psychological interiority comes in the 1997 Taste of Cherry, a film which, in my experience, exists as an important point of transition in the director’s career. The careful attention afforded Sabzian’s subjectivity by 11 hours of footage shot within the courtroom is starkly contrasted by Badii’s enigmatic drive towards death. Any reasons as to why Badii wants to take his own life are importantly withheld, such that viewers of the film are unable to identify with him as we might with other characters in Kiarostami’s oeuvre. Despite the nothingness of Badii’s interiority, his drive, or desire, to die remains intact. The actuality of his affliction – existing in opposition to an esoteric nothing – informs his determined, repeated path between Tehran and the hillside grave. The only lapses in this fatalistic orientation towards death come in the symbolic recognition of beauty.
After moving through the desolate landscape uninterrupted for a majority of the film’s runtime, Badii’s third passenger, Mr. Bagheri, is the first to suggest an alternate path. “I don’t know this road,” Badii resents. “I know it. It's longer, but better and more beautiful.” As Badii stops the car and redirects following his signal, the taxidermist shares of his own attempted suicide, here providing a context (marital tensions) which Badii’s own drive lacks. Absence – in Badii’s psyche, a landscape drained of vitality/ color, a cast devoid of women, and an end without formal resolution – presents itself once more as an opportunity to create something new. Mr. Bagheri’s story relates an experience of rediscovering the beauty of the world, an experience he seems eager to share with Badii when pointing towards the “more beautiful” road. Though it is not worth speculating that Mr. Bagheri’s evocation of life’s beauty absolves Badii, in his silence, of the desire to end his life; it does produce a noticeable – even if unintelligible – shift within him. After confirming the plan for his burial with Mr. Bagheri, Badii’s attention strays for the first time from the path towards his grave: a contrail glows pink, slicing through a pale blue sky; children in multicolored sweaters jog the perimeter of a soccer field below; the rich blush of a setting-sun silhouettes the Tehran skyline as a crane pivots slowly in the foreground. In these final moments of daylight before Badii lays to rest in the hillside grave, beauty seeps back in as he seems to find peace in his approaching death. Within these specific scenes of beauty reside, also, an invocation of new beginnings, or of life to come.
Continuing this reading provides a potential direction for parsing the film's final scene, following Badii’s presumed death marked by several minutes of near-total darkness. The low roar of thunder and rainfall fades seamlessly into the chirping of birds and insects punctuated by the rhythmic cadence call of soldiers marching in the distance. As the darkness lifts we are met with an entirely new world: abstracted by a digital grain reminiscent of early 2000s home-video (a nostalgic aesthetic recalling childhood in my own experience of the scene), the lush, oversaturated greens and yellows of the Iranian hillsides glow in the morning light of late-spring. Beyond the imaginal potentials enabled by the blurring between actor and character, the resurrected-body – Badii – elevates death alongside transition as ultimate experiences of not-being. Refusing the essentialization of imposed markers of identity, a psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality as illuminating a non-alikeness to oneself liberates the subject, allowing them to take action and change themself. Within this framework, gender transition joins suicide in their shared potential for agential rebirth or reaffirmation of identity. The resurrected body is also different from its physical or material form, a shift present more abstractly in the doubling inherent to the filmic production of an image: a representation of a pre-existing reality, split from its referent at the moment of photographic capture. Here, an additional layer of alteration demarcates a material transition in Kiarostami’s filmmaking practice as Badii is reborn through digital video. This scene of resurrection in which Badii and his gravesite return – importantly – changed, reads as Kiarostami welcoming a new era of film marked by a radical shift in technology; a newborn opening their eyes onto the digital contemporary. Despite moving away from the Bazinian indexicality of the celluloid frame, an impression of this final scene – in viewing the film more than twenty years after its initial release – arises as being paradoxically “more real” than the rest of the film preceding it. Perhaps unique to a perspective accustomed to a lived condition of digitality; the metacinematic reveal of the film crew, Kiarostami, and a resurrected Badii; coupled with the aesthetic language of handheld camera movements and poor resolution; retroactively establish an entirely new visual lexicon of digital indexicality. From the death of film comes the birth of the digital, from a dead name comes new life.
Whether a clever response to location-restrictive modesty enforcement or out of mere fascination with the possibilities of framing a landscape (and subjects) trapped somewhere between interior and exterior space, Kiarostami’s interest in the car as a vehicle for moving a camera through the world predates the director’s epochal transition to digital video. First thoroughly explored in Life and Nothing More in its capacity for expanding the scope of the viewer’s look into the world on-screen, the car – and driving – has become a central motif throughout the filmography of Kiarostami. Where Life and Nothing More introduces the potential of the car window for enabling an exoteric view onto the world beyond the glass during Kiarostami’s “traumatic” reckoning with the earthquake in Koker, the role of the car in Badii’s drive towards death is most significant in its illumination of an esoteric condition of nothingness; space generated by the empty passenger/driver seat during the shooting of long conversations on the winding hillside roads prevents Badii from visually establishing a connection, or being together, with his passengers throughout the film. In the director’s first feature-length film shot entirely on video, the interior of the car returns – once again transformed – and seems to reach a theoretical extreme in its methodical construction of space and narrative modularity. Mirroring the stylistic shift in Italian Neorealist films aided by the introduction of then-new 16mm technology, the reduced footprint of digital cameras allows Kiarostami to further remove himself from his half-made films. In Ten, two cameras mounted to the car’s dashboard approach a total elimination of directorial presence and contain the countdown of sequential scenes to the space of the car’s front seats. Important to this technological shift is the ability of the actors – or more specifically, for the first time in Kiarostami’s career, predominantly (entirely?) actresses – to experience the esoteric space of the car together.
Following a lineage of films featuring boys pursuing esoteric journeys largely alone, the first – or “tenth” – scene of Ten opens with a “boy,” Amin, riding in the passenger seat of his mother’s car; the female protagonist – a presence notably absent from Kiarostami’s films to-date – is withheld from view for the 15-minute duration of their ride. From the tension of the mother and son’s heated dialogue arises, almost instantly, a sharp examination of a specifically-feminine interiority. Towards the apex of their argument, the unnamed driver profoundly asks: “A woman has to die so as to be able to live?” Continuing in the language of death explored in the final scene of Taste of Cherry, this invocation of resurrection seems intrinsically tied to a broader exploration of subjectivity in the films of Kiarostami. Once more, with Ten, digitality seems to access new heights in the expression of esoteric realities through an unflinching elucidation of varied experiences of womanhood in Tehran. Scene 9 – as marked by a digitally-transposed film leader countdown that punctuates the film in sync with the shutting of the passenger-side door (a blurring of digital/analog signifiers which furthers Kiarostami’s career-spanning investigation of the camera-reality relationship in the “capture” of an image; sonic and visual confluence in these moments invokes the closing of a camera’s shutter) – opens with the driver’s sister waiting in the passenger seat in silence. The harsh backlight completely abstracts the view through the car windows, furthering the disembodiment of the car’s interior from the world it is situated within and effecting the ontology of a close-up through this relative neutralization of the setting. The scene becomes uncomfortable with anticipation as we watch her fidget, bite her lip, fan herself and adjust her scarf in apparent discomfort, all while expectantly looking through the windshield onto a world withheld from our view. Car horns, sirens, and people passing by reveal sound as our primary point of access to the world “beyond,” enacting the development of a feminine interiority through a structural move which becomes the basis for Kiarostami’s 2008 Shirin. The following scene is one of two in Ten which, for its duration, withholds the passenger from view, suggesting a significance in the way in which the protagonist is able to experience the world and understand herself better through the conversations with her various passengers. In this scene, the disembodied voice of the older woman urging her to go to the mausoleum and pray takes on the connotation of an exoteric influence from some form of spiritual advisor, retroactively informing the driver’s internal experience of spirituality and search for something within as discussed with the passenger first met in scene 6.
Before returning to a discussion of scene 7, I would like first to point out the noticeably-degraded resolution of the copy of Ten which I have had digital access to. This visual aesthetic, coupled with a consistent delay in the appearance of subtitles throughout, serve as subtle, subconscious reminders of the film’s broader context as it was introduced to me: having been banned in Iran after its release at the Cannes Film Festival. Upon rudimentary research (performed as I am writing this with the intention of confirming the film’s having been banned upon release), I have found through Ten’s Wikipedia page more information regarding allegations from the lead actress, Mania Akbari, accusing Kiarostami of abuse as well as plagiarizing footage. Additionally, Akbari expressed that none of the women in the film had been compensated for their participation, and considering all of this, requested that the film not be shown at subsequent screenings. Undoubtedly, this provides additional context as to why the film seems more difficult to find than Kiarostami’s other work, and has thus affected my specifically-digital mode of access. Although it remains outside of the scope of this paper and the points I still hope to address, I do feel that it is important to at least hold space for recognizing these allegations and their dissonance with my initially positive reading of the film and Kiarostami’s work in general.
With an initial experience of the scene noticeably impacted by the aforementioned misalignment between the dialogue and English subtitles, scene 7 opens with an exchange expressing a confusion of gender:
-You thought I was a man?
-What did you think?
Because of this delay, in rewatching the scene I still can’t quite separate who is mistaking whom for “a man;” in addition to being the second of two passengers whose face is withheld from our view, this is one of the few scenes in which we don’t see or hear the passenger getting into the car. Nonetheless, this confusion of gender/ mistaken identity feels important in introducing the investigation of feminine sexuality within the scene, as well as – ironically – my experience of the film from a specifically transfeminine perspective. The passenger, who it soon becomes clear is a sex worker having likely mistaken the driver as a potential client, fends off the driver’s attempts at conversation – “Pretend I’m a man…” – with “I’m not working in that field yet.” Though the passenger is likely hidden from view because of the controversial subject matter, their spirited back-and-forth becomes predominantly relevant in its elucidation of the driver’s own experience of sexuality in her conversation with the sex worker. Through tongue-in-cheek reference to clients answering calls from their wives with “I love you,” the passenger insinuates that the driver is “in the dark” to assume that her husband is faithful. In this scene, as in the scene with the older woman, the driver being in frame for the entirety of the scene develops a sense of emphasis on her experience of self through others: a unidirectional influence responding to confrontations with embodied sexuality and spirituality outside of herself. In the other scenes, her femininity or broader interiority is understood moreso as an experience of or with others, furthered by an establishment of relation as mother, sister, friend, or stranger. In a subsequent scene with her son, the driver mentions her occupation as an artist and photographer, revealing not only the role that work can play as an experience of self, but also furthering Kiarostami’s investigation of art more specifically as a means of responding to or illuminating an esoteric reality.
The second to last scene, and arguably the emotional climax of the film’s countdown, sees the return of the passenger from scene 6, once more, changed. No longer strangers (having connected earlier over their shared internal experiences interfacing with religion and spirituality) the two women exhibit an understanding of one another reflective of requisite internal developments in their respective subjectivities. Almost immediately, the passenger reveals that her boyfriend no longer wants to marry her, adding: “the hardest part for me is admitting that it’s hard.” As the driver attempts to console her, validating the difficulty of “losing” and recognizing the added insult of there being somebody else that he is thinking about, she interjects: “Are you modest? Why is your veil so tight? It doesn’t suit you.” The camera again rests on a close-up of the passenger as she begins to loosen her veil and then hesitates, staring blankly into the nothingness beyond the windshield. Slowly, she inches the scarf back, revealing to the driver that she has cut her hair. “Am I hideous?” she asks immediately through a simultaneous smile and approaching tears. For the remainder of the scene, she struggles to find words to respond – “Why did you do it?... Why are you crying?” – but in these spaces of silence it is evident that the two women truly understand and see one another. As the driver wipes tears away from cheeks raised in a self-aware smile, there is a clear recognition, and acceptance, that no words could do justice in describing the joy felt in making this decision for herself. Through this agential mode of feminine expression, she takes action to move an esoteric experience of self into an exoteric projection of selfhood. Mirroring a transfeminine experience of physically actualizing an esoteric reality, this realization of self allows for a shared moment of esoteric feminine understanding. “He’s gone. Have you changed?” the driver asks. After more silence, she looks up and ends: “But I’d like him to be here.” With this expressed dissonance, a difficulty in sitting with conflicting internal realities (joy in an experience of selfhood separate from her romantic partner, as well as a feeling of loss and longing for mutual dependence), this deeply moving scene moves beyond the development of a uniquely feminine interiority. In their largely non-verbal emotional exchange and ability to recognize the other through difference, the two women’s shared experience of self suggests a specifically feminine way of being, together.
After my first screening of Ten, I happened upon current information about the cast and discovered that the person who played Amin in the film, Amina Maher, has since become known in Iran for her work as a trans-feminist artist and activist. Through this chance encounter with the actress’s Wikipedia bio, the film has – retroactively – taken on an entirely new dimension of significance in its portrayal of a transfeminine-adolescent mother-daughter relationship. In situating my experience of Kiarostami’s filmography intentionally alongside my own gender transition, I have found ways to identify and locate myself within his films with notable introspection regarding my own experience of adolescence as “boyhood.” During a class discussion of Ten, the character of Amin was heralded as embodying a “patriarchal tyranny” which strengthened his significance as the only male-presenting character in the film. In returning to notes that I took the first time I watched Ten, before discovering the contemporary reality of Amina’s transfeminine existence, I specifically noted a sense of identification with an experience of childhood anger which I have, in retrospect, attributed to my own adolescent suppression of a non-normative gender identity. In that moment, “Amin’s” rage towards his mother felt eerily reminiscent of my own irritability riding in the passenger seat of my father’s car, feeling resistance towards a similar shift in marital status. Now, in reconsidering the context of these scenes in which Amina was shot, unknowingly, in the passenger seat of her actual mother’s car (Mania Akbari), the presence of a latent transfeminine subjectivity is further inseparable from my reading of the film. Specifically, in the scene where Amina speaks of her father presumably watching pornography on the TV at home, this childhood confrontation of sex and sexuality through encounters with one’s parents reveals an understanding of sexuality – or a broader coming “into being,” an experience of self – as an experience of, with, or through another.
In its digital afterlife, Ten lives on with its characters/ actresses as films often, too, stay with their viewers. The opening scene of Amina’s short-film Letter to my Mother begins with a borrowed scene of her pre-transition, adolescent self in Ten – the film, now, acting as an unconscious document of her own experienced childhood. Throughout, my emphasis on the “chance encounters” specific to the digital context of my experience of Kiarostami’s work intentionally borrows the language of love to highlight the difficulty and complex significance of how I have experienced and located a deeper understanding of myself – and by extension, a transformed perception and way of navigating the world – through these films. Particular resonance with the director’s later work is furthered by a confluence between the digital medium, the digital encounter, and the digital context of contemporary experiences of transfemininity.
My entire awareness of and exposure to non-normative sexuality and other modes of embodied identity, topics entirely absent from institutionalized Western education systems, originated online. Specific to my experience growing up, an increasing dissonance between my esoteric and exoteric experience of self – retrospectively, a rift between bodily development and access to perceived femininity – coincided with my connection to any recognition or understanding of myself moving progressively inward and online. This phenomenon, shared with nearly every trans person I have spoken to who has recognized or begun addressing their transness within the last decade, suggests a contemporary condition of transdigitality. Lacking access to points of affirmation or community IRL facilitated an experience of individuation and selfhood-construction with social media as the sole mode of accessing like-minded community and information regarding non-normative ways of identifying. As it became less possible to identify with my physical, bodily self, I subconsciously constructed an esoteric image of myself disembodied and relocated into an online persona and the physical/ digital products of my own visual production. My experience-of-self resided entirely online and only found a mode of physical expression through my practice as a visual artist. In retrospect, as I pushed myself towards making work which felt important and meaningful to myself and a world that I wish to see around me, I unconsciously developed an archive of my own atemporal experiences of and confrontations with gender and sexuality that lived importantly outside of myself until just this past year.
In recognizing my process of transitioning as a tangible, experiential resurrection; the movement of my esoteric, digital awareness of transness to an exoteric, physical projection onto my embodied self has located its own reflection in the visual language of Kiarostami’s two films produced outside of Iran. Continuing the narrative trajectory of the director’s exploration of the visual potential offered by framing with car windows, the space of the car is transformed once more as the digital camera moves now beyond the window/windshield, allowing the coexistence of multiple ways of being or seeing the world on and through a simultaneously transparent and reflective surface. Just as higher digital contrast in Ten resulted in the abstraction/ erasure of the world outside of the car, the visual capabilities of the digital camera in Certified Copy usher a transcendental shift in the poetic visuality of Kiarostami’s now-famed driving sequences. Accompanying returning themes of mistaken/indefinite identity, fiction producing reality, and the individuation of an esoteric subject, Certified Copy introduces the digital veil – a close-up, surface, or image – as a means of achieving intricate visual compositions which further highlight the conditions of a subjective interiority. The car scenes, instead of serving as a window onto an internal reality, now act as a surface onto which an exoteric perception of the world is projected, producing a specifically-digital veil which paradoxically reflects/ refracts, obstructs/ abstracts, and elucidates the presence of an other-/ nothing-ness beneath its spectral throw.
In the final feature-length film released during Kiarostami’s lifetime, Like Someone in Love, the digital veil reaches its purest form of visual expression. The enigmatic, transient nature of Akiko’s identity throughout the film subverts any individual, ontological categories of being and foregrounds the omnipresent off-screen as containing a negative excess. Confirming Kiarostami’s intentionally-sparse aesthetic sensibility as indicating an esoteric constraint, sexuality remains elusive outside of the regional context of Iranian modesty, protected – or veiled – in its presentation throughout Like Someone in Love. Of particular note, the bedroom scene central to Akiko’s meeting with Mr. Watanabe is completely withheld, alluded to only through a reflection of Akiko’s own shadowy figure sitting bedside on the blank TV screen in her client’s bedroom. Here, I am reminded of the black screen of Badii’s death, a nothingness through which – especially when viewed on a digital screen – viewers are confronted with a literal reflection of our own image, asking us to look inwards, confronting ourselves and that which cannot be known. Recalling the young boys’ desire to possess their own image in The Traveler, the dark, digital screen assumes the ontological qualities of a mirror; the screen is highlighted as a spectral surface situated in a world shared with its viewer and emanating perceptual access to an on-screen world. Throughout the film, Akiko’s image and likeness are continually called into question: upon entering Mr. Watanabe’s apartment, she tells of her own experience searching for her resemblance in the painting hung on the wall; a search enacted once more as she looks at an image of Watanabe’s family resting on a side table; a search transmuted by the denial of her own image in the magazine advertisements. Exhibiting a non-identity with herself, Akiko looks like herself, which is to say other than herself (the “real” image always contains an otherness in its separation from the referent). Chance returns, here, in viewing confrontations with oneself and others as being constitutive of an identity and worldview.
Borrowing Alain Badiou’s definition of love as “a rebirth of the self through the prism of difference [emphasis added],” transfeminine resurrection is transposed onto the spectral surface, elucidating a dehiscence which enables the construction of a new self. The declaration of love transforms chance into destiny retrospectively (a joking working-title for this essay was “Becoming Trans with Kiarostami,” emphasizing the inseparability of my chance encounter with his films and my recognition/ acceptance of transness). In retrospect, my reckoning with a transfeminine self-understanding as a layered, atemporal/ aspatial, digital experience of a world reflected onto me is mirrored in the kaleidoscopic artificial starscapes of city lights resting, as a veil, upon the image of Akiko riding in the backseat of a taxi, listening to her grandmother’s denial of her exoteric projection of selfhood in a phone-booth advertisement. Through the tension, or dissonance, of recognizing this simultaneity in absolute being and non-being; viewers – alongside, through, or as Akiko – confront the confluent, intersecting, illegible facets of an interiority contained beneath and beyond the veil of our corporeal form. In viewing Kiarostami’s films posthumously, the worlds on-screen, off-screen, and impossibly yet importantly somewhere between the two merge into a single, reflective, transparent pane. Should one happen to encounter the generative realities enveloped by these digital veils, an esoteric self-image emerges upscaled and sharpened, pixels imbued with the glint of an unknown.