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Beyond Representation
Vered Maimon
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Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 3, May, 2012, 331 344

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Beyond Representation
Abbas Kiarostamis and Pedro Costas
Minor Cinema
Vered Maimon

1. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj

Zizek, eds, The Idea of
Communism, Verso,
London and New York,
2010. See also John
Roberts, Art, Enclave
Theory and the
Communist Imaginary, in
the special issue Art, Praxis
and the Community to
Come, Third Text 99, vol
23, no 4, July 2009,
pp 353 367.
2. Alain Badiou, The
Communist Hypothesis,
New Left Review 49,
January/February 2008,
p 42
3. Issues of collectivity and
political subjectivity also
pertain to contemporary
artistic practices,
particularly those that
employ video and film. See
my essay The Third
Citizen: On Models of
Criticality in
Contemporary Artistic
Practices, October 129,
summer 2009. See also the
anthology Beth Hinderliter
et al, eds, Communities of
Sense: Rethinking
Aesthetics and Politics,
Duke University Press,
Durham, North Carolina,
and London, 2009; Grant
H Kester, Conversation

Recent philosophical and political writings convey the return of ideas of

emancipatory politics. This return of the communist imaginary, best
exemplified in the recent conference and anthology The Idea of Communism, organised and edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek,
also underlines the writings of Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancie`re and Jean-Luc Nancy.1 Badiou, in particular, calls for the urgent re-instalment of the communist hypothesis,
which he defines as a pure universal Idea of equality. He argues that
the communist hypothesis has been actualised in different ways throughout history and that it is not the victory of hypothesis which is at stake
today, but the conditions of its existence.2 Yet, while emphasising the
necessity of the return of the hypothesis, Badiou also stresses its
impossibility because of the inadequacy of the specific model of the communist state-party to the current political context. The re-opening of the
communist hypothesis therefore demands the experimental invention of
new collective forms of political subjectivity that will move beyond a representational model of politics in which the party represents the
workers or the sovereign state the people. Thus, in order to bring into
existence the claims of emancipatory politics, one must take leave of representation but not of creation or the powers of the imagination. In this
regard, the need to move beyond representation is aesthetic as much as it
is political. Consequently it is contemporary cinema (among other
artistic forms) of the kind created by Abbas Kiarostami and Pedro
Costa, this essay argues, that offers the possibility to imagine new political forms of subjectivity.3 After all, as the historical art of the masses,
cinema was the site for the most spectacular visual representations of
the idea of equality, for example in the films of Sergei Eisenstein.
It might therefore also become the site where this idea is no longer
represented but enacted.
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2012)
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.679041

332

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Pieces: Community and

Communication in Modern
Art, University of
California Press, Berkeley
and London, 2004

4. Antonio Negri, Towards

an Ontological Definition
of the Multitude, Arianna
Bove, trans, available
online at: http://multitudes.
samizdat.net/Towards-anOntological-Definition,
accessed June 2011
5. Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt, Empire, Harvard
University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
and London, p 62
6. Ibid, p 61 (emphasis in the
original)
7. Slavoj Zizek, Blows
Against the Empire?,
available online at: http://
www.lacan.com/zizblow.
htm, accessed June 2011
8. Jacques Rancie`re, The
People or the Multitudes?,
in Dissensus: On Politics
and Aesthetics, Steven
Corcoran, ed and trans,
Continuum, London and
New York, 2009, p 86. For
a similar criticism see
Ernesto Laclau, Can
Immanence Explain Social
Struggles?, Diacritics, vol
31, no 4, winter 2001.
9. Sylve`re Lotringer, We, the
Multitude, Social Text 82,
vol 23, no 1, spring 2005,
p 10
10. Giorgio Agamben, What is
a People?, in Means
without End: Notes on
Politics, Vincenzo Binetti
and Cesare Casarino, trans,
University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p
32 (emphasis in the
original)
11. Jacques Rancie`re, Who is
the Subject of the Rights of
Man?, in Dissensus, op cit,
p 68

MINOR PEOPLE
The resistance to representation triggers debates surrounding historical
and current political forms of subjectivity. In Empire (2000), and its successors Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005) and
Commonwealth (2011), Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt formulate the
term multitude as a whole of singularities which is diffident of representation because it is an incommensurable multiplicity.4 They argue that
while the concept of the people originates from sovereign transcendence
and therefore results in the abstraction and unification of singularities, the
multitude constitute the real productive force of our social world, that
is, it is an ontological positive force that produces new subjectivities
and creative forms of socialisation and communication; what Negri
calls General Intellect.5 The multitude thus exists within Empire and
against Empire as a vital immanent force that animates it, but that
ultimately will lead to its inevitable destruction.6
Yet is it precisely Negri and Hardts emphasis on the immanence of the
multitude and their rejection of any transcendental negative form of
resistance that seem completely to vacate any notion of politics,
let alone an emancipatory one. As Zizek analyses this problematic:
. . . how does this politicisation of production, where production directly
produces (new) social relations, affect the very notion of politics? Is such
an administration of people (subordinated to the logic of profit) still politics, or is it the most radical sort of depoliticisation, the entry into postpolitics?7

In a similar way Rancie`re argues that as an ontological formation the

multitude substantialises the egalitarian presupposition with the
outcome that everything is political because political subjects ought
to express the multiple insofar as the multiple is the very law of
being.8 With the concept of the multitude, politics as a specific sphere
of practices disappears and its emancipatory claims become inseparable
from the flow of global capital, yet, as Sylve`re Lotringer points out:
. . . there is as much communism in capital as capital is capable of, too: abolition of work, dissolution of the state, etc. But communism in any form
would require equality, and this is what capital is incapable of providing.9

While Negri and Hardt dismiss the term people because it eclipses
internal differences by representing the whole of the population under a
hegemonic group, for Giorgio Agamben the term marks an inherently
split form of collective subjectivity, a polar concept that evokes simultaneously a people in the popular sense of the unprivileged and excluded
and in the opposing sense of The People as a constitutive political
subject.10 Meanwhile for Rancie`re political subjects do not form definite
groups but surplus litigious names that enact or stage a dispute in
relation to what is perceived as common and universal. As he explains:
. . . freedom and equality are not predicates belonging to definite subjects.
Political predicates are open predicates: they open up a dispute about what
they entail, whom they concern and in which cases.11

Politics thus consists of the capacity to open up processes of subjectivisation that demonstrate a relation of inclusion and exclusion. In this regard

333

12. Jacques Rancie`re, From

the Actuality of
Communism to its
Inactuality, in Dissensus,
op cit, p 82

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13. Alain Badiou, The

Communist Hypothesis,
op cit, p 41 (emphasis in
the original)
14. Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell, trans, Columbia
University Press,
New York, 1994, p 108
(emphasis in the original).
See also their classic A
Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Brian
Massumi, trans, University
of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis and London,
1987.
15. Paul Patton, Deleuze and
the Political, Routledge,
London and New York,
pp 47 48
16. See Sylve`re Lotringer, We,
the Multitude, op cit,
p 5. See also the exchange
between Negri and Deleuze
on these issues in Gilles
Deleuze, Negotiations,
1972 1990, Martin
Joughin, trans, Columbia
University Press,
New York, pp 169 176.
17. On the films of Abbas
Kiarostami see Mehrnaz
Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Abbas
Kiarostami, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana,
Illinois, 2003; Alberto
Elena, The Films of Abbas
Kiarostami, Belinda
Coombes, trans, Saqi,
London and Beirut, 2005;
Jean-Luc Nancy, The
Evidence of Film: Abbas
Kiarostami, Christine
Irizarry and Verena
Andermatt Conley, trans,
Yves Gevaert, Brussels,
2001. See also the chapter
on Kiarostami in Hamid
Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian
Cinema, Past, Present, and
Future, Verso, London and
New York, 2001. On Pedro
Costas films see James
Quandt, Still Lives: On the
Films of Pedro Costa,
Artforum, September

a political subject cannot be represented by a pre-existing category but

has to be enacted or performed. While politics for Rancie`re is an inactual intempestive event which marks the fact that you do and do not
belong to a time,12 for Badiou as well the possibility of reopening the
communist hypothesis demands the courage:
. . . to operate in terms of a different duree to that imposed by the law of the
world. The point we are seeking must be one that can connect to another
order of time.13

Both therefore insist on the capacity to implement equality by a subject

whose precise mode of existence is precisely what is at stake: both
present and absent, actual and virtual, real and fictional.
By formulating the problem of political forms of subjectivity in terms
of becoming rather than being, these debates surrounding the term
people seem to reverberate back to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris
urgent statements in What is Philosophy? That:
We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do
not yet exist.14

While the political philosophy of Negri and Hardt is underlined by the

vitalist philosophy and terminology of A Thousand Plateaus, it is striking
that they left out its major political terms: majority, minority and, most
important, becoming-minor or minoritarian. Minority is not a name for
a marginalised social group but for a transformational group which, as
Paul Patton explains, is defined by the gap that separates its members
from a standard model or norm in the same manner in which the simulacrum challenges representation.15 Regardless of the fact that Deleuze and
Guattaris political philosophy is inseparable from their ontology of
immanent difference and in this regard cannot be re-coded without significant difficulties into an antagonistic form of political struggle, their
analysis makes it clear that they qualitatively differentiate between a capitalist form of deterritorialisation and a minoritarian one and of course
completely refrain from assigning any telos to these processes.16
It is in his cinema books, in particular The Time-Image, that Deleuze
gives a sense of what inventing the people will consist of; not that cinema
or any form of art can create a people, but modern cinema can allow one
to imagine a form of political subjectivity that constantly hovers between
belonging and not belonging, the real and the fictional, the present and
the future. Following Deleuze, I argue that the films of Kiarostami and
Costa constitute a minor cinema in which the simultaneous absence
and presence of the people is manifested most clearly.17 What distinguishes their otherwise very different films is the fact that while they
focus on marginalised groups such as immigrant workers, drug addicts,
the poor and the illiterate, they resist representing them in either a documentary manner in which their mode of existence is predetermined in
advance in a pseudo-anthropological or sociological manner, or in a fictional form in which personal identities are granted interiority in the
form of deterministic biography and simplified psychology. In their
films real characters play themselves rather than simply being themselves. The idea of real people filming and directing themselves has
become a major marketing strategy for what is called reality TV, yet

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2006, pp 335 359; JeanLouis Comolli, Frames

and Bodies Notes on
Three Films by Pedro
Costa: Ossos, No Quarto
da Vanda, Juventude em
Marcha, Afterall 24,
Summer 2010, pp 63 70;
Jacques Rancie`re, The
Politics of Pedro Costa,
available online at: http://
www.pedro-costa.net/
download/TATEPEDRO%20COSTA.pdf,
accessed June 2011. See
also the booklet of essays
that is included in the DVD
box set Letters from
Fontainhas: Three Films by
Pedro Costa, The Criterion
Collection, 2010.

what often underlies these programmes is precisely the logic of representation in which characters try to conform to a model rather than diverge
from it by presenting their true self beyond fictional or false appearances. Yet, in minor cinema of the kind that Kiarostami and Costa make,
the issue is not to eliminate fiction, but, as Deleuze argues, to free it from
the model of truth which penetrates it, and on the contrary to rediscover
the pure and simple story-telling function which is opposed to this
model.18 The issue is not to become-conscious by adhering to prevalent
models of subjectivity and truth, but to become-Other by opening
oneself to another order of time to which one simultaneously belongs
and does not belong.
What facilitates, but in no way initiates, Kiarostamis and Costas
specific modes of film-making is the use of digital video cameras. In
their work the shift from film to video is inseparable from the invention
of forms of collaboration. The use of digital cameras enables them to
create films with limited crews, no sets, no professional actors and no
scripts. Most importantly, it enables them to work outside the pressure
of production time and budget. Video enables time: time for observation
and for the slow unfolding of stories which evolve out of the process of
working together and which are then restaged. In this regard it is a
cinema of double becoming in which, as Deleuze argues, the director
expresses himself through real characters, while the characters speak
as if they are reported by a third person. Write for the illiterate,
Antonin Artaud said, and Deleuze interprets this comment as not for
their benefit or in their place, but as before, as a question of becoming
in which the author becomes illiterate, while the illiterate becomes something else and tears himself away from his own agony.19

ABBAS KIAROSTAMIS POWER OF THE FALSE

18. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:

The Time-Image, Hugh
Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta, trans, University of
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1997, p 150
(emphasis in the original)
19. Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, What is
Philosophy, op cit, p 109
20. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:
The Time-Image, op cit,
p 79
21. Ibid, p 79

Critics often debate whether the films of Kiarostami and Costa are documentary or fiction, but the sense of indeterminacy which underlines
these films is not simply stylistic, generic or rhetorical, the result of intentional and scripted mixture between so-called subjective and objective
points of view. Rather it emerges out of a much more radical reciprocal
and reversible movement between the actual and the virtual, the real
and the imaginary, the present and the past, which marks what Deleuze
defines as the crystal image in modern cinema. With this kind of
image, the crucial issue is not to suppress the distinction between these
poles, but to make it indiscernible or unattributable. Relying on Henri
Bergson, Deleuze explains this mutual coexistence in terms of the
relations between present and past: The image has to be present and
past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. If it
was not already past at the same time as present, the present would
never pass on. The past does not follow the present that it is no longer
on, it coexists with the present it was.20 What is especially fascinating
in this formulation in relation to the films of Kiarostami and Costa is
that Bergson himself explains it in terms of acting: Whoever becomes
conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception
and recollection. . . will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.21

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335

Abbas Kiarostami, still from Close-Up, 1990, colour thirty-five millimetre film, ninety-eight minutes # The Institute for the
Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults Celluloid Dreams, courtesy Celluloid Dreams

22. For information on the

making of the film see
Godfrey Cheshire, Prison
and Escape, in the booklet
included with the DVD of
the film issued by The
Criterion Collection in
2010. For an excellent
analysis of Close-Up see
Gilberto Perez, Film in
Review, The Yale Review,
vol 85, no 1, 1997,
pp 171 184. See also Jared
Rapfogel, A Mirror Facing
a Mirror, available online
at: http://www.
sensesofcinema.com/2001/
17/close_up/, accessed June
2011.

The best example for this ceaseless temporal process of mirroring

occurs in Kiarostamis 1990 film Close-Up.22 Kiarostami read a piece
in the newspaper about a man named Hossain Sabzian, a poor unemployed printer, who was arrested and put on trial because he impersonated the famous film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and decided to
make a film about the event. On their first meeting in prison Sabzian
asks Kiarostami to send a message to Makhmalbaf: Tell him his last
film is my life. Close-Up is composed of re-enactments of the event
with the real individuals playing themselves and the filming of the
actual trial in which the wealthy Ahankhah family, whom Sabzian
deceived by promising to make a film in their house using their son as
the main actor, confronts him. The main question that arises in the
trial is that of Sabzians motives. He replies that in his films Makhmalbaf
portrays suffering and speaks for people like him. In one of the strongest
scenes of the trial, while the camera is fixed on Sabzians face, the following dialogue between him and Kiarostami takes place:
Abbas Kiarostami Now that you played this part do you think youre a
better actor than director?

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Hossain Sabzian I dont want to be presumptuous. . . but Im more interested in acting. I think I could express all the bad experiences Ive had,
all the deprivation Ive felt with every fibre of my being. I think I could
get these feelings across through my acting.
AK Arent you acting for the camera right now? What are you doing now?
HS Im speaking of my suffering. Im not acting. Im speaking from the
heart. This isnt acting. For me, art. . . is the experience of what youve
felt inside. If one could cultivate that experience, its like when Tolstoy
says that art is the inner experience cultivated by the artist and conveyed
to his audience. Given the positive feelings Ive experienced, as well as
the deprivation and suffering, and my interest in acting, I think I could
be an effective actor and convey that inner reality.
AK Then why did you pretend to be a director instead of an actor?
HS Playing the part of a director is a performance in itself. To me, that is
acting.
AK What part would you like to play?
HS My own.
AK Havent you already done that?
23. Godfrey Cheshire states
that It should be noted that
Kiarostami scripted most
of Sabzians speeches at the
trial, though he based them
on things Sabzian had
actually said. See Godfrey
Cheshire, Prison and
Escape, op cit, np
24. A documentary film on
Sabzian titled Close Up
Long Shot was made in
1996 by Mahmoud
Chokrollahi and Moslem
Mansouri. In contrast to
Close-Up, this film
concentrates on his
biography and psychology,
in particular his obsession
with cinema, which led, the
film suggests, to his
personal destruction. The
film is included with the
2010 DVD of Close-Up,
op cit.
25. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:
The Time-Image, op cit, p
150. On Deleuzes concept
of fabulation see Ronald
Bogue, Fabulation,
Narration and the People
to Come, in Constantin V
Boundas, ed, Deleuze and
Philosophy, Edinburgh
University Press,
Edinburgh, 2006, pp 203
223. See also his book
Deleuzian Fabulation and
the Scars of History,
Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh, 2010.
26. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:
The Time-Image, op cit,
p 150

What is striking in this intensive encounter is the irreducibility of Sabzians performance, which constantly shifts between what he is (a poor
printer) and what he becomes (an actor in a film whose words while
attributed to him were also scripted),23 between his actual present role
(an actor in Kiarostamis film playing himself) and his virtual previous
role (that of the director Makhmalbaf ), between his real character,
whatever that might be, as it is not possible to know him through the
film, and his staged character, the highly emotional and dramatic act he
performs of himself in front of the camera and the court.24 What is therefore crucial is not the conflation or blurring of the real and the imaginary
but their inseparability, their coexistence in the very formation of Sabzians cinematic role and subjectivity. Kiarostamis film allows him to
become an actor who watches himself playing and to play himself
rather than be himself, thereby allowing him to become-Other, not be
an Other, a fixed emblem of an Iranian poor man.
By juxtaposing staged re-enactments of the real event together with
edited footage of the trial, Kiarostami is creating a new mode of story
which affects the very division between fiction and reality. Close-Up
manifests what Deleuze calls the power of the false or fabulation where:
. . . what is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is
always that of the masters or colonisers; it is the story-telling function of
the poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a
memory, a legend, a monster.25

The forger, Deleuze argues, is the most emblematic character of this kind
of cinema because he constantly transforms himself and in this way
mobilises the story. What therefore makes Sabzian a real character is
not his subordinated adherence to a model of pre-existing subjectivity,
even though he pretends to be a specific famous person, but the way his
singular impersonation marks an affirmation of fiction (and of cinema)
as a power of becoming rather than a model of truth. What this kind of
cinema demonstrates, Deleuze argues, is not the identity of a character,
whether real or fictional but the becoming of the real character when he
himself starts to make up fiction.26

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337

27. On Kiarostamis use of cars

in his films see Stephen
Bransford, Days in the
Country: Representations
of Rural Space and Place in
Abbas Kiarostamis Life
and Nothing More,
Through the Olive Trees
and The Wind Will Carry
Us, available online at:
http://www.
sensesofcinema.com/2003/
29/kiarostami_rural_
space_and_place/, accessed
June 2011.
28. See Laura Mulvey, Abbas
Kiarostami: Cinema of
Uncertainty, Cinema of
Delay, in Death 24x
Second: Stillness and the
Moving Image, Reaktion,
London, 2006, p 129.
29. Jean-Luc Nancy, The
Evidence of Film, op cit,
p 28
30. On the making of Ten see
Geoff Andrew, 10, British
Film Institute, London,
2005, pp 35 39. See also
Mahmood Khoshchereh,
Kiarostami: The Man with
the Digital Camera, Film
International: Iranian Film
Quarterly, vol 10, no 2,
autumn 2003 winter
2004, pp 56 63; Rolando
Caputo, Five to Ten: Five
Reflections on Abbas
Kiarostamis 10, available
online at: http://www.
sensesofcinema.com/2003/
29/abbas-kiarostami/ten/,
accessed June 2011.
Kiarostami talks about Ten
in the master-class
documentary 10 on 10 that
is included in the DVD
Ten, Zeitgeist Films, 2004.

Deleuze links the power of the false to a form of narration in

modern cinema in which vision takes the place of action and the experience of time becomes liberated from its subordination to movement or
chronology. This emphasis on time leads to films in which either movement is reduced to zero or it is incessantly exaggerated. Significantly,
this is precisely what marks Kiarostamis cinema, which constantly
focuses on cars and immobile figures driving in films such as Life and
Nothing More (1992) and Taste of Cherry (1997).27 The car is both a
private and a public space, a self-contained environment cut off from
the outside and a site for encounters with the outside. The car is also
a framing device and a machine for seeing and observing, since in
modern cinema, as Deleuze points out, the character becomes a seer
rather than an agent, someone who records more than acts or
reacts.28 Jean-Luc Nancy has argued in his book on Kiarostami, The
Evidence of Film, that the car window is an opening of a gaze into a
world, a way to mobilise and animate it. The car reinforces for him
the way cinema is the motion of the real, a motion that is not simply
a movement between two places but a situation in which a body is compelled to find its place, a place it consequently has not had or no longer
has. I move (in matter or mind) when I am not ontologically where I
am locally.29
This focus on characters driving culminated in Ten (2002), a film shot
in its entirety in a car using two digital video cameras attached to the
dashboard, one facing the driver and the other the passenger. The main
character of the film is a recently divorced woman whose name is not
given but is played by Mania Akbari, whose own life story as a young
divorced mother struggling to find a place in society that assigns highly
submissive and limited roles to women became the basis for the character.
The film follows her as she drives around Tehran picking up her young
son and female passengers, some of whom are Akbaris real family and
friends and some strangers who share their life stories with her. There
was no script for the film and Kiarostami only gave the characters
general instructions on what to talk about. He was not present in the
car when the acting and shooting took place.30 Yet while the film has a
main character, it lacks a consciousness or identity because of the way
it refuses to link images to either objective or subjective points of
view or to create an identity between what the character sees and what
the camera sees, both necessary strategies of the conventional model of
truth of classical cinema. In Ten, because of the way the two cameras
are positioned and the highly limited points of view they give, mainly
close-ups of the characters, it is not possible to assign to them an objective status; on the other hand, it is also not a case of what the characters
see in fact what the viewer sees is precisely what the characters cannot
see: a full frontal view of the person sitting next to them and what they
do see, a broad frontal view of the streets of Tehran, is not seen in the film.
What is actually seen is highly limited but not subjective, and frustratingly static and fixed but not objective. Moreover, in a number of
scenes, such as Akbaris first encounter with her son and her subsequent
meetings with a religious woman and a prostitute, the viewer sees only
one of the speakers while hearing the voice of the other. In these largely
emotional scenes, specifically those with her son, who verbally abuses
her because she left his father, the voice triggers an image in the

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Abbas Kiarostami, four stills from Ten, 2002, colour thirty-five millimetre film, ninety-four minutes, # Abbas Kiarostami
Productions

31. Geoff Andrew, 10, op cit,

p 39
32. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:
The Time-Image, op cit,
p 153

viewers imagination but the film refrains from linking it to a visual

representation of a specific face or a defined individual.
The film gets its title from its framework of ten segments of different
dialogues, separated by graphics that mimic the countdown figures on a
film leader; each number appears accompanied by the whirring sound of
a film projector followed by the ring of a bell.31 This structure not only
emphasises the serial as opposed to chronological structure of the film,
but also contributes to a strong sense of before and after in the characters
and the film: their entering the car signals the beginning of a scene that sets
conversation in motion, and the moment they exit the end; in other words,
placing the characters in the car means setting them in the film itself. What
the film triggers is thus not a chronology of events but an incessant passage
from one state to another, a movement of becoming in which characters
constantly reach a limit in which they oscillate between what they no
longer are and what they are in the process of becoming.32 This sense of
temporality especially pervades Akbaris two encounters with a young
woman whom she picks up from a local shrine. In their first encounter
the woman tells her that she is going to pray in the hope that it will
make her boyfriend marry her. In their second encounter the woman
informs Akbari that her boyfriend has ended the relationship and that
she is sad but that she will overcome this separation. And then in a
highly provocative and moving scene Akbari urges the woman to loosen
her tightened head scarf and it slips to reveal her shaved head. As tears
drop on the womans cheeks Akbaris hand is seen wiping them away
(the only case in the film of an actual touch). This gesture of empathy
breaks the basic binary segmented structure of the film in which each
camera shows only the gestures and movements of one character. The
power of this scene lies not only in the brave gesture of an Iranian
woman who exposes her bald head (which led to censorship of the film
in Iran), but in the way it stages a political process of subjectivisation in
which the womans unmarried status and Akbaris divorced status
become a positive force, not a mark of a failure or a lack, but an
affirmative power of becoming-minoritarian, a refusal to conform that is
at the same time an opening of the possibility of solidarity and community.

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PEDRO COSTAS CRYSTAL IMAGES

33. Pedro Costa comments on

this specific architecture in
the documentary film by
Aurelien Gerbault, All
Blossoms Again, 2006. The
film is included in the DVD
box set Letters from
Fontainhas: Three Films by
Pedro Costa, op cit.

While in the films of Kiarostami characters mainly talk to each other, in

Costas films characters become storytellers who tell their own stories not
as confessions but as reports. This effect is no doubt created because each
scene, while evoking a strong sense of intimacy and proximity, was in fact
rehearsed and shot many times. Costas trilogy of films, Ossos (1997), In
Vandas Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006), were all filmed in Fontainhas, a recently demolished slum in Lisbon. In these films the residents
of the neighbourhood, mostly immigrants from Cape Verde and drug
addicts, play the main characters; but only with the second film, In
Vandas Room, did they start to play themselves and Costa to do most
of the shooting in video, sometimes recruiting local sound assistants.
The second film focuses on Vanda Duartes room, which functions as a
private place where she sleeps and shoots heroin together with her
sister Zita, and a meeting place for her friends where they talk about
their family, what happened to whom, about the situation of Portugal
and about life in general. This multiplicity of function is also the striking
architectural and spatial feature of the neighbourhood itself, where there
is no clear sense of inside or outside, as every narrow street becomes a
hallway and every enclosed space is simultaneously a house, a business
and a social meeting place; Vandas mothers vegetable and fruit shop
serves also as the familys living room.33 Costa films this strange architecture of entangled streets while it is undergoing demolition and bulldozers
tear down the houses.
Costa relies on existing local light, often candles, and his camera is
always static and positioned opposite the characters, establishing a
unique sense of both proximity (because the makeshift spaces are
narrow and low), and distance, as there are no talking-head shots and
the few close-ups are disorientating. Costas camera turns the neighbourhood into series of still-life tableaux, an arrangement of figures and
objects in space. Yet, in a strange way, this formal focus on light,
colours, sounds, surfaces and textures results not in abstraction but in a
sensually enriched materiality. On the one hand, the dramatic pictorial
effects employed in the film, such as chiaroscuro, dissolve or obscure

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Pedro Costa, still from In Vandas Room, 2000, colour thirty-five millimetre film, 178 minutes, # Pedro Costa

the specific reality which is depicted, but on the other hand the focus on
autonomous objects and empty or evacuated spaces leads to what
Deleuze calls pure optical and sound situations in which it is no
longer possible to separate Costas mode of filming from its object of
depiction, the residents and their living environment. That is, the neighbourhood does not function as a setting that presupposes or promotes a
specific action that Costas camera then documents. Instead what is
filmed is the very crisis of action, the inability to act or respond in
situations that overwhelm the characters capacities, such as the demolition of their houses. As Nhurro (also named Yuran), one of the main
characters, states, as he sits in a dark decrepit room that he will be

341

forced to leave, his body appearing as a dark silhouette against the

dirty wall:

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My hair is filthy, I look like a tramp. . . Ive parked cars, Ive been a thief. . .
a street paver, I helped in construction, I dont know what else. . . what else
I can do in this world.

34. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:

The Time-Image, op cit,
p 169
35. On the problem of belief in
relation to Costas films see
Jean-Louis Comolli,
Frames and Bodies, op cit.
36. On Deleuzes notion of free
indirect speech see my essay
Towards a New Image of
Politics: Chris Markers
Staring Back, Oxford Art
Journal, vol 33, no 1,
March 2010, p 90.

The immobility of Costas camera and its pure optics constitute not an
arbitrary stylistic choice on the directors part, but what Deleuze calls a
break in the link between man and the world, which makes man a
seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world.34
In this regard the problem Costas films face is not that of giving knowledge about the economic realities of the current moment but, as Deleuze
emphasises with regard to the time-image of modern cinema, of restoring
belief in this world.35
In Vandas Room makes an extraordinary use of pure sound that
exists independently of the image. Through the rooms thin walls, the
viewer often hears sounds issuing from Vandas mothers shop but does
not see their source: music from the TV and radio, her sisters baby
crying, people stopping by, the sound of bulldozers, children shouting.
The sound in the film functions as an image in itself that adds a mental
dimension to the visible image by opening it to the outside. This
additional framing constantly splits the films visual and acoustic registers
into the actual and the virtual: the still-present of the neighbourhood
coexisting with the already past of its demolition as the film unfolds,
and the future of its residents still to come.
Their future is depicted in the last part of the trilogy, Colossal Youth,
which focuses on the character of Ventura, an immigrant worker from
Cape Verde who fell from scaffolding while working on the construction
of the Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon. The film follows him as he visits the
former residents of Fontainhas, whom he names my sons and daughters, including Vanda and other characters from the previous film, in
the homes they have been allocated in a newly built neighbourhood of
tall white modernist buildings. Throughout the film Venturas gestures
are stiff, his face expressionless, and his manner of speaking impersonal
as if he were reciting lines even when he is telling his own life story of
immigration, hard work and mishap. This mode of speaking about the
past as if ones words are reported by a third person, or what Deleuze
calls free indirect speech, also underlines the mode of filming in which
scenes that seem to belong to a different time other than the filmed
present are not marked in any way that suggests a shift in time.36 For
example, after Ventura talks about his accident, he appears wearing a
head bandage in scenes with his fellow immigrant worker Lento, and
they seem to be returning from work to their shack in Fontainhas,
which the viewer knows no longer exists. In one of the scenes Lento
talks in the present tense about the military coup in Portugal that took
place in 1974, a long time before the diegetic present of the film. Just
as words cannot be attributed to a specific consciousness, although
spoken by an individual voice, images of the past are not filmed as specific
individual or collective flashbacks. Like Kiarostami, Costa creates crystalline images that oscillate between the past and the present of places and
people (Portugal, Fontainhas, Ventura, Vanda and other characters)
that evade clear attribution or identification.

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342

Pedro Costa, still from Colossal Youth, 2006, colour thirty-five millimetre film, 155 minutes, # Pedro Costa

37. Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari, Kafka: Towards
a Minor Literature, Dana
Polan, trans, University of
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis and London,
1986, p 18

The past in Colossal Youth is also that of the very idea of collectivity
and freedom. In another scene with Lento in their shack Ventura plays a
record of a popular song from the Cape Verde war of independence led by
Amlcar Cabral against Portugal in 1975: Raise your arms and shout
freedom/shout oh independent people/shout oh liberated people/July
5th means freedom/July 5th the road to happiness/shout, long live
Cabral/freedom fighter of our nation. This song, played on a now obsolete turntable, sounds like a relic from a different long-ago time. The song
draws power from its clear sense of political agency and the national
coherence of the people as a unified We combating a colonialist oppressor, but the film marks the disappearance of this collective consciousness.
In a historical condition in which, as Deleuze famously stated, the people
are missing, the only possibility is to make a minor cinema, following
the model of Kafkas minor literature, in which the message does not
refer back to an enunciating subject who would be its cause, no more
than to a subject of the statement who would be its effect.37 This explains
the films interest in collective assemblages of enunciation, such as
stories, legends and songs that are singular but not individual, collective
in a performative sense but not in a symbolic or representational one.
Throughout the film Ventura often recites from a love letter that at first
seems to be written by himself on behalf of an illiterate Lento. Yet

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343

viewers of Costas films immediately recognise this letter from his earlier
film, Casa de Lava (1994), in which the identity of the writer and the
addressee could not be established. And as Ventura goes on reciting
this letter about immigrating to a foreign place and missing his loved
ones, wishing he could buy her dresses and cigarettes, and the challenges
he faces of hard work and learning a new language, the feelings of fear
and hope and the unbearable waiting for a return letter, it becomes
clear that the letters power lies in its potential inter-exchangeability
and lack of exclusivity. Costa created the letter by combining lines
from a letter by an actual immigrant worker and a poem by the French
poet Robert Desnos, written from a Second World War concentration
camp. The letter is not meant to create emotional identification but to
trigger, as Rancie`re points out, an open system of exchanges, correspondences and displacements in which the art of the poor, of the public
scribe, and of great poets are captured together in the same fabric: an
art of life and of sharing, an art of travel and of communication.38
Critics often argue that Costas films aestheticise poverty and are
therefore inherently apolitical because they do not provide any analysis
of the landscape of capitalism under globalisation.39 Responding to
these charges, Rancie`re states that:
Pedro Costa does not film the misery of the world. He films its wealth, the
wealth that anyone at all can become master of: that of catching the splendour of a reflection of light, but also of being able to speak in a way that is
commensurate with ones fate.40

It is clear that Costas films are not about the poor, nor do they represent the poor, rather they confirm Negris observation in Time for
Revolution that poverty is the opposite of wealth because it is the singular possibility of all wealth.41 His films insist on shared common
capacities to tell stories that are as rich as countless life experiences. In
this regard they offer an adequate response to Badious call to start implementing the communist hypothesis from an affirmation of a single performative principle: there is only one world. The first consequence that
follows is:
38. Jacques Rancie`re, The
Politics of Pedro Costa,
op cit
39. See for example Thom
Andersen, Paintings in the
Shadows, Film Comment,
March/April, 2007, p 59.
40. Jacques Rancie`re, The
Politics of Pedro Costa,
op cit
41. Antonio Negri, Time for
Revolution, Matteo
Mandarini, trans,
Continuum, London and
New York, p 190
42. Alain Badiou, The
Communist Hypothesis,
op cit, p 39
43. Ibid, p 39

. . . the recognition that all belong to the same world as myself: the African
worker I see in the restaurant kitchen, the Moroccan I see digging a hole in
the road, the veiled woman looking after children in the park.42

The idea is not that all these subjects are the same but that they all have a
right to belong regardless of their different religions, cultures, languages
and so on. The right to belong should not be conditioned by conformity
to a hegemonic model, yet it also should not involve a fixation on identities
but a fascination with becoming in which one constantly invents new modes
of subjectivity. Costas films allow one to imagine what it would be like to
live in a world where other people exist exactly as I do myself.43 What
would it feel like? What would it be like to inhabit a world where the
universalism that underlines the communist hypothesis becomes not a marketing slogan (we are all friends), but a political proposition?
By asking real marginalised individuals to play themselves rather than
be themselves, Kiarostami and Costa make films that echo the mode of
being specific to the concept of the people: real and imaginary, actual
and virtual, past and present. Their cinema is one that insists on the

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44. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:

The Time-Image, op cit,
p 275
45. Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, op cit, p 110

power of the false, where the false ceases to be an appearance or lie, but
what allows a character, as Deleuze argues, to cross a limit, to become
another in an act of story-telling which connects him to a people past
or to come.44 In this regard their films are inherently political not
because they are about marginalised groups or because they challenge
conventional documentary or fictional forms of representation, but
because they move away from representation by opposing any notion
of identity thinking that presumes the common or the consensual
rather than contesting its inequalities and violence. Contemporary
cinema cannot create a people, but it does share with those who suffer
a common resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable. . . and to
the present.45 In the current political context, where resistance to violence and racism often hinge on the unimaginable, these films allow
one to imagine new forms of political subjectivity and to restore belief
in the possibility of a common world.