To See or Not to See: A Wittgensteinian Look at Abbas Kiarostami's Close-up

Abstract

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