Return to the Real
„The evidence of cinema is that of the existence of a look trough which a world can give back to itself its own real and truth of its enigma (which is admittedly not its solution), a world moving of its own motion, without heaven or a wrapping, without fixed moorings or suspension, a world shaken, trembling, as the wind blows it. That is how Kiarostami’s cinema is a metaphysical mediation (to play on Descartes ’s title). But this does not mean a cinema treating of metaphysical themes (for example, in the sense that Ingmar Bergman’s „Seventh Seal“ does); it means cinematic metaphysics, cinema as the place of mediation, as its body and its realm, as the taking-place of a relation to the sense of the world.
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The capturing of images in a film […] captures nothing if it is not to let free again. The framing, the light, the length of a take, the camera’s movement contribute to free a motion, which is that of a presence in the process of making itself present. The film’s ‚maker‘ makes nothing other than a making-real and a realization of the real: of the real that a respectful gaze makes possible.“
(aus: Jean-Luc Nancy „L’Évidence du film. Abbas Kiarostami“. Brüssel: Yves Gevaert, S.44, 38)