What is noticeable about Francesco Rosi and Abbas Kiarostami is that both belong to neorealist tradition in a sense that the typical neorealist characteristics is recognizable in the works of both. Nevertheless, both Rosi and Kiarostami try to push the boundaries of neorealism from the local and the regional to the universal and the general.
    Cristo si è fermato a Eboli is an adaptation of the novel of the same name that Carlo Levi had published in 1945, after having spent his exile, during the Fascist era, in a remote village in Southern Italy. His experience of this outlying world haunted his mind in the following years, reflected in his paintings and portraits of the peasants. Rosi made his film two decades after his cooperation with Visconti in La terra trema. To maintain his distance from Visconti, he postponed his film for two decades, in order to find his own individual style, despite the dominant neorealistic attitudes of the time. This individual style allows him to keep his distance from classic neorealism, and advance to a new concept of it. This new concept of neorealism goes beyond merely representing reality, in order to question the essence of the real. As Rosi put it:
   “...there was a second phase which consisted of a time for reflection and a critical examination of the first phase. In the beginning, neorealism involved only the attempt to be a witness to reality, with no critical perspective, just a desire to record reality. But it was not enough”[1].
    In this regard, Rosi presents the case for a complete rethinking of what reality is and what deserves to be represented as reality.
    Similarly, this Iranian version of neorealism, as reflected in Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, goes beyond the mere representation of social realities and turns it to a plane of poetic thinking which is largely intuitive. In fact, Kiarostami’s works broaden the frontiers of neorealism in many ways. Kiarostami combines traditional concerns of neorealism with a hint of more general concern with life, death, time, love, etc. The formal similarities of the worlds represented in Cristo si è fermato a Eboli and The Wind Will Carry Us -- each passes the borders of classic neorealism in its own way-- provide an appropriate field for their comparison. In both films, the protagonist comes from a civilized environment (the city), travels to a remote village, and experiences a different world.
    Neorealistic influences are obvious in both, in the use of non-professional actors and location shooting, in its socio-political themes and uncomplicated plot. In fact illustrating the misery of local life with real villagers and the social-political commitment of the filmmaker are reminiscent of early neorealism. Nevertheless, landscape shots, and pure optical and sound situations created in such shots as the one that follows a bird flying over the plain from Levi’s point of view, reflect Deleuze’s definition of neorealism where the relaxed sensory-motor links and the appearance of opsigns and sonsigns distinguishes old realism from neorealism.
    The most notable feature of neorealism for Deleuze is how it disrupted the action-image. The action-image is related to "particular states of things, determinate space-times, geographical and historical milieux, collective agents or individual people" engaged in defining actions (Deleuze, 1986, 109). Whilst time-image, as we know, is defined by any-space-whateveres. Any-space-whatever represents an ambiance which possess a pure potential, a sort of pure quality independent of determined actualized states of things. ‘They are possibilities for meaning and emotion expressed not in a determined and meaning-laden space, but in an “any-space-whatever’ (Rodowick, 2010, 104).
    In this sense, the village in The Wind Will Carry Us can be considered as an any-space-whatever. On their way to the village, the filmmakers cross the geographical determined borders and milieux. This can be inferred from their address of the village: ‘After winding road we reach a single-tree, but which one? There are lots of single- tree here’. In addition, the moving of character through village streets disrupts our understanding of space, as if there is no center or square just winding paths full of ups and downs which do nothing but relink different spaces as a deconnected space. Deleuze explains that any-space-whatever ‘is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all spaces. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkage can be made in an infinite number of ways’ (Deleuze, 1986, 109).
    Gagliano village, as well, can be considered as any-space-whatever in its two forms: disconnected space due to its separated unrelated parts and empty space. On the other hand, the village of Gagliano bears little relationship with history; it is a remote, timeless place within an autonomous world. Its people are less concerned with issues like government and nation than with a Utopia (United States). Historical events like war, victory and failure exert the least effect on their life. As Levi writes to her sister: ‘here none of the peasants belongs to any political party. They are not fascist just like they belong to no other party….for the peasants, the state is farther than the sky and more evil. Because it is always on the other side. The state is a form of fate, like the wind that burns the crops and the fever that burns the blood…..It is a history that belongs to other’[2].
    It seems that concepts like state, nation and belonging to a united world have a destructive role in the life of the peasants because of both tax collectors and war recruiters. Here even war is meaningless and purposeless: a war for occupying another world, a war for nothing. This is made clear in one of the closing scenes, where Mussolini’s voice, reciting declaration of victory, is superimposed on the shots of landscapes devoted of crowds, emphasizing on the absurdity and insignificance of his promises for the people of these regions.
    This lack of a sense of belonging to the world can also be attributed to Carlo Levi. He comes to this outlying place to spend his exile, received at first with disapproving glances and closed doors. On the day of his arrival, he finds a dog that belongs to no one, just like himself. This residence in another world, not belonging to him, is a novelty, and makes reality look different to him. This new way of seeing the world is the distinction Deleuze makes between realism and neorealism. In Cinema 2, he explains neorealism as representative of people who encounter a new reality after the war, and thus their perspective of the world is completely different now. In short, a new kind of character appears in such situations; a character who only observes what is happening around him. These characters are no longer subjects, or in Cartesian term, res cogitans; rather, they are people drown in a world of which they can hardly make any sense. This wandering, which characterizes modern people, separates them completely from their life.
From the moment of his arrival, Levi turns into an observer, wandering the winding alleys of the village and watching peasants’ lives, thereby he acquires a deep understanding of this outland. In other words, what reduces Levi and other peasants to mere seers is not an incredible or extraordinary event.
    In Deleuze’s opinion, in pure optical situations everyday activities turn into the intolerable. Important incidents like sickness and death are defined among this dailiness. In these pure optical and sound situations time is revealed in its purest form. In fact, “in everyday banality, the action-image and even the movement-image tend to disappear in favor of pure optical situations, but these reveal connections of a new type, which are no longer sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct relation with time and thought (Deleuze, 1989, 17).
    Similarly, Behzad’s main action in The Wind Will Carry Us is nothing but watching people’s life and landscapes. Ha wanders about the village and sees. This is in fact, Kiarostami’s own technique which invites us to see the aspects of the world, which we are unaware of in everyday life. In fact, for him, realism is a tool for illustrating what is invisible, for expressing what cannot be seen by means of what has been profusely seen. By demonstrating quotidian life, he creates an opportunity for thinking of what we never think about. Hence, his images provoke thoughts and provide a perfect example of what Deleuze calls thought-image.
    Thought-image is an image which can make a shock to thought inducing us to think. Indeed the relation between image and thought is also traceable in classic cinema and Deleuze describes the different forms of this relation in Cinema2. But in modern cinema, this link between cinematic image and thought achieves a different nature. When the relation between man and the world is suspended and reality loses its integration and continuity ‘we are faced with the unthinkable, that which defies logical thought and yet demands to be thought’ (Bogue, 2003, 171).
    In The Wind Will Carry Us, this shock is felt by disrupting our usual pattern of perception surrounding the concept of death, where a group of documentary filmmakers go to a remote village to make a film of the traditional funeral waiting for the death of an old woman. In addition to the overall theme of the film (its unique encounter with death) some other details also give us shock, as the unthinkable appears through long shots and long takes of banal and marginal events. For example, the shot of a rolling apple in The Wind Will Carry Us with no logical relation to its previous or subsequent scenes turns to the marginal, - thought-provoking. Kiarostami states about such scenes: “I was constantly hunting for scenes in which there was nothing happening. That nothingness I wanted to include in my film”[3]. This nothingness realizes the unthinkable. In The Wind Will Carry Us, this nothingness takes different forms: repetition of scenes (like Behzad’s phone ringing and his haste to reach a high place for his cell phone antenna) and reiterative, inconclusive conversations provide a thought-provoking function because they disrupt narrative logic.     
    On the other hand, the unthinkable in Deleuze’s theory stems from an outside which is more distant from a merely out-of-field. This outside is felt within images as something too powerful or too beautiful but generally too intolerable in a way that characters cannot take any action except seeing. It is discoverable in Levi’s paintings. The dull and frozen gazes in Levi’s portraits promise something too powerful, and too intolerable to be expressible in actions or gestures. The inexplicable thus gives way to pure optical and sound situations. Purely optical and sound situations "surge up when links between actions are undone and when we along with the characters are abandoned to what there is to see, to that which is too beautiful or too unbearable, not only in extreme situations but also in the smallest fragments of everyday life" (Marrati, 2008,61).
    This strong presence that instills itself into everyday actions of peasants is nothing but death. Black ribbons over the doors of houses signifying death remain there until they naturally rot away. Death is the main impulse in this village, and the calmest and coolest place to be found is the hole excavated by the gravedigger. The frosty and steely looks of the peasants of Gagliano express no feelings, as if pain and misery were buried in the depths of their being. Even their mourning over a dead person was more ritual ceremony than expressed affection. The peasants' actions are reduced to the level of the satisfaction of the most basic needs. Life does not exceed an animal state, where the main impetus in all actions and reactions (and even gazes) is fear of death.
    The black uniform of women annihilates any distinctions and differences among them. Their actions attend only to their biological needs. The world of this village fits Deleuze’s concept of ‘originary world’. The originary world is a world of primitive forces and instincts which are reflected neither in the state of things and determined milieux nor in human behavior and affections. An originary world "is recognizable by its formless character. It is a pure background, or rather a without-background, composed of unformed matter, sketches or fragments, crossed by non-formal functions, acts, or energy dynamisms which do not even refer to the constituted subjects"(Deleuze, 1986,123). Therefore, an originary world is a space with powers and motivations covert within its depths, forces that control all behaviors and states and cause all events to occur but are not manifested or actualized in comportment or manners. Nevertheless, as Deleuze states, the originary world is not separated from the real milieu and is dependent on historical, geographical places. In fact, determined milieu acts as a medium for this originary world.
    The remote village of Gagliano located in the Southern Italy, is, on the one hand, a historically determined place, and, on the other hand, an originary world connected to primitive forces and impulses. The impulse of death, destruction and decline flows in all routine activities of peasants. Even the drunk priest of the only church in the village has no relationship to spirituality. He admits that “This town has been abandoned even by the grace of God. They come to church just for play…I say Mass to the empty benches. They are not even baptized[4]”. Superstitious beliefs, however, dominate the most routine activities; the old woman who insists on keeping the coin on her forehead in order to relieve pain, or the housekeeper who does not put garbage out at mid-day to avoid insulting the outside angle, occupy a primitive world, a fragmented world with no central belief.
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    Time, in the originary word, loses its chronological concept and turns to a pure becoming. Levi replies to her sister when she asks about time: I don’t know. I don’t look at my watch anymore.[5]
As if the past, the present and the future have lost their significance. This non-chronological time gives way to duration and becoming in Deleuze’s theory. He says: “appearing as a non-chronological force, what it expresses is an event wherein each passing present yields to the unforeseeable, the unpredictable, and the emergence of the new” (Rodowick, 2010, xviii). That is why in this ambiance, the eclipse is construed not as a natural event but as a symptom implying something unpredictable and evil.
    On the contrary, Kiarostami poetically insists on the strong presence of life within death; a quality, which is well demonstrated in the naïve gaze of peasants in contrast with the explorer’s disturbing gaze of urbanized character. Kiarostami, is looking for a poetic force in everything that gives them a tone of beauty and makes audience to look at the most banal actions in a new, different way. This poetic reality can be seen in the works of ‘late neorealism’ like Pasolini or Fellini.
    However, the poetic facet of The Wind Will Carry Us can also be explained by Deleuze’s classification of images referring to Peirce semiotics. According to the Peirce’s classification of images, two sorts of images are firstness and secondness. Firstness is related to an understanding of the being independent of anything else as a sort of potentiality or possibility, for example the color red exists before every red thing in the world. Therefore, firstness can be defined as a naïve, immediate feeling as opposed to secondness, which is actualized and belongs to a real, individuated existing category. Secondness is revealed in the state of things, in determined time-space and historically and geographically specified milieux.
     Peirce himself acknowledges the difficulty of the comprehension of firstness; it is a category, which can only be felt. Deleuze calls this immediate awareness ‘affection’. The affection-image “is quality or power, it is potentiality considered for itself as expressed” (Deleuze, 1986, 98). Thus, affection is expressed in things as a non-personal quality as long as it is not actualized in behaviors. This pure affection which is called firstness by Pierce is best expressed in art and poetry. Thus is the secret of the poetic quality in Kiarostami’s works, a pure quality which flows in all shots but is not actualized in behaviors or states of things.
    Moreover, the poetic language of Kiarostami is characterized by some stylistic and visual properties, which can be known as a kind of “free indirect discourse” to use Pasolini’s term. Deleuze explains that free indirect discourse is a semi-subjective perception. That is, it belongs neither to the subjective perception of characters nor to the objective perception of the camera but somewhere in the middle: ‘we are no longer faced with subjective or objective images; we are caught in a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it (Deleuze, 1986, 74).
   This is a pure form, a sort of autonomous insight going beyond being objective and subjective. The free indirect discourse is comprehensible in Kiarostami’s attitude toward empty frames, landscape shots and inconsiderable movements of characters in the heart of nature like the movement of the filmmakers’ car through the winding roads or wheat fields. These features cause the camera to maintain its independence and beyond that, to challenge Behzad’s view. His small inconsiderable image in a vast plain as seen through a camera lens emphasizes on his inability to understand the concept of life and his failure to communicate with nature.
    Furthermore, presenting some characters by not showing them as well as the independent presence of sound in the image indicates Behzad’s confined, partial point of view that is incapable of comprehending the wholeness of life. Indeed, ‘the film is as much about what is not said and what is not shown’ (Mulvey, 2000, 63).
    Following Bergson, Deleuze insists that it is necessary to break the habits that confine our understandings of events and things to clichés, in order to obtain true knowledge of the world. This required filmmakers to transcend neorealism's original boundaries and represent a reality reflected not just in actions, gestures, and mise-en scene, but in feelings, in mood, and in the atmosphere of pure optical situations. Rosi and Kiarostami each chose his own visual language, which are closely intertwined irrespective of their individual differences. Rosi appeals to painting and develops a painterly cinematic style. In fact, it is through canvas that Levi is able to express his experience of this alien world. The painting's frame is Levi’s (and our) entrance to this other world. Rosi’s camera, like the canvas, renders Levi’s point of view. It is clear in close ups of the peasants’ faces, which are reminiscent of Levi’s portraits in the opening scene of the film. Though this technique is recognizable in Kiarostami’s film, he primarily uses poetic language, which can be seen both in the title of the film[6] and in the verses recited by Behzad and other characters. A striking example can be found in the milking scene (which is lighted by a single lantern), where the face of the girl is invisible and we hear Behzad’s voice reading a poem of Forugh, The Wind Will Carry Us, in which, the word of wind implies death. The view through his camera lens is also poetic, like the scene of a turtle creeping on a grave.
    On the other hand, the distance between the atmosphere of the two villages, Gagliano and Siah Dare, is as huge as their geographical distance. The village of the Fascit era, despite the indifferences of a political system in which it simply does not belong, is not safe from its problems. Poverty, illness, and death are predominate conditions in their routine existence, and the weight of war expenses and government taxes are imposed on them despite their impoverishment. The quiescence of a timeless village in a backwater of history causes time to be manifested not as a vector between two events but in its purest form. In other words, since time in this still, motionless space is not dependent on the sequence of events then the viewer can grasp it as a pure form.
    In Kurdish Siahdare, however, life is happier and more promising. Peasants wear more colorful cloths and sunlight shines on the village most of the time in contrast to the cloudy and foggy weather of Gagliano. This is life that is revealed in the most banal actions. Even the bones that are found in their respective graveyards have different connotations in each film. In Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, it represents the impending presence of death. The gravedigger mentions that this village is built on the people’s bones, which implies the presence of death in every moment of life.
    In The Wind Will Carry Us, however, the bone in Behzad’s hand (that he throws into the stream at the end) refers to the strength of the life force. Life flows even through death, and death is merely a part of life. This is the lesson Behzad learns while waiting for the old woman’s death... and this waiting ignites thoughts within him, prompting him to ask the boy: ‘do you think I am a bad person?’.
    Deleuze (following Bergson and Nietzsche) seeks the escape from nihilism and skepticism in his new faith, in choosing “...to believe in this world, the world in which we exist now, alive and changing, and not some transcendent or ideal world" (Rodowick, 2010, 100). The only way is to believe in the existing world and in the relation between world, life and thought; thinking about the unthinkable and regaining faith in life against death. This is the faith that changes Behzad’s view. He is not waiting for the death anymore but instead searching for life, by throwing the bone in the river. He regains his faith in life and in whatever connects us to the world. Similarly, Levi learns to understand and fashion an appropriate relationship with this new world. This can be perceived from his intimacy with both peasants and children. Ultimately, dealing with this world and trying to build a link with it, affects and transforms Levi’s world. This fulfills the vocation Deleuze assigns to the cinema: "one of the goals of the modern cinema is to make possible a belief in the world-not in some other world, or some future utopian state of this world, but in this world here and now" (Bague, 2003, 179). Believing in this world, and establishing new relations with it, constitutes psychical health. Indeed, by penetrating this world, Levi is cured, regains his faith in himself, and undertakes his duties as a healer. Not only do peasants come to believe to his treatments but he himself overcomes his fears and restarts his medicine regimen.
    In sum, by entering into this new world and dealing with people whose logic is distinctive, in contrast with the rational logic of modern people, the worldviews of the characters, and their perspectives on such important topics as life and death, are seen to evolve. This alteration is, according to Deleuze, the result of redefining relations between man and the world in the modern era. The slow rhythm of life in this nowhere allows time for thought, and transforms characters into mere seers restlessly wandering in alleys, which is the defining feature of modern characters, according to Deleuze. In virtue of this detached seeing, their profound understanding of life and death is constructed. Their alliance with the world they enter gives a novelty to their gaze, which is essential to a deep knowledge of the self and the world.
    Consequently, in both films we witness a move toward a more pure form of reality, surpassing objective relations and actions which were the basic tenets of classic neorealism. Hence, a move from the classic neorealism to the ‘late neorealism’ from the partial to the general, from the social-political realities to the deeper realities of life and death, from loosed action-image to the time-image and thought-image and finally from a disbelief to the believing the world as it exists here now and, faith in life as it is, not in a heaven promised in Bible. As the old physician recites some verses of Omar Khayyam, Iranian poet, to the documentarist of The Wind Will Carry Us:
Some for the glories of this world;
and some sigh for the prophet’s paradise to come;
Ah take the cash and let the credit go,
nor heed the rumble of a distant drum!
 
References
[1]. Cited in Crowdus and Georgakas, 1975, 6
[2] “Qui, nessun contadino è iscritto a un Partito politico, Ci mancherebbe anche questo! Non sono fascisti come non sarebbero di un altro Partito ……Per i contadini, lo Stato è più lontano del cielo, e più maligno, perché è sempre dall'altra parte, Lo Stato è una delle forme del destino, come il vento che brucia i raccolti e la febbre che rode il sangue ….per una storia altrui, che non li riguarda”.
[3] cited in Elena 2005: 88
[4] Questo paese ha perso la grazia di Dio, Vengono in Chiesa solo per giocare!... non ci viene nessuno, a Messa. Io la dico ai banchi! Non sono neanche battezzati!
[5] Non lo so. Non guardo più nemmeno l'orologio.
[6] Baad ma ra khahad bord/ the wind will carry us, a poem of Forugh Farokhzad (1935-1967), Iranian modernist poet.


Bibliography​​​​​​​
Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlison, Barbara Habberjam, Athlone Press, London.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlison, Barbara Habberjam Athlone Press, London.
Bogue, Ronald (2003), Deleuze on Cinema, London & New York, Routledge.
Marrati, Paola (2008), Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, trans. Alisa Hartz, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Mulvey, Laura (2000), Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 833-44.
Rodowick, D.N (2010), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy; edited by Rodowick, University of Minnesota Press.

 

Neorealism from the perspective of two films: Cristo si è fermato a Eboli - The Wind Will Carry Us​​​​​​​
​​​​​​​Faezeh Jafaryan