Over the last two decades, Abbas Kiarostami (b. 1940) has become the darling of contemporary film criticism. The recipient of numerous prizes, and a regular at the Cannes, Venice, and Locarno festivals, Kiarostami was chosen by the critics of several leading film journals (Cahiers du Cinéma, Screen, and Film Comment) as the most important filmmaker of our era. The reasons for his spectacular success are not easy to assess. His films are innovative in their use of non-professional actors, the employment of documentary techniques, and meta-cinematic reflections. However, most of these techniques had been anticipated by Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave. Thematically he barely seems to break new ground; his humanism may even seem a bit old-fashioned. Nevertheless, many critics have suggested that his films stand out in contemporary cinema because they have a certain depth. As Jonathan Rosenbaum (one of Kiarostami's more articulate advocates) puts it, “Kiarostami belongs to that tribe of filmmakers for whom a shot is often closer to being a question than to providing an answer.” The questions that his shots raise, Rosenbaum adds, are profound and “philosophical.”

The aim of the present essay is to probe the nature of this “depth” by considering how his films can be deemed philosophical, and can be seen to be engaged in thinking. However, in my attempt to highlight the nature of his cinematic thoughts, I do not seek to explicate Kiarostami's philosophical ideas and the way he expresses them in his films. Over the course of his long career, Kiarostami has always been skeptical about the ideal of the filmmaker as someone who communicates “ideas,” whether philosophical, political, or moral ideas. For him, a film does not start with an idea that springs from a filmmaker's mind to be subsequently translated into cinema. A film director should not be compared with an author in this regard; in fact, in many of his numerous interviews, Kiarostami notes that he is even reluctant to call himself the director of his films since the notion of directing usually implies the exercise of control over the process of filming.