The Death-Image and the Ethics of Time:

Kiarostami’s Cinema of Life, Absence and Duration

Abstract

This article investigates Abbas Kiarostami’s cinematic engagement with mortality, temporality, and ethical spectatorship through the lens of Susana Viegas’s “death-image.” Unlike conventional depictions of death, Kiarostami stages mortality as an unseen but structuring presence, emphasizing life’s duration over narrative closure. Drawing on Deleuze’s time-image, Sareh Javid’s early-film readings, and Asbjørn Grønstad’s concept of biovisual ethics, the study situates Kiarostami’s work within a framework in which observing, waiting, and contemplation constitute acts of ethical attention. Two case studies, Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), demonstrate how Kiarostami constructs cinematic space and duration to sustain ambiguity and invite reflection. In Taste of Cherry, the final sequence enacts the Deleuzian crystal-image, blending actual and virtual registers to destabilize distinctions between life and death, reality and fiction. In The Wind Will Carry Us, the village cemetery functions as a locus for observing ordinary life amid the deferred event of death, reinforcing an ethics of attention. Intertextual references to Persian literary traditions, particularly Omar Khayyam’s quatrains, underscore a philosophy of impermanence and sceptical reflection on transcendence. Kiarostami’s films cultivate an ethical cinematic space where life, death, and temporality coexist in uncertainty, resisting spectacle and closure, and fostering a contemplative engagement with the flow of time.