On Evidence: Life and Nothing More by Abbas Kiarostami

Abstract

And Life Goes on is, in its French translation ("I will come back to it"), the title of the film made in 1992 by Abbas Kiarostami.1 Among ordinary expressions, among current ways of speaking, that is to say, ways that have an immediately recognizable value and that can be exchanged without difficulty (that are exchanged for nothing, for their own echo and that, therefore , are worth nothing . . . ) , this one speaks of this constant and inevitable flow of life, which continues its course in spite of everything, in spite of mourning and catastrophe. In fact, the film tells us from the beginning, by means of a voice on the radio: "The magnitude of the disaster is enormous" (it's about the 1990 earthquake in Iran). The expression says that it has to continue and it also says that it is good that it continues, that life is really, perhaps, also that: that it goes on. The expression says nothing about "life," its goal, its meaning, its quality; it does not say that it is the life of the species, or that of the universe that would unfold itself above that of individuals (no doubt, in the middle of the film, we will see a young couple getting married after the catastrophe, but we will not see the birth of a child) ; the expression does not imply an indifference to death, or to any form of completion or accomplishment. Quite the contrary, in a sense, the film is itself this accomplishment, it accomplishes, it shows that: the catastrophe, the continuity, and also something else, the image that the film both represents and designates at the