" Contemplative Absence: Sacred Experience in Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us and the Aesthetics of Slow Cinema"

Abbas Kiarostami's film The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) creates sacred experience through systematic absence rather than explicit religious content. Formal techniques such as strategic concealment and extended duration generate contemplative states without religious references. The film adapts Persian poetic traditions of veiling (pardeh) and the interplay between hidden (bāṭin) and manifest (ẓāhir) to create meaning through what remains unseen: a dying woman who never appears, acousmatic voices of invisible characters, and village spaces kept off-screen. Comparative analysis with other slow cinema practitioners reveals how Kiarostami's life-affirming approach, integration of Persian poetry, and ethical engagement with observation distinguish his method. The article contributes to post-secular frameworks for understanding cinematic spirituality through embodied spectatorship and participatory meaning-making.

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Abstract

This article examines how Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) creates sacred experience through systematic absence within contemporary slow cinema aesthetics. While previous scholarship has focused on religious content in spiritual cinema, this analysis demonstrates how formal techniques—particularly strategic concealment and extended duration—generate contemplative states without explicit religious references. Drawing on Paul Schrader’s transcendental style theory and recent slow cinema scholarship, the article traces how Kiarostami adapts Persian poetic traditions, particularly concepts of pardeh(veiling) and the interplay between bāṭin (hidden) and ẓāhir (manifest), to create meaning through what remains unseen. The dying woman who never appears, the acousmatic voices of invisible characters, and the village spaces kept off-screen transform absence from lack into generative force. Through comparative analysis with international slow cinema practitioners like Béla Tarr and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the study reveals how Kiarostami’s life-affirming approach, integration of Persian poetry, and ethical engagement with observation distinguish his contemplative method. The article contributes to post-secular frameworks for understanding cinematic spirituality, demonstrating how films create conditions for transcendent experience through embodied spectatorship and participatory meaning-making rather than religious representation.