Abbas Khiarostami: Ambiguity, its uses in art and its limit

In his “Ten on ten” Abbas Khiarostami talks about his ideas about the art of film.

These ideas are to some extent properly his as he’d never gone to school to study film or ever served as anyone’s assistant director. Yet, the ideas he talks about have been around for centuries. One makes art not by adding, but by subtracting, said a philosopher once; anything truly profound needs a mask, said, on another occasion, another; one must hide art with art, said yet another.

The idea that a certain amount of ambiguity in art intensifies the viewer’s experience is as old as art itself.

For Khiarostami the viewer is the person who creates the work of art – the work of art being not the film, but his inward experience. A good film therefore must not spoon-feed the viewer with clear messages; but stimulate him to think with kind of prolegomena: appropriately moving but incomplete inputs for thought.

In this sense, the Hollywood style of film-making, which sets out to tell an unambiguous story but in an emotionally absorbing manner -- by manipulating the viewer’s emotions (with, for example, the sound track which says, in fact: “now feel sad”, “now feel scared”) is, in Khiarostami’s words, “an act of theft in the dark” – quite literally in the dark, of course. It deprives the viewer of his intellect. It denies him the opportunity to think and interpret.

There is no such thing, says Khiarostami, as understanding art; there is only a number of different possible reflections about it. To illustrate the point, he recalls having once seen a Swedish film, of the dialogue of which he understood nothing. Yet he liked the film so much that he went right back to the ticket window, bought another ticket and saw the film all over again: he had been deeply moved by the interpretation he had invented for the film. Later he had found the film’s script and discovered that the plot was not quite what he had imagined it to be and that he had liked his own version much better.

It is this mechanism that he wishes to stimulate in the viewers of his films. He does it well.

Yet, there appears to exist a limit to the amount of ambiguity art can take before it becomes downright silly. The prescription to success appears a well-crafted kind of ambiguity, one susceptible to numerous but well founded and interesting interpretations. The next step in this research must be a better understanding of just how ambiguous ambiguity should be on the one hand and can be on the other.