« Signes éternels » : l’image métaphysiqueselon De Chirico et Kiarostami

An exercise of anachronism, the article reads Kiarostami’s movies through the lenses of De Chirico’s painting. The exercise is not common in historical disciplines, like art and cinema history. Relations of influence never contradict the “temporal arrow”. Semiotics disregards this temporal frame, and compares texts by situating them in a common network of signifying relations. Semiotics can compare two or more artistic texts whatsoever, but does not encourage an anarchist point of view. Only texts that share similar structures can be fruitfully compared. De Chirico was not only the foremost metaphysical painter but also an important theoretician of metaphysical art. In a text on “art and madness”, he points out that the mad man is like the man who has lost his memory. However, the kind of memory De Chirico has in mind is not the long-term memory of psychologists, but a kind of “semiotic memory”, where interpretative habits are deposited. If this memory is lost, signs cannot be connected to other signs in a customary way, but become the origin of a new perception of reality. That is, according to De Chirico, what happens both in madness and in metaphysical art, where usual spaces and common objects turn into ground for marvel and terror, but also for sweetness and comfort. Metaphysical art, then, does not aim at finding a supernatural reality beyond that of everyday life, but, on the contrary, seeks to finds in everyday life a secret dimension, wherein things reveal themselves as different from how they appear. De Chirico’s reflection on metaphysical aesthetics was a consequence of his experiments with visual language and artistic forms. He had realized that painters could use some architectural forms, like those of arcades, harbors, train stations, etc. in order to frame space in a way that might elicit a metaphysical perception of reality. More generally, two formal features characterize most of De Chirico’s paintings executed in Florence/Paris (1910-1915) and Ferrara (1915-1918): a strong “geometrization” of space and a multiplication of contradictory framings. On the one hand, geometrization simplifies the structure of space and confers an a-temporal outlook to reality; on the other hand, the multiplication of contradictory framings visually translates the enigmatic character of metaphysics. Nothing, or almost nothing, justifies a comparison between De Chirico and Kiarostami from a historical point of view. The latter never mentions the former in his commentaries on his own films; nor spectators, either in Iran or in Italy, think about Italian metaphysical art when they watch Kiarostami’s movies. Moreover, it is undeniable that many characteristics of Kiarostami’s filmic discourse are closely related to a culturally specific background: the (visual) culture of contemporary Iran. Nevertheless, it is evident that Kiarostami’s cinema shares many of the aesthetical principles and creative processes of Italian metaphysical art. First of all, as it turns out from the analysis of most Kiarostami’s movies, an effort to present spectators with a geometrical, simplified, and essential space characterizes the plastic level of his filmic discourse. It is an essential space where relations between elements of narration are visually schematized. Second, Kiarostami too is almost obsessed with the superposition of multiple, often contradictory framings over this geometric space. That allows Kiarostami’s filmic discourse to transform it into a symbolic device, able to signify and communicate complex relations between deep, cosmic, and metaphysical values (mainly life and death). As de Chirico points out in some of his theoretical writings, his aesthetics also relies on the creation of uncanny configurations of objects, where strange and de-familiarizing relations subvert and replace customary ties between subjects and objects, and especially among objects themselves. The same aesthetic principle is at work in most Kiarostami’s movies, where objects are central not only in the development of narrative plots but also as symbolic devices that allow deep values to be expressed at a figurative level. Many differences separate De Chirico and Kiarostami: the historical époques in which they live(d), the socio-cultural contexts in which they work(ed), and the media that they adopt(ed). Yet, a strong similarity can be perceived in certain aspects of their visual languages. There are at least two ways to account for this similarity: on the one hand, the philological one, which nevertheless seems to be doomed not to succeed for the two artists do not share the same historical landscape. The second, more promising way is the one suggested by Lotman’s cultural semiotics: maybe similarities between De Chirico’s and Kiarostami’s visual languages are due to the fact that the Italian and the Iranian semiosphere share some general features in the way in which they shape the articulation and manifestation of meaning through visual texts. A tentative hypothesis explaining such similarity could be formulated as follows: a strong influence of the poetic discourse on the creation of meaning characterizes both semiospheres, a discourse where the syntactic relations of prose are less predominant than the emphasis on the symbolic value of empty space and isolated objects.