The Wind Will Carry Us opens with long takes of a car zigzagging down a road in the Iranian countryside. This is to say it opens with a sequence that, to anybody who knows Kiarostami's work, will be immediately recognisable as typical of it: Life and Nothing More returns repeatedly to such sequences, and ends with a brilliant one; similar sequences turn up in Taste of Cherry; Through the Olive Trees concludes with a long shot of its protagonists zigzagging across a field; we see the hero of Where is the Friend's Home? meandering in a similar pattern on more than one occasion. The opening of The Wind Will Carry Us is intriguing and, with its muted semi-screwball feel, a little funny. By the time of this film's release, however, the car on the screen was bringing this cinematic history with it. Thus there is something self-aware or even selfeffacing about these opening shots: Kiarostami seems to be referring here not only to his previous works but also perhaps to himself, and to the by then internationally recognisable figure called ‘Kiarostami’. So if Nancy is right to say that long aerial takes are Kiarostami's “signature” – that “a person or a car's zigzagging path on the background of an unchanging landscape traverses, like a single trajectory, five movies … and turns into an emblematic summary of all the films” – then perhaps this is complicated here by a certain irony. We might say that in the opening sequence of this film Kiarostami cites his own signature, with all the philosophical complications such a gesture entails.

For what is it to cite one's signature? As Jacques Derrida argues, there is an ontological tension in the very idea of a signature, insofar as it is both an “absolute singularity” – a means by which we secure the identity of a particular person, plus a singular event of writing – and an eminently “repeatable, iterable, imitable form”. Despite the fact that it is singular, a signature is also a repetition of previous signatures, and it becomes what it is through iteration (such that, for instance, one's first ever signature cannot really qualify as such). But how much iteration does it take? And won't each iteration also be a unique, singular event? To clarify this problem, suppose someone untrained in forgery has a stamp made of a handwritten example.