The Endless Day: Ritual, Repetition, and the Traumatic Cut

By Osman Arslan Film History December 30, 2025

The brown hills surrounding Tehran are bone-dry, baked by an unforgiving sun. A man, Mr. Badii, drives a Range Rover through their winding, unpaved roads. He circles, again and again, a landscape that offers no destination, only variations on a theme of dust and desolation. Abbas Kiarostami’s camera observes him, sometimes from within the car, sometimes from a godlike distance, but always with a profound patience. We cut from Badii’s impassive face to the faces of the men he tries to enlist for a strange task; we cut from the car’s Sisyphean journey to the gaping, shallow grave he has dug for himself. This is cross-cutting, the bedrock technique of cinematic dynamism, yet in Kiarostami’s hands, it produces not acceleration, but a deepening stasis. It is not a syntax of action, but a poetry of attrition.

Decades later and half a world away, another solitary wanderer navigates an endless landscape. In Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, Fern’s van, “Vanguard,” traces its own circuits across the American West, from the Badlands of South Dakota to the Arizona desert. The light here is different, often the celebrated “magic hour” glow, yet it serves a similar function. We cut from Fern’s face, etched with a quiet, persistent grief, to the vast, indifferent horizon. We cut from the small, repeated rituals of her nomadic existence, arranging items in her van, preparing a meal, cleaning a toilet at a seasonal job, to the sun-drenched emptiness that surrounds her. Like Badii, she is moving, but she is not progressing.

It strikes me that a powerful, underexplored dialogue exists between these two films, a dialogue conducted through the grammar of editing and the texture of natural light. Both filmmakers, I would argue, subvert one of cinema’s foundational techniques to achieve a radical end. Contrary to readings of cross-cutting as a mechanism for dynamic tension-relief, from D.W. Griffith’s last-minute rescues to the kineticism of Hollywood spectacle, in Zhao and Kiarostami it functions as ritualistic stasis under natural lighting. This transformation turns memory and trauma into an anti-narrative repetition that subverts expectations of progress inherited from New Hollywood and the Japanese New Wave, revealing the very form of cinema as a potential site of a traumatic loop rather than a redemptive arc. In these films, the cut does not create suspense; it consecrates a state of being. It does not promise escape; it insists on the haunting permanence of the present moment.

I. The Rhythm of Stasis: Cross-Cutting Against Momentum

The history of montage, particularly cross-cutting, is a history of convergence. Two lines of action, destined to intersect. A train hurtling toward a victim tied to the tracks; a hero galloping to the rescue. The cut quickens the heart rate, manipulates our temporal perception, and rushes us toward a climatic resolution. But what happens when the cuts lead nowhere?

In Taste of Cherry (1997), the cross-cutting between Mr. Badii and his potential assistants, a young Kurdish soldier, a wary Afghan seminarian, an elderly Turkish taxidermist, is not a progression but an accumulation of futile encounters. Each conversation is a variation of the same request, each refusal or tentative acceptance a beat in a monotonous litany. Kiarostami refuses to build narrative momentum. Instead, he uses the cuts to emphasize the cyclical nature of Badii’s quest, which mirrors the circularity of his suicidal ideation. The edits between Badii’s lonely drive and the mundane labor of others (construction workers, soldiers on patrol) do not juxtapose different worlds but flatten them into a single, shared plane of existence under the same bleached sky. This is what Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his review from Cannes that year, astutely identified as an "existential tone poem of exasperating pace and deliberation." The exasperation is the point. The form forces us to inhabit Badii’s exhausted psyche, to feel the weight of each repeated gesture. The ritual is not in the digging of the grave, but in the search itself.

This approach stands in stark contrast to another master of cinematic stillness, Yasujirō Ozu. In Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu famously uses what David Bordwell has termed "pillow shots", brief, static cutaways to landscapes or objects, like smokestacks or corridors, which punctuate the human drama. One might interpret these, as I am inclined to, as a form of repressed cross-cutting. They are spaces of quiet contemplation where the unspoken anxieties of post-war Japanese family life gather. Ozu’s cuts show us what the characters cannot or will not say; they are pockets of silence that contain the trauma of societal change and familial dissolution. Kiarostami does something different. His cuts are not between the moments of trauma; they are the enactment of the trauma. The repetition of the drive, the repeated conversational gambit, the visual rhyme of the dusty hill and the earthen grave, this is the trauma made manifest as a cinematic ritual.

Chloé Zhao’s work in Nomadland (2020) can be seen as a spiritual successor to this Kiarostamian rhythm, transplanted into the soil of the American West. The film cross-cuts between Fern’s solitary van-life rituals and the vast, sun-bleached horizons that dwarf her. We see her meticulously organizing her few possessions, then the cut takes us to a wide shot of her van, a tiny speck in a majestic but desolate landscape. We see the repetitive, often grueling labor of her seasonal jobs, packing boxes for Amazon, serving food at Wall Drug, and then the film cuts back to her silent, lonely meals. This editing structure challenges the forward momentum we associate with the American road movie, a genre steeped in the mythos of progress and self-discovery. Fern’s journey is not linear. She returns to the same places, the same communities, the same feelings of loss. The cross-cutting between her interior life (the van) and the exterior world (the landscape) does not suggest a dialectic leading to a synthesis. It suggests a loop. The small, repeated actions are not steps on a path to healing; they are the very substance of her suspended grief, a way of holding life together in the wake of its collapse.

II. The Unforgiving Gaze: Natural Light as Traumatic Witness

This ritualistic cutting is rendered all the more potent by the filmmakers’ shared commitment to natural lighting, a choice that aligns with André Bazin's belief in the camera's ability to record the "imprint of reality." Yet, here, that reality is not one of spiritual revelation but of profound, almost geological, indifference.

In Nomadland, Zhao and her cinematographer, Joshua James Richards, chase the light of the “magic hour.” It is a light beloved by Terrence Malick, a light that can bestow a sense of grace and transcendence. But in Zhao’s hands, it feels less like a benediction and more like an examination. The unfiltered, low-angle sunlight catches every line on Fern’s face, every speck of dust in her van. It illuminates her world with a documentary frankness that echoes the work of Agnès Varda, particularly in how it blurs the line between a character’s performed grief and the authentic presence of the real-life nomads who populate the film. The light does not stylize Fern’s pain or offer a romantic gloss. Instead, it exposes it, making her trauma an ambient condition of her environment. Her grief for her dead husband and the lost town of Empire, Nevada, is not a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but a climate she inhabits, as pervasive and inescapable as the light and the dust.

Kiarostami’s use of light in Taste of Cherry is even more severe. The film is largely shot under the harsh, high sun of midday. This light overexposes the dun-colored terrain, bleaching out detail and creating a landscape of abstract forms. It is the opposite of the expressionistic lighting that projects a character’s inner turmoil onto their surroundings, as in German Expressionism or film noir. Here, the landscape is an indifferent archive of memory. It offers no solace, no reflection of Badii’s existential crisis. When the elderly taxidermist, Mr. Bagheri, tells his story of attempting suicide and being saved by the taste of mulberries, the camera remains focused on their faces within the claustrophobic confines of the car, the brutal light outside framing them. The hope he offers is a human one, a fragile anecdote set against a world that remains impassive. This inversion of pathetic fallacy, where nature resolutely refuses to mirror human feeling, transforms trauma from an eruptive event into a persistent, environmental pressure. It is not in the shadows; it is everywhere, in the blinding light of the endless day.

This approach feels like a direct counterpoint to the surrealist impulse, say of Buñuel, where trauma erupts into the frame as a shocking, irrational image, an eye being sliced, ants crawling from a hand. For Kiarostami and Zhao, trauma is not an eruption; it is the terrain itself, made visible by a light that refuses to look away.

III. An Unlikely Dialogue: New Hollywood, the Iranian New Wave, and the Echoes of Ozu

By placing Zhao and Kiarostami in conversation, we uncover an unlikely but fertile hybridization of cinematic traditions. Zhao’s aesthetic is steeped in the legacy of 1970s New Hollywood, with its emphasis on character-driven stories, location shooting, and a realist sensibility. One can see echoes of this in the intimate, naturalistic vignettes of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), where the Sacramento light becomes a vessel for nostalgic memory and adolescent angst. Zhao borrows this naturalistic palette but marries it to the rhythmic sensibilities of the Iranian New Wave. She takes the American landscape of alienation but drains it of its forward-moving, individualistic trajectory, infusing it instead with Kiarostami’s “exasperating” and deliberate pace.

The result is a new kind of "neo-ritualist" cinema. In Nomadland, trauma is not a psychological backstory to be overcome, as it might be in a conventional Hollywood drama, nor is it repressed into the silent spaces of the family home, as in Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Instead, the trauma of economic collapse and personal loss is externalized and performed through the ritual of movement. Fern’s journey is a post-2008 critique of the American Dream, where the open road is no longer a symbol of freedom but of precarity. Her cross-cut rituals, the silent work, the lonely drive, the temporary community, form a litany for a lost way of life.

This formal choice carries profound political weight. For Kiarostami, working in the context of post-revolutionary Iran with its strict censorship, the slowness and repetition were a form of subtle resistance. By focusing on a man’s existential crisis with such unyielding patience, he carves out a space for profound human questions that transcend state ideology. His Palme d'Or win, shared with Shohei Imamura's The Eel (another film about a man grappling with a past crime through repetitive, ritualistic labor), signaled a global cinematic moment, a recognition of form as a vessel for complex, unresolved interiority. Zhao, working in a vastly different context, adapts this language to critique the failures of late-stage capitalism. The nomadic loop is the logical outcome of a system that discards people and places like refuse.

This transpacific dialogue, where Ozu’s repressed memory, Kiarostami’s exposed repetition, and New Hollywood’s introspective realism meet in the nomadic frames of the 21st century, challenges the Eurocentric telling of film history. It reveals how formal strategies evolve and are re-signified across cultural and historical divides, used not just to tell stories, but to embody states of being that narrative arcs cannot contain.

IV. The Haunting of the Cut

What finally lingers from these films is not just the images, but the feeling of the cuts themselves, their quiet audacity. In the silent era, the power of cross-cutting was often amplified by musical accompaniment, an accelerando that urged the image forward. Here, the cuts are often cloaked in diegetic sound or silence. The scrape of Fern’s tools, the rumble of Badii’s engine, the whisper of the wind, these are the sounds that bridge the edits. The absence of a non-diegetic score to guide our emotional response is crucial. It denies us the comfort of catharsis.

This creates what I would call a "haptic repetition." The viewer does not simply observe the ritual; we are made to feel its texture, its grinding duration. We endure the journey with the characters. This refusal of emotional release is a radical act in a cinematic culture predicated on resolution. Pauline Kael famously championed films for their kinetic, emotional, and even sensual impact. These films offer a different kind of impact: the slow, sustained ache of endurance.

In the final, bewildering moments of Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami breaks the fourth wall entirely. After Badii lies down in his grave and the screen fades to black, we cut to grainy video footage. We see the film crew, including Kiarostami himself, milling about on the same green hills (now vibrant, not dusty) where the film’s drama unfolded. The soldiers march by, smiling. This final cut shatters the ritualistic stasis we have been trapped in for ninety minutes. It releases us. But what does this release signify? Is it an assertion that artifice is the only escape from the existential loop? Or is it a reminder that the trauma we witnessed was a construction, a thing to be examined rather than merely experienced?

The film withholds an easy answer. Much like Zhao’s ending, which sees Fern driving away once more, continuing her loop rather than ending it, Kiarostami’s conclusion opens up new avenues for thought rather than closing them. This cinema of ritual repetition does not offer solutions. It does not promise that trauma can be overcome, that the dead can be mourned and left behind, or that a new life can begin. It suggests something more unsettling and perhaps more honest: that for some, living is a ritual of carrying the wound. And the camera, in its patient, unforgiving gaze, can do nothing more, and nothing less, than bear witness to the endless day.

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