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Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016): |
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1. The Earth Trembles (2003/2004)
At the beginning of
the splendid documentary Abbas
Kiarostami: The Art of Living (2003) by Fergus Daly and Pat Collins, the
master Iranian director remarks:
For me the camera is exactly like a pen. It can be
used by the common person, or it can be used by Baudelaire to create a great
poem. We have an Iranian saying that if you want to become a good writer, you
just keep writing and writing and writing. So in response to the question of
how to develop a good aesthetic vision, I can say that you have to keep seeing
and seeing and seeing.
But what exactly is
this seeing in the work of Abbas
Kiarostami? In January 2000, for a Film
Comment poll, I unhesitatingly selected Kiarostami as the person who, for
me (and, it turned out, for many others), best and most decisively defined
cinema in the 1990s. I appended a few words: “The filmmaker who has used the
humblest, most modest elements of life, landscape and cinema to generate the most
profound, moving and radical artistic gestures of our time”. (1)
But the precise
nature of the road from simplicity to complexity in Kiarostami’s cinema remains
enigmatic, hard to get a focus on. There’s a problem in over-stressing the
simplicity – as if he were a Franciscan child-innocent or a hyper-humanitarian Andy
Warhol, just “finding reality” (where is that?) and letting the camera roll as
he absents himself as demiurge. And there’s equally a problem in stressing the
complexity, as if the only good movies today must pass through a filter of
baroque artifices and convoluted deconstructive paradoxes. Between the reflexive
games of Close-Up (1990) or Through the Olive Trees (1994) and the
bone that just flows down a stream, saying everything in The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), something eludes us in this
magnificent body of work – which is just as well, because that’s a sign of just
how great an artist he is.
To my mind, there
is a televisual side to Kiarostami’s work – even if, for a long time, he has had
nothing literally to do with television production – and a cinema side. And I
believe much critical discussion of Kiarostami privileges what I’m calling the
TV side, or turns him into a kind of tele-artist, thus ignoring the cinema
side. Maybe it’s a blind spot generated by the inescapable association and
affinity of Kiarostami with Roberto Rossellini, who travelled from neo-realism
to intimate cinema to television. But where Kiarostami is going – I hope – is
not where Rossellini went.
Let me explain. If
you take Kiarostami as essentially a transparent filmmaker – if what he is showing are modest facts of life in a simple,
unostentatious way, however complex the final effect or vision – then it is
easy to watch his films on TV and receive them whole (as it were). Because TV
reduces aesthetics to mere information. Thus the idea of the film screen as a
kind of static or mobile tele-window that informs so much writing on
Kiarostami, even the sophisticated rumination of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy
(for whom Kiarostami, in a conceptual twist, is the mediator of an already
mediatised world). (2)
The director
himself has fallen prey to this slide into the merely televisual: ABC Africa (2001) – which I have to say
is his worst film – is pure TV reportage. Like any TV crew, Kiarostami and his
assistants are led around by the nose for a couple of days, pretty much just
tourists on a guided, carefully prearranged stroll. They develop no insight
into Africa, pursue no investigation: in that sense, it’s bad reportage, a bad
documentary. And Kiarostami embraces there the worst temptation of digital
filming – that is, to just walk into a place and instantly shoot whatever is there
in front of you, thinking it is somehow going to be expressive or telling
because it is a “virginal vision”, a first look at something. But a first look,
in itself and in its spontaneity, guarantees nothing. Jonas Mekas frequently
makes that categorical mistake, too.
We forget that
Kiarostami (at his best) makes cinema.
While I have experienced a number of his films only on video or disc, I had the
enormous fortune of seeing Where is the
Friend’s Home? (1987) at the Singapore Film Festival in the early 1990s,
and Taste of Cherry (1997), his greatest work, at the Melbourne
Film Festival in the late ‘90s. These were the formative and essential Kiarostami
experiences for me. And I realised at those sessions that there is a monumentality, not just a minimalism, to
his work. It is for the same reason that we must always see (whenever possible)
the films of Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien on a big screen.
The earth just does
not exist in Kiarostami; it trembles.
It is that vibration – the imperceptible aftershocks, as it were, of the
earthquake in Life, and Nothing More … (1991) – married to the stillness of the shot or the steady, gliding car
movements, to the duration of the images and their rhythm, to the unstable
exchanges between inward feeling and outward pose in his actors – which creates
the monumental effect of cinema in Kiarostami.
And it is a
sensation that finally explodes in Ten (2002), a film that
surprised many of his followers and announced a new, radical turn in his
career. Ten is, alongside everything
else, electric in its form. Reducing cinema to the absolute essential of a
two-point mise en scène and the most
basic editing, he turns the car into a veritable cinematic apparatus: there is an
angle of vision (so important to the art of driving!) and a cut cued by every
opening or closing of the door, which is like a lightning bolt each time it
articulates a scene.
We too easily forget
or overlook the aura of menace, the fear of the unknown, the threat of death
that animate Kiarostami’s work, like a subterranean stream. It is there in the
boy’s journey in Where is the Friend’s
Home, there in the fragile, collapsing earth in The Wind Will Carry Us. And it is above all there as Badii lies in
his makeshift grave in Taste of Cherry,
a scene that does not survive its TV/VHS/DVD transfer: with its flashes of
lightning in the blackout of night, with its Sensurround/Dolby-type rumbling of
thunder, with its unbearably poignant mystery of whether this man will live or
die, the scene takes us close to an absolute (and absolutely cinematic)
experience of existential negation, more powerfully than any horror movie. It’s
almost Emil Cioran for the screen, on the heights of despair! And it is the
breathtaking transition between this cinematic limit-experience, this
intimation of a lonely apocalypse, through to the airy lightness of a
video-in-progress that makes the ending of Taste
of Cherry so radical – not just the comparison between (or continuum of)
fiction and reality.
Without this
infusion of cinema, Kiarostami’s films can pass over into banality, into United
Nations-approved message pictures about world peace or individual compassion
(again, the banality of ABC Africa).
Kiarostami (his interviews make this abundantly clear) is not a specialist in
cultural difference or cultural specificity or in much of anything that
cultural intellectuals hold dear these days. It is a folly to overload his
movies with that kind of baggage. He cares only about what it is to be present
in the world – the world as a daily and as a philosophical entity – and how to
register that consciousness, and then the interactions (the Kiarostamian “stories”)
that proceed from this consciousness. He fashions tales of chance interactions,
encounters, random conversations that subtly change the course of people’s
destinies.
French critic Alain
Bergala comments, in The Art of Living,
that all Kiarostami’s films are about a
strange arrangement: someone with a
problem stumbles upon someone else who – usually unknowingly – holds the key
that will unlock that problem. (3) In Ten,
for the first time, this process of arrangement takes a bleak turn, because the
film addresses the patriarchal conditions of Iranian culture. A woman (Mania Akbari) drives to the spot where she
will pick up her garrulous son, Amin (Amin Maher). When she parks, we see
through her car door a van from which Amin emerges to cross the road. There is
a tense, shouted exchange, through the passing traffic, between the woman and
her ex-husband concerning how many hours she can have the child and when and
where she must return him. The woman drives off. A moment later, the van pulls
up alongside the car; more heated words are exchanged in motion, and the van
zooms away.
This scene is
perfectly in keeping with the peculiar, formal constraints that Kiarostami
chose for making Ten: not a single
scene in it takes place outside the woman’s car. But it also speaks volumes
about modern life, and the role of the car as the ultimate private space – more
of a functioning home than anything that has four, solid walls. And Kiarostami’s
digital cameras mounted on the dashboard not only capture of the intimacy of
life in cars, but also suggest the cold eye of the surveillance camera – in
other words, the convergence of what sociologists call the private and public
spheres.
It is a curious
coincidence that both Kiarostami and Claire Denis in Friday Night (2003) should, at the same moment, alight on the car as the central subject of
a film. It is another curious coincidence that they happen to be the only
filmmakers whom Jean-Luc Nancy has written on at length. Nancy is a commentator
whose work obsessively addresses the themes of encountering “the stranger”, and
of the difficulties of forming a workable community in a fragmented world –
themes that resonate deeply for countries like Australia grappling with a
so-called refugee crisis.
Indeed, as the
Australian cultural theorist Meaghan Morris once argued, the car is, in cultural
terms, a curious kind of uncertain border-space: it seals the passengers in
their rigidly circumscribed, social roles (Ten evolved from a project about a psychoanalyst and her patients), but it also
cannot help but let in the multifarious influences of the outside world and its
changing history. (4)
This is partly what Ten – the most aggressively urban
film that Kiarostami has so far made – is about. Everyday day life is portrayed
as a small-scale but ceaseless war (each of the ten scenes is introduced with
the sound of a boxing-match bell) in which traditional and progressive values
duke it out, especially around the role of women in present-day Iranian
society. And while there is a heavy pull toward the dour triumph of patriarchy,
the bustling world that constantly forces its presence on the characters and us
through the car windows suggests other possibilities. Kiarostami finds a simple
but brilliant way to express this dynamic: making his actors actually contend
with real streets, traffic and strangers takes them out of the interiority of
their little lives and stories, and puts them in a constantly surprising
relation to the real world.
In light of all
this, we can re-read the statement made by Kiarostami about his time in Africa,
a statement that is every bit as poetic as his best films, poems or
photographs:
I don't think that either I or anyone else who was in
that strange atmosphere could remember that he was a filmmaker. They didn't
know me and I didn't know myself. We were witnessing scenes that made a deep
impression on us. It was something like the Day of Judgment. On that Judgment
Day, who can remember what he does for a living? (5)
We forget the tension that constitutes Kiarostami’s
cinema, and indeed the films of others who have been inspired or influenced by
him. An unbelievable tension, arising from that subtle trembling, which always
builds to an apparition, a vision, in
the final moments of his films. What we see in those moments, those final
shots, is never quite what we expected to see, and it suspends what we may have
thought to see resolved – this is Kiarostami’s immense, and immensely sly,
storytelling skill at work. Kiarostami’s persona can evoke the modest teller of
folk tales or a reciter of poems, but in cinematic terms he is a creator of gestures as powerful as those in Pedro Almodóvar,
Bertrand Bonello or David Lynch.
I don’t mean the
physical gestures of his performers, but the sense of an epiphanic moment that is slowly arrived at, carefully nurtured, and
delivered as if with the clarity of an Eastern mystic finally pointing a finger
at the appearance in the world of something that has been prepared in the
spectator’s mind: something amazing and thrilling to behold, a revelation, like those plaintive figures
walking and wrangling (undecidably) far into the distance at the conclusion of Through the Olive Trees. (6)
This final shot is
a point-of-view shot (from the director’s alter ego) “maybe not literally, but
in effect … because what is not possible in real life becomes possible in
film”, as Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa has commented. (7) Isn’t this a way of saying that
a matter-of-fact (“humble”) point-of-view shot can metamorphose, magically and
dramatically, into a visionary moment
– overflowing with all the constitutive tension of the lived, immanent world
but also allowing a glimpse or an intuition (as it at last takes leave of the
spectator) of a transcendental void?
2. The Wind Will Carry Him (2010)
Ten marked a break in the career of
Abbas Kiarostami. And it is a break that many – some of his most fervent
admirers and champions included – have had a hard time coming to terms with,
even a decade later.
A measure of the discomfort generated by Kiarostami’s
surprising Knight’s Move can be gauged from the negative capsule review of Shirin (2008) that appeared in an issue
of Cahiers du cinéma early 2010.
Patrice Blouin – himself no stranger to the analysis of video art and digital
culture – recalls the director’s “audacious gesture” in Ten of simply attaching cameras to the left and right sides of a
car and letting his cast members drive off to improvise their conversations,
ten times over. With this gesture, according to Blouin, Kiarostami sought to
“do away with mise en scène” –
meaning, all traditional procedures of scripting, staging, dressing the décor
and setting the lights, choreographing the moves, guiding the actors … in place
of which Ten instituted what the
French call a dispositif, a fixed,
rule-bound system for generating a work, a game which (in Kiarostami’s case)
allowed for an “automatic recording”.
For the better part of a decade, Kiarostami’s work
then went the way of the dispositif.
This much is clear even from the titles, when Ten announces its structure of ten dialogue scenes and Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) flags its
five, static, long takes. Blouin, while sympathetic to the initial audacity of
the director’s gesture in Ten, finds
this career-reorientation a case of diminishing returns: once you, as a viewer,
“get” the game played in Shirin – the
fact that you will only hear the soundtrack of an epic movie off-screen, and
will only see a procession of women in close-up seemingly in the process of
watching and reacting to it – there is nothing more to experience or explore.
An endgame typical, we might say, of much contemporary art in the galleries: to
know it is not to love it.
But Kiarostami is an artist who refuses to be
contained by the categories we – particularly in the West – erect to comprehend
him. The origin of his current evolution is perfectly clear: Kiarostami has
long been an inhabitant of the international art world – as photographer,
installation artist and “videaste” – and he has evidently been exposed to much
on that circuit that has inspired and excited him. Presumably, he has found
that work more inspiring and exciting than what he has seen lately on cinema
screens. And who can blame him?
For me personally, a disconcerting rack-focus in my
fervent appreciation of Kiarostami came when I attended, in Melbourne in 2008,
the remarkable Correspondences exhibition that twinned him with Spain’s Víctor Erice. I came in with the
loaded question: how would two such Great Men of Cinema react to, fight against
and transform the constraints of the art institution? But there was a big
difference between Erice’s response to this situation and Kiarostami’s. Erice,
as he has unequivocally declared, is uneasy about the idea of “cinema in the
museum”; all his ingenious efforts in the exhibition were geared to retaining
the presence and effect of his favourite, chosen medium of film: the power of
its imagery, its play with light and dark, its special mid-way point between
fictional artifice and everyday reality.
Kiarostami, on the other hand, seemed altogether more
relaxed about this gallery commission. No Death of Cinema crisis for him! There
were his superb photographs, edited clips on LED display screens, the
video-letters exchanged (in another kind of playful dispositif) with Erice … and, most strikingly, right there almost
under foot on the floor, a filmic segment that didn’t make it into the Ten Minutes Older set of anthology films
from 2002: ten minutes of a child sleeping, a perfectly Warholian spectacle
which was prime material for infinite video-looping in the gallery space. That
was already a self-quotation of sorts for Kiarostami: Sleepers in 2001 had developed the idea at one-shot feature-length.
But is this all really such a revelation? Kiarostami’s
links to contemporary art should always have been obvious to his commentators,
right from the early works. Instead, many of us, throughout the ‘90s and
beyond, were busy boxing him into a certain definition – or straitjacket – of
cinema. And this happened precisely at the historic moment when we cinephiles
felt our precious, beloved medium of film slipping away from us, or mutating
into something unrecognisable. We were clinging to the past.
So perhaps it is our problem, not Kiarostami’s, if we
find Shirin or Ten inferior to The Wind Will
Carry Us or Taste of Cherry.
Perhaps we were looking askew all along at his work, projecting our own fantasy
of what we needed his cinema to be. No wonder so many of us are caught short by
the dispositif of Shirin, at once spectacular and minimal,
absorbing and frustrating – a kind of elegy to an old-fashioned ideal of grand
cinema (and our experience of this cinema) which is already, literally, out of
view and up for grabs in a DIY digital age. It takes no small amount of courage
for Kiarostami, in his 70s, to be embracing these kinds of challenges and
paradoxes.
There are many possible explanations as to why
Kiarostami’s films of the ‘90s – especially the so-called Koker Trilogy
comprising Where is the Friend’s Home?, Life, and Nothing More … and Through the Olive Trees – wielded the
enormous impact they did on film festival culture and arthouse cinemas beyond
Iran. Yes, the films were, in themselves, novel, striking, deeply moving,
sometimes profound – as many top-line critics, from Laura Mulvey and Gilberto Perez to Mehrnaz Saaed-Vafa, have ably demonstrated.
But films – particularly successful ones – are never
just aesthetic objects “in themselves”; they are also social events in
circulation, and their destiny is subject to factors and forces beyond them.
And Kiarostami, if anything, has actively welcomed such loss of control over
his art – it is, as he has repeatedly said, whatever you wish to make of it. He
is just the catalyst of the dispositif,
not its master. The wind will carry him …
But this wind sometimes blows ill. To put it bluntly,
Kiarostami in the ‘90s was fixed in a seemingly benign but actually vicious
film-culture pincer, caught in a two-step between the Neo-Real and the Modern.
When he filmed the daily problems of schoolchildren in Where is the Friend’s Home?, drove through the post-earthquake ruins
of Koker in Life, and Nothing More …,
or gazed at the peasants at work in the fields in Through the Olive Trees, Kiarostami was hailed as Vittorio De Sica
or Roberto Rossellini reborn – in fact, maybe closer to the soul of neo-realism
than even those Italian filmmakers (who were not above a little, or a lot, of
narrative and stylistic contrivance) ever were.
This is a familiar spectacle in international film
culture: pick a nation or region that we suppose (however erroneously) to be
“underdeveloped”. Then attribute to its New Wave of filmmakers previously
unnoticed in the West (however long they may already have been practising their
craft at home) a primitive charm – an almost naïve closeness to the daily
conditions of real life. The film festival circuit loves its speedy,
cosmopolitan, border-crossing dandies – its Olivier Assayas or Wong Kar-wai
types – but it craves the counter-balance of a little Third World,
unsophisticated innocence. Even the critic’s gesture of branding a Trilogy for
Kiarostami – a label he has rejected for these three films – speaks of a
desperate need to keep him stuck in one, largely rural, location, a “poet of
place” like the Dardennes or, for a long time, Hou Hsiao-hsien. All in all,
chalk it up as another “Criterion Effect”! (8)
In this context, Kiarostami became, especially after
the first two instalments of the so-called Trilogy, a particularly attractive
figurehead of the Neo-Real: he was taken as, above all, a storyteller issuing
from some ancient tradition, a fountainhead of folk wisdom. Here, we managed to
trap him not only in space but also in time: we liked Kiarostami best when he
kept away from the big cities (hence the rudeness of Ten), and immersed himself in the timeless (read: pre-industrial)
ways of the peasantry and the countryside.
But then, almost magically, something starkly
different began to stir in Kiarostami’s creativity – and, for a while, we liked
it. He started to go Modern on us. There was the insistence on
frames-within-frames, like the views through the car doors and windscreen in Life, and Nothing More … – putting his
work into dialogue with, say, that of Michael Haneke. There were the reflexive
games, like the re-staged filming in Through
the Olive Trees of a scene from Life,
and Nothing More …, done over and over again for our close inspection –
echoes of Jacques Rivette or Jean-Luc Godard. And there was the ever more
insistent presence of a severely reduced, minimal aesthetic – long takes, static
camera, direct sound – that brought the comparison with Ozu, as well as with
contemporaries like Hou. Slow Cinema, and all that. And yet all this seemed to
come – to Western eyes and ears – naturally, unselfconsciously. He had
spontaneously reinvented Neo-Realism for us, and now he was doing the same for
Modernism.
Many of the critical paeans to the “birth of the
Modernist impulse” in Kiarostami by the close of the branded Koker Trilogy,
when re-read today, remind me of how critics of an earlier generation in the
West greeted the “discovery” of Sergei Parajanov – as yet another zany and
inscrutable folk primitive (from Georgia, on that occasion) who, seemingly by
accident or sheer untutored intuition, had stumbled upon the devices and tropes
of modern cinema. “He wants to breathe the air of the Moderns”, one such critic
wrote in the mid ‘80s – as if Parajanov had not fully imbibed and researched
art movements from the world over, long before his belated appropriation by the
West. Kiarostami, too, has been breathing the air of the Moderns for quite some
time now.
The Neo-Real and the Modern: what is striking about
both designations, when used on any currently working filmmaker, is that they
are fatally nostalgic. When Kiarostami stopped being our substitute neo-realist
guy from the 1940s and ‘50s, he graduated to being a perfectly comforting ‘60s
art-cinema radical – like Werner Herzog, Atom Egoyan and so many others have
ended up becoming on the current arthouse circuit, no matter their ages,
backgrounds or personal intentions; ultimately, like Kiarostami, they have no
say in it. And this tendency precisely delimits the types of cinema that so
many cinephiles (especially of older generations) believe they need to defend
or redeem or resurrect, the rapidly disappearing ideals and pleasures of their
youth: Bicycle Thieves (1948) and the
Nouvelle Vague, Satyajit Ray and 8 and a
Half (1963) …
There was hardly ever the possibility, amidst this
circus of deathly nostalgia, of hailing Kiarostami as Post-Modern, or as being
part of the latest wave in international, conceptual art. And this is not just a
question of getting up to speed with the novel and demanding pleasures of Ten, Five or Shirin in his 21st century career, or looking more widely at his achievement across all the
diverse media and art forms – from photography to poetry, cinema to theatre –
that he has worked in by now. It is also an urgent matter of revisiting the
canonical works of the “Koker Trilogy” with fresh eyes, on the lookout not for
what is profoundly and universally human in them (we saw that already), but for
all the cagey dispositifs of looking
and acting, of events and their framing, that quietly reformulate the
relationship between film and spectator. And this will mean more than that Kiarostami
plays (‘60s style) on film-and-reality (big deal) or that he occasionally
points up the artifice of his means.
Abbas Kiarostami was prolific without every really
trying to be. He practised an advanced form of laziness, and I do not say that at all in a critical or derogatory
way: for him, art came easy, or it didn’t come at all. This was an attitude, a
practice, a way of being in the world that he carefully cultivated and
developed.
Kiarostami never stuck to one path, whether in the
film industry (nationally or globally), or in the art world. He claimed the
freedom to wander from short films to feature films, from photographs to poems,
from theatrical productions to conceptual gallery installations, from the big
cinema screen to the small computer screen via the TV set. As I have heard from
frustrated producers, he often entertained but then nimbly walked away from
projects in their early planning stages, the moment that conditions did not
feel to him entirely right or free …
After being acclaimed, by the time of The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), as the
great cinema humanist on the prestigious festival trail of Cannes-Venice-Toronto-etc,
he headed off, unconcerned with this reputation, into more hermetic and
abstract investigations, for almost a full decade. (9) Finding himself always described
as the neo-neo-realist of our time probably pushed him into making Certified Copy, a deliriously fictive
fancy with a big European star, Juliette Binoche. He wanted to show his
“professional” hand, directing actors and constructing a true mise en scène to die for. It is among
the great films of the 2010s.
He deliberately ended his final completed feature film
production, Like Someone in Love (2012) shot in Japan, with an abrupt cut, still in the middle of the
story-events: even more brutally than in the sublime Taste of Cherry, he announced to us, in this fashion, that the film
was simply over, and that we needed to find our own transition between its
artificial construction and our daily, lived reality. The links were always
there for each of us to discover, as he himself never ceased searching for and
discovering them. (A posthumous, somewhat patched-up work followed in 2017: 24 Frames, another conceptual piece in a
digital format, disappointingly uneven in its execution and inspiration.)
In a sense, many of Kiarostami’s works, in whichever
medium he alighted upon (poetry, photography, film), had an off-hand,
impulsive, seemingly unworked quality. He liked to remove himself as much as
possible from his creations, making himself just another spectator, not the
privileged artist-controller-master, simply a discoverer of the result on par
with any other viewer: the dashboard-mounted digital camera on the driver and
passengers in Ten marked the height
of this tendency. Whenever a critic presented him with a reading of his work,
however fanciful or removed from his own thoughts and intentions, he was
delighted (as very few filmmakers are, I assure you): the piece didn’t belong
to him any longer, and it was the task, the pleasure, of all of us to use the
fragments he offered in order to spin our own stories, forge our own
perceptions of the world.
Of course, there is work, profound work, underneath Kiarostami’s productions in all media. But the
exercise of his capacity for art-making came, as he once described it, from
practising the act of seeing – with
his eyes, firstly, and only then through some representational apparatus such
as a camera. Kiarostami’s laziness – tales abound, not only of his ability to
casually walk away from projects in which he quickly lost interest before the
first contracts were signed, but also the “squandering” of his best ideas by
simply speaking and not writing them down, musing to his friends, assistants
and colleagues as he travelled from one location to another – is a kind of
openness, an availability to the
world.
What he learned to see, to notice, could then be
immortalised, swiftly and effortlessly, in the framing of a photo or the
composition of a poem. That was the gesture he trained himself to perform. Aesthetic time was, for Kiarostami, a matter of
captured moments. And what marvellous moments, dispersed across the globe, he
has left us with!
1. See the Film
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