One of the most famous images of the history of art is a self portrait of the artist at work. It shows the painter Velázquez and the little princesses, the “meninas”, with her playmates in a salon at the Spanish royal court. Velázquez, with a long mane and elegant mustache, looks searchingly out of the picture, to where there is the subject of his unfinished painting. Who is there, reveals a mirror in the back of the room: It is Philip, the King of Spain, with his wife. So we see what the artist sees – and at the same time, what those he considered, behold, while he paints them: the whole story of vision in a single image
If you wanted to do the work of the Iranian film director and writer Abbas Kiarostami roughly shortening a term, one would have to say he was the Velázquez of modern cinema. As no one else since the invention of the medium Kiarostami won the game of seeing and being seen, the conflict between appearance and reality, which is the essence of the filmic, adopted a series of compelling images and scenes in an image.
the confession, which he retained until then
the film, in which he succeeded in what is Truffaut, Fellini and all the others are only half succeeded, called “through the olive grove”, and he playing in a godforsaken village in the mountains of northern Iran. A director of Tehran making a film about the survivors of the earthquake in 1990, where a loving couple, Hossein and Tahereh, is the focus. The actor Hossein proves miscast why another man, a mason, his place occupies. He also named Hossein, and he loves the actress who Tahereh who rejects him because he is not rich enough to her grandmother, the only other survivor of the family. The director begins to be interested in the romantic drama, he ensures that Hossein is alone with the girl, and with his eyes we see the final scene, in which the mason his sweetheart can finally make the confession he retained until then has, and she gives him an answer that we do not understand, because between us and inside an olive grove. The shooting is over. In the film within a film, the two become a couple. In reality, the fiction everything is still open.
More about
Kiarostami was with this film, how satisfied with almost all that he made, not, he found that he himself would have to play in order to authenticate the story the part of the director. But if there is a love story in which the image of magic and the inner workings of cinema undimmed appear as those of the theater in “Romeo and Juliet”, it’s “Through the Olive Grove”, this quietest of all cinematic masterpieces.
Forty days working on a scene
the village Koker, in which the story takes place, had Kiarostami discovered in 1987 during the research for his film “Where is the friend’s home?”, that of the search a boy told after his schoolmates in the neighboring town. Four years later he returned to Koker to rotate that docudrama about the consequences of the earthquake, where his alter ego in “olive grove” works. In 1999 he went again into the mountains, this time in a Kurdish village where he “The wind will carry us” staged, a parable about the death and the beauty of everyday life on the edge of the inhabited world. Both belonged to Kiarostami together; since the encounter with the earthquake victims, he once said, was he can not stop thinking about dying.
His awakening experience had Kiarostami 1970, when he made his first short film “Bread and after years as commercial director and designer Gasse “recorded. The cameraman tried to break up a scene in which a boy is bitten by a dog, in single takes. Kiarostami insisted they rotate in a setting to be closer to the action. Work on the scene lasted forty days but her director had her figured out a way to subvert the traditional rhetoric of cinema. From then on he was on camera away everything prevented him from self-examination as to the unconditional exploration of reality.
Bring a window
There are no sets, no costumes and special effects with Kiarostami, and yet one can not get a surprise out. Two of his films, “Ten” and “Taste of Cherry”, playing almost entirely in cars. The first is about a divorced woman, the other by a suicide, and two you can learn more about life in Iran, as we dared to hope. At the same time, each of these films is a lesson about a standstill and movement in the cinema, about what you have to show, and what you can conceal. Other directors have taken this lesson: Jafar Panahi, the symbol of the Iranian film was Kiarostami’s assistant and two of his screenplays adapted. In Panahi’s work the views of his teacher lives on.
That Kiarostami was not only a great director, but also a great poet and reader, can be felt in many moments of his films. One of the best comes from “The wind will carry us.” When the photographer Dourani, the main character of the film, descends into a dark cellar to the woman waiting there to bring a message of her lover, he recites a poem of the Persian poet Forough Farrokhzad: “When you come into my house, lover , / bring with a lamp and a window / so I can see the happy people on the street. “
the house is quiet now, sounding verses as a grave inscription. On Monday Abbas Kiarostami died sechsundsiebzigjährig in Paris after a long illness.
No comments:
Post a Comment