Silence is not a quality beholden to most conjurers and receivers of present-day cinema, nor is sublime musings on Nature and man’s attempts to mediate with it.
This is where the Iranian New Wave has crucially filled a void, entrancing audiences seeking ‘meaningful cinema’. The Iranian movement has cemented its place after the post-war waves of the French, Italian, East European, the Soviet and Japanese Cinema have all but ebbed following the end of the Cold War.
It is common consensus that noone has done more than Abbas Kiarostami, who passed away Tuesday aged 77, to single-handedly bring Iranian cinema to world audiences, something which Youssef Chahine did for Egypt and Arab cinema in the 1950s and 60s.
His films, armed with silence and infused with metaphysical poetry, effortlessly, almost clinically, demolished clichéd US myths about Iran as a warmongering State only peopled by demented Khomeini-like Mullahs to unveil its humane side.
It was Kiarostami, more than anyone, who fashioned for Iranian cinema its near-mythical poetic humanism – right from their unique, mystical Rumi-like titles taken from the work of the country’s foremost contemporary poets.
His classic Koker trilogy (referring to the name of the village in Northern Iran) - Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (1992), Through the Olive Trees (1994) - was doing ecstatic art-house rounds at a time when the Western mainstream celluloid was throwing up wildly overrated ‘feel-good humanisms’ like Forrest Gump and The Shawshank Redemption (both 1994).
In his skilful use of non-actors in his films, Kiarostami dons the mantle of the great humanistic film tradition exemplified by Italian neo-realists like de Sica and Rossellini and Frenchmen Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati. It is to Tati that Kiarostami’s “children-centric” films, imbued with gentle humour, are often compared to.
Most importantly, Kiarostami resurrected, Lazarus-like, the child’s place to the centre of the film while permeating his work with a deep Middle Eastern philosophy which melds with Western formal film-making styles. One reason is that after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Kiarostami chose to remain in his country, unlike many of his contemporaries. His preoccupation with children led to his founding the film department of the institute for the Intellectual development of Children and Young Adults (known as Kanun).
His very first film, a 12-minute short he made in 1970 titled, The Bread and Alley endearingly tells of a young boy, who trying to make his way home with a loaf of bread, is accosted with a vicious dog who bars his way. While renewing the focus on children, he subtly devalued the primacy of the director from a position of all-encompassing authority to that of an ordinary character, having him commingle with ordinary citizens as they navigate through the conundrum called Life.
This is particularly striking in And Life Goes On , the second film in his Koker trilogy, which is a semi-fictional account of the meandering journey a film director and his son undertake to reach Koker in the immediate aftermath of the tragic 1990 Iran earthquake.
Like his masterpiece Close-Up (1990), the film underscores the ever-present tension between documentary and fictional narrative which is seasoned with Kiarostami’s overarching philosophical vision.
The superlative Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), whose title itself is derived from a poem by the great Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri, tells the deceptively simple story of a sincere schoolboy’s Odyssey to return his friend’s notebook in a neighbouring village, failing which his friend risks being expelled.
Expressive shot composition is a vital element of Kiarostami’s ouvre, conveying the humour, the poetry and the philosophical dilemmas faced by the characters in his films.
Note the zigzag shot motifs which pervade Where is the Friend’s Home? indicating the many physical and spiritual turns the child has to take in order to find his friend. Similarly, Mr. Badii who is traversing the hilly roads in Taste of Cherry is looking for someone to bury him. In Life and Nothing More …, the filmmaker has to find two children who acted in his previous film and takes many a twisting path amid the ravages of the quake.
Reviewing the Koker trilogy, American critic Jonathan Rosenblaum of the Chicago Reader memorably summarized Kiarostami’s cinema as “sustained meditations on singular landscapes and the way ordinary people live in them.”
Kiarostami paved the path for younger directors like Jafar Panahi and Majid Majidi, who have refined his warmth in their breakthrough ventures like The White Balloon (1995), Children of Heaven (1998) and the heart-rending Baran (2001).
‘Creative audience participation’ forms another critical facet of his films, especially informed by his recurrent use of the black screen.
This is evinced In The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), where the young village girl is milking the cow while the hero is reciting the poetry of the iconoclastic Forough Farrokhzad, and in A.B.C. Africa (2001), where the blank screen is only punctuated by Kiarostami’s talking and the first image, delayed for a long time, reveals itself in form of a lightning bolt which lights up a view of trees only for a second.
Likewise, Close Up drives the audience to think and interpret the reality and truth for themselves with Kiarostami deliberately undercutting the dramatic flow of the storyline by shifting to the opinions of minor characters whose lives are not considered dramatic or important.
The film, about a simple man who impersonates film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is in the transcendent humanist tradition of the works of Satyajit Ray. Kiarostami alloys fact with fiction in such a way that it is impossible to separate the two.
This ambiguity has spurred schismatic critical divisions which still dog his masterpiece A Taste of Cherry ever since it caused much brouhaha at Cannes in 1997, where Kiarostami was given a standing ovation.
The film has provoked lively discussion owing chiefly to its near-notorious ending, which deliberately leaves the ‘motive’ behind Badii’s suicide so very open-ended, urging the audience to form its own opinions.
Interestingly, obituary notices in the American media still wrangled about inanities with some critics stating that Kiarostami had only two full-fledged masterpieces.
Such hacks failed to grab the import of Iran’s cinematic renaissance man whose most enthusiastic Western champions have always been the French.
It is not for nothing that the startling Jean-luc Godard, ever the penetrating critic, paid the most eloquent tribute when he said: “Film begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.”
