Cinematic
Deathscapes: Mortality, Memory, and Meaning in Kiarostami's Cinema
Saurav Chattopadhyay
Independent Researcher
Delhi, India
&
Mandana Kolahdouz Mohammadi
Department of English Literature,
Translation Studies and Linguistics
Payam-e Noor University, Iran
Abstract: Abbas Kiarostami
(1940–2016) was a great Iranian cinematic artist and poet whose work spanned
the time period of about fifty years and created a special reality through
which death was not understood as a subject but as an atmosphere that composed
the essence of his ideas and gave his movies their peculiar heaviness and
brightness. The authors of this paper claim that Kiarostami devised what can be
described as a ‘cinema of thresholds’ – a method for delivering themes related
to mortality, dying, memory, and mourning in a way that departs from common
melodramatic paradigms of world cinema. Rather, Kiarostami’s approach
epitomizes the employment of ellipsis, the use of time, the evocation of
landscapes, and the questioning of reality.
Using close readings of the films Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987),
Life and Nothing More (1992), Through the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry
(1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), along with his later works such as
Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012), and the present work
investigates four interconnected thematic-formal complexes: the road as a path
to existential goals; the landscape as a repository of memory; the gaze and its
ethical role in witnessing; and the ambiguity of the philosophy Kiarostami
incorporates into his films. Placing Kiarostami in the context of film theories,
Iranian culture after the revolution, and world art films, the article reaches
the conclusion that Kiarostami has contributed to making a new language of
human finitude possible by denying any comfort, while at the same time artfully
insisting on the existence of life.
Keywords: Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian cinema, mortality,
landscape, memory, ellipsis, threshold cinema, phenomenology of film, Taste of
Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us.
I. Introduction:
Death as Atmosphere
Abbas Kiarostami once said that films that
are never finished are more than the finished ones because life itself is also
never finished. This kind of statement can be described as rather ambiguous —
it seems to be humble and at the same time it is somehow revolutionary. That is
how the main idea of Kiarostami's great career is formulated. For him,
incompleteness is not a problem but a method. This is the way how Kiarostami
makes sure that what absent is felt. And this strategy is well illustrated by
how he portrays death.
This paper analyses Kiarostami’s “cinematic
deathscapes” — a combination of the formal elements, narrative patterns, and
philosophical angles through which his films deal with death, dying, memory,
and grief. There are three components in our argument. First, Kiarostami
creates cinema on the verge of life and death, presence and absence, the real
and the unreal. Second, he does not see the landscape as a mere background. The
landscape serves as a mnemonic archive where the dead remain alive. The third
point is that uncertainties and ellipses are not signs of inadequacy in
Kiarostami’s cinema but philosophical statements.
Through careful examinations of key films across three
decades, from the Koker trilogy of his early works to his European films in the
latter part of his career. The paper also examines Kiarostami in relation to
wider intellectual currents surrounding cinema: the phenomenological tradition
of film theory from Merleau-Ponty to Vivian Sobchack; the particular conditions
of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, which embodies a difficult balancing act
between artistic aspiration and governmental censorship; and the traditions of
international art cinema, particularly those of Rossellini and Bergman, to whom
Kiarostami was constantly compared and whose influences he assimilated.
What
will result eventually is an image of a director who sees death not as an end
but as a kind of continuity. His films pull no punches with respect to death,
but, rather, find beauty in it, which helps them cope with this subject.
II. The Road and the Threshold: Existential Passage in the Koker
Trilogy
Film has often relied on the metaphor of the road in representing the journey of life. Yet for Kiarostami, the road provides a sense of paranoia and discomfort; it is no longer associated with adventure or self-discovery, but rather becomes the site of the battle against death and the limits of human capability. This is best demonstrated in the Koker trilogy — Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Life and Nothing More (1992), and Through the Olive Trees (1994)—where the same roads situated in the northern hills of Iran are used to engage in the discourse of survival, memory, and continuity of everyday life in the midst of catastrophes.
Where Is the Friend's Home? was made
three years prior to the catastrophic Manjil-Rudbar earthquake, and looking
back, one wonders if the film should actually be regarded as a documentary of a
civilization that was about to vanish or not? The protagonist of the film, boy
Ahmad, travels through a recognizable and detailed world consisting of stone
walls, olive trees, and mountains. However, the structure of the film suggests
a sort of threshold logic. Ahmad crosses the distance between two villages at
dusk, trying to return a notebook belonging to one of his classmates. The
journey itself is straightforward, but the meaning is complex. Kiarostami's
framing choices show us the boy inside a car or from outside its window. These
shots also allow the viewer to see Ahmad as a vulnerable figure who is small
against the background of the gigantic indifferent world.
By the time Life and Nothing More
(1992) was produced, Koker was only a pile of stones following the earthquake.
The film's plot is about a director who drives through the areas hit by the
disaster in search of the child actors of Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987) and this blurs the
line between fiction and documentary. Kiarostami's finding, which he manages to
capture through his film, is that life goes on in the world full of death. His
characters still live normal life, get married, cook, and discuss the
television antenna in a manner that can be described as either brave or
unconscious. The film avoids sentimentalizing its content; it simply shows the
events as they are.
The third movie, Through the Olive
Trees (1994), adds an extra level of fiction to the already intricate levels of
reality: it presents the process of filmmaking regarding the consequences of
the earthquake with actors impersonating the actors. The elements of a film
with actors impersonating the actors are present. The film is closely related
to death, which was behind the story events and was caused by the earthquake;
however, it is not portrayed on-screen, instead being represented as an absence
in ruined houses seen through the car windows, as well as casual references to
family members lost and Hossein’s loving attempts of dating a girl who lost
everybody in her family.
The idea of liminality is the key to
understanding the films of Kiarostami. The characters of Kiarostami are always
in the process of moving from one place to another. The presence of the notion
of liminality is visible in all his works. The element of car as a liminal
space is ever-present in Kiarostami's films. His characters exist in a constant
state of transition, never really settled, always travelling from one location
to another, from one state to another. One might argue that the car, which
appears in nearly all of his films, symbolizes this sort of life of being in
transit: a safe but still mobile place which is at the same time small yet
never stationary. He portrays his characters in different situations, in this
“car” setting - they confess their love to somebody, fight or argue with him or
her, keep silent or deeply think about something while looking out of the window.
The idea of the threshold- an
intermediate space between two states of being- bodes well for an analysis of
cinematographic techniques used by Kiarostami. His characters find themselves
constantly in motion, never reaching their destination, perpetually between one
location and the other, between one state of being and another one. In this
respect, the car, serving as a special space in almost every film, represents
the idea of threshold existence quite vividly. It is mobile, confined yet
provides intimate interactions in motion. By using this unique space, the
characters share their secrets, quarrel, keep silence, and face the realities
of their own lives with its help. Car's windscreen works like a metafilmic
screen that connects the inner world of a human being to the beauty of the
external world.
According to film theorist Hamid
Naficy, Kiarostami’s film work is part of the category called “accented cinema”
where motion pictures depict themes involving exile, displacement, and
transitory experiences. Although Kiarostami spent most of his creative life in
Iran, the themes of his films reveal concerns about things like death and life
to mention only one of them. In Kiarostami’s films, travel does not bring
liberation but alienation since one experience the deep rift between life and
eternal nothingness right on the road.
III. Taste of Cherry: Suicide, Ethics, and the Will to
Continue
Within Kiarostami's career, no other
film can be considered to deal with the issue of death more intensely than
Taste of Cherry (1997), his masterpiece that won the Palme d'Or award. The
storyline is an extremely simple one: an elderly man called Badii is driving
through the desolate area of Tehran in search of a person who would agree to
bury him after he takes away his own life. The film can chiefly be described as
a storyline about Badii who meets three potential assistants: a young Kurdish
soldier, an Afghan student, and a Turkish taxidermist, who give him very
different answers to his request. Finally, the film is closed with the scene
where the night comes when Badii lies on his grave, but then Badii appears on
the footage made by the film crew, and all the actors are shown in their modern
clothes.
The critical reception of Taste of
Cherry was immediately preoccupied with its moral dimensions. Some read the
film as a defense of suicide's legitimacy; others as a profound argument for
life; still others as a deliberate refusal to adjudicate. This last reading is
closest to Kiarostami's own stated view — he described the film as a question,
not an answer – and it illuminates the film's deeper philosophical project. By
constructing a film in which we never witness the suicide (if it occurs), never
know Badii's motivation, which are denied a final resolution, Kiarostami places
the ethical and existential weight of the film on the viewer. We are put in the
position of the three men in the car: confronted with a request we may not be
able to fulfill, compelled to articulate our reasons for living or for refusing
to assist with dying.
The film's scenery is core to its
point. The hills surrounding Tehran are parched, colored tawny and grey, scored
by tiremarks; they appear to be a wasteland where life has either already been
snuffed out or never existed. But on this apparently deserted site, Kiarostami
produces little moments of illumination: a mulberry tree by the roadside, the
taste of a cherry in light, a worm crawling out from the soil after the rain.
What he does here is not the kind of philosophical argument but the evidence
that senses need in order to counter the suicidal wish.
Laura Mulvey claims that cinema's
relation to death is essential since the basis of film is photographic and
hence involves some form of embalming (the preservation of something that is
already lost). Kiarostami directly engages this claim in the film Taste of
Cherry and the ontology of the film becomes part of its subject. In the final
sequence, which is video and documentary and filled with the elements of
chance, the film presents a contrast with the clear images preceding it and
indicates that whatever we just watched has already been a death in some way.
Thus, the return to video means the formal resurrection, which does not bring
resolution to the film's concerns but only puts emphasis on them. The questions
of whether Badii is alive or dead remain unanswered, and we are well aware of
the fact that the film survived and so have the viewers.
Through more
indirect means, the film also engages with the particular realities of dying in
Iran after the revolution. The world of derelict factories and building sites
which Badii drives through is surely a world of sophistication and displacement
— a world being reconstructed at great human cost. The three men he meets
represent marginalized populations: a Kurdish conscript, an Afghan immigrant,
and a Turkish worker, and their attitude towards Badii's request is a
reflection of their positions in a society which has borne the brunt of war,
displacement, and survival. Kiarostami does not interpret these realities
overtly, as the film is not a work of realist cinema in the strict sense, but
these realities are nevertheless part of the texture of the film.
IV. The Wind Will Carry
Us: Waiting, the Rural, and Ethics of Witnessing
In the event that Taste of Cherry
poses the query of whether human existence is worthwhile, The Wind Will Carry
Us (1999) puts forth a connected but unique inquiry: what duties must we
fulfill in the face of dying, in addition to how such duties influence the
lives of individuals who await? The movie’s central character, a member of a
film crew dubbed “the Engineer”, makes the journey to a remote Kurdish village
high in the mountains with the purpose of capturing the passing of an old lady
on film, however when he reaches the place, the lady does not die. He simply
has to wait, and the shooting of the film captures this waiting process
exactly.
The Wind Will Carry Us revolves around
a lot of postponements. Every time the Engineer gets a phone call summoning him
somewhere that may have significance, he rushes to a hilltop to get a phone
signal, only to return back from the meeting unchanged. The movie is all about
the juxtaposition of waiting with arriving and dealing with the story one came
to watch with the fact that life keeps getting in the way. Kiarostami makes a
metacinematic point with the film, and what he is doing is questioning the
meaning of shooting a film.
The village itself serves as a
palimpsest of sorts, a site that is crawling with history and with the specter
of all the dead. The Engineer goes where young Farzad guides him in the village
— to the ditch where a man is digging, to the sick woman’s house, etc. — and
each place has the weight of death on it. The ditch where a man is digging (for
a telephone cable, as we later learn, but even now we suspect it is a grave)
serves as a metaphor that recurs throughout the film; something is buried and
something is dug; the line between connection and burial gets blurred.
The title of the film is taken from
the poem by the Iranian modernist poet Forough Farrokhzad The Wind Will
Carry Us, which Kiarostami quotes in the film. One of the scenes shows the
engineer going down to the dark cellar of a dairy where a young woman is
milking a cow and reciting the poem to her in the dark. The poem reflects on
the impermanence of life and our longing for it; the short-lived human
relations contrasted with the lasting indifference of the world. In the
film, The Wind Will Carry Us, the poetic presence continues the Iranian
tradition of lyrics where love and mortality are always intertwined, showing
that Kiarostami's work, in any of its forms, is in line with the traditions of
classical Persian literature.
One of the film's central themes is
the ethics of seeing. The Engineer is a documentary filmmaker who comes to the
village to record, observe and use death as raw material for his work.
Kiarostami conveys irony: throughout the film, the Engineer is impatient with
the old woman who refuses to cooperate with him; treating the villagers merely
as background for his documentary work is somehow violent.
V. Landscape as Memory:
Death Memory in Kiarostami's Terrain
In the filmography of Kiarostami,
landscape plays the role of memory rather than simply of a background. It is
memory because it contains all the traces of what has happened in that
landscape. This is most clearly visible in the Koker films where the same roads
and hills appear in the different films of the same filmmaker. But, at the same
time, it is a principle that works in other films of Kiarostami. It allows him
to be one of the representatives of a long tradition of thinking on landscape
and death that can be traced back to Romanticism and the cinema of neorealism
right after World War II.
W. J. T. Mitchell, a theorist of
landscape and memory, maintained that landscape painting — and therefore
landscape cinema — is fundamentally ideological work, meaning that it serves to
render a historical situation natural. Kiarostami, however, uses landscape
differently, not naturalizing but alienating it. His Iranian landscape
emphasizes the fact that human efforts to change it through the construction of
roads, terraces, and olive groves always fail and that the landscape is slowly
yet surely regaining its natural form. Among all elements of Kiarostami's
landscape, the roads are probably the most important one. The filmmaker’s
famous zigzags represent not just a beautiful visual construction, but rather a
topological idea of how distance is measured.
The roads that meander through the
hills in Koker represent one of the most evocative landscape features.
Kiarostami’s famous zigzag patterns— roads that switchback on hillsides that
can be seen from different degrees—are not just visually appealing (although
they certainly are). They are topological theories: they indicate that the
distance between two points is not a straight line, that the journey of one’s
life is one that loops back, and that any step forward is also a return.
Therefore, the boy walking on this road in Where Is the Friend’s Home? is
already on the way to the earthquake, to destruction and to the circumstances
that will create the next two movies.
Trees are another memory landscape
device used by Kiarostami. Through the Olive Trees is about olive trees;
Taste of Cherry also features mulberry trees, and in his later photos we
can see cherry trees. They represent living beings that are older than
generations of people; they also preserve the history of every incident in
their rings that cannot be recalled by any human being. In the movie Taste of
Cherry, when the taxidermist tells Badii that he once stood on the edge of a
cliff, thinking about taking his life, but was amazed by the beauty around him,
it is true.
Among the
various mnemonic elements used in Kiarostami's films, the wind could be the
most delicate one. Although it may be completely invisible to observers, it
helps memory to travel from the past to the present time. Just think about the
poem that the engineer reads in a dark room or the sounds of breathing in a
still landscape. Hence, the idea is that the wind is a carrier of memories
because it is incapable of being touched or seen; it comes and leaves something
behind on the way.
VI. Ellipsis, Ambiguity,
and the Philosophy of Unseen
One of the most observed
characteristics of Kiarostami's cinema is the purposeful application of
ellipsis - the exclusion of information, which is usually revealed according to
the traditional narrative pattern, from the movie. For instance, Kiarostami
does not depict the dead from the earthquake, nor does he show Mr. Badii's
death or survival. Instead, he does not show the dying woman in The Wind Will
Carry Us. He also does not complete the story of love in Through the Olive
Trees.
According to philosopher Stanley
Cavell, who has provided Kiarostami with one of the most enriching theoretical
approaches for his work, cinema is capable of presenting reality from behind
the screen – making it seemingly real, tangible, and yet inaccessible. He
considers this Cinematic condition as a metaphor for human cognition. There is
no way for people to know what other people think, whether their perceptions
match reality or not. Kiarostami builds his filmic works using this Cavellian
notion. By leaving viewers in the dark about what actually happened, he makes
them experience what it is like to be a person left alone after the tragedy:
grieving, missed and bereaved.
The epistemological project at hand
carries specific formal indications. Most significantly, Kiarostami’s films are
particularly sparse on exposition, as they provide no backstory or
familiarization with motivation and fail to establish a clear causal link
between events. For instance, we have no idea why Mr. Badii wishes to die; we
also cannot say whether Hossein’s love for Tahereh in Through the Olive Trees
would have a positive answer; and we are not able to tell if the Engineer will
succeed in filming what he set out to film in The Wind Will Carry Us. This is
not a failure of the narrative type but a philosophical statement for the films
asserts that the inner human life is truly impenetrable.
Kiarostami's last films, which he made
after his relocation to Europe, deepen his cinematic philosophy. The film Certified
Copy (2010), starring Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, is an elaborate
formal game revolving around the themes of authenticity and imitation. The
protagonists meet as strangers but by the end of a brief afternoon they seem to
have transformed into a couple with years of history behind them; or they may
have always been a couple and the whole stranger plot is a game they play. The
film does not resolve this ambiguity, thus making the problem of mortality the
underlying theme of the story: the possible success of the marriage is, like
any other relationship, determined by the passage of time, which is the basis
of both love and death. The title refers to the question of whether a certified
copy of a work of art can be of equal value as the original, but also to the
way memories copy and adjust perception.
Similar
themes are depicted in Like Someone in Love (2012), a film set in Japan. A
professor who is old and studying memory, a young female escort, and her
jealous boyfriend go through a big misunderstanding in which characters attempt
to label each other. The film ends abruptly during a catastrophic moment.
Kiarostami remains cryptic concerning the ending event; in his belief, the
length leading up to the final event is what matters.
VII. Poetry, Image, and
the Lyric of Finitude
Kiarostami is famous for being not
only a filmmaker but also a poet, whose poetic material presented in the
collection of poetry Walking with the Wind (2001) and A Wolf Lying in Wait
(2005) serves as a great companion to his films. His poetry is concise and
imagistic and embodies the same ideas that are presented in his films — namely,
the notion of presence and absence; the ideas of everyday; and the matter of
world persistence after loss. Being acquainted with both his poems and films,
it is easy to see that Kiarostami was simultaneously working in two different
mediums of art, which had different visions of the issues of time and
mortality.
Film, as André Bazin pointed out, is
“mummification of change”; it keeps the past forever trapped in the amber of
photographic time, thus presenting a presence in the form of something that is
actually already an absence. Poetry, on the other hand - and especially the
compressed poetic form of classical Persian and modern Persian poetry that
Kiarostami functioned in, is engaged in another activity. In poetry, the moment
is compressed into the essential image, with the narrative and context stripped
from the image, leaving only the pure feeling. In merging these two forms
together - using lyric moments instead of a narrative basis for his films -
Kiarostami creates a cinema that is both a photographic image and a poetic
image at the same time.
The translation of one of his major poems has the
following lines: “I asked my heart / why did it feel love / It said: / I am
afraid of silence / that could emerge / if it stops.” This verse might appear
as an epigraph for the entire movie-making. The fear of silence and loneliness
drives the love-stricken person as well as a movie maker. Making films means to
deny the emergence of silence, assuring the existence of the world despite the
knowledge of its temporary nature. However, silence is always present, in the
empty gaps between the shots, in the voids made by ellipses.
The visual poetry of Kiarostami, just
like his written poetry, expects to incorporate elements of humanity in the
non-human reality. Through his series of photographic works, which consists of
photos depicting both snow and tire tracks, Kiarostami manages to demonstrate
some landscapes that were designed by the presence of the body which is not
present anymore – the paths travelled, the snow pressed, the invisible weight
of human being left into the imprint of its presence – and thus the result is a
series of elegaic vision of ordinary activities of life that are reflected
after the completed time.
VIII. Kiarostami’s
Cinema of Mortality within Broader Contexts
When examining the cinema of death
created by Kiarostami, it is necessary to pay attention to three major
backgrounds, which all have overlapping characteristics: the specific history
of post-revolutionary cinema of Iran; the tradition of international art
cinema, where the director was constantly working in relationship with various
topics; and the phenomenological cinema theory, which provides perhaps the most
sophisticated terminology for the analysis of Kiarostami’s filmmaking style.
Post-revolutionary cinema of Iran
developed under a regime characterized by heavy censorship and strict
ideological rules, which normally leads people to either propaganda or silence.
However, what happened in fact was much more complicated and surprising —
Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Panahi, Rasoulof and other filmmakers gained productive
experience from the given restrictions and gained their own unique voice in
film production. Being unable to show adult female in their performances
wearing hijabs; depicting acts of violence; or providing the representation of
sexuality, Iranian filmmakers resorted to metaphors, allegories and worked with
the characters’ expressions. The filmmaking approach used by Kiarostami, which
prefers unseen, abstained and implied characters, can be viewed as a reaction
to the situation when the limitations became a means of creating philosophy.
In order to place Kiarostami’s films of dying within the
scope of his cinematic influences, we must consider at least three different,
yet interrelated contexts: specifically, the historical background of
post-revolution Iranian cinema, the heritage of the global movement of art cinema
to which Kiarostami belongs, and phenomenological film theory which gives us
the best understanding of forms in his films.
Iranian cinema after the revolution
was formed under severe censorship and ideological restrictions which could
have meant reduced possibilities for artistic expression. The opposite,
however, is true: Kiarostami along with most of his contemporaries managed to
find ways to mold their expressive style despite these restrictions. The
Iranian filmmakers suddenly found themselves being much better story-tellers
since they turned to their ability to suggest their ideas through living
images. Kiarostami’s works are characterized by meaning suggestion and
suggestion, which is a direct result of the existing censorship.
The global art film tradition —
Rossellini, Bergman, Antonioni, Tati — gave Kiarostami the model of duration,
landscape and existential questioning in cinema. His link to Rossellini in this
respect is significant, because both pursued the interest in the consequences of
catastrophe, in what remains of everyday life following the disaster and how
different techniques of documentary filmmaking and fiction filmmaking blur the
boundaries between these two styles. Kiarostami admitted this influence and
understood his undertaking as a continuation of neorealism in all of its
aspects — not surface reality but the reality of time.
From a phenomenological standpoint,
Kiarostami’s film work can be best understood in light of Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology, especially in the interpretation of his works made by Vivian
Sobchack in The Address of the Eye. According to Sobchack, cinema is not simply
an image of reality, but rather a specific way of functioning in reality. In
the case of Kiarostami’s films this investment is very obvious, as the camera
moves through the space as a body.
The concept
of “transcorporeality” developed by Stacy Alaimo — the way in which the human
body is inextricably linked with the nonhuman world, transforming both human
beings and the environment — serves as another meaningful way of interpreting
Kiarostami's landscape cinema. The characters in Kiarostami's films are not
separate from their environment, but are created out of the same natural
elements and shaped by the influences of the same natural forces acting on
them. When Mr. Badii rests in the grave he has dug for himself, he does not
distance himself from the world around him but instead recognizes his
entanglement.
IX. The Late Films and
the Archive of Loss
During his last years, Kiarostami made
fewer films but kept producing photographs, digital videos, and installation
works, thus extending his inquiry on death into new territory in terms of form.
His digital videos are either silent or consist of long takes of winter
landscape or night roadside and have brought to its limits his cinema of
duration, resulting in works situated at the boundary between films and
meditation.
Five (2003) which is dedicated to Ozu
consists of several long takes featuring a beach: waves, dogs, ducks gathering
together, moon rising in still water, and darkness. There are no narrative
lines, no characters, and no dialogues in it. The world presented on its own
terms and time is what remains, and the slow accumulation of light, movement
and sound makes up the “life of things,” as Kiarostami called it. The
dedication of Kiarostami to Ozu is of great importance since both directors
were concerned with the phenomenon of ordinary life rituals, the use of
duration to demonstrate moral attitude of a filmmaker, and the idea of cinematography
as mourning for the dead.
Ten (2002),
filmed using a small digital camera attached to a car's dashboard, captures
numerous dialogues between an individual and a variety of travelers during many
days. One of those exchanges is with an old lady who visited a holy site;
another one features a girl who lost her boyfriend and cut her hair. The
conversations pertain to issues of loss and dealing with its consequences. The
film's minimalism in two cameras at fixed positions and no crew is a message of
the film — this is cinema in its essence.
According to
Shirin (2008), there is an even more significant degree of the use of the
cinematic medium: the story of the film is about a group of women watching a
film. In this sense, the focus is on the audience watching the film instead of
on what the film shows. The subject of the film is described by the author as
the one of death, the one explaining how the cinema enables the viewers to
experience and reflect upon the relationship between the living people and the
deceased.
X. Conclusion: The
Grammar of Finitude
Abbas Kiarostami passed away in Paris
on July 4, 2016, due to complications from surgery for gastrointestinal cancer.
He was 76. Until shortly before his death, he had been working — taking
photographs, writing poetry, teaching, preparing new films. His last finished
film, Like Someone in Love, had been released four years earlier. This ending
is extremely Kiarostami-like — open-ended, unclear, with the job still ongoing
at the time of the end.
The movies that he has produced are
among the most comprehensive studies of death in global history. Kiarostami’s
work, which spans five decades from the short films created in the Kanoon phase
to the Koker trilogy, the movie Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, the
films made later in Europe, and his works created using the digital techniques,
pursued the unique approach to illustrate the fact that humans will die one
day, which cannot be found in any other films.
In this paper, the authors tracked the
four main features of this discourse: The road as life’s journey, the world as
memory holder, the gaze with a moral dimension, and the usefulness of doubt.
However, these categories, even though informative, failed to reflect what it
really means to see Kiarostami’s movies, which is always an experience, one
might say, of something not that specific: the special form of attention or
care or even tenderness. Indeed, Kiarostami’s camera treats the world it films
with tenderness: faces of non-professional actors, dust on the road, light on
the river’s surface, or even simple acts of life, which should be considered as
acts of survival.
His poetry is much less translated and
analyzed compared to his films, yet it may be said that it is the most explicit
manifestation of the aforementioned truth. In one of his final poems, the
author mentions that he has been observing the movement of a worm along the wet
ground after the rain, and motionless, he understood the idea of the importance
of persistence in life. The picture itself seems simple, while the idea behind
it is profound. This idea is reflected in all his works: the world is full of
lives trying to survive, and death is not the end but a way of being, and in
this case, one's feeling cannot be called sadness or joy, rather it represents
something in-between.
While formulating his cinema of
finitude, Kiarostami also proposed his reasoning behind the purpose of cinema.
He was against two extremes—the bravado of Hollywood cinema and the didactic
tone of political documentaries. Using concepts that are contrary to both of
these practices, Kiarostami offers a cinema of presence—a cinema that gives
itself time to contemplate, does not hurriedly pass through irreversible
events, and marks watching as the process of sorrow and love. Such
understanding of cinema remains with us. This is not the set of techniques or
philosophical doctrine; it simply shows how one should be present in this
world, knowing that the present is inevitably disappearing. The wind carries us. The taste of cherry
remains. The road curves back up the hill, and somewhere on it, a small figure
continues to climb.
Works Cited
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and
the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010.
Bazin, André. “The
Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What
Is Cinema? Vol. 1, translated by Hugh Gray, U of California P, 1967, pp.
9–16.
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the
Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed., Harvard UP, 1979.
Farrokhzad, Forough. Another Birth and Other Poems.
Translated by Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée, Emeryville, 1981.
Kiarostami, Abbas. A Wolf Lying in Wait. Translated by
Farideh Mahmoudi, Steidl, 2005.
Kiarostami, Abbas. Walking with the Wind. Translated by
Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Michael Beard, Harvard UP, 2001.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.
“The Film and the New Psychology.” Sense
and non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus,
Northwestern UP, 1964, pp. 48–59.
Mitchell, W. J. T.,
editor. Landscape and Power. 2nd ed.,
U of Chicago P, 2002.
Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving
Image. Reaktion, 2006.
Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic
Filmmaking. Princeton UP, 2001.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of
Film Experience. Princeton UP, 1992.