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March 01, 2007

Three Inspired By Kiarostami

This afternoon, as the MoMA begins its career-spanning retrospective of Abbas Kiarostami with his 1997 film Taste Of Cherry, I watched that same picture for the first time (the timing was a coincidence - I didn't know about the retrospective until immediately afterward). The film's provocative ending left me with three stairstepping thoughts:

  1. How many directors in the past have broken the fourth wall in the manner that Kiarostami does at the end of this film? I'm sure there have been a few (such as Godard in general and Le Mépris in particular) but the one which pops most immediately to mind is Fellini, who brought And The Ship Sails On to a close with a similar meta-reveal, and with similar intentions. By confronting the viewer head-on with the implicit falsehood of cinema, they underscore the fact that their films are about something bigger than their ostensible plots (for instance, both films have serious political strains running throughout them which are put into a greatder degree of perspective by their denouments). Both endings are, of course, open to interpretation; Kiarostami's could be a representation of the afterlife, or a return to reality after a long dream (inasmuch as cinema is inherently 'dreamlike').

  2. I already knew about this ending (and its history) from Jonathan Rosenbaum's chapter on it in Movie Mutations, and yet I didn't feel it was spoiled for me because Rosenbaum offered no interpretation. The same goes for his review of the film at the time of its release, where he instead offers a quote from Kiarostami on his intentions: "I believe in a cinema which gives more possibilities and more time to its viewer--a half-fabricated cinema, an unfinished cinema that is completed by the creative spirit of the viewer, so that all of a sudden we have a hundred films." I was well on my way to taking up that collaborative invitation by the time the film came to a close, but as I watched the credits and reflected on my own interpretations and whether or not I would write about them here, I also remember how late I was to the game. Had all the good thoughts already been thunk?

  3. A quick Google search certainly did lay out all my own ideas before me, already formulated and put into words alongside others I hadn't even considered (of particular note, at least regarding the ending, is this article by Michael Price in Sense Of Cinema). The fun thing about writing about films online is that there's no temporal guidelines (or no real need for them, in any case); we're free to traipse across the chronology of cinema, watching and writing about whatever we please. But sometimes, I feel daunted when approaching a classic (particularly a relatively recent classic) - it's like writing your first collegiate paper on Plato or Aristotle and realizing that there's no possible way to say anything original. The best one can hope to offer, initially, is novel reiteration and thorough footnotes.

    On the other hand, given the vehicle in question, I think that's okay. I believe that blogs are an entirely legitimate critical medium, but they also afford the writer the luxury of public development in a way that the more empirical printed word cannot.

My sole footnote here, lazily left uncoded as such, is Zach Campbell's thoughts on his first viewing of Taste Of Cherry, prompted by missing tonight's screening at MoMA.

Posted by David Lowery at March 1, 2007 05:14 PM

Comments

David, glad you got to see Taste of Cherry. I empathize with the feeling of inadequacy when it comes to saying something about a big film not long after everyone else has had their say--I felt that way when I watched Funny Games recently, and even for The Departed I wasn't sure what I could ever write that would be original.

I think one great thing about Kiarostami's cinema is how it embraces a variety of viewer responses, such as (the big elephant in the room), boredom. I'm personally never bored by Kiarostami, I even liked Five, I don't think he's jumped the shark at all yet. But AK knows that slumber or perhaps frustration might arise at one of his leisurely, methodical films ... and instead of trying to use that ennui or restlessness, even harness its energy (like one might say Akerman or Tsai do), Kiarostami just opens his arms wider and lets it in. 'Clearly, the plot is not the most important thing!' he seems to say, with the Taste of Cherry coda. 'So if you haven't been following, bored viewer, no problem, I'm thinking of you too!' I'm kind of exaggerating what I think to be Kiarostami's stance, to make my own point, but I think the essential thrust of Kiarostami as an uncompromising but totally generous artist is there ...

Posted by: Zach at March 5, 2007 07:31 AM