Dialogue with the natural world and allow the audience to use their own life experience to freely explain the image information they see. Is there such a possibility that the process of watching a movie can become a negative force that breaks through the shackles of daily life and goes against systemic discipline?
Perhaps, watching Abbas’ film "Gone with the Wind" is just such a process. The plot of the film is very simple: an engineer came to a village in Iran, and in the process of constant conversation with the characters in the village, he gradually comprehended the life philosophies about the proposition of life and death. In the film, Abbas constantly reminds the audience that this is a story with a continuity and a clear plot with specific pictures and different perspectives of the camera; at the same time, he often stops the pace of the camera shooting, using a linear cycle that is just like daily life. The narrative system carries out experimental repetition and meaningless dispelling, so as to examine the abstract and symbolic attitude towards life, and stimulate the audience's infinite reverie. However, from the perspective of the whole film, the second perspective is undoubtedly more exploratory.
The subtlety of daily life lies in its omnipresent aesthetics, which is usually based on the materiality of nature . There are a lot of scene descriptions and life details in the film, which directly puts a light and bright veil on every frame of the film, giving the audience a sense of warmth and satisfaction. A large number of sceneries in the film focus on creating an impressionist painting from the perspective, and make every detail in the frame clearly visible to the audience. For example: golden wheat fields, white slopes, speeding motorcycles. In addition, detailed sound concepts such as voice-overs, natural winds, and creaks of crushed roads are also crucial. It seems to be a natural fit with the landscape, becoming a part of the cube that is projected onto the screen with the picture. Although for the audience, most scenes in the film cannot be speculated about the speaker's specific appearance, but the speaker's affection and their attitude towards life came into being in the scenes that were accidentally launched. The most precious place in daily life is nothing more than people living in fireworks. Concerning their relationship with nature, about their open-mindedness, and anxiety about their conflict with modernity.
Abbas’s images have a great feature: repetition . For people, repeating one thing means habit, which means control and restraint of one's own life. And this repetition is also inseparable from the confrontation between personal experience and systemic system. For example, the audience can see the protagonist (engineer) running to the cemetery on the mountain over and over to answer the phone, but in the endless repetition, it is difficult for him to perceive the tiny and unique changes around him. We only know that the engineer representing modern social order and symbolic status in this village has become a category of independence and rejection of discipline. Although he is curious about the surrounding things and has a strong desire to explore, he always carries his own "surprise." It cannot be integrated into this relative aura of experience space. This experience space is full of plain details, and these details themselves create a spectacle that cannot be changed-creating chaos and then repelling alienation. As for the way to break this spectacle, Abbas gave an explanation here: the philosophy of understanding life and death.
The engineer's transformation is largely due to the changes in the objects and gaze styles he gazes at- "a raised rather than confrontational gaze" . Here, the triviality and alienation of daily life are captured by the camera and become a source of tension. The camera owner here has a special field of vision. On the one hand, it is the God’s perspective of the film, and on the other hand, it is the perspective captured by the engineer himself with the camera. However, no matter which perspective it is, it seems to have the function of revealing the mysterious space of private life. . The allowed attention is based on comprehending the flow of life and death. When the alternating and impermanence of life and death is regarded as the habitual repetition of this village, intrusive camera-based viewing with peeping and revealing secrets is undoubtedly a taboo behavior that interferes with habits and breaks the existing moral order of space. Therefore, at the beginning of the film, the tea lady boss of the cafe tried her best to stop the filming. However, as engineers further explored and studied village life, at the end, the engineer's act of saying goodbye while taking group portraits seemed to erase moral boundaries and social taboos. This sense of distance in sneak shots has obviously been eliminated in a certain sense, or it has been recognized by the "friend" relationship of the person being filmed-"It is that you are not just intervening in them, but visiting them."
Abbas also mentioned in an interview with the "Film Weekly" that he actually saw only 50 movies when he was shooting "Gone with the Wind", so his purpose of making the movie and the hope that this movie will be The way of making and understanding is not that complicated. On the contrary, he hopes that every audience can understand the philosophy he hopes to understand. The audience can choose to conduct selective analysis of images such as tortoises, dung shells, and bones. They can also consider the ideologies expressed in the film (such as feminism, racial All this is a process in which each viewer discovers his own subjectivity in watching these movement continuums composed of image sequences—to explore the connotation beyond the ordinary through his familiar daily life.
It is time and destiny that go by in the wind. Perhaps, every viewer will feel bored such as the ordinary and repetitive of daily life when they first come into contact with Abbas' films. However, life is actually like this, repeating, cyclical, and then discovering new meaning of survival in every old soil, and then flying to the next landing site.
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