As a representative figure of Iranian film art, Asian film master, and one of the most important contemporary film authors recognized by academia, the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami obviously deserves all enthusiastic praise.
But it must be admitted that Godard made the famous statement on Abbas’s artistic achievements in the 1990s ("The film began with D·W. Griffith, and ended with Abbas Kiarosta. M") is too dead and too early. The unpredictable new century has brought the entire film history in a direction completely opposite to Godard’s prediction: the art of film, of course, has not stagnated, but has become newer and more vigorous day by day; and the life of Abbas himself, It is also burned out in the continuous process of film creation, rather than the reverse as Godard said-that is, Abbas stops at the film, not the film at Abbas.
Facts have proved that no one can predict the future of movies, let alone the ultimate of movies. All we do is wait and witness.
In 2021, the fifth year after Abbas died of cancer. Standing today, looking back at Abbas’s life as a director, what have we witnessed? Few more than a dozen feature films, as well as some short films and documentaries. That's it?
This inheritance is indeed not rich in quantity, but its significance is extremely valuable: from the filming of the short film "Bread and Alley" in 1970, which officially started the director's career, to the completion of his children’s posthumous work "24 Frames" in 2017. Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Abbas's creative career spanning half a century left behind not only a linear sequence of works, but also a distinct and three-dimensional aesthetic universe.
Even though Abbas himself has passed away forever, but in his movies, we can still experience his life.
1. Yuan movie
Among the various characteristics regarded as Abbas's style or "authority", the most prominent and most talked about by movie fans is his innovation and development of the so-called "metamovie" film genre.
Before Abbas, directors such as Fellini, Garrell, Woody Allen had a special liking for making meta-movies, but their works basically only focused on "making movies" as the core drama event (or based on "Film director" is the protagonist), whose "meta-attribute" is only on the subject and plot level, while the form or structure of the film is still limited to the medium; in other words, it is traditional.
On the other hand, under the impact of the modernist film wave that has continued from the last century to the present, film or video art can no longer be accepted by conscious creators as a pure and immaculate, objective and selfless creative tool, and it must itself Be investigated, reflected, deconstructed, and recreated. The awareness and thinking of film as a creative medium by film authors during the creation process has given many modernist films more or less a certain "meta-film" aspect, even though they are usually not necessarily directly related to film production.
The “meta-attribute” of this kind of movies is mainly reflected in the fact that they direct the questioning and deconstruction from the text or form level to the “movie” itself, or at least one of its components. For example, although the two works of Antonioni's "Zoom" and "The Night of the First Performance" by Kasawitz seem to be not directly related to the movie, they actually differ from "photography (camera)" and "performance (actor)". "These two films are part of the self-referential and reflexive films.
Specifically, "Zoom" alters the metafiction propositions of "photographs record reality" and "texts imagine photographs" in the original short story (Cortazar's Devil's Saliva), and replaces them For the meta-photographic propositions of "evidence of images" and "fragility of reality perception", the "cameras of movies (images in movies)" and "cameras in movies (photos in movies)" are used in movies. It is juxtaposed and analogized; and "Night of the First Performance" focuses on the division and duality brought to the actors by the act of "playing". In the context where drama and reality are intertwined and merged, "the image of the role" and " The actor's self" burst out from the body of Gina Rowlands at the same time.
However, as an art form, film is originally an inseparable whole (film>>photography + performance), so it is obviously not thorough enough to think about a certain aspect every time. Abbas’s contribution is to establish a new form of meta-film. It can directly refer to the film as a whole and ontology without indirectly relying on a certain film component, thereby making up for Antonioni and Casavi. The one-sidedness of the media of the authors such as Tzu is reflexive.
Abbas's pioneering work is related to the duality of "documentation" and "fiction". Although the two are the poles of the coordinate axis of film or video art, they are also dialectically unified: no film does not have both at the same time, but the ratio of the two is different.
"Record" is an inherent attribute of film. There is almost no artistic creation tool that is more loyal to reality than a camera: the lens, film (photosensitive element), and shutter always follow the constant physical rules and mechanical design, and proceed at a uniform speed and fairness. Viewfinder, sensitize, and store images. As we all know, the invention of photography has crossed the "realistic" gap that realist art has been working to fill for thousands of years, because under ideal conditions, the photographic image itself is the mirror of the real image.
On the other hand, "fiction", or its more general form-"artificiality" or "author's will", is inevitable in any film and even any art. Aside from the inevitable fictional elements such as script, performance, set, color, and soundtrack, in a pure documentary, the unique editing of the film combines different scenes that do not occur continuously, which is already the largest Fiction-the fiction of time and causal logic.
However, for a film that does not have a formal reflexive perspective (even if it can be called a "metamovie" in terms of plot or subject matter), the dialectical relationship between record and fiction does exist, but they are not the thinking of movies. Objects are just a set of tools for building a movie, which present a functional relationship between before and behind the scenes, means and ends: for fictional works, recording is a fictional means, such as the camera recording the scene in front of the lens and the actors In order to make them fictitiously form the space and characters of the movie; for documentaries, fiction is a means of recording, such as shooting a piece of material in multiple cameras and then merging them into a complete stream of time during editing. This is fiction, but the purpose is In order to show the content of the material more comprehensively and "realistically".
Abbas’ films replaced this traditional division of labor with the reflexive relationship of meta-films. In a series of masterpieces in the 90s, Abbas, who has a lot of experience in making feature films and documentaries at the same time, created a series of works between feature films and documentaries. They are sometimes called "pseudo documentaries" by fans, but it needs to be clarified that this definition of these works is inaccurate.
Pseudo-documentaries in the general sense, such as those in genre movies or realist works, are just feature films that want to pretend to be documentaries. They use fiction as their ultimate goal just like ordinary fictional works. The difference lies only in the means of fiction: in order to create a sufficiently realistic and false reality, the pseudo-documentary form is also included as one of the means.
Pseudo-documentaries have certain media thinking, but they are limited to the most basic ones. They do not intend to speculate and express on this proposition, but only use it to further enhance the fictional simulation level in order to deceive the audience's trust. This not only deviates from the original intent of the media’s reflexivity, but sometimes also turns into the exploitation of reality ("Leo Landau"), creative opportunism ("The Camera Don't Stop"), and marketing gimmicks ("Blair the Witch") , And even regard the texture of "pseudo-record" as the only non-movie pursued ("Hardcore Henry").
The Abbas movie is exactly the opposite of the "pseudo documentary." In his meta-movie, the record and the fiction are equal and coexist, neither is a means nor an end. It can even be said that his purpose is to make the two inseparable under the form of meta-movie. When the audience can't and no longer need to distinguish the virtual and real nature of the material, they can instead appreciate the absolute reality that belongs to the movie.
An important turning point in Abbas’s creative career, the 1990 work "Close-up" can be used as a concrete example: in this film, characters (fictional content), character prototypes (imitation reality) and actors (means of recording) Having the same referent, the plot (fictional content), the blueprint of the plot (the reality to be imitated), and the act of filming (the means of recording) constitute the text of the film.
In "Close-up", everything seems to be fiction and performance after the fact, but everything is absolutely and undoubtedly true. Although a piece of material is fictitious and rehearsed, the audience not only watches the fictitious and rehearsed content, but also draws meaning and energy from the fictional and rehearsed "meta-action" itself; even, the importance of the latter depends on the degree of importance of the latter. Much greater than the former.
At this time, the distinction between the real and the fiction is no longer meaningful, because the fictional action here is not to deceive the audience to believe, but to frankly show the fiction of oneself, and then interact with the reality to produce richer content. What we see is not the "produced work", but the action itself of "the production of the work"-the former may not be real, but the latter cannot be fictionalized. "Close-up" is a meta-movie in the true and complete sense. It not only deconstructs the fictional film, but also reconstructs a new fictional fictional film that is frank and frank. And this is precisely what makes the movie truly real.
Like the best works of many great directors, the birth of "Close-up" originated from an accident, but in the end it became a turning point and a new realm for the author's creation like a fate. Abbas claimed that “Close-up taught him how to make movies”; in fact, Abbas’s works after “Close-up” did have more or less meta-film perspectives and thinking. The most famous and also The most typical ones are "Life and Growth" in 1992 and "Lover under the Olive Tree" in 1994. Both and "Where is My Friend's Home" in 1987 constitute the world-famous "Kogell Three". song". These three movies can be simply summarized as a nested meta-recursive structure: each one has the previous one as the background and material, and each one is the highlight and the key to the deconstruction of the previous one.
After Kogel's trilogy, Abbas almost no longer has a meta-movie directly exposed-perhaps 2008's "Princess Schilling" was an accident. On the surface, this movie, which always aims the camera at the audience’s face in the theater, is obviously about “watching a movie” rather than “making a movie”; but in fact, the movie “Princess Schilling” seen by the audience in the movie It does not exist. The whole movie shows the whole process of making a movie: using the audience's reaction (actor's performance) and the voice outside the painting to make up a movie.
In many other Abbasic films, the aspect of meta-films is lurking in deep text and creative thinking.
For example, although "The Taste of Cherry" filmed in 1997 seems to have nothing to do with filmmaking from the subject matter, Abbas chose to break the fourth wall and insert it into the studio like Fellini's "The Ship Continues". The "features" as the end of the movie. It is precisely because of this that this story about the "meaning of life" is free from vulgarity.
"Gone with the Wind" shot in 1999 is a half-improvised movie. There was no script before shooting, only a two-page outline. During the filming process, Abbas deviated from the original idea based on the folk customs of the location itself, and used a large amount of documentary material in the film.
"Ten Rhythms of Life" in 2002, like "Close-up", is an intermediate product between a feature film and a documentary. But the difference is that the latter makes a clear self-declaration with the help of the arrangement of the structure, while the former hides his true identity between the two. Jaffa Panasi's meta-film "Taxi" is a simpler and more explicit imitation of this work.
The work "Legal Copy" co-produced with France in 2010 is more profound and obscure in concept. In the first half, the relationship between the real and the "copy" is still in the plot and between the roles. If you continue to develop according to this idea, then even if it is more skillful in playing with the reality than in "Sirs Maria" , But it also stopped at another Casavetti-style "meta-performance" film; but in the second half, the camera and the film itself also participated in this wonderful performance, and was eventually exposed and blocked. By this, Abba Si told us that "the fiction of the film" is a "legal copy" of the "truth of life." Like "The Taste of Cherry", the seemingly heterogeneous surface theme in "Legal Copy" is compared and isomorphized with the movie, and a second theme linked to the meta movie is formed.
The unfinished posthumous work "24 Frames" in 2017 may be the most extreme meta-film in Abbas's career. It is completely composed of still shots like "Wu" created in 2003, without any narrative intent. But if the "meta-movie" aspect of "Wu" is still only to talk to Ozu Yasujiro's works through five empty shots in the form of imitation, then "24 Frames" goes to the extreme and chooses to pass the most "non-movie" Deconstruct the movie in a creative form (all the pictures of the movie are made by CG). In the context of the movie, "still" is death, and "movement" is life. In the first frame of "24 Frames", Bruegel's famous painting "Hunter in the Snow" was added with CG of animals and heavy snow, gradually resurrecting from static visual art to flowing time; and in the 24th, which is the last In one frame, the last kiss shot of the movie "Golden Age" is divided into frames of static pictures on the computer screen, the moving images die in stillness, and the person in front of the computer is sleeping soundly. At the end of his life, Abbas also prepared a beautiful, gentle and sad funeral for the movie.
2. Invalid dialogue
Many people complain that Abbas’ films are “boring” and “hypnotic”, but the reason for this feeling is not the slowness or silence of ordinary “boring” art films. Objectively speaking, the density of audiovisual information in Abbas’ films is usually not low, especially there is no lack of auditory information: in his later works, large paragraphs of character dialogues often appear at high frequencies.
For example, on the basis of weak plots, dialogue has become the most important theatrical event and interaction method of characters in works such as "Close-up," "The Taste of Cherry," and "Gone with the Wind". It is also the core of every scene and every scene; After completely excluding changes in scenes and shots, "Ten Rhythms of Life" has almost become a film composed, promoted and connected entirely by dialogue.
What makes some people feel boring is that these dialogues are usually not progressive lines through dramatic choreography, but some repetitive, chattering, life-like language: they are long, but they carry very little information. Rather than saying that these dialogues are a bridge of communication, it is better to say that they often exist as a manifestation of "communication failure" between characters, which is a kind of "invalid dialogue."
In general, the relationships and emotions between characters that do not understand and disagree with each other are typical situations that lead to invalid dialogue-such situations can be seen everywhere in Abbas' films. However, according to the specific details of the situation, "invalid dialogue" can be divided into two situations.
The first situation is "invalid questioning": the question is thrown out, and no effective answer is obtained, so the questioner throws up the question again, and still returns without success... Looping through this process, you will get a typical Abbas. Invalid conversation. The repetition of questions and the absence of answers dissolve the necessary conditions for communication between individuals, and the meaning of dialogue is naturally cut off at the source, leaving only empty forms.
Regarding invalid questions, the most typical examples can be found in Kogel's trilogy. A comprehensive examination of the texts of the three works reveals that they are not simply nested in the recursive structure of the meta-movie, but also use an invalid question (and the invalid dialogue it evokes) as the core concept and main narrative of the film. Driving force.
In "Where is My Friend's House", "Do you know where Mohamed Reda Nematzadeh's house is?" is a typical invalid question. In the story, the little boy traveled back and forth between the two villages in order to return the workbook he took by mistake to the same table in time, but he didn't know where his friend's home was, so he asked this question when he met.
The audience must be impressed by the boy’s immature face, innocent expression and muttering voice when he asked questions-such a successful performance allowed the textual level of invalid questions to penetrate into the sound and picture system, and the film became an overflowing film. Comedy of innocence and childishness.
If the invalid question in "Where is my friend's house" is mainly a humorous element, then the question in "Sheng Sheng Liu Liu" acts more seriously on the narrative structure and thematic expression. After the earthquake, the director and the boy drove back to Kegel, trying to find the two young actors in the previous work. In order to find a path that was not damaged by the earthquake, they stopped again and again and asked the way: "How do I get to Kegel?"
This time, there is no longer a small flower sandwiched between the pages of the book as the hidden answer to the question: the cycle of asking for directions, finding directions, and asking for directions continues until the end of the movie; but on the other hand, in the last mirror, there is another picture. The car in the painting is a metaphor for the temporary decline of life and the eternal progress of life. This is also the best response to the film title "Life and Growth".
Compared with the solemn and mourning of "Birth and Growth", the invalid question in "Lover under the Olive Tree" seems more trivial and commonplace, but this question leads to the most profound and mysterious answer in the trilogy: it Appeared at the last moment before the end of the movie, but the audience will never know the content.
In the last part of the movie, the man and the woman go one after another, crossing the green shade and the earth, all the way to the distance. The man asked the woman the invalid question throughout the movie: "Can you marry me?" The woman remained silent, as always, no matter how the man persuaded, promised, or pleaded, she was indifferent. Finally, she turned her head and said something to the man; but at this time, the two of them had already reached a field far away beyond the reach of cameras and recording equipment, and the answer was instantly swallowed by the tranquil nature and the distant distance.
In this unfinished ending, the woman's answer becomes blurred along with the direction of the movie itself. The only thing that can be determined is that the humorous relationship between the two that originally existed as a comedy element suddenly transformed into a touching life in the last big vision of the contrast between the magnificent nature and the small portrait. force.
Invalid questioning leads not only to invalid dialogues, but also to thinking about another aspect of Kogel's trilogy: Why do we need to ask questions? Because of the need to pursue, and precisely because of the unavailability of what is sought, the quest becomes endless, and the movie stretches in the span of time.
So far, it can be seen that Kogel’s trilogy is just a three-stage journey of quest driven by the information potential between "too many questions" and "no answer", no matter if it is a child/adult comedy ( "Where is My Friend's House" with children as the protagonist and "Lover under the Olive Tree" with adults as the protagonist), or road films with both childlike and seriousness (children and adults) with tragic colors In the "Birth and Growth Flow", which is opposite to the drama, the concept of pursuit is still unified and continuous.
At the end of the twentieth century, Abbas handed over two more feature films: "The Taste of Cherry" and "Gone with the Wind." They are more stylized, and as a result, the driving force at the narrative level is significantly weaker and the rhythm is slower. However, as the need to explain information to the audience has decreased, the volume of lines in the two works has not decreased but increased compared to the previous works. It is not difficult to imagine that the dialogue among them is of course more ineffective dialogue as the main mode.
In these two movies, the invalid dialogue presents its second branch: "invalid request". Under the premise that the two interlocutors have conflicts of interest but are unwilling to make concessions, the requester keeps requesting, and the requestee keeps rejecting the former's request. As a result, the dialogue cannot proceed and can only turn around in the middle of repeated requests and rejections.
Obviously, the request and refusal in the second case is compared with the mere answer to the non-question in the first case. The latter leads to a more pressing relationship between the characters and leads to dialogues and situations with more dramatic tension. The marriage proposal in "Lover under the Olive Tree" is both a question and a request; however, before it becomes a request, it first exists as a raised and unanswered question, focusing on the action of the question. And the problem itself. On the contrary, in an invalid dialogue triggered by an invalid request, compared to the request itself, the dramatic conflict caused by it is the main characterization object of the movie. At this time, although invalid dialogues still do not directly produce meaning, their continuous accumulation makes the mood of the film progress in the conflict, and indirectly promotes the narrative of the film.
This principle is reflected in every dialogue in "The Taste of Cherry". It is connected to the last two parts of Kogel's trilogy. The three works are connected to each other and form the "meaning of life" trilogy (Compared to Kogel's trilogy, Abbas himself recognizes this One classification). With the previous two as the basis, "The Taste of Cherry" once again reiterated the theme of pursuit, but this time, the protagonist is pursuing his own death.
As the stylized pinnacle of Abbas’ movies, "The Taste of Cherry" is back to the basics in form, and even became one of his most minimalist works: the opening scene of the film, a man looking for death drives a car, looking for a suitable person to bury himself. Since then, the movie has repeatedly performed this action, and the invalid dialogue composed of the man's request and the rejection of others has become almost the entire plot content of the movie.
The disadvantage of this film is that although it depicts the process of a man preparing to die, the experienced audience must understand that what it actually wants to show is the process by which men gradually discover the meaning of life. The man’s final epiphany was accidental in terms of plot, but it was destined to be so in terms of expression.
Fortunately, for this old-fashioned question, Abbas chose to provide us with a novel answer sheet in the form of blank space and meta-film: at the end of the melodious jazz, the image of the set slowly appeared, and we just understood at this moment. What makes people live to death is not the "taste of cherries" but the "taste of movies." As a result, the film has carried out a gorgeous self-exposure to the preaching lie that it has been committed to establishing, disintegrating the fictional reality, and embracing it. The real fiction.
Contrary to the minimalism of "The Taste of Cherry", "Gone with the Wind" is one of Abbas's most ambitious and complex and diverse works, and contains many different levels of expression and thinking.
Different from the previous two trilogy, the core action that underpins "Gone with the Wind" is no longer chasing, but waiting: reporters from the newspaper came to a remote village, waiting to report on the death of an old woman In order to report on her funeral. The state of the characters changes from active to passive, and the narrative of the film becomes more stagnant and passive. Therefore, the film hardly uses and unfolds the core plot of "Waiting for the funeral" which is given at the beginning of the opening. It was because of the toss and turns and deviations of creative ideas during the shooting process), but chose to start and end in Sri Lanka.
Because it is no longer advancing, the narrative of "Gone with the Wind" explores inwardly: For most of the length, the film lingers repeatedly between various unrelated and loosely connected plots that take place in the village. If you look closely, you will find that almost every episode is based on an invalid dialogue: the failed reconciliation between the male reporter and the little boy, the quarrel between the boss’s wife and the husband, the male reporter asked to see the milk girl’s face but was rejected... If "The Taste of Cherry" is a single, linear, minimalist narration of a journey, then "Gone with the Wind" is a comprehensive, three-dimensional display of a space and a world.
Even so, "Gone with the Wind" still has a unified and rigorous structure. Between many invalid dialogues of different characters and different scenes, Abbas used the same invalid request based on absolute physical obstacles to connect the whole movie: the signal in the village is not good, and the call is intermittent, in order to When answering the phone, the male reporter drove up the mountain again and again, hoping to get news of the death of the old woman, but he was always unable to complete the task and leave the village for no time.
After the new century, Abbas’s film journey has gone farther and farther across the Eurasian continent. However, whether it was filmed in Iran, France or Japan, the characters in Abbas’ films are always incomprehensible, incomprehensible, Postures that are unwilling to understand each other appear and communicate, and therefore always lead to situations of invalid dialogue.
For example, "Ten Rhythms of Life" can be understood as ten invalid conversations between female taxi drivers and passengers. The opening shows the whole process of communication failure between mother and child from idle to hysterical communication.
The last scene of "Legal Copy" takes place at the bedside of the hotel. In this scene, the core contradiction of the film is brought out: the woman asks the man to stay and continue to play, but the man refuses and returns to reality alone, which means not only The real and fictional victory and defeat is also the last time this invalid request throughout the film is staged.
In 2012, "Ru Mu Love River" also used invalid requests as the cause of the drama conflict, but changed the perspective, starting from the perspective of the requestee rather than the requester: the heroine's boyfriend and grandmother kept making invalid requests to the heroine , Wanted to meet her, but the heroine who was getting more and more tired of rejection finally came to the university professor-it is because of the kidnapping of no family relationship between them that truly effective communication can be produced.
Following Abbas’s creative trajectory, we can find the rudimentary form of invalid request in the 1976 medium-length film "Wedding Dress." The two boys asked the other boy for a wedding gown at the same time, and the boy who had not borrowed the gown asked the boy who had borrowed the gown for a gown. However, although the two requests were lengthy and convoluted, they all succeeded in either pleading or coercion. They can be counted as "effective dialogue", but at least "inefficient dialogue."
The 1983 documentary "Citizens" may be another source of Abbas's love for invalid dialogue. Abbas, who once worked in the transportation department, pointed the camera at the entrance of a prohibited street in Tehran, where the traffic police who checked the passes and the drivers who tried to enter forcibly repeated the invalid/inefficient dialogue of request and refusal— —This is a real situation with absolutely no fiction, but it is as humorous as "Where is My Friend's House" and "Wedding Dress", and it is likely to be a great source of inspiration for the latter. From this point of view, even before "Close-up", Abbas has cleverly applied the experience of shooting a documentary to his fictional creation.
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