As a film lover, Abbas was one of the masters of the first "encounter" during his film enlightenment in college. At that time, in a suburban university town more than 20 kilometers away from Hangzhou City, for a few pirated movie discs, I could take a bus for more than an hour to chat with a scholar-like boss in the mysterious corner of Wensan Road Computer Market. A few sentences, pick a few movies, and take them back to the bedroom like treasures to watch on the computer.
At that time, there was not much knowledge on the Internet. In addition to relying on a small amount of information to recommend movies, they mostly relied on posters to find movies of interest. In the past few years, in addition to American sci-fi blockbusters, among the dozens of foreign films that have been lingering in my mind for a long time, in addition to "The Godfather", there are also "Blue, White and Red Trilogy" and Rohmer's "Four Seasons". .
And the only one who uses the director as a memory clue is Abbas. In my opinion, these films from different countries, different forms and themes, sci-fi films inspire the exploration of the future, "The Godfather" is the nostalgia of Sicily, blue, white, and red are the maddening fantasies, and "Four Seasons" represents the countryside of the new wave. To me, they also represent the eternal theme of human nature: the tragic spirit.
From the perspective of "tragedy", in addition to epic and heroic tragedies, in the humanistic films of the masters, there are also boring pictures, close-ups of ordinary characters, small people, and small events. These works, at first glance, are bitter and tasteless, even hypnotic, but after reading them, I don't think I will watch them again. But as time passes, those hypnotic pictures and plots become clearer and clearer, and when you re-savour it, it brings out a culture and society of Vientiane. The director and his works have become the key.
Abbas is one of those keys to me. As an independent symbol, rather than a meaning inspired by a work, he constructs the modern Iran that people imagine. He finds the philosophical meaning of film in life through long takes, natural light, and non-professional actors. He entered into the record of the meaning of social history, and went beyond "history". With simple pictures, he captured the fleeting moments that seemed boring at the time, but actually made people continue to reminisce.
On a larger level, he recorded an era of melancholy and ups and downs: Iran, which stepped out from the countryside and farming, went from a vibrant society to a closed and conservative country through the Iranian revolution. Abbas, who was born in Tehran, graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Tehran University, worked as a graphic designer, and embarked on the path of director after finding that he was not suitable for the path of fine arts.
The 1970s, when he became famous, was the most prosperous era in Iran in the last century. The French New Wave film movement soon reached Tehran, which had absorbed all new knowledge and culture in a novel way. And all this was reversed in the revolution of 1979 into a country that was not turbulent but socially divided. The "tragic" significance of Abbas's works is that he recorded this reversal in a quiet film language and his personal perception.
This shows that filmmakers or literati were not absent when politics moved from secular authoritarian conservative to Islamic state-religion integration. In the early 1970s before the Iranian revolution, the political climate had turned conservative, and after Dariush Mehrjui initiated Iran's new wave film movement, under various bans, Abbas passed the Tehran Institute for the Development of Children and Adolescents' Intellectual Development. (Kanoon), together with a group of young directors, created the standard of Iranian children's films, and children's films have also become a genre of his fame. Majid Majidi and Abbas sympathized with each other. The former used children's films such as "Little Shoes" and "Colors of Heaven" to echo Abbas's work in "Life and Flow", "Passing Through", "Where Is My Friend's?" In the works such as "Home", "White Balloons" and "Let the Wind Take Me Fly", the images of children presented in "Dancing in Shackles".
It was the key of Abbas that brought me into an imaginary Iran with Persian history: its land is barren, but it has poetry, music, and people who love the land. This is very clear in his abstract video expression about "road", which presents a lonely, continuous and passing space and time. Abbas systematically reviewed his imagery of the road in his 2006 short film The Road. Although in the 30-minute video, that road is no longer the barren and desolate countryside in "The Taste of Cherry" and "The Wind Will Take Us", it is a modern highway, but the scene is still withered and lonely.
This kind of decay and loneliness is constantly revolving and repeating in Abbas's many films, and it is also constantly verified in reality. In Paris in 2016, when Western European society was traumatized by multiple terrorist attacks, Farhad, an Iranian professor who stayed in France from the Iranian Revolution, called for people to return to the history of the 1970s to understand Islam. The decay and loneliness passed on by Abbas reappeared.
As the director, Abbas used wind and road to record the ordinary people of Iran for half a century. As a poet, Abbas wrote a collection of poems "Walking with the Wind" written in Persian. The space created by the shortest text echoes these images in his film works: "The white figure of the dove / smeared into the white cloud. China/White Vast World".
In "The Wind Will Take Us Away", Abbas presented his understanding of death with the image of "wind". On July 4, the wind really took him away. And I, in Hangzhou, where he was filming the last work "Love in Hangzhou", paid tribute to this great modern and contemporary Iranian director.
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