March 1, 2009

Flashback #45

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of France, Cinema of Iran, Cinema of Japan, Flashback | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Five Dedicated To Ozu (2003) (aka Five)
Abbas Kiarostami
Silent

“…”

Five

Unquestionably, Kiarostami’s films are unlike any film ever seen, leave alone Iranian ones.  But one film that is extreme and decidedly avant-garde even by Kiarostami’s standards – Five: Five long takes dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu (2003) – has turned out to be one of his finest works. In what can be described as a super-slow version of Koyaanisqatsi(1982), Kiarostami presents us five shots of the sea, filmed during various times of the day, at various distances and of varying lengths. Kiarostami quietly integrates the five elements of nature to create a film that is as warm as Ozu’s and as puzzling as his own, in a way, forming a singular connection between them.

The first shot shows us a piece of log lying on the beach as the incoming waves unsuccessfully try to pull it in. There is instant engagement here. I do not know about others, but I have spent hours watching such insignificant dramas of nature – the wind trying to knock off a fruit of a tree, a crow trying to pull out a twig that is stuck and the waves trying to sweep my feet at the beach. There is complete focus on the log and the incoming waves here. These are the only two components of the frame and these alone form the foreground of the image. Interestingly, this is the only segment where the camera actually moves in order to accommodate the object under consideration. Kiarostami shows us a very ordinary piece of event, but our mind conjures up a narrative of sorts – with its own formulation of safe-space and danger zones of the “narrative”.  And things become complicated as the log breaks off and the larger part is swept off into the sea. Though completely unrigged, this “turning point” makes our attention shuttle between the drifting piece in the water and the struggling one on the beach. Is Kiarostami alluding to Floating Weeds?!

In the second one, we are shown the image of the sea as seen from an embankment on the beach. We are drawn into the horizontal waves that decorate the widescreen in the form of broad white lines. Gradually, we have people walking across in front of us pushing the sea into the background. People of all ages flood the screen in many amusing ways, regularly diverting our attention from the sea. There are even critters that wallow into the frame and easily gather focus. There is a feeling of watching a Béla Tarr film – but only in a sense. That is, in Tarr’s films, the dynamics of the foreground, though initially attractive, feel like clockwork after a while. Slowly, we sense the background – the still life – gathering a presence of its own and even imposing itself upon us. There is a feeling of intimidation and ill-omen whereas here, it works the other way round. The patterned backdrop is quite fascinating to start with, but as the humans start coming in the foreground, our attention is naturally devoted to them. We start studying them and even start expecting some new ones (I was hunting Jafar Panahi’s cameo). This segment ends the way it started – the sea alone occupying the stage.

The next shot presents us the sea sandwiched between the sky and land. This is shot from considerable distance and looks like a painting. It is early morning and there are dogs lying on the beach. Almost nil action takes place notwithstanding the stray movements made by the canines. Everything is in the background here as opposed to the previous two shots. Gradually, the contrast of the image starts reducing and after one point we are unable to differentiate between the sky and the sea. The shot fades to white after all the three elements of nature dissolve into one another.

The fourth shot is perhaps the most “interesting” of all. In a direct homage to Ozu’s style, Kiarostami places the camera at knee level and in close proximity to the sea. Soon, the screen is infested by ducks of various sizes, colours and gaits. This is the as close to comedy as the film gets. The ducks move at almost a fixed speed and their footwork seems like a musical rhythm.  Suddenly, all the ducks that have gone past retreat as a bunch as if in a panic. The concentration is completely on the foreground here and the sea becomes no more than a comfortable backdrop.

The final shot lasts about half an hour and is the boldest of them all. It is night time and we can hear the loud croaking of frogs and barking of dogs. And it is only after a while we come to know that we are staring at the still sea. The reflection of the moon appears in a distorted way on the dirty surface of the water. Once more we desire the reflection to settle down to form the perfect circle. The notions of foreground and background are completely eliminated as the pulsating moon appears like a milk drop that falls into abysmal vacuum. And just when everything seems unperturbed, rain comes. The annoying frogs disappear and so does the reflection. Kiarostami has probably shot this in time lapse as the rain stops suddenly to restore the noisy atmosphere. The moon “settles down” and soon disappears behind the clouds. It is interesting to see that all the dynamics of the scene here is off-screen and their presence indicated only by the sounds they produce. We stare at nothing but dark blank space for most of the time but never once lose hold of what is happening in the film’s environment. A little later, we hear the rooster’s call and sure enough, bright sunlight strikes the image to reveal the clear blue water. This part is truly a revelation as one feels a fresh lease of life in the hitherto mundane and contemplative frame.

There is naturally a problem with a film that is as provocative as “Five”. How much of the content we derive out of the film is intentional? Was there a set of objectives for the director while filming the footage? Was every element in the mise-en-scene completely controlled by the filmmaker? Would the film have been different if each shot was prolonged or shortened?  Here lies the classic tale of the emperor and his clothes. With a name as great as Kiarostami’s in the title cards, one directly gets ready to attach significance to the images, however banal they are. At the same time, it is but natural to feel awkward while watching such material. There is that absurd feeling of watching a Stan Brakhage film (I’ve seen over two dozen of his films and I must admit I can’t recognize most of them!) to the point of laughing at yourself. You get the feeling that Kiarostami is probably toying with his audience after all.

But surely, this isn’t anything like what Warhol did. Here is a filmmaker who understands what Ozu stood for and how big a responsibility the title of the film places on him. A filmmaker in the tradition of Ozu himself, Kiarostami does not go for cheap attention using complicated mise-en-scene and steady-cam shots. He doesn’t just see the world but observes it. He studies the relation between the various planes of the image. He experiments with the distance of observation and the range of emotions they evoke. In essence, he analyzes the subjective and objective components of the cinematic image never once losing the most important ingredient of his entire body of work – humanity. And that is why “Five”stands as a fitting tribute to one of cinema’s greatest humanists, by another.

 

January 15, 2009

Flashback #44

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Iran, Flashback | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Ayneh (1997) (aka The Mirror)
Jafar Panahi
Persian

“I’m not acting anymore.”

 

Ayneh

Iranian cinema has been getting a lot of attention in this first decade of the new century and rightly so. The contribution of stalwarts like Abbas Kiarostami is being progressively applauded with Kiarostami himself being called as the unofficial leader of the whole movement. And if we jot down the names of the most vital of his Iranian contemporaries, we would almost instantly arrive at one name that has been surprising the audience with the sheer power of the films he has been creating with shocking consistency – Jafar Panahi. The charming The White Balloon (1995) put him on the world cinema map firmly and films like The Circle (2000) just added to his glory. But a quiet little film that he made in between these two films, Ayneh (1997), is one that has intrigued me for years and has made me return to it multiple times.

One should be careful while furnishing the story of Ayneh for the very plot is subject to one’s own interpretations. You’ll know what I mean when you see the film’s tradition defying form that can by itself start a perpetually healthy conversation about cinema. You have a little girl Mina ready to go home after the school. Her mother has not come to pick her up. So she decides to go home on her own. There are a lot of struggles in her venture and a hope for triumph seems vague. And suddenly at one point in the film, Mina throws down her scarf and announces that she is not going to act any more. This is where we are revealed that what we have witnessed is a film shooting. Mina quits and walks home as the crew continues to film her from their vehicle as the shooting for the day seems to stand aborted. Or does it?

The film’s title translates to the word Mirror – an instrument that one can look at in two ways– one that reproduces reality as it is without any ornamentation or one that resembles reality only because it completely inverts it point by point. One is a statement about absolute truth and the other about absolute falsehood. And like this paradoxical idea that the mirror presents, Panahi’s film uses the cinematic screen as a mirror that simultaneously presents both striking similarity between the two formally different sections of the film and stark difference between the fiction of the first part and the intriguing “reality” of the second. Mina struggles to find the way to her home and her tongue-tied nature nearly shuts off the possibilities. On the other hand, we see a bolder Mina going out into the wilderness of Tehran and sorting it out herself. But what remains same is her untainted childishness that shows that children are after all, children. Inherently, this duality makes one think how fiction tries to track reality closely and how reality itself is so fictionalized.

There is a clearly defined point in the film where Mina breaches the fourth wall and quits shooting. She goes off from the “sets” and walks home on her own. The film makers continue to film her nevertheless without her knowledge. Now, it is comfortable to assume that what ever has happened till now is the fictional part and what ever is going on is nothing but reality. But are we witnessing reality as it is? How do we know that this dissidence of Mina isn’t staged too? How do we know that what the director is filming in the obviously “candid camera” style isn’t a highly skilled manipulation of the filmic medium? And are we sure that there is no artifice here even though the style is clearly self referential. I am reminded of another skillful film from Iran. In Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), we have a wannabe director who infiltrates the home of an unsuspecting family impersonating as Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He is caught alright and tried in the court in front of the camera. Note that this is as complex as films get. Kiarostami reconstructed the film with the same family and the crook and staged what happened earlier almost exactly. The trial scene is the real trial though. Here, the protagonist tries to gain sympathy by elaborating his love for cinema. This may be real, but how do we know that this person is not acting because of the presence of the camera? This meditation on the classic Schrödinger cat is perhaps the insuperable study of the nature of cinema but Panahi too manages to put forth some very thought-provoking questions on the ontology of the most popular art.

We as the audience play the most vital part in its execution and his property of Ayneh which places the audience as the completing half of the film is its biggest success. With its all-encompassing sound design that includes even stray sounds such as car horns and other banal conversations, the first half pushes one to accept it readily as a near-genuine representation of reality. But once that illusion is shattered, we are pushed on to a new version of “reality”. We mock ourselves for believing in the first half and comfortably settle once more into the new atmosphere coolly assuring ourselves that this is indeed reality. All this is engrossing and fun. However, the more demanding viewer will be once bitten, twice shy. (S)he will hold the film at an arm’s length. (S)he will be skeptical about what is happening on screen and will try to observe the film rather than get involved. In short, a complete detachment from the medium is achieved – an idea that giants like Godard have been trying for decades.

I like Panahi’s more “conventional” ventures like Crimson Gold (2003) and Circle (2000) which are pretty staggering in their own ways, but what sweeps me off my feet is his films like Ayneh and Offside (2006). In Offside, like Ayneh, Panahi seamlessly blends reality and fiction as we know it. We begin to question about the boundary between them. Is the football match a synthetic premise to construct the film’s ideas or is the drama outside the stadium really happening like the match itself? What other arts have been doing for decades – reflecting on the medium themselves rather than the content they carry – cinema has started picking up. At the end of it all, the content of Ayneh – the girl, her house, the social details –seems secondary even though a lot is open to discussion. And isn’t that a huge success for a such a minimal film such as this? And aren’t we all glad that filmmakers such as Kiarostami and Panahi exist?