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How Does Abbas Kiarostami Create The Cinematic Tension That Has Won Him Awards All Over The World? He Leaves Things Out: Facts, Dialogue - Even His Actors' Faces. The Iranian Master Film-maker Talks To Peter Lennon

The Guardian (London)
September 15, 2000

Abbas Kiarostami has taken up two daunting challenges. First, the Iranian director, increasingly acknowledged as one of the most original film-makers working today, wants to preserve cinema's visual purity in the face of the current pyrotechnic overload. Second, he wants to give to cinema the advantage of the novel where the reader-spectator willingly visualises what is not actually shown. Before this is dismissed as grandiose bombast, it is worth pointing out that he has already achieved it notably in Close-Up (1990), Through the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1996) and now The Wind Will Carry Us.

Kiarostami's spectators are tamed into a degree of submission where they have to fill in visual (and even factual) gaps as audiences used to do for storytelling of old. It is a reaction against modern cinema's giddy infatuation with showing everything. His answer is to show less; tell less, and still mesmerise the viewer.

So the ending of Through the Olive Trees concentrates uniquely on the protracted efforts of a young, illiterate peasant to get a sign from a young educated girl, orphaned by an earthquake, that she accepts his proposal of marriage. She walks off down a hill and across an immense valley. When she is in danger of disappearing into the distance, the boy runs after her, closing on her until he in turn almost disappears.

By now we are hypnotised by these two distant dots, urgently needing to spot the signal which will satisfy our curiosity. Suddenly one of the dots the boy turns and begins to run back towards us; running, running. We are now focused on only one thing: the coming glimpse of this approaching face which will reveal the boy's state of mind. Before the dot becomes a face, the film ends.

We have been conned, we realise, into watching two specks on the screen for minutes on end. At this point, the witlessly overweighted techniques of modern commercial film-makers, their work cacophonous with bullying detail, collapse into absurdity before the skill of a director who can keep us as spellbound as Hitchcock could, only watching two dots. This is mastery of suspense without violence; human feeling is the motor. Also, you cannot rid yourself of the film immediately: the mind still churns with the necessity of reliving the scene to look for clues. Kiarostami has it both ways: his way of showing less is to place less in a ravishing framework. Those radiant hills and olive groves are worth watching for themselves.

In his latest film, The Wind Will Carry Us, there is a subplot of the courtship between a youth we never see he is digging a deep well and a young girl milking a cow in the dark whose face is constantly averted. (The Iranian religious censors, deeply suspicious that there might be something erotic here, have not yet given permission for the film to be released in Iran.)

But cute variations on courtship are by no means the limit of Kiarostami's achievements; he also knows how to send up dependence on modern technology. There is, literally, a running joke involving the chief character in The Wind Willl Carry Us. He has come to a village in Iranian Kurdistan to record mourning rituals. But every time Tehran calls him on his mobile he has to dash, panting, to his car and rattle up the hills to get adequate reception. Meanwhile life and death in the village carry on at their own traditional pace.

On his way home from serving on the jury of the Montreal film festival, Abbas Kiarostami stopped off in Paris last week where we met under the giant limbs of the Eiffel tower. The city's normal hubbub was upped a considerable few decibels by 3,000 taxi drivers hooting in a snail-crawl fuel price protest along the boulevards. The only rural landscape I could offer this teller of rural tales was to get him in amongst the shrubbery of the tower's garden.

He is short, dark, quiet, courteous and candid. The one suggestion of vanity is a refusal to remove the dark glasses when being photographed: Nobody would know me without them,' he explains.

Whenever I get the opportunity,' he says. I like to provide for film the advantage of literature. The usual way in film is to show something. But my aim is to create a cinema to see how much we can do without actually showing it. How much use we can make of the imagination of the spectator.

You must be able to imagine what is going on beyond what is physically shown, because you are actually only showing a corner of reality. It is a good idea when pictures and action guide you to something which is outside the story without actually showing it.'

In Taste of Cherry, which won Cannes' Palme d'Or in 1997, a man drives around, trawling for someone who will help him commit suicide. None of his passengers asks why he wants to commit suicide.

He clearly left that question out on purpose. So that everybody could have their own answer,' he says. Allowing them to project their own difficulties and feel how it translates into their own daily lives. A lady in New York said: I am absolutely confident that the man was in love!' I am sure the lady herself was in love. And a businessman said: I think he was bankrupt.' I am certain he had financial problems.

You see, when you have made a statement, you have only made that statement. But if you don't make any one statement you have all the others.'

Directors have occasionally attempted to use this kind of austere ambiguity notably Antonioni in L'Avventura. But that was manifestly an intellectual exercise. Here we have ambiguity and reticence at the service of wonderful, humane storytelling.

Kiarostami, who has just turned 60, began as graphic artist designing feature film titles. While working as a clerk in a police station, he enrolled in a fine arts school. In 1969, with a friend, he founded the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. This eventually developed into the prestigious Iranian film studio which has produced, among others, Jafar Panahi, who last week won the Golden Lion at Venice. He began making short television films for children. Growing up in the Shah's Persia, there were two cinematic influences: American films which were far from our way of life, and the Italian neo-realists De Sica and Rossellini who were nearer'. This was the style he developed from.

He and his wife, a designer, divorced 20 years ago; he has two grown sons, one in computers, another making publicity films. Although on his 10th feature and with increasing international fame, nothing is made easy for him. The story of the making of The Wind Will Carry Us underlines this. Even his film crew abandoned him.

The conditions were very bad,' Kiarostami said. The flies were terrible and some of the people lived with their cattle. We had to spend a huge sum of money pounds 10,000 disinfecting the houses with DDT. A film crew is used to comfort, but we had very little hot water and they didn't even have a pretty face to look at. I have refused to use artificial light for my last four films and the main problem was that Iranian crews don't work in the morning. But since the light goes quickly I needed them up at six in the morning. In the end they went off and I was left with my sound man and assistant cameraman to finish the film.'

In the village where they were shooting there is an ancient mourning ritual by which women cut their faces to express sympathy with a bereaved person. Women have been known to do this even when their husband's boss has a bereavement to ensure their husbands or sons keep their jobs. I assume that portraying women so debased by their economic circumstances that they would mutilate themselves in the hope of security must have been one of the points which angered the censors?

For the past 20 years,' says Kiarostami, the religious censors have unfortunately shown they do not pay any attention to economic problems. They were more sensitive about undermining religious ideas.'

One of the scenes the censors are creating problems with involves the young girl, who is milking the cow while the visitor from Tehran quotes from the love poem that gave Kiarostami his title The Wind Will Carry Us, by Forugh Farrokhzad. A revolutionary poet, one of the first to deal with women's problems and explicitly with sex, Farrokhzad died in a car crash in 1967, aged 33. The censors also do not approve of the quotation from the celebrated 12th century Persian poem, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The verse runs:

Some for the Glories of This World; and some

Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;

Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,

Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!'

How does he deal with the censors? By being patient,' says Kiarostami. An Iranian official hardly ever remains in his position a very long time. When one goes and another comes, that is the best time to try again.'

Last year the UN asked Kiarostami to make a documentary on the plight of Ugandan children whose parents have died or are dying of Aids. I wondered at first why they had chosen me,' he said, but of course I spent my first 20 years making films for children at the Tehran institute.'

He discovered that Uganda was not the land of savagery and horrific violence we believe it to be. This is potentially a very rich country with a happy and vigorous people,' he says. They are dying, often without knowing what is happening to them. These villages were 200 miles from the nearest town and not only did they not have electricity, they didn't even have oil lamps or candles. So in the long dark nights they have nothing to do but make love, which they do very naturally and without guilt. Some religious groups put up posters urging women to remain virginal and be chaste.' He laughs. Condoms make no impression on them. For them it is normal to undress to make love. They don't understand why you have to put on something to make love.

What is amazing about these primitive people is how very polite and well-mannered they are. Where does it come from? Once a woman complained about my photographing her and called a policeman. He was the most courteous policeman I have ever met in the world. He was meticulous, made no attempt to undermine the lady's rights and sorted the matter out completely impartially. And he wouldn't accept a bribe, which would be normal in most countries.'

Kiarostami cannot tell me much about his next project, he says, except that he will start shooting this winter and this time it will be about city life. On leaving, I remark to his interpreter (the interview was in Farsi) how curious it is that truly talented people never make difficulties in interviews; it is only those of dubious ability who put up barriers.

He replies: We have a saying in Iran. The fruitful tree bends.' ' The Wind Will Carry Us is released next Friday

 

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