Ray Pride

Lessons in bearing: How do you carry yourself when film critics and scholars around the world concur that you are one of the handful of the greats? Abbas Kiarostami is a charming, cosmopolitan presence, genial and forthcoming in interviews. From behind dark glasses, he speaks of his work with the reflective character of a philosopher, but also the matter-of-factness of a craftsman. The 59-year-old Iranian director champions a style of filmmaking he calls the "half-made film," insisting that audiences must do half the work, where clues and potential entryways are only suggested, teased out by the director. He has the sweetest tickle of a smile as he says, "As directors, we have no right to pronounce judgments," he says. "Our mission is to raise issues. We follow reality until that extraordinary moment," he said, "when we arrive at the truth."

"The Wind Will Carry Us" is Kiarostami's first feature since the spare, exquisite "The Taste of Cherry," and it is also elegantly minimal, endlessly mysterious. How much architecture do you take away from a film and still have it stand? His protagonist, played by Behzad Dourani, has an expressive, bemused face. He is performing a mysterious task that we never truly decipher. He may be a filmmaker, waiting to record a mourning ritual, or perhaps not. He makes many ridiculous trips to the top of a mountain, finding it necessary to scale the highest heights in order to receive phone calls, near a black hole being dug by an unseen laborer to further such "communications": It's a hilarious commentary on voices in the ether, telling each other immaterial things, our voices, our souls everywhere and nowhere, carried by the wind.

But the mystery buried in the traversing of the landscape deepens into a larger question: What is modern man doing in that Iranian Kurdistan village? While Kiarostami's minimalism has never seemed more radiant and suggestive, it's also dryly funny. Speaking with him at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival, I wonder if this effort fulfilled his idea of "the half-made film." "It doesn't have to be a half-made movie," he says through a translator. "It's more or less the curiosity, almost a nuisance kind of curiosity, where the audience has to puzzle out, 'What is this film about?' That kind of curiosity allows the movie to continue afterwards. This is not a movie with explosions and sex and killing and murder. If you omit all of these, what do you replace them with?"

He answers his own question: "I think that perhaps you replace them with curiosity. That requires some kind of mystery. You don't answer all the questions because you want a viewer to stay curious. When the audience comes out of the theater, each one has taken, according to their own knowledge and understanding of life -- of everything -- an interpretation of my movie. They call cinema the seventh art, and say that it is the most complete art, but it's one that's more backward than other kinds of art." We talked about still photography and poetry for a while, and he continues, "For example, poetry, some of it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't bear any particular meaning, but we accept it. A painting may not have a clear meaning, but we accept it. Music -- two people go to a concert, listen to the same piece of music, they each have different words for what that music inspires in them. We accept that. But cinema is the only art that is not really art anymore. There is a feeling that each person's perception has to match that of the rest of the audience. Or we want to judge them, which is worse. In the art of film, we watch a movie and judge the characters, then forget the big picture. Each scene is not just a character doing an action, but it's a combination of scenery, of light, of colors, that makes the scene. Most of the general public don't pay attention to that. They just judge the actions of the characters. In my opinion, today's movies are a medium to empty out your worries, to void yourself of stress.

"There are viewers and audiences who see what I do as repetition," he tells me. "But that means they are impatient and they are missing the point. I hate repetition. The way I look at this, as Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher said, we never cross the same river twice. Neither we nor the river are the same when we cross. Repetition is something that is only an illusion. In reality, things change. I really want to draw attention to the fact that what seems to be a cyclical thing is in fact a process of slow transformation and change. There is an audience who would get enervated and aggravated by this kind of reference to repetition in my work. This is an audience corrupted by a remote-control approach to filmmaking. That kind of cinema does an injustice to reality and life, which is itself cyclical.

An analogy might be between a snapshot aesthetic of photography versus studied portraiture, where you discover moments rather than planning them. "A photograph is better than a movie," Kiarostami says. "A simple video shot is better than an expensive film made with the latest equipment. That simply goes to my theory of minimalism. There is much beauty that you can bring out in very simple ways of describing. One example would a young girl whose dress is torn, and the tear reveals her beautiful shoulder. But it is the simple beauty that is more attractive than something planned and worked out."

"The Wind Will Carry Us" opens Friday at the Music Box. (2000-12-07)

Also by Ray Pride

GREEK TO ME
Thessaloniki is not a premiere festival, like Sundance or Cannes, or a catch-all like Toronto, but ten days with one and a hundred pockets. Most of the films have played elsewhere, including Chicago's festival. But the combination of films and filmmakers are always a great treat.
(2000-11-30)

STILL LIFE
Compact and masterful, "Dead Man" reveals its years of contemplation, like pebbles worn smooth at the bottom of a cool stream. This is clear-headed stuff of an order too few cultural commentators have the leisure or inclination to pursue.
(2000-11-30)

GIMME PROVIDENCE
This is rock; this is dread; this is sex and longing; and "Gimme Shelter" is an exquisite microcosm of ambiguity in an observer's art. I dare you to put half a dozen people in a room and get them to agree on any aspect of "Gimme Shelter" but its essential excellence.
(2000-11-23)

THE MYSTERIES OF HISTORY
For a couple months, I've struggled to come to quips with the 5-CD, complete soundtrack to Jean-Luc Godard's monumental eight-part video critique of a century of cinema, "Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du cinema." Godard's hoarse rumble confides all.
(2000-11-16)

SUSHIOLOGY 101
(2000-11-09)

ID STUFF
(2000-11-09)

INTIMATE LIGHTNING
(2000-11-02)

AMERICAN POP
(2000-11-02)

TICKLE ME DEADLY
(2000-10-19)

WEST IS EAST
(2000-10-12)

THE FODDER OF OUR COUNTRY
(2000-10-05)

HOW THE FEST WAS WON
(2000-10-05)

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