Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy
- 1 The Wind Will Carry Us: Cinematic Scepticism
- 2 ABC Africa: Apparition and Appearance
- 3 Ten: Everything there is to Know
- 4 Five: Artifice and the Ordinary
- 5 Shirin: Absorption and Spectatorship
- 6 Certified Copy: The Comedy of Remarriage in an Age of Digital Reproducibility
- 7 Like Someone in Love: The Suspension of Belief
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Five: Artifice and the Ordinary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy
- 1 The Wind Will Carry Us: Cinematic Scepticism
- 2 ABC Africa: Apparition and Appearance
- 3 Ten: Everything there is to Know
- 4 Five: Artifice and the Ordinary
- 5 Shirin: Absorption and Spectatorship
- 6 Certified Copy: The Comedy of Remarriage in an Age of Digital Reproducibility
- 7 Like Someone in Love: The Suspension of Belief
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the press kit released with Ten, Kiarostami invokes a story by Milan Kundera:
Kundera tells a fascinating story that genuinely impressed me: he relates how his father's lexical range diminished with age and, at the end of his life, was reduced to two words: “It's strange!” Of course, he hadn't reached that point because he had nothing much to say anymore but because those two words effectively summed up his life's experience. They were the very essence of it. Perhaps that's the story behind minimalism too …
Kiarostami must be referring back to this when, in the 2005 film Around Five: Reflections on Film and the Making of Five, he refers to Five as a ‘one-word film’: if Ten was an example of ‘two-word cinema’, Five takes its minimalist tendency even further. If in the spirit of this we were to give the five episodes titles, we might end up with something like: ‘wood’; ‘esplanade’; ‘dogs’; ‘ducks’; ‘moon’. The first episode follows a piece of wood floating on small waves, which alternately push it up onto a beach and drag it back down into the shallow water. The second presents an esplanade littered with puddles of rainwater backgrounded by a distant beach where larger waves break; over the course of the episode, we watch a number of people (plus the occasional pigeon) walking past, and observe a conversation between a group of four old men. The third episode gives us another seaside scene, this time with a number of dark shapes – eventually revealing themselves as dogs – silhouetted in front of the waves. The fourth stands out for its comedy: here hundreds of ducks – proceeding in a long queue – waddle across a beach, only to turn around and come back again. The final episode offers a view from above of water at night reflecting a full moon, the sounds of toads, birds, a rooster, and a dog, the slow brewing of a thunderstorm, and eventually dawn. The movie is more than an ode to calm, the beauty of nature, and the dignity and drama of the ordinary (even if it is also that): it opens beguiling problems of cinematic truth and artifice.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy , pp. 79 - 87Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017