Godard once said: "Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami."
Scorsese followed: "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." I've come to admire the truth in both expressions.
What impresses me most about Kiarostami's work is what isn't shown. He hides a lot of stuff in the margins, waits for us to fill in the dots and dashes. Half-films, he called them. Unfinished cinema. The untold or unexplained parts of his films cast a mysterious spell over the mind, similar to Denis' filmography. His stories rely upon the power of ellipsis, the power of role-play; they endow us as both author and detective of the story. He respects and leaves space for us to…
Godard once said: "Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami."
Scorsese followed: "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." I've come to admire the truth in both expressions.
What impresses me most about Kiarostami's work is what isn't shown. He hides a lot of stuff in the margins, waits for us to fill in the dots and dashes. Half-films, he called them. Unfinished cinema. The untold or unexplained parts of his films cast a mysterious spell over the mind, similar to Denis' filmography. His stories rely upon the power of ellipsis, the power of role-play; they endow us as both author and detective of the story. He respects and leaves space for us to use our imagination. He trims the fat and provides only what is essential, similar to Bresson.
Make-believe often becomes a spiritual tool transferred from character to spectator, as we together try to make meaning from what he's omitted. In THE TRAVELER (1974), a young boy pretends he's a photographer; in CLOSE-UP (1990), a grown man pretends he's a filmmaker; in CERTIFIED COPY (2010), strangers pretend to be lovers, or maybe it's lovers pretending to be strangers?
Each film participates in a form of deception that challenges our perception of what is real and what is fiction, leaving mysterious characters at our slippery fingers to solve like riddles. In this way, his films often explore the tender balance between artifice and realism, which imbues his storytelling with a sense of magic and trickery. He's at once narratively simple and conceptually complex, and one of the greatest filmmakers out there.
