How
do Kiarostami's films Where is the Friend's Home, Life and
Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees adopt, update,
go beyond and even challenge the basic tenets of Neorealism? (You must
include here a discussion of the reflexivity involved in these films and
how this reflexivity relates to neorealism).
Abbas Kiarostami, an Iranian director, made three
films often referred to as the
Kokek trilogy after the town in which they take place. They balance
on each other’s
existence in order to be a fully fleshed out fusion of fiction and
reality. These films are
‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’ (1987), ‘Life and Nothing More’ (1992)
and ‘Through the
Olive Trees’ (1994). Through his unique, reflexive filmmaking style
and minimalist
visions of poverty-stricken commoners strewn throughout his homeland,
Kiarostami
updates, adopts, goes beyond and challenges the basic tenets of neorealism.
His films
take place in the present day, spanning seven years in time (particularly
the year 1992
when a devastating earthquake killed thousands) and meet all the requirements
of “new
moral poetry”. His use of real people (non-professional actors who
are actual
townspeople) as characters and his near omission of a hero character
meets the standard
set by the Italian neorealists of the 1940’s, who made their protagonists
ordinary men
faced with the same problems in society which would befall the projected
audience.
Kiarostami employs minimalism in nearly every aspect of the technical
process necessary
to creating his films. His editing is slight, his camerawork picturesque
but conservative
and his lighting is slim to none. Kiarostami is connected to the people
he films, just as
other neorealist directors are required to be based upon the
rules set by the founders of
the movement. He challenges the movement with endings that don’t beg
conclusion - or
are finite - and by making films that are passive rather than rousing.
The films of Abbas
Kiarostami also connects to neorealism in a special way because their
Chinese box
structure spurs a reflexivity that is directly related to the way neorealist
films look inward
in order to create a realistic fiction.
Kiarostami’s Kokek Trilogy takes place in
and around the last ten or so years.
Neorealism dictates that the films made in its style, and the wake
of whatever oppressive
circumstances offset its need, must be an examination of a time that
has only just passed.
These three films take place during a recent time (we assume based
upon their release
dates, from 1987-1994), a time when poverty is rampant and a disastrous
earthquake has
wiped clean the morale of the country and created a mournful suffering
and shaded
sadness all about. His characters, anyone and everyone that turns up
in the country and
along his journey, have an uncanny knack of summarizing the turn of
events in Iran since
the earthquake occurred in 1991, using only their faces. Important,
though, is the look of
timelessness that we feel can help them to remember past their strife
of recent years. As
these films are reflexive, the turn inward of a gaze upon oneself can
be a healing motion
that returns one to the contented state one inhabited before catastrophe
struck. Consider
the moment when the newly married man, tying his shoes, tells the film
director of how
many people have died in his family. Through his sullen, flat expression,
we can read the
heartbreak he is staving off in hopes of rebirth. He is a wonderful
metaphor for the way
Kiarostami’s films - particularly ‘Life and Nothing More’ - work. They
cast a glow of
dark, unimaginable anguish and replace it with a re-imagined but remembered
joy. His
contribution to the people who have lost so much in this horrible event
is his film. The
importance of neorealism’s required incubation period of only five
to ten years lies in the
healing effect of the film. Kiarostami’s film, as illustrated in the
man who has lost so
many relatives - but has also just been married and is looking forward
to starting his new
life - shows, quite simply, that life goes on to flourish no matter
what has befallen us.
Releasing the film directly following the earthquake fills in the reasoning
behind the
description often applied to neorealism: New Moral Poetry. This film,
as with the other
two films in the Kokek trilogy, is about a reconstruction of a shattered
morale, in a
country that had just lost 30-50,000 people in a natural disaster (just
as ‘The Bicycle
Thief’ and ‘Umberto D.’ were meant to inspire nationalistic resurgence
in the wake of
World War II).
A major tenet of neorealist films meant to
distinguish it from other, more
entertainment-intended films and to keep it about the people it tries
to help, is the push to
get to a place where the protagonist (or hero) is put on the backburner,
a place usually
used to house “the others”. These “others” are people in films that
are the equals of
extras, as they stand around, setting the atmosphere, mood and background
of the film.
Though Kiarostami’s films don’t tend to use these “others” (or townsfolk
as they are in
the Kokek trilogy) to rouse the viewers; he does use them to replace
the need for a
protagonist and set the atmosphere appropriately. In fact, all three
of these films shift
their respective protagonists into the forefront, but never as heroes,
more as spot-lit
symbols, meant to stand for the collective consciousness of the people
the respective film
is about. In ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’, young Ahmed is more of
a pagemarker - one
that will come in handy in ‘Life and Nothing More’ - meant to show
the difference in
Iranian society to foreign audiences (or, in Iran, to highlight the
joys and pleasures of
living in a society that is so moral-centered). As a boy who will do
good without thought
of reward, even without thought of his own safety or parental repercussions,
he may be
the main character, but if we examine the way the society is boundlessly
painted in ‘Life
and Nothing More’ and, to an extent, in ‘Through the Olive Trees’,
we see that he is
merely a emblem of Iran’s people, all of whom appear to be very kind,
decent and
ethical. We get the sense (as in the neorealist films of Italy, where
the everyman is
singled out, but not alone in his dissension) that any one of the townsfolk
whom
Kiarostami offers to us in either of the three films, would be capable
of the journey of
Ahmed or the journey of the film director in ‘Life and Nothing More’.
Essentially, he
updates the method which De Sica employed in both ‘Umberto D.’ and
‘The Bicycle
Thief’. Both filmmakers imagine the plight of many as concentrated
into one single
character. Kiarostami, going a step beyond De Sica’s characterization,
allows the main
character to reflect the people around him and vice versa - but allows
“the others” a voice
all their own. Though his films have characters we could call heroes
(because of both
their role and the tasks they perform), as an audience we are in awe
of everyone in the
country, and the power of their conviction - right down to Puya, the
film director’s son in
‘Life and Nothing More’, who desperately wants a soda and upon realizing
that it is
warm, graciously donates it to a starving child and his mother - both
of whose faces we
never see. The film is reflecting the world it is portraying, but in
its representative use of
both Puya and the film director as denizens of Iran who are doing their
part to assist the
stricken, it never has too little time to stop and observe people as
they behave and appear
in real life.
All three films have a look to them that clearly
has had no grounding in
artificiality. Even in the scene where Kiarostami’s double, another
film director, shoots a
scene for ‘Life and Nothing More’ (in ‘Through the Olive Trees’), there
doesn’t seem to
be much more than an audio recorder, a camera and a white board to
light for clarity.
Grabbing onto the neorealist position that reality is to be presented
unembellished,
Kiarostami presents his films just as the original founders of the
movement would have
insisted: very little feeling is emoted in the actors faces, lighting
and editing are all highly
minimal and the idea of “a picture of life” seems so focused and embraced
by Kiarostami
as his camera rarely moves, and often, captures a snapshot-like image
of his world,
unflinching to catch every nuance of life’s rich pageant. While I thought
some of the
original films used too much chiaroscuro (both ‘The Bicycle Thief’
and ‘Umbero D.’
seem a little too well-shot to qualify as lean in the cinematography
department),
Kiarostami seems to have adopted this dogma which was never fully utilized
and
re-instated it. (This is not to say that Kiarostami’s films don’t look
terrific, visually - they
do - but his photography is wholly more effective that De Sica’s).
Another example of Kiarostami’s great comprehension
of the neorealist cinema:
his actors and their relation to himself. As his films have a notion
suggesting that he
considers himself to be a large part of the world he is filming, he
takes it a step further by
including everyone else he meets along the way. Everyone in his films
are common
folk-turned-non-professional actors. Using the dialect of different
regions (this actually
comes up more in a later film of his, ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’, but
is not absent in the
Kokek trilogy), the implied social critique (much more subtle than
his Italian
predecessors) and working class characters, he is able to create a
world of authenticity
that we believe not simply because he is telling us that it is a world
of authenticity using
mise-en-scene, story construction, etc.; we believe it because these
people are living it as
the camera rolls and, as we understand, before and after Kiarostami
begins committing
them to celluloid. This is one of the things he does that was set out
by neorealist founders
that I don’t think he either adds or subtracts from, but simply employs.
The characteristic we get from watching his
Kokek trilogy is the idea that a film
director (specifically Kiarostami himself) is connected to the world
much the way a poet
or a writer is. As he creates a touching story of a good deed in the
first installment
(‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’), he shows us that it was “just a story”
by lifting the veil
of fiction and blurring the line between real and unreal. He does this
by casting someone
else as the director of ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’ and thrusting
that person, now a
character, into the world of fiction. All he has done with this strategy
(in ‘Life and
Nothing More’), is show us that ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’ was fiction
and that
Kiarostami himself feels like a character in a film. He confidently
places that first film as
both an observation by a socially motivated, morally centered director
and as a character
in the same diagesis, eager to know the fate of his actors. The director
in ‘Life and
Nothing More’ wants to find out if the person who played Ahmed was
killed in the
earthquake. Kiarostami himself has rendered the real so impeccably
that he believes that
his character would both want to find out if Ahmed was alive (even
if he was a character)
and show once and for all that the worlds he creates to be so realistic,
a documentary-like
film about the maker of ‘Where is the Friend’s House?’ could seem even
more real than
the world Kiarostami cooks up using non-actors, little light or editing
and atmospheric
touches such as dialogue and real settings. This is an extremely neorealist
ploy, perhaps
one of the most original and competent ever attempted.
Quite clearly, based upon the evidence I’ve
already presented, the characters in
the Kokek Trilogy (many of whom overlap) are molded by their surroundings.
The social
environment is all of Iran, essentially a community of self-sustained
human beings, living
on the edge of utter poverty. Every village, though slightly different
in appearance, has
the same basic things going on inside it: The men are working, the
women are tending
the home, the children are going to school. Just as neorealism is a
filter, the poverty
becomes a filter. While in America, we have all the same roles in society
- to a certain
extent - in Iran, the jobs, the home and the school are all desolate,
empty places (often
they look as if constructed or carved out of stone). Their homes, businesses
and schools
all resemble caves. The people of Kokek show little emotion, just like
their habitat. Their
expressions are colorless as is their setting. The neorealist point-of-view
that everything
should be as close to being real as possible is firmly in place in
Kiarostami’s films. Even
as the audience begins to have doubt in the idea that reality is even
a possibility by the
third film (‘Through the Olive Trees’, one step removed from reality
beyond ‘Life and
Nothing More’), the films look authentic.
As far as being rousing, being the type of
film to promote active viewership or
initiate social change, the Kokek trilogy - and Kiarostami as a filmmaker
- seem to be
much more passive than this. As much as the aggressive, almost entirely
commiserating
‘The Bicycle Thief’ and ‘Umberto D.’ hoped to bring about the social
progression that
was part of the overall hope and objective of the neorealist movement,
we as an audience
get the sense that Kiarostami, in pointing his camera towards the impoverished
world of
Kokek and its citizens, wants to inspire the wonder of life and motivate
us to unlock the
manner of survival of the human race, even if we aren’t of the particular
economic class
that Kiarostami’s subjects are. As he said, his films aim to be “...half-created
cinema, an
unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit
of the audience, so
resulting in hundreds of films”. Though he doesn’t seem to be attempting
to initiate some
sort of social change through the awareness his films promote, he is
hoping to give birth
to change within his audience by way of their understanding of themselves
and their
connection to their world, just as Kiarostami’s characters strive to
grasp.
Neorealist films often do not conclude in
a way that is satisfying to the characters
fate, or satisfying to our particular tastes (particularly as American
filmgoers).
Kiarostami’s films challenge this very much. The endings of ‘Life and
Nothing More’
and ‘Through the Olive Trees’ are nearly identical: characters involved
in determined
actions whose conclusions we don’t see but are invited to imagine.
In ‘Where is the
Friend’s Home?’, the end is conclusive and finite. Though it has a
definitive ending, its
content doesn’t really beg one. ‘Life and Nothing More’ and ‘Through
the Olive Trees’
don’t really crave one either, but end closer to the tenets of neorealist
ideals. Or do they?
It seems to me that movies like ‘The Bicycle Thief’ and ‘Umberto D.’
both end in a
limbo that is meant to agitate and stimulate the viewer. ‘Life and
Nothing More’ and
‘Through the Olive Trees’ don’t end like this at all. Their endings,
like the last bit of
water in a bathtub, tend to flow slowly down the drain, leaving plenty
of time for
pondering and reflection. Essentially, since I don’t believe the endings
to be neorealist in
the least, Kiarostami’s Kokek trilogy takes exception to this aspect
of the movement’s
rules.
The reflexivity of these films is very much
an offshoot of neorealism. As much as
neorealism purports to examine the recent years in a country’s history,
its tragedy, a need
for rebuilding - all of these things can be achieved in the manner
that removes reality
from fiction and mirrors itself. In ‘Through the Olive Trees’, when
they are casting,
scouting and shooting ‘Life and Nothing More’, a film about the search
for the actor in
‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’, they are creating a reality out of fiction.
This is the basic
idea with neorealism as well: to take fiction and make it seem as real
as possible to
promote awareness of social ills. Also, they are taking on the thematic
charge that says
one event in life, no matter how far out of context it is, can be like
another. Most of
‘Through the Olive Trees’ shows how different ‘Life and Nothing More’
can be
perceived by articulating the roles of its actors, its characters and
its director. The scene
where the man who has lost many family members and has just been married
plays
differently when we know the actor was in love with the woman who was
supposed to
play his wife, but she rejects him (probably because he is the lackey
for everyone
involved in the production). We don’t know that the final shot in ‘Life
and Nothing
More’, the image of the car slowly creeping up the pathway and stalling
often was
inspired by the director’s observance of this actor following the woman
who was
rejecting him down a long pathway into the distance - never giving
up - just like the man
in the car at the end of ‘Life and Nothing More’. The way this fictional
sequence with the
man following the girl, concocted by Kiarostami, but meant to stand
for reality in
‘Through the Olive Trees’ could be the incentive for the closing shot
in ‘Life and
Nothing More’, a film we took for real but turned out to be fiction,
shows how using
corridors of reality can make a film more realistic. The more realistic
- but still fictional -
the film is, the stronger it appears to make use of its neorealist
roots. It also stands to
show up that every little thing has a bigger meaning, an idea which
flows throughout the
neorealist films, but isn’t necessarily spelled out directly.
Abbas Kiarostami, maker of inert masterpieces
of lyrical, almost pastoral moral
visions, ironically, harnesses a style of filmmaking ripe for political
action (which
connotates rebirth, a side effect of which is revolution, which is
not always so idle). By
using the tenets of neorealism such as minimalism, self-reflection
and attention to the
relationship between reality and fiction, Kiarostami created three
films that are one. If
one were to be so bold, one could take just one more neorealist aspect
from the Kokek
trilogy. The three films, though their editing is bland, could be a
sort of grand-scale type
of collision editing, a method often employed by the Italian neorealists.
If you look at
‘Life and Nothing More’ in between ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’ and
‘Through the
Olive Trees’, it takes on a completely different meaning than if it
were to come after
‘Through the Olive Trees’ or if it were to be viewed separately, out
of context. Likewise,
if you remove ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’ from the trilogy, it becomes
nothing more
than a reference in the other two films. They would work, but not as
effectively as they
do when viewed following ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’. Finally, in
the most deeply
felt example, if you view ‘Through the Olive Trees’ by itself, it would
be a total mess, a
film that made very little sense and contained less of the intellectual
puzzle that emerges
when it is seen with the other two films, as part of a complete trilogy.
If you were to
watch ‘Through the Olive Trees’ without ‘Where is the Friend’s Home?’
you might be
okay. If you were to watch ‘Through the Olive Trees’ without ‘Life
and Nothing More’,
how would you understand the way life imitates art in ‘Life and Nothing
More’, itself a
hybrid of things that occurred in both of the other films. The idea
here is that while
Kiarostami embodies some of the principles of neorealism and changes
a few to fit his
needs, a bigger picture exists which creates the kind of dependence
camera angles and
editing had in ‘The Bicycle Thief’ and ‘Umberto D.’ out of the Kokek
trilogy as a whole.
Essentially, Kiarostami employed neorealism so thoroughly, he even
structured his
gimmick around it.
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