The directors of the European festivals, like their sailor ancestors, were happy from discovering intact lands with intact materials; films of these wonderlands were rich of such resources. Resources like scenes they’ve never encountered; materials that you can’t see in the usual story-based or blockbuster films. Post-story Cinema? Metanarrative? There is always room for arbitrary commentary and critique. They smell of mysticism too. The destructive kind; best suited for the new generation of European hippies who are harmless and non-remonstrative. On the other hand, there’s the ascendency of Hollywood’s story-telling cinema. The Europeans became speechless abate of modern cinema giants. Materials like long shots and plan-sequences. The idea of referring to cinema itself and the idea of film in film (obvious in Kiarostami’s works). Now with this new discovery, even the likes of Godard and Bordwell lost control1. In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that killed over 30,000 people, the leading role of Kiarostami’s “Life, and Nothing More…” – played by Farhad Kheradmand – goes among the earthquake victims. His excuse is to get some news about the actors of “Where Is the Friend's
Home?”. He chats with groups of people and tells them that “life goes on” and leaves. He always keeps his distance, he doesn’t get out of the car unless he has to. He is not familiar with the agony of those people and he doesn’t even try, and of course he does nothing to ease their pain too. Just like the filming crew who sit in the car with their camera and film the earthquake victims along the way from the side window and don’t even bother to get out of their car unless they really have to. The earthquake is a justification, but the film could have taken place in any other time, and the motion picture of the people from the side window would have run in front of us anyway and then life would have still gone on. Filmmakers have traveled to villages as tourists. Things that look exotic to a tourist are everyday stuff to locals; a tourist looks for eye-catching keepsakes to prove that he/she has been somewhere; like taking snapshots on a vacation or buying fake handicrafts. It’s the same with these touristic films. They are all the same. It doesn’t matter where it takes place; villages of Gilan or Kurdistan. When war broke out in Iraq and Afghanistan, these festival-filmmakers (the festives!) went there too. They even
went to Africa for their last resort. Because it doesn’t matter where you go or who you’re filming, the only thing that matters is filming primitivism. Let’s forget about our humanitarian masks and human-rights rationalizations. Because the filmmaker hasn’t considered the residents of these villages as humans and doesn’t introduce them to us as humans. The villagers are creatures that are presented to the viewer because they are unusual and astonishing or worse, they are pathetic and pitiful. The filmmaker sells their pain and in return, gains attention and awards. And cinema as a humanistic form of art, becomes a postmodern form of those “freak shows” and “human zoos” of the late 19th and early 20th century that took place in Europe. But this time, we are the directors of these shows and the honor of this racism goes to us as well. For example, take “A Time for Drunken Horses” (a film by Bahman Qobadi). Who cares where it happens? The only thing that matters is the misery. In the beginning, they took away their car and the father dies, the cripple brother is dying and they are forcing the sister to marry someone she doesn’t want to, they trade the brother for a mule and they are
1.Jean-Luc Godard has said: «Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.» [http://www.theguardian.com/ film/2005/apr/16/art] David Bordwell named Kiarostami as the best filmmaker of 90s: “…Person of the Decade can only be Abbas Kiarostami, who seems along with his Iranian colleagues and the best Asian directors to be reinventing the history of the cinema…” [http://www. filmcomment.com/article/film-comments-best-of-the90-s-poll-part-one/]
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opinion