“Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Lessons of Darkness:’ Affect, Non-Representation, and Becoming-Imperceptible.” Iran Namag, A Quarterly of Iranian Studies 2, no. 4 (Winter 2017/2018), University of Toronto, Canada. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Untitled: On Cinema, Invisibility and Sense
Untitled: On Cinema, Invisibility and Sense, 2019
Acknowledging that cinema is able to establish a very special relationship with the human mind, this essay will analyse how films can relate with perceptual experience and connect with subjective inner realities by triggering thoughts and emotions that give the spectator the opportunity to deconstruct normative discourses and assume subject positions. Analysing Marta Alvim’s film work Instinctive Behaviour (2017) while doing a bridge between film theory and the author’s perspective on possibilities of sense making through the absence visual forms, this essay will look into how the cinematic image can, throughout the visible and the invisible, be consciousness, time and reality. Exposing the importance of binary oppositions in fiction and discussing aspects of agency and of authorship, this essay will explore, throughout the analysis of a film, some of the choices and strategies that lie behind the process of filmmaking. INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOUR Link for film: https://vimeo.com/181335088
Silence studies in the cinema and the case of Abbas Kiarostami
2013
This thesis is an attempt to formulate a systematic framework for 'silence studies' in the cinema by defining silence in pragmatic terms and suggesting different forms of filmic silence. As an illustration of my model, I examine the variety of silences in the works of Abbas Kiarostami, a notable figure of Art Cinema. The analytical approach suggested here can further be applied to the works of many other Art Cinema auteurs, and, by extension, to other cinematic modes as well, for a better understanding of the functions, implications, and consequences of various forms of silence in the cinema. Chapter 1 provides a working and pragmatic description of silence, applicable to both film and other communicative forms of art. Chapter 2 represents a historical study of some of the major writings about silence in the cinema. Chapter 3 introduces, exemplifies, and analyzes the acoustic silences in the films of Kiarostami, including the five categories of complete, partial (uncovered; covered with noise, music, or perspective), character/dialogue, language, and music silences. Chapter 4 introduces the concept of meta-silence and its trans-sensorial perceptions in communication and in arts, and then defines the four categories of the visual, character/image, narrative, and political silences in Kiarostami's oeuvre. In the conclusion, some of the powers of silence in the cinema of Kiarostami are discussed. The narrative, ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions of silence in Kiarostami make it possible to define his cinema as one based in, and dependent on, silence.
Cinema, thought, immanence: Contemplating signs and empty spaces in the films of Ozu
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2016
In his two-volume study of the cinema, Deleuze presents a unique understanding of film as a space of thinking productive of its own cinematic thoughts and ideas, which it thinks through the compositions of images and signs it produces. This question of what new kinds of thinking the cinema might develop underwrites Deleuze's theory of the postwar transition from the sensori-motor thought of the 'movement-image' towards an intensive 'thought without image' generated by the crystalline 'time-image'. Great directors, for Deleuze, are those who invent new intense connections of preindividual singularities and ideas in thought that disrupt the habits and clichés of ordinary perception and action, forcing us to think and feel differently. It is precisely in terms of the production of a new style of cinematic thinking, I argue, that we can frame encounters with the films of Japanese director Ozu Yasujirō, and specifically his contribution to the emergence of what we might term, following Deleuze, a cinema of contemplation rather than action. Whilst a number of scholars have recognised a certain 'contemplative' aesthetic in Ozu's films (Bordwell, 1988; Schrader, 1988), this article turns to Deleuze's discussion in Difference and Repetition to understand contemplation not as a subjective form of transcendence, but rather as an immanent event of individuation. I focus in particular on Ozu's cinematic thinking of contemplation generates new and transformative ways of thinking and perceiving the city, uncoupling urban spaces and bodies from the requirements of sensori-motor action such that they become expressive sites of indeterminate signs and unexpected intensities of affect. By dramatizing these immanent transitions and thresholds of affective and spatial becomings, I argue that Ozu's films direct us toward new possible openings of thought to a politics of the virtual.
Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy (proofs of introduction: please do not cite without permission)
This book presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostami’s films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work. Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Noël Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostami’s most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy, and Like Someone in Love. Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy shows that the philosophical significance of film consists less in its ability to make a positive contribution to theorising than in how it beguiles, goads, and rebukes it.
In this essay I engage the perspective of film phenomenology to analyze the black screen as a frame-breaking negative experience, based on an understanding of cinema as event. Relying on Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological approach and taking inspiration from Cecil M. Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900), a case in point for a method predicated on the question of “how,” I place emphasis on the “film’s body” and consciousness which, through its own paralysis and impairment, affects the spectator’s lived-body. Following the terminology of sociologist Erving Goff man, I approach both a car accident at the turn of the twentieth century and 9/11 on the cusp of the new millennium as frame-breaking events that generate a profound negative experience. I then describe the black screen in 9/11 films as a frame-breaking occurrence that creates a negative event in its own right. Th e encounter with the breakage of the conventional mechanisms and modes of the “fim’s body” as well as the forced sensory shift lead the spectator to a heightened awareness of his/her own body as a receiving medium that empathetically partakes in the experience of a negative event at the scene of cinema, both perceptually and reflexively.
Aesthetically & existentially relevant scenes from Kiarostami's cinema
Taste of Cinema, 2016
Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) was one of the most influential post-revolution (1978-79), Second Wave filmmakers of Iran who accrued universal attention for his atypical cinematic style. Kiarostami helped in setting up the film department for Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun). Over the twenty years during which he made films for Kanun, he developed his individualistic style. Kiarostami's cinema is austere and devoid of an ostentatious mise-en-scène. He often empaneled non-actors to play the roles in his films to leverage their wisdom and sincerity. His style is known for mix of fiction and documentary-like elements. His distinguishing cinematic techniques include scenes shot in cars, panoramic long shots, intimate close-ups, real time filming and a realistic diegetic soundtrack. He created a poetic cinema by not only using poetry of Persian poets such as Omar Khayyám, Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad in themes and dialogues, but also by metaphorically linking it with his films. He replaced a large part of the narrative with poetic imagery. Despite his orientation towards minimalism, his cinema is artistically evolved and intellectually challenging. His films often deal with deep philosophical complexities and tickle the conscience. Some recurring themes in his cinema are about life and death, oppressive society and search for identity. Kiarostami gives the audience space for constructive expressionism by keeping the film endings abstract and open-ended. His films invite the audience to introspect, challenge conventions and appreciate unorthodox shots. The scenes selected here illustrate Kiarostami's distinct cinematic style and make us question existential truths.
Abbas Kiarostami and a New Wave of the Spectator
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2010
Western references of Kiarostami’s work are often over-estimating the influence of the Western Cinema – especially Modernism, the New Waves, Godard, Bresson – on his films. But self-reflexivity and minimalism here have more to do with the eastern ornamental mode, symbolic iconography and tradition of deconstruction. A close analysis of the issue of spectatorship (and, moreover, that of the woman as spectator) in this self-effacing cinema will show how gaps and even a lack of visual stimuli are turning the image into a mirror reflecting the spectator ‘written into’ the very texture of these films.
Abbas Kiarostami and the New Wave of the Spectator
Western references of Kiarostami’s work are often over -estimating the influence of the Western Cinema – especially Modernism, the New Waves, Godard, Bresson – on his films. But self-reflexivity and minimalism here have more to do with the eastern ornamental mode, symbolic iconography and tradition of deconstruction. A close analysis of the issue of spectatorship (and, moreover, that of the woman as spectator) in this self-effacing cinema will show how gaps and even a lack of visual stimuli are turning the image into a mirror reflecting the spectator ‘written into’ the very texture of these films.
Transcending Cinema: Kiarostami's Approach to Filmmaking
Iran Namag, 2018
As an artist, photographer and filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami continued his experimentations with the medium, style and storytelling throughout his fruitful career. Kiarostami has managed to use formalist and realist modes of filmmaking simultaneously and move beyond the simple categorization of film genres. Formalism emphasizes film's potential as an expressive medium. For the formalists, film should not merely record and imitate what is before the camera, but should produce its own meanings. Realism, by contrast, emphasizes film as a medium that reproduces what is before the camera. In realism film techniques are important, but not for producing meaning within the film. The content of realism should speak for itself for the audience to draw their own conclusions. Bazin believed realist cinema was a more democratic form of film in that it did not manipulate the audience. And this admittedly what Kiarostami also believed in his filmmaking however he does walk a fine line between formalism and realism. His realism and formalist juxtaposition is evident in Kiarostami’s framing be it in one of his cinematic films such as “Where is the friend’s house?” or his framing with the fixed digital camera angels in “Ten” as well as the timing and editing styles he uses in his films. This paper will look at how Kiarostami uses both elements of realism and formalism as they are defined in film theory to make films or as he puts it “to get close to his subjects” in his films.