I remember trees. A forest of Leafless trees. Carvings on barks. A solitary wilderness. An acute variation of empty, white space where sight can roam free. An imminent silence.
From a distance, I see Abbas Kiarostami. He stands in the middle of his art installation, a row of sculptural trees representing a forest, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The trees seem nude, even lifeless. But in reality they bring about a movement, though with no pattern and continuity. Amongst the trees, wearing his dark glasses, Kiarostami stands still, marveling at the lightening, cutting silently across his exhibition. Despite the disquiet at the busy museum, he remains calm and so present.
And even in death he remains present. In the span of over forty years, Kiarostami's works represented a poetic cinema of life and the living. His films employed a distinct style with scenes flowing into a stream of unfolding, unpredictable events marked by implicit tensions where the lines between fiction and reality collapse. The minimalistic style of his films depicted slow moving plots that lead to art and life imitating each other with hypnotic effects.
His films were evidence of life. The French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, has argued that Kiarostami's Life and Nothing More, a film about a director who travels to Koker in the aftermath of an earthquake in search for the actors of a movie he directed years earlier, accomplishes the task of depicting life not through representation or reportage but giving evidence of renewal through cuts and edits. What emerges out of the wreckage of the earthquake is life in its perpetual continuity, a process that resumes with palpable discontinuities, "which is life itself, its meaning and its salt, its truth that obeys no injection, no destination." Life flows in disarray.
In The Taste of Cherry, life's disarray is at full display. But the frenzy is not because of Mr. Badi, the main character, who drives in the barren countryside in search of someone to help him commit suicide. Rather in winding roads where people enter, leave, and ride as passengers or drivers on desolate roads; roads as currents with humans riding the crest of slow wave of time, while awaiting the inevitable storm of death. Roads are sketched on a seasoned earth that, as Walt Whitman described, never tire; winding roads, curving, twisting, at times flowing into each other, giving birth to new directions, creating the presence of openness. The roads continue not as a journey but, recalling Nancy, as "traversal without attributable borders, hence, without discontinuous markers, a traversal that only passes through (this is called an experience), a passing through..." Roads intertwine with no end, and we, the passengers of time, pretend to linger on.
Life passes. It moves forward through fading traces that remind us of our inescapable mortality, and our all-too-brief presence as fleeting moments in the vast realm of unending roads.
The final scene of his 1999 film, The Wind Will Carry US, a story about a team of men (called by the locals as "engineers") who have come to film a funeral ceremony to take place after the death of an old woman, shows one of the engineers throwing a human bone into a narrow river. Floating on choppy waters, the bone passes by the green weeds, fed by carefree goats, as birds chirp and sing in a distant to the rhythmic sound of waves. Life streams in a whirl of noise.
I often think of Kiarostami standing in the middle of his leafless trees. The image remains framed in the shadows of my memory. Like a close up of life with details of movements, incessant of motions, random shapes, without borders, without which life would be meaningless, Kiarostami floats amid the solitary wilderness of his own making. And yet he looms large like a long shot, perhaps a frameless shot that fills an entire film screen, where all details merge into a single image. And that single image is of a man in shape of an open-road, disappearing into a distant horizon that is life, and nothing more.