Erice-Kiarostami
The Pathways of Creation

Alain Bergala

As luck would have it, Abbas Kiarostami and Víctor Erice were born a week apart, the first in Iran (in Tehran) on 22 June 1940, the second in Spain (in Karrantza) on 30 June 1940.

Their personal history will determine that both men will become filmmakers – Kiarostami by taking a circuitous path; Erice via the more classical route of a film school. Both are now internationally renowned filmmakers and have become, in their respective countries, leading lights for a younger generation of directors, who consider them to be exemplary ‘big brothers’ and amicable ‘masters’. Both have placed their personal imprint on their national cinema, their work being inscribed as a kind of beacon, in both cases the most representative of their generation – a somewhat lost generation in cinema history, the one which begins making films in the 1970s, following the great efflorescence of the ‘60s.

For both individuals, this personal history is inscribed within the more painful History of their respective countries. As adults, the two of them lived through a radical change of political regime, with all that this means in terms of an upheaval within everyday life, an openness towards other cultures, moralities, censorship, the possibility of artistic expression. For Erice this rupture, the end of Francoism and the advent of a democratic regime, comes about within two years of the making of his first film, The Spirit of the Beehive, in 1973, while censorship will only be abolished in Spain in 1977. For Kiarostami, it is a few years later in the same decade, in 1979, that the Islamic revolution will cause his country to make the switch from the old regime of the Shah to the Islamic Republic of today. These two changes of regime have nothing in common, obviously, except that to be born, to grow up and be formed as a filmmaker, artist or intellectual in an extreme historical and political situation – with all that this entails by way of censorship, cultural frustration, trickery, prudence, but also courage and a taste for freedom, and to find oneself in one’s thirties, fully mature, faced with a radically different situation, other rules of social intercourse, other ideologies, other kinds of limitation – implies a further calling into question of the role of art in society and, for a creative person, of everything that defines his own artistic practice. For Kiarostami, who learnt to make films under the old regime in an educational institution (the Kanoun) founded by the Shah’s wife, the Islamic Revolution has not necessarily meant a gain in creative freedom. It has brought him face to face with new forms of ideological and religious pressure and censorship, and demanded, in his case, enormous strength of conviction and attachment to his country in order to go on living and exercising his métier as a filmmaker there, even though international recognition has offered him the possibility of going into exile and freely producing his future films elsewhere.

For both men the political, cultural, ideological and social climate of the two periods they have lived through (before and after the political change) was never to be the declared subject of their films. They share the same conviction that cinema is first and foremost an art of singularity, that of the human beings whose story they tell and the actual world around them: their house, their neighbours, their landscape, their way of life. They are obviously aware that these modest, ordinary lives (the only ones in their eyes that are worth taking the trouble to recount) are partly determined by the overall situation of the society in which they are active. But in the cinema it behoves them to make, this quintessentially human factor must never steal a march on an attentive and modest approach to the singularity of their character. In their films one can read the effects of the overall political situation in which the story takes place, but these signs retain the opacity and areas of shadow that they have for their characters. Both men have always been convinced that neither the filmmaker nor the viewer must have the slightest superiority nor the least prominence over the character, what happens to him, what he does and does not understand of the world in which he lives. We will know nothing more of the man who takes refuge in the abandoned house in The Spirit of the Beehive, and to whose aid the little girl will come before he is shot down, than what this little girl sees and understands. We will have not the slightest inkling of what the character of the young girl with whom Hossein is in love thinks in Through the Olive Trees (1994) all through the film, which is centred on the character of the boy who forcefully and innocently repudiates the social rules of caste that prevent him from aspiring to marry her. This non-access to what the young girl in the story thinks and feels is, for the filmmaker, a radical, incisive way to make us feel, as viewers, something of the status and the place of women in this Iranian society, and of the censorship which reigns therein vis-à-vis female characters – without ever directly speaking of it in his film.

Today, in 2006, it seems obvious that in their lives as filmmakers these two men have made the same basic choices of never submitting to the laws of cinema as an industry and a market; of keeping all careerism fiercely at bay in order to bring their work to a successful conclusion with the sovereignty befitting an artist, even if both of them must put up with severe cutbacks in the financing without which no film can get made. These two œuvres bear witness to the same freedom and the same exigency on the part of their authors never to give in where their desire to create is concerned. The two men have never entered into the game of the norm, of cinematic fashion, of would-be ‘public taste’ and of a career. They have made their films when the conditions for a worthwhile personal creation seemed to them to be right – which has frequently been very long, too long, in Erice’s case – while Kiarostami has permitted himself the freedom, after a Palme d’or at Cannes, to pass from the cinema of standardised production and distribution (feature films on 35 mm) to a much poorer and solitary cinema shot on a small DV camera, without profiting from the access facilities to the financing of his film projects that success in Cannes opened up for him.

Their first resemblance is, then, of the order of an intransigent morality of artistic creation. This similarity is to be expressed in their films by an ethics of form, ensuring that their films have an unmistakable aesthetic kinship.

Both began in cinema with a conviction that this art was, for them, indissociable from the childhood which they have made at once an origin and a subject. This profound similarity marks their belonging to a generation of children and adolescents born during and just after the war, of which Serge Daney and Jean Louis Schefer speak, who have had the indelible feeling very early on that films had ‘gazed at their childhood’. Of these films, miraculously encountered at the right moment as an overwhelming experience for those who will be able to do little more, henceforth, than devote their lives to them in one way or another, Philippe Arnaud wrote: ‘They are indispensable images that define us and form a sort of destiny which awaits us, a baffling kind of knowledge since it is in advance of us, forever stamped by an irremediable hallmark in which we know that this concerns us without understanding why.’ The children of The Spirit of the Beehive and The South (1983), those of Where Is My Friend’s House? (1987), And Life Goes On (1992) and most of Kiarostami’s short films, also perceive the world as an enigma whose key is at once contained by and hidden in the visible. Above all, these are clairvoyant, silent children through whom Erice and Kiarostami seek to rediscover the infancy of their art and an as-yet primitive, magical vision of the mysteries of the world which was that of the children they once were. The projection of Frankenstein (1931) in The Spirit of the Beehive and that of the coloured lamps on the walls of the forbidden village in Where Is My Friend’s House? are dependent on this same revelation of the enigma of oneself and of one’s relationship with the world, in a mysterious visible dimension which is capable of provoking a formative shudder. This resemblance renders even more visible the basic difference between the child characters of the Spanish filmmaker – who live this founding experience of the relationship to the world in terms of a protected milieu in which they can return nice and warm to the family home, loved despite everything by parents with whom they can converse – and those of the Iranian filmmaker, who are often much more alone in the world, faced with parents closed to any genuine dialogue, and must seek out other adults, met by chance, as guides and initiators, with the exception of the little boy in And Life Goes On.

In his installation for this exhibition, Erice has made a three-dimensional version of his decisive encounter as a child with the cinema, in a troubling, magical place, a closed Casino, which relies on a film – The Scarlet Claw – about which he has then posed, without having the answers, the essential questions about his relationship to the world, to adults, to death, to actors, about the relationship between the screen and life.

Whatever the vast differences between their mutual cultures of origin, Kiarostami and Erice have always shared the taste for a cinema which takes the time to contemplate the things of the world, to look at human beings confronted by this enigma, a cinema of minute observation, of patience and attention to small things. Since their debuts in cinema, both have had the conviction that there are no minor and no major themes, but that the vocation of the artist is to give himself up to that inessentiality of which Maurice Blanchot said: ‘The risk of giving oneself up to the inessential is itself essential (...) And whoever has a presentiment of it can no longer steal away. Whoever is approached by it, even if he has recognised in himself the risk of the inessential, sees in this approach the essential, sacrifices to it all the truth and all the seriousness to which he nevertheless feels tied.’ To make a work with a painter who paints an ordinary tree in his garden (Erice) or with a child who must return a schoolbook to his friend (Kiarostami) – means to place oneself at the core of this essential inessentiality of art, and to rejoin the universal via the most singular.

Both directors have preferred a cinema of the ‘being-there of things’ to a cinema of the tyranny of meaning and narration; a cinema in the process of being made to a cinema of staged programmes and production values. But their cinema manifests, for all that, the same fierce refusal of flat naturalism; the world and people they film are also dependent on thought, on philosophical and metaphysical speculation, on a multiple and fantastic perception of appearances. The almost Franciscan respect for what is in front of the camera when they film is, for both directors, also a respect for the individuals around whom the film being made is based – its most fragile and precious raw material. Kiarostami and Erice have doubtless learnt a lot from the real people who ‘perform’ in their films, actors or otherwise, and above all from the children before whom no filmmaker can dissimulate or take refuge hide behind any possible technique for directing actors. Kiarostami has almost always refused professional actors, preferring to work with people who contribute much of what they are to his films. Erice, who has always liked to have actors and non-actors performing together, has, in The Quince Tree Sun (1992), made a film in which it becomes impossible to distinguish between the real people (who play their own roles) and the fictional aspect that turns them, despite everything, into film characters. When Erice films the painter’s dream, he behaves like a pure fiction filmmaker, this dream being an absolute creation of cinema, as arbitrary as the dreams of Buñuel’s or Hitchcock’s characters.

Kiarostami and Erice also have a ‘politique of slowness’ in common, which is the greatest of the current acts of resistance to the accelerating rotation of cultural objects, and to the pseudo-demands of an allegedly evermore impatient public. Both consider that time is their raw material, which they must neither force nor brutalise but, on the contrary, humbly espouse its meanderings, accept its rhythm, stases, blockages and accelerations – without which the work would have no chance of inscribing itself in the longue durée of art or transcending the fashions of cultural consumption. Both are past masters in the art of musical repetition of motifs, and thus join in a modern serial postulating of their art. One has only to compare the scenes which are repeated (with subtle differences) in Antonio Lopez’s picture-making in front of his quince tree in The Quince Tree Sun, and the multiple takes, edited in a series of almost identical shots, that the fictional filmmaker of Through the Olive Trees shoots, in order to become aware of the capacity for resistance of these two directors to the alleged expectation of film viewers for something new, different and surprising in every scene. On the contrary, they trust in the viewers’ ability to appreciate a more musical and subtler art based on repetition and difference, on seriality, on the device; namely, on the pleasure of inner recall produced by the film from scene to scene, and not on the linear, amnesiac principle of effacing one sequence by the next. Both of them prefer the tabular to the linear, allowing the viewer the freedom to enjoy the musical variations in his own way, rather than bearing him off in a headlong narrative flight of which he can only be the passive subject. This bit of freedom left to the viewer, invited to participate in the imaginary elaboration of the film, relies on an aesthetic of the shot in which there is no question of imposing what is important and what is not, as in standardised cinema which creates a hierarchy among the figures through perspective, narrative découpage and editing. In their cinema, the screen is willingly treated as a flat surface where things are on an equal footing, where the viewer is free to organise the trajectory of his gaze as he sees fit. And the scale of shots is not necessarily that of classical cinema, geared to the characters’ function within the narrative, but a scale in which each species has a right to equal attention, at a shot scale (the bees of The Spirit of the Beehive rhyme with the shots of insects in And Life Goes On), in which the setting is as important as the figures who inhabit it and who are inhabited by it.

There is nothing surprising about the fact that, based on this shared ethic and aesthetic, these two filmmakers have ended up joining each other in terms of the favourite themes and motifs they share: the landscape, villages, paths, nature, the tree ... but also silence, meditation and, of course, childhood. Both are transfixed by the same fascination for what lies beneath the ground, for what may surge up from it that is unforeseeable, for what is invisible to our rational intelligence and which can only be glimpsed and approached through the mysteries of nature: a fog which covers the hill, a cloud that hides the sun, a storm during the night (Erice); of an inexplicable wind which suddenly rises in one shot, of the invisible man in the underground passage of The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), or again a nocturnal storm (Kiarostami).

Both, finally, are primitive filmmakers in the best sense of the word – namely, that in their cinema they rediscover the infancy of their art, yet at the same time are the most radically modern filmmakers in indirectly behaving as contemporary visual artists, even in their films: Kiarostami’s famous Z-shaped path partakes of the purest Land Art, and the mise en scène of the quince tree in The Quince Tree Sun, under its plastic hoop and with its ‘geometrical marks’ added by the painter, relies on the most up-to-date installation practices. For some time now, Kiarostami has skipped between the practice of cinema and the creation of museum installations. His first two installations are projections on the ground of sleeping people (a couple in the first, a child in the second). In a more recent, monumental and playful installation – Forest Without Leaves – the visitor is invited to stroll through an artificial forest of life-sized trees photographically reconstituted from thousands of digital photos.

Both have long been aware that cinema has everything to gain from working at the boundaries of the other arts at this time, which is their time: photography, video installations, painting. They have used photography as a frontier region of cinema, in a fascinated confrontation with the immobile time of the still photo. Erice has often filmed photographs in his fiction films, while keeping his own practice as a photographer a secret; whereas, for Kiarostami, being a photographer has become an activity as essential in his eyes as cinema, enabling him, like poetry, to create images in the solitude of his contemplative and meditative wanderings in nature.

For his part, Erice has had, along his path as a filmmaker, a decisive encounter with the painter Antonio Lopez, which gave birth to a film which is one of the greatest ever made about creativity, The Quince Tree Sun. Here he confronts as no one had done before him since Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso (1956) – and in a radically different way – the twin acts of painterly creation and cinematic creation. Erice wished to present some of the painter’s pictures in an exhibition setting, but posed himself a filmmaker-type question on this subject – how does one accompany the visitor’s gaze in this confrontation with a painting? – and has set up a system of lighting and sound in order to smoothly organise this encounter, which can only be an intimate one.

Both, lastly, belong to the generation of filmmakers which, over the last ten years or so, has seen the digital camera revolutionise the making of cinema. If, for thirty years, both learnt, practiced and loved 35 millimetre ‘chemical’ cinema and traditional editing tables, they immediately wanted to experiment with the new possibilities that small digital cameras opened up for them. In this new tool, Erice has found a fresh way to approach the subject of a film without prejudging in advance what it was going to be, and to make true works out of these images ‘towards’ the film. He has made a three-dimensional version of the Notes (1990-2003) that enabled him to approach Lopez and the act of painting. With Five: Dedicated to Ozu (2003), at once film and museum installation, consisting of five contemplative shots filmed with the freedom, flexibility, economy and patience bestowed by these little cameras, Kiarostami has made a radical change in his practice of cinema.

It was almost inevitable that these two singular paths, traced in countries and cultures that are seemingly different but which partake of this same cinema land that figures on no geographical map, should intersect one day in a place that is itself beyond artistic frontiers, where cinema, photography, video, painting and installations can coexist.

The exhibition Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences, as should now be clear, is not simply an exhibition on two artists. It is also, above all, an exhibition by two artists. It has been patiently prepared as a work in progress to which the two filmmakers have endlessly contributed, via their continually developing ideas, the creation of new pieces, and a permanent exchange based on a symmetry that plays on the tension of resemblance and difference between the two œuvres. The exhibition, in effect, has been posited as symmetrical and reversible, viewable in either direction, articulated in its setting by an œuvre à deux: an exchange of letters in mini-DV which form its pivot and creative culmination.

The raison d’être of the exhibition is firstly to establish the essential correspondences in the way of envisaging the work of these two filmmakers, at the highest level of exigency in the artistic expression of their time. Obviously, in the two œuvres there was, from the very first, a notion of a museum installation, of the viewer’s right of inspection. The exigency of the two filmmakers and their œuvres has posed several crucial questions, which they have contributed to resolving – about how to exhibit cinema, how to exhibit cinema images in relation to other sorts of images, and how to make an exhibition tour into an experience of the gaze that is sustained and personal for each visitor.

This text was written for the catalogue of the exhibition Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences, which began at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (10 February-21 May 2006) and continues at La Casa Encendida in Madrid (4 July-24 September 2006), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in January 2007.