"Through the Olive Trees" (1994) / "Certified Copy" (2010)

Watching two Kiarostami films back to back, the first an early film, the second his latest, made 16 years later, it is striking to see how little Kiarostami has changed over time. For some directors, this may be perceived to be a defect in the evolution of style, but in Kiarostami's case the fact that he hasn't changed much proves the durability of his thinking. Through the Olive Trees, of all Kiarostami's works, relates the most to his most recent film, Certified Copy, the latter which is also the Iranian director's first film made outside Iran. Through the Olive Trees is about love which begins as simulation and ends as reality; Certified Copy is essentially the same film -- though in some ways with noticeably less complication and sophistication. Both films, one feels, began as isolated images, auratic images that impelled the director to unveil the processes that brought them to being. In Through the Olive Trees -- whose title succinctly summarizes the gist of the film -- Kiarostami was perhaps struck one day, as he stood on a cliff or hilltop overlooking a wide green valley, by the distant image of a young girl walking through a grove of olive trees. The girl, of course, is wearing a hijab, and her figure is only barely perceptible as she disappears from sight under the tree boughs. The image is overpowering, poetic because it is inexplicable. How does one conjure up this image again, what story could bring it back to life? Watching the end of Through the Olive Trees, one feels that Kiarostami wrote the story specifically to recapture the emotion of this singular image, the sight of a young girl walking under the green cover of olive trees: what would a young man feel at seeing her, so out of reach that she becomes almost phantasmal? Such a film would dwell on the beauty of women, on the mystery of youth and maturity in women, in blithe girls and pensive mothers, and, especially, on the special kind of beauty which the hijab confers on feminine nature. Through the Olive Trees is one of those rare Iranian films -- at least, of those produced after the Islamic Revolution -- that manages to demonstrate the "Eternal Feminine" without needing to rely on any overt eroticization of female beauty. (The character of the strong and determined Miss Shiva is a case in point in which the metaphysical stability of a strong woman shines through her voice and uprightness.)

Certified Copy is a film that would be impossible to make in Iran; Kiarostami, in making it, has effectively signed himself into exile (especially after having to witness the unjust imprisonment of his close friend and collaborator, Jafar Panahi, who makes a youthful appearance in Through the Olive Trees) -- and we sense that, like Andrei Tarkovsky and other master directors who were forced to live in exile from their native country, Kiarostami will expect to work abroad for an indeterminate length of time. (Already his next film, titled The End, looks to be produced and filmed in Japan and France.) Certified Copy, by any measure of decency, is a tame film, but I recall the distinct shock -- or so I was led to imagine what might be "shocking" for Iranians to behold -- of seeing Juliette Binoche wear a low neckline blouse with her brassiere visibly in view (and which she eventually takes off, in a church!). There was something quaintly european, even slovenly, about Binoche's appearance, compared to the strict attire of the Iranian women who populate Through the Olive Trees. But it was still Binoche, and her charming smile sufficed to bring us back to the matter-of-factness of the liberal West, where women are indeed allowed to wear what they like and flirt and think as they like. Certified Copy, in this regard, feels like the kind of film that Kiarostami always wanted to make, not only about what the West, what Europe, means to him, but also what an empowered and liberalized woman would look and talk and act like if she were removed from the context of Iranian culture. It is important, I think, to remember that Kiarostami was raised in a culture that categorically forbade women to not only dress as Binoche dresses, but to act and think and speak as she does: and Binoche delivers in all respects another portrait of the Eternal Feminine. But Kiarostami is no immature idealist, and Binoche is as much defined by the circumstances of her francophone culture as she is by the circumstances of her relationship to the art professor James Miller (played by William Shimmel) and her relationship to the geographical environment (Tuscany) in which she lives and works. Kiarostami's ability to write her so purely in her own voice demonstrates the maturity of his vision. The final image of the art professor looking at himself in the mirror, as he contemplates the reality of his situation (is this really happening? why am I here?), while church bells play in a Tuscan background colored by the warm light of sunset, punctuates the essential Kiarostami technique of building up a film from the retrospective angle of its ending: one feels that the ending had been written first, before the scenario shaped itself into a discourse on the nature of the "copy", authentic and inauthentic. 

One reviewer has astutely observed that Kiarostami's thesis that european culture is itself a simulation, a copy, of the Antique, as opposed to being anything "original" or unique, testifies to the director's outsider privilege of being an Iranian: as a man raised in a persian culture in many ways more ancient than the relics of Europe, Kiarostami's insight into european society enjoys a perspective equal to that of a dispassionate man viewing a  beautiful girl walk through a grove of olive trees that spreads out in the valley below.

"Carlos" (2010)

"I'm not talking about the Algerians, I'm talking about the Syrians." Gist of the film. We do not ever know, really, what they talk about; we just flow with it, expecting hijinks of all kinds. The seriousness of the events, I think, is meant to be questioned, and this is the boldest move Assayas makes: because Carlos is a jackal after all, a terrorist, a cold-blooded murderer. The film prides itself on daytripping, nightsurfing, from country to country: and this constancy in flight is accompanied by a constancy in disorientation. Europe and the Middle East mainly; but the scenes and plot segments flow into each other seamlessly -- "historically" -- and this may or may not be the film's virtue (one forgets it was, after all, a television miniseries: hence the length, hence the painfully blundering final segment). Structurally speaking, if we consider the positive-negative mirroring that worked so well in Soderbergh's Che, Carlos will appear as much a failure in exercise as the real man was in comparison to the real Guevara: the revolutionary principles which made Che so monumental were swiftly taken over, in the figure of the jackal, by the cynicism of pop art.

A lot of postpunk (Wire mainly) suffuses the film with an aura of pop-star impenetrability; Carlos is meant to be taken as a pop-star of a kind, a terrorist who finds himself sufficiently justified by the media attention he attracts. "They would pay very well for my head." That seems to be the only reason for his existence: media and the cult of death that surrounds the making of every pop idol. The last segment is a lame cough, a stumble and tumble, a pathetic overweight fall in comparison with the exhilaration of the first two parts. It all ends, as the "15 mins" tend to do for the reality TV star, in swollen testicles, paralysis, and easy capture.

"Hunger" (2008)

"Business of the soul" they say. 66 days hunger strike. Bobby Sands dies alone. All men die alone. The only political status a man has, when all else is uprooted and thrown away, is self-representation. If a man's right to political status -- to voice and speech -- are taken away, then his body remains the last site of jurisdiction. Visible suffering; but also: internal suffering. Business of the soul. The right to wear one's own clothes. The right to spend one's time as one wishes (to meditate, to do nothing, to sleep in peace, to smoke cigs). The right to converse with other men, other prisoners, and to pursue self-education, recreation, advancement. The right to read letters addressed to oneself, and to receive the gifts of goodwill from the outside: family parcels, lovers' griefs, children's pictures. The right to receive remission when opportunities are pirated away by the leadership. The central command of shield-banging; black boots and the gauntlet of masked aggression. Against such facelessness there is but one solution: the right to self, and that self an Irish self. Northern Irish, but of one Ireland. Catholic but also Protestant. Irish but also not-British, subject to neither the Crown nor to Maggie Thatcher. One begins with a comrade; one ends with a dream of youth. Cross-country runner, Bobby was, the best of Belfast. The endurance to persist in the cold frost of a morning, when he last remembered the light of a chill sun and the frightened sparrows rush out and fall away into airy patterns, was what he envisioned at the moment his soul fled away into a dark grove. They wheeled poor Bobby out, champion runner, on a stretcher, and tears could not have pooled at the corners of his emaciated face. What eyes he had were the sores on his back. "Jesus had backbone." So did Bobby when his skin and muscle sunk and wrapped for dear life around it.
-----
The film is worthy of study chiefly for its structure, besides the acting; this is where McQueen's training as an artist shines through. The film is divided into 4 parts: the prologue, prison life, interview/confession, hunger strike. The Prologue (not truly a prologue but I call it so because its power lies in its ability to conceal the inner chambers of the film and rather hints at the violence to come) has us contemplating the routine life of a nondescript, well-fed, well-dressed, seemingly honorable man who happens to be a prison guard. McQueen focuses not only on the trifles of his passing hours but most expressly on his bruised hands, which the prison guard constantly has to submerge in a sink of warm water to soothe their swelling when we see that they are freshly cut and bruised time after time. What does he do that hurts his hands so? Rather, who does he hurt to make his hands hurt so? This recurrent image is powerful enough -- of an irishman hurting, as we assume, other irishmen, and ends up bruising himself -- and its strength of expression gains resonance by indirectly suggesting an unseen, off-screen violence. The 2nd part, which I call Prison Life, follows a fresh prisoner into a cell where we are cast with him into the shit storm, literally. We're gradually made aware of the absence, the delayed introduction, of Bobby Sands: neither of the two young men with whom we inhabit the 2nd part of the film is Sands, and this makes the everymanness of the prisoners' ordeal poignant. When Sands is finally introduced we don't immediately recognize him: hardly any one in the film is referred to by name or cast into sharper light by dialogue: speech among the characters is sparse, arising only in the necessaries of actual human functions, when something vital has to be said. Who in prison would waste the energy to blabber when everything is at stake? The prisoners/rebels are displayed to us like monks in a cloister who practice the virtues of silence, endurance and forbearance; not merely because they are rebels thrown into the pen, but because they are irishmen sworn by blood to their country; something greater than them is in peril, must be preserved. The 3rd part, by which time we know who Sands is (played imperiously, magnificently by Michael Fassbender) leads eventually to the extended dialogue scene involving Sands and a Catholic bishop. This scene, acted with virtuoso solemnity by both parties, weighs everything down, and leads theoretically to the actual hunger strike, of which we see only Sands' martyrship. The ending, having nothing to do with the beginning (except in terms of cinematographic light, in their share of color and tone), flares out in birds and death; Sands' martyrship stays with us until the last credit rolls, and all that had happened before doesn't come full circle as other films do, and instead spirals outward into a haunted sky. What was done is done. "It is finished."

"Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971)

Stripped down to the essentials: chassis, engine, oil, water. Machine and fluid; so too is man his matter and the aqua vitae. The classic Cartesian Dichotomy returns in the form of a pulp film: Mechanic and Driver. (The characters have no name, not even the girl, who plays the romance interest, who is simply "The Girl"; or Warren Oates, credited as "G.T.O."; because man is the sum of his parts, he is his car; in action, at rest.) The beginning credits, no music, neither the ending credits; the film begins in a blur of pavement as the camera zooms by, and the movie ends in a dissolve of celluloid, as the grey 55 Chevy speeds toward the unknown distances, into the oblivion of pure velocity. The nothingness of racing.
--
"I'll tell you one thing, there's nothing like building an old automobile from scratch and wiping out one of those Detroit automobiles. It does give you a set of emotions that stays with ya. Know what I mean? Those satisfactions are permanent."

They are permanent because they are ennobled beyond the ordinary measure of practicality. Immeasurable because they are fast and constant.

"Antichrist" (2009)

...

The film is ludicrously dedicated to Tarkovsky... and yet there is reason for this. The "Prologue" that begins the film is beautifully directed, in a crystal b&w cinematography, slow-motion, lots of water: in a shower two people making love, or spilling from a plant jar tipped over by a child; as the jar breaks, water. The love-making in the shower includes a pornographic feature which is aestheticized to maximum effect, and the love-making in general is draped in a luxuriant cadence by the slow-mo, by the baroque music, by the pristine sheen of the camera-shots. The von Trier of old -- the Tarkovsky acolyte who lacked all of Tarkovsky's mysticism, poetry, substance, but none of his eye or technical gift -- returns in the "Prologue," a pleasure-principled exercise in style. 

Why is the film dedicated to A.T.? Because it is something of the opposite, the direct, epicurean antinomy to A.T.'s fundamentally spiritual praxis; an exercise in style proposed and sought by von Trier out of resignation (that he is nowhere in A.T.'s league) and also out of a weird modesty: not wishing to ape the master's poetics, von Trier, the provocateur, chooses strategically to avoid any and all pretentiousness (a strategy that fails in many respects to achieve its aim; it is altogether too easy to think of von Trier as "pretentious") and instead work as the "antichrist" (in the Nietzschean sense) to A.T.'s christian mysticism. The anti-Tarkovsky, relational and obsessed, not with locating the self in God-origin but with locating the self in a nihilist daemonism. 

What is the purpose of the "Prologue"? To introduce the first chapter, titled "Grief," the cause thereof: a toddler falls to its death while the parents make love. ("He" and "She"; they are not given names because they are meant to embody the two sexes, masculinity and femininity, animus and anima, with no regard for gender or socialization, since von Trier is trying out severely reduced psychoanalytic foundations.) We see the toddler die while the couple make love: sex gives birth to life but it also takes life away. This is the principle of regeneration: sex is always death, not as "the end of life," but as the beginning of life, or the continuation of life, repetition interminable, reincarnation out of endless obsession with carnality: one dies to be reborn again, and again, and again. This is the telos of sex: reincarnation. The body and the obsession with the body is the cause for embodiment throughout the history of matter. "One re-enters the womb door": because one is committed to sex, as pleasure and as fate and as life-purpose. Because sex begets death begets life. A circle constructed within nature is constructed within the body, which is the very springboard of nature. 

Why is this film so profoundly Freudian? Firstly, the theory of "repression": "The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious." What "She" represses is not her grief -- her grief is written all over her, it is inscribed on her body, it makes her quiver, it makes her violently unstable -- rather, she represses a memory of a distant past that is only awakened by her grief, by the loss of her child. The couple go to the woods because she has a dream about walking through a particular wood and staying at a particular cabin. As she learns to go beyond her grief she learns something about herself that unsettles her deeply, irrevocably, something which the loss of her child made painfully clear to her only in an automatic way. Her concealed memory isn't just distant, it is ancient, as ancient as the origin of the sexes; and this hidden seed in her isn't just a self-identifying agency, it is a collective mania. She learns (as the film develops) that she is an unconscious vehicle of nature: she is the womb that embodies carnality and gives birth to the very organs of growth. She is a "witch" only to the extent that "nature is satan's church"; her religion is the ancientest in human history, it is pagan, it is cyclical, it is preserved by carnality. Her church is nature: nature is in her very organism. She has only thus far repressed a rememory of the very principle underlying her sexual existence: her dream was a dream of the ages, a dream as old as the oldest acorn-dropping tree. She gives life, but in this faculty she is also given the ability to take life away, to produce pain as well as joy. (We learn also that she is at fault for the child's death: she watched the toddler fall to its death as she experienced orgasm; in order to give birth to something else, she had to allow the shedding of life in another direction.)

Secondly, there is the Freudian concept of "transference": the therapist, her husband, is too entwined with her emotionally and sexually to be able to circumvent the unprofessional act of transference, a fundamental problem in dealing with patients. If the therapist is affected by the patient, he/she loses the requisite distance to effect any change or unconceal what is concealed in the patient's neurosis. The real horror begins when "He" becomes affected by "She" through an unwilled and accidental love-making, after which they reform a dyad that daily engages in the sexual activity of an unloosed and perilous subconscious. The transference develops into a violent counter-transference, emotional at first ("He" begins to have disturbing symbolical dreams and he starts having unsettling visions), and then gruesomely physical: they both begin to hate their own sex and sex in general, because it produces an unendurable misery, a deep-rooted despair which is a sickness unto death: all life is generated only to die; this is an intolerable condition, the daimon's most intimate knowledge. She eventually enacts her wrath (against him, against herself) because she is finally emptied of her shattered persona; she becomes vengeful Nature itself, Nature personified, and her wrath against the audacity of mental life is one equally at war against the impudent vocabulary of psychoanalysis. If man in his carnality is ontologically enslaved to Nature, then man must die as Nature wishes: bodily, painfully, joyously, but always in a sharp and unavoidably unstable sentience.

...  

"Fallen Angels" (1995)

What is the cool? Withering indifference, weapon-like, unsheathed with effortless precision. Indefatigable composure at the sight of a gun. The decision to allow others to make decisions for you. (The hitman who permits the black sunglassed woman to appoint his tasks as she pleases, loved from afar by her -- she who holds his fate in her groomed vengeful hand, and he who doesn't flinch once knowing this -- given completely over, as they are, to erotic fatalism.) We do learn that the cool is also a state of hermetic vulnerability, in spite of its usual appearance of cold glamour; because there's still the one thing which will shatter it completely: l'amour. For the man submerged in cool, and the lady dressed to the hilt in its ruffle and sash, love proves more vicious than death, more cruel. There's no hilarity to be found in the assassin who loses the vigor of his gun.


Sex is vicarious. Imagined through someone else's embrace, in love with another man's wife. Teetering at the touch of a passenger on the metro, in the crush of bodies at rush hour. Masturbation at twilight: imagining one's old conquests, another's faded half-worded confession. Wong Kar-Wai's strength: making a jukebox fantasy out of an array of neon-lit shots and the effusive carnality of a choice song. A woman's orgasm effortlessly simulated by focusing on her stockinged legs folded gingerly on a sofa bed. Add a soundtrack and you've got symphonic ecstasy. Wong uses the camera like a hidden appendage, a fugitive human arm that gets up-close to a human face and slides onto the rim of a lip or feels up the texture of leather feeling up a woman's partly concealed thigh. Visceral post-new wave cinematics. When the story's nowhere to be found, Wong uses his gut emotion, substituting a posture, a statuesque pose, a speeding light or the trail of smoke from the sly phallus of the cigarette, just a semblance of story which is nothing more than a gaze adrift or escaping the criminal behavior of the heart, in love with death because it is the aesthetic suspension of beauty. Just neon and orgasm. Sensation rather than sense. Velocity over meditation.

The other side of the television screen is a television screen. "Blondie" is the marker/marksman inhabiting and adumbrating contiguous alternate worlds. One of the worlds is the actual movie, Wong Kar-Wai's movie, about hipsters imagining what lives assassins and spies lead. Another of the worlds is the actual one, in which people die fairly easily, and hearts are broken more often than made.

Portraits of Friends - 5

For Michael K.
...
What had Cyrus done, that Cadmus could not
When Thebes arose? (You told me once)
That men are not to judge of others’ happiness,
Till death swathes them, and molds their mask;
Cyrus knew firsthand: by fire had Croesus
Livened, who Solon’s name he soothed, amidst
The auric and silver chargers, reflective.
Solon had smiled that day he was privy
To Croesus’ vast wealth, the Lydian throne:
When asked, gazing on eglantine gardens
And parchments spent with numberless territories,
Who it was, could name himself happiest and blest,
The sage replied,
                           “An Athenian I knew,
Who worked those fields of sweetbrier,
And stretched the parchments that boldly
Picture your reign. A peasant as good a man
As king.”
               Croesus unbearing this, and burning
Hubris, swore Solon’s name and dismissed him
From his throne;
                         But now Cyrus, known
To the Israelites as Koresh, and Zulqarnain,
The two-horned ram of God, who’d conjoin Media
And Persia, to the Mohammedan, conquered Lydia,
And set Croesus on his death-seat,
A pyre to end his days, sighing
Solon’s name. Cyrus, known as the Merciful,
Spared that gross king’s immolation,
And would permit the Israelites revisit Jerusalem,
To build their House in Judah.
Cyrus, when an infant, could not be more
Mistaken for a herdsman’s son –
(So Plutarch tells us) – ennobled by his inner aspect,
A child who like the sun could not perish
In the bosom of cold mountains,
But rises over Soleyman’s shoulder
Again to shine on the four-cornered earth.
Afore Alexander, and Greater in reach,
Cyrus wrapped hands on Phrygia in the West,
Planted serpent-toothed satraps southward in Thebes,
Loomed over Gandhara and fondled India,
While his head rested in the Caucasus,
And his right hand, when lifted, on Thrace alighted...
…
Why also is ancient Cyrus, Great?
His Icon bears him up, his shining face,
That like divine justice doth transcend
An Iago, an Imogen, and all binaries –
(Chiefest, which is, Man-and-Picture) –
Narrows the splintered eye, to focus
On singularities, on Cause, whose grin
Is countless, and hath no effect (nor a multitude),
But will affect multitudes regardless:
The Achaemenids – the Babylonians – the Persians:
And us, our posterity,
Obsessed with picture-writ legacies.
…
Let me tell you this (you told me): a slave
Selects the cause to correct the effect, or the effect
To create the cause. So that falsely, one effect
Should magnetise a single cause: but imagine this:
(A legend unrecorded by Plutarch)
…A slavish-subject, by his passions staved, steps up
To Cyrus – the Merciful (and the War-Rash),
The Meek Ruler, (and the Great Conqueror),
Who was first among kings to monody Theo
(spotless Ahura Mazda), and offer lineaments
Of gratified law to the foreigner and Persian alike –
This slavish man, for whom Cyrus had artisans
Stencil the image of his likeness, as an honored
Subject, who had brought stores of proverbs
From distant lands for Persia, and plied
The monarch with philosophies to come;
Such an unchaste, ungrateful merchant –
Who like Paris in the House of Atreus
Sparked a war with an affront –
Smited lordly Cyrus on the cheek,
And spit obscenities on his dominions;
Because he was wild with wine, and crimson
With vanity; a guest in Cyrus’ house,
Who had traded dry sack from western lands,
And sugared Cyrus with castrated fowls
For flesh; this craven man’s bowl, fulsome,
And filled when unfilled; drank to his death;
Tempted Croesus’ fate with his wanton palm,
And slighted the man to whom God
Had given the kingdoms of the globe…
…
What then did Cyrus do? …Laughter,
Like thunder curling in the cloud
Of his eye, whose inner gaze, wrapped
By the fourth wing of his face, diversified
His counsel, and unified his command.
He was of those who listened, as he spake:
          “If a king drinks, he does not go drunken;
He abuses no thing but the goblet: I, Cyrus, worship
Wine, which you have bartered and drowned your
Self with, because I wish to avoid worshipping
Self, like you, a man made a beast, to avoid the burden
Of manliness. A king is manly: even in wine,
He won’t forfeit his nature; though flesh & blood,
The king’s Image stays intact.”
          With that, the uncouth merchant grew ashamed,
And choked himself with his cups; and the portrait
Which Cyrus commissioned for him, lengthened,
Farther stretched, and distanced itself, as a star
Stretches from planets-in-miniature, from the likeness
Of one who had once rejoiced in wine and company;
The merchant’s vows, ‘broken beyond repair, by a flask
Of wine, and a girl with disorder in her hair,’
Etched in him, guilt, and caused in him, friendlessness:
Love’s infidel, who had not learnt
To worship wine, but drank it, whorishly;
Hung himself, unhappy humiliated creature,
In Cyrus’ sight.
…
          Cyrus saith again: an Icon bears up
Its own justice, metes it among righteous men,
And its conscience, like Zeno’s, in which
Music mingles with wisdom-love, and all things
Are one, of no dissimilarity or mimesis,
Past Man or Picture, of a cause married to effect –
Effects its cause, purposes its wholesome purpose.
Unfragmented as no Fisher King, like a Mauberley
Coining his own face (which the age demanded),
A medallion whose minted eyes turned topaz
From a measureless distance; in which
The arrow flies motionless in flight, of one piece
With the bow that swerved it, and the sky
That embraces it: an image for which all ends
Are ended, and by which lambs lie with lions,
And friends unafraid befriend sworn enemies,
Former enemies to erstwhile friends made…
…
And so was Cyrus called, ‘the Humble,’ thenceforth…