filmpost

In his Koker Trilogy, Abbas Kiarostami tells a multilayered story about the simplicity of life.

An essay by Babak Sadaghian

I felt a strange sense of unease before I started engaging with Kiarostami’s cinema. Having heard about him and his brilliance my whole life, I feared I would not like his movies, or that I would be biased, as a fellow countryman, and end up overestimating him. Admittedly, I did not know much about his cinema. While I was growing up, he was one of those preeminent Iranian artists revered by virtually every culturally informed person. Moreover, the prominence he gained outside of Iran and the way he, as one of only a handful of people, attempted to represent our politically (very) troubled country in a non-political field, put even more pressure on my efforts to approach his movies. I had been familiar with the titles of some of his films for as long as I can remember, mostly through my parents and their admiration for Kiarostami’s art. This is mostly why I lacked the initial courage to embark on his cinema: I feared a pre-shaped, lopsided judgment of his work, one devoid of the delightful gift of the ignorance attendant to encountering art outside of one’s own cultural orbit.

All these fears were futile, as Kiarostami is so much more than just an ‘Iranian’ filmmaker. I had been oblivious to the emotional and intellectual universes that he builds and crosses over in his films. Once again, ignorance bore its unlikely fruits. I first watched Taste of Cherry (1997) and was immediately struck by the overlapping layers of creative artistry and cerebral innovations, the minimalist visual and literary language, all of which pointed to a great thinker behind the camera. Taste of Cherry had an easily understandable, fairly relatable plot, but it was also about something more. This ‘more,’ the underlying intellectual layer that hid in the gaps and interstices of the film, conspicuously and yet unpretentiously exhibited, was what most confounded and pleased me in my first Kiarostami encounter. The final scene, in which we see the director at work, conducting the crew, was then but the cherry on top of ‘the cherry.’ As if the numerous allegories and symbolic plays were not enough, this was a twist that came unexpectedly yet was anything but misplaced. Right after the apotheosis of its symbolism, the film forces us to accept its filmic nature. With this forming, in my mind, the main take from Kiarostami’s magnum opus, I decided to approach his critically acclaimed Koker Trilogy.

Where Is the Friend’s House (1987), the trilogy’s first installment, is a simple, conventionally structured movie. It has it all: a main actor, a plot, a development, and a conclusion. As viewers, we are separated from the film, the so-called “fourth wall” remains intact. Minimalist from start to finish, Friend follows a schoolchild in the village of Koker who mistakenly takes one of his classmate’s notebooks with him, and then spends much of the film trying to return it. For me, the cinematic key here is the shrewd combination of long and short shots. Throughout the film, we are mostly presented with short shots of the child and forced into his world and his simple story, as he runs from village to village to find his classmate’s house. Parallel to this plot line, however, there is also the grown-ups’ story, revolving around wooden windows and doors being gradually replaced by metal ones. Although this latter story is, in essence, as simple as the child’s poignant adventure, it is felt much more seriously by the adults whose livelihoods are tied to the production of doors and windows. To me, therefore, this plot point also became the main enriching artistic contribution in Friend, elevating the film from a mere poetic reflection on a child’s innocence and moral integrity to the heights of an intellectual contemplation over how to contextualize a story that, to be sure, could stand beautifully on its own legs.

And Life Goes On (1992) is, perhaps, the least-engaging cinematically of the trilogy. Yet it demonstrates Kiarostami’s ingenuity and skill in offering an artistic response to a natural catastrophe. In the aftermath of the calamitous earthquake in Iran’s Gilan province in 1990, Kiarostami drove to Koker to learn about the fate of its inhabitants, and specifically those who participated as non-actors in Friend. The film relates the short adventures of Kiarostami —portrayed by an actor— and his fictional young son as they drive around the affected area in search of the child who played the main character in Friend. Kiarostami adds a simple yet intriguing element to the plot: while asking the locals about the child, the Kiarostami stand-in always shows them a photo of him as depicted on a French poster of the movie, thereby allegorizing the inevitable alienation of any work of art from the reality it engages with. The second installment of the trilogy includes appearances by actors from the first, who talk about their experiences as non-actors during the former shoot. Life is a movie about a movie, as well as a respectful dedication to the people of Koker who fell victim to the disastrous earthquake.

In Through the Olive Trees (1994), we witness the peak of Kiarostami’s resourcefulness. Although he denied the deliberate development of the three successive films as a trilogy, it is difficult to watch Olives and comprehend its full intellectual depth and playfulness without knowledge of the films that preceded it. The underlying connections, especially to Life, are too obvious — if not too important— to ignore. If we had already moved from the world of film in Friend to the world of filmmaking in Life, Olives baffles us by taking yet another leap to a novel sphere, that of a meta-reality observing and thereby dismantling what we had previously thought of as given. In the movie’s unusual opening overture, we see Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz standing next to a tree, talking as his real self and revealing that, in what follows, he’ll be playing the role of Abbas Kiarostami. For this part, Kiarostami hired a professional actor for the first time in the trilogy. As Keshavarz finishes speaking, he is called by his stage director to join her for the fictional casting. They are about to choose a female actor among some schoolchildren for a part not yet revealed to us. We already know, however, that these are people of Koker, still living in the aftermath of the earthquake. After some minutes, we see Keshavarz and his crew shooting a scene with Farhad Kheradmand, the actor who played the Kiarostami stand-in in Life. Thus, we have come full circle back to the previous film.

At this point the intricate layering of the trilogy is unfolding before our eyes in its totality: we are watching a film about a film about a film. Olives leaves a legion of questions open, but none more pressing than this: how could the leap be taken from the second level of cinematic reality to the third level, while the role of the director is reduplicated? In Olives, there are technically three Kiarostamis: Kheradmand from Life, Keshavarz from Olives, and Kiarostami himself directing them both, outside the frame. Given the consistent documentary-like presentation of all films, the intellectual puzzle we’ve arrived at testifies to Kiarostami’s ingenuity. The trilogy has often been praised for its exploration of the narrow line between truth and fiction, blurring the boundaries between real life and art. While this is unquestionably true, I believe there is also a cutting forcefulness in how the three films impose themselves on the viewer, though without ever quite sacrificing their immense tenderness. Kiarostami’s craftsmanship is evident in his mischievous presentation of the rough edges of a pure conception of art as such. His gentle presentation form radically distances the work from the pitfalls of pure formalism. He forces us to face the most pressing questions of what art is, as well as of the extent to which aesthetic romanticism is an immanent component of art, and of whether an artist can remain loyal to the objective truth. He also asks where an artist’s subjectivity begins and where it ends, where the viewer ends and the work of art begins, etc. And yet we willfully embrace these demanding impositions, for Kiarostami is not a postmodern philosopher but a filmmaker, and as such can pose questions on art through his delightful cinema.

In retrospect, it is hard to imagine the three movies as anything but a masterfully coherent trilogy. Kiarostami has stated that the sole connecting factor between the three was the “accident” of the place, Koker. Yet to know that the true accident was the earthquake that took place in Koker in 1990, means to glimpse at how the emergence of a trilogy out of Friend (a film not originally conceived as part of a series) bespeaks Kiarostami’s sensible creativity in responding to an external event. It might be that Koker was primarily chosen for its picturesque scenery and the simplicity of rural life hiding in its well-preserved alleys. But even after the earthquake that reduced the idyllic setting to rubble, Kiarostami contrived to elevate the romance of the physical place to unexplored abstract territories. Once the pristine aura of Koker was gone, Kiarostami created a Koker of his own, helping the phoenix of its romanticism rise above its ashes.

The creativity of crafting a cinematic world embedded in the real world makes Kiarostami stand out among Iranian directors. In his characteristic genre of docufiction, he is crossing the borders of reality and fiction in almost every scene, placing one foot on each realm. The greatness of his artistry lies in the way that both the reality and fiction in his work are transcended and nullified at once. He extracts the message he’s willing to convey from the reality of his environment, but his love for and knowledge of the medium of cinema imparts to his work the beauty that transfigures the content. The visual language that he crafts supersedes the realities of Koker captured by the cameras to stand on its own.

It is often said that excellence in arts is only reached when contingent exigencies of time and place are transcended. If this is so, then Kiarostami most definitely offers a guidebook to excellence for Iranian artists. For Koker is Koker and yet more than Koker in his world. It is a real place insofar as it is struck by an event as real as an earthquake. And yet it goes far beyond its locality on the Iranian plateau to reify archetypal truth in its universality. Kiarostami resolves the dichotomy between form and content by simply restating well-known truths. Koker can be watched and indulged in universally because its inhabitants are us, endlessly struggling with the burden of being, while striving to savor every moment of what Kiarostami aptly calls ‘the preciousness of life.’