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Text | Zhang Benben
Why Godard said, "The film begins with Griffiths and ends with Abbas", the evaluation of the teacher explains this problem very well, he said, "Some people are painting colors for movies, some people are repairing the essence of movies, and Abbas belongs to the latter."
Indeed, Abbas's films seem to me to be at least not just about telling a story to the audience, conveying a theme or expressing a kind of poetry as some people think, these are even secondary, and Abbas himself once said that "I am afraid to tell a story and become a novelist".
<h1>Abbas Chiarostami </h1>
This is abbas's genius, which is different from the narrative form of traditional cinema and avoids the storytelling of cinema.
In several films of his Iranian period, he broke the sixth space of the screen through "shooting in the film" and "presented himself to see itself", destroying the authenticity of the film's story.
The director has a very experimental film "Princess Shirin", and the camera is even aimed at the audience watching the movie.
Princess Shirin (2008)
Abbas's video style pursues truth and nature, and each of his films is like a clip of life, and everything in the shot seems to be real before the film begins.
The narrative process often deliberately ignores the causes and consequences of events, so the film requires the audience to pay attention to each picture, rely on their own life experience, and gain insight into the information revealed in the film, so different audiences may create different worlds. A thousand people may have the taste of a thousand cherries.
Without the intervention of the audience, many of Abbas's narrative techniques will lose their meaning, and in the director's own words, "some stories should have some loopholes, some gaps, like a crossword puzzle, and it is the audience who connects them." Or, of course, like a private investigator constantly discovering them in the threads of a case. As a director, I rely on this creative intervention, otherwise the film and the audience will disappear together."
At the 60th Cannes Film Festival in 2007, Abbas appeared at the premiere of "One Movie Per Person" with Takeshi Kitano, Wim Mendes and Walter Cyrus.
Abbas's last two films, filmed in a foreign country, will have a different image style than previous films directed by directors in Iran.
This article wants to analyze the formal style of the film "Like Mu Love River" to try to show how Abbas relies on the intervention of the audience to complete a film in this film- "an unfinished film that is completed with the creative spirit of the audience".
1 Narrative form
The story of "Like Mu Love River" takes place within 24 hours, except for the two plots (taxi and bedroom) that are omitted in terms of time, the screen time of the rest of the paragraphs is consistent with the actual length of the plot, and the narrative is limited to this specific time.
As with Abbas's previous narrative style, from the beginning of the film, the characters seem to be placed in real life, and the director does not make any explanations about the characters and events in advance.
In this mode, the audience cannot be carried away by the "plot" deliberately created in the traditional film, but is forced to concentrate on every sentence and every picture in the film.
This narrative approach of the film sometimes leads to an ambiguous and uncertain expression. In the dialogue of ten minutes in the opening bar, the audience does not seem to have 100% certainty about the identity of the heroine, but this guessing game must stimulate the audience's peeping impulse to the identity of the heroine.
Immediately after the passage inside the taxi, the director gives the taxi driver several separate medium shots that have no effect on the development of the plot.
In the driver's shot, the driver is in the middle, the steering wheel is in the bottom left, and a key prop, the rearview mirror in the upper right corner, is deliberately placed outside the picture by the director.
The deliberate composition accompanies the wandering gaze of the driver, and this hidden rearview mirror becomes the focus, which seems to me to allude to the voyeurism of the audience off-screen.
Whether the driver is looking at the heroine in the back seat or observing the road conditions through the rearview mirror, everyone's understanding is different.
Such as the above driver's shot, the director only shows the superficial words and deeds of each character, and these behaviors do not have a clear direction to achieve ambiguous effects, the audience through the observation of the character's words and deeds, can only explore the character's personality and ideas according to their own preferences and experience, so as to create their own truth.
This is especially true of the role of the old professor in the film, where each viewer has a different image of the professor in his heart, and the audience reflects on himself through the viewing of the professor.
2 film spaces
As mentioned above, the narrative of this film is continuous in time, so the film needs to create a smooth space to achieve the purpose of the narrative.
The first scene in the bar at the beginning of this film is by no means a simple set of front and back shot switching, and the director creates a sense of depth, layering and openness of the space through exquisite scene scheduling, using only three fixed camera positions.
Through the movement of the figures to form a flowing space, the audience will even imagine the extramural space behind the bathroom door. The third shot taken from the outside of the bar to the inside reflects the space outside the bar through mirror imagery, and also forms a very interesting overlap with the spatial image inside the bar.
Under the gaze formed by the fixed lens, the audience more truly and clearly feels the "movement rules" of the characters through space, and the movement creates a clear and rich spatial layer for viewing.
The spatial design of the last scene of the film is also quite interesting. In this scene, the camera never leaves the professor's residence, and the glass windows in the residence emphasize the space outside the screen.
In the picture, there is no dialogue between the professor and the heroine, and the only sound source in the room comes from the microwave oven tone.
The sound of the outdoor environment throughout the film has become the most important audiovisual element of this scene, and the sound outside the painting cooperates with the activities of the characters in the picture, while presenting the plot development of the two spaces inside and outside the painting, and breaking the independence of the two spaces with the accidental smashing of the window, creating a flashpoint of the final plot.
In other words, other directors may choose parallel editing to present this scene. Abbas's move not only easily creates a sense of breath-holding tension, but also emphasizes a kind of watching, and the film at this moment "is not a performance, but an attraction that serves the viewing".
There are also many interesting spatial expression methods in the film, such as Abbas's common use of car windows to divide space in many works, and several fixed long shots also cleverly use mirror reflections (car windows, TV screens) to present the relationship between characters and space under deliberately created still gaze.
3 Processing of sounds
In order to present an immersive sense of viewing, the film's photography and editing follow a movement law, from beginning to end the audience seems to be able to feel the trajectory of the camera, the picture rarely jumps to another space at random (except for a few shots that omit time).
So what happens at the same time in two spaces refuses to be presented in parallel clips. As mentioned in the previous section, the sound usage of the last scene is mentioned, the film places the source of the sound off-screen several times, forming two parallel events with the ongoing picture on the screen.
Due to the realistic style of the film, the film does not use sounds outside the story space, and there are still a few clever sounds in the film that play a role in creating an atmosphere to set off the mood.
In the taxi, when the heroine switched from a sad mood to a lipstick into a working state, a female pop song with a little dust smell in the car radio sounded, which successfully played the role of a soundtrack.
In the final scene, the director sets the sound of the microwave oven work as the only sound source in the room, which rings out many times when the plot is most tense, and this redundant and irritable sound intensifies the tension in the play, and when the glass at the end is suddenly shattered, all the sounds disappear with this fright, leaving only the "beep..." from the microwave oven.
This article mainly talks about the narrative "form" of several parts of the film, rather than the "theme" of the story. It seems to me that mere formal exploration makes this film no less than Abbas's previous works. And my limited level of knowledge and appreciation is far from enough to illustrate the greatness of Director Abbas.
bibliography:
1. "Close-up: Abbas and His Films" in Abbas Kiarostam's "One Movie, One Hundred Dreams"
2. Jean-Luc Nancy in "The Grey Dawn of Tolerance" in "The Proverbs of Cinema"
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