For as long as we’ve had philosophy we’ve had the perspective that our experience of the world is representation, i.e. we take in “sense data” from the outside world, then internally reconstruct this to form our subjective experience. Subjectivity then is ultimately unreliable — right now you could be asleep and dreaming, or tricked, or you might subscribe to the whole universe-is-a-simulation thing (conspiracy theory?). The point is that our internal mirror of the external world might be foggy, therefore the world-in-itself remains unknowable. This thread goes all the way back to Plato’s cave and its shadow puppets, through to Descartes, who in the 17th century invented The Matrix. In the early 20th century we got a new thread, first with Heidegger, then Wittgenstein, then Richard Rorty: why assume a mirror at all?
It’s through this lens I’ve been thinking about the Kiarostami films of the past few weeks, together with my own intentions here.
In one way, the whole meta-contextualising of the Koker trilogy could be seen as a multi-step process of reminding the audience they’re watching a film — formalistically, we could say Where is the Friend’s Home? exists within the cinematic world of And Life Goes On…, which in turn exists within that of Through the Olive Trees — not unlike the deliberate distancing at play in Godard’s mid-career films.
But I think Godard and Kiarostami are at opposite ends of a spectrum: while Godard might drop the boom mic into shot or spin the camera back onto the filmmaking process to pull you out of whatever your absorbed feeling and return your awareness to film as representation, Kiarostami instead places the film within the world, implicating us within that shared world too. The former approach points out the mirror, the latter seeks to remove it.
Kiarostami reminds us that the world of the film is still our world, rather than pull us away, he builds continuity.
If you’ll allow me to stretch this thread even further, it is a sense of continuity that I’m interested in communicating with this newsletter — between cinema and the world, between one week and the next, and between you and me.
Here we can pretend that I’ve written something thoughtful and in-depth about the whole fragmentation of collective experience in the online age, so I can skip to advocating the idea that our experience of cinema ought not be fragmented, but follow a kind of thread. Rather than just consuming one piece of streaming content after the next, I want to follow this thread, hand-over-hand, along a path into and through the unknown. We can then, at some future point, look back and see what that brought us there.
I had to look up whether frogs indeed hop between lily pads, or if this impression was owed only to cartoons (they do!), but this image works best for the kind of path I want — like the frog, there’s no plotting waypoints or holding a vector, rather each hop brings us to a new spot, presenting new directions and ideas. We’re not striking films off a linear to-watch list, it’s a path built one step at a time. It’s not just about experiencing more meaningful cinema, but that the process itself should be meaningful. It should avoid falling into discrete pieces, but be a path entrenched within the world.
The films I’m watching this week…
Where is the Friend’s Home?
(Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)
And so completes the Koker trilogy. The first and arguably therefore the most straightforward. The child actors in this film become the object of investigation in And Life Goes On… (#5), a scene of which becomes the focus of Through the Olive Trees (#4). I am continually amazed and inspired at Kiarostami’s ability to tell stories with just the elements at hand (e.g. in this case, a notebook).
The Painter and the Thief
(Benjamin Ree, 2020)
There seems to be a trend of documentaries sparked from the refrain, “This terrible thing happened to me, so I picked up a camera.” When bad things happen to me I usually go back to bed, which precludes me from ever participating in this trend. This documentary is about an artist who, after having some paintings stolen, sought out and invited the thief to sit for a portrait. We could say that this documentary relates to this week’s overall theme because it is then a portrait of that relationship, but no, a “portrait” depicts only one person.
Recommended by Sherwyn.
Paris, Texas
(Win Wenders, 1984)
Paris, Texas holds a special place for a lot of people. I first saw it with a group of friends at the Chauvel Cinema on a scratchy 35mm reel that threatened to break into pieces at any moment, but miraculously persevered through to the end credits. Then there is this quote from an email I fondly recalled:
I just saw Paris, Texas. I loved it. The whole thing. I was on the edge of my seat transfixed and I welled up with tears repeatedly. :D Pauuul it was so good.
I have the score on vinyl, which includes Harry Dean Stanton’s monologue. And when I was taking a film theory class in university, the lecturer, without warning, screened this disembodied monologue scene to a cohort of kids who mostly had not seen the film — I was so furious I left the room and immediately dropped the class! (I can assume this guy now lives in a van down by the river.)
That which remains in mind…
That I happened to watch two films shot on 16mm this week — Leaving Las Vegas (#6) and Tigerland — and both looked gorgeous. Do you know any others?
Amanda Knox’s bizarre response to Stillwater, which seems to argue the fictional film is not at all a representation of her life, but also that the film is not accurate enough in its representation of her life.
A conversation I had with a friend about the relationship between subtlety and ambiguity in cinema, which we’ll delve into next week.
Does The Matrix Resurrections trailer rely too heavily on over-the-top action at the expense of just regular action?