No artist, in any country, is free. S/he is a living contestation.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
The films of Abbas Kiarostami are now complete. With Kiarostami’s death this last July 4th, the worlds of his creation are now fixed, at least in number.
And yet how extraordinarily alive his cinema is. Refusing the label of story teller, rejecting propaganda as political-artistic engagement, Kiarostami’s art assumed that most humble and respectful position of recognising in his audience their freedom, their ability to create as much as he, as the filmmaker. His films are gifts to an audience that he was never able to see as consumers, or worse, people to be beaten into submission by abusive seduction. Like a friend, he shares with us worlds honestly, that is, as incomplete, allowing us thereby to breath, to imagine, to take flight.
Kiarostami’s film characters are often poorly fitted to the world. But in inviting us to see with them, feel with them, we learn of our own subtle dissonances, everyday rebellions, feeling then in our hearts that something akin to a revolutionary also lurks within us; a dreamer of other worlds awakened by the cracks of this world, brought into the light by Kiarostami’s fictioning.
However static Kiarostami’s films appear to be, nothing remains stable. His mastery was in seeing movement where we see only immobility. And if we can learn to see with him, as he so often invited us to do, then we discover that nothing is, that all is becoming. But we learn also that it is in this very becoming, in its permanent possibility and our awareness of it, where wisdom can lie.
The words that follow are Kiarostami’s …
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Breaking up the european union
The british referendum to quit the european union, driven by populist nationalism, racism, xenofobia; a referendum organised by a right-wing political party and imagined by all others; the fantasy of substituting one authoritarian capitalism by yet another more vile: none of this can offer any anarchist, even leftist, any solace.
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