I've slipped back into my worst habits in writing about film - that is, not writing about film. Been ages since I have managed as simple a thing as writing up notes on what I've seen lately. This despite seeing some pretty good films this spring. No answer for that put to write a post, so here goes. These are the films by important directors that have come out this spring. Most of them deserve more, but you have to take what you can get...
To the Wonder - 10/15 - good old Terrence Malick. He managed to get this one made in a year or so instead of the usual 8, but the results are basically the same - gorgeous looking, brilliantly edited, but still fluff. He has somehow acquired a reputation for depth and seriousness, though I can never see why. He makes films that look like advertisements - full of gorgeous photography, beautiful people twirling (my god, do they twirl) with their hair and clothes billowing around them, edited to music, the whole thing flowing along as a kind of image of Beauty and Wonder - all that's lacking is a clear product being sold. Though this time, the product seems a bit more obvious than usual - it seems to be the Catholic Church. Okay - for all the snark, the truth is, I rather liked this film - more than anything of his since Days of Heaven. There is a story of sorts - Ben Affleck in Paris meets a Ukrainian woman with a kid, takes them to Oklahoma (I guess it is), where they don't quite settle, she leaves and they scuffle while apart, then she comes back and marries him for the green card, followed by a marriage with its good and bad moments, etc. Javier Bardem, meanwhile, shuffles around visiting the poor and downtrodden, while afflicted by Malick's voiceovers. And somewhere in here, among the fluff, there are some very fine moments, not just the usual nature photography (which is as ravishing as ever), but some almost documentary looking footage of the town, houses and people, of parades and schools, trees and streets and walls. It is at its best in those moments of documentary detail. It is also, like Tree of Life, a bravura editing performance (as is Upstream Color) - how he puts this stuff together is always breathtaking.
Upstream Color - 11/15 - Shane Carruth comes back with another experimental science fiction film. This one has a clear enough plot: a thief raises worms that he feeds with some kind of hallucinagin that lets him form a psychic bond to people; he uses one on a girl, and steals all her money, and somewhat inadvertently ruins her life along the way. When he is done, she wanders off to a man who makes sound recordings, who extracts the worm from her and puts it into a pig - which allows him to have a psychic bond with both the pig and the girl. She gets on with some kind of life and meets another man who seems to share her memory - he's obviously been in the same situation she's in. They fall in love, somewhat uneasily - and in the end find the sampler.... Like To the Wonder, this is largely an exercise in editing - told in a similar elliptical style, with very little dialogue or conventional narrative - but the underlying story is much stronger, and more convincing, and the style fits the story and its themes, its hallucinatory qualities, its blurring of identities. And, I suppose, I just prefer the tone of this to the mysticism Malick deals in. This does not look like an ad.
Beyond the Hills - 13/15 - latest film from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu; in this one, a girl, Alina, comes back to Romania from Germany to join her friend, Viochita; the latter lives in a monastary. Alina's plan is to convince Voichita to go to Germany with her - Voichita does not want to go; she has turned religious. Alina stays, trying to convince her to leave, but she is a bit crazy, and madly in love with Voichita. She has an episode, they put her in the hospital, but she comes back, as everyone thinks she would be better off with friends - but things go from bad to worse. She tries to go to her foster parents, but like Alex' parents in a Clockwork Orange, they have taken in a boarder... so no matter what everyone wants, she keeps landing back at the monastery, where she cracks again, and they have no answers but to try to exorcize her, which goes very very badly.... It is a fairly magnificent film, really - the best by some margin that I have seen this year. It is very complex. I think you could say there are three stories running parallel: the first is the friendship, which is itself rather complicated - Alina loves Voichita, Voichita has changed, moved on - that creates tension, between love, change, loyalty, obsession, and the fact that both of them seem to need help - Alina seems to know this - they are both in trouble, one going crazy, one torturing herself with crackpot religion... Second is a fairly obvious and straightforward religious allegory: Alina comes to the church like Christ in the guise of one who is naked and hungry - she is a test; how will they react? The answer is clear enough - they treat her like Christ himself was treated, literally - rejected, scorned and finally crucified... And finally - there is a diffuse commentary on the world - the film is set in the modern day, but this is hidden at times, and at other, is clearly important in its ambiguity - the fact that things aren't noticeably different than in communist days is probably to the point. We see the poverty and trouble of society; we see hints of the abusive system the girls grew up in. The politics are subtle, and I can't pretend to know what is going on, but it's there....
Spring Breakers - 7/15 - Harmony Korine is back - I don;t know. 4 college girls decide to go on spring break. Having no money they rob a chicken shack. In Florida they are arrested at a party and bailed out by a skeezy rapper played by James Franco who pulls them into crimes - his war against Gucci Mane, a gangster. A couple of the girls go home, starting with Selena Gomez, who's only willing to go so far in sullying her image after all... Two of them stay and go over completely to the rapper's life of crime. After reenacting Wild Things in the pool, they go to kill his rival - Franco goes down, but the girls wipe out Mane's gang and drive away in his convertable. The American Dream! Despite the exploitation story, it's just Korine - fake outrageousness, moralizing, pop culture references, colors, and artsty talkiness, repetitive voiceovers and forced partying. Dumb, pointless, amusing - Franco is fantastic, the girls are indistinguishable (they're all playing Britney Spears one of the actresses says - sounds right - this is Mr. Lonely Part II). It's got a couple scenes - "look at my shit!" - that almost justify its existence, but that's not really enough.
Like Someone In Love - 12/15 - Kiarostami in Japan. Starts with a girl at a bar arguing with someone on the phone, a man who doesn't believe her. Meanwhile she has to go on a date - she is a prostitute - she argues with her boss, saying her grandmother is in town, but it doesn't help. She goes, though she drives by the station looking at the poor old woman standing by a statue waiting to see her.... So she goes to her date, which is with an old man, a translator, who tries to entertain her, but she falls asleep. The next day he gives her a ride to school and there she runs into her boyfriend - who starts talking to the old man... he assumes the old man is her grandfather, and the old man does not deny it. The boy talks about the girl - when she comes back, he offers to fix the man's car (he's a mechanic) - but they run into an old student of the professor. Later -t he girl calls the old man, panicky - he takes her home, and the boyfriend shows up, ranting and raving - it ends with a brick through a window. That's a lot of plot, I suppose, for Kiarostami - though he moves through it in his customary way. It's the details - he's kind of the opposite of Malick and Carruth and their elliptical rush from image to image - he stays put, letting long scenes play out - some dialogue, but some not; some dialogue with two people on screen, sometimes just one side of the conversation - or one side of a confrontation at the end. These are never static - the scenes evolve, characters evolve, relationships are changed and recreated, worlds are filled in behind the scenes. Something like the boyfriend's conversation with the old man - the boy seems threatening at first, but as he talks, seems increasingly harmless. He loves her - he wants to marry her - but he also says, he wants to marry her to control her, so she can't ignore him. This kind of endlessly shifting understanding of the situation is Kiarostami's bread and butter - this might not be as exhilarating as Certified Copy or some fo the Iranian films, but it's still first rank work.
Night Across the Street - 11/15 - the last film by Raul Ruiz, set in Chile. An old man about to retire seems to be living in his head - taking classes with Jean Giono; remembering childhood adventures; politics (Ibanez, a dictator in the 1920s); walking around with Beethoven - or images of talks with Long John Silver... Along with this, there is a kind of radio show, about his memories, and scenes in a boarding house, where a man turns up to kill him, or to be killed by someone else. Everyone ends up shot, I guess, though - the central images - marbles of time - keeps coming back, and certainly animates the events. Lovely little film in any case.
Stoker - 10/15 - Here is Park Chan-wook working in English, with somewhat underwhelming results. It's somewhere between Shadow of a Doubt and a ghost story - a man dies - his brother turns up at his funeral, and soon moves in. The women of the house are Nocole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska, both more than a little mad. In any case, people start dying - Park plays with the idea of the supernatural without committing to it - then, at the end, switching away to a simple serial killer plot, at which point the eyes roll.... Indeed - the script is crap, but Park gets about as much out of it as is humanly possible - and the actors are very entertaining.
Side Effects - 10/15 - A Steven Soderbergh thriller, slickly made, a bit soulless. A woman's husband gets out of jail (for insider trading) - she is depressed and drives her car into a wall. The psychiatrist evaluates her, sends her home, puts her on drugs - she reacts badly, and continues to be erratic and depressed at home - she finally gets to a drug she likes (recommended by her former doctor, Catherine Zeta Jones channeling a bit of Barbara Bel Geddes) - it makes her alert and healthy, but also makes her sleepwalk - but she wants to stay on it... then - she stabs her husband... while sleepwalking. Much trouble for the shrink, fears of malpractice, he loses everything - then he starts to suspect - something is wrong: the old shrink wrote a story about the drug - things happen - names don't match up, the crazy woman quotes Styron, everyone quotes Styron - everyone tries to stop him, but he finally gets her with a placebo truth serum, and slowly traps her, by convincing her that the shrink/lover sold her out. And so - she turns state's witness - then gets arrested herself, and all is well. It is all very slick, but that's about all. I kept trying to remember if this was the plot of that Raul Ruiz film a few years ago - Isn't this the plot of that Raul Ruiz film a few years ago? (Shattered Image) Is it? I don't know. Either way, it's a Hitchcock pastiche that works well enough, is very nicely made, but is a bit flat...
Showing posts with label Kiarostami. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kiarostami. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Certified Copy
April is turning out to be quite a month for movies. Everything I have seen has been worth seeing - and I have managed to attend three pretty much great films as well.
Note the verb. In fact one of the strong ties between these three great films is that it would be an injustice to any of them to say I "saw" them. I did see them of course, but I also listened to them - they all make extraordinary use of sound. I will come back to the other two (which would be Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives [which I need to see again] and Le Quattro Volte) - I'll start here with some thoughts about Kiarostami's Certified Copy.
Brief run through what happens: it's basically a two-hander for Juliette Binoche and William Shimell (an opera singer in his first film) - he plays a writer, doing a book tour - she owns an antique shop - they go out for a Sunday drive in the Tuscan countryside, talk about art and her sister, see some sights, then, when they are mistaken for a married couple by a woman in a coffee shop, start acting the part. They visit a church specializing in weddings, a museum with a famous copy, they look at sculptures and art, try to eat at a restaurant, visit the hotel where they spent their wedding night, all the while growing into their roles as husband and wife, in a marriage on the rocks... Along the way they interact with a few other people - her son, the woman at the cafe, newlyweds, an old couple (Jean-Claude Carrierre and Agathe Natanson, as it happens) by a fountain, and various passersby - as well as a few people who don't appear, but have substance - her sister and brother in law, the people on the other end of their phones.... The story, then, is Strange - they begin as strangers, they are recast (as it were) by the observer as a married couple, and they start playing the parts - getting more and more engaged by the roles. Maybe they are play-acting with each other - maybe they were married all along - maybe reality changes - it probably doesn't matter. It seems to me, it is as if they are enacting the entire course of a relationship in one afternoon, from flirtation to courtship to marriage and the decay of the marriage. Maybe. Whatever is happening, the film is beautiful looking, gorgeous sounding, and all of it is very clever. Binoche is magnificent, her character a strange, rather off-putting person, but a great performance; Shimell doesn't quite seem up to her level - he comes off like Jeremy Irons in Inland Empire - though that may be the point. The character is pretty loathsome (though he is given some interesting critical positions - the arguments aren't really unbalanced), selfish, solipsistic, rude, though with an odd, sad, charm - gentle and cold... And everything is combined into a magnificent piece of filmmaking.
I've written before about how Kiarostami's films sound - and it's the sound that was most dazzling about Certified Copy. Nothing sounds like Kiarostami. That isn't to slight the visuals - this is a ravishing looking film, and visually clever to boot - but it sounds like nothing else. HIs films remind you how much we take sound for granted in films - and how hard it is to talk about sound. What does sound do? Most films use sound very conventionally - ambient sound to create a sense of realism - more precisely determined sound to emphasize actions - the music to shape our reactions - and dialogue... sound, in most films, guides us to the meaning of the film, shapes our attention and signals the importance of things on screen. Sound, most of the time, is used in a very similar way to analytical editing - it guides our attention, focuses us on certain elements of the film, shapes the emotional impact of the film.
Kiarostami doesn't use sound this way. He does a couple characteristic things, both different from conventional sound design. First - he immerses us in the sonic world of his films. His soundtracks are dense with ambient sound - voices and machines and natural sounds, tires and footsteps and wind and doors opening and floors creaking and so on, and snatches of diegetic music, TV and radio, etc. The sound immerses us in the world of the film, surrounds us - If most films use sound to guide your attention to the important elements of the image, Kiarostami uses sound to fill in the world outside the image. His sound designs are analogous to his cinematography - the deep focus, the open spaces, the somewhat disordered and random backgrounds. His films give the impression of being free, outside the direct focus of the story - the story takes place in a world that is going about its business regardless of the story. It's hard to describe properly - because it is combining two ideas. The story - in this case, the interactions between Binoche and Shimell - are carefully shot, framed, lit - they are edited precisely, taking full advantage of all the resources of art cinema (mirrors and frames in the frames and all the rest).... But behind the main actors, the rest of the city seems to be going about its business, just there. The sound design works to the same ends - the careful control of the dialogue, clear and distinct - but against the background sounds of the rest of the world (a city, a town, going about its business). Now: it can probably go without saying that these things are very highly controlled - you don't get a soundtrack as precise and rich as this without a lot of work and artifice. I imagine the same is true of the people wandering around in the back of the shots. (And it's certainly true of the compositions, the lighting, the reflections on the car windshield in the driving sequences, etc.) It reproduces at a technical level the general shape of his films - that carefully balanced blend of artifice and realism.
The other characteristic device Kiarostami uses here is a kind of split of the image and sound. There is always a careful interplay between the image and sound, and very often, Kiarostami breaks them apart. He does this in quite a few of his films - most radically in Shirin, but it happens repeatedly. In Certified Copy, that is how the film begins - the image (a table set up for an author talk, but with no people) is broken from the sound (an crowd, gathering, murmuring, somewhere behind the camera.) This changes - a man appears (a translator, introducing Shimell's character, James Miller, a writer, who is late) - then Miller - who begins by repeating (with a variation) the translator's excuse for his tardiness... Meaning already we have themes we will see again: characters repeating one another, even if they don't know what the other have said; a distinct image of an audience and spectacle - we hear the audience, and indeed seem to be part of the audience ourselves (the camera is in their place) - a relationship (between the camera and actors) that will be repeated throughout the film. (Several head on shots of the actors - interacting, diegetically, with other characters - but literally, interacting directly with the camera...
Okay... back to sound and image - and as that first sequence continues, Kiarostami continues to play games with the sound and image - we see the crowd rather than Shimell as he starts to speak; we see the antics of Binoche's character and her son, while the speech is going on, see them talking to one another and the translator, without hearing what they say; then she leaves - and Kiarostami gets in one more joke, when a cel phone goes off, and we pause a second, not knowing whose it is. Then - of course it is Shimell's, and he answers it, and we get half the conversation... And throughout the film, similar patterns return. Several cel phone conversations that we only hear half of, if that - though sometimes, the character on the phone (usually Binoche) gives a running commentary about the call... Their conversations sometimes run into other conversations, or people interact with one of them at a time, and fill in the other half of a conversation. The moment when they are mistaken for a couple plays like this - everyone seems to be getting about half of the conversation, and end up filling in the other half on their own - making jokes with languages - does Miller speak Italian? French? sometimes yes, sometimes no...
More than one scene plays as a tour de force - take the museum scene, with its copies and discussion of copies, its signs and glass, reflecting cases, the retellings of the story - Binoche tells Shimell about the piece (a 200 year old copy of an ancient Roman painting); then the tour guide tells the same story in Italian (and Binoche repeats it - inaudibly - for Shimell, who in this scene does not seem to speak Italian or French), then in French.... Or the scene by the fountain, especially the meeting with Carrierre and Natanson. Binoche and Shimell have been quarreling about the meaning and value of a statue - she has gone to solicit opinions of some of the others people in the courtyard, while he watches her in a series of mirrors. He sees Carrierre and Natanson - and when they first appear, he (Carrierre) is shouting - Natanson is behind him, apparently the target of his annoyance - then they turn, and we see he's talking to someone on the phone (she has the phone, he has the earpiece) - a lovely bit of misdirection. Binoche approaches them, talks to them - we don't hear their conversation (we see her in the mirrors) - then Shimell joins them. Binoche tries to get them to repeat what they told her about the statue - they won't quite do it, they even say she is the one who said what she wants them to say... It's all dazzling - the play of sound, the doubling of the pairs of characters (with the statue, of a man and woman, another in the series), the way what people say isn't quite original, people repeating each other, or putting words in each other's mouths - even the ubiquitous cel phones... words breaking free from their speakers, images and sounds divided, images and sounds multiplying, languages multiplying... a tour de force.
Note the verb. In fact one of the strong ties between these three great films is that it would be an injustice to any of them to say I "saw" them. I did see them of course, but I also listened to them - they all make extraordinary use of sound. I will come back to the other two (which would be Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives [which I need to see again] and Le Quattro Volte) - I'll start here with some thoughts about Kiarostami's Certified Copy.
Brief run through what happens: it's basically a two-hander for Juliette Binoche and William Shimell (an opera singer in his first film) - he plays a writer, doing a book tour - she owns an antique shop - they go out for a Sunday drive in the Tuscan countryside, talk about art and her sister, see some sights, then, when they are mistaken for a married couple by a woman in a coffee shop, start acting the part. They visit a church specializing in weddings, a museum with a famous copy, they look at sculptures and art, try to eat at a restaurant, visit the hotel where they spent their wedding night, all the while growing into their roles as husband and wife, in a marriage on the rocks... Along the way they interact with a few other people - her son, the woman at the cafe, newlyweds, an old couple (Jean-Claude Carrierre and Agathe Natanson, as it happens) by a fountain, and various passersby - as well as a few people who don't appear, but have substance - her sister and brother in law, the people on the other end of their phones.... The story, then, is Strange - they begin as strangers, they are recast (as it were) by the observer as a married couple, and they start playing the parts - getting more and more engaged by the roles. Maybe they are play-acting with each other - maybe they were married all along - maybe reality changes - it probably doesn't matter. It seems to me, it is as if they are enacting the entire course of a relationship in one afternoon, from flirtation to courtship to marriage and the decay of the marriage. Maybe. Whatever is happening, the film is beautiful looking, gorgeous sounding, and all of it is very clever. Binoche is magnificent, her character a strange, rather off-putting person, but a great performance; Shimell doesn't quite seem up to her level - he comes off like Jeremy Irons in Inland Empire - though that may be the point. The character is pretty loathsome (though he is given some interesting critical positions - the arguments aren't really unbalanced), selfish, solipsistic, rude, though with an odd, sad, charm - gentle and cold... And everything is combined into a magnificent piece of filmmaking.
I've written before about how Kiarostami's films sound - and it's the sound that was most dazzling about Certified Copy. Nothing sounds like Kiarostami. That isn't to slight the visuals - this is a ravishing looking film, and visually clever to boot - but it sounds like nothing else. HIs films remind you how much we take sound for granted in films - and how hard it is to talk about sound. What does sound do? Most films use sound very conventionally - ambient sound to create a sense of realism - more precisely determined sound to emphasize actions - the music to shape our reactions - and dialogue... sound, in most films, guides us to the meaning of the film, shapes our attention and signals the importance of things on screen. Sound, most of the time, is used in a very similar way to analytical editing - it guides our attention, focuses us on certain elements of the film, shapes the emotional impact of the film.
Kiarostami doesn't use sound this way. He does a couple characteristic things, both different from conventional sound design. First - he immerses us in the sonic world of his films. His soundtracks are dense with ambient sound - voices and machines and natural sounds, tires and footsteps and wind and doors opening and floors creaking and so on, and snatches of diegetic music, TV and radio, etc. The sound immerses us in the world of the film, surrounds us - If most films use sound to guide your attention to the important elements of the image, Kiarostami uses sound to fill in the world outside the image. His sound designs are analogous to his cinematography - the deep focus, the open spaces, the somewhat disordered and random backgrounds. His films give the impression of being free, outside the direct focus of the story - the story takes place in a world that is going about its business regardless of the story. It's hard to describe properly - because it is combining two ideas. The story - in this case, the interactions between Binoche and Shimell - are carefully shot, framed, lit - they are edited precisely, taking full advantage of all the resources of art cinema (mirrors and frames in the frames and all the rest).... But behind the main actors, the rest of the city seems to be going about its business, just there. The sound design works to the same ends - the careful control of the dialogue, clear and distinct - but against the background sounds of the rest of the world (a city, a town, going about its business). Now: it can probably go without saying that these things are very highly controlled - you don't get a soundtrack as precise and rich as this without a lot of work and artifice. I imagine the same is true of the people wandering around in the back of the shots. (And it's certainly true of the compositions, the lighting, the reflections on the car windshield in the driving sequences, etc.) It reproduces at a technical level the general shape of his films - that carefully balanced blend of artifice and realism.
The other characteristic device Kiarostami uses here is a kind of split of the image and sound. There is always a careful interplay between the image and sound, and very often, Kiarostami breaks them apart. He does this in quite a few of his films - most radically in Shirin, but it happens repeatedly. In Certified Copy, that is how the film begins - the image (a table set up for an author talk, but with no people) is broken from the sound (an crowd, gathering, murmuring, somewhere behind the camera.) This changes - a man appears (a translator, introducing Shimell's character, James Miller, a writer, who is late) - then Miller - who begins by repeating (with a variation) the translator's excuse for his tardiness... Meaning already we have themes we will see again: characters repeating one another, even if they don't know what the other have said; a distinct image of an audience and spectacle - we hear the audience, and indeed seem to be part of the audience ourselves (the camera is in their place) - a relationship (between the camera and actors) that will be repeated throughout the film. (Several head on shots of the actors - interacting, diegetically, with other characters - but literally, interacting directly with the camera...
Okay... back to sound and image - and as that first sequence continues, Kiarostami continues to play games with the sound and image - we see the crowd rather than Shimell as he starts to speak; we see the antics of Binoche's character and her son, while the speech is going on, see them talking to one another and the translator, without hearing what they say; then she leaves - and Kiarostami gets in one more joke, when a cel phone goes off, and we pause a second, not knowing whose it is. Then - of course it is Shimell's, and he answers it, and we get half the conversation... And throughout the film, similar patterns return. Several cel phone conversations that we only hear half of, if that - though sometimes, the character on the phone (usually Binoche) gives a running commentary about the call... Their conversations sometimes run into other conversations, or people interact with one of them at a time, and fill in the other half of a conversation. The moment when they are mistaken for a couple plays like this - everyone seems to be getting about half of the conversation, and end up filling in the other half on their own - making jokes with languages - does Miller speak Italian? French? sometimes yes, sometimes no...
More than one scene plays as a tour de force - take the museum scene, with its copies and discussion of copies, its signs and glass, reflecting cases, the retellings of the story - Binoche tells Shimell about the piece (a 200 year old copy of an ancient Roman painting); then the tour guide tells the same story in Italian (and Binoche repeats it - inaudibly - for Shimell, who in this scene does not seem to speak Italian or French), then in French.... Or the scene by the fountain, especially the meeting with Carrierre and Natanson. Binoche and Shimell have been quarreling about the meaning and value of a statue - she has gone to solicit opinions of some of the others people in the courtyard, while he watches her in a series of mirrors. He sees Carrierre and Natanson - and when they first appear, he (Carrierre) is shouting - Natanson is behind him, apparently the target of his annoyance - then they turn, and we see he's talking to someone on the phone (she has the phone, he has the earpiece) - a lovely bit of misdirection. Binoche approaches them, talks to them - we don't hear their conversation (we see her in the mirrors) - then Shimell joins them. Binoche tries to get them to repeat what they told her about the statue - they won't quite do it, they even say she is the one who said what she wants them to say... It's all dazzling - the play of sound, the doubling of the pairs of characters (with the statue, of a man and woman, another in the series), the way what people say isn't quite original, people repeating each other, or putting words in each other's mouths - even the ubiquitous cel phones... words breaking free from their speakers, images and sounds divided, images and sounds multiplying, languages multiplying... a tour de force.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Sound and Image in Shirin and The Mirror
Today is the last day of the Iranian Film Blogathon, hosted at the Sheila Variations. Today I want to write a bit about Shirin, one of Abbas Kiarostami's most experimental films. Shirin is best known, perhaps, for being made up completely of shots of women in a darkened theater, watching a movie, an adaptation of an old poem, Khosrow and Shirin. The film on the screen that we don't see (but hear) is an old fashioned melodrama - the audience reacts, more or less as one would imagine... we hear the story, and see the emotional high points reflected in the audience's faces.
There are many things to say about this film, I'm interested in the play of sound and image. This is the most extreme instance of Kiarostami's love of manipulating the sound and image tracks of his films - a love he shares with many Iranian art film directors. His soundtracks have always been among the densest, richest, most beautiful in film - usually ambient sound, the world around the characters, as well as the dialogue - I remember from his films, car engines and tires on gravel, traffic noises, sirens in the city, bird calls, even wings flapping, construction sounds, machine sounds, snatches of music and talk from radios, prayers... There is a sense, consistently, in his films, of the world pressing in on some kind of enclosed space - all those cars passing by teeming cities, with the sound, and glimpses of the city and countryside just out of reach. In all his films, there is a play between when we can see and can't see - things glimpsed too quickly to grasp - and on the manipulation of sound. He manipulates tape recording in documentary films (sound cutting out in Close-Up, say) - manipulates the soundtrack of the metafictional films, the various levels of reality competing. He makes films that underline the way sound and pictures interrelate - the stories about how he shoots and records films like A Taste of Cherry, or Shirin - putting them together after the fact, sound and image - keep the relationship of sound and image in your mind. Shirin, then, is the most extreme version of this, where the sound track and images never mesh. The pictures, the audience for the film we hear, react to the sound - but remain separate from it. Though they do react - maybe not literally, maybe they are reacting to whatever he is telling them to react to, but he has edited the sound and image into a coherent piece. Which is also consistent with his other works - he manipulates sound and image to form a beautiful whole. In Shirin, this is done partly by matching the audience emotions to the soundtrack, partly by manipulating lighting (we see the flickers of the film, as well as hear it, which show and hide the other people in the audience) - and partly through cutting between images in time with the sound. A lot of the things I've read about this film concentrate on how the sounds modify what we see - but it's worth noting that the images also modify what we hear. They do work to generate emotional investment in the narrative. This is, among other things, a way to tell an old fashioned story in a fresh way...
This interest in sound and pictures is common in Iranian films. Documentaries (real and fake) get a lot of mileage from their manipulation of sound. Jafar Panahi's The Mirror does this masterfully - sound becomes vital to the film. The story is allegedly about a little girl, left at school by her mother (who may be having a baby), trying to get home - then half way through, she rebels against the film crew shooting her, and heads off on her own - and they follow. It's a neat trick, ratcheting up the tension on the story - and a device that highlights both the relationship between sight and sound, and the importance that the manipulation of information (what we see or hear or know, and when) has in Iranian films. When the girl leaves the film crew, the film suddenly becomes like a surveillance. The role of sound changes - where before, the noises and traffic and people were obstacles for the girl to overcome, as well as the texture of the world she lived in, when she leaves, this becomes a kind of obstacle to us, the viewers. (Through the film crew.) The crew follows, but now the cameraman has to work to jeep her in sight. She is miked, but the mike cuts in and out, sometimes dramatically (at one point there is a screech of tires, then the mike cuts out, and for a long time, we don’t see or hear the girl - this is a very distressing moment, no matter how much you tell yourself, it's being staged! it's being staged!) There are always cars and trucks and people between us and the girl, sometimes the camera loses the girl, though we still hear her, and the crew drives around looking for her, while she talks to people. It gives the film other dimensions - the sheer intrusiveness of film (media, surveillance,w hat have you), a rather graphic demonstration of the sheer number of people in Tehran. And pushes the theme of seeing and hearing, being seen and heard, that Panahi pursues in several of his films. I mentioned in my earlier comments on The Circle, the effects of Panahi withholding information - his way of showing a character's reaction to something before showing the cause of the reaction. (More or less the whole idea behind Shirin....) It's also there in Offsides - the way the characters are prevented from seeing the game, but try to follow it, through glimpses, sounds, and so on... Though of course it also goes back to realism, the invention of realism - you can follow an entire soccer game through The Mirror, for instance, off snippets we hear on the radio...
There are many things to say about this film, I'm interested in the play of sound and image. This is the most extreme instance of Kiarostami's love of manipulating the sound and image tracks of his films - a love he shares with many Iranian art film directors. His soundtracks have always been among the densest, richest, most beautiful in film - usually ambient sound, the world around the characters, as well as the dialogue - I remember from his films, car engines and tires on gravel, traffic noises, sirens in the city, bird calls, even wings flapping, construction sounds, machine sounds, snatches of music and talk from radios, prayers... There is a sense, consistently, in his films, of the world pressing in on some kind of enclosed space - all those cars passing by teeming cities, with the sound, and glimpses of the city and countryside just out of reach. In all his films, there is a play between when we can see and can't see - things glimpsed too quickly to grasp - and on the manipulation of sound. He manipulates tape recording in documentary films (sound cutting out in Close-Up, say) - manipulates the soundtrack of the metafictional films, the various levels of reality competing. He makes films that underline the way sound and pictures interrelate - the stories about how he shoots and records films like A Taste of Cherry, or Shirin - putting them together after the fact, sound and image - keep the relationship of sound and image in your mind. Shirin, then, is the most extreme version of this, where the sound track and images never mesh. The pictures, the audience for the film we hear, react to the sound - but remain separate from it. Though they do react - maybe not literally, maybe they are reacting to whatever he is telling them to react to, but he has edited the sound and image into a coherent piece. Which is also consistent with his other works - he manipulates sound and image to form a beautiful whole. In Shirin, this is done partly by matching the audience emotions to the soundtrack, partly by manipulating lighting (we see the flickers of the film, as well as hear it, which show and hide the other people in the audience) - and partly through cutting between images in time with the sound. A lot of the things I've read about this film concentrate on how the sounds modify what we see - but it's worth noting that the images also modify what we hear. They do work to generate emotional investment in the narrative. This is, among other things, a way to tell an old fashioned story in a fresh way...
This interest in sound and pictures is common in Iranian films. Documentaries (real and fake) get a lot of mileage from their manipulation of sound. Jafar Panahi's The Mirror does this masterfully - sound becomes vital to the film. The story is allegedly about a little girl, left at school by her mother (who may be having a baby), trying to get home - then half way through, she rebels against the film crew shooting her, and heads off on her own - and they follow. It's a neat trick, ratcheting up the tension on the story - and a device that highlights both the relationship between sight and sound, and the importance that the manipulation of information (what we see or hear or know, and when) has in Iranian films. When the girl leaves the film crew, the film suddenly becomes like a surveillance. The role of sound changes - where before, the noises and traffic and people were obstacles for the girl to overcome, as well as the texture of the world she lived in, when she leaves, this becomes a kind of obstacle to us, the viewers. (Through the film crew.) The crew follows, but now the cameraman has to work to jeep her in sight. She is miked, but the mike cuts in and out, sometimes dramatically (at one point there is a screech of tires, then the mike cuts out, and for a long time, we don’t see or hear the girl - this is a very distressing moment, no matter how much you tell yourself, it's being staged! it's being staged!) There are always cars and trucks and people between us and the girl, sometimes the camera loses the girl, though we still hear her, and the crew drives around looking for her, while she talks to people. It gives the film other dimensions - the sheer intrusiveness of film (media, surveillance,w hat have you), a rather graphic demonstration of the sheer number of people in Tehran. And pushes the theme of seeing and hearing, being seen and heard, that Panahi pursues in several of his films. I mentioned in my earlier comments on The Circle, the effects of Panahi withholding information - his way of showing a character's reaction to something before showing the cause of the reaction. (More or less the whole idea behind Shirin....) It's also there in Offsides - the way the characters are prevented from seeing the game, but try to follow it, through glimpses, sounds, and so on... Though of course it also goes back to realism, the invention of realism - you can follow an entire soccer game through The Mirror, for instance, off snippets we hear on the radio...
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