Abbas Kiarostami - Poetry, Artistry and Photography

Poetry, Artistry and Photography

Kiarostami, along with Jean Cocteau, Satyajit Ray, Derek Jarman, and Gulzar, is part of a tradition of filmmakers whose artistic expressions are not restricted to one medium, but who show the ability to use other forms such as poetry, set designs, painting, or photography to relate their interpretation of the world we live in and to illustrate their understanding of our preoccupations and identities.

Kiarostami is a noted photographer and poet. A bilingual collection of more than 200 of his poems, Walking with the Wind, was published by Harvard University Press. His photographic work includes Untitled Photographs, a collection of over thirty photographs, essentially of snow landscapes, taken in his hometown Tehran, between 1978 and 2003. In 1999, He also published a collection of his poems. Kiarostami also produced Mozart's opera, Cosi fan Tutte, which premiered in Aix-en-Provence in 2003 before being performed at the English National Opera in London in 2004.

Riccardo Zipoli, from the Università Ca' Foscari Venezia in Venice, has examined some aspects of the relations and interconnections between Kiarostami's poems and his films. The results of the analysis reveal how Kiarostami's treatment of this theme is similar in his poems and films. Kiarostami's poetry is reminiscent of the later nature poems of the Persian painter-poet, Sohrab Sepehri. On the other hand, the succinct allusion to philosophical truths without the need for deliberation, the non-judgmental tone of the poetic voice, and the structure of the poem—absence of personal pronouns, adverbs or over reliance on adjectives—as well as the lines containing a kigo (a season word) gives much of this poetry a Haikuesque characteristic.