Cinematic Style of Abbas Kiarostami - Poetry and Imagery

Poetry and Imagery

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak of the University of Maryland discusses how one aspect of Kiarostami's cinematic style is that he is able to capture essences of Persian poetry and create poetic imagery within the landscape of his films. In Where Is the Friend's Home? and The Wind Will Carry Us, classical Persian poetry is directly quoted in the film, highlighting the artistic link and intimate connection between them. This in turn reflects on the connection between the past and present, between continuity and change.

In 2003, Kiarostami directed Five, a poetic feature that contained no dialogue or characterisation whatsoever. The movie consists of five single-take long shots of the natural landscape along the shores of the Caspian Sea. Although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is "more than just pretty pictures": "assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration."

He notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery as everyday moments are captured. A piece of driftwood is tossed and broken by the waves; people stroll along the promenade; a group of dogs gather by the water's edge whilst ducks strut across the frame. A pool of water is shot at night with the sounds of a storm, and frogs croaking break the stillness.

An aspect of Abbas Kiarostami's artistry that eludes those unfamiliar with Persian poetry and that has therefore remained inaccessible to many is the way he turns poetic images into cinematic ones. This is most obvious in those Kiarostami films that recall specific texts of Persian poetry more or less explicitly: Where's the Friend's Home? and The Wind will Carry Us. The characters recite poems mainly from classical Persian poet Omar Khayyám or modern Persian poets Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad. One of the most poetic moments in Wind Will Carry Us is a long shot of a wheat field with rippling golden crops through which the doctor, accompanied by the filmmaker, is riding his scooter down a twisting road. In response to his comment that the other world is a better place than this one, the doctor recites this poem of Khayyam:

However, the aesthetic involved with the poetry goes much farther back in time and is used much more subtly than these examples suggest. Beyond issues of adaptation of text to film, Kiarostami often begins with an insistent will to give visual embodiment to certain specific image-making techniques in Persian poetry, both classical and contemporary, and often ends up enunciating a larger philosophical position, namely the ontological oneness of poetry and film.

Sima Daad from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington feels that the creative merit of Kiarostami's adaptation of Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad's poems extends the domain of textual transformation. Adaptation is defined as the transformation of a prior text to a new text. Kiarostami's adaptation arrives at theoretical realm of adaptation by expanding its limit from inter-textual potential to trans-generic potential.