Cinematic Style of Abbas Kiarostami - Themes of Life and Death

Themes of Life and Death

Themes of life and death and the concepts of change and continuity play a major role in Kiarostami's works. In the Koker trilogy, for example, we see an ongoing life force in the face of death and destruction, and the power of human resilience to overcome and defy death. The film is set in the aftermath of the 1990 Tehran earthquake. Kiarostami expressed how important these themes are in his films, particularly in the film Life, and Nothing More..., directed soon after the disaster:

It is a very important film, Life, and Nothing More..., in that what was filmed was inspired by a journey I had made just three days after an earthquake. And I speak not only of the film itself but also of the experience of being in that place, where only three days before 50,000 people had died. For the survivors, it was as if they were reborn, having experienced death around them. The earthquake had happened at four or five in the morning, so in a sense everybody could have been dead and it was almost accidental that they hadn't died. So I didn't just see myself as a film director here, but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death. So this was a very big influence on me, and the issue of life and death from then on does recur in my films. ..

The theme of suicide is also important in several of his earlier films. He shows how the desire to self-harm is often counteracted by humanity and the need to help others in the face of death. This illustrates the ongoing life force and the power of life over death.

Taste of Cherry explores the fragility of life and rhetorically focuses on the preciousness of life. Badii, a middle aged apparently healthy and well off Tehrani (played by Homayoun Ershadi), cruises the city’s outskirts in his Range Rover trying to find a stranger who will help him commit suicide. Conversations with people on the way gradually convince him of the positivity and preciousness of life. From the young Kurdish soldier who is spooked by the shuddering request to a middle-aged Afghani seminarian who is unable to dissuade Badii with religious sympathy to a Turkish taxidermist at a natural history museum who urges the glories of nature — the taste of cherries — as the prime reason not to kill oneself, Kiarostami evokes a high degree of emphasis on the different elements of life.

When the protagonist reaches his grave, a black screen evokes his symbolic death, but the finality of this ending is undermined by the video sequences that follow, which show the actor playing Mr. Badiei lighting a cigarette and the film crew resting. Again, life goes on, but in an off-screen elsewhere.

Symbols of death proliferate throughout The Wind Will Carry Us with scenes set in a graveyard, the imminence of the old woman’s passing, and the ancestors that the character of Farzad mentions in an early scene. Such devices ask the viewer to consider the parameters of the afterlife and the concept of immaterial existence. In the film’s opening sequence, Behzad tells Farzad that like people, cars have ghosts. This becomes the theme of the work and the subject of the film — they are waiting for the old woman to give up the ghost. The viewer is asked to consider what constitutes the soul, and what happens to the soul after death. In discussing the film, Kiarostami stated that his function is that of one who raises questions, rather than answers them. Kiarostami affirms that the audience must decide for themselves.

Some film critics believe that the assemblage of light versus dark scenes in Kiarostami's film grammar in Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us suggests the mutual existence of life with its endless possibilities and death as a factual moment of anyone’s life. When the leading actor in The Wind Will Carry Us enters the dark he recites a poem by Forough Farrokhzad that represents his nostalgic yearning for light and life in a dark, dead moment:

Regarding Kiarostami's ABC Africa made in Kampala in 2001 during the AIDS epidemic, Geoff Andrew stated that "like his previous four features, this film is not about death but life-and-death: how they're linked, and what attitude we might adopt with regard to their symbiotic inevitability..."