My first Kiarostami, and his last. Twenty-four 'frames' - presumably so called because the camera is completely still for each - and each 4 1/2 minutes in length. The premise is that each started from a still image - generally a photograph - and the film-maker then imagined what might have happened before or after that image was taken.
Nearly all take animals as their subjects, and while some have little micro-narratives (will the cow get up and walk away before the tide comes in?) in ways that were surely intentional - and, at times, ever so slightly edge towards the sentimentalising, though who can say how much that's my own fault as a viewer in importing anthropocentric readings into the animals' behaviour? - basically not much happens in most of these, calling for a contemplative approach to looking at what's framed on screen, and to absorbing the repeated motifs across the scenes (snow, waves coming into shore, a fence of some kind in the foreground, latticed/hatched windows, a human vehicle passing through the scene in the background).
Most are black and white, some have music - often, amusingly, with a romantic tinge - and while it certainly required attentiveness, I thought it was worth it.
(w/ trang, and also Kevin)
Nearly all take animals as their subjects, and while some have little micro-narratives (will the cow get up and walk away before the tide comes in?) in ways that were surely intentional - and, at times, ever so slightly edge towards the sentimentalising, though who can say how much that's my own fault as a viewer in importing anthropocentric readings into the animals' behaviour? - basically not much happens in most of these, calling for a contemplative approach to looking at what's framed on screen, and to absorbing the repeated motifs across the scenes (snow, waves coming into shore, a fence of some kind in the foreground, latticed/hatched windows, a human vehicle passing through the scene in the background).
Most are black and white, some have music - often, amusingly, with a romantic tinge - and while it certainly required attentiveness, I thought it was worth it.
(w/ trang, and also Kevin)
