Watching a movie made in a place that subjects movies to censorship invokes a particular way of viewing. Whether the censorship is of the kind exerted by the studios here under the Hays Code in Hollywood’s classic age or the kind exerted by the Chinese government, it teaches the sharpest filmmakers ways to get their ideas and emotions out in forms that elude official scrutiny, and viewers attuned to such filmmakers become adept in symbology.
One of the masters of the modern cinema, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, combines a patient and loving attention to characters drawn from daily life and to their landscapes with a precise, canny, and fierce distillation of concrete phenomena into brilliant, vertiginous, and liberating abstractions. (Last year, I wrote about his recent short film “Where Is My Romeo?,” which carries the practice to a stunning extreme.) In his 1999 feature, “The Wind Will Carry Us,” which I discuss in the clip above, Kiarostami reflects on the practice of his own art by means of a protagonist who is a filmmaker from Tehran en route to a remote village to document an obscure local funeral rite; the anticipated death is that of a colleague’s relative, an elderly and moribund woman who greatly inconveniences the filmmaker and his crew by not dying on time. But if the subject of their art is death, the subject of their visit turns out to be life—and, in particular, its creation. From the director’s first encounter there, with a young boy, to his meeting with the mother of nine children, the movie takes on—indirectly but unmistakably—the making of babies. One strikingly scene features an elderly café owner, a woman, who talks of woman’s three jobs, one of which is her “night work.” And, later on, Kiarostami proves exactly what he means, with a cut from a daytime delight in sensual reality to a view of the village at night, leaving us to imagine exactly what kind of “work” is being done behind closed doors.
Another comic riff features the unseen digger of a ditch (for a planned antenna) atop a mountain (one that the filmmaker needs to visit whenever his cell phone rings, in order to hear the caller) and his literally underground visitor, a woman. Modern means of communication, Kiarostami suggests, are providing ever-new subterfuges for those who would love in defiance of authority. And the cinema, of course, is one such device; for Kiarostami, its practice as well as its results offer the promise of personal liberation. The exuberant declamation heard at the end of the clip above offers a shiver of exultation, a moment of true happiness, that’s rare in the cinema.
P.S. Daringly, Kiarostami offers a scene, between the filmmaker and a local schoolteacher, in which the ritual to be filmed—one of women’s scarification—is revealed to be the subject of abuse by secular officials.