Risks and Revelations
Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences

Miguel Marías

The exhibition which has been showing at Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) since February 9, Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences – headed for La Casa Encendida in Madrid 4 July to 24 September 2006 and to the Centre Pompidou in Paris in January 2007 – could boast of five premieres that most film festivals would have cherished and even fought over: three new, brief pieces by the ever longed-for Víctor Erice and two by the comparatively more active Abbas Kiarostami, both among the greatest living directors in the world (winners of the Cinematheque Ontario poll on the best of the ‘90s: Erice’s El sol del membrillo [The Quince Tree Sun, 1992] in the first position; Kiarostami with four films, more than anyone else, among the top ten). If everything goes as it should (and is expected to), the number of film ‘letters’ in the exhibition will grow with each relocation.

Beyond any of the ‘correspondences’ – some converging, others diverging, and several rather parallel and therefore bound to never cross paths – which curator/critic Alain Bergala has detected and consistently charted between Kiarostami and Erice, this gallery exhibition has the virtue (now quite uncommon) of inviting the curious visitor to think about a series of urgent and serious issues that each year fewer directors stop to wonder about (not to mention the vast majority of filmgoers and even critics): what to film and how, what to tell (if anything at all), with what means, with or without actors, from which camera set-ups, how far or near, when and why to end a shot, and how to link it to the next?

Let us acknowledge at the outset that the main affinities between the two filmmakers are rather vague, although elemental, and relate to the limpidity and precision of their respective ‘ways of seeing’ – gazes which are unmistakably their own, and not to be mistaken or even assimilated, even if both may have paid close, caring attention to children and very young people (fortunately without staying there forever). Therefore, whoever can and wishes to take a look at Correspondences has two choices: either begin in the Kiarostami area, or by Erice’s side. The order in which you see it can change your general impression, the overall effect – and could even affect the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole labyrinth. So, in order to be fair, I would rather recommend starting with the filmmaker with whom you are more familiar. You will have to move and stop, walk again and then sit down for a while, before you reach the shared area of the DV letters exchanged between the two filmmakers; after that, you cross to the other side, and walk again, stopping and gliding towards the exit, unless you are tempted (maybe compelled) to go back inside and see it all again, at a different pace (and not necessarily swifter), in the opposite order. I think only when you do that, if you get that impulse, do you really see the whole exhibition, which - without being an expert, far from it, in such matters - seems to me something rather special of its kind, not a usual museum exhibition through which you can casually walk, taking a lazy look at each side, perhaps stopping fleetingly for several seconds (when even five minutes would not really be enough) before a particular item. Neither is it the usual art gallery video installation, where time is either compressed or has been altogether suppressed, and moving items – usually a short film, or an excerpt – are reduced to the status of a still photograph or a canvas, when they do not feature several simultaneously working monitor screens, and the whole can be sampled standing, with the mental dedication granted by any TV zapper.

The unique thing here is that the exhibition offers rather long (for a museum) narrative materials, which should be seen in their full length and require as much concentrated attention as any movie shown in theatres; moreover, these small films may warrant an adjustment in the way of looking at movies that has become customary, since they call for an acute consciousness of the moral responsibilities involved in choosing a camera set-up and a frame. This might require a little additional time, as well as inviting the dweller not wanting to abandon her/himself into an impressionistic jungle to stop and make his home (for several minutes at least) in the successive points of view, searching her/his own perspective and reframing whatever either Kiarostami or Erice are offering. The inclusion of Kiarostami’s masterful tribute to Ozu, Five (2003), demands seventy-five minutes of watchful, active, sitting attention.

If you want to really see everything in full detail, you will need between five and six hours – although this can change with the architecture and design of the exhibition in the different places where it is scheduled, and also because the mail or correspondence exchanged between the two filmmakers, four rather brief video-letters when it opened, is expected to increase to six by the time it gets to Madrid and to eight when it reaches Paris. That many hours of double and consecutive immersion in two worlds and two ways of seeing – so different and so far apart culturally and geographically, never to be mingled or assimilated, only comparable in their exigent aesthetical search for clarity – offer a strong resistance to the habitual film-related museum shows. Maybe the fact that Erice is a newcomer to this sort of enterprise can partly explain the anomaly, but Kiarostami, besides being a photographer, is already a veteran of this recent development. One could say that, unlike most of their colleagues in the industrial/commercial standard cinema, both Erice and Kiarostami regard and film mainly to see better, to learn something about whatever they discover, find, recall, search or invent, and to detect what lies beneath those realities or fictions, those human beings, these recollections. And this begs for some quiet and requires time, at least to synchronise the peculiar rhythms of each of these filmmakers to the varying internal timings of each spectator as he or she walks through the exhibition. After some minutes, the spectators’ eyes are washed by the fresh images that both Erice and Kiarostami provide, so that visitors may see things other than they were able to before.

Of course – and this is the rule at museum exhibitions of this kind more and more frequently involving filmmakers – a certain part of the filmed material existed already, although many will probably have not seen it: Five, or Alumbramiento (Lifeline), the Erice episode included in the twin features titled Ten Minutes Older (2002), remain unreleased in most countries. Another part, however, whose weight is intended to increase – since it is a show in progress – is the specific products generated by this meeting project’s own dynamics. On one hand, obviously, the first DV letter which Víctor addressed to Abbas, the latter’s surprising answer, and the ensuing real exchange is a modern version of messages in the bottle – sent not only to communicate, but also in the knowledge that they would be shown to strangers, those who wander now through the rooms and corridors of this new Marienbad which is the exhibition, and thus the virtual meeting point of two lonely and distant filmmakers struggling for the survival of cinema as a way of reaching knowledge.

But these DV letters, so far tentative and interesting – but no more, definitely not major works – are not the only world premieres witnessed at Barcelona last February 9. There is also a new thirty-three minute piece by Erice, his longest since 1992, called La Morte Rouge (Soliloquio), which could be considered the second chapter (after a sharp, elliptical jump of five years) of a possible autobiographical movie, which adds to his own birth (already a risky event) in Alumbramiento a new basic experience, that of his first exposure to the somehow uncanny influence of the movies, a particular version of what was the common experience of young filmgoers in the ‘40s and ‘50s. La Morte Rouge was the name of the Canadian village dreamt up by Roy William Neill and his partners in crime for The Scarlet Claw (1943), the first film Erice ever watched, and one of the best in the Sherlock Holmes-inspired series with Basil Rathbone as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective. Erice’s latest film is a mainly black and white affair of singular density, emotion and intimacy, where he recalls the child he once was, and the lure of cinema. Contrary to what it might seem – and to some people young enough to lack recollections who despise reminiscing – it is not a sentimental reconstruction of the past, but something made with the most up-to-date light equipment, searching for a future place for these phantoms. This is not a happy Arcadia remembered, for it shows the scar of an everlasting injury, the mark of fire of the loss of innocence exemplified by the voltaic arc that suggests that, under strong lighting, what underlies reality is revealed – even if that ‘reality’ is made up on a film set to tell a most unlikely fiction: this artificial, unnatural light, whether the filmmaker wants it or not, recreates and transforms reality into something else, like some alchemist’s trick, as already intimated at the critical moment of El sol del membrillo when the documentary on a painter at work shows its other face, like a duplicating machine, a distortion at the root of all the conflicting riches and limitations of cinema, of its power and its flaws, the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome already depicted, as an archetypal myth, by Robert Louis Stevenson, another of the tutoring magicians of the childhoods of those years.

It is thus a long voyage, this mysterious meeting of two of the few living filmmakers who can be considered exemplary, no matter how much you agree or disagree with their respective conceptions of cinema, time, life or the world, their uncertain ways of exploring the boundaries of reality and art, of fiction and point of view. You do not have to share their ideas to realise that both are constantly asking themselves the basic questions that the future cinema, now again at a crossroads, must consider.

I must not end this piece, however, without expressing my misgivings at recent developments which are being joyously saluted - even hailed sometimes as cinema’s belated recognition as a major art, or its liberation(?) from film theatres! - almost everywhere, without sufficient realisation of the risks involved in this operation of recovering or funding filmmakers in need - since they are out of the mainstream of current cinema - through the museums, art galleries and institutes of this sort. Their films – or worse yet, excerpts from them, or pre-designed sketches or storyboards for them, or any sort of doodling their makers may indulge in their spare or unemployed time – from drawing or painting to photography, music composition or poetry – will be, for the first time, explicitly (even blatantly) offered to the public as ‘art’, and advertised, regarded and even reviewed as such (perhaps by art critics rather than film critics). These filmmakers can be almost the first ever to display films directly as art, and to have them looked at with reverence; they may, consciously or not (if they are less modest than Kiarostami and Erice), fall prey to the temptation of deliberately creating ‘works of art’. Instead of telling a story and letting people eventually recognise its worth as art, they can begin to accept assignments with all kind of limitations – probably confined to short movies - on commission from their welcoming institutions, adapting their work to the environment where they will be shown and regarded rather than watched. And they may become too self-conscious of their status as plastic (rather than narrative) artists, indulging in some sort of minimalist aestheticism which I find quite dangerous, especially if they also avoid dialogue and even sound. It reminds me too much of the so-called film d’art which became fashionable in France in the ‘20s. It is one thing to run for cover - and quite another to be pompous about it.