johnaggreyodera's review
5.0
I know very little about Cinema (let’s just say nothing), but I do know what I like and what I don’t - so generally, from hearing people speak about a film, I can usually tell whether I’ll like it or not. Of course sometimes I am wrong; I thought I would hate “Spider man: Into the spiderverse”, but I loved it. I do remember the first movie that I ever had the feeling of “this is the kind of movie that I like”. It was Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”, which I saw when I was eighteen. I felt that Linklater respected my intelligence as a viewer, didn’t try to meet or thwart my expectations; didn’t try to trade on lazy emotionalism. The result was a film that I thought was remarkably human; it didn’t have “good” guys and “bad” guys - though of course there were characters one liked or disliked, as in life. I thought the film very well captured the contingency, comlexity and fragility of life - mothers trying to take care of their kids but constantly fucking up; fathers with unfulfilled dreams and frustrations taking their frustrations out on their children, but loving them nonetheless; the falling apart of love and marriage because people just weren’t right for each other; kids smoking weed, having sex, going to college. It was, I thought, the important stuff of human life - thus of storytelling.
So after this, first I went and watched everything by Linklater that I could find: Slacker, the Before trilogy, Waking Life, Last Flag Flying. Then I stumbled upon Michael Hanneke, who I learned did similar work. I watched - and loved, nearly everything by him: Das Weisse Band: Einer Kindergeschichte, La Pianiste (My favorite film by Hanneke - mostly because of Isabelle Hupert’s incredible performance), Amor, Caché, and finally Lumière et Compagnie. One day while watching a Hanneke interview on YouTube, I heard him say that he thought Abbas Kiarostami was one of the best film directors to ever live (an illustrious list that included such luminaries as Satyajit Ray and Kurosawa). So I went and watched Kiarostami’s work. I started with The Koker Trilogy - I think some of his best known work, then Close up (I was blown away), Certified Copy (which I liked mostly because I have a crush on Juliet Binoche), Taste of Cherry, Passager, Through the Olive Trees, The Wind Will Carry Us, and finally, Where is the Friend’s Home?
Reading this book now, and learning about Kiarostami’s thoughts during the making of many of his films (the interviews covered films from 1970 to 1999) has made an even bigger fanboy, in the most unashamed sense (I never thought that was even possible). All of Kiarostami’s work is philosophical, but there’s lots of ambiguity in them, lots of poetry, so much use of allegories, that many times I found myself mind blown, without having really understood much. But to now hear (well, read) him speak about his thoughts during the process, his discussions on death, art, what children can teach us about life (Kiarostami was big on child protagonists btw), that filmmaking (and thus story telling), or at least his filmmaking, is not about telling the truth qua truth, or uncovering a deception, but rather about presenting life as it often is - messy, so that we can think our way through it, and come out with answers that are not really elegant, but rather muddled between truth and fiction and complicated by memory and feeling; this has moved me so much.
So after this, first I went and watched everything by Linklater that I could find: Slacker, the Before trilogy, Waking Life, Last Flag Flying. Then I stumbled upon Michael Hanneke, who I learned did similar work. I watched - and loved, nearly everything by him: Das Weisse Band: Einer Kindergeschichte, La Pianiste (My favorite film by Hanneke - mostly because of Isabelle Hupert’s incredible performance), Amor, Caché, and finally Lumière et Compagnie. One day while watching a Hanneke interview on YouTube, I heard him say that he thought Abbas Kiarostami was one of the best film directors to ever live (an illustrious list that included such luminaries as Satyajit Ray and Kurosawa). So I went and watched Kiarostami’s work. I started with The Koker Trilogy - I think some of his best known work, then Close up (I was blown away), Certified Copy (which I liked mostly because I have a crush on Juliet Binoche), Taste of Cherry, Passager, Through the Olive Trees, The Wind Will Carry Us, and finally, Where is the Friend’s Home?
Reading this book now, and learning about Kiarostami’s thoughts during the making of many of his films (the interviews covered films from 1970 to 1999) has made an even bigger fanboy, in the most unashamed sense (I never thought that was even possible). All of Kiarostami’s work is philosophical, but there’s lots of ambiguity in them, lots of poetry, so much use of allegories, that many times I found myself mind blown, without having really understood much. But to now hear (well, read) him speak about his thoughts during the process, his discussions on death, art, what children can teach us about life (Kiarostami was big on child protagonists btw), that filmmaking (and thus story telling), or at least his filmmaking, is not about telling the truth qua truth, or uncovering a deception, but rather about presenting life as it often is - messy, so that we can think our way through it, and come out with answers that are not really elegant, but rather muddled between truth and fiction and complicated by memory and feeling; this has moved me so much.
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