The Wind Will Carry Us Abbas Kairostami (Iran; 1999) Behzad Dorani
viewed dvd
mirror mirror on the wall…
Kairostami’s opening sequence of “The Wind will Carry Us’ (The Wind) establishes ‘an arriving’ and a moral proposition.
A car speeds along a road through the mountains. There’s an emptiness, a majestic emptiness of man that defines the landscape. The driver of the car talks to the passengers, whose outline we can only dimly make out. We realise that they are a film crew who’re on their way to a remote Kurd village to document the unusual death rituals of the villagers. The information is that an old lady’s on her death bed so her funeral will be an opportunity to film. The driver, who’s ‘The Director’, tells the crew that he doesn’t want the reason for their visit to be known by the villagers. Perhaps he’s thinking in terms of the immediate filming task that such knowledge might lead to some distortions in their relations with the villagers (perhaps he’s worried they might want payment). He tells the crew that if asked about the purpose of their visit, they’re to say they’re looking for ‘treasure’. But perhaps the reflex to deceive goes deeper than any immediate rationale. Perhaps deception is an ingrained habit of film makers, a defensive paranoia to which they resort by default as a means of exerting control over the world in which they operate, control they see as necessary to their work but which also becomes part of them.
We are not just in a film but in an ethically compromised play out.
Kairostami’s opening sequence doesn’t just set up the situation that its scenario will play out, it establishes a moral thematic that defines and surreptitiously dominates his movie. The underlying moral issue is: deception. More specifically the normalisation of deception how the incorporation of normalised deception into the warp of life progressively corrupts and distorts the experience of life, in particular its grounded imminence.
The villagers of course are grounded in the very soil in which they live. You could call it: ‘Truth’. In the film the villagers are simply themselves, true to themselves and their way of life. The only professional actor involved is Behead Doran who plays: ‘The Director’.
‘The Wind..’ is not a story; it’s about storytelling, the relations that are needed for a story to be told. The main person with whom ‘The Director’ interacts is the young boy who befriends him. As their relationship grows, the boy brings ‘The Director’ news as to what is happening to the old woman. But the boy also takes on another role, the role of a mirror. The boy in his openness frankness honesty becomes an obverse mirror reflecting back to ‘The Director’ the image of his own dishonesty and world weary deception, to the point where as the relationship becomes almost too painful to bear, ‘The Director’ reveals the truth about the purpose of his stay in the village.
Kairostami’s script spoofs the structural elements involved in the business of making a film. When you watch a movie you see a homogeneity of form in which all the relevant shots are combined in the edit to form a seamless experience which is visually characterised by the players. But of course this experience is defined by what we don’t see, the unseen members of the production crew. Kairostami’s script, like the obverse mirror, plays on reversing this relationship. In ‘The Wind..’ it is the key characters whom we don’t see: the dying old woman, the ditch digger, ‘The Director’s’ producer, the other members of his crew; conversely it’s the most important of the unseen crew, ‘The Director’, whom we see the most. It’s a knock-about parody, given energy by the slap-stick scripting device of ‘The Director’s’ phone, which not working properly in the village forces him to charge off in his car to the top of a near-by hill in order to find reception good enough to speak to his increasingly irate producer.
The other unseen element of a film is the purpose for which it is made. With some films such as unalloyed propaganda movies, the intent is obvious, to reinforce an ideology or belief system. In many films the ‘why’ is not apparent; include in this Hollywood output. Films from Hollywood are intended to make money (that is one primary purpose) but wrapped up in Hollywood’s various dramas and melodramas are powerful subtexts in relation to American values and the American way of life. These messages are not necessarily understood by non American audiences but the values and images are absorbed from the screen and become part of an unarticulated but engrained world view.
With ‘The Wind….’ Kairostami is very clear that he is making a film about film making: its absurdity its corruption its deception and its detachment from the everyday. None of this means that filmmaking is in itself an unredeemed human activity, but by virtue of power it exercises we need to keep balanced view of its nature. Films communicate inspire amuse educate give insight provide needed distraction; there are also dark forces mostly unseen that congregate behind the picture.
Kairostami incorporates one dark sequence into his scenario, its meaning unclear. ‘The Director’ looking to buy milk (life’s first food) is sent to the basement of a house in the village where in the dim half light a young girl (perhaps aged between 12 and 16) is milking a cow. ‘The Director’ stands waiting in the darkness behind her. As she milks he suddenly launches into a full recitation of Forough Farrokhzhad’s poem ‘The Wind will Carry us” (from which of course comes the title). The words of the poetess sound through the dark enclosed space which like the poem has a timeless quality.
Forough Farrokhzhad was viewed negatively by the Islamic revolution who banned her work for many years in an attempt to suppress her proto-feminist voice.
Farrokhzhad’s imagery conjures up features of the natural world – wind moon trees clouds – with a range of emotions – and the visitation of a phantom love. It’s not clear if the milkmaid understands the poem – perhaps she only speaks Kurdish – but this scene suddenly charges the film with a heightened tension that coming out of nowhere shocks us, jolts the spine. The poem, its insinuations spoken out loud infiltrate the space, an intrusion of the sensual into a the world of the manual. It’s almost a violation but the words, suggestive as they might be, are those of a woman and ‘The Director’ appears to have no ulterior or corrupting motive. There are no clues as to what’s going on; what Kairostami intends. We viewers have to figure it out. We have perhaps to accept the scene on its own strange terms as a collision of forces, where picture and sound, in dissonance excite two enduring expressions of the feminine: the one producing milk the other producing beautiful words, the traditional the modern.
There are many films that take their form and structure from the idea of making a film, but Kairostami knows how to get maximum return from the idea of not being able to make a film.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
