No words: Abbas Kiarosta­mi RIP

There are no words. Sad face emo­jis will not suf­fice. Hasti­ly post­ed pho­tos of hap­pi­er times offer no emo­tion­al balm. The king is dead. You can­not pith­ily encap­su­late all that was great about the Iran­ian mae­stro Abbas Kiarosta­mi in a cou­ple of mere sen­tences. Adjec­tives aren’t wor­thy. One of the fore­most cin­e­ma artists, a true orig­i­nal, a gal­vanis­ing poet who toyed with the illu­sion of sim­plic­i­ty, who asked us to observe and won­der at the world as it is, has passed.

The feel­ing is one of cat­a­stro­phe, as if an era has come to a close, as if the walls of cin­e­ma itself are tum­bling in around us. The great film­mak­ers betray an air of omnipo­tence, we take for grant­ed that they’ll always be there to deliv­er us the boun­ty of their work, that they’ll con­stant­ly be engag­ing with the land­scape for the pur­pos­es of pub­lic inter­pre­ta­tion. Yet such for­lorn reminders of life’s final­i­ty are as bit­ter­sweet as Kiarostami’s films themselves.

Kiarostami’s movies, to me, remain mys­te­ri­ous objects. They’re gor­geous open texts which hold no mes­sage or moral, but cap­ture what Paul Schrad­er once described as tran­scen­dence. They’re not about peo­ple or the world, but more about the invis­i­ble sinews con­nect­ing the two and the unseen inter­play which cre­ates bal­ance. Life isn’t what’s hap­pen­ing to the peo­ple on screen, it’s the small, ecsta­t­ic, often unseen moments that, even­tu­al­ly, help to define it.

More so than most direc­tors, Kiarosta­mi was some­one who believed that cin­e­ma offered a vision of the world that can’t be glanced by human eyes. We can see the things that peo­ple miss, or that they would active­ly chose not to look at or notice. We see an aerosol can roll down a hill in Close-Up, or a small flower pressed into a text­book in Where Is the Friend’s House? or a neon city as reflect­ed in a car win­dow in Like Some­one in Love.

He was some­one who was so in awe of the world (a tem­pered, ratio­nal awe), that he could locate sto­ries any­where, in any­one or any­thing. Give me the face of a woman and I’ll give you the world he seemed to say in 2008’s Shirin. His so-called ​‘Kok­er tril­o­gy’ saw him vis­it­ing the same rur­al site three times, first to tell a sto­ry (Where is the Friend’s House?), then to exca­vate that sto­ry from the rav­ages of an earth­quake (Life and Noth­ing More) and then to return to ask whether any new sto­ries can be told (Through the Olive Trees). He was a pio­neer of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, flip­ping the format’s aes­thet­ic lim­i­ta­tions into daz­zling advan­tages in films like the dash­board con­fi­den­tial, Ten, and the qui­et­ly rad­i­cal doc­u­men­tary ABC Africa. He was a polit­i­cal film­mak­er also, pro­duc­ing tren­chant cri­tiques of con­tem­po­rary Iran­ian soci­ety which where expressed through sym­bols and asso­ci­a­tions rather than brash declamations.

This will­ing­ness to talk with images made his films at once cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic and whol­ly uni­ver­sal, oblique and open, expres­sion­is­tic and lit­er­al. His films are invig­o­rat­ing in a way that few oth­ers are, emo­tion­al­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly rous­ing in equal mea­sure. They will live on past the dev­as­ta­tion of his death and become even more entrenched with­in film cul­ture. They will remind crit­ics why they fell in love with movies. They remind stu­dents why they want­ed to make movies. They will remind philoso­phers of the pro­found mys­ter­ies of exis­tence. They will remind poets of the rav­ish­ing beau­ty that con­sumes our every wak­ing moment. They will remind chil­dren of basic moral life lessons. They will remind adults of the con­tin­u­ing impor­tance of those very same lessons. They will remind every­one how to live, how to love, and – most impor­tant­ly – how to see. RIP, to one of the masters.