On the Beginnings of Contemporary Cinema
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
On the Beginnings of Contemporary Cinema: Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami and Dream of Light by Victor Erice – The Fraternity between Documentary and Fiction as a Synthesis of Early Cinema and Cinematic Modernity Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez To cite this version: Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez. On the Beginnings of Contemporary Cinema: Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami and Dream of Light by Victor Erice – The Fraternity between Documentary and Fiction as a Synthesis of Early Cinema and Cinematic Modernity. L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cine- matograficos, Associació Cinefòrum L’Atalante, 2018, 25, 10.5281/zenodo.3819970. hal-02611554 HAL Id: hal-02611554 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02611554 Submitted on 18 May 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. VANISHING POINTS ON THE BEGINNINGS OF CONTEMPORARY CINEMA: CLOSE-UP BY ABBAS KIAROSTAMI AND DREAM OF LIGHT BY VÍCTOR ERICE –THE FRATERNITY BETWEEN DOCUMENTARY AND FICTION AS A SYNTHESIS OF EARLY CINEMA AND CINEMATIC MODERNITY LOURDES MONTERRUBIO The encounter between the filmmakers Abbas films represented a new response to the histori- Kiarostami and Víctor Erice in Correspondenc- cal, social and audiovisual reality of their time: a es (2005-2007) established a link between their postmodernity defined by the crisis of the meta- filmographies that was hinted at more than a de- narrative, the commodification of knowledge, so- cade earlier, with the almost simultaneous cre- cial atomization, individualism, and the principle ation of two films that would become foundation- of otherness that characterise a society headed al experiences of contemporary cinema: Close-Up towards a crisis in historicity, as posited by Fred- (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990) and Dream of Light (El sol ric Jameson (1991). This crisis determines the his- del membrillo, 1992). During the round table dis- toricism of cultural production, understood as cussion at the exhibition presentation in Madrid “the random cannibalization of all styles of the in 2006, Erice used the concept of a “fraternity past, the play of random stylistic allusion,” and between reality and fiction”1 to define his way of based on the concept of the “simulacrum”: “the understanding the cinematic experience. It is my identical copy for which no original has ever ex- intention here to analyse this documentary-fic- isted” (Jameson, 1991: 18). Such cultural produc- tion fraternity as an essential conception in the tion serves as evidence of a reality crisis: “this films that the two directors made in the early mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged 1990s and that turned them into precursors of a as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our contemporary cinema established in opposition historicity, of our lived possibility of experienc- to the hegemony of the postmodern image. Both ing history in some active way” (Jameson, 1991: L’ATALANTE 25 january -june 2018 165 VANISHING POINTS 21). Jean Baudrillard defines this simulacrum in aspects and their narratological and semiotic el- terms of the evolution of the image and its hege- ements, and also including a comparison of the mony in the postmodern era: “it has no relation different theoretical studies that have analysed to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure sim- them. My objective in doing so is to define the el- ulacrum” (1994: 6). The reality crisis described by ements of this “documentary-fiction fraternity” the French sociologist is intensified by the omni- and to determine its functionality, in view of the presence, in this period, of new technologies. The fact that these films have become recognised as technological revolution has created a postmod- foundational experiences of contemporary cine- ern space where all distances have been abolished ma and turning points in the careers of both film- and where the opposition between private space makers. and public space has been diluted. The result is a new existential space where a second-level reali- ELEMENTS OF THE DOCUMENTARY- ty—virtual reality—has effectively destroyed the FICTION FRATERNITY real: “The virtual is, in fact, merely the dilation of the dead body of reality—the proliferation of an Alain Bergala defines this fraternity as an alloy achieved universe, for which there is nothing left when describing Kiarostami’s work: “an alloy as but to go on endlessly hyperrealizing itself” (Bau- yet unknown between documentary and fiction, drillard, 1996: 47). Àngel Quintana describes how transparency and device, raw presence of the a new era of suspicion2 has materialised at this time real and mental cinema, reality and abstraction, in audiovisual production as a result of its failure physics and metaphysics, tradition and avant-gar- to “convey reality”: “The crisis of television truth, de, East and West” (2004: 3). François Niney calls and with it the model for an information utopia, it conciliation in the case of Close-Up: “where the has once again challenged a model of realism un- fable and the event are mixed in an extraordi- derstood as an affirmation of objectivity, and has nary process of conciliation between the real expanded the limits of fiction” (2003: 264). In this and the imaginary” (1991: 63). For David Oubiña, crisis of reproduction, cinematic language mimics it represents an oscillation that constitutes a new the language of television, advertising and com- cinematic gaze: “This oscillation is important be- ics, thus weakening its ties to literary language. cause it makes the place of the gaze an ambiguous Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy call this cine- place. This gaze captures the film on the thresh- matic postmodernity hypercinema—in correspon- old of indeterminacy” (2008: 201). On the other dence with the concept of hypermodernity—and hand, Frédéric Sabouraud defines it as “a form define it as a fourth age of cinema—following of syncretism” that “proposes to us a conjugation early, classical and modern cinema—dominated of opposites, an articulation of past and present by an image-excess that aims for saturation (2007: modes of thinking and representation, a cohabi- 72). It is in this context that Kiarostami and Erice tation” (2010: 26). All these concepts referring to create a filmic experience based on what I have Kiarostami’s work could equally describe Erice’s called the fraternity between documentary and film. Filmic creation is thus geared towards a new fiction: “The hybridisation between reproduction approach to reality that defines contemporary and representation is what marks the signs of the cinema, as Erice puts it: “Dream of Light [...] has time and what complicates the nature of images” provided me with something precious that could (Quintana, 2011: 81). The aim of this study is thus be decisive for the future of my work. It is direct to offer a comparative analysis of the two films contact, without mediation of any kind, with re- mentioned above, considering both their genetic ality” (quoted in Pérez Turrent, 1993: 15). The doc- L’ATALANTE 25 january -june 2018 16 6 VANISHING POINTS umentary-fiction fraternity is born of “an ethics of preconceived idea. A fixed work plan cannot of form that means that their films have an un- be designed because it is the filming itself that es- mistakable aesthetic kinship” (Bergala, 2007: 284), tablishes its own needs day by day. In this way, whose elements, evident in both films, I will now both Erice and Kiarostami place the device above turn to identifying and analysing. the mise-en-scene, turning the former into an Both films arose out of an impulse, out of what instrument of liberation from film conventions: might be described as a call of the cinematic con- “It is life itself that the device tries to capture, tent concealed in reality that needs the filmic ex- without the reductive arrogance of the mise-en- perience to be able to reveal itself. In Erice’s case, scene that tries to bend reality to its will” (Berga- after having observed the work of the painter la, 2004: 49). In both films the characters are real Antonio López for weeks, the two men decided people, thus also eliminating the element of the to part without having come up with an idea for professional actor, leading Erice to speak of pres- a joint project. The filmmaker explains how the ences. These two omissions thus bring to life one project was then born: “Antonio’s plan was very of the maxims of Robert Bresson: “No actors [...] clear: he told me he wanted to get straight to work No parts [...] No staging. But the use of working painting or drawing a quince tree he had planted models, taken from life” (1997: 14). The classical in his garden. That was how, suddenly, the im- conception of the actor’s work is thus abandoned pulse necessary to make a film emerged” (Erice, to produce the first synthesis between early and 1992). Kiarostami, meanwhile, read the news of modern cinema, that of character-presences who Sabzian’s arrest in the newspaper and could not leave scripts and their mise-en scenes behind to resist the appeal of the character and his poten- approach the filmic device as a means of captur- tial story. The filmmaker expresses that same im- ing reality. pulse of the desire for knowledge: “When I read Waiting is an essential notion in both films, this case in the newspaper I went to bed with that unfolding on two levels: that of film making as a idea and I got up with the same idea.