And Life Goes On (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 1991). In the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated northern Iran in 1990, a filmmaker (a fictionalized version of Kiarostami) returns to Koker with his son to search for the boy who starred in his 1987 film, Where Is the Friend's Home? Kiarostami also meditates on the human condition with characteristic precision, paying special attention to the resilience of human beings in accepting and overcoming earth-shattering tragedies. As one of his characters remarks, living is an art. Kiarostami's films are able to capture and affirm that truth through their creative oscillation between reality and fiction. A.
Through the Olive Trees (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 1994). Taking a scene from And Life Goes On as its starting point, Kiarostami uses Through the Olive Trees to fictionalize that film specifically as well as deconstruct his filmmaking process in general, and thus extend the internal dialectic established in the previous film. By successively redescribing his previous films as fiction (the primary mode through which authors express “truth” by claiming to represent it), Kiarostami also deconstructs the means by which people express truth and the way meaning is interpreted externally to the film itself. Of course, focusing on Kiarostami's discourse of fiction marginalizes Kiarostami's potent metaphysical concerns. While themes of life and death are not as explicitly rendered in this film as they were in And Life Goes On, the film seems similarly grounded in a spiritual basis. A.
These two films, along with Where is the Friend's Home?, have been retroactively categorized by some scholars as forming a trilogy. Kiarostami himself doesn't agree with this categorization, and after viewing them, I am inclined to side with the author. (This is not to suggest that I think the author's reading of his or her text is necessarily the authoritative interpretation—in this particular case, however, I think Kiarostami is correct; this categorization is useful in that it establishes one conceptual framework to examine the films, but it is not necessary, nor is it an intrinsic quality of the films themselves.)
[Next up: The Wind Will Carry Us]
