Journeying with Kiarostami: The Wind Will Carry Us

scene from the movie
(video by yoyochey)

I had already read a lot about the movie of Kiarostami, The Wind Will Carry Us, when I watched it for the first time. You could say I was prepared. However there was the same sensation that many had witnessed: what was this movie about?

A film crew from Tehran arrives in a remote village to shoot the burial of a hundred years plus old woman. The issue is that the woman hasn't died yet; everybody expects her to pass away, but the event seems to be postponed day by day. The head of the crew is called every twenty-four hours on cell as the boss from Tehran cannot understand why they cannot produce the documentary; how long will it take for the old woman to die? Meanwhile life goes on in the village, nothing special happens. By the end you will not know anything more: a movie where nothing happens.

Actually it is not very clear whether the crew came to shoot the burial or for some other hidden reasons: nothing is explained, you hear all the crew members talking, you don't see them, but their chief only. People call him Engineer, he lets them believe that's true, we spectators suspect he's anything but engineer.

Now, if you think at Tarkovsky's Stalker, everything is unclear there, too, and nothing is explained. You don't know where they go and why; however, there is a growing tension, and you start to participate along with the personages to the quest.

While here, in The Wind Will Carry Us, there is no tension: are they looking for something, expecting something, the death of the woman, the discovery of a treasure, whichever? You, spectator, don't know and as the movie approaches its end you don't care any more.

Thinking at Stalker, an idea came to my mind: that the movie was actually communicating something, only it was very well hidden: here, in The Wind Will Cary Us, we spectators were actually the personages looking for the meaning of the movie, the same way the personages of Stalker were looking for their unknown target. Kiarostami was apparently playing with us the way the guide was playing with the two other main characters from the movie of Tarkovsky.

So I decided to watch the movie again, this time without subtitles. I had tried this experience very successfully with other movies. This way you are no more disturbed by the summary given by subtitles; you can dedicate your time hundred percent to the flow of images: they should give you the logic of what's on the screen.

The images were fantastic: the village with the houses embedded in the hill, looking from distance like small caves carved in stone, the way monks from old times were living; as you were coming closer they were looking like made from clay, a whole village of clay; as you were even closer you were starting to see small houses with the walls of an unreal white and the windows of an unreal blue; the weird way to walk through the village, following kind of an Escher logic. The houses were somehow one on the top of the other, walking through the village meant using sometimes small ladders, sometimes leaving your house and jumping on the roof of the house below, you had to go down the village to get to the top of it. Of course people were sharing with their animals the narrow paths through the village, and the camera of the movie was having all the patience in the world to film a cock passing slowly the image from right to left or to observe two animals in copulation.

Well, there was something strange with the images: they were repetitive; the same image was coming again and again, with the same personages (villagers, goats, whichever) doing the same thing in the same way; like in Minimalist music (think at Philip Glass for instance), the repetitive musical phrases. The effect was somehow the same: images like patterns, suggesting a rhythm of life rather than supporting a story.

There was something else that struck me this time: the sound of the voices! Not the voices of the crew members, no. The sound of the voices of the villagers. It was the same sound that I remembered from my visits years ago to a village on the border of Danube in Romania!

Of course there wasn't any link between the language spoken by the Romanian villagers from the border of Danube and the one spoken in the Kurdish village from the movie; however the sound was identical! The way they emphasized parts of their speech. Also the way they were moving, the grimaces on their faces in specific situations! I would say the grimaces on their voices and on their faces. And their movements, their actions: they were like expected by me, I knew them, they were the same as in the village I knew.

A rural civilization: I thought at Parajanov's Tini zabutykh predkiv. Well, it was very different. The movie of Parajanov was a ballade about forgotten shadows. Here, in The Wind Will Carry Us it was a rural civilization nowadays.

A rural civilization that is our contemporary. Of course the villagers are aware of the urban civilization; the young ones dream to move to the city (where they loose more and more the rhythms of the village; it takes them two generations to be completely adapted to the new environment).

And it is not only the migration to the city. You feel here in the village the influence of the urban civilization. However, their life goes on a different pace. They take something from the city, but they go on with their rhythms. Their values are different, their approach to the challenges. The more you know them the more you realize that their universe is different. And you realize some kind of impenetrability.

And so I started to understand that the movie was not about the apparent plot; it was about a rural civilization: it was somehow playing over the fine line between a feature film and a documentary; was it a documentary hidden into the appearance of a narrative?

I watched the movie once more, this time with subtitles.

So I discovered something new: the dialog was full of quotations from Iranian poets! It seemed at first very odd to me: the verses seemed to be artificially put in the economy of the movie.

However, the movie had the title of a poem by a modern Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad. So, it was something hidden here, too.

I found the poem (The Wind Will Carry Us) on the web, in its French and English translations. I tried a translation into Romanian, just to understand a bit better the Weltanschaung of the poet.

I looked then for other poems of Forough Farrokhzad. I found Another Birth: I translated it also into Romanian and I was amazed to find this time a string of verses (Perhaps life is / A long street along which a woman / With a basket passes every day) that recalled into memory a scene from one of the greatest movies ever: Spring in a Small Town, the masterpiece of Fei Mu, from 1948!

The universe of Forough Farrokhzad was seeming to me somehow deceptive, both simple and subtle. A very direct language, with a very natural and candid expression of the erotic, while her intimate feelings were communicating with the perception of cosmic: sun, and storm, and wind, life and death, real and illusory (It seems that it was along the vision of flight / that one day the bird emerged. / It seems that those breathless leaves in desire of breeze, / were made from green lines of dream).

Now, what could have been the logic of quoting Forough Farrokhzad in the movie? Her poem was recited by the engineer to a young woman, while she was milking a goat. The woman could not be seen as she was hidden in some dark spot. I was thinking at the reason of placing this poem exactly in that very moment, seemingly with no relation of any kind.

Watching the movie once more I noticed other verses of Forough Farrokhzad, just before the moment of the poem. This time it was a fragment from a very small piece of poetry (The Gift: O kind one, / If you come to my home, / Bring me a light / And a nook / From which I may watch the crowding of the glad lane).

The young woman was milking the goat in such a nook! A tiny dark spot, and she had a flash light: actually darkness was outside the nook. Suddenly the scene appeared to me as a delicate painting filled with poetry: a cinematic replica to the verses!

I watched again the movie and I noted some other verses. It was difficult to find the source: however I succeeded with Neshami, a poem of another modern Iranian, Sohrab Sepehri. The quotation was at the beginning of the movie: a SUV carrying the crew was running on a dusty road, toward the village; they were having very summary directions (take the road down till you see a huge tree alone, then take a left, then ...). The engineer said suddenly two verses (Near the tree, / There is a garden-line greener than in God's dreams), making kind of fun of their situation. The other guys started to laugh, as they all knew the poem:

The rider asked in the twilight,
Where is the friend's house?
Heaven paused
The passer by bestowed the flood of light on his lips to the darkness of sands,
and pointed to a poplar and said:

Near the tree,
Is a garden-line greener than God's dream
Where love is bluer than the feathers of honesty.
Walk to the end of the lane, which emerges from behind the puberty,
then turn towards the flower of solitude,
two steps to the flower,
stay by the eternal mythological fountain of earth,
where a transparent fear will visit you,
in the flowing intimacy of the space you will hear a rustling sound,
you will see a child,
Who has ascended a tall plane tree to pick up chicks from the nest of light,
ask him:
Where is the friend's house?

And the child appeared suddenly in the movie: he was waiting to lead them to the village! So, the beginning of the movie became to me a replica to the poem of Sepehri.

Towards the end, a quote from Omar Khayam (They tell me the other world is as beautiful as a houri from heaven! / Yet I say that the juice of the vine is better. / Prefer the present to those fine promises. / Even a drum sounds melodious from afar).

Was the whole movie a succession of replicas to poetry? I would say yes, as I noted some other verses, though I wasn't successful any more to find their source (When you are fated to be black / Even holly water cannot whiten you): the engineer and the kid are walking through the village and the engineer is wondering why the name of the village is Black Hill when all houses are painted white.

Then the whole conversation among villagers at the tea house, about the three trades performed by a woman during day, evening and night: it looks like a humorous Persian folk tale from medieval times.

A documentary or a replica to verses, be them old or modern?

Need was to watch the movie several times to understand that beyond the apparent simplicity of a plot where nothing happened it was hidden a very refined creation offering multiple levels of understanding. The rural civilization depicted there was actually the support chosen by Kiarostami for a cinematic replica to Iranian poetry.

Then what about the plot? What was its role?

A plot that seemed to make no sense: the crew arrives in the village, the engineer walks here and there, greeting people with Salaam Aleikum. He is called on cell each day by his bosses from Tehran. In order to have a proper cell signal, the engineer jumps each time on his SUV and runs to the only place where his cell is functioning: the cemetery. Someone in the cemetery gives him once a femur from a human corpse. He keeps the femur as kind of a trophy.

And those stabbed words
are circulating in his ravaged mind:Salaam Aleikum!...
How could I tell him that he is not alive,
that he was never alive.

These verses (from The Cold Season, that weren't recited in the movie) started giving me some insights into the plot, and into the movie as a whole. The engineer had come to the village to make a documentary on the rural civilization there . But he could not understand the life of the village (he was not alive there, so to speak), because he was framed by other values, other rhythms. He and the village were living in parallel universes, not connected each other. Each time he was trying to take a step inside the village life, the cell was calling, he had to jump on the SUV and to run; each time he was running the SUV the dogs were barking after him, or the herd of goats was passing imperturbably, or a cock was crossing the road.

Well, as the movie was going on, the engineer seemed to begin understanding the values of that rural society; the implicit arrogance from the beginning was progressively replaced by some kind of amazement and humility.

At a certain moment he sees a tortoise and pleasingly overturns it; after a couple of scenes we see that the tortoise has succeeded to come back to her normal position and is continuing its way. Another moment comes: the engineer observes an ant carrying a piece of bread much bigger than it. Now he is understanding a small miracle of life.

And at the end of the movie the engineer renounces to his trophy, the femur from a human corpse: this is no more for him a piece of derisive play. The femur is thrown in a stream of water, and it starts to flow down: it was returned to the nature where it belongs.

The poem in the middle of the development of the movie became suddenly for me a moment of climax: from that moment on the engineer will start to realize that, like in the verses of Forough Farrokhzad, he should open his mind to the smallest details of life, and follow them, give up his urban control... the wind will carry him away...

In my small night, ah
the wind has a date with the leaves of the trees
in my small night there is agony of destruction
listen
do you hear the darkness blowing?
I look upon this bliss as a stranger
I am addicted to my despair.

listen do you hear the darkness blowing?
something is passing in the night
the moon is restless and red
and over this rooftop
where crumbling is a constant fear
clouds, like a procession of mourners
seem to be waiting for the moment of rain.
a moment
and then nothing
night shudders beyond this window
and the earth winds to a halt
beyond this window
something unknown is watching you and me.

O green from head to foot
place your hands like a burning memory
in my loving hands
give your lips to the caresses
of my loving lips
like the warm perception of being
the wind will cary us.

And I realized that, like in all work of Kiarostami, this was an exploration of the differences between movie and reality, between representation and object. The engineer was actually Kiarostami himself, trying to seize the universe in his movie, unable to do it other way than forgetting about plot and conventions, opening his eyes and mind to the humblest detail, letting himself be fascinated by the miracle of each small creature, forgetting about narrative and contemplating the poetry of the beyond the obvious.



(I'm in the Mood for Kiarostami)

(Forough Farrokhzād)