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For a formal ethics: Abbas Kiarostami, pedagogue director
It’s been more than 20 years since Abbas Kiarostami (Tehran, 1940) became popular among western viewers, during Locarno Festival (1989). He there received his first international award with his fourth short film Where is the friend’s home? (1987). Schoolboy Ahmad, the main character, takes his friend’s notebook by mistake; worried, he starts looking for his friend’s house to return it, but, just when he has found it, he changes his mind and leaves. Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema is exactly this: a fascinating journey, a research that begins again right in the moment when it should be ending, – because it seemed to have revealed the object of the research – catching that vagueness and energy from the things it meets on its way (the world, the perceptible…), just to start all over again. His cinema is meant to be watched by an attentive viewer, ready to creatively play with what he sees and feels, because even though reality is self-evident (a cinema where image seems to be used only as a testimony of something), he doesn’t have to hide behind certainties and appearances, he has to look deeper inside that reality and be willing to play an active role.
<<…the viewer [must be aware that in movies] we tell a series of lies in order to get to a greater truth. Fictional lies, but ultimately true ones. The viewer must always keep in mind that he’s watching a movie… Maybe I should warn my viewer. I don’t want to play with his feelings, or to keep him hostage… if we don’t get sentimental, we can dominates ourselves and be more aware of the world around us… Though it’s true that a movie lacking a plot usually has little success among the general public, we need to accept that a story is supposed to have some blanks, some gaps, kind of like a crossword. It’s up to the viewer to fill them. >>.
Kiarostami’s look is like an eye on the world, between reality and the representation of reality, beetween fiction (narration) and the epiphany and obviousness of things. <<…one day I was walking down a street with my son. - Kiarostami said - He was just a little kid and he said: “Dad, the eye is a really weird thing!” I then asked him why, and he replied: “Because two glass spheres so little are capable of seeing such big things” … you just have to watch the world in a simple way>>. This little eye into the world that can see huge things has actually access both to the visible and the invisible, since it can feel what can’t be seen with a single glance – it needs the viewer to wait and be patient: Kiarostami’s cinema is an out-field one, it’s the cinema of shadow pushing on the shot, to open it to new forms and visual experiences.
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Abbas Kiarostami
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Ducks, 2003, 7’
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Zang-e tafrih, 1972, 14’
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Jacques Tati, a born comedian
Raincoat, hat, way too short pants and, obviously, pipe and umbrella: add a bike and here we have Monsieur Hulot and François the Postman, the two characters created and brought to life by one of the most important comic icons in the history of cinema, Jacques Tati. Tati (born in 1908 from emigrant Russian parents – his real surname is Tatischeff - he dies on 4th November 1982) used to be a mime at first, and even before he was a semi-professional sportsman (a rugby player). His passion for sport will become a sort of trademark of Tati’s works, since his first short film Oscar champion de tennis in 1932, up to Forza Bastia, Tati’s last work (we can also include the several characters of Cours du soir, 1967).
Mime, cabaret actor in the ‘30s and then director, he begins his cinematic career as an actor with a series of short films where his comic art develops and grows - he’s not a director yet (Rene Clement shoots Soigne ton gauche, while his first official short film will be L’ecole des facteurs, 1947). But he won’t achieve success until later, in the post-war period, when he shoots a film that will mark an important date in the history of comedy movies: Jour de fête (1949), presented in the same year at the Mostra del cinema di Venezia and awarded the prize for Best Screenplay.
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Jacques Tati
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Cours du soir, 1967, 28’
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L'ecole des facteurs, 1947, 15’
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Between analogic and digital: the art of Zbig Rybczynski
The artistic career of Zbigniew Rybczynski (Lódz 1949) – also known as Zbig for short - can be divided in three very distinguished moments: a Polish period (70’s and early 80’s, from his first work Kwadrat in 1972 to Tango in 1980, until Wdech-Wdech in 1981) and two distinguished American moments, the first one characterized by the realization of several videoclips (in the middle of the 80’s, starting from Close to the edit for the Art of noise in 1984 until Image for John Lennon in 1987) and the second one characterized by the development and the application of digital technologies (from the end of the 80’s until today, starting from The fourth dimension of 1988). To tell the truth, it would be then possible to divide the same career alternating two macro-categories representing and marking, at the same time, the different attitude of contemporaneity on the topic of the visual: that is the passage from the analogical (in which we include the use of the filmstrip and the so-called heavy means...) to the digital (the advent of the video and, by now, the image of virtual synthesis).
Wanting the two great divisions to interact with each other, we can say that while the Polish period is marked by the use of the filmstrip, his (Zbig’s) “emigration” to the States, where he’s still living and working, marks the gradual passage to the digital experimentations and therefore to the virtual image: in short, Rybczynski’s art is between analogical and digital and, in a way, the first period will anticipate some aspects that will emerge only in the following years. This point is extremely important because the feature that marks Zbig’s art is actually hybridization, that is the will and the ability (because in Polish artist’s works like in no other’s the will must be accompanied by a technologically assisted ability) to speak to the spectator through different means: animation, film, video, digital effect, symbolization and metaphorization of images....
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Zbig Rybczynki
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Steps, 1980, 30’
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Tango, 1980, 10’
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Kwadrat, 1972, 4'
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