MOVING IMAGES
At Cannes, cinema’s great masters light up the big screen
Cinema is the runaway child of photography. At the Cannes Film Festival this week however, two films show the deep and inspiring connection between the two forms. In Villages Visages ( Faces/Places), the grandmother of the French New Wave Agnes Varda teams up with photographer JR to create the most charming work in the festival. Meanwhile in 24 Frames, the late Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian director who passed away last July, posthumously gave viewers the most mesmerising series of images on the big screen of Grande Theatre Lumiere.
Varda’s and JR’s Visages Villages is a light-footed documentary about how the two artists — one at 88 and the other 34, one a formalist who helped shape modern cinema in the 1960s, the other a graffiti-based muralist of the street art generation — bring art to the overlooked corners of France. Roaming the country in JR’s photography truck, they visit villages, farming communities, mining townships and industrial factories and photograph the people they meet — farmers, miners, fishermen, factory girls, dockworkers — and plaster their larger-than-life images on walls.
In a manner of a kind grandmother travelling with her hipster grandson, Varda and JR also speak to these people, letting them tell their stories and consulting them about the project. Thus Visages Villages — in this year of the French election — becomes an enchanting portrait of the disappearing ways of life in a country going through social and economic soul-searching. The artwork pasted on the walls of factories, crumbling estates, an abandoned bunker in Normandy and a barnyard of a lone farmer, become a celebration of art and of life, simple, home-made yet powerful images that recognise their presence.
Visages Villages pops with colour and energy also because of the chemistry between Varda and JR, over half-acentury apart, yet chum along like old lovers. As the film sketches the story of France, the two image makers also represent the generations of French art, always moving forward, always inventive, and always relevant to the state of society. Varda may speak of death, but it’s the desire for life and art that keep her creativity flowing. This is one of the best films showing in Cannes, and there’s a good chance it’s coming to Bangkok later.
Cinema and photography also make for a sublime experience in Kiarostami’s 24 Frames. Screened in tribute to the filmmaker as well as to celebrate Cannes 70th anniversary, this “film” is actually a two-hour-long video art that will fit into gallery space — and yet for it to be shown on the big screen of Cannes is essential. A great modernist, Kiarostami is an explorer of form — the formalism as well as the plasticity of cinema — and here in his final work before his death, 24 Frames delights as well as inspires us to question the way we perceive images, still or moving.
The film is comprised of, as the title suggests, 24 shots. Each of them (except the first one) is made up of a still photograph — mostly of nature, a windblown forest or blizzard-strewn field, a seaside promenade or a beach. As we look at this “still” picture, layers of moving images are superimposed on it, mostly of birds, wolves, horses, foxes, and in one intriguing scene, a pair of copulating lions.
The border between the stark realism of the photograph and the manipulation of special effects — the birds and wolves are all fake — becomes indistinguishable, the line separating them so fuzzy and tempting, so each image attains a kind of spiritual and cinematic beauty.
As we stare at the screen (each shot lasts nearly five minutes), we wonder what’s “real” and what’s not, a strange reaction in the moviegoing experience of the 21st century when we watch, say, a superhero movie and never pause to ask the same question that has plagued cinema from the beginning.
In life, Kiarostami gave us masterpieces of existential drama such as The Taste Of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us (“Cinema began with Griffith and ended with Kiarostami,” said Jean-Luc Godard). Now in death, the Iranian filmmaker continues to give us more.
We wonder what’s ‘real’ and what’s not