Film and video art researcher Alexandra Persheeva will speak about the border between documentary and fiction in Abbas Kiarostami’s late works and the films of other authors.
Abbas Kiarostami is a director whose work helps to grasp what theorist André Bazin meant by the term “ontological realism” in relation to film. Cinema always deals with reality, it is always “for real.” In Kiarostami’s pictures, however, documentary footage turns into lyrical tropes, while staged scenes produce such a powerful impression from faces, voices, light, color, texture, and movement that it creates a feeling that it is not merely “real”, but “literally happened to me.”
Alexandra Persheeva will address the soft border between documentary and fiction on the material of films by Kiarostami as well as those by the directors of his generation and video artists exploring the matter of moving imagery in their own idiosyncratic manner.
The lecture is part of the public program accompanying Garage Screen’s Abbas Kiarostami retrospective Film and Nothing More.
