Five shots, averaging about ten minutes each, capture several bodies of water at different times of the day. A piece of wood drifts away and then approaches the seashore during a powerful tide. Four elderly men gather on the shore and talk while watching the sea. Dogs frolic by the water during the morning calm. A long caravan of ducks passes through the same place during different times of the day. The moon floods the night pond until the onset of dawn. Abbas Kiarostami’s homage to his favorite director, the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, was screened out of competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
Unlike Kiarostami’s more poetically titled pictures (Through the Olive Trees, Taste of Cherry), Five Dedicated to Ozu sounds literal. However, this meditative documentary without a plot and dialogues concentrates on poetry perhaps more intensely than the rest of his works, with the visual motif of peering into nature, so important for the Iranian director, reaching its climax here. Kiarostami began working on the film in 2002 while staying in the north of Iran on the Caspian Sea coast. Each of the five shots is remarkable for something: the opening scene is the only one filmed with a movable camera; the second was shot in Spain and includes people; the third seamlessly flows into the fourth by turning white; the fifth, depicting the nighttime, is the longest. Maintaining a commitment to Ozu’s representational rigor, Kiarostami’s camera hardly moves or zooms, unveiling beauty inherent in the raw mundane life. He would revisit the theme of Japan even more literally in Like Someone in Love—Kiarostami’s last feature film, shot in Ozu’s home country with Japanese actors.
The screening will be preceded by the lecture “Abbas Kiarostami’s Ontological Realism” at Garage Auditorium. Film and video art researcher Alexandra Persheeva will speak about the border between document and fiction in Abbas Kiarostami’s late works and films of other authors. Admission is free with advance registration.
Five Dedicated to Ozu
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
Iran, France, 2003. 74 min. 6+
