Abbas Kiarostami.
A Poetics of Reality
Film Retrospective
Until April 30, 2006
The Roads Exhibition
Until June 12, 2006
Curator: Elisa Resegotti
This show was organized together with the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy
In the framework of the 8th Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, Malba – Colección Costantini has organized Abbas Kiarostami. A Poetics of Reality, a tribute to the renowned Iranian director. The show includes a comprehensive retrospective of his films (more than 28 titles), an exhibition of his series of photographs The Roads and the video-installation Ten Minutes Older (2001).
This show is part of an annual exhibition program which Malba dedicates to cinema, focusing on the figure and work of a major director. Kiarostami is one of the most visible figures of Iranian and independent international cinema. His work has won not only the respect of critics and the worldwide audience, but also the admiration of outstanding directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa. In Kiarostamis work, space and time, the gaze, the journey, nature, the difficulty of making films, the indistinct boundary between fiction and documentary are recurring themes. The Iranian director formulates cinema in a pure state. He proposes a poetic, ethical and philosophical oeuvre that, as filmmaker and critic Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa points out, celebrates the economy of filmic language, states Eduardo F. Costantini (Jr.), Executive Director of Malba Colección Costantini.
Along with the show, Malba has published a catalogue on Kiarostamis work. The publication includes an essay by Adrián Cangi; a selection of poems by Kiarostami, directly translated from the original Iranian; critical texts by Alberto Elena, Geoff Andrew, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Youssef Ishaghpour and Jean-Louis Comolli; two previously published interviews with Kiarostami, as well as an interview by a Malba team in collaboration with El Amante magazine; and Kiarostamis filmography, with comments by El Amante.
I can not stand narrative cinema. I get up and leave the theater. The greater the effort to narrate and the better the narration is, the more I resist it. The only way to imagine a new cinema lies in a greater respect for the role of the viewer. It is necessary to anticipate an in-finite and incomplete cinema where the viewer can intervene and fill in the holes, the gaps, explains Kiarostami in Poetic Autobiography.
In addition to film, over the past twenty-five years Kiarostami has explored photography and poetry. Like his films, these fields entail a unique aesthetic search and reflect on mans place in the world. Sometimes I think about how to make a movie where nothing is said. If the images give the viewer the power to interpret them, to draw meaning from them, a meaning that even I did not imagine, it is better not to say anything and let the viewer imagine everything, says the filmmaker.
Together with the film retrospective, Malba is exhibiting the video-installation Ten Minutes Older and the series of photographs The Roads, first seen at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, in Turin (Italy), in September of 2003. That exhibition was curated by the Italian Elisa Resegotti. The road subject is not new for Kiarostami. Roads are deeply meaningful in classic Iranian poetry. They refer to comings-and-goings, to migration, to moving from one place to another. They allude to a feeling of sadness, of detachment, of arriving to an unknown place. They allude to birth and death, he explains.
To purchase the catalogue, please visit Tiendamalba at http://www.malba.org.ar/web/latienda.php or call 5411 4808 6550.
Press: Elizabeth Imas / Guadalupe Requena. T 54 (11) 4808 6507/6520 | F 54 (11) 4808 6599 | eimas@malba.org.ar | prensa@malba.org.ar
Malba Colección Costantini
3415 Figueroa Alcorta Avenue
C1425CLA, Buenos Aires, Argentina
t: 5411 4808 6500 f: 5411 4808 6599
