Impressionist Light in Abbas Kiarostami's Cinema (A Study on the Film: The Wind Will Carry Us)

The Impressionists developed one of the most innovative movements in the history of Western art. Their revolutionary ideas about light and color, expression, realism, the aim of painting, and the artist's role laid the foundations of modern art. Although ridiculed at first by the art establishment in Europe, Impressionism became one of the most celebrated and popular art styles. Artists such as Monet, Manet, Pissarro, and Renoir have achieved enduring acclaim. Unlike the earlier Realists, Impressionists focused more on how light impacted the landscape at a particular time rather than creating a faithful representation of a static scene. Their techniques, subjects, and color palettes would conflict with accepted parameters for art during their era, necessitating a break from the restrictive control of institutions such as LAcadrmie des Beaux-Arts, which had traditionally set the standards in the Paris art world. Developing in Paris in the 1860s, its influence spread throughout Europe and eventually the United States. Its originators were artists who rejected the official, government-sanctioned exhibitions or salons, consequently shunned by powerful academic art institutions. In turning away from the fine finish and detail to which most artists of their day aspired, the Impressionists aimed to capture the momentary, sensory effect of a scene - the impression objects made on the eye in a fleeting instant. Many Impressionist artists moved from the studio to the streets and countryside, painting en Plein air to achieve this effect. As a multifaceted art, cinema is dependent on arts such as literature, music, and the visual arts, especially painting. The image, the most crucial element of cinema, owes much to the visual arts. French Impressionism is arguably the movement that initially academically inspired film criticism. The movement explored non-linear editing, innovative lighting, and attempts to portray dream sequences and fantasies, and other ingenious methods to tell a story from a protagonist's point of view. Although these conventions are well-known to filmgoers today, this common knowledge is thanks to innovative frameworks created with movements such as French Impressionism. Abel Gance even introduced using widescreen to enhance the cinematic experience for his 1927 film, Napoléon. The movement was somewhat inspired by the increasing dominance of American cinema released in France after World War I. These American releases would usually have mainstream appeal and, therefore, conventional storytelling for that period. This explains why filmmakers such as Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Abel Gance, and Marcel L'Herbier decided to challenge these conventions using undeniably French techniques, despite never officially forming a collective to change the status quo. Marcel L’Herbier, one of the chief filmmakers associated with the movement, admitted to an integrated theoretical stance: None of us – Germaine Dulac, Epstein, Delluc or myself – had the same aesthetic outlook. But we had a common interest, which was the investigation of that famous cinematic specificity. On this we agreed completely. In retrospect, the movement is widely known for prioritizing aesthetically beautiful images, in the same vein as Impressionist painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas. Visual elements as the basics and artistic alphabet are particularly important in forming graphic work in visual language. Cinema needs visual elements to form an image. The combination of visual features based on visual language leads to creating a cinematic vision. This accompaniment in the film frame, like a painting, conveys the adequate energy of the image to the viewer. Given the close relationship between cinema and painting, the present study intends to analyze and compare the role of light in Impressionists and Kiarostami's films in two fields of painting and cinema. To do this research, several Kiarostami's appointments that were consistent with the research goal were selected and studied as a statistical population. His first artistic experience was painting. He continued into his late teens, winning a painting competition at the age of 18 shortly before leaving home to study at the University of Tehran, School of Fine Arts. He majored in painting and graphic design and supported his studies by working as a traffic policeman. As a painter, designer, and illustrator, Kiarostami worked in advertising in the 1960s, designing posters and creating commercials. In the late 1960s, he began creating credit titles for films (including Geyser by Masoud Kimiai) and illustrating children's books. Abbas Kiarostami was one of those filmmakers who tried to base the visual texture and form of his work on a personal system and ignore the old and shared traditions and forms of storytelling. In his films, human, poetic, and philosophical concepts have been conveyed through cinematic tools such as the lighting in the heart of simple stories. In Kiarostami’s cinema narration is omitted by the omission of the director. He, in his recent works mentioned above, uses the “self-reflection” element much more than before. Besides trying to the Cinema as a media and the work being released, he tries to omit the director as well. In other words, he considers the audience as the chief creator of the work, without the work is not complete. By borrowing the element of “reaction” from drama, he bases he cinema on “reaction”. This is done in its most unusual way in his movie Shirin. One of the essential commonalities between painting and cinema, is the issue of lighting. Cinema is a painting with light. Lighting in cinema can be examined from two perspectives: the light that shines from the projector to the screen and causes images. The other is the exposure and lighting in film scenes to see the cinematic image and convey meanings and concepts. Some of Abbas Kiarostami's most important cinematic works have been made due to his style outside the urban space, i.e., in meadows, villages, mountains, roads, and the embrace of nature in general like The Koker trilogy: Where Is the Friend's Home? Life, and Nothing More... and Through the Olive Trees. but Taste of Cherry film, has an urban theme and narrates an urban human being who wants to die, a large part of the film takes place outside the city. The wind will carry us, which some critics consider being a poetic and philosophical work. Like many of Kiarostami's films, it narrates Kiarostami's most critical human concerns and his most prominent themes. Kiarostami directed The Wind Will Carry Us in 1999, which won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival. The film contrasted rural and urban views on the dignity of labor, addressing themes of gender equality and the benefits of progress, utilizing a stranger's sojourn in a remote Kurdish village. An unusual feature of the movie is that many characters are heard but not seen; at least thirteen to fourteen speaking characters have never been seen. Researches show that the role of light in Kiarostami's work is in line with the Impressionists' goals in their work, and in some cases, may coincide (The Wind Will Carry Us). Finally, light can serve the artist and her thinking as an independent and controllable element. Determining the amount of light reflection can provide a new kind of style to the artist and offer new concepts in visual arts.