Absolute Mobility in Abbas Kiarostami: From Nature to Cinema

The aim of this article is to investigate Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘total art’ by showing some of the creative links between his experiments in poetry, photography and cinema. In Kiarostami’s incessant search for an ‘ethics’ of vision – the right intimacy and the just distance from the image – poetry (Walking with the Wind, 2001) is what provides him with the chance to write a simple, intense and ‘natural’ landscape, upon which to inscribe his black and white photos of Roads and Trees (1978-2003), whose geometrical simplicity and plastic originality hint at the singularity of representation. Kiarostami then carries on his research by animating the poetic landscape and the static frame of his still images with a cinematographic universe continuously changing, insistently linking different and connected subjects: the experiments with documentary and fiction (Close-up), the analysis of the mystery of survival (And Life Goes On), of love (Through the Olive Trees) and of death (A Taste of Cherry), the discovery of a passion for life which, by keeping its mystery, prompts vision to continue (And the Wind Will Take Us). Poetic writing, photographic framing, cinemato-graphy: in the knitting of natural love, formal singularity and enigmatic vision, Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘mobile’ art invents, depicts and signs its determination for ethical ‘communication’.