The onset of winter. Ants carrying the corpse of a spider. Wall outside Machine Shop. Evening falls hard on the city.
This post comprises a series of animation loops, and therefore, will demand some patience on the part of the viewer. Each animation will take around 5-7 minutes to load and play in your browser (for most Indian viewers with a standard broadband connection). This post also marks the end of our shoot. The blog, however, will go on.
The Onset of Winter #1
Click on image to view animation
The Onset of Winter #2
Click on image to view animation
The Onset of Winter #3
Click on image to view animation
The Onset of Winter #4
Click on image to view animation
The Onset of Winter #5
Click on image to view animation
This series of animations is a tribute to the work of three filmmakers – Abbas Kiarostami, Victor Erice and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Their films dwell on time, on the great cycles of death, life, and the passage of seasons. Also, much of their work is an ode to small things.
Both Abbas Kiarostami and Nuri Bilge Ceylan are also photographers. Their photographs echo their films and initiate an enduring dialogue between cinema and photography, between images and places, times and seasons, and between stasis and motion. But, somewhat strangely, their photographs are not as widely known as their films. Here, we link two different series of Kiarostami’s photographs. The first one, Rain Series, is shot through the windows of a moving car with a digital camera. In the second, Trees in Snow, Kiarostami’s rendition of the winter landscape approaches abstraction.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s photographs of his father hark back to his early films, and are a mediation on ageing, on man’s being in and with nature, and the loss of an order of being in the world. What haunts us about these photographs is that the man becomes a part of the landscape, like a tree.
We also link here a multimedia installation project, Correspondences, collaboratively created by Kiarostami and Erice. Conceived by two Spanish curators, and first shown in the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2007, this installation, which is also a dialogue between the two filmmakers, pulls together images and motifs from their films, and is also a site for them to respond to each other’s work. More importantly, from a formal perspective, a major part of this installation grew out of the video letters that the two directors “wrote” to each other. We link this project here because it is an indication of where cinema, photography and, more generally, the image, are headed. We leave our viewers to make the connections.
