Roads of Kiarostami
This year Onion City’s opening-night program reflects this tendency even more: it includes a video by cult horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Peter Tscherkassky’s radical reworking of footage from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in 35-millimeter and ‘Scope, Andy Warhol’s two 1966 “screen tests” with Bob Dylan, and best of all Abbas Kiarostami’s half-hour Roads of Kiarostami. This video starts out as a straightforward and unassuming introduction to a selection of his black-and-white landscape photographs, but it turns into something poetic and frighteningly up-to-date that speaks to a much broader constituency.
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In Roads Kiarostami starts by slowly zooming in and out or panning across his photographs, making them succeed one another in overlapping dissolves, often to the strains of Vivaldi, as if to give them motion. Then he keeps his camera still while he films shots of cars moving through similar landscapes, speaking in voice-over about discovering his interest in roads and paths after realizing how many thousands of them he’d photographed. Finally he starts speaking about roads in Persian poetry and Japanese haiku and quoting examples of the former.
When: Thu 6/15, 8 PM
