And Life Goes On (1992)

Thursday, October 17, 2019 @ 7:00 PM
Globe Cinema - 617 8 Avenue SW, Calgary, AB
$12 General | $10 Members/Seniors/Students | $40 5-Pack Punch Pass | $99 Season Pass

The second film in Kiarostami's Koker Trilogy, And Life Goes on follows a film director in search of survivors of a devastating earthquake.

And Life Goes On (1992) follows a film director and his son who journey through the country in the aftermath of a major earthquake in search of survivors, including some of the nonprofessionals who acted in Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987).

This is the second film in the informal Koker Trilogy and is the first of Abbas Kiarostami’s major works to focus on a "director surrogate", a nonprofessional performer representing a version of the film director (here played by Farhad Kheradmand), in the aftermath of calamity. In this instance Kiarostami returns to the Koker region in the hopes of assessing the welfare of nonprofessional actors from the earlier production, Where Is the Friend’s House? in the aftermath of a major earthquake that hit the area in 1990.

The film stands out for integrating a number of techniques that would go on to be central in the director’s subsequent films. For example, the centrality of the automobile - a provisionally social space, providing windows onto the outside world, which has been seen by many as analogous to a movie theatre. Additionally, the investment in self-inquiry in place of a more pedagogical or perhaps paternalistic imperative - Kiarostami uses the director surrogate as a means to interrogate his preconceptions, blind spots, and privilege.

The combination of documentary and fiction becomes more explicitly a matter of experimental inquiry, whereby discovery and fabrication are combined into a single philosophical orientation. The film maintains a remarkable poetic openness in its repudiation of false knowledge and the insistence that life’s meaning is plural. As Aunt Lydia says in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: “there are as many points of view in the world as there are people of sense to take them.”

-Written by Jason Wierzba 

MASTERS SERIES: ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

Filmmaker, poet, and photographer Abbas Kiarostami was born in 1940 in the Iranian capital of Tehran. He began making films in the 1970s, in the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, working primarily as a documentarian. From early on, Kiarostami’s films had a special focus on children, with whom he would develop an effective and idiosyncratic manner of working. A turn to narrative fiction films in the 1980s, first with Where is the Friend’s House? (1987), the first film in his newly restored Koker Trilogy, and then Close-Up (1990), a fiction-documentary hybrid, would be the beginning of the director’s remarkable ascent to international prominence. His focus on real people and locations, a product of his documentary background, has earned comparisons to the Italian Neorealist masters of the immediate postwar period, but his work is also suffused with elements adopted from Persian poetry and art. With our Masters: Abbas Kiarostami series, Calgary Cinematheque highlights five universally humanistic works from the filmmaker’s rich cinematic legacy.

About Calgary Cinematheque

We are a non-profit film society dedicated to presenting significant, challenging, and essential works of cinema art in Calgary. During our season, which runs from October to April, we screen films weekly, in curated programs which situate each film in a thematic and historical context. We do this because we believe cinema is an essential form of artistic, social, and political expression. Audiences should be able to engage with a wide range of cinematic expression, not only with what is commercially viable. We believe in the power of sharing these experiences with other people in a theatrical setting and we strive to cultivate a community around that experience.  

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