Abbas Kiarostami and Víctor Erice were born a week apart, one in the Iran of the old regime and the other in Franco's Spain, in June 1940. This is only one of many correspondences between these two filmmakers . While analysing them in depth, this exhibition addresses some crucial issues, like the ways of exhibiting cinema, as well as the ways of exhibiting both cinematographic images and those of a different nature, photos and paintings, or how to make a visit to an exhibition a personal, sustained experience of the gaze for each spectator.
Time as a raw material
The first similarity between the two filmmakers is the fact that neither has bowed down to the laws of the cinema as an industry and a market. They carry out their work with the characteristic sovereignty of the artist. The second relates to the themes of their films. For them, cinema cannot be separated from childhood, which they have made both their source of inspiration and a theme of their movies. But they have also coincided on many other themes: landscape, the village, paths, nature, the tree, silence, meditation....Kiarostami and Erice also have formal aspects in commun: the liking for a form of cinema that takes the time to contemplate the things of this world, a cinema based on careful observation, patience and attention to details. Both take time as their raw material.
The infancy of art and the art of infancy
Two audiovisuals compare the filmographies of Erice and Kiarostami. The infancy of art records the points of convergence in the formal sources of their films and in the morality of their representation of the world. The art of infancy explains their deep-rooted communion in the theme of childhood. Two routes are then offered to visitors through the works of the two artists. Those who began with Kiarostami will end with Erice, and vice versa. Víctor Erice presents La morte rouge, a cinematographic essay about his initiatory experience with cinema, and a work about his relation with painter Antonio López, the protagonist of his film El sol del membrillo. Visitors who choose the Abbas Kiarostami itinerary enjoy a selection of his internationally famous photographic work. Other works include, Forest without Leaves, an installation in which Kiarostami invites visitors to take a walk through a forest of life-size photographic trees, and two video installations, Sleepers and Ten minutes older.
Halfway through the itineraries, the visitors find Correspondence, an installation with the letters in mini DV format written/filmed by Erice and Kiarostami during the organisation of the exhibition. The letters sent are sequences of their most immediate reality, by means of which they construct a new filmic reality that only finds its deepest meaning in the exposition. This is absolutely new ground with the tang of discernment and brilliance of the two artists invited to dialogue in a space that is not the one they are used to. A work that will allow spectators to. become better acquainted with the personality of the two men and their concepts of cinematographic creation
Illustration Víctor Erice,First letter. El jardí del pintor, April 22 2005, fotogram
Publication
Exhibition Catalogue Texts by: Jordi Balló, Alain Bergala, Jean-Philippe Tessé, Dominique Païni, Gonzalo de Lucas, Miguel Marías and Charles Tesson.17 x 24 cm; 176 pages; 200 b/w and colour images 15€
This exhibition is presented by The Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona and La Casa Encendida in Madrid . After Barcelona it will run in Madrid from July 4 to September 21 2006.
To see more illustrations, click on VERSION FRANCAISE at the top of this page
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