Kiarostami’s Cinematic Poetry in Where is the Friend’s Home? and The Wind will Carry Us

Summary

I have come, along with the wind,

on the first day of summer.

The wind will carry me along

on the last day of fall.

∼ Abbas Kiarostami

Poetry in Iran pours down on us, like falling rain, and everyone takes part in it.

∼ Abbas Kiarostami

Introduction

I am writing this on the gustiest night I remember this year. Everything that can move is moving outside the window, even things which do not normally move. If I walk outside, I too will be moved in a way I am not normally moved, by a strong force that I cannot see. My imagination wanders, to where I might end up if I simply let the wind carry me.

Wind and poetry have a special connection. They both move us. They both come out of places that are hard to detect and are not easily pinned down. Both also occupy a special place in the aesthetic affinities of filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. We catch glimpses of what is happening in his wind-blown imagination through his poetry, his photography, and his films, a few of the intersections of which are the focus of this essay.

There are many connections between literature and Iranian film, such as the use of literary stories and ideas, particularly in early Iranian film. In his introduction to The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation, and Identity, Richard Tapper notes that Iranian cinema “has firm roots both before and after the revolution, and in richer and more profound Iranian cultural traditions of drama, poetry and the visual arts that have survived many centuries of political and social change.” However, there is also a sense in which a certain strain of Iranian cinema not only draws on themes from poetry but employs some of the same poetic techniques in its cinematography. Some accounts of Iranian cinema discuss the importance of a cluster of films made from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, categorized as “poetic realism” and characterized by a realistic portrayal of seemingly mundane daily life or simple human events, which take on a kind of poetic depth and meaning in the subtle, unique way they are portrayed on the screen.