film, eyeballs, brain

There isn’t a single boring moment in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five, but it’s difficult to convince people of this when the “protagonists” of the film are, in order of appearance, a piece of driftwood, the crashing surf and a railing, sunbathing dogs silhouetted against a glaringly bright sea, a platoon of ducks walking one way and then the other, and finally, the moon reflected in a pond just before a rainstorm. (After giving her this synopsis, my friend Jane paused for a beat, then said, “You really need to start dating again.”)

I write “in order of appearance” because this merely pertains to the visual elements of the film; the sounds of waves crashing and frogs croaking are as essential to the comprehension of the movie as what the audience sees. (In short, the film enacts a re-privileging of the sense of hearing, which perpetually plays second fiddle to the gaze. If people talk about sound in cinema nowadays it’s more about THX vs Dolby Digital.)

Five‘s secondary title is “5 Long Takes Dedicated To Ozu”, but I haven’t seen enough Ozu to see the similarities, I’m afraid (and I’m not familiar with the whole transcendentalism thing either). And I won’t attempt to philosophize over the meaning of the piece of wood being buffeted by waves and the odd dramatic tension when it disappears from the camera and returns, a few minutes later, already (tragically?) swept out to sea. Or the ducks, intent on waddling to a destination off-screen, only to return en masse to the other direction.

It’s a little easier to write about particular segments and how they work. My favorite is the fifth: a barely visible reflection of the full moon on a pond, with an oppressively loud chorus of frogs (and a lone barking dog, followed later by crowing roosters) croaking on cue. The otherwise perfect circle of the moon is stretched, sliced, and chopped by the ripples on the water; it’s hard not to think of the instability of light and chemicals on celluloid in this scene. Sometimes the turbulence, and clouds across the moon, render the light into a milky gray. When the rain comes down, only the intermittent lightning on raindrops is left to illuminate the scene. It’s an impressive aesthetic minimalism — cinema literally reduced to nothing but sound and flicker — and all the more conceptually interesting in its technology because Kiarostami relies only on the vicissitudes of nature to prove his point.

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