Víctor Erice-Abbas Kiarostami: Correspondences

The release of Víctor Erice-Abbas Kiarostami Correspondences (2007) arrived at a key juncture in the lives of both filmmakers. It represents the exact mid-point in the more than 30-year gap between Víctor Erice’s last two features – 15 years after El sol del membrillo (The Quince Tree Sun, 1992) and 16 years before Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, 2023). (One must not mistake this gap, as is sometimes done, for an unproductive period in Erice’s career, during which time he directed several short films, among them the notable La Morte Rouge (2006) and an entry in the omnibus film Centro Historico (2012) alongside contributions by Pedro Costa, Manoel de Oliveria, and Aki Kaurismäki.) As for Abbas Kiarostami, the Correspondences appear as the filmmaker began to make his transition to digital filmmaking with films like ABC Africa (2001), Panj (Five Dedicated to Ozu, 2003) and, the year after, Shirin (2008). 

To this, we may add two additional points of convergence between these two great artists, pointed out by the French critic Alain Bergala,¹ who had no small role to play in the origin of this project: Erice and Kiarostami were born within a week of each other in 1940, on 30 June and 22 June respectively; and both released their first feature film in 1973 – for Erice, El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive); for Kiarostami, Tajrobe (The Experience) – on the eve of the enormous political transformations in their respective home countries of Spain and Iran at the end of the decade. 

Art cinema in the latter half of the 20th century tended to divide itself along a spectrum of two extremes. There were those, on the one hand, who tended to preserve the textured documentary elements of neorealism, and there were others who pursued more painterly and theatrical presentations.² In the former camp, we may include Glauber Rocha, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jocelyne Saab, and Jean-Luc Godard; in the latter, Ingmar Bergman, Theo Angelopoulos, and de Oliveira. Yet if this difference in aesthetic preference distinguishes their work, placing Kiarostami in the former camp and Erice in the latter, they reencounter each other in other ways. For both men, the power of cinema is best measured by the experiences of a child – for Erice, this is seen in The Spirit of the Beehive and El sur (1983), and for Kiarostami, in the great majority of his early features and especially Masq-e sab (Homework, 1989) and Khane-ye dust kojast (Where is the Friend’s House?, 1987). In contrast to the energetic, new wave style popular among filmmakers of their generation, they chose to embrace a slower, contemplative approach. Above all, what unites them is a certain understanding of the limits to what can and cannot be shown, a sensitivity to absences and the role of imagination in cinema, that leads them to be preoccupied by the same questions: who to shoot, why, and how to do it.

The Correspondences – comprised of short filmed “letters” addressed to one another shot on digital video – invite us to draw these comparisons. It should be kept in mind that they were originally made to be presented in galleries as part of an exhibition showcasing multimedia work by both filmmakers that began in 2006 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, before travelling to other locations – including Melbourne – and ending at the Centre Pompidou in France.³ Between these shows, the number of “letters” grew from an original four to an eventual ten entries, six by Erice and four by Kiarostami, completed between April 2005 and May 2007. Seen together in a single sitting, the ten letters bring out the differences in their approach. Erice’s letters tend to be more conversational, reading his first few letters aloud in voice-over. As in his features, his concern remains what cinema means to those who watch it, how it helps to mediate the emotions and beliefs of its audience in dealing with cruelty in the world. Kiarostami’s are abstract and almost always wordless. “Writing a letter to you is not easy,” he writes to Erice in the second episode, “Mashhad”. “I tore up the two previous letters I wrote to you.” 

One can almost divide the letters into two thematic “suites.” The first half – the more conventional “letters” of the bunch – are more closely aligned with the original intentions of the exhibition, with the two expressing their mutual admiration of the other’s work. In the third letter, “Arroyo de la Luz,” the longest single entry at 22 minutes, Erice records the reactions of young Spanish schoolchildren to a screening of Where is the Friend’s House? in their classroom, where they debate the ethical questions raised by the film with their teacher. Asked how many of them would do their friend’s homework for them like the child in Kiarostami’s film, the whole class raised their hands. Kiarostami replies with a letter imagining the afterlife of the quince fruit of the tree depicted in The Quince Tree Sun – Kiarostami’s favorite of Erice’s films – shown swept along by the current of a river before being found and eaten by an Iranian peasant. After a brief pause, the second half of the Correspondences organize themselves around a motif suggested by the great Spanish critic Miguel Marías, that the original letters were like modern versions of “messages in a bottle.” Erice goes first, hiding his letter from view and tossing it into the sea. In a next letter some months later, he films the bottle lost at sea, picked up by a fishing boat. Kiarostami finishes the narrative with the bottle arriving, only for the letter to be blown out of the hands of the confused fishermen before he has a chance to look at it.

Erice ends his great autobiographical cine-essay La Morte Rouge, made concurrently with the Correspondences, with a tribute to the cinema as the country without boundaries or barriers of any kind. This exchange with Kiarostami is another exercise in this claim. Two great artists, separated by some 4,000 miles, nonetheless united by three core maxims: a love of people, a love of chance, and a love of cinema. 

Víctor Erice–Abbas Kiarostami: Correspondences (2007 Spain/Iran 96 mins)

Dir, Scr: Víctor Erice, Abbas Kiarostami Phot: Víctor Erice, Abbas Kiarostami, César Hernando, Ramón Lopes, Valentín Alvarez Ed: Víctor Erice, Abbas Kiarostami, Luis Cerveró, Juan Pedro Díez

Endnotes