Director Abbas Kiarostami Balanced Realism and Poetry, Censors and Viewers

By THOMAS ERDBRINKJULY 5, 2016
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Abbas Kiarostami, in 2015. Credit Marta Perez/European Pressphoto Agency

TEHRAN — It was a hot June evening last year when my wife and I received an invitation for a gathering at a rooftop garden here. No reason for the event was given, but when we walked in — carelessly, without gifts — it turned out that a monument of cinema was celebrating his 75th birthday.

It was a surprise get-together, and the guest of honor, Abbas Kiarostami — a filmmaker, photographer and poet — quietly and modestly received congratulations, the same way he had received dozens of international awards for his movies.
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When the Siren enters in the second scene — its sole female — she’s immediately spectacular. She runs in on point, in profile, crowned with a long purple cloak trailing behind her (see below). She’s unlike any other creature in ballet.
She announces herself with big flourishes of each leg, and ritualistic windings of her cloak about her shoulders and thighs. Everything she does amazes — the flamboyant way she parts and extends those legs! — perhaps nowhere more than when she marches on all fours (hands and points), her chest and pelvis facing the sky, with that royal cloak trailing from her neck and her thighs slicing up into the air: right, left, right. The Prodigal, as the dance world calls him, stares at her as if she’s from outer space.

“Prodigal” returns this week to American Ballet Theater repertory, with two casts; in January it returns to New York City Ballet for five performances, Jan. 17 to 29. Even if you know the 1920s silent-movie vamps made famous by Garbo and her predecessors, this Siren is a singular sensation. She flourishes her hands ceremoniously in the air, and she has a gesture where one hand slowly rises behind her crown like the fan of a cobra’s hood. (In an earlier and yet deadlier version, the hand stayed closed and pointing upward, in the shape of a snake’s head.)

When she dances with the hero, she seems to tower over him, and to take possession of him in what remains one of the most overtly sexual pas de deux ever made in ballet. She pins his pelvis to hers with one raised leg, and she clasps his head to her breast in a way that suggests she’s also the mother he’s been missing. She’s a femme fatale all right; she’s voluptuous, glamorous, but Balanchine also made her to be cold, snakelike, lethal and brutal.

Die Rolle der Kunst.

Das Cardillac-Syndrom

Cardillac kann den Gedanken, dass er seine Schmuckstücke nicht für sich behalten kann und andere seinen Schmuck anlegen dürfen, nicht ertragen. So tötet er die Käufer kurzerhand, um den Schmuck wieder zu erlangen und ihn dann in einem verborgenen, nur durch eine Geheimtür zugänglichen Gelass nur für sich allein zu genießen. Darin offenbart sich seine gesellschaftliche Schwäche: Indem er bis zum Mord geht, um sein Werk nicht mit der Allgemeinheit teilen zu müssen, zieht er die extreme Konsequenz seiner Eigensucht.

Künstler müssen, um von ihrer Kunst leben zu können, ihre Werke verkaufen, das heißt, sie müssen sich von ihnen trennen. Doch das fällt ihnen mitunter schwer, da ihre Kunst einen wichtigen Teil ihrer Identität darstellt. Schon Goethes Tasso vermag sich nicht von seinem dichterischen Werk zu lösen, da er nur darin sich selbst findet. Modernere Künstler behelfen sich vielfach mit sorgfältig geführten Erwerberlisten, gelegentlich auch mit vertraglichen Rückkaufsrechten. Arnulf Rainer zum Beispiel behielt sich das Recht vor, ein verkauftes Werk jederzeit aufsuchen und ändern zu dürfen. Die Psychologie spricht in diesem Zusammenhang in Anlehnung an E. T. A. Hoffmanns Novelle vom Cardillac-Syndrom.
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