24 FRAMES ****
Abbas Kiarostami
2017
IDEA: A series of 24 "frames" that combine photography with digitally-manipulated movement.
BLURB: It’s no surprise a movie called 24 Frames would be an interrogation of film form, but Kiarostami’s swan song doesn’t settle with being merely a structuralist exercise. The film is as concerned with the medium’s essential characteristics – movement and temporality – as it is with its increasingly nebulous form in the digital era, encapsulating and distilling cinema as it always has been and is continually becoming. But rather than posit some facile evolution by dichotomizing the photographic and the synthetic, the natural and the artificial, Kiarostami sets them in dialectical relation, enmeshing their properties in “frames” that transcend traditional indexical and digital image capture classifications. As we watch these meticulous frames, mostly composed to emphasize their graphic flatness, we are incited to wonder about their ontology. Which parts of them were composited, and which were originally there? What has been manipulated on a computer? Kiarostami doesn’t let us experience them passively or unquestioningly, leaving the crude seams of his digital stitching to rupture their illusion, as well as our naturalized expectations of vision. That wildlife features so prominently in them compounds this thrilling askewness, the aleatory behavior of birds, horses, cows, and dogs coming into pronounced tension with their seemingly algorithmic interpolation into the tableaux, an intermingling of the contingent and the structured that is at the heart of Kiarostami’s fascination with the medium. 24 Frames is constantly negotiating this and other dualisms, dissolving and reworking distinctions between machine and human production, representation and reality, presence and absence, to proffer a vision of cinema that resists our anthropocentric (pre)conceptions. The film re-sensitizes us to the world, yes, but also to the new, radical exorbitance of ways it can be sensationally figured; its sublimity, in the end, is as much due to its gorgeous scenery and meditative rhythms as to its suggestion that this endlessly mutable art form will forever exceed our ability to contain it.
BLURB: It’s no surprise a movie called 24 Frames would be an interrogation of film form, but Kiarostami’s swan song doesn’t settle with being merely a structuralist exercise. The film is as concerned with the medium’s essential characteristics – movement and temporality – as it is with its increasingly nebulous form in the digital era, encapsulating and distilling cinema as it always has been and is continually becoming. But rather than posit some facile evolution by dichotomizing the photographic and the synthetic, the natural and the artificial, Kiarostami sets them in dialectical relation, enmeshing their properties in “frames” that transcend traditional indexical and digital image capture classifications. As we watch these meticulous frames, mostly composed to emphasize their graphic flatness, we are incited to wonder about their ontology. Which parts of them were composited, and which were originally there? What has been manipulated on a computer? Kiarostami doesn’t let us experience them passively or unquestioningly, leaving the crude seams of his digital stitching to rupture their illusion, as well as our naturalized expectations of vision. That wildlife features so prominently in them compounds this thrilling askewness, the aleatory behavior of birds, horses, cows, and dogs coming into pronounced tension with their seemingly algorithmic interpolation into the tableaux, an intermingling of the contingent and the structured that is at the heart of Kiarostami’s fascination with the medium. 24 Frames is constantly negotiating this and other dualisms, dissolving and reworking distinctions between machine and human production, representation and reality, presence and absence, to proffer a vision of cinema that resists our anthropocentric (pre)conceptions. The film re-sensitizes us to the world, yes, but also to the new, radical exorbitance of ways it can be sensationally figured; its sublimity, in the end, is as much due to its gorgeous scenery and meditative rhythms as to its suggestion that this endlessly mutable art form will forever exceed our ability to contain it.
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