I film normal-life subjects in natural settings that some people would consider uncinematic. But what I want to show is nature itself, as the truth of life.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of depicting the truth of life through natural and ordinary subjects.
Abbas Kiarostami expresses his artistic vision of capturing the essence of life through the lens of normalcy and nature. He suggests that true beauty and truth lie not in the grandiose or overly stylized subjects, but in the authenticity of everyday life and the natural world, which together reflect the genuine experience of being alive.
In practice
During an art exhibition, I might reference Kiarostami's quote to emphasize the beauty of ordinary life.
Digital photography is, by definition, unfinished. You don't feel that after every 24 or 36 shots you have to change your film - you know you can go on for ever if you want. You can see the result immediately, and find out if your original idea is worth going on with or not, whether it can be corrected, whether it can be improved.
When I talk to some of the younger filmmakers, they are so worried about their films that, eventually, this state of being worried reflects itself in and helps the final work. Whereas, with projects that are meticulously planned, you look at the end result and it is full of emptiness.
From my very first movie, what was my concentration, my inspiration, was I didn't want to narrate something, I didn't want to tell a story. I wanted to show something, I wanted for them to make their own story from what they were seeing.
Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.
As film-makers, it is very important for us to find common ground between cultures, and maybe that's less the case for politicians who benefit more from finding the conflicts and differences between us.
Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.
How well I would write if I were not here!
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
I really think that music itself, being one of the greatest possible vehicles for mass communication, should be probed to its extremes, to see how effective it can actually become, which is one of the reasons why I became also interested in presenting political points of view.
Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.
The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.
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