24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami, 2017)

24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami, 2017)

Sound editor: Ensieh Maleki. Visual effects: Ali Kamali, Sam Javanrouh, Helen Thach.

Cats don't get montage. I figured this out while watching 24 Frames, Abbas Kiarostami's last film, which consists of 24 four-and-a-half minute segments, each filmed with a stationary camera and no cutting. In all of them, the only moving things are trees and waves blown by the wind, falling rain and snow, and birds and animals that wander in and out of the frame. Only one of the "frames" features human beings, and some of them are motionless too -- people standing at a parapet overlooking the Eiffel Tower as the nighttime light show begins. As the frame holds on these immobile figures, other people wander past them, and one busker tries but fails to get their attention. At the end, a man enters the frame and looks directly at the camera as he passes through. Two of the sequences are almost music videos: They're accompanied by music that has no direct connection with what's on screen, Maria Callas singing "Un bel di" in one, and Janet Baker's version of Schubert's "Ave Maria" in another. In other segments, human activity is offscreen -- in the sounds of gunshots or traffic or airplanes -- as the action onscreen is carried by the weather and the birds and animals. In one sequence, we see only a woodpile with a bird sitting on it and the tops of two trees in the background. Throughout we hear the sounds of machinery until finally we hear a power saw and first one and then the other tree falls out of the frame. Midway into 24 Frames, I noticed that my cat was paying attention to what was happening on the screen. Ordinarily he never pays attention to what's on TV, I think because it moves too swiftly, involves swift cuts in point of view -- in other words, the montage on which almost all films depend. But this time the screen had become a window on the outside world, as interesting to him as the real windows in our house. It is the motion within stillness, the absence of the manipulations of montage, that gives Kiarostami's film its odd quality, makes it such a meditative film. We see a cow, lying slightly out of focus in the foreground as other cows pass by, and we wonder if the cow is dead until we see its flanks moving as it breathes. Why is the cow lying there amid all this bovine activity? Is it ill? We humans live by story, and when "nothing happens" we begin to try to form what we see and hear into stories that explain the something inherent in the nothingness. Or as Wallace Stevens put it in "The Snow Man," we become

        the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.