The ongoing Beaubourg retrospective of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and Spanish director Victor Erice is a chance for viewers to discover—or to rediscover in the case of hardcore cinéphiles—works by two influential filmmakers of the last quarter century.
For those already familiar with Kiarostami’s most recent films (The Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten), it’s recommended to catch his earlier works, which include several documentaries, shorts, educational films, and even cartoons, all centered around the world of children. In his first fictional short entitled Bread and Alley (1970), the normally banal incident of two kids trying to cross an alleyway becomes, through Kiarostami’s lens, a case of heightened drama. His first feature, The Traveler (1974), takes things one step further and turns a boy’s quest to attend a soccer match in Teheran into a Hitchcockian play of action and suspense. In all cases, the spontaneity and imagination of children helps fuel a narrative whose style is one of “staged realism”—it feels like you’re watching a documentary, but you’re not. This process comes to a head in the rarely screened masterpiece, Close-up (1990), where the lines between fiction and nonfiction, art and reality, are blurred to the point of abstraction, and all that remains is Kiarostami’s brilliant manipulation and understanding of cinematic form.
With three feature-length films made in over three decades, Victor Erice is the art house equivalent of Terence Malick. And like Malick, his highly original period pieces combine a world of natural beauty with stories that touch upon the lost continent of the past. His two fiction works—The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and El Sur (1983)—form a childhood diptych that explores the director’s own youthful memories and nightmares of the Spanish countryside. These were followed by Dream of Light (1992), a three-hour documentary which details a painter’s hardened attempts to produce, throughout the course of a year, a single still life of a tree in his garden. By concentrating uniquely on the artist’s struggle to capture the surrounding universe, Dream of Light seems to be touching upon the very essence of Kiarostami’s own films: How to transform reality into art without damaging its delicate fabric.

Centre Georges Pompidou until January 7, 2008
Pompidou Center, Paris 4. M° Rambuteau. 01 44 78 12 33. www.centrepompidou.fr