Manafonistas

Another snowstorm full of plutonium snowflakes. Rubber Band is (of course) a play on words – it means Gummiband, as well as something less well defined: a band who aren’t very good, presumably they sound so bad it’s as if they are playing with makeshift strings.

The band aren’t recording artistes (it’s 1910) and the only individual who critiques them is their (perhaps only) audience, the song’s singer.

A Gummiband is of course infinite – it’s a loop. Travel round it and you will never stop. And resilient. And possibly even has a memory (…sort of…) given that it displays hysteresis: stretch a rubber band and it doesn’t immediately return to its original state, instead undergoing irreversible thermodynamic change. They also expand in cold and contract in heat.

All of which forms an odd metaphor that is unclear – out of tune though the band may be, on his return from overseas about 4 years later, the singer finds out that the band leader stole his girl. The elastic of love and longing has been stretched too far, and his parting shot is a comedic wish that the band leader ‚breaks his baton‘ – a sharp return to reality, and a slightly more prosaic example of thermodynamic change.

In a very strange way, Rubber Band is a eulogy to the transformative power of performance. A yet-to-be world famous artist sketching out a scene that takes place 50 years or more in the past, with (you’d imagine) no idea just how powerful the act of performance would be in his own life in time to come.

While Rubber Band doesn’t quite achieve the pathos of the two preceding songs on the album, it does address some very interesting ideas – the limited projection of the Rubber Band versus the stadia and satellite world of the 1960s, as well as themes of attraction, orbit: perigee/apogee and of course tea and scones.

What the fuck happens in this film? Nothing. This is a formal experiment based on the notion that you might stare at a painting or a photograph for five minutes, imagining the world inside it. That’s what Kiarostami does in these 24 short pieces, which are like photos that happen to be moving. The first piece is a painting by Pieter Bruegel which becomes animated by certain moving elements: smoke, birds, dogs. The other pieces are photography, many in black and white, that feature nature and animals. It’s often snowing or raining, and there are many birds and cows. Frame 15, one of the few with people in it, combines a still image of people’s backs as they stare from a bridge at the Eiffel Tower and pedestrians pass between them and the camera. Most pieces are marked by meticulous natural sound design, though a few feature songs like Maria Callas‘ rendition of „Un bel di vedremo“ and Janet Baker singing Gounod’s „Ave Maria“. The most complex piece is the final one. As we hear Andrew Lloyd Webber’s „Love Never Dies“, we see misty winter trees outside a window while, in the bottom foreground, a boy or girl sleeps at a desk and a laptop shows a slow-motion kiss from William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).“ Many meanings can be read into this rich arrangement. 24 Frames will be released as DVD/BLURAY by Criterion on February 4.

(Michael Barrett, popmatters)