NZIFF Review: Dry Leaf

WEB EXCLUSIVE | REVIEW | NZIFF

Written by Trevor Pronoso |  Letterboxd: @CleverGurl | Instagram: @trev.pro | Contributing Writer

For the dedicated cinephiles reading this, most discourse surrounding Dry Leaf hits the nail on the head as to why this should be on your immediate radar: an imaginative synthesis between impressionist/post-impressionist painting alongside the patient cinematic sensibilities of Abbas Kiarostami.

The real kicker is filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze's ingenious formal substitution: the Sony Ericsson W595 phone camera as the paintbrush, the 240p 15fps video resolution as its canvas. Every pixel thus becomes a brushstroke; each digital square of its raster becomes a point of transition as its colour and brightness values constantly modulate themselves to the whims of the camera's auto-exposure feature, creating a 'pulsating effect' in certain images depending on how little or how much light enters the camera lens. In other words, one detects the image as being 'alive' or 'breathing' despite its stillness, despite its relative technical 'limitations'. Yet calling the Sony Ericsson's camera a limiting factor is to submit to the imprisoning hegemony of 'realism' in Western art, of mainstream narrative filmmaking, that the image has to look exactly as how my eyes would see it. This is precisely what impressionism/post-impressionism and Kiarostami sought to move away from, what Koberidze also seeks to move away from.

Kiarostami rarely filmed in a studio and shot most of his films on location in the same way the impressionists ventured out into natural landscapes and painted what was directly in front of them. And like Kiarostami, Koberidze's fascination with characters navigating their environments—sometimes labyrinthine, sometimes sequestered—alongside both their languid, contemplative attitudes towards discovery and adventure are given newfound artistic sustenance through Dry Leaf's digital impressionistic approach to the stolid inertia of nature. Within stillness there is life… and nothing more.