SHIRIN
Václav Krůček

Opening: November 27th. from 5:30 - 8:30 pm in the Gallery 207, Intermedia Studio, n.207, AAAD
Artist presentation, commented review and closing: December 4th. from 4:10 pm in classroom, n.411, AAAD 
Exhibition from November 27th. to December 4th. 2018

Shirin 

The feature-length film Shirin by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostamí, screening out of competition at the 65 Venice International Film Festival in 2008, is simply a study of close-ups of 110 Iranian actresses who are watching a film which we never see. Some viewers are intrigued when they realize there is never going to be a reverse shot, while others will succumb to a hypnotic series of beautiful faces and a charming fairy tale read on the soundtrack.

The film features faces of many notable Iranian actresses and French actress Juliette Binoche as they watch a film based on a part mythological Persian romance tale of Khosrow and Shirin, with themes of female self-sacrifice. The film has been described as "a compelling exploration of the relationship between image, sound and female spectatorship." According to a documentary called Taste of Shirin by director Hamideh Razavi, the women were filmed individually in Kiarostami's living room, with the director asking them to cast their gaze at a mere series of sketches above the camera, while they imagine their personal life experiences.

The project 

In the film Shirin we see women‘s faces following a film which the viewer never sees. In my project I decided to double the absence of the non-existig film and expand it further into the space of a projection room. In this case, the women are actually watching the projector, and we see them partially reflected in the narrow mirror next to it. The viewing space into the projection room is limited to a narow gap in order to stage an incomplete fragment of the screen. Regardless of the possible frustration of the staging effect, the viewer is challenged to complete their own image/s in conjunction with off-screen field. 

On screen presence, off screen field 

Film theory usually distinguishes between two different kinds of cinematic space: that included within the frame and that outside of the frame. Screen space can be defined as including everything perceived on the screen by the eye. Off screen space is more complex. It is a specific kind of virtual space, which we can feel outside the four borders of the screen, behind obstacles inside the space of film and invisible space behind the camera. For the purpose of my project I will substitute off-screen space by the term “off-screen field”. I argue that on-screen “space” and off-screen “field“ are invisibly connected together as a virtual energy that extends in all directions to infinity.

The aim of my presentation here is to endeavour finding a way to “recover” the image by means of its absence, which has, in my opinion, been “devalued” in the course of time and “disposed” to a status of “any other image”. This means submitting it to the process leading from representation, signification and their linear narrative, to the perception of the image in its absence or duration of that absence within the frame. Cinema’s biggest challenge, as Deleuze remarks, is the same challenge facing all the arts:

“In fact, it is a civilization of the cliché where all the powers have an interest in hiding images from us, not necessarily in hiding the same thing from us, but in hiding something in the image […]

But sometimes, it is necessary to make holes, to introduce voids and white spaces, to rarify the image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe that we were seeing everything. It is necessary to make a division or make emptiness in order to find the whole again.” 1

1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, The Time-Image, London,The Athlone Press 1989, p. 21.