Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.
Ivana Miloš, Through the Olive Trees (2021), monotype, collage and gouache on paper, 33 x 24 cm
The olive tree does not weep and does not laugh. The olive tree Is the hillside’s modest lady. Shadow Covers her one leg, and she will not take her leaves off in front of the storm.
—from The Second Olive Tree by Mahmoud Darwish; transl. Marilyn Hacker
As long as there are olive trees growing somewhere, we may find hope for life. While the tree defines landscapes like no other and is connected to a special density of sunlight and the sound of chirping cicadas (so overused in modern cinema), its greatest treasure ultimately lies in its own, black juice—a juice that has been running through the veins of those refreshed by its fruits since childhood.
When, as a child, I first encountered an olive tree on a trip to the South with my parents, I believed it to be dead. I couldn’t figure how something as twisted and crooked, silver-colored and leaning towards heavy winds and relentless sunshine, could not be dead. It was not until I saw the beauty of an entire olive grove that I understood why the trees look the way they do: They are as rich, shaken, and old as the very soil they grow from. These evergreen trees also reminded me of the modest people I saw resting in their shade. People that seemed so much older than me and even older than my parents or grandparents, people, I thought, who must have prolonged their life by living in the shadow of that strange tree. Until today I am not sure if that’s not true.
I can’t remember the first time I saw Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees, set, like many of his films, close to the Caspian Sea, but I was certainly older and it was a time when I tended to seek pleasure in understanding the different layers that make up reality as a construction. Even if I was preoccupied with my self-involved theoretical euphoria, I couldn’t help being distracted by the silver glow of the landscape and the constant feeling that something betrays the very idea of life and death in the earthquake-shattered region around the village of Koker, so famously filmed by the Iranian director. It was olive trees again, present in almost every second shot of the film, including its iconic final sequence. Somehow they managed to elude the provoking way reality is depicted in the film.
The sun’s daughter, as poet Kostis Palamas has called the magical Olea europaea, is said to be native to the Mediterranean Basin, and it is certainly traditional to the regions bordering on this sea so central for the history of Eastern and Western civilization. There are roots of those sacred olives under the churches of Greece or Palestine, older than the prophets and saints causing so much violence. However, as with many other treasures of the Levantine soil, their cultivation history is one shared with Persian soil. As with other plants characteristic for the Mediterranean, such as oranges, lemons or tangerines originating from Arabic countries, figs or agaves from the Americas, it is, for example, cypresses which were brought to the Mediterranean from Persia. With olives it is the other way round. Nevertheless, the region around Rudbar (only a couple of miles south of Koker) has a longstanding tradition of cultivating olives. It’s even mentioned in the film when the director asks some pupils watching the film shoot about the specialty of Rudbar. They scream out in harmony: “Olives! Olives!”
As neither fruit nor oil (Persians didn’t use olive oil until the 20th century) were as popular in the region as they were further west, cultivation had been rather inefficient for a long time. By now this has changed. If you, for example, want to prepare a Torshi Tareh, a traditional herb stew with marbled eggs made by one of the earthquake survivors in the film, olive oil is a very important ingredient. The popular Zeytoon Parvardeh is another dish with marinated olives common in Northern Iran. Homer called the oil (which is etymologically related to the olive) liquid gold and no matter if you consider its taste or its meaning in the regions where it grows or the corruption of its trade (there is a reason why Vito Corleone in The Godfather prefers the oil business to narcotics), there is no better image for the olive.
When Kiarostami shot his scenes in the olive groves it was still common practice to beat and damage the tree with a stick in order to harvest the fruits. In the meantime methods and efficiency have improved and with around 85,000 hectares of soil being used for oil production, Iran is one of the main exporters of olive oil in the world, though reliable data remains hard to access. Even if it is not unusual (we can also discover one in the film) to grow olive trees in one’s courtyard, there are three types cultivated commercially in Iran: Zaytun-e rowḡan (an olive producing a lot of oil), zaytun-e zard (a yellow olive), zaytun-e māri (snake olive with a smaller fruit). In addition to food, the oil is also used in soaps and cosmetics, while the beautiful and dense wood is mainly used for indoor objects and furniture.
The fertility of the olives visible on the side of the road, or whenever Kiarostami decides to go for a total shot of the landscape, stands in stark contrast with the horrifying ramifications of the 1990 earthquake in the region which killed more than 50,000 people. I couldn’t help wondering why the olives seem so untouched by the disaster? When Kiarostami pans along the olives moving tenderly with the wind, I felt a sense of timelessness. People declare that they live under the trees, they build their home between the olives. In one scene, in which the director speaks about the ghosts of the village answering as an echo to greetings, I felt it was the olives answering and that maybe each victim of a natural disaster turned into the plant most important to the land she or he has been living on. There it was again, a sense of magic attached to the tree.
Through the Olive Trees focuses on Hossein (playing, like almost everybody including the trees, a version of himself), a tragic man who tries to convince a woman and co-actress of a film shot in the region to marry him. He fell in love with her at a cemetery surrounded by olive trees. She refuses to speak to him and her grandmother declares him unfit as he has no house and is illiterate. While for a long time the trees seem like just a part of the setting for the director (comparable not only to the many flower pots brought to the film set in the film by young boys but also to Californian olives employed in many classical Hollywood films set in the Mediterranean but shot in a Los Angeles film studio), they become something different towards the end of the film.
Hossein, motivated by the director, follows the silent woman through a grove of olive trees, while the director tries to follow them. The young man confronts her again and again with his desire to marry her while she remains silent and keeps on walking. The film cuts to a long shot, unable to move closer. Finally, there is a scene, but the director is unable to film it. Somehow the olives begin to veil this possible love story. They hold a position between film and reality. Whoever moves between them can hide. They grow so densely that the camera can’t look through them.
What the camera can’t really capture is life beyond its construction. It’s a tragedy because the filmmaker dreams about crossing class boundaries. Cinema is part of people’s life but not all of life is part of cinema. The director of the film within the film has access to the lives of those people but their true emotions and convictions remain hidden. It’s only through imagination, as Kiarostami has said, that we can see the reaction of the woman. To me, it is surprising how unanimous critics feel her answer is positive. How do they know? Is it because the director said so? Kiarostami, too, can’t film through the olive trees. He accepts his impotence and remains a foreigner to these people and also to the olive trees that speak louder to those who grew up between them. “And through the olive trees we saw / The twinkle of my vesper lamp; / Wilt kiss me now as then, my Phaon?”, wrote Sappho, and we can feel her desire from a distance in these last unanswered seconds of Through the Olive Trees.
Maybe the sensation of death I had when I first encountered an olive tree was that very same impotence. I subconsciously experienced a foreignness and as much as cinema can give us the illusion and even the means to bridge gaps between cultures, classes and living beings, it is eternally failing. I have no idea what an olive from Iran tastes like.