By Mojtaba Bayat
Marcell Iványi, the Hungarian filmmaker, was born in 1973 in Budapest. In 1996, he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his short fiction film Wind, which was originally a class assignment. As part of the assignment, students were required to write a screenplay based on one of Lucien Hervé’s photographs. Wind is a cinematic expansion of Hervé’s 1951 photograph Three Women, and stands as a remarkable example of translating one medium (in this case, a photograph) into cinema.
Lucien Hervé is considered one of the pioneers of twentieth-century photography, particularly in the field of architectural photography. He had a long-standing collaboration with the modernist architect Le Corbusier, and his work clearly reflects the spirit of the Bauhaus, modernist abstraction, and constructivist influences. Hervé had a unique talent for transforming buildings and architectural spaces into poetic compositions of light, shadow, lines, and forms. Through a fragmented vision of modernism, he sought to reveal the essence of space and structure in his photographs. A striking example of this approach can be seen in his black-and-white photograph Three Women, which depicts three rural women standing motionless against a backdrop of trees and village houses. The women stand rigid and motionless, staring at something beyond the frame—something that remains invisible to us. What lingers is only the silence and stillness of witnessing.
The photograph’s framing, theatricality, soft lighting, and stillness imbue it with a ritualistic and mournful quality. Yet what matters is not the mourning itself, but the mourners. By deliberately omitting the event that has prompted their reaction, the photograph places what lies outside the frame on equal footing with what is shown, inviting the viewer to complete the image’s narrative in their own mind. In doing so, Hervé centers the act of witnessing—with all its formal and ethical implications—as the photograph’s core concern. Our confrontation with the scene as witnesses thus becomes the photograph’s central question.
What follows is an exploration of how the aesthetic elements of the photograph—namely witnessing and absence—are translated into the film Wind, and how these elements are transformed in the passage from still image to moving image.
From Photograph to Film
The six-minute film Wind begins and ends by recreating the photograph Three Women, first presenting its opening moment and then moving the camera to reveal what lies beyond the frame—what the photograph does not show. The structure of Wind is minimal and unfolds in four distinct stages. It begins with a static shot that meticulously recreates Lucien Hervé’s photograph Three Women. This is followed by a slow, continuous 360-degree movement of the camera, which gradually reveals the surrounding environment and events that lie beyond the original frame. The camera then returns to its starting position, where the women are now seen turning and walking away into the background. Finally, the film ends with the display of Hervé’s original black-and-white photograph, bringing the cinematic interpretation full circle and anchoring it to its photographic origin. The entire film is a single take, with no editing, dialogue, voice-over, or sound design. The only elements present are the moving images of people engaged in everyday tasks, accompanied by ambient sound.
The film opens with white text on a black screen: “Three Women (Audincourt, France 1951) – Lucien Hervé.” At this point, the viewer does not yet know what this information refers to. It is only at the very end of the film, when Hervé’s original photograph is shown, that the viewer realizes what the title Three Women was pointing to all along. The film intentionally delays revealing the connection between the title and the image, creating a deliberate pause between the question and its answer. To understand this choice, it is important to examine what unfolds during the six-minute interval between the presentation of the photograph’s title and the appearance of the photograph itself.
The film continues with a shot of the three women gazing toward a point outside the frame on the left. This allows the viewer to connect the image with the opening text. However, what distinguishes this shot from Lucien Hervé’s photograph is the presence of the wind. The shot recreates Hervé’s photograph so precisely that without the wind, it would be impossible to tell a single frame of the film apart from the photo. Clearly, what creates this distinction is the addition of movement. The wind becomes visible not only through sound but also by stirring the women’s hair and clothing, transforming the stillness of a photograph into the moving image of the film.
Unlike cinema, photography lacks a temporal dimension and operates solely within a two-dimensional space. Cinema, by contrast, generates meaning through both time and space. A photograph captures a single frozen moment, halting the flow of events and standing somewhat outside of them. As a result, any sense of movement must be imagined by the viewer. In contrast, film possesses temporal continuity; meaning in cinema arises not from a single frame, but from the sequence of frames and the passage of time. Through the continuity of images and sounds, film creates the possibility of storytelling and engages the viewer in a dynamic, ongoing process of meaning-making—a narrative that, whether open or closed, is always rooted in time.
Iványi, following Hervé’s strategy of omitting the event and focusing on the reaction, creates a sense of suspense through a careful play with viewer perception and framing, elevating framing from a purely technical function to a narrative device. The question of what might enter from the right or exit from the left embeds suspense into the very fabric of the image. At the heart of this suspense—and of an aesthetic grounded in the delay between the observer and what is observed—is a shift in emphasis from what is seen to the act of seeing itself.
As viewers, we are watching a film that, through its suspense, directs our attention to what remains unseen. We are compelled to interpret the unfolding event outside the frame based on the women’s expressions and posture. This use of suspense binds narrative to the film’s aesthetic—an aesthetic shaped by absence and the tension between stillness and movement. As long as the camera remains still, or no element enters or exits the frame, the narrative remains suspended. In this way, Iványi aligns the progression of the story with the movement of the camera, constructing a film whose narrative is inseparable from its method of execution, from the camera’s motion, and from the complexity of its gaze.
The second chapter of the film begins with a 360-degree camera movement. Here, by introducing a different kind of motion, the film expands its aesthetic beyond that of the photograph. What we see during this sweeping pan is a series of seemingly incidental visual and auditory presences—people whose identities and relationships to the women are never explained. As the camera rotates, we encounter scattered sounds of animals and humans, along with noises such as doors opening and closing, the rustling of grass, and the flow of water—all variations of the sound of wind. These elements reveal fragmentary details of a barren landscape dotted with isolated houses. We then see a group of unknown men entering from the right side of the frame and exiting in the opposite direction, moving against the camera’s motion. Eventually, in the exact direction the three women were staring at in the film’s opening, we witness the execution of five men: four already dead, and an officer in the act of executing the fifth. Finally, the camera returns to its original position—back to the image of the three women, still standing motionless as they were at the beginning.
The distance between the gaze of the three women and the moment when the camera finally reveals what they were staring at could have easily been bridged in just a few seconds using a conventional shot/reverse shot technique. However, as previously noted, the film’s visual language must be understood within the framework of a politics of delay, where movement becomes a central device. In Wind, the transition from photograph to cinema is shaped by the filmmaker’s imaginative motion—an interpretive passage made possible through the film’s carefully controlled atmosphere, mise-en-scène, and audiovisual language. This approach unfolds through a dialectic of stillness and motion, of photograph and film, and their relation to the viewer. Just as the absence of the event in the photograph activates narrative potential in the viewer’s mind, the film, by resisting direct dramatic answers, opens a space for active viewer engagement and interpretation.
The film begins by setting the three women in motion, and by its conclusion, it is the photograph that reins in the film, returning it to stillness. Yet embedded in this cinematic movement—this motion that breathes life into the photograph’s frozen frame—the women, along with a sense of collective trauma, are summoned back from the depths of history and memory. In this way, the film becomes a meditation on the meaning carried by the camera’s slow, circular motion: a movement that doesn’t merely depict time but embodies it—with all its stretches, hesitations, continuities, interruptions, and delays—drifting gently and insistently, like the wind itself.
The creation of distance between the observer and the observed evokes a mode of attention centered on the act of spectatorship itself. The camera’s panning movement steers the film toward a portrayal of a passive, almost paralyzed form of watching. By rotating in the opposite direction of the women’s gaze, the camera resists providing an immediate or direct answer, generating a meaningful gap in the viewer’s perception. This camera movement—a complex blend of rightward tracking, forward motion, leftward panning, and vertical crane shots—moves counter to expectation, maintaining the off-screen space as something unknown and unresolved.
Rather than offering quick revelations, this preservation of ambiguity and the viewer’s suspension in a state of not-knowing encourages a mental wandering, inviting the audience to reflect on the conditions and realities that shape the event before rendering any judgment. Ultimately, the film is less concerned with outcome than with the process of interpretation itself—promoting a form of spectatorship rooted not in linear or simplistic conclusions, but in drift, exploration, and an attentiveness to nuance.
As the film unfolds, we come to understand that this wandering—much like the motionless gaze of the three women in Lucien Hervé’s photograph—is devoid of action. Wind expands two levels of observation within the space between photograph and cinema: the women’s observation (in the photo) and the camera’s observation (in the film). Although these two modes of seeing appear independent, they function in an overlapping and mutually reinforcing way within the film’s structure. The slow, continuous movement of the camera—added through cinema’s language to the still image—positions us psychologically as “witnesses” who, without intervening in the narrative, pass by people, objects, and landscapes like the wind; an unavoidable encounter with an event that can neither be stopped nor fully recounted. The camera looks on without emotion or reflection, seeing in our place. The viewer, like the three women, remains trapped in a state of staring and inaction. By placing us in the role of observers, the film transforms watching into a morally charged act. The camera’s circular movement formally recreates this repetitive cycle of observation. Rather than moving forward toward resolution or closure, the camera returns to its starting point—as if the tragedy before us has been repeated so many times that it has become an everyday occurrence.
In Wind, cinema is not a tool for entertainment but a form of thinking through images—an effort to touch collective memory via the moving image. The film tells its story not through editing or dialogue, but through movement within space. This camera movement becomes the most expressive cinematic language for conveying the unspeakable; a visual response to the trauma that has frozen the women in visual stillness and leaves the viewer in a state of unresolved reflection and emotional impact.
From Image to Sound
Another key element of movement and continuity in cinema is sound. The absence of dialogue in Wind is filled by the sounds of nature—especially the wind—which takes on a prominent presence and becomes, in a way, the film’s sole effective language. The natural sounds—like the wind, window hinges, roosters, and cowbells—evoke a strong connection to the raw materiality of the space.
However, the wind is more than just a natural element; it is the narrative itself. From beginning to end, the sound of the wind shapes the film’s sonic structure and replaces spoken language. The wind maintains the film’s narrative coherence, its varying intensities made visible not only through sound but also visually and even tactilely—such as through the movement of hair and clothing. It is as if, after the collapse of language and human presence, the wind remains the only voice and storyteller of this world.
Alongside the continuous diegetic sounds, the film intervenes in its narrative at two points through non-diegetic sounds. These sounds, reaching their peak during the execution scene, fade out without any linguistic intervention, ending with the hollow sound of the wind. This moment creates a rupture in the narrative flow, where emotional intensity and narrative reality converge, and the semantic implications extend beyond the limits of the image.
The film’s non-diegetic sounds encompass a range of linguistic and non-linguistic noises: unstable, fragmented, multilingual, and discordant voices lacking any linguistic or semantic cohesion. At the film’s beginning, an indistinct male voice is heard without identification or clarity. This is followed by a woman singing a song, a faint piano melody, and then a cough from another man. Individually or combined, these sounds resist any clear structural or interpretive coherence. Each has its own timing, intensity, and sonic quality, sometimes overlapping briefly, and other times fading unpredictably into silence. It is as if, within the trauma, linguistic logic has collapsed and become lost in the constant howling of the wind, leaving the wind alone to carry the narrative forward—a fragile, persistent sound that continues, like life itself.
In the end, the women who witnessed the execution return to their homes; the sounds come back—murmurs, laughter, everyday noises. These sounds do not signify recovery but rather echo the same collective helplessness and passivity in the face of trauma that is neither fully comprehensible nor forgettable. Through its silences and sounds, the film reminds us that confronting tragedy is often met with inaction, and that the repetition of life continues not out of forgetting, but perhaps out of an inability to stop it.
Epilogue
Wind is not merely a cinematic representation of a photograph but a profound meditation on the processes of seeing, witnessing, and engaging with an image of tragedy. Utilizing minimal cinematic elements—camera movement, ambient sounds, and the absence of dialogue—the film pushes the spectator’s capacity for confrontation to its limits, demonstrating how cinema can go beyond mere observation to place the audience in the position of a deeply affected and involved witness.
The film stands as a striking example of cinematic translation; through its continuous and circular motion—both in the camera’s movement and the sound of the wind—it not only extends time but immerses the viewer in a temporally grounded encounter with catastrophe. Thus, the film transcends a linear recounting of a historical event, becoming instead a lived experience in which action gives way to an awareness of time and the spectator’s perception. The viewer becomes a subject who always stands “after the event”—a silent observer permitted to witness but not to intervene. In this sense, the wind narrates not the event itself, but the confrontation with it. This subtle distinction between “event” and “encounter” redefines the boundary between cinema and photography.
This is precisely what Gilles Deleuze describes in his theory of cinema as the “time-image” or “movement-image.” Here, we encounter a form of time-image: a narrative constructed through the continuous movement of images that clearly distinguishes itself from photographic storytelling. While Hervé’s photograph captures a static moment laden with the past and death, Iványi’s film transforms that death into a visual experience extended through time—an experience that holds the viewer suspended within the heart of tragedy, in a state of helplessness and uncertainty.
فیدان در شبکههای اجتماعی