With a machine able to POST it was time to install an operating system. There is not really much of a debate about which one to pick.
I made a mistake when I decided to get the software in the original boxes. The version of Windows 98 was still sealed. And I could not get myself to crack it open. So I did the only logical thing. I bought it again in the OEM version.
Sadly no bootable CD but it came with a boot floppy that automatically configured the CD drive. The installation was as smooth as I remembered it.
I was always amazed by the quality of Microsoft stuff from that era. Back then, you could take the HDD out of an old machine, insert it in a completely different PC, and the thing would boot all the way to a 640x480 desktop. All you had to do was install a few drivers.
Windows 98 came with support for the Matrox Mystique out-of-the-box. I only had to use the drivers that came with the SoundBlaster Live and network card to get them working.
The next thing I wanted to be able to do was transferring files from/to the Quake PC. All I had to do was to enable File Sharing in Windows 98 and check the SMB 1.0 option in Windows 11 Features list.
Once again, I tip my hat to Microsoft for its remarkable focus on backward compatibility. That being said, transfer speed was slower than I anticipated. So I only transferred a single file, ftpserver3pro.zip for Quick ‘n Easy FTP Server Pro. It is a marvel of a stand-alone FTP server with blazing fast transfer speed.
The only weird thing about it is that it is skinned for Windows XP so you get a little bit of a visual mismatch. Overall it is well worth it given how useful it is.
If you don't have a Windows machine available, you can also just run an FTP server and use Internet Explorer to download Quick ‘n Easy FTP Server Pro. Modern browsers have dropped support for FTP but IE4 will have it forever!
The latest version of winrar supporting Windows 98 is wrar311.exe. It allows to decompress anything that was ever compressed (except 7z :/). I also followed the example of LGR[2] and register my version after all these years of free-loading.
The film’s plot is elegantly simple on the surface, yet dizzying in its implications. A film crew, led by a director (played by professional actor Mohamad Ali Keshavarz), arrives in the earthquake-devastated town to shoot a scene for And Life Goes On . The scene involves a young, newly married couple moving into a damaged house. The husband is Hossein (Hossein Rezai playing himself), a stonemason who has lost everything in the quake. The wife is Tahereh (Tahereh Ladania), a shy, educated young woman from a more respectable family.
We cannot hear them. The distance is too great. We only see Hossein’s gesticulating desperation and Tahereh’s steady, walking refusal. The soundtrack is filled only with the chirping of birds and the wind—the sounds of the world continuing, indifferent to the heartbreak below.
Kiarostami teaches us that the truth is not found in what the characters say, but in what they do when they think no one is looking—or rather, when they know everyone is looking. Through the olive trees, we do not see a resolution. We see a possibility. And in the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, a possibility is infinitely more powerful than a certainty.
Through the Olive Trees: Abbas Kiarostami’s Masterpiece of Reality and Illusion Through the olive trees- Abbas Kiarostami
While Through the Olive Trees ostensibly follows a simple romantic pursuit, its true depth lies in its , which deconstructs the filmmaking process to argue that life’s authentic "truth" exists in the unscripted spaces between cinematic frames. 2. Key Themes to Explore
Over time, the film's reputation has only grown. It is now regarded as a cornerstone of postmodern cinema, a precursor to the works of directors as diverse as Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, and Jia Zhangke. Its influence can be seen in the meta‑cinematic experiments of the Iranian New Wave—particularly in the work of Jafar Panahi, Kiarostami's protégé, whose This Is Not a Film and Taxi push the boundaries of documentary and fiction even further.
To fully appreciate Through the Olive Trees , one must understand its place within Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy, named after the rural northern Iranian village where the films are set. The film’s plot is elegantly simple on the
On its surface, the plot is deceptively slight. In the earthquake-ravaged landscape of Northern Iran, a film crew (the same one from And Life Goes On... ) is shooting a scene. A young, poor bricklayer named Hossein is cast opposite a young, literate woman named Tahereh. The problem? Hossein is desperately in love with Tahereh in real life, while she refuses to even acknowledge his existence, believing him to be beneath her social standing. Between takes, Hossein follows her, pleading his case in a relentless, circular, almost comical monologue.
In the pantheon of world cinema, few filmmakers have blurred the line between documentary and fiction with the philosophical rigor of Abbas Kiarostami. As the leading light of the Iranian New Wave, Kiarostami constructed films that were not merely stories but meditations on the very nature of storytelling. While his 1997 masterpiece Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or, it is the final film of his informal “Koker Trilogy”— Through the Olive Trees (1994)—that serves as the most breathtaking and vertiginous essay on the relationship between art, reality, and obsession.
: A "behind-the-scenes" look at the production of And Life Goes On , specifically expanding a brief four-minute scene involving a young couple. Plot and Thematic Core: Love Amidst the Rubble The husband is Hossein (Hossein Rezai playing himself),
In Through the Olive Trees , the "good piece" is the realization that the olive trees do not care about our romances, yet they provide the stage upon which we play out our desperate, beautiful need for connection. The film teaches us that sometimes the most powerful dialogue is silence, and the most perfect ending is the one that continues in the audience's heart long after the screen has gone dark.
A semi-fictionalized documentary road movie. A director travels to Koker after the 1990 earthquake to find out if the two young actors from the first film survived.