Abbas Kiarostami, The Legendary Director who put Iranian Movies on World Cinema Map
Kiarostami’s films were often highly inventive, bending time and space and using shifting realities to deconstruct personal relationships — relationships that themselves were often the vehicle for cannily obfuscated social- and political commentary. But despite his formal playfulness, Kiarostami’s subject was seldom Film itself. Instead, his focus was the dynamics between human beings, whether between individuals in microcosm or in more institutionalized settings, like a courtroom or film set. He somehow managed to be conceptual without being cold, empathetic without being sentimental.
When I say that spaces and places in Kiarostami’s films are both real and imagined, what I am suggesting is that there is a complex interplay in Kiarostami’s work between the representation of real spaces and places, imaginative ideas about these real spaces and places, and wholly imaginative constructions of space and place. His films continually shift between three spatial functions: 1) they serve to document culturally specific spaces and places and thereby help to put these spaces and places “on the map”; 2) they provide socio-political insights about these specific spaces and places through symbolic imagery and language; and 3) they critique regressive, exploitative spatial constructions, again through complex imagery and language. Put another way, Kiarostami’s films slip between being a catalogue of specific spaces and places, a poetic social commentary about those spaces and places, and an intervention into ongoing discourses about space and place.
Kiarostami had a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary-style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. He is also known for his use of Persian poetry in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films. Kiarostami’s films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often a mix of fictional and documentary elements. The concepts of change and continuity, in addition to the themes of life and death, play a major role in Kiarostami’s works.
Close-Up: The Hybrid Films of Abbas Kiarostami
Art and culture invite individuals to think outside the boxes that limit our imaginative lives. One can thrive on the margins and occupy the space in between conventions and forms. Active engagement with art takes us to better places and there’s no better example of this than in the new Abbas Kiarostami retrospective. The Kiarostami showcase features several titles that illuminate the fluidity of hybrid filmmaking and the wonders of innovation that arise when a filmmaker defies categories. Kiarostami’s films draw upon elements of documentary, neo-realism, and dramatic filmmaking, but the fine line between the forms is often imperceptible.
The must-see of these films is Close-Up (1990), arguably Kiarostami’s most playful and audacious experiment with form and meaning. Close-Up innovatively shows that truth can be stranger than fiction as Kiarostami takes a story that he discovered in the news and makes it into a movie.
The subject suits cinema perfectly since it considers a man named Hossain Sabzian who posed as Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and exploited the filmmaker’s image and personality to gain access to the home of the well-to-do Ahankhah family. The conceit, however, is in the film’s ingenious casting: the director hires not actors, but the subjects of the story themselves to re-enact the drama that put them in the headlines. What ensues is in many ways a dramatized documentary, or a verité-style film made entirely with reshoots.
The approach to Close-Up challenges notions of form and filmmaking, for the players, story, and, presumably, the key facts jive with the events as they happened. The film suggests that non-fiction filmmaking doesn’t need to be in the present tense to be authentic. Something like the truth makes its way to the screen in Close-Up in this ingenious experiment in reality-based filmmaking.
The hybrid films of Abbas Kiarostami reject categories and find life in the malleability of their forms and subjects. By creating a new space in which to play, they open the boundaries of cinematic freedom and draw the viewer into a conversation that lingers long after the films inevitably cut to black. Kiarostami, filming outside the box, dissolves the borders of cinema and lets them flutter in the wind.
“Kiarostami was a master of interruption and reduction in cinema,” says Iranian film critic Ehsan Khoshbakht. “He did everything with subtlety. He diverted cinema from its course more than once. From his experimental children’s films to deconstructing the meaning of documentary and fiction, to digital experimentation, every move brought him new admirers and cost him some of his old ones. Kiarostami provided a style, a film language, with a valid grammar of its own.”
