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A painter and photographer, Abbas Kiarostami is a minimalist master, the finest filmmaker to emerge from the specific cultural conditions prevalent in Iran at the end of the twentieth century and arguably the most formally adventurous director of his generation.
At first blush, it's easy to underestimate his slow, subtle cinema, predicated as it is on long fixed-camera shots, minimal cutting, naturalistic mise en scene, and a syntax of repetition and elision. Influenced by both neo-realism and postmodernism, Kiarostami is an anomaly in contemporary cinema and virtually unknown to the majority of mainstream audiences, yet he is enormously respected in Europe and elsewhere (his influence on Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou and the Turk Nuri Bilge Ceylan is obvious) and he has mentored a number of Iranian filmmakers, most notably Jafar Panahi.
After working as a commercial artist in the 1960s, Kiarostami helped set up a film department at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran. He ran the department from 1969 to 1974, and it was there that he made his first short, Bread And Alley, in 1970. As with the Italian neo-realists, children figure prominently in Kiarostami's cinema, as protagonists (The Traveller, 1974, Where Is The Friend's House?, 1987), subjects (Homework, 1989, ABC Africa, 2001), and even antagonists (Ten, 2002). By focusing on children, Kiarostami not only disarms government censors, but also achieves a frank and unaffected realism. The goal, as he explains it in the manifesto film 10 On Ten (2004), is "absolute truth" (although, as he also acknowledges, this is an illusory and unobtainable quest).
Kiarostami's aesthetic goes further than the neorealist model because it doesn't simply consist of real people enacting stories in actual locations; he all but dispenses with plot to privilege "real time". That is, the audience experiences time in pace with the characters on screen (repetition and narrative ellipsis may be the correlatives of such a strategy). In 10 On Ten, he talks about the necessity of liberating the cinema from the tyranny of technology; of creation by subtraction. He uses a minimal crew and mostly eschews a score. So persuasive is the illusion of reality that often viewers erroneously assume (watching Ten, for example) that they are watching a documentary.
A number of Kiarostami's films are non-fiction (Homework, for example). The others combine documentary and dramatic fiction in varying measures, not to camouflage artifice but to explore the limitations of any truth to which filmmakers - and the rest of us - lay claim. In the non-fiction narrative feature Close-Up (1989) an Iranian who passed himself off as the famous local director Mohsen Makhmalbaf plays himself in reconstructions of his fraud and in documentary-like courtroom scenes. In the end, he even meets the real Makhmalbaf for the first time - although even this "reality" is potentially scripted. In And Life Goes On... (1991), an actor playing Kiarostami journeys to the Koker region where he made Where Is The Friend's House? after a calamitous (real) earthquake to make sure that his erstwhile collaborators have survived. Filmmakers also appear in Through The Olive Trees (1994, the third part of the so-called "Koker Trilogy", ostensibly dealing with offscreen events from And Life Goes On...) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), while Kiarostami appears on (or sometimes off) screen as himself in Homework, ABC Africa and 10 On Ten.
It may be apparent by now that Kiarostami's oeuvre is an ongoing project in which each film is a reflection on what has gone before. This is most obvious in the Koker trilogy, but also clear in the shift towards minimalism over the last decade, a paring down which culminates in the Zen landscape pieces of Five (2003). Describing Five, Kiarostami's sometime collaborator and acolyte Mania Akbari said, "Five is the look of an artist who came on a scene one day and took off his coat and threw it away. And then took off the rest of his clothes and threw them away. And then took off a leg, and threw that away too. And the other leg. And one by one, he took off everything and threw it away from the scene, until just one finger was left, and then all that was left was the scene.'
From The Rough Guide to Film: An A-Z of directors and their movies [2007 Rough Guides/Penguin]
Author: Tom Charity. Tom Charity is film critic for CNN.com and LOVEFiLM, and a programming consultant for the Vancouver International Film Festival. He writes regularly for Sight & Sound, Cinema Scope, Total Film, Uncut and several British newspapers. His books include John Cassavetes: Lifeworks (2001) and The Right Stuff (1997. He is also an annual contributor to the Time Out Film Guide.
Image: Abbas Kiarostami, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).Courtesy of Abbas Kiarostami and MK2, Paris. |
