Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami
	File:Nantes-kiarostami.jpg "Kiarostami event" at The Nantes Three Continents Film Festival (2004)
Born	Abbas Kiarostami
Years active	1970 to the present

Abbas Kiarostami (Template:PerB; born 22 June, 1940, Tehran) is an internationally and critically acclaimed Iranian film director, screenwriter, and film producer.^[1]^[2]^[3] Active as a director since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over 40 films including many short films and documentaries although he is perhaps best known for his films of the Koker trilogy, filmed between 1987 and 1994, A Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).

Kiarostami has worked extensively on an array of tasks in his own films and others, including scripting, editing, art direction and film production and designing credit titles and publicity material. Apart from making films, Kiarostami is a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, graphic designer and has appeared over ten times as a film festival panelist.

Kiarostami belongs to a generation of filmmakers who created the so-called "Iranian New Wave", a movement in Persian cinema that started in the late 1960s, and included pioneering directors such as Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi; many of whom created poetic films, often with political and philosophical tones and undertones.^[4]

Early life

Kiarostami was interested in the arts from an early age. As a boy he showed a keen interest in painting, and at age eighteen won a painting competition.^[5] Kiarostami majored in painting and graphic design at Tehran University, and paid for his studies with his job as a traffic policeman. As a painter, designer, and illustrator, Kiarostami worked in advertising throughout the 1960s, making commercials and designing posters. Towards the late sixties, he began creating credit titles for films (including Gheysar by Masoud Kimiai) and illustrating children's books.^[5]^[6] Between 1962 and 1966 he shot some 150 adverts for Iranian television.

Film career

Early work

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A close-up of the boy in Kiarostami's first film The Bread and Alley (1970)

In 1969, the first year of the "Iranian New Wave" with Dariush Mehrjui's film The Cow, Kiarostami helped to set up a film making department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) in Tehran. The department's debut production was Kiarostami's first film, the twelve-minute The Bread and Alley (1970): a neo-realistic short film about an unfortunate schoolboy's confrontation with an aggressive dog. This was followed by Breaktime (1972). The department would become one of Iran’s most famous film studios, producing not only Kiarostami’s films, but acclaimed Persian films such as The Runner and Bashu, the Little Stranger.^[5]

In the 1970s, whilst Kiarostami was part of the Iranian cinematic renaissance,^[7] he was keen to pursue a career that demonstrated individualism and a peculiar style of film making. When discussing his first film, The Bread and Alley, he stated: "Bread and Alley was my first experience in cinema and I must say a very difficult one. I had to work with a very young child, a dog, and an unprofessional crew except for the cinematographer, who was nagging and complaining all the time. Well, the cinematographer, in a sense, was right because I did not follow the conventions of film making that he had become accustomed to." ^[8]

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Abbas Kiarostami and Bernardo Bertolucci on the poster of "Exhibition of the Persian Maestro's Art work" held in Rome.

Following The Experience (1973), Kiarostami released The Traveller or Mossafer (1974), Kiarostami's first feature that tells the story of a troublesome, amoral 10 year old boy Hassan Darabi, living in a small town in Iran, who wishes to go to Tehran to see the Iran national football team play an important match. To achieve that, he steals money from friends and neighbors through a series of scams. After a number of adventures, he finally reaches Tehran stadium at the time of the match, but there, in wrong-doing he meets an element of moral punishment for his crimes and comeuppance. The film addresses how driven the boy in reaching his objective, and in doing so never thinking how what he is doing will affect other people, even those that are closer to him, examining human behaviour and the balance of right and wrong. The film furthered Kiarostami's reputation of realism, diegetic simplicity, and stylistic complexity, as well as showing a fascination with physical and spiritual journeys.^[9]

In 1975, Kiarostami directed the short films So Can I and Two Solutions for One Problem. In early 1976, he released Colors, followed by the 54-minute film A Wedding Suit: a story about three teenagers coming into conflict over a suit for a wedding.^[10]^[11]

Kiarostami's first feature film was the 112-minute Report (1977). It revolved around the life of a tax collector accused of accepting bribes; suicide was among its themes. In 1979, he produced and directed First Case, Second Case.

1980s

In the early 1980s Kiarostami continued to direct several short films including Dental Hygiene (1980), Orderly or Disorderly (1981), and The Chorus (1982).

In 1983, he directed Fellow Citizen, but it was not until 1987 that Abbas began to gain recognition outside Iran with the release of Where Is the Friend's Home?.

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Where Is the Friend's Home? 1987

Where Is the Friend's Home? tells a deceptively simple account of a conscientious eight-year old schoolboy's quest to return his friend's notebook in a neighboring village, since, should his friend fail to hand it in the next day, it is likely he will get expelled. The film regarded by critics as a metaphor for the sense of civil duty of the Iranian people, as well as a film experiencing notions of loyalty and everyday heroics. The traditional beliefs of Iranian rural people were depicted in different parts of the movie. The film has been noted for its poetic use of the Iranian rural landscape, its earnest realism, important elements of Kiarostami's work. Contrary to a number of films documenting children, Kiarostami also succeeded in making a film from a child's view point, removing the condescending tone common to most films made about children.

Where Is the Friend's Home? and the following films And Life Goes On (1992) (also known as Life and Nothing More), and Through the Olive Trees (1994) are regarded by critics as the Koker trilogy because the films a are connected by the village of Koker in northern Iran. The films are based around the 1990 earthquake disaster in which 50,000 people lost there lives, and each film turn is connected through various devices that Kiarostami uses within them addressing themes of life and death, along with change and continuity. The original 1987 film and the others would go on to be become a success in France in 1990 and other countries thereafter.^[12]

However, Kiarostami has rejected claims that the three films form a trilogy, suggesting that it might be more appropriate to consider the latter two titles plus Taste of Cherry (1997) as a trilogy, given the common theme of the preciousness of life.^[13]

In 1987, Kiarostami was involved in the screenwriting of The Key, which he edited but did not direct, and released Homework in 1989.

1990s

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In 1990 Abbas directed Close-Up

In 1990 Kiarostami directed Close-Up, which tells the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. The family suspects theft as the motive for this complex charade, but the impersonator, Hossein Sabzian, argues that his motives were more complex. The film was released across Europe.^[14] The part documentary, part staged film develops to examines Sabzian's moral justification for usurping Makhmalbaf's identity questioning his ability to sense his cultural and artistic flair.^[15] ^[16] Close-Up received praise from directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nanni Moretti.^[17].

In 1992, Kiarostami directed Life, and Nothing More..., regarded by critics as the second film of the Koker trilogy. The film follows a father and his young son as they drive from Tehran to Koker in search of the two young boys who starred in the 1987 film Where is the Friend's Home?, fearing that the boys might have lost their lives in the 1990 earthquake that killed 50,000 people in northern Iran. As they travel through the devastated landscape, they meet earthquake survivors forced to carry on with their lives amidst tragedy.^[18]^[19]^[20] That year Kiarostami won a Prix Roberto Rossellini, his first professional film award of his career for his directorship of the film.

The last film of the so-called "Koker trilogy" was Through the Olive Trees (1994), a film which turns the filming of a scene from Life and Nothing More into the central drama.^[21]

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Through the Olive Trees (1994)

Critics such as Adrian Martin have identified the style of film-making pursued in the Koker trilogy as "diagrammatical", linking the zig-zagging patterns in the landscape, and the geometry of forces of life and of the world.^[22]^[23] A flashback of the zigzag path in Life and Nothing More... (1992) in turn triggers the spectator’s memory of the previous film, Where Is the Friend’s Home? back in 1987, shot before the earthquake had ever occurred in Koker. This in turn symbolically links to the post-earthquake reconstructions in Through the Olive Trees in 1994.

Kiarostami next wrote the screenplays for The Journey and The White Balloon (1995), for his former assistant Jafar Panahi.^[5] Between 1995 and 1996, he was involved in the production of Lumière and Company, a collaboration with 40 other film directors.

In 1997, Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) award at the Cannes Film Festival for Taste of Cherry, the tale of a desperate man Mr. Badiei bent on committing suicide. The film involves themes including morality, the legitimacy of the act of suicide, and the meaning of compassion.^[24]

Kiarostami next directed The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), which won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival. The film contrasted rural and urban views on the dignity of labour, addressing themes of female equality and the benefits of progress, by means of a stranger's sojourn in a remote Kurdish village.^[12] Many of the characters are heard but not seen, and there are some thirteen or fourteen characters in the film who remain invisible throughout.^[25]

2000s

In 2000, Kiarostami directed Ten, revealing a somewhat different method of film-making, and abandoning many of the conventions of scriptwriting.^[25] Kiarostami focuses on the socio-political landscape of his homeland Iran, and the images are seen through the eyes of one woman as she drives through the streets of Tehran over a period of several days. Her journey is composed of ten conversations with various passengers, including her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute and a jilted bride, as well as her imperious young son. The style of film making was praised by a number of professional film critics such as A. O. Scott in The New York Times, who wrote that Kiarostami, "in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema...He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk."^[26]

ABC Africa

In 2001, Abbas Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, travelled to Kampala, Uganda at the request of the United Nations's International Fund for Agricultural Development, to film a documentary about programs assisting Ugandan orphans. He stayed for ten days and made ABC Africa. The trip was originally intended as research in preparation for the actual filming, but Kiarostami ended up editing the entire film from the video footage obtained.^[27] Although Uganda's orphans are overwhelmingly the result of the AIDS epidemic, Geoff Andrew stated about Kiarostami's film: "Like his previous four features, this film is not about death but life-and-death: how they're linked, and what attitude we might adopt with regard to their symbiotic inevitability."^[28]

In 2003, Kiarostami directed Five, a poetic feature with no dialogue or characterisation. It consists of five long shots of nature which are single-take sequences, shot on hand-held DV camera, along the shores of the Caspian Sea. Although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is "more than just pretty pictures": "assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration."^[29] He further notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery.

In 2004, Kiarostami produced 10 on Ten, a journal documentary that shares ten lessons on movie-making while driving through the locations of his past films. The movie is shot on digital video with a stationary camera mounted inside the car, in a manner reminiscent of Taste of Cherry and Ten.

He directed The Roads of Kiarostami between 2005 and 2006, a 32 minute documentary that reflects on the power of landscape, combining austere black-and-white photographs with poetic observations, engaging music with political subject matter.

Kiarostami's most recent film was Tickets, directed in collaboration with Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi.

Cinematic style

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Palme d'Or winner "Taste of Cherry"

Individualism

Though Kiarostami has been compared to Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Tati, his films exhibit a singular style, often employing techniques of his own invention.^[5]

During the filming of The Bread and Alley, Kiarostami disagreed with his experienced cinematographer about how to film the boy and the attacking dog. Whereas the cinematographer wanted separate shots of the boy approaching, a close up of his hand as he enters the house and closes the door, followed by a shot of the dog, Kiarostami believed that if the three scenes could be captured as a whole it would have a more profound impact in creating tension over the situation. That one shot took some forty days days to complete. Kiarostami later commented that the breaking of scenes can disrupt the rhythm and content of the film's structure, preferring to let the scene flow as one. ^[8]

Unlike other directors he showed no interest in developing his directorial muscles by staging extravagant combat scenes or complicated chase scenes in large-scale productions. Instead, he attempted to administer the medium of his films to his own specifications. As he quoted in relation to his cinematographer's perspective on filming

"I did not follow the conventions of film making that he had become accustomed to".

Kiarostami appeared to have settled on his style when he made the Koker trilogy. Nevertheless, he in fact continued experimenting with new modes of filming, using different directorial methods. Much of Ten, for example, was filmed in a moving automobile in which Kiarostami was not present. He gave suggestions to the actors about what to do, and a camera placed on the dashboard then filmed them while they drove around Tehran.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).

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The dashboard camera used to film the daily routines of a women in Ten in the absence of the Kiarostami the director himself

The camera was allowed to roll, capturing the faces of the people involved during the daily routine, using a series of extreme-close shots.

According to film professors such as Jamsheed Akrami, Abbas Kiarostami unlike many other contemporary filmmakers has consistently attempted to redefine film and film medium by lowering its full definition and forcing audience's increased involvement. In recent years he has also progressively trimmed down the size of his films which Akrami believes reduces the film making experience from a collective endeavor to a purer, more basic form of artistic expression.^[30]

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Kiarostami in 10 on Ten, looking back on his filming making techniques

As Kiarostami quoted in relation to his individual style of minimalism:

My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated. This was pointed out to me by somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark. And it's something that we do - we bring out elements that we want to emphasise..^[31]

Fiction and non-fiction

Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often mix fiction and documentary elements. As Kiarostami has said "We can never get close to the truth except through lying."^[5]^[32]

Stephen Bransford contends that Kiarostami's films do not contain references to the work of other directors, but do include a myriad of references to his own work. Bransford believes his films are often fashioned into an ongoing dialectic: one film reflecting on and partially demystifying an earlier film.^[21]

Kiarostami has said of his film making: "An artist designs and creates a piece hoping to materialize some thoughts, concepts or feelings through his or her medium. The credibility of great Persian poets like Rumi and Hafiz comes from the very fact that they are composed in such a way that they are fresh and meaningful regardless of the time, place and conditions in which you read them—and this means reading them while doing divination or simply as literature."^[8]

The boundary between fiction and non-fiction is significantly reduced in Kiarostami's cinema.^[33] The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, writing about Kiarostami, and in particular Life and Nothing More..., has argued that his films are neither quite fiction nor quite documentary. Life and Nothing More..., he argues, is neither representation nor reportage, but rather "evidence":

[I]t all looks like reporting, but everything underscores (indique à l'évidence) that it is the fiction of a documentary (in fact, Kiarostami shot the film several months after the earthquake), and that it is rather a document about "fiction": not in the sense of imagining the unreal, but in the very specific and precise sense of the technique, of the art of constructing images. For the image by means of which, each time, each opens a world and precedes himself in it (s'y prédède) is not pregiven (donnée toute faite) (as are those of dreams, phantasms or bad films): it is to be invented, cut and edited. Thus it is evidence, insofar as, if one day I happen to look at my street on which I walk up and down ten times a day, I construct for an instant a new evidence of my street.^[34]

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The impersonating character from Close-Up is based on real-life events but focuses in on the emotions of the protagonist that a documentary would not

Close-Up, for example, contains scenes from the real-life trial of a man charged with fraudulently impersonating a film director. In order to make the film, however, Kiarostami subsequently coaxed the antagonists to re-stage scenes occurring between them, including the arrest scene. While such a technique clearly precludes labeling the film as a documentary, by re-staging events between the deceiver and the deceived, Kiarostami implicitly poses questions about the validity and significance of what the audience sees. Furthermore, because these are the actual participants in a drama played out in criminal court, it dawns on the audience that these re-stagings are also part of the real life of these people, especially since both the impersonator and the family he fooled were interested in working in cinema. Thus if these re-enactments constitute a kind of "evidence", this is less because they "show us" what took place to cause the arrest than because the audience is witness to a scene in which the "actors" are in fact continuing the story of their confrontation and/or reconciliation.

For Jean-Luc Nancy, this notion of cinema as "evidence," rather than as documentary or imagination, is tied to the way Kiarostami deals with life-and-death (cf. the remark by Geoff Andrew on ABC Africa, cited above, to the effect that Kiarostami's films are not about death but about life-and-death):

Existence resists the indifference of life-and-death, it lives beyond mechanical "life," it is always its own mourning, and its own joy. It becomes figure, image. It does not become alienated in images, but it is presented there: the images are the evidence of its existence, the objectivity of its assertion. This thought—which, for me, is the very thought of this film [Life and Nothing More...]—is a difficult thought, perhaps the most difficult. It's a slow thought, always under way, fraying a path so that the path itself becomes thought. It is that which frays images so that images become this thought, so that they become the evidence of this thought—and not in order to "represent" it.^[35]

In other words, wanting to do more than just represent life and death as an opposition, and instead to show the way in which each is inevitably and profoundly involved with the other, Kiarostami has devised a cinema that does more than just present the viewer with the documentable "facts," but neither is it simply a matter of artifice. Because "existence" means more than simply life, it is projective, containing an irreducibly fictive element, but in this "being more than" life, it is therefore contaminated by mortality. Nancy is giving a clue, in other words, toward the interpretation of Kiarostami's statement that lying is the only way to truth.

Themes of life and death

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Life, and Nothing More... 1991-1992

Themes of life and death and the concepts of change and continuity play a major role in the construction of Kiarostami's works. In the Koker trilogy these themes play a central role to the film and represent an ongoing life force in the face of death and destruction and the power of human resilience to overcome and defy death illustrated in the aftermath of the 1990 Tehran earthquake disaster. Kiarostami has expressed how important these themes are in his films, particularly in regards to the film Life and Nothing More..., directed soon after the Tehran disaster:

It is a very important film, Life And Nothing More, in that what was filmed was inspired by a journey I had made just three days after an earthquake. And I speak not only of the film itself but also of the experience of being in that place, where only three days before 50,000 people had died. For the survivors, it was as if they were reborn, having experienced death around them. The earthquake had happened at four or five in the morning, so in a sense everybody could have been dead and it was almost accidental that they hadn't died. So I didn't just see myself as a film director here, but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death. So this was a very big influence on me, and the issue of life and death from then on does recur in my films. ..^[36]

British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey has examined not only the dialectic between life and death in the Koker trilogy but also in Taste of Cherry.^[37]

In the latter, the suicidal protagonist Mr. Badiei reaches his grave, a black screen evoking his "symbolic death", but the finality of this ending is undermined by the video sequences that follow, which show the actor playing Mr. Badiei lighting a cigarette and the film crew resting. Again, life goes on, but in an off-screen elsewhere. ^[37]

The theme of suicide is also important in several of his earlier films and how the desire to self-harm is often counter-acted by humanity and the need to help others in the face of death. This again illustrates the on-going life-force and the power of life over death.

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The dark graveyard in The Wind Will Carry Us

However unlike the Koker films, which convey an instinctual thirst for survival, Taste of Cherry also explores the fragility of life and rhetorically focuses also on the preciousness of life . Although on the surface the film appears to privilege death following the middle-aged apparently healthy and well-off Tehrani, Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) as he cruises the city’s outskirts in his Range Rover trying to find a stranger who will help him commit suicide, the conversations with numerous people on the way who gradually convince him of the positivity of life emphasises life's preciousness even more significantly. From the young, Kurdish soldier who is spooked by the shuddering request; to a middle-aged, Afghani seminarian who’s unable to dissuade Badii with religious sympathy; to a Turkish taxidermist at a natural history museum who urges the glories of nature—the taste of cherries as the prime reason not to kill oneself evokes a high degree of emphasis on the different elements to life, in turn emphasised by these different people he encounters on his journey and thier different reasons for the reason to live and life's divinity.

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The devastation caused by the 1990 Iran earthquake

On the contrary, symbols of death proliferate throughout The Wind Will Carry Us with the scenery of graveyard, the imminence of the old woman’s passing, and the ancestors that the character of Farzad mentions in an early conversation during the film. Such devices address the viewer to consider the parameters of the afterlife, to say nothing of immaterial existence more generally. Indeed, in the film’s opening sequence, Behzad tells Farzad that like all people, cars too have ghosts developing one step further to consider the supernatural and the paranormal. This becomes the explicit theme of the work, once the viewer discovers the subject for their film—they are waiting for the old woman to give up her ghost. The viewer is asked therefore to consider what it is that constitutes the soul, and what similarly happens to the soul after death. In discussing the film, Kiarostami has stated that his function as that of one who raises questions, rather than the person who answers them. In a highly realistic sense Kiarostami affirms that these questions thst the audience must decide for themsevles in viewing his films.^[38]

Some film critics believe that the assemblage of light versus dark scenes in Kiarostami's film grammar in films such as Taste of Cherry" and Wind Will Carry Us suggests the mutual existence of life with its endless possibilities and death as a factual moment of anyone’s life in his films. When the leading actor in "Wind Will Carry Us" enters the dark he recites this poem of Forough Farrokhzad that implicitly represents his nostalgic yearning for light and life in a dark, dead moment:^[39]

If you happen to come to my house, oh dear, bring a lamp for me;
and a window
so that I can watch the crowd in the Happy street.

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The children in Kampala, Uganda in ABC Africa

Centering on Kiarostami's issues of life and death in ABC Africa in 2001 made in Kampala, Uganda during the AIDS epidemic, Geoff Andrew stated has stated that

Like his previous four features, this film is not about death but life-and-death: how they're linked, and what attitude we might adopt with regard to their symbiotic inevitability...^[40]

Visual and audio techniques

Kiarostami's style is notable for the use of long shots, such as in the closing sequences of Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees, where the audience is intentionally distanced physically from the characters in order to provoke reflection on their fate. Taste of Cherry is punctuated throughout by shots of this kind, including distant overhead shots of the suicidal Badii's car moving across the hills, usually while he's conversing with a passenger. However, the physical distanciation techniques stand in juxtaposition to the the sound of their dialogue, which always remains in the foreground. Like the coexistence of private and public space, or the frequent framing of landscapes through car windows, this fusion of distance with proximity can be seen as a way of generating suspense in the most mundane of moments.^[19]

The close up of the subject in Taste of Cherry followed by the juxtaposed long-shot (below) as the dialogue continues

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The car in the long shot

This relationship between distance and intimacy, between imagery and sound, is also present in the opening sequence to The Wind Will Carry Us. From the outset, Kiarostami formulates a dialectical relationship between image and sound. The camera moves from long shots of the Land Rover winding its way through the mountain paths to extreme close-ups of the film’s protagonist. Concurrently, Kiarostami aurally represents an expanse that extends far beyond what the viewer can see at any moment, even when the camera remains a considerable distance from the persons or things presented on-screen. Kiarostami establishes numerous spaces beyond the visual field by fragmenting his soundtrack to represent, at once, other sounds such as birds singing, dogs barking and electronic devices such as cell phones and radios blaring in the distance.

Michael J. Anderson has argued that such a thematic application of this central concept of presence without presence—through using such techniques, and by often referring to characters which the viewer does not see and somtimes not hear directly—affects the nature and concept of space in the geographical framework in which the world is portrayed. Kiarostami's use of sound and imagery conveys a world beyond what is directly visible and/or audible, which Anderson's belives emphasises the interconnectedness and shrinking of time and space in the modern world of telecommunications.^[38]

Other commentators such as film critic Ben Zipper beleives that Kiarostami’s work as a landscape artist is evident in his compositional distant shots of the dry hills throughout a number of his films directly impacting on his construction on the rural landscapes within his films. He believes that Kiarostami’s use of rural locations and remote settings is reminiscent of Sepehri’s attention to landscape as represented in his poems such as "Golestaneh," in which the poet treats the rural environment realistically and imbues it with a poetic aura.^[39]

Poetry and imagery

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, of the University of Maryland, argues that one aspect of Kiarostami's cinematic style is that he is able to capture essences of Persian poetry and create poetic imagery within the landscape of his films. In several of Kiarostami's pictures such as Where's the Friend's Home and The Wind Will Carry Us, classical Persian poetry is actually directly quoted in the film, highlighting the artistic link and intimate connection between them. This in turn reflects on the connection between the past and present, between continuity and change. ^[41]

For instance in 2003, Kiarostami directed Five, a poetic feature which contained no dialogue or characterisation whatsoever. The consists of five long shots of the natural landscape which are single-take sequences along the shores of the Caspian Sea. However although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is "more than just pretty pictures": "assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration."^[42]

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The natural landscape of the ducks in relation to the open landscape of the Caspian Sea

He further notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery as every day moments are captured. A piece of driftwood is tossed and broken by the waves; people stroll along the promenade; a group of dogs gather by the water's edge whilst ducks strut across the frame from one side to the other. A pool of water is shot at night with the sounds of a storm , and frogs croaking breaking the stillness in natural contrast.

An aspect of Abbas Kiarostami's artistry that eludes those unfamiliar with Persian poetry and that has, therefore, remained inaccessible to many among his audiences has to do with the way he turns poetic images into cinematic ones. This is most obvious in those Kiarostami films that recall specific texts of Persian poetry more or less explicitly: Where's the Friend's Home and The Wind will Carry Us. The characters recite poems mainly from ancient Persian poet Khayyam or modern Persian poets Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad. One of the most poetic moments in "Wind Will Carry Us" is a long shot of a wheat field with rippling golden crops through which the doctor, accompanied by the filmmaker, is riding his scooter in a twisting road. In response to his comment that the other world is a better place than this one, the doctor recites this poem of Khayyam:^[39]

The poetry of Khayyam, 12th century Persian poet and philosopher

They promise of houries in heaven
But I would say wine is better
Take the present to the promises
A drum sounds melodious from apart

However, the esthetic involved with the poetry goes much farther back in time and is used much more subtly than these examples suggest. Beyond issues of adaptation of text to film, Kiarostami often begins with an insistent will to give visual embodiment to certain specific image-making techniques in Persian poetry, both classical and contemporary, and often ends up enunciating a larger philosophical position, namely the ontological oneness of poetry and film. ^[43]

In "Adaption, Fidelity, and Transformation: Kiarostami and the Modernist Poetry of Iran", Sima Daad from Department of Comparative Literature at University of Washington, argues that the creative merit of Kiarostami's adaptation of Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad's poems extends the ___domain of textual transformation. Adaptation is defined as the transformation of a prior to a new text. However Kiarostami's adaptation arrives at theoretical realm of adaptation by expanding its limit from inter-textual potential to trans-generic potential. ^[44]

Spirituality

Kiarostami’s "complex" sound-images and philosophical approach have caused frequent comparisons with "mystical" filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson. Irrespective of substantial cultural differences, a lot of western writing on Kiarostami seems to position him as the Iranian equivalent to such directors by virtue of a supposedly universal austere, "spiritual" poetics and moral commitment.^[45] Some draw parallels between certain imagery in Kiarostami's films with that of Sufi concepts.^[46]

Kiarostami's films often reflect on immaterial concepts as the soul and an afterlife. However at times, the very concept of the spiritual seems to be contradicted by the medium itself, given that it has no inherent means to confer the metaphysical. Some film theorists have argued that The Wind Will Carry Us provides a template by which a filmmaker can communicate metaphysical reality. The limits of the frame, the material representation of a space in dialogue with another that is not represented, physically become metaphors for the relationship between this world and those which may exist apart from it. By limiting the space of the mise en scène, Kiarostami expands the space of the art. ^[38]

Asked in a 2000 Film Comment interview if there are any other directors who might be working on a "similar wavelength", Kiarostami responded: "Hou Hsiao-hsien is one. Tarkovsky’s works separate me completely from physical life, and are the most spiritual films I have seenwhatFellini did in parts of his movies, bringing dream life into film, he does as well. Theo Angelopoulos’ movies also find this type of spirituality at certain moments. In general, I think movies and art should take us away from daily life, should take us to another state, even though daily life is where this flight is launched from."^[38]^[47]

There are also many controversies here. While vast majority of English-language writers such as David Sterritt as well as some others like Spanish film professor Alberto Elena interpret these films as spiritual films, some critics like David Walsh and Hamish Ford don't take such interpretations.^[45]^[46]^[13]

Poetry and photography

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Kiarostami directing Five in 2004

Abbas Kiarostami, along with Ridley Scott, Jean Cocteau, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Derek Jarman, and Gulzar, is part of a tradition of filmmakers whose artistic expressions are not restricted to one medium, but who show the ability to use other forms such as poetry, set designs, painting, or photography to relate their interpretation of the world we live in and to illustrate their understanding of our preoccupations and identities.^[48]

Kiarostami is a noted photographer and poet. A bilingual collection of more than 200 of his poems "Walking with the Wind" was published by Harvard University Press. His photographic work includes Untitled Photographs, a collection of over thirty photographs, essentially of snow landscapes, taken in his hometown Tehran, between 1978 and 2003). He has also published a collection of his poems in 1999.^[49]^[5]

Riccardo Zipoli, from the Ca' Foscari di Venezia University in Venice has examined some aspects of the relations and interconnections between Kiarostami's poems and his films. In the first of three parts some introductory remarks are made on the importance and function of the image in Kiarostami's artistic activities. This initially involves an analysis of the way the images are described and organized in the poems of Hamrah ba bad. On the basis of this analysis, the similarities between the poems and the films are then explored in terms of their respective visual and sound aspects. The second part of the paper is devoted to a description of the 'semantic' analogies between the poems in Hamrah ba bad and the films of Kiarostami, especially with regard to the main characters (people, animals, plants, etc.), geographical and temporal contexts (the landscapes with their villages and roads, the sky with the sun and the moon, the night, etc.), and themes (loneliness, solidarity, incommunicability, etc.). The final part of the paper focuses on a specific theme characterizing both the poems and the films: the uncertainty of reality (with its ambiguities, doubts, duplicities, expectations, contrasts, misunderstandings, and so on). The specific handling of this theme in the poems in Hamrah ba bad is analysed, also by giving examples and commenting them: the results of the analysis reveal how Kiarostami's treatment of this theme is similar in his poems and films.

Kiarostami's poetry is reminiscent of the later nature poems of the Persian painter-poet, Sohrab Sepehri. On the other hand, the succinct allusion to philosophical truths without the need for deliberation, the non-judgemental tone of the poetic voice, and the structure of the poem—absence of personal pronouns, adverbs or over reliance on adjectives—as well as the lines containing a kigo (a season word) gives much of this poetry a Haikuesque characteristic. ^[48]

Reception and criticism

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Book cover

Kiarostami has received worldwide acclaim for his work from both audiences and critics, and, in 1999, he was unequivocally voted the most important film director of the 1990s by two international critics polls.^[50] Four of his films placed in the top six of Cinematheque Ontario's Best of the '90s poll.^[51] He has gained recognition from film theorists, critics, as well as peers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Nanni Moretti (who made a short film about opening one of Kiarostami's films in his theater in Rome), Chris Marker, Ray Carney, and Akira Kurosawa, who said of Kiarostami's films: "Words cannot describe my feelings about them ... When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami’s films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place."^[5] ^[52] Critically-acclaimed directors such as Martin Scorsese have commented that "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." ^[53] In 2006, Guardian's panel of critics ranked Kiarostami as the best non-American film director.^[54]

Nevertheless, critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum have argued that: "There's no getting around the fact that the movies of Abbas Kiarostami divide audiences—in this country, in his native Iran, and everywhere else they're shown." ^[19]

Rosenbaum has argued that disagreements and controversy over Kiarostami's pictures have arisen from his style of film making because what in Hollywood would count as essential narrative information is frequently missing from Kiarostami's films. Camera placement, likewise, often defies standard audience expectations. In the closing sequences of Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees, the audience is forced to imagine missing scenes. In Homework and Close-Up, parts of the sound track have been masked, or drop in and out.

Whilst Kiarostami has had significant acclaim in Europe over several of his films, the Iranian government has refused to permit the showing of his films in his native Iran. As Abbas had stated in response to the situation, "The government has decided not to show any of my films for the past 10 years," he says. "I think they don't understand my films and so prevent them being shown just in case there is a message they don't want to get out" ^[53] However in the United States too, Kiarostami has faced opposition. In 2002, he was refused a visa to attend the New York Film Festival in the wake of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Centre attacks.^[55]^[56] Festival director Richard Pena, who had invited him, said: "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in my country today that no one seems to realise or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world".^[53] Film director Aki Kaurismaki boycotted the festival in protest.^[57] Kiarostami had been invited by the New York International Film Festival, as well as Ohio University and Harvard University.^[58]

In 2005, London Film School organized a festival of the Iranian artist’s work, named "Abbas Kiarostami: Visions of the Artist" as well as a workshop. Ben Gibson, Director of the London Film School said "Very few people have the creative and intellectual clarity to invent cinema from its most basic elements, from the ground up. We are very lucky to have the chance to see a master like Kiarostami thinking on his feet."^[59]

Honours and awards

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Kiarostami accepting an award from Martin Scorcese

Prix Roberto Rossellini (1992)
Prix Cine Decouvertes (1992)
François Truffaut Award (1993)
Pier Paolo Pasolini Award (1995)
Federico Fellini Gold Medal, UNESCO (1997)
Palme d'Or, Cannes Festival (1997)
Honorary Golden Alexander Prize, Greece (1999)
Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival (1999)
Akira Kurosawa Award (2000)
Honorary doctorate, Ecole Normale Supérieure (2003)
Konrad Wolf Prize (2003)
President of the Jury for Caméra d'Or Award, Cannes Festival (2005)
Fellowship of the British Film Institute (2005)
Gold Leopard of Honour, Locarno film festival (2005)
Prix Henri Langlois Prize (2006)

Kiarostami and digital micro cinema

At the turn of 21st century Kiarostami decided to change from 35 mm film production to digital video. The first film in which he utilised this technology was ABC Africa, which was compiled from footage shot with two small digital video cameras, material originally gathered for the purposes of research and scouting.^[60] Refering to digital cinema Kiarostami said: "Digital video is within the reach of anybody, like a ballpoint pen. I'd even dare to predict that within the next decade, we'll see a burst of interest in film-making as a consequence of the impact of video".^[61]

Abbas Kiarostami's film Ten (2002), was an experiment that used digital cameras to virtually eliminate the director. Kiarostami fastened cameras to the dashboard of a car, and then allowed his actors to act. There was no film crew in the car, and no director. There is no camera movement, other than the movement of the car which carries the camera. There is minimal cutting and editing.^[62] This new direction is towards a "Digital-Micro-Cinema", defined as a micro-budget filmmaking practice allied with a digital production basis.^[63]

Kiarostami stated about the documentary ABC Africa that "directing was spontaneously and unconsciously eliminated, by which I mean artificial and conventional directing."^[62]

Modularity, Repetition and Variation in "Ten (2000)"

According to filmmaker Matthew Clayfield, Kiarostami's work with digital video may be more valuable to cinema than it is to post-cinema, but it also proves that virtually anyone with a camera can contribute to the art form in ways that were previously impossible.^[64]

However, in 2005, Kiarostami directed a workshop on digital film-making in London Film School, in which he expressed reservations about digital cinema. "My film 10 is a couple of years old now," explains Kiarostami to film students, "and today I'm not so fascinated by digital technology. [...] recently it has become clear to me just how few people actually know how to use it properly."^[65]

He also stated: "I have somewhat lost my enthusiasm [for digital video] in the last four or five years. Mainly because film students using digital video these days have not really produced anything which is more than superficial or simplistic; so I have my doubts. Despite the great advantages of digital video and the great ease of using the medium, still those who use it have first to understand the sensitivities of how to best use the medium."^[66]

Film festival work

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Kiarostami was a member of the jury at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and in 2005 president of the Camera d'or Jury

Kiarostami was a member of the jury at numerous festivals, most notably the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, 2002 and 2005. He was also the president of the Camera d'or Jury in Cannes Film Festival 2005.

Some representatives:^[67]^[68]

Venice in 1985
Locarno in 1990
Cannes in 1993
San Sebastian in 1996.
Cannes in 2002
São Paulo International Film Festival (2004)
Cannes in 2005 (president)

Personal life

Abbas was married to Parvin Amir-Gholi between 1969 and 1982 when they filed for divorce. Their marriage bore two sons; son Ahmad was born in 1971 and son Bahman was born in 1978. Bahman Kiarostami has become a director and cinematographer in his own right and directed Journey to the Land of the Traveller in 1993 at the age of fifteen. In 2000 San Francisco Film Festival award ceremony, Kiarostami surprised everyone by giving away his "Akira Kurosawa prize" to veteran Iranian actor Behrooz Vossoughi for his many years of contribution to Iranian Cinema.^[69]^[70]

Filmography

The Bread and Alley 1970