Films by Abbas Kiarostami
Five of the Kiarostami features have shown at the Film Center before, but everything else is a Chicago premiere. In many respects the short films–many of which I first saw last August at the Locarno film festival–are the real revelations in the series. Most of these works are conceptual and experimental pieces having something to do with children, and many of them have a fascinating relationship to Lehrstücke, or “learning-play,” a form closely identified with Bertolt Brecht. This isn’t to suggest that they’re political in the sense that Brecht’s learning-plays are, that they critique either the state of Iran or the state of Islam; but they often critique the state of cinema–that is, cinema as a partially self-contained system of beliefs, practices, and power relations. In this respect, a statement by Kiarostami recently cited by critic Godfrey Cheshire seems pertinent: “We can never get close to the truth except through lying.” Clarifying how and why the cinema lies is a central part of his enterprise.
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In Two Solutions for One Problem, where, significantly, the opening credits are written on a blackboard, two little boys at school become the protagonists in an extended moral lesson. When Nadar returns Nara’s notebook with its cover torn, Nara has two options: one entails revenge (leading to escalating acts of violence), the other involves using glue (maintaining their friendship). The morality of this five-minute movie is simple, but the comedy and mise en scene are dazzling as each boy in perfect deadpan rips up something belonging to the other–a curious kind of demonstration combining the rigor of experimental filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet with the surefire physicality and methodical serial progressions of Laurel and Hardy. And later, when the behavioral choices are magically codified on the blackboard in parallel columns that contain objects as well as words, the lesson is virtually translated into rebus form.
In So Can I a comparable dialectic is set up involving the movements of animals in clips from animated cartoons and the efforts of two little boys to ape the gestures. Here again the concept is ultrasimple, but the illustration entails the creation of an abstract space that contrives to combine a classroom, animated film footage, and other settings where the imitated gestures are played out. (Alas, the payoff shot in the final gag–a cut from a live-action airplane taking off to the confounded expression of a boy unable to duplicate that maneuver–was missing from the print shown at the Film Center two weeks ago.)
Putatively a documentary, Close-Up (showing this Saturday and Sunday) is in fact a multifaceted critique of the documentary form. The real-life incident that provoked it–surprisingly similar to the real incident that inspired John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation–was the impersonation of a famous Iranian film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kiarostami’s only real peer), by an impoverished, out-of-work printer named Hossein Sabzian. Introducing himself as Makhmalbaf to a wealthy middle-aged woman on a bus, Sabzian got himself invited to her home, where he persuaded the entire Ahankhah family (mother, father, and grown son) that he planned to make a film in their house, using them as nonprofessional actors. Once his ruse was discovered the police were alerted, and they turned up with a reporter from Soroush magazine and arrested him. During his trial, Sabzian freely admitted that he undertook this fraud largely to be treated with respect, and the Ahankhah family was eventually persuaded by the judge to drop charges. (In the Manhattan incident that inspired Six Degrees of Separation a black youth persuaded a wealthy white couple that he was the son of Sidney Poitier and that his father wanted to cast them in the movie version of Cats; this youth was also arrested, but, if memory serves, the couple didn’t drop charges, and the youth certainly didn’t play himself in the play or movie.)
Close-Up is the most intellectually dense and in many ways the most subtle of the features playing in this retrospective, but I would single out Life and Nothing More… as the most beautiful, mysterious, and moving. Its overarching theme–the relations between filmmakers and ordinary people–is the same as that of Close-Up and Through the Olive Trees, Kiarostami’s most recent feature. (A just-completed feature concerning suicide is expected to premiere at the Venice film festival late this summer). Yet the role played by landscape in Life and Nothing More… and Through the Olive Trees is much more pronounced, and in both films Kiarostami proves himself a master of the “cosmic” long shot who periodically imposes physical distance as a form of philosophical detachment and humor. (Whether or not he’s been influenced by Jacques Tati in this respect, Kiarostami has been swimming in the same waters for the past quarter of a century–something that’s detectable in his earliest shorts.) Having written at length in the Reader about Life and Nothing More… in 1992 and Through the Olive Trees last year, I’ll deal with them only in passing here. But they’re as important as anything that’s happened in movies in the 90s.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Close-Up”.
