Born: 1940, Tehran
After university (where he studied fine arts/graphic arts), Kiarostami discovered interest in graphic design of which he is quoted as saying “an art that communicates its message to the general public with the minimum of means and the maximum of constraints” – hence a connection with the way he would later be comfortable making films through the constraints of censorship, seeing it as a guiding challenge to find ways around these.
He began his film career making credit titles and commercials. From 1969, he worked at the
Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults and established a film department there, directing his first film, a short called Bread and Alley, in 1970. Kiarostami's earliest films (shorts and features) were educational films for children which regularly won prizes at Iran's
Fajr Film Festival.
Some aspects of his shorts seem like experiments/tests/rehearsals for his later films. Most obviously the recurring young boy protagonist who struggles in the adult world and must display resourcefulness. But also in the schema of repetitions (e.g. in 'Two Solutions for One Problem', or in 'Orderly or Disorderly?') where even the self-reflexivity comes in with the shots of the clapperboard punctuating the different versions of events being repeated. This reminds of the multiple takes being re-done in
Through the Olive Trees for example.
The Institute supported his films up to and including And Life Goes On (1991), after which he has tended to collaborate with the French company MK2.
Style:
Kiarostami's films are elliptical and minimalist. The idea of the 'half-finished' film, inviting creative input from viewers, and the principle of uncertainty, which plays with viewers' expectations, are distinctive aspects.
He works without a script, using mostly non-professional actors (including children) and largely rural or outskirt locations; landscape is an important feature of his post-revolutionary films, as is repetition.
Kiarostami's signature shots are of zigzagging roads. These reflect broad existential statements as well as the particular predicament of his characters. For example, in Where's Is the Friend's Home?, the zigzag path - constructed specifically for the film - signifies the 'hurrying around' of modern life as well as its child protagonist's tortuous quest.
Kiarostami's later films turn increasingly self-reflexive. In these, the blend of documentary and fiction, a characteristic of all his work, is extremely complex. In the earlier works, he often appears as an interviewer; in the later films, he recedes from view, deploying a stand-in, representing a director or producer whose motives we question, filming a film-within-the-film. This self-reflexive trait has roots in
Persian storytelling traditions but resonates internationally with European modernist forms. Moreover, Kiarostami's brand of self-reflexivity is inflected by the conditions of Third World filmmaking: the films-within-the-films raise questions about the ethics of middle-class urban outsiders, like Kiarostami himself, who go to remote rural locations in order to film villagers and tribal folk. They highlight the potential for exploiting and exoticising their rural subjects, activating anxiety about replicating the Orientalist gaze.
Another important trait emerging in these films is use of the car as a kind of camera, especially in shots giving the car's point-of-view in place of the driver's point-of-view. Windscreen shots are a staple of
A Taste of Cherry. As a zone which is both public and private, the car enables Kiarostami to avoid censorship restrictions on the depiction of private space.
Reception:
Domestic:
Not all negative: "Whoever can describe a tragic event more lamentably we consider that person a more eloquent and capable orator." Golmakani then proceeded to read every technical aspect of Kiarostami's virtuosity with a view toward the highest compliment that an Iranian aesthetician can give an artist: that his art is "impossibly simple," for that is the way we usually describe the work of our great medieval poet, Sa'di (1184—1291). Golmakani is not alone in his praise for Kiarostami. Javad Tusi also has given rather positive reviews of Kiarostami's cinema, with certain reservations. Kiarostami's "realism" in particular is refreshing and healthy in Tusi's reading. He does object, though, to Kiarostami's preference for Vivaldi's music as opposed to any number of jubilant melodies in Persian classical music. Robert Safarian, Reza Dorostkar, and Majid Islami all have had positive responses to Kiarostami's vision. Gholam Heydari, in his theoretically informed book Zaviyeh-ye Did dar Cinema-ye Iran {Point of View in Iranian Cinema, 1990), has included a positive reading of Kiarostami's camera work as a good and relatively consistent example of third-person-singular narrative." [
Dabashi M&M, 290]
On the domestic-abroad dialectic: "So as you can see Kiarostami's cinema has received a far more positive reception outside his homeland—unmercifully vilified at home and yet enthusiastically glorified abroad. It is safe to say that had it not been for the accidental chance of the no man's land of film festivals and the naked eyes of a foreign audience, the culturally compromised eyes of Iranians would never have seen what Kiarostami is trying to show. Kiarostami's cinema is, in my judgment, too simple, and the Iranian perspective too conspiratorially compromised, too culturally curtailed, for a revolutionary aesthetic to register in the immediate neighborhood of its own creative vicinity. It seems to me that Kiarostami had to be celebrated abroad in order to be understood domestically at home. This is a bizarre thing to say, but I believe it to be true. A dialectic soon emerged between his foreign admirers who were trying to figure out his cinema and his native audience who were trying to see him otherwise than they had." [
Dabashi M&M, 298]
Quotes:
- "I want to create the type of cinema that shows by not showing."
- "My experience in showing this film [Close-Up] in Iran has been quite peculiar. I remember very vividly that after the film was first screened some people came up to me and said, "What was wrong with the sound in the last scene, when Makhmalbaf and Sabzian were driving on a motorcycle? Was something wrong with the sound? Could you not dub it afterward? And some were even suggesting that I intentionally screwed up that scene.... None of the Iranian viewers could follow that I had an intention other than showing the conversation between the two men. .... But viewers in Berlin all recognized that scene as an exceptionally good one, fall of innovation. The director of the academy, who is one of the great German filmmakers, told me, "I wish I could cut this section of your film and keep it for myself." It never occurred to any of the [German] viewers that that scene was accidentally screwed up, or that I had done a trick. They viewed the film as a mode of filmmaking, and they liked the film for that reason, and I think that perhaps precisely for this reason people did not like the film in Iran. At any rate, I am absolutely convinced that we are an intelligent people, and I do not think that Iranian viewers lack anything in comparison with European viewers. Actually, when I compare the reviews that Iranian critics have written on my films with those written by European critics, I come to the conclusion that the Iranian critics are very intelligent. The only distinction that exists, in my judgment, is our politics-stricken consciousness, as a result of which we confront a product maliciously. In addition, since we have not yet passed through the melodramatic period [in our filmmaking], we still look for story. Thus when we confront a film, instead of trying to find out what it wants to convey, we are more interested in what we want to understand by it, and if we come up short [in our reading] then We swiftly dismiss the film and refuse to connect with it." [From a 1992 interview with the important Iranian magazine 'Film', which was largely sympathetic to Kiarostami unlike other domestic publications such as Sumeh, and quoted in Dabashi M&M p288.]
- "If you wanted to reduce Kiarostami to a single idea, you would be not far wrong in saying that he has spent his career developing a cinematic equivalent to Iranian modernist poetry" - Godfrey Cheshire
Filmography:
- The Bread and the Alley
- Experience
- The Traveller
- ..
- The Report
- ..
- Where is the Friend's House?
- Homework
- Close Up
- Life and Nothing More...
- Through the Olive Trees
- Taste of Cherry
- The Wind Will Carry Us
- ABC Africa
- Ten
- Five (2004)
- 10 on Ten (2004)
- ...
Resources:
‘Abbas Kiarostami: A Cinema of Questions’ –
Godfrey Cheshire (Film Comment 1996)
