Close-Up on Abbas Kiarostami

"Cinema begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami." – Jean-Luc Godard. Close-Up is proud to present a retrospective of 18 feature and mid-length films spanning Abbas Kiarostami’s nearly five-decade career. This series includes new restorations of The Koker Trilogy, Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, and Kiarostami’s rarely screened early short films.

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The Experience
Abbas Kiarostami, 1973, 56 min

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht (21/02 only)

“Based on a story by Amir Naderi, who also cowrote the film, this slice of a fourteen-year-old boy’s life follows his efforts to fend for himself in the big city, working as a tea server and assistant in a photographer’s studio, running errands, and, briefly, exchanging glances with a pretty middle-class girl. With no music and little dialogue, and distinguished by its darkly elegant compositions, the film offers an impressionistic meditation on adolescent solitude.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

Orderly or Disorderly
Abbas Kiarostami, 1981, 17 min 

“The first shot shows students descending a staircase in calm, orderly fashion, then the second details the same action as a chaotic rush. Separated by slates and Kiarostami’s voice intoning, “Sound, camera,” subsequent sequences describe the same dichotomous behavior in a schoolyard, on a school bus, and in the haphazard traffic of Tehran. Kiarostami described this as “a truly educational film,” but it plays more like a quirky philosophic aside.” – Janus Films

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The Traveller
Abbas Kiarostami, 1974, 74 min

“Kiarostami’s first feature focuses on a boy in a provincial city so avid to get to Tehran to see a soccer match that he’ll lie to adults and cheat other kids. A quest film that’s also a study of youthful obsession, it’s filmed in edgy black and white with a quiet energy that matches its hero’s. The Traveler has an acridly ironic ending and one of the best performances by a child in Kiarostami’s early work.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

Breaktime
Abbas Kiarostami, 1972, 15 min

“Disciplined at school for breaking a window, a boy joins throngs of his schoolmates as they make a cacophonous exit into Tehran’s streets. He then briefly joins an impromptu soccer game but disrupts it by stealing the ball and running away, and ends up drifting aimlessly along a busy highway. Free of dialogue but using nonsynchronous concrete sound throughout, this moody film shows Kiarostami expanding his visual vocabulary with zooms and crane and helicopter shots.” – Janus Films

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A Wedding Suit
Abbas Kiarostami, 1976, 60 min

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht (28/02 only)

“In a trilevel shopping arcade, a teenage boy who works for a tailor is besieged by two other boys who want to borrow a new suit to wear on a social outing before it’s turned over to its owner. One of the most accomplished and intricately plotted of Kiarostami’s Kanoon films, this sharply observed drama contains suspense, satire, an undercurrent of violence, and even a magic show.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

Bread and Alley
Abbas Kiarostami, 1970, 12 min

““The mother of all my films,” according to Abbas Kiarostami, starts out as a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran alleys carrying a loaf of bread. Variations on both the boy and the old man he sees and begins to follow will factor into future Kiarostami films, as will the use of “dead time,” the journey structure, and the poetic articulation of space. The final scene, involving a dog and a door, ends things on a note of wry ambiguity.” – Janus Films

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The Report
Abbas Kiarostami, 1977, 110 min

“The rare early Kiarostami film made outside of Kanoon, and one of the most downbeat of his features, this adult drama concerns a civil servant besieged on two fronts: he’s accused of taking bribes, and his marriage is collapsing (Kiarostami has admitted this latter element was autobiographical). Full of pre-revolutionary disquiet, the film features future star Shohreh Aghdashloo as the wife.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

So Can I
Abbas Kiarostami, 1975, 4 min

“The first of Kiarostami’s films made for, rather than about, children was an experiment in combining live action and animation, done in collaboration with animator Nafiseh Riahi. As two schoolboys watch animated views of animals’ actions – kangaroos jumping, fish swimming, etc. – one boy (played by Riahi’s son Kamal) says, “I can, too,” and imitates the actions. The music is sprightly, the mood fun. The second boy is Kiarostami’s son Ahmad.” – Janus Films

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First Case, Second Case
Abbas Kiarostami, 1979, 48 min

“Made in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow, this extraordinary film serves as a Rorschach blot for people in a revolutionary mind-set. Kiarostami stages two versions of a classroom discipline situation – in one, a student tells on a troublemaker; in the other, seven students refuse to rat – and then has several adult authorities comment on the outcomes. The fascinating responses evoke conflicts between order and resistance.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

Toothache
Abbas Kiarostami, 1980, 27 min

“Though much of this film is a straightforward lecture about dental hygiene delivered by a dentist facing the camera, it still manages to be persuasively Kiarostami-esque in its description of young Mohammad-Reza’s life at home and school before he falls prey to tooth woes. (Kiarostami found the boy having a tooth removed, then filmed the earlier parts of the story later.) That some audiences find the film hilarious testifies to the humour that can accompany great discomfort.” – Janus Films

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Fellow Citizen
Abbas Kiarostami, 1983, 51 min

“Kiarostami’s fascination with both Tehrani car culture and the uses of power in postrevolutionary society combine in this documentary about a traffic officer assigned to enforce driving restrictions in central Tehran (a locale near the director’s office at Kanoon). The officer, a rock star in his own world, remains coolly authoritative as he faces a steady stream of exasperated motorists.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

Solution No. 1
Abbas Kiarostami, 1978, 12 min

“The rare Kanoon film that doesn’t involve children, this unusual road movie was made during the revolution and afforded Kiarostami what may have been a welcome escape from the capital. Shot amid spectacular mountain scenery north of Tehran, it shows a young man on a roadside with a tire, trying to get a ride. After several minutes of failure, he simply takes the tire and rolls it down the mountain, a lyrical visual journey that’s accompanied by a triumphal score.” – Janus Films

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First Graders
Abbas Kiarostami, 1984, 84 min

“Inspired by his work at Kanoon and his own sons’ schooling, the first of Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education looks in on a schoolyard of chanting, playful boys but mainly transpires in the office of a supervisor who has to deal with latecomers and discipline problems.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

Tribute to Teachers
Abbas Kiarostami, 1977, 17 min

“An assignment from the Ministry of Education, this documentary from the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty includes interviews with officials who predictably praise teaching as a sacred, noble, and honourable profession. The teachers who are also interviewed are less starry-eyed; one speaks of ungrateful students and the job’s poor pay. The contrasting views express Kiarostami’s interest in education while registering some of his reservations about how it is practiced.” – Janus Films

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Where Is the Friend’s House
Abbas Kiarostami, 1987, 83 min

“The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing trilogy of films set in the northern Iranian village of Koker takes a premise of fable-like simplicity – a boy searches for the home of his classmate whose school notebook he has accidentally taken – and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. Shot through with all the wonder, beauty, tension, and mystery one day can contain, Where Is the Friend’s House? established Kiarostami’s reputation as one cinema’s most sensitive and profound humanists.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

Two Solutions for One Problem
Abbas Kiarostami, 1975, 5 min

“This simple moral tale seems to prefigure Where Is the Friend’s House? Two young schoolboys, Dara and Nader, are friends until Dara returns Nader’s notebook torn and Nader retaliates in kind, setting off an escalating battle that leads to destruction of property and physical injury. In the second solution, Dara realizes his offense and repairs the notebook, preserving the peace and the friendship. The film is shot mostly in close-ups, with a narrator drolly chronicling the action.” – Janus Films

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Homework
Abbas Kiarostami, 1989, 77 min

“In Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first and second graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there. It emerges that many parents are illiterate. Tellingly, many kids can define punishment (the corporal variety seems common) but not encouragement.” – Janus Films

Preceded by:

The Chorus
Abbas Kiarostami, 1982, 18 min

“An old man strolls through the noisy streets of Rasht, and when his hearing aid is knocked out of his ear, the film’s sound goes off, mimicking the silence that envelops him. At home, the same thing happens when he takes the device out, and Kiarostami intercuts his silent actions with the clamour of schoolgirls who try to get his attention from outside. Another Kiarostami meditation on the contrasts of silence and sound, age and youth, solitude and solidarity.” – Janus Films

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Close-Up
Abbas Kiarostami, 1990, 98 min

“Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event – the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf – as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, Close-up has resonated with viewers around the world.” – Janus Films

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And Life Goes On
Abbas Kiarostami, 1992, 95 min

“In the aftermath of a 1990 earthquake that left 30,000 dead, Kiarostami returned to the village of Koker where his camera surveys not only the devastation but the teeming life that continues in its wake. Blending fiction and reality into a playful, poignant road movie, And Life Goes On follows a film director (played by an actor standing in for Kiarostami) who, along with his son, makes the difficult trek to the region in hopes of finding out if the young star of his movie Where is the Friend’s House? is among the survivors. There he discovers a resilient community pressing on in the face of tragedy as he’s helped along on his journey by the generosity of those he meets. Finding beauty in the bleakest of circumstances, Kiarostami crafts a quietly majestic ode to the best of the human spirit.” – Janus Films

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Through the Olive Trees
Abbas Kiarostami, 1994, 103 min

“Kiarostami takes meta-narrative gamesmanship to masterful new heights in the final instalment of his celebrated Koker trilogy. Unfolding “behind the scenes” of the shooting of the previous film in the series, And Life Goes On…, Through the Olive Trees traces the complications that arise when the romantic misfortune of one of the actors – a lovelorn young man who pines for the woman cast as his wife even though, in real life, she will have nothing to do with him – creates turmoil on set and leaves the hapless director caught in the middle. An ineffably lovely, gentle human comedy steeped in the folkways of Iranian village life, this Pirandellian pastoral peels away layer after layer of artifice as it investigates the elusive, alchemical relationship between cinema and reality.” – Janus Films

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Taste of Cherry
Abbas Kiarostami, 1997, 99 min

“The first Iranian film to win the Palme d’Or, this austere, emotionally complex drama by the great Abbas Kiarostami follows the enigmatic Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) as he drives around the hilly outskirts of Tehran looking for someone who will agree to bury him after he commits suicide, a taboo under Islam. Extended conversations with three passengers (a soldier, a seminarian, and a taxidermist) elicit different views on mortality and individual choice. Operating at once as a closely observed, realistic story and a fable populated by archetypal figures, Taste of Cherry challenges the viewer to consider what often goes unexamined in everyday life.” – Janus Films

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The Wind Will Carry Us
Abbas Kiarostami, 1999, 118 min

“A TV crew from Tehran arrives in a remote Kurdish village to film an unusual funeral ceremony but are stymied when the old woman they expect to die clings to life. A fablelike story about professional and personal frustration, this droll drama is the most tantalizingly opaque and allusive of Kiarostami’s films, containing numerous references to poetry and several key figures (including the old woman) who are never seen.” – Janus Films

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ABC Africa
Abbas Kiarostami, 2001, 84 min

“In 2000, Kiarostami travelled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS. Working outside of Iran and shooting on digital video for the first time, he returned with this disarmingly hopeful look at a country where death hovers ever-present yet life – embodied by the playful spirit of the kids who peer curiously into his camera’s searching, humane lens – flows on undiminished. Part idiosyncratic travelogue, part ode to childhood wonder, ABC Africa is quintessential Kiarostami in its movingly philosophical reflection on human resilience in the face of adversity.” – Janus Films

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Ten
Abbas Kiarostami, 2002, 94 min

“As she roams the streets of Tehran in her car, a recently divorced woman (Mania Akbari) chauffeurs a rotating cast of passengers, from her combative young son to a heartbroken wife abandoned by her husband to a defiant young sex worker going about her job. Fully embracing the minimalist freedoms of digital filmmaking by shooting entirely on two cameras fixed to the vehicle’s dashboard, Kiarostami crafts a miracle of slice-of-life docufiction that probes the experiences of women in contemporary Iran. Capturing revealing moments of everyday human interaction, Ten uses its simple premise as a vehicle for a remarkably rich, perceptive look at the tension between the strictures of a patriarchal society and the universal need for personal freedom.” – Janus Films

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Five Dedicated to Ozu
Abbas Kiarostami, 2003, 75 min

1. A piece of driftwood on the seashore, carried about by the waves.
2. People walking on the seashore. The oldest ones stop by, look at the sea, then go away.
3. Blurry shapes on a winter beach. A herd of dogs. A love story.
4. A group of loud ducks cross the image, in one direction then the other.
5. A pond, at night. Frogs improvising a concert. A storm, then the sunrise.

Preceded by:

Colours
Abbas Kiarostami, 1976, 15 min

“Ostensibly also a film for children, this picture-book essay about the range of hues that brighten our world has the air of a delightfully playful formalistic exercise. As a narrator runs though the colours one by one, Kiarostami shows us where each appears in nature and human life (which occasions some great views of pre-revolutionary consumer culture in Iran). Of course, a little boy is featured – in one memorable sequence, he fantasizes about being a race-car driver.” – Janus Films

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Shirin
Abbas Kiarostami, 2008, 92 min

“One of Kiarostami’s most daring formal experiments turns the camera on the audience. Set entirely in a movie theatre showing an adaptation of a twelfth-century poem by Nezami Ganjavi – never actually glimpsed but heard throughout – Shirin surveys in a succession of close-ups the reactions of those raptly watching the tragic love story, an audience made up of more than 110 actresses, including Juliette Binoche. The result is a masterful study of spectatorship and the affective power of cinema.” – Janus Films