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1. Abbas Kiarostami: The Mirror of Possible Worlds [Film West 32
1998]
When European cinephiles first watched Kiarostami’s films they saw
Italian neo-realism. They saw long takes, a focus on the details of
everyday life, powerful emotions, fictional works that looked like
documentaries. Of the latter they weren’t quite sure. Was it the
reverse? Fiction or fact, Kiarostami seemed to make nonsense of the
distinction. Perhaps it was this very indeterminability that threw some
critics, leading them to dismiss his work as simplistically humanistic,
a-political, moralistic or even didactic. These are charges that
Kiarostami still needs to be defended from, as he does from many of
his supporters who praise his love of human foibles and strong moral
values.
De Sica does seem an obvious model for the early work, in particular
The Traveller (1974) in which a soccer loving boy travels alone to
Tehran to see the national side play but falls asleep just before the
match begins. In interviews Kiarostami has admitted that neo-realism
had a deep impact on him as a young man. Kiarostami is at the best of
times a peculiar and fascinating interviewee, using his considerable
eloquence and charm to evade seemingly straight-forward questions
that somehow seem to disconcert him. In one interview he states that
he has barely seen 50 films in his lifetime, that he has never wanted to
see any film more than once and admits to finding the films of
Bresson and Dreyer unwatchable. In all, he says, there are hardly 20
sequences in all of cinema which matter to him. When he does cite
influences they are usually Iranian, such as Sohrab Shahid Sales’ film
A Simple Event, the films of Kimiavi or Mehrjui’s The Postman.
Recent and classical Farsi poets are often more likely to be referred to
than film-makers. In turn, one Iranian critic has suggested
“Kiarostami is similar to Mowlana, the 13th century mystic poet who
made the complexity of philosophy easily comprehensible and who
showed us in a simple manner what life is.” Yet, European critics
continue to see his debt to the Italians as the predominant one. “C’est
Rossellini” exclaimed Serge Daney for whom the issue was: “By
what strange alchemy an Iranian working alone can rediscover and
advance Rossellini?” Jean-Claude Biette agrees that The Traveller
bears the imprint of De Sica: “Kiarostami hadn’t yet found what he
will discover in Close-Up and the later films — the regulative
principle of emotion, namely, the organic law that will enable him to

2. choose the mechanism best suited to the most intense expression of
his sympathy for the suffering of other beings.” For Biette, with
Close-Up Kiarostami is already out of neo-realism and closer to late
Rosselini and the great television works, “He takes the best qualities
of TV, the techniques of reconstruction, the mixture of the true and
the false, the faith in documentary, eradicates all voyeurism and
absolutism from them and submits them to the spacious rhythm of
lived time — the only time available to both filmed and spectators
attune to the intransitive and soothing tempo of their memories.”
Kiarostami has spoken wonderfully well of his interest in and use of
distantiation effects and his dislike for simple realism.” I seek simple
reality but hidden behind apparent reality ... we should remind the
audience as much as possible that we are reconstructing reality.”
Someone once described late Rossellini as “patently artificial and
startlingly real” and these words could equally well be ascribed to to
Kiarostami’s recent films. These works demonstrate the falseness of
the opposition between cinéma vérité and fabricated cinema.
Kiarostami’s habit of working without a script, of using non-
professional actors and the way in which the seemingly trivial events
of everyday life assume global significance in his films are the
elements retained from neo-realism, but the essence of his oeuvre lies
elsewhere.
Kiarostami’s method of working with actors, in particular children,
has received the utmost accolades from his peers, including Akira
Kurosawa who has moreover gone on record to declare the Iranian the
finest living film-maker (this from a man who in his long lifetime has
only ever commended Tarkovsky, Satyajit Ray and Cassavettes). A
few years ago ‘Cahiers due Cinéma’ published an account of a
meeting between Kiarostami and Kurosawa, the pretender and the
master, which is a model of its kind, full of fascinating verbal
exchanges and shared experiences most notably regarding the
direction of actors. Even Jean-Luc Godard has felt compelled to
honour Kiarostami and his workng methods. In a list of his ‘life’s
disappointments’ he included failure “to force the Oscar people to
reward Kiarostami instead of Kieslowski.”
The following lengthy passage is worth quoting in full as it gives a
good indication of Kiarostami’s approach to working with actors: “If
you want to work with non-professionals you have to be clear - never
give them a sentence to utter in front of the camera. Nothing will
happen. You must make them believe in the dialogue enough so that

3. over time they come to believe that the words are their own. It can
take weeks, months to really communicate with them. I was in contact
with Hosein Rezai (Through the Olive Trees) for a year and met him
once a week during this period. It works like hair transplanting. You
must implant one or two locks at a time. During one encounter I
suddenly pitched to him the phrase ‘Those who have money and those
who have not’. Next time, when we met up with my cameraman I said
to Hosein ‘Repeat what you said to me about the haves and the have
nots.’ Hosein considers for a moment whether it was he or I who said
it before duly repeating it. When he gets it wrong I correct him adding
another sentence pretending that he had said that too. I build it up
over the months and little by little Hosein believes that he is the
source of his words, they become fixed in his memory. During films
he repeats them in a natural manner to the camera. He has come to
believe that the dialogue was his because he has related it to his own
life.” But even Kiarostami’s working methods are developing all the
time. For Through the Olive Trees he chose a professional actor to
play the part of the director. For his latest film The Taste of Cherries
(the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes) he for the first time shot a test
version on video and this is a procedure he is set to repeat for his next
film.
The comparisons with Rossellini do help in the task of pinpointing
Kiarostami’s originality and the unique experience of watching his
films. Whereas Rossellini’s characters continue in many respects to
follow the behavioural and psychological patterns of the classical
action film in that they reflect on their surroundings and the situation
they find themselves in, and tend to have a consciousness change or
revelation of some sort, in Kiarostami’s later films (in particular Close
Up and Through the Olive Trees) the character is in the midst of a
kind of hall of mirrors, a closed world wherein he indulges in some
bizarre repetitious pursuit that seems destined to destroy him and
where (as Laurent Roth has noted in the aforementioned ‘Cahiers du
Cinéma dossier) the sparkling allure of his surroundings continues to
feed this desire. Watching, in particular, Through the Olive Trees one
can often feel that Kiarostami is closer to some of the more
‘postmodern’ works of Von Trier or Ruiz than to any of the various
schools of realism.
Strangely enough, Hitchcock would seem to be a vital reference point
in this respect. Roth says “As with Hitchcock, every film of
Kiarostami’s functions like a kind of trap from which an innocent

4. character must escape. Being both victim and author of this snare, he
is always alone. The
framing, the mise-en-scene, the intervention of cinema itself in the
course of events affirms more and more the specular contract that the
character enters into with the world and with his own desire.’ The
character is always transfixed by or pursuing someone or something
be it his friend’s house (Where is my Friend’s House? [1987]),
earthquake survivors (And Life Goes On ...[1991]), the great Iranian
film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Close Up), his future wife
(Through the Olive Trees) or someone to help him commit suicide
(The Taste of Cherries). In Close Up and Through the Olive Trees
there is a film-maker close behind the leading character acting as a
kind of perverse double. This plot level drag-hunt is often reflected
within the mise-en-scene of the film, and each of the films mentioned
contains scenes in which a character is spellbound for a lengthy
period by something still or moving in his immediate milieu, for
example, the aerosol interminably rolling down the hill in Close Up,
the gas bottle in And Life Goes On ... and the side-view mirror in
Through the Olive Trees. That Kiarostami’s films came to have an
increasingly complex mise-en-abyme structure culminating in the
dizzying film within a film within a film effect of Through the Olive
Trees is a direct result of these concerns.
Close-Up is a pivotal work, ostensibly a reconstruction of a case
involving an imposter who passes himself off as filmmaker Mohsen
Makhmalbaf but featuring all of the real actors in the drama and
footage from the eventual trial. When Jonathan Romney asked if it is
fake documentary or fake fiction, he usefully raises the issue of
Kiarostami's films' relationship to truth and falsity. His neo-realist
heritage may allow him to use the camera to uncover the truth of the
world around him, but his penchant for formal mise-en-abyme and
trompe l'oeil effects undercuts this search for the 'real' and reveals the
true power of his cinema to be the laying bare of a certain falseness in
the very thread of things. And, paradoxically, in this universe, a
character's uniqueness is an effect of his multiple reflections, the
singular point of view that he maintains (or is) in the hall of mirrors in
which he stands. This leads to the disconcerting strangeness one feels
when viewing a Kiarostami film even when it is at its most lyrical. It
is as if the narrative unfolding before you was simultaneously doubled
by a possible narrative.

5. Therefore Hossein in Close-Up can be both himself and Makhmalbaf,
Hossein in Through the Olive Trees can both persuade and fail to
persuade Tahereh to marry him. Kiarostami has spoken of his taste for
this kind of inclusive disjunction in his hilarious account of a Taazich
play he saw performed in which traditional Iranian folk-theatre
produces distantiation effects that outdo Brecht: "for example, the lion
which was played by a very old man wearing a lion skin became
tired-and went to lie down in the shade of a boulder. He began to
smoke a cigarette. A smoking lion. I didn't see anyone laugh at this.
He could be the lion and not be the lion."
All of these factors contribute to Kiarostami’s films often seeming to
be deceptively simple when in fact they are every bit as complex as
the most ostentatiously postmodern film. This is also why they are not
humanist films in the traditional impoverished sense of the word ie
involving audience identification with characters or situations which
give expression to the immutable values of mankind. There are no a
priori evaluating points-of-view in these films since the point-of-view
is always paradoxical and arises only in the course of the film and
from its mirror-play. Judging with eternal values also means using
sight to interpret and evaluate. Kiarostami is closer to the classical
notion of the seer, the visionary who never judges but grasps the
essence of what happens in all its paradoxical fullness. He once
wrote: “if you look at things that are seemingly without value in a
poetic manner, they will take on the value of a poem. You will
discover their values and you will show to others that all the things in
the world can be seen poetically”. There are some very interesting
accounts in print of Kiarostami’s particular propensity to gaze at the
world. In a text entitled The Traveller he tells of spending four hours
in an airport passenger lounge simply observing the Farsi poet Mehdi
Akhavan Salesse. A similar story is told of his time spent gazing at
Kurosawa from a few seats behind for the duration of the Japanese
director’s film Madadayo. Kiarostami has also said: “The cinema and
all the arts ought to be able to destroy the mind of their audience in
order to reject the old values and make it susceptible to new values.”
This very Nietzschean declaration might surprise many of the more
humanist fans of his work but watching his films with these words in
mind certainly enriches their viewing.
For all the charm and lyricism of his films there is much irony in

6. Kiarostami’s work. Some critics have even written of the cruelty to
which he submits his characters. Alain Bergala has produced a fine
piece about those moments in Kiarostami when, following a series of
close-up and medium close-up shots, the camera suddenly pulls back
and observes the character from afar. Bergala interprets this gesture as
displaying the ambivalent attitude of the director towards his
character. There is simultaneously “detachment (you must life for a
time in the world alone without me); possessiveness (I won’t totally
lose you from view; in the next shot you will again be under the
control of my gaze, your freedom totally depends on me); playfulness
(I put to the test the ties that bind me to you which can be severed if
you disappear into the world); and compassion (you touch me all the
more at this distance as you are in danger of dissolving into the image
of the world and only I can still be moved by that which defines your
singularity in the species and which is invisible to the naked eye at
such a distance).” Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray, Bergman and
Godard have all used this shot and Bergala believes we can learn
much from weighing up the varying measures of detachment-
possessiveness-playfulness-compassion deployed by the different
auteurs. Kiarostami’s is a strange mix of cruelty and benevolence as if
he is telling his character: “Let’s measure your distress in the world
where you would be so small and abandoned without me to gaze at
you, frame you, watch over you.” He cites the final, now famous,
scene of Through the Olive Trees as a prime example of this where
the camera takes the viewpoint of the director within the film as he
gazes from a hilltop as Hassein virtually disappears from view before
turning and heading back towards him. Kiarostami’s own explanation
for this shot preference may be contained in his justification for his
frequent use of the sequence shot and can also serve as a final riposte
to those who accuse him of cheap moralizing: “Sometimes I prefer the
sequence shot to the close-up because the spectator is then in direct
contact with the totality of the subject. With close-ups we eliminate
all the elements of reality that must be present in order to involve the
spectator in the situation and enable him to judge. A just approach
will allow the spectator to choose what moves him in a given scene.
He can choose his own close-up according to the way he feels.”
Kiarostami’s cinema is an example of an ethics of choice and not at
all of a morality of imposition. He knows what all great filmmakers
before him have known, that to choose a single shot out of all the
possibilities is not only an aesthetic but a ethical choice.