Biography
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was born on June 22, 1940 in Tehran. Interested in art from an early age, he won a painting competition at 18 and left his home to study at Tehran University's Faculty of Fine Arts. After completing his studies, he began work as a designer and illustrator. Throughout the 1960's, Kiarostami worked in advertising, making commercials, designing posters, creating credit titles for films, and illustrating children's books. He also had a stint as a traffic police officer.
Kiarostami's introduction to film came in 1969 when he helped to create the filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. The first film produced by the department, coincidentally, was Kiarostami's own debut work, the short film Bread and Alley (1970). The film department would eventually become the most famous film studio in Iran, producing many other Iranian films such as Bahram Beizai's Bahsu, the Little Stranger (1989), as well as all of Kiarostami's films.
In the years since Bread and Alley, Kiarostami has gone on to make over 20 films, covering different genres that include fiction, educational works, documentaries, and films for television. It was not until the 1990's that his films began to show outside Iran, beginning with And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), both shown at the New York Film Festival. He shortly garnered worldwide recognition, and in 1997 earned huge success when his film Taste of Cherry won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d'Or. He was the first Iranian director to win the prize.
More than just critical acclaim, however, Kiarostami has also received the respect and praise from many of his well-known contemporaries, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa, who is quoted as saying "I believe the films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami are extraordinary. Words cannot relate my feelings. I suggest you see his films; and then you will see what I mean" (AFI, 2001).
"Though Kiarostami's films have been compared at various times to those
of Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Eric Rohmer, or Jacques Tati, they remain
uniquely Kiarostamian. Effortlessly simple and conceptually complex in
equal measure; poetic, lyrical, meditative, self-reflexive and increasingly
sophisticated, they mix fiction and documentary in unique ways, often presenting
fact as fiction and fiction as fact. (Kiarostami has said 'We can never
get close to the truth except through lying.')" (Zeitgeist Films, 2000).
His Films
1970 - Bread and Alley (Naan va Kooche)
1972 - Recess (Zang-e Tafrih)
1973 - Experience (Tajrobeh)
1974 - Traveller (Mosafer)
1975 - Two Solutions for One Problem (Doe Rah-e Hal)
1975 - So Can I (Man ham Mitoumam)
1976 - The Colors (Rangha)
1976 - The Wedding Suit (Lebassi Baraye Arossi)
1977 - The Report (Gozaresh)
1977 - Tribute to the Teachers (Bozorgdasht-e mo'Allem)
1977 - How to Make Use of Our Leisure Time? (Az Oghat-e Faraghat-e
Khod
Chegouneh Estefadeh Konim?)
1978 - Solution (Rah Hal-e Yek)
1979 - Case No.1, Case No.2 (Ghazieh-e Shekl-e Aval, Ghazieh-e
Shekl-e Dovom)
1980 - Dental Hygiene (Behdasht-e Dandan)
1981 - Regularly or Irregularly (Be Tartib ya Bedoun-e Tartib)
1982 - The Chorus (Hamsarayan)
1983 - Fellow Citizen (Hamshahri)
1983 - Toothache (Dandan Darad)
1984 - First Graders (Avaliha)
1987 - Where Is the Friend's Home? (Khane-ye Doust Kodjast?)
1989 - Homework (Mashgh-e Shab)
1990 - Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik)
1992 - And Life Goes On (Zendegi Edame Darad)
1994 - Through The Olive Trees (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton)
1997 - Taste of Cherry (Ta'ame Gilas)
1999 - The Wind Will Carry Us (Baad Mar Ra Khahad Bord)
(Filmography courtesy Iran Media)
Taste of Cherry
Cast:
Homayon Ershadi - Mr. Badii
Abdolrahman Bagheri - Mr. Bagheri
Safar Ali Moradi - The soldier
Mir Hossein Noori - The seminarian
The
film that brought Kiarostami international acclaim tells the story of Mr.
Badii, a middle-aged man intent on committing suicide. Badii drives
around in his vehicle, looking for someone he can hire to bury him, as
he has already dug his grave and plans to kill himself in it. He
drives past the day laborers first, but does not stop. His plan is
to find someone who will come to his gravesite the next day to bury him
if he has succeeded in killing himself, or to help him if he has failed.
As Badii drives around, he asks the strangers he meets about their financial
means, attempting to find someone desperate enough to complete the task.
He offers rides to three people during the day, a soldier, a seminarian,
and a taxidermist. The first two men both refuse to help Badii.
The soldier runs away in fear, while the seminarian refuses on religious
grounds and instead attempts to sway Badii from committing the act by preaching
to him. Inevitably, the taxidermist accepts the task, because, even
though he does not want Badii to commit suicide, he has a sick child and
needs the money. The film ends with Badii lying in his grave, still
alive when the final shot fades out.
Does Badii die? It seems that Kiarostami intends that the audience never know because it seems that the film is not about suicide but about life. Though Badii drives around in search of someone who will aid him in his task, he does not pay heed to those that he knows are qualified to do the job, such as the day laborers. Instead, he calls upon people that he seems to think might help him in other ways, people who appear to have some meaning in life, which very well might be the thing for which Badii is really searching. "In essence, A Taste of Cherry is not about a man's search for death, but his search for a reason for living" (Acquarello, 2000).
"The film's central character wants to commit suicide, and we don't know why. After a day of deliberation and preparation, we don't even know whether he succeeds. It could be argued…that Kiarostami omits this kind of information because he has nothing to say. I would counter that because Kiarostami is speaking with and through us - inviting us to share in a collective, common narrative - we have to share part of the burden of whether the film is saying anything…. If we don't want to think about our own deaths and what they might say about our lives - or about the possible suicides of strangers and how we might respond to their appeals - Taste of Cherry can't have anything to say to us" (Rosenbaum, 1997).
Close-Up
Cast:
Ali Sabzian - Himself
Abolfazl Ahahkhah - Herself
Mahrokh Ahahkhah - Herself
Mohsen Makmalbef - Himself
Based around actual events, Close-Up is a film about a man facing
trial for falsely impersonating a famous Iranian director, Mohsen Makmalbef. 
The story tells of the man (Sabzian) who, while he is reading a book by
Makmalbef, meets a woman on a bus. When the woman (Marohrokh Ahankhah)
shows interest in the book, Sabzian tells her that he is Makmalbef.
She invites him to dinner at her house with her family, where her husband
(Abolfazl Ahahkhah), upon hearing Sabzian say that their house would be
the perfect setting for his film, invites him to stay with them.
During the trial, the Ahankhah family argues that Sabzian was surveying
the house in order to rob it, while he claims that he first told the Ahahkhahs
he was Makmalbef because he was hungry. Only later did he continue
to impersonate the director because of his love for film and the confidence
it gave him. The trial ends with the judge accepting Sabzian's repentance
and asking the Ahahkhah family to forgive him, but the film does not end
until Sabzian meets the man he impersonated, Makmalbef himself, outside
the courthouse.
Though the events described in the trial occur in flashbacks, Kiarostami filmed the trial before he filmed the flashback scenes. His intentions were mostly out of curiosity as a film director, he wondered why a man would want to impersonate a film director. When he decided to make the story into a film, in addition to casting the actual people involved in the trial as themselves for the flashback sequences, Kiarostami also filmed the trial in a crude documentary form and accidentally used a microphone that did not work during the finals moments of the film between Sabzian and Makmalbef. He blends the reality of the story with the superficiality of film to accentuate the nature of Sabzian, a man so enamored of cinema that he twists reality to become a part of it. "The result is a masterpiece about the mechanism of and the relationship between cinema and the viewer, filmmaking and acting, reality and fiction" (Iran Media). In a way, one might consider Close-Up a story about Kiarostami, as film has become the thing of which he is so much a part that he no longer distinguishes his life from his work. In the final scene, when Sabzian meets Makmalbef, the man he idolized through impersonation, "the question arises: are we still watching a film or real-life unfold before us? To Abbas Kiarostami, it is all one and the same phenomenon - a captured moment in the evolving document of life" (Acquarello, 2000).
Works Cited
Abbas Kiarostami. Acquarello. 11 April 2000. Strictly Film School. Internet. 2 Dec. 2001. <http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/kiarostami.html>.
The Films of Abbas Kiarostami. American Film Institute. 2001. Internet. 2 Dec. 2001. <http://www.afionline.org/nft/may96/nft.kiarostami.html>.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Fill in the Blanks. Chicago Reader. 1997. Internet. 2 Dec. 2001. <http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1998/0598/05298.html>.
Various contributors. Iran Media Abbas Kiarostami. Nima Web Design. Internet. 2 Dec. 2001. <http://www.nima3.com/IranMedia/Abbas.html>.
Various contributors. Zeitgeist Films: Close-Up: Abbas Kiarostami. Zeitgeist Films. 2000. Internet. 2 Dec. 2001. <http://www.zeitgeistfilm.com/current/closeup/closeupkiarostami.html>.
Selected Bibliography
Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian Director. Film International (Quarterly). 1994. Internet. 2 Dec. 2001. <http://www.netiran.com/Htdocs/Clippings/Art/940915XXAR05.html>.
Home, Exile, Homeland. Hamid Naficy. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Maghsoudlou, Bahman. Iranian Cinema. New York: Hagop Kervorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, 1987.
Madhi, Ali Akbar. In dialogue with Kiarostami. The Iranian. 25 Aug. 1998. Internet. 2 Dec. 2001. <http://www.iranian.com/Arts/Aug98/Kiarostami/>.
Scaruffi, Piero. Abbas Kiarostami: biography, reviews, links. 1999. Internet. 2 Dec. 2001. <http://www.scaruffi.com/director/kiarosta.html>
Films Without Borders: Abbas Kiarostami Talks About "ABC Africa" and Poetic Cinema
An Interview with Abbas Kiarostami
The Iranian Who Won the World's Attention
PBS Online: Beyond the Veil Iranian Cinema
Zeigeist Films: Close-Up: A History of Iranian Cinema
Author: Wesley Kerns, Fall 2001
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