Abbas Kiarostami
Encyclopedia
Abbas Kiarostami is an internationally acclaimed Iran
ian film director
, screenwriter
, photographer and film producer
. An active filmmaker since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries
. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker Trilogy
(1987–94), Taste of Cherry
(1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us
(1999).
Kiarostami has worked extensively as a screenwriter
, film editor
, art director
and producer and has designed credit titles and publicity material. He is also a poet, photographer, painter
, illustrator
, and graphic designer
.
Kiarostami is part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema
movement that started in the late 1960s and includes pioneering directors such as Forough Farrokhzad
, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Mohsen Makhmalbaf
, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi
. The filmmakers share many common techniques including the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues.
Kiarostami has a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. He is also known for his use of contemporary Iranian poetry
in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films.
Kiarostami was born in Tehran
. His first artistic experience was painting, which he continued into his late teens, winning a painting competition at the age of eighteen shortly before he left home to study at the Tehran University School of Fine Arts. There he majored in painting and graphic design, and supported his degree by working as a traffic policeman. As a painter, designer, and illustrator, Kiarostami worked in advertising in the 1960s, designing poster
s and creating commercials. Between 1962 and 1966, he shot around 150 advertisements for Iranian television. Towards the late 1960s, he began creating credit titles for films (including Gheysar
by Masoud Kimiai
) and illustrating children's books.
In 1969, Abbas married Parvin Amir-Gholi but later divorced her in 1982; they had two sons, Ahmad (born 1971) and Bahman (1978). At the age of fifteen, Bahman Kiarostami
became a director and cinematographer by directing a documentary Journey to the Land of the Traveller
in 1993.
Kiarostami was one of the few directors who remained in Iran after the 1979 revolution
, when many of his colleagues fled to the west, and he believes that it was one of the most important decisions of his career. He has stated that his permanent base in Iran and his national identity have consolidated his ability as a filmmaker:
Kiarostami frequently appears wearing dark-lensed spectacles or sunglasses. He wears them for medical reasons due to a sensitivity to light.
In 2000, at the San Francisco Film Festival award ceremony, Kiarostami surprised everyone by giving away his Akira Kurosawa Prize
for lifetime achievement in directing to veteran Iranian actor Behrooz Vossoughi for his contribution to Iranian Cinema.
(1970), a neo-realistic
short film about an unfortunate schoolboy's confrontation with an aggressive dog. Breaktime
followed in 1972. The department went on to become one of Iran’s most famous film studios, producing not only Kiarostami's films, but acclaimed Persian films such as The Runner and Bashu, the Little Stranger
.
In the 1970s, as part of the Iranian cinematic renaissance, Kiarostami pursued an individualistic
style of film making. When discussing his first film, he stated:
Following The Experience
(1973), Kiarostami released The Traveler
(Mossafer) in 1974. The Traveller tells the story of Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral ten-year-old boy in a small Iranian town. He wishes to see the Iran national football team
play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors. After a number of adventures, he finally reaches Tehran stadium in time for the match. The film addresses the boy's determination in his goal, and his indifference to the effects of his actions on other people, particularly those closest to him. The film is an examination of human behavior and the balance of right and wrong. The film furthered Kiarostami's reputation of realism
, diegetic
simplicity, and stylistic complexity, as well as showing a fascination with physical and spiritual journeys.
In 1975, Kiarostami directed two short films So Can I
and Two Solutions for One Problem
. In early 1976, he released Colors
, followed by the fifty-four minute film A Wedding Suit
, a story about three teenagers coming into conflict over a suit for a wedding. Kiarostami's first feature film
was the 112-minute Report
(1977). It revolved around the life of a tax collector
accused of accepting bribes; suicide
was among its themes. In 1979, he produced and directed First Case, Second Case
.
(1980), Orderly or Disorderly
(1981), and The Chorus (1982). In 1983, he directed Fellow Citizen
, but it was not until 1987 that Abbas began to gain recognition outside of Iran with the release of Where Is the Friend's Home?
.
Where Is the Friend's Home? tells a deceptively simple account of a conscientious eight-year-old schoolboy's quest to return his friend's notebook in a neighboring village lest his friend be expelled from school. The traditional beliefs of Iranian rural people were depicted throughout the movie. The film has been noted for its poetic use of the Iranian rural
landscape and its earnest realism, both important elements of Kiarostami's work. Kiarostami also made the film from a child's point of view, without the condescending tone common to many films about children.
Where Is the Friend's Home?, And Life Goes On (1992) (also known as Life and Nothing More), and Through the Olive Trees
(1994) are described by critics as the Koker trilogy
, because all three films feature the village of Koker
in northern Iran. The films are based around the 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake
in which 40,000 people lost their lives; Kiarostami uses the themes of life, death, change, and continuity to connect the films. The trilogy went on to become successful in France in the 1990s and other countries such as the Netherlands
, Sweden
, Germany and Finland
. However, Kiarostami does not consider the 3 films as part of a trilogy, suggesting instead that the last two titles plus Taste of Cherry (1997) comprise a trilogy, given their common theme — the preciousness of life. In 1987, Kiarostami was involved in the screenwriting of The Key
, which he edited but did not direct. In 1989, he released Homework.
, which narrates the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf
, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. The family suspects theft as the motive for this charade, but the impersonator, Hossein Sabzian, argues that his motives were more complex. The part documentary, part staged film examines Sabzian's moral justification for usurping Makhmalbaf's identity, questioning his ability to sense his cultural and artistic flair. Close-Up received praise from directors such as Quentin Tarantino
, Martin Scorsese
, Werner Herzog
, Jean-Luc Godard
, and Nanni Moretti
and was released across Europe.
In 1992, Kiarostami directed Life, and Nothing More...
, regarded by critics as the second film of the Koker trilogy. The film follows a father and his young son as they drive from Tehran to Koker in search of two young boys who they fear might have perished in the 1990 earthquake. As they travel through the devastated landscape, they meet earthquake survivors forced to carry on with their lives amid tragedy.
That year Kiarostami won a Prix Roberto Rossellini
, the first professional film award of his career, for his direction of the film. The last film of the so-called Koker trilogy was Through the Olive Trees (1994), which turns a peripheral scene from Life and Nothing More into the central drama.
Critics such as Adrian Martin
have called the style of filmmaking in the Koker trilogy as "diagrammatical", linking the zig-zagging patterns in the landscape and the geometry of forces of life and the world. A flashback of the zigzag path in Life and Nothing More... (1992) in turn triggers the spectator’s memory of the previous film, Where Is the Friend’s Home? back in 1987, shot before the earthquake. This in turn symbolically links to post-earthquake reconstruction in Through the Olive Trees in 1994.
In 1995, Miramax Films
released Through the Olive Trees in the US theatrically.
Kiarostami next wrote the screenplays for The Journey
and The White Balloon (1995), for his former assistant Jafar Panahi
. Between 1995 and 1996, he was involved in the production of Lumière and Company
, a collaboration with 40 other film directors.
In 1997, Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or
(Golden Palm) award at the Cannes Film Festival
for Taste of Cherry
, the tale of a man, Mr. Badii, determined to commit suicide. The film involved themes such as morality, the legitimacy of the act of suicide, and the meaning of compassion.
In 1999, Kiarostami directed The Wind Will Carry Us
, which won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival
. The film contrasted rural and urban views on the dignity of labor, addressing themes of gender equality and the benefits of progress, by means of a stranger's sojourn in a remote Kurdish village. An interesting feature of the movie is that many of the characters are heard but not seen, and there are at least thirteen to fourteen characters in the film who remain invisible throughout.
, revealing an unusual method of filmmaking and abandoning many scriptwriting conventions. Kiarostami focused on the socio-political landscape of Iran, and the images are seen through the eyes of one woman as she drives through the streets of Tehran over a period of several days. Her journey is composed of ten conversations with various passengers, which include her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute and a jilted bride and her demanding young son. This style of filmmaking was praised by a number of professional film critics such as A. O. Scott
in The New York Times
, who wrote that Kiarostami, "in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema...He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk."
In 2001, Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, traveled to Kampala
, Uganda
at the request of the United Nations
International Fund for Agricultural Development
, to film a documentary about programs assisting Ugandan orphans. He stayed for ten days and made ABC Africa
. The trip was originally intended as a research in preparation for the actual filming, but Kiarostami ended up editing the entire film from the video footage obtained. Although Uganda's orphans are overwhelmingly the result of the AIDS epidemic
, Time Out editor and National Film Theatre
chief programmer Geoff Andrew stated about Kiarostami's film: "Like his previous four features, this film is not about death but life-and-death: how they're linked, and what attitude we might adopt with regard to their symbiotic inevitability."
In 2003, Kiarostami directed Five, a poetic feature with no dialogue or characterization. It consists of five long shots of nature which are single-take sequences, shot with a hand-held DV
camera, along the shores of the Caspian Sea
. Although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is "more than just pretty pictures". He further adds, "Assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration." He further notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery.
In 2004, Kiarostami produced 10 on Ten
, a journal documentary that shares ten lessons on movie-making while driving through the locations of his past films. The movie is shot on digital video with a stationary camera mounted inside the car, in a manner reminiscent of Taste of Cherry and Ten.
In 2005 and 2006, he directed The Roads of Kiarostami
, a 32-minute documentary that reflects on the power of landscape, combining austere black-and-white photographs with poetic observations, engaging music with political subject matter.
In 2005 Kiarostami contributed the central section to Tickets
, a portmanteau film
set on a train traveling through Italy. The other segments were directed by Ken Loach
and Ermanno Olmi
.
In 2008 he directed the feature Shirin
.
which has been shot in Tuscany. It is his first film which has been shot and produced outside Iran. It was entered in competition for the Palme d'Or
in the 2010 Cannes Film Festival
.
, Vittorio de Sica
, Éric Rohmer
, and Jacques Tati
, his films exhibit a singular style, often employing techniques of his own invention.
During the filming of The Bread and Alley in 1970, Kiarostami had major differences with his experienced cinematographer
about how to film the boy and the attacking dog. While the cinematographer wanted separate shots of the boy approaching, a close up of his hand as he enters the house and closes the door, followed by a shot of the dog, Kiarostami believed that if the three scenes could be captured as a whole it would have a more profound impact in creating tension over the situation. That one shot took around forty days to complete, until Kiarostami was fully content with the scene. Abbas later commented that the breaking of scenes would have disrupted the rhythm
and content of the film's structure, preferring to let the scene flow as one.
Unlike other directors, Kiarostami has showed no interest in staging extravagant combat
scenes or complicated chase scenes in large-scale productions, instead attempting to mold the medium of film to his own specifications. Kiarostami appeared to have settled on his style with the Koker trilogy, which included a myriad of references to his own film material, connecting common themes and subject matter between each of the films. Stephen Bransford has contended that Kiarostami's films do not contain references to the work of other directors, but are fashioned in such a manner that they are self-referenced. Bransford believes his films are often fashioned into an ongoing dialectic with one film reflecting on and partially demystifying an earlier film.
Nevertheless, he continued experimenting with new modes of filming, using different directorial methods and techniques. A case in point is Ten, which was filmed in a moving automobile in which Kiarostami was not present. He gave suggestions to the actors about what to do, and a camera placed on the dashboard
then filmed them while they drove around Tehran. The camera was allowed to roll, capturing the faces of the people involved during their daily routine, using a series of extreme-close shots. Ten was an experiment that used digital cameras to virtually eliminate the director. This new direction towards a Digital-Micro-Cinema, is defined as a micro-budget filmmaking practice, allied with a digital production basis.
Kiarostami's cinema offers a different definition of film. According to film professors such as Jamsheed Akrami of William Paterson University
, Kiarostami has consistently attempted to redefine film
by lowering its full definition and forcing the increased involvement of the audience. In recent years, he has also progressively trimmed down the timespan of his films, which Akrami believes reduces the filmmaking experience from a collective endeavor to a purer, more basic form of artistic expression.
The boundary between fiction and non-fiction is significantly reduced in Kiarostami's cinema. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy
, writing about Kiarostami, and in particular Life and Nothing More..., has argued that his films are neither quite fiction nor quite documentary. Life and Nothing More..., he argues, is neither representation nor reportage, but rather "evidence":
For Jean-Luc Nancy, this notion of cinema as "evidence", rather than as documentary or imagination, is tied to the way Kiarostami deals with life-and-death (cf. the remark by Geoff Andrew on ABC Africa, cited above, to the effect that Kiarostami's films are not about death but about life-and-death):
In other words, wanting to accomplish more than just represent life and death as opposing forces, but rather to illustrate the way in which each element of nature is inextricably linked, Kiarostami has devised a cinema that does more than just present the viewer with the documentable "facts," but neither is it simply a matter of artifice. Because "existence" means more than simply life, it is projective, containing an irreducibly fictive element, but in this "being more than" life, it is therefore contaminated by mortality. Nancy is giving a clue, in other words, toward the interpretation of Kiarostami's statement that lying is the only way to truth.
However, unlike the Koker films, which convey an instinctual thirst for survival, Taste of Cherry
also explores the fragility of life and rhetorically focuses on the preciousness of life.
In contrast, symbols of death
abound in The Wind Will Carry Us with the scenery of graveyard
, the imminence of the old woman’s passing, and the ancestors that the character Farzad mentions early in the film. Such devices prompt the viewer to consider the parameter
s of the afterlife and immaterial existence. The viewer is asked to consider what constitutes the soul, and what happens to it after death. In discussing the film, Kiarostami has stated that he is the person who raises questions, rather than the person who answers them.
Some film critics believe that the assemblage of light versus dark scenes in Kiarostami's film grammar, such as in Taste of Cherry and Wind Will Carry Us, suggests the mutual existence of life with its endless possibilities and death as a factual moment of anyone’s life in his films.
This relationship between distance and intimacy, between imagery and sound, is also present in the opening sequence to The Wind Will Carry Us. Michael J. Anderson has argued that such a thematic
application of this central concept of presence without presence, through using such techniques, and by often referring to characters which the viewer does not see and sometimes not hear directly affects the nature and concept of space in the geographical
framework in which the world is portrayed. Kiarostami's use of sound and image
ry conveys a world beyond what is directly visible and/or audible, which Anderson believes emphasizes the interconnectedness and shrinking of time and space in the modern world of telecommunications.
Other commentators such as film critic
Ben Zipper believe that Kiarostami’s work as a landscape artist is evident in his compositional distant shots of the dry hills throughout a number of his films directly impacting on his construction on the rural landscapes within his films.
, of the University of Maryland
, argues that one aspect of Kiarostami's cinematic style is that he is able to capture the essence of Persian poetry
and create poetic imagery within the landscape of his films. In several of his movies such as Where is the Friend's Home and The Wind Will Carry Us, classical Persian poetry is directly quoted in the film, highlighting the artistic link and intimate connection between them. This in turn reflects on the connection between the past and present, between continuity and change.
The characters recite poems mainly from classical Persian poet Omar Khayyám
or modern Persian poets such as Sohrab Sepehri
and Forough Farrokhzad
. One scene in The Wind Will Carry Us has a long shot of a wheat field with rippling golden crops through which the doctor, accompanied by the filmmaker, is riding his scooter in a twisting road. In response to the comment that the other world is a better place than this one, the doctor recites this poem of Khayyam:
However, the aesthetic element involved with the poetry goes much farther back in time and is used more subtly than these examples suggest. Beyond issues of adaptation of text to film, Kiarostami often begins with an insistent will to give visual embodiment to certain specific image-making techniques in Persian poetry, both classical and modern. This prominently results in enunciating a larger philosophical
position, namely the ontological oneness of poetry and film.
It has been argued that the creative merit of Kiarostami's adaptation of Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad's poems extends the domain of textual transformation. Adaptation is defined as the transformation of a prior to a new text. Sima Daad of the University of Washington
contends that Kiarostami's adaptation arrives at the theoretical realm of adaptation by expanding its limit from inter-textual potential to trans-generic potential.
reality. The limits of the frame, the material representation of a space in dialog with another that is not represented, physically become metaphors for the relationship between this world and those which may exist apart from it. By limiting the space of the mise en scène
, Kiarostami expands the space of the art.
Kiarostami's "complex" sound-images and philosophical approach have caused frequent comparisons with "mystical" filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky
and Robert Bresson
. Irrespective of substantial cultural differences, much of western writing about Kiarostami positions him as the Iranian equivalent of such directors, by virtue of universal austere, "spiritual" poetics and moral commitment. Some draw parallels between certain imagery in Kiarostami's films with that of Sufi concepts.
However, differing viewpoints have arisen about this issue. While a vast majority of English-language writers, such as David Sterritt and Spanish film professor Alberto Elena, interpret Kiarostami's films as spiritual films, other critics including David Walsh
and Hamish Ford have diminished its influence in his films.
, Derek Jarman
, and Gulzar
, is part of a tradition of filmmakers whose artistic expressions are not restricted to one medium, but who show the ability to use other forms such as poetry
, set designs, painting
, or photography
to relate their interpretation of the world we live in and to illustrate their understanding of our preoccupations and identities.
Kiarostami is also a noted photographer and poet. A bilingual collection of more than 200 of his poems, Walking with the Wind, was published by Harvard University Press
. His photographic work includes Untitled Photographs, a collection of over thirty photographs, essentially of snow landscapes, taken in his hometown Tehran, between 1978 and 2003. In 1999, He also published a collection of his poems.
Riccardo Zipoli, from the Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
in Venice
, has examined some aspects of the relations and interconnections between Kiarostami's poems and his films. The results of the analysis reveal how Kiarostami's treatment of this theme is similar in his poems and films.
Kiarostami's poetry is reminiscent of the later nature poems of the Persian painter-poet, Sohrab Sepehri
. On the other hand, the succinct allusion to philosophical
truths without the need for deliberation, the non-judgmental tone of the poetic voice, and the structure of the poem—absence of personal pronouns, adverbs or over reliance on adjectives—as well as the lines containing a kigo (a season word) gives much of this poetry a Haiku
esque characteristic.
, Nanni Moretti
(who made a short film about opening one of Kiarostami's films in his theater in Rome), Chris Marker
, Ray Carney
, and Akira Kurosawa
, who said of Kiarostami's films: "Words cannot describe my feelings about them ... When Satyajit Ray
passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami’s films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place."
Critically acclaimed directors such as Martin Scorsese
have commented that "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." In 2006, The Guardian
s panel of critics ranked Kiarostami as the best contemporary non-American film director.
Nevertheless, critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum
have argued that "there's no getting around the fact that the movies of Abbas Kiarostami divide audiences—in this country, in his native Iran, and everywhere else they're shown." Rosenbaum argues that disagreements and controversy over Kiarostami's movies have arisen from his style of filmmaking because what in Hollywood would count as essential narrative information is frequently missing from Kiarostami's films. Camera placement, likewise, often defies standard audience expectations. In the closing sequences of Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees, the audience is forced to imagine missing scenes. In Homework and Close-Up, parts of the sound track have been masked, or drop in and out. It has also been argued that the subtlety of Kiarostami's form of cinematic expression is resistant to critical analysis.
While Kiarostami has won significant acclaim in Europe for several of his films, the Iranian government has refused to permit the screening of his films in his native Iran. Kiarostami has responded, "The government has decided not to show any of my films for the past 10 years... I think they don't understand my films and so prevent them being shown just in case there is a message they don't want to get out".
Kiarostami has faced opposition in the United States as well. In 2002, he was refused a visa
to attend the New York Film Festival
in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center
. Festival director Richard Peña
, who had invited him said, "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim
world". Finnish
film director Aki Kaurismäki
boycotted the festival in protest. Kiarostami had been invited by the New York International Film Festival
, as well as Ohio University
and Harvard University
.
In 2005, London Film School
organized a workshop as well as festival of Kiarostami’s work, titled "Abbas Kiarostami: Visions of the Artist". Ben Gibson, Director of the London Film School, said, "Very few people have the creative and intellectual clarity to invent cinema from its most basic elements, from the ground up. We are very lucky to have the chance to see a master like Kiarostami thinking on his feet."
In 2007, The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center co-organized a festival of the Kiarostami's work, titled "Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker". Kiarostami and his cinematic style have been the subject of several books and two films, Il Giorno della prima di Close Up
(1996), directed by Nanni Moretti
and Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living (2003), directed by Fergus Daly. Abbas Kiarostami is also a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation
. The project was founded by Martin Scorsese and aimed at finding and reconstructing world cinema films that have been long neglected. Austrian director Michael Haneke
has admired the work of Abbas Kiarostami as one of the best.
in 1993
, 2002
and 2005
. He was also the president of the Caméra d'Or
Jury in Cannes Film Festival 2005.
Some representatives:
General:
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
ian film director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
, screenwriter
Screenwriter
Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...
, photographer and film producer
Film producer
A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...
. An active filmmaker since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker Trilogy
Koker trilogy
Koker trilogy refers to a series of three films directed by Abbas Kiarostami.Koker trilogy refers to Where Is the Friend's Home? , And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees . The designation was done by film theorists and critics...
(1987–94), Taste of Cherry
Taste of Cherry
Taste of Cherry is a 1997 film by the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. It is a minimalist film about a man who drives through a city suburb looking for someone who can carry out the task to bury him after he has died.-Plot:...
(1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us
The Wind Will Carry Us
The Wind Will Carry Us is a 1999 Iranian film by Abbas Kiarostami. The title is a reference to a poem written by the famous modern Iranian woman poet Forough Farrokhzad. In 1999, the movie was nominated for Golden Lion of Venice Film Festival. It won Grand Special Jury Prize , FIPRESCI Prize and...
(1999).
Kiarostami has worked extensively as a screenwriter
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
, film editor
Film editing
Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling...
, art director
Art director
The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....
and producer and has designed credit titles and publicity material. He is also a poet, photographer, painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, illustrator
Illustrator
An Illustrator is a narrative artist who specializes in enhancing writing by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text...
, and graphic designer
Graphic designer
A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...
.
Kiarostami is part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema
Cinema of Iran
The cinema of Iran is a flourishing film industry with a long history. Many popular commercial films are annually made in Iran, and Iranian art films win praise around the world....
movement that started in the late 1960s and includes pioneering directors such as Forough Farrokhzad
Forough Farrokhzad
Forugh Farrokhzād was an Iranian poet and film director. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably one of Iran's most influential female poets of the twentieth century...
, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Mohsen Makhmalbaf is an Iranian film director, writer, editor, and producer. During 2007 he was the president of Asian Film Academy.Makhmalbaf's films have been widely presented in international film festivals in the past ten years. The multi-award-winning director, belongs to the new wave...
, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi
Parviz Kimiavi
Parviz Kimiavi is an internationally acclaimed Iranian film director, screenwriter, editor and one of the most prominent figures of Persian cinema of the 20th century....
. The filmmakers share many common techniques including the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues.
Kiarostami has a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. He is also known for his use of contemporary Iranian poetry
Persian literature
Persian literature spans two-and-a-half millennia, though much of the pre-Islamic material has been lost. Its sources have been within historical Persia including present-day Iran as well as regions of Central Asia where the Persian language has historically been the national language...
in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films.
Early life and background
Tehran
Tehran , sometimes spelled Teheran, is the capital of Iran and Tehran Province. With an estimated population of 8,429,807; it is also Iran's largest urban area and city, one of the largest cities in Western Asia, and is the world's 19th largest city.In the 20th century, Tehran was subject to...
. His first artistic experience was painting, which he continued into his late teens, winning a painting competition at the age of eighteen shortly before he left home to study at the Tehran University School of Fine Arts. There he majored in painting and graphic design, and supported his degree by working as a traffic policeman. As a painter, designer, and illustrator, Kiarostami worked in advertising in the 1960s, designing poster
Poster
A poster is any piece of printed paper designed to be attached to a wall or vertical surface. Typically posters include both textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or wholly text. Posters are designed to be both eye-catching and informative. Posters may be...
s and creating commercials. Between 1962 and 1966, he shot around 150 advertisements for Iranian television. Towards the late 1960s, he began creating credit titles for films (including Gheysar
Qeysar (film)
Qeysar ,also written as Gheisar, Kaiser and Gheysar, is a 1969 film by acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Masoud Kimiai. The film was considered a turning point in Iranian cinema and brought out a new trend...
by Masoud Kimiai
Masoud Kimiai
Masoud Kimiai is an Iranian director, screenwriter and producer. He was born in 1941 in Tehran, Iran.- Biography :Kimiai started his career as an assistant director and made his debut, Come Stranger, in 1968. With his second film, Kaiser , he and Dariush Mehrjui with The film Cow, caused a...
) and illustrating children's books.
In 1969, Abbas married Parvin Amir-Gholi but later divorced her in 1982; they had two sons, Ahmad (born 1971) and Bahman (1978). At the age of fifteen, Bahman Kiarostami
Bahman Kiarostami
Bahman Kiarostami is an Iranian film director, cinematographer, film editor, film producer and translator, son of the critically acclaimed Abbas Kiarostami....
became a director and cinematographer by directing a documentary Journey to the Land of the Traveller
Journey to the Land of the Traveller
Journey to the Land of the Traveller is a 1993 Iranian documentary film directed by Bahman Kiarostami....
in 1993.
Kiarostami was one of the few directors who remained in Iran after the 1979 revolution
Iranian Revolution
The Iranian Revolution refers to events involving the overthrow of Iran's monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and its replacement with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the...
, when many of his colleagues fled to the west, and he believes that it was one of the most important decisions of his career. He has stated that his permanent base in Iran and his national identity have consolidated his ability as a filmmaker:
When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground, and transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit. And if it does, the fruit will not be as good as it was in its original place. This is a rule of nature. I think if I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree.-Abbas Kiarostami
Kiarostami frequently appears wearing dark-lensed spectacles or sunglasses. He wears them for medical reasons due to a sensitivity to light.
In 2000, at the San Francisco Film Festival award ceremony, Kiarostami surprised everyone by giving away his Akira Kurosawa Prize
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
for lifetime achievement in directing to veteran Iranian actor Behrooz Vossoughi for his contribution to Iranian Cinema.
1970s
In 1969, when the Iranian New Wave began with Dariush Mehrjui's film Gāv, Kiarostami helped set up a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) in Tehran. Its debut production and Kiarostami's first film was the twelve-minute The Bread and AlleyThe Bread and Alley
The Bread and Alley is a 1970 Iranian short film directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami. The ten-minute film was the first film directed by Kiarostami....
(1970), a neo-realistic
Neorealism (art)
In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...
short film about an unfortunate schoolboy's confrontation with an aggressive dog. Breaktime
Breaktime
Breaktime is a 1972 Iranian drama film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.- Film Details :When the breaktime bell rings, young Dara leaves school; he has been sent home as a punishment for breaking a window with his football. On his way home he comes across some other boys playing a game of football,...
followed in 1972. The department went on to become one of Iran’s most famous film studios, producing not only Kiarostami's films, but acclaimed Persian films such as The Runner and Bashu, the Little Stranger
Bashu, the Little Stranger
Bashu, the Little Stranger , is a 1986 Iranian drama film directed by Bahram Beizai. The film was produced in 1986, and was released in 1989. This multi-ethnic film was the first Iranian film to make use of the northern dialect of Persian, Gilaki, in a serious context rather than comic relief...
.
Individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...
style of film making. When discussing his first film, he stated:
"Bread and Alley was my first experience in cinema and I must say a very difficult one. I had to work with a very young child, a dog, and an unprofessional crew except for the cinematographer, who was nagging and complaining all the time. Well, the cinematographer, in a sense, was right because I did not follow the conventions of film making that he had become accustomed to."
Following The Experience
The Experience (film)
The Experience is a 1973 Iranian short feature film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.- Film Details :Mamad, an orphaned teenager, works as a messenger boy in a photographic studio, where he also sleeps at night...
(1973), Kiarostami released The Traveler
The Traveller (film)
The Traveler is a 1974 Iranian drama film directed by Abbas Kiarostami that tells the story of Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral 10-year-old boy in a small Iranian town. He wishes to see the Iran national football team play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his...
(Mossafer) in 1974. The Traveller tells the story of Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral ten-year-old boy in a small Iranian town. He wishes to see the Iran national football team
Iran national football team
The national football team of Iran represents Iran in international football competitions and is controlled by the Football Federation Islamic Republic of Iran...
play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors. After a number of adventures, he finally reaches Tehran stadium in time for the match. The film addresses the boy's determination in his goal, and his indifference to the effects of his actions on other people, particularly those closest to him. The film is an examination of human behavior and the balance of right and wrong. The film furthered Kiarostami's reputation of realism
Realism (dramatic arts)
Realism was a general movement in 19th-century theatre that developed a set of dramatic and theatrical conventions with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances....
, diegetic
Diegesis
Diegesis is a style of representation in fiction and is:# the world in which the situations and events narrated occur; and# telling, recounting, as opposed to showing, enacting.In diegesis the narrator tells the story...
simplicity, and stylistic complexity, as well as showing a fascination with physical and spiritual journeys.
In 1975, Kiarostami directed two short films So Can I
So Can I
So Can I is a 1975 Iranian short film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.-Film Details:Two boys watch a cartoon film about various kinds of animals and one of them claims repeatedly that he can do the same things he sees the animals doing. But then the sight of birds flying plunges him into confusion:...
and Two Solutions for One Problem
Two Solutions for One Problem
Two Solutions for One Problem is a 1975 Iranian short film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.-Film Details:During breaktime, Dara and Nader have a fierce argument about a torn exercise book that the former has given back to the latter. There are two possible outcomes, which the film shows one after the...
. In early 1976, he released Colors
Rang-ha (film)
The Colours is a 1976 Iranian short film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.-Film Details:By showing a series of different-coloured objects, the film aims to familiarize very young children with the various colours, and ends with a shot of a blackboard, a symbol of learning....
, followed by the fifty-four minute film A Wedding Suit
A Wedding Suit
A Wedding Suit is a 1976 Iranian comedy film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.-Film Details:A woman orders a suit from a tailor for her young son to wear to her sister's wedding. The tailor's apprentice, together with two other teenage boys who work in the same building, devise a plan to try on the...
, a story about three teenagers coming into conflict over a suit for a wedding. Kiarostami's first feature film
Feature film
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...
was the 112-minute Report
The Report
The Report is a 1977 Iranian drama film directed by Abbas Kiarostami and starring Academy Award-nominated actress Shohreh Aghdashloo.-Film Details:...
(1977). It revolved around the life of a tax collector
Tax collector
A tax collector is a person who collects unpaid taxes from other people or corporations. Tax collectors are often portrayed in fiction as being evil, and in the modern world share a somewhat similar stereotype to that of lawyers....
accused of accepting bribes; suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
was among its themes. In 1979, he produced and directed First Case, Second Case
First Case, Second Case
First Case, Second Case is a 1979 Iranian film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.-External links:*...
.
1980s
In the early 1980s, Kiarostami directed several short films including Dental HygieneDental Hygiene
Dental Hygiene is a 1980 Iranian short film directed by Abbas Kiarostami....
(1980), Orderly or Disorderly
Orderly or Disorderly
Orderly or Disorderly is a 1981 Iranian short film directed by Abbas Kiarostami....
(1981), and The Chorus (1982). In 1983, he directed Fellow Citizen
Fellow Citizen
Fellow Citizen is a 1983 Iranian documentary film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.-External links:*...
, but it was not until 1987 that Abbas began to gain recognition outside of Iran with the release of Where Is the Friend's Home?
Where Is the Friend's Home?
Where Is the Friend's Home? is a 1987 Iranian film directed and written by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The title of the film was derived from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri...
.
Where Is the Friend's Home? tells a deceptively simple account of a conscientious eight-year-old schoolboy's quest to return his friend's notebook in a neighboring village lest his friend be expelled from school. The traditional beliefs of Iranian rural people were depicted throughout the movie. The film has been noted for its poetic use of the Iranian rural
Rural
Rural areas or the country or countryside are areas that are not urbanized, though when large areas are described, country towns and smaller cities will be included. They have a low population density, and typically much of the land is devoted to agriculture...
landscape and its earnest realism, both important elements of Kiarostami's work. Kiarostami also made the film from a child's point of view, without the condescending tone common to many films about children.
Where Is the Friend's Home?, And Life Goes On (1992) (also known as Life and Nothing More), and Through the Olive Trees
Through the Olive Trees
Through the Olive Trees is a 1994 film directed and written by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, set in earthquake-ravaged Northern Iran....
(1994) are described by critics as the Koker trilogy
Koker trilogy
Koker trilogy refers to a series of three films directed by Abbas Kiarostami.Koker trilogy refers to Where Is the Friend's Home? , And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees . The designation was done by film theorists and critics...
, because all three films feature the village of Koker
Koker
Koker is a village in northern Iran. In the early 1990s the well known Koker trilogy of films were filmed in the village, which was devastated by the 1990 earthquake....
in northern Iran. The films are based around the 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake
1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake
The Manjil-Rudbar Earthquake occurred at 00:30:09 on June 21, 1990 . It caused widespread damage in areas within a one hundred kilometer radius of the epicenter near the city of Rasht and about two hundred kilometers northwest of Tehran. The cities of Rudbar, Manjil, and Lushan and 700 villages...
in which 40,000 people lost their lives; Kiarostami uses the themes of life, death, change, and continuity to connect the films. The trilogy went on to become successful in France in the 1990s and other countries such as the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
, Germany and Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
. However, Kiarostami does not consider the 3 films as part of a trilogy, suggesting instead that the last two titles plus Taste of Cherry (1997) comprise a trilogy, given their common theme — the preciousness of life. In 1987, Kiarostami was involved in the screenwriting of The Key
Kelid
The Key is a 1987 Iranian drama film directed by Ebrahim Forouzesh and written by Abbas Kiarostami....
, which he edited but did not direct. In 1989, he released Homework.
1990s
In 1990, Kiarostami directed Close-UpClose-up (film)
Close-Up is a film directed by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, a docufiction. The film tells the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. It features the people involved, acting as...
, which narrates the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Mohsen Makhmalbaf is an Iranian film director, writer, editor, and producer. During 2007 he was the president of Asian Film Academy.Makhmalbaf's films have been widely presented in international film festivals in the past ten years. The multi-award-winning director, belongs to the new wave...
, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. The family suspects theft as the motive for this charade, but the impersonator, Hossein Sabzian, argues that his motives were more complex. The part documentary, part staged film examines Sabzian's moral justification for usurping Makhmalbaf's identity, questioning his ability to sense his cultural and artistic flair. Close-Up received praise from directors such as Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
, Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
, Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog Stipetić , known as Werner Herzog, is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.He is often considered as one of the greatest figures of the New German Cinema, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner...
, Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, and Nanni Moretti
Nanni Moretti
Giovanni "Nanni" Moretti is an Italian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor.-Life and work:Moretti was born in Bruneck, South Tyrol , in 1953 to parents who were teachers...
and was released across Europe.
In 1992, Kiarostami directed Life, and Nothing More...
Life, and Nothing More...
Life, and Nothing More... is an Iranian film directed by Abbas Kiarostami. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival...
, regarded by critics as the second film of the Koker trilogy. The film follows a father and his young son as they drive from Tehran to Koker in search of two young boys who they fear might have perished in the 1990 earthquake. As they travel through the devastated landscape, they meet earthquake survivors forced to carry on with their lives amid tragedy.
That year Kiarostami won a Prix Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
, the first professional film award of his career, for his direction of the film. The last film of the so-called Koker trilogy was Through the Olive Trees (1994), which turns a peripheral scene from Life and Nothing More into the central drama.
Critics such as Adrian Martin
Adrian Martin
Dr. Adrian Martin is an Australian film and arts critic from Melbourne. Dr. Martin is Associate Professor, Co-Director of the Research Unit in Film Culture and Theory and Head of Film and Television Studies at Monash University...
have called the style of filmmaking in the Koker trilogy as "diagrammatical", linking the zig-zagging patterns in the landscape and the geometry of forces of life and the world. A flashback of the zigzag path in Life and Nothing More... (1992) in turn triggers the spectator’s memory of the previous film, Where Is the Friend’s Home? back in 1987, shot before the earthquake. This in turn symbolically links to post-earthquake reconstruction in Through the Olive Trees in 1994.
In 1995, Miramax Films
Miramax Films
Miramax Films is an American entertainment company known for distributing independent and foreign films. For its first 14 years the company was privately owned by its founders, Bob and Harvey Weinstein...
released Through the Olive Trees in the US theatrically.
Kiarostami next wrote the screenplays for The Journey
The Journey (1995 film)
The Journey is a 1995 Iranian film directed by Ali-Reza Raisian, written by Abbas Kiarostami....
and The White Balloon (1995), for his former assistant Jafar Panahi
Jafar Panahi
Jafar Panahi is an Iranian filmmaker and is one of the most influential filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave movement. He has gained recognition from film theorists and critics worldwide and received numerous awards including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Silver Bear at the...
. Between 1995 and 1996, he was involved in the production of Lumière and Company
Lumière and Company
Lumière and Company was a collaboration between 41 international film directors in which each made a short film using the original Cinématographe camera invented by the Lumière brothers....
, a collaboration with 40 other film directors.
In 1997, Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...
(Golden Palm) award at the Cannes Film Festival
1997 Cannes Film Festival
-Jury:*Isabelle Adjani *Gong Li *Mira Sorvino *Paul Auster *Tim Burton *Luc Bondy *Patrick Dupond *Mike Leigh *Nanni Moretti *Michael Ondaatje -Feature film competition:...
for Taste of Cherry
Taste of Cherry
Taste of Cherry is a 1997 film by the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. It is a minimalist film about a man who drives through a city suburb looking for someone who can carry out the task to bury him after he has died.-Plot:...
, the tale of a man, Mr. Badii, determined to commit suicide. The film involved themes such as morality, the legitimacy of the act of suicide, and the meaning of compassion.
In 1999, Kiarostami directed The Wind Will Carry Us
The Wind Will Carry Us
The Wind Will Carry Us is a 1999 Iranian film by Abbas Kiarostami. The title is a reference to a poem written by the famous modern Iranian woman poet Forough Farrokhzad. In 1999, the movie was nominated for Golden Lion of Venice Film Festival. It won Grand Special Jury Prize , FIPRESCI Prize and...
, which won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
. The film contrasted rural and urban views on the dignity of labor, addressing themes of gender equality and the benefits of progress, by means of a stranger's sojourn in a remote Kurdish village. An interesting feature of the movie is that many of the characters are heard but not seen, and there are at least thirteen to fourteen characters in the film who remain invisible throughout.
2000s
In 2002, Kiarostami directed TenTen (film)
Ten is a 2002 Iranian film directed by Abbas Kiarostami and starring Mania Akbari. It was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and ranks at number 447 on Empire magazine's 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time...
, revealing an unusual method of filmmaking and abandoning many scriptwriting conventions. Kiarostami focused on the socio-political landscape of Iran, and the images are seen through the eyes of one woman as she drives through the streets of Tehran over a period of several days. Her journey is composed of ten conversations with various passengers, which include her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute and a jilted bride and her demanding young son. This style of filmmaking was praised by a number of professional film critics such as A. O. Scott
A. O. Scott
Anthony Oliver Scott, known as A. O. Scott , is an American journalist and critic. He is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with Manohla Dargis.-Background and education:...
in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, who wrote that Kiarostami, "in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema...He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk."
In 2001, Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, traveled to Kampala
Kampala
Kampala is the largest city and capital of Uganda. The city is divided into five boroughs that oversee local planning: Kampala Central Division, Kawempe Division, Makindye Division, Nakawa Division and Lubaga Division. The city is coterminous with Kampala District.-History: of Buganda, had chosen...
, Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
at the request of the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
International Fund for Agricultural Development
International Fund for Agricultural Development
The International Fund for Agricultural Development , a specialized agency of the United Nations, was established as an international financial institution in 1977 as one of the major outcomes of the 1974 World Food Conference. IFAD is dedicated to eradicating rural poverty in developing countries...
, to film a documentary about programs assisting Ugandan orphans. He stayed for ten days and made ABC Africa
ABC Africa
ABC Africa is a 2001 Iranian documentary feature film directed by Abbas Kiarostami. It was screened out of competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival....
. The trip was originally intended as a research in preparation for the actual filming, but Kiarostami ended up editing the entire film from the video footage obtained. Although Uganda's orphans are overwhelmingly the result of the AIDS epidemic
HIV/AIDS in Africa
HIV/AIDS is a major public health concern and cause of death in Africa. Although Africa is home to about 14.5% of the world's population, it is estimated to be home to 67% of all people living with HIV and to 72% of all AIDS deaths in 2009.-Overview:...
, Time Out editor and National Film Theatre
BFI Southbank
BFI Southbank is the leading repertory cinema in the UK specialising in seasons of classic, independent and non-English language films and is operated by the British Film Institute.-History:...
chief programmer Geoff Andrew stated about Kiarostami's film: "Like his previous four features, this film is not about death but life-and-death: how they're linked, and what attitude we might adopt with regard to their symbiotic inevitability."
In 2003, Kiarostami directed Five, a poetic feature with no dialogue or characterization. It consists of five long shots of nature which are single-take sequences, shot with a hand-held DV
DV
DV is a format for the digital recording and playing back of digital video. The DV codec was launched in 1995 with joint efforts of leading producers of video camcorders....
camera, along the shores of the Caspian Sea
Caspian Sea
The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed body of water on Earth by area, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea. The sea has a surface area of and a volume of...
. Although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is "more than just pretty pictures". He further adds, "Assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration." He further notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery.
In 2004, Kiarostami produced 10 on Ten
10 on Ten
10 on Ten is a 2004 Iranian documentary film directed by Abbas Kiarostami. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival....
, a journal documentary that shares ten lessons on movie-making while driving through the locations of his past films. The movie is shot on digital video with a stationary camera mounted inside the car, in a manner reminiscent of Taste of Cherry and Ten.
In 2005 and 2006, he directed The Roads of Kiarostami
The Roads of Kiarostami
Roads of Kiarostami is a 2005 Iranian documentary film directed by Abbas Kiarostami.Looking to his own art for inspiration, Abbas Kiarostami reflects on the power of landscape, which combines views of the Iranian auteur's austere black-and-white photographs with poetic observations, engaging music...
, a 32-minute documentary that reflects on the power of landscape, combining austere black-and-white photographs with poetic observations, engaging music with political subject matter.
In 2005 Kiarostami contributed the central section to Tickets
Tickets (film)
Tickets is a 2005 comedy-drama film directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi....
, a portmanteau film
Anthology film
An anthology film is a feature film consisting of several different short films, often tied together by only a single theme, premise, or brief interlocking event . Sometimes each one is directed by a different director...
set on a train traveling through Italy. The other segments were directed by Ken Loach
Ken Loach
Kenneth "Ken" Loach is a Palme D'Or winning English film and television director.He is known for his naturalistic, social realist directing style and for his socialist beliefs, which are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as homelessness , labour rights and child abuse at the...
and Ermanno Olmi
Ermanno Olmi
Ermanno Olmi is a renowned Italian film director.-Biography:Olmi was born in Bergamo, Lombardy. He is married to Loredana Detto, who played Antonietta Masetti in Il Posto....
.
In 2008 he directed the feature Shirin
Shirin (film)
Shirin is a 2008 film directed by master Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The film is considered by some critics as a notable twist in the artistic career of Kiarostami....
.
2010s
As of April 2010, Kiarostami's next film is Certified CopyCertified Copy (film)
Certified Copy is a 2010 film by Iranian writer and director Abbas Kiarostami, starring Juliette Binoche and the British opera singer William Shimell, in his first film role. The film is set in Tuscany, and focuses on a British writer and a French antiques dealer, whose relationship undergoes an...
which has been shot in Tuscany. It is his first film which has been shot and produced outside Iran. It was entered in competition for the Palme d'Or
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...
in the 2010 Cannes Film Festival
2010 Cannes Film Festival
The 63rd annual Cannes Film Festival was held from May 12 to May 23, 2010, in Cannes, France. The Cannes Film Festival, hailed as being one of the most recognized and prestigious film festivals worldwide, was founded in 1946. It consists of having films screened in and out of competition during the...
.
Individualism
Though Kiarostami has been compared to Satyajit RaySatyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature...
, Vittorio de Sica
Vittorio de Sica
Vittorio De Sica was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement....
, Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher. A figure in the post-war New Wave cinema, he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma....
, and Jacques Tati
Jacques Tati
Jacques Tati was a French filmmaker, working as a comedic actor, writer and director. In a poll conducted by Entertainment Weekly of the Greatest Movie Directors Tati was voted the 46th greatest of all time...
, his films exhibit a singular style, often employing techniques of his own invention.
During the filming of The Bread and Alley in 1970, Kiarostami had major differences with his experienced cinematographer
Cinematographer
A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...
about how to film the boy and the attacking dog. While the cinematographer wanted separate shots of the boy approaching, a close up of his hand as he enters the house and closes the door, followed by a shot of the dog, Kiarostami believed that if the three scenes could be captured as a whole it would have a more profound impact in creating tension over the situation. That one shot took around forty days to complete, until Kiarostami was fully content with the scene. Abbas later commented that the breaking of scenes would have disrupted the rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
and content of the film's structure, preferring to let the scene flow as one.
Unlike other directors, Kiarostami has showed no interest in staging extravagant combat
Combat
Combat, or fighting, is a purposeful violent conflict meant to establish dominance over the opposition, or to terminate the opposition forever, or drive the opposition away from a location where it is not wanted or needed....
scenes or complicated chase scenes in large-scale productions, instead attempting to mold the medium of film to his own specifications. Kiarostami appeared to have settled on his style with the Koker trilogy, which included a myriad of references to his own film material, connecting common themes and subject matter between each of the films. Stephen Bransford has contended that Kiarostami's films do not contain references to the work of other directors, but are fashioned in such a manner that they are self-referenced. Bransford believes his films are often fashioned into an ongoing dialectic with one film reflecting on and partially demystifying an earlier film.
Nevertheless, he continued experimenting with new modes of filming, using different directorial methods and techniques. A case in point is Ten, which was filmed in a moving automobile in which Kiarostami was not present. He gave suggestions to the actors about what to do, and a camera placed on the dashboard
Dashboard
A dashboard is a control panel placed in front of the driver of an automobile, housing instrumentation and controls for operation of the vehicle....
then filmed them while they drove around Tehran. The camera was allowed to roll, capturing the faces of the people involved during their daily routine, using a series of extreme-close shots. Ten was an experiment that used digital cameras to virtually eliminate the director. This new direction towards a Digital-Micro-Cinema, is defined as a micro-budget filmmaking practice, allied with a digital production basis.
Kiarostami's cinema offers a different definition of film. According to film professors such as Jamsheed Akrami of William Paterson University
William Paterson University
William Paterson University is a comprehensive public institution located in Wayne, New Jersey serving nearly 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students through five colleges: , , , , and ....
, Kiarostami has consistently attempted to redefine film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
by lowering its full definition and forcing the increased involvement of the audience. In recent years, he has also progressively trimmed down the timespan of his films, which Akrami believes reduces the filmmaking experience from a collective endeavor to a purer, more basic form of artistic expression.
Fiction and non-fiction
Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often a mix of fictional and documentary elements. Kiarostami has stated, "We can never get close to the truth except through lying."The boundary between fiction and non-fiction is significantly reduced in Kiarostami's cinema. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher.Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre , a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe...
, writing about Kiarostami, and in particular Life and Nothing More..., has argued that his films are neither quite fiction nor quite documentary. Life and Nothing More..., he argues, is neither representation nor reportage, but rather "evidence":
[I]t all looks like reporting, but everything underscores (indique à l'évidence) that it is the fiction of a documentary (in fact, Kiarostami shot the film several months after the earthquake), and that it is rather a document about "fiction": not in the sense of imagining the unreal, but in the very specific and precise sense of the technique, of the art of constructing images. For the image by means of which, each time, each opens a world and precedes himself in it (s'y précède) is not pregiven (donnée toute faite) (as are those of dreams, phantasms or bad films): it is to be invented, cut and edited. Thus it is evidence, insofar as, if one day I happen to look at my street on which I walk up and down ten times a day, I construct for an instant a new evidence of my street.
For Jean-Luc Nancy, this notion of cinema as "evidence", rather than as documentary or imagination, is tied to the way Kiarostami deals with life-and-death (cf. the remark by Geoff Andrew on ABC Africa, cited above, to the effect that Kiarostami's films are not about death but about life-and-death):
Existence resists the indifference of life-and-death, it lives beyond mechanical "life," it is always its own mourning, and its own joy. It becomes figure, image. It does not become alienated in images, but it is presented there: the images are the evidence of its existence, the objectivity of its assertion. This thought—which, for me, is the very thought of this film [Life and Nothing More...]—is a difficult thought, perhaps the most difficult. It's a slow thought, always under way, fraying a path so that the path itself becomes thought. It is that which frays images so that images become this thought, so that they become the evidence of this thought—and not in order to "represent" it.
In other words, wanting to accomplish more than just represent life and death as opposing forces, but rather to illustrate the way in which each element of nature is inextricably linked, Kiarostami has devised a cinema that does more than just present the viewer with the documentable "facts," but neither is it simply a matter of artifice. Because "existence" means more than simply life, it is projective, containing an irreducibly fictive element, but in this "being more than" life, it is therefore contaminated by mortality. Nancy is giving a clue, in other words, toward the interpretation of Kiarostami's statement that lying is the only way to truth.
Themes of life and death
The concepts of change and continuity, in addition to the themes of life and death, play a major role in Kiarostami's works. In the Koker trilogy, these themes play a central role. As illustrated in the aftermath of the 1990 Tehran earthquake disaster, they represent an ongoing opposition between life and death and the power of human resilience to overcome and defy destruction.However, unlike the Koker films, which convey an instinctual thirst for survival, Taste of Cherry
Taste of Cherry
Taste of Cherry is a 1997 film by the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. It is a minimalist film about a man who drives through a city suburb looking for someone who can carry out the task to bury him after he has died.-Plot:...
also explores the fragility of life and rhetorically focuses on the preciousness of life.
In contrast, symbols of death
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....
abound in The Wind Will Carry Us with the scenery of graveyard
Graveyard
A graveyard is any place set aside for long-term burial of the dead, with or without monuments such as headstones...
, the imminence of the old woman’s passing, and the ancestors that the character Farzad mentions early in the film. Such devices prompt the viewer to consider the parameter
Parameter
Parameter from Ancient Greek παρά also “para” meaning “beside, subsidiary” and μέτρον also “metron” meaning “measure”, can be interpreted in mathematics, logic, linguistics, environmental science and other disciplines....
s of the afterlife and immaterial existence. The viewer is asked to consider what constitutes the soul, and what happens to it after death. In discussing the film, Kiarostami has stated that he is the person who raises questions, rather than the person who answers them.
Some film critics believe that the assemblage of light versus dark scenes in Kiarostami's film grammar, such as in Taste of Cherry and Wind Will Carry Us, suggests the mutual existence of life with its endless possibilities and death as a factual moment of anyone’s life in his films.
Visual and audio techniques
Kiarostami's style is notable for the use of panoramic long shots, such as in the closing sequences of Life and Nothing More andThrough the Olive Trees, where the audience is intentionally distanced physically from the characters in order to stimulate reflection on their fate. Taste of Cherry is punctuated throughout by shots of this kind, including distant overhead shots of the suicidal Badii's car moving across the hills, usually while he is conversing with a passenger. However, the visual distancing techniques stand in juxtaposition to the sound of the dialog, which always remains in the foreground. Like the coexistence of a private and public space, or the frequent framing of landscapes through car windows, this fusion of distance with proximity can be seen as a way of generating suspense in the most mundane of moments.This relationship between distance and intimacy, between imagery and sound, is also present in the opening sequence to The Wind Will Carry Us. Michael J. Anderson has argued that such a thematic
Theme (arts)
In the visual arts, a theme is a broad idea or a message conveyed by a work, such as a performance, a painting, or a motion picture. This message is usually about life, society or human nature. Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a work. Themes are usually implied...
application of this central concept of presence without presence, through using such techniques, and by often referring to characters which the viewer does not see and sometimes not hear directly affects the nature and concept of space in the geographical
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
framework in which the world is portrayed. Kiarostami's use of sound and image
Image
An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...
ry conveys a world beyond what is directly visible and/or audible, which Anderson believes emphasizes the interconnectedness and shrinking of time and space in the modern world of telecommunications.
Other commentators such as film critic
Film criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...
Ben Zipper believe that Kiarostami’s work as a landscape artist is evident in his compositional distant shots of the dry hills throughout a number of his films directly impacting on his construction on the rural landscapes within his films.
Poetry and imagery
Ahmad Karimi-HakkakAhmad Karimi-Hakkak
Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak is a Persian literary figure and Iranist.Ahmad Karimi Hakkak was Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Washington for nineteen years. He is currently a professor and founding director of the Roshan Center for Persian Studies in the School of...
, of the University of Maryland
University of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...
, argues that one aspect of Kiarostami's cinematic style is that he is able to capture the essence of Persian poetry
Persian literature
Persian literature spans two-and-a-half millennia, though much of the pre-Islamic material has been lost. Its sources have been within historical Persia including present-day Iran as well as regions of Central Asia where the Persian language has historically been the national language...
and create poetic imagery within the landscape of his films. In several of his movies such as Where is the Friend's Home and The Wind Will Carry Us, classical Persian poetry is directly quoted in the film, highlighting the artistic link and intimate connection between them. This in turn reflects on the connection between the past and present, between continuity and change.
Omar Khayyám
Omar Khayyám was aPersian polymath: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, climatology and theology....
or modern Persian poets such as Sohrab Sepehri
Sohrab Sepehri
Sohrab Sepehri was a notable modern Persian poet and a painter.He was born in Kashan in Isfahan province....
and Forough Farrokhzad
Forough Farrokhzad
Forugh Farrokhzād was an Iranian poet and film director. Forugh Farrokhzad is arguably one of Iran's most influential female poets of the twentieth century...
. One scene in The Wind Will Carry Us has a long shot of a wheat field with rippling golden crops through which the doctor, accompanied by the filmmaker, is riding his scooter in a twisting road. In response to the comment that the other world is a better place than this one, the doctor recites this poem of Khayyam:
However, the aesthetic element involved with the poetry goes much farther back in time and is used more subtly than these examples suggest. Beyond issues of adaptation of text to film, Kiarostami often begins with an insistent will to give visual embodiment to certain specific image-making techniques in Persian poetry, both classical and modern. This prominently results in enunciating a larger philosophical
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
position, namely the ontological oneness of poetry and film.
It has been argued that the creative merit of Kiarostami's adaptation of Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad's poems extends the domain of textual transformation. Adaptation is defined as the transformation of a prior to a new text. Sima Daad of the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
contends that Kiarostami's adaptation arrives at the theoretical realm of adaptation by expanding its limit from inter-textual potential to trans-generic potential.
Spirituality
Kiarostami's films often reflect upon immaterial concepts such as soul and afterlife. At times, however, the very concept of the spiritual seems to be contradicted by the medium itself, given that it has no inherent means to confer the metaphysical. Some film theorists have argued that The Wind Will Carry Us provides a template by which a filmmaker can communicate metaphysicalMetaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
reality. The limits of the frame, the material representation of a space in dialog with another that is not represented, physically become metaphors for the relationship between this world and those which may exist apart from it. By limiting the space of the mise en scène
Mise en scène
Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
, Kiarostami expands the space of the art.
Kiarostami's "complex" sound-images and philosophical approach have caused frequent comparisons with "mystical" filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director, widely regarded as one of the finest filmmakers of the 20th century....
and Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson
-Life and career:Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907, varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and...
. Irrespective of substantial cultural differences, much of western writing about Kiarostami positions him as the Iranian equivalent of such directors, by virtue of universal austere, "spiritual" poetics and moral commitment. Some draw parallels between certain imagery in Kiarostami's films with that of Sufi concepts.
However, differing viewpoints have arisen about this issue. While a vast majority of English-language writers, such as David Sterritt and Spanish film professor Alberto Elena, interpret Kiarostami's films as spiritual films, other critics including David Walsh
David Walsh (writer)
David Walsh, born in New York City, New York, is a film critic and political writer for the World Socialist Web Site.- Works :* French Workers in Revolt: A New Stage in the Class Struggle, November–December 1995. ISBN 1-973045-22-4...
and Hamish Ford have diminished its influence in his films.
Poetry and photography
Kiarostami, along with Jean CocteauJean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
, Derek Jarman
Derek Jarman
Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener and author.-Life:...
, and Gulzar
Gulzar (lyricist)
Sampooran Singh Kalra , known popularly by his pen name Gulzar , is an Indian poet, lyricist and director. He primarily writes in Hindi-Urdu and has also written in Punjabi and several dialects of Hindi such as Braj Bhasha, Khariboli, Haryanvi and Marwari.Gulzar was awarded the Padma Bhushan in...
, is part of a tradition of filmmakers whose artistic expressions are not restricted to one medium, but who show the ability to use other forms such as poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, set designs, painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, or photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
to relate their interpretation of the world we live in and to illustrate their understanding of our preoccupations and identities.
Kiarostami is also a noted photographer and poet. A bilingual collection of more than 200 of his poems, Walking with the Wind, was published by Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...
. His photographic work includes Untitled Photographs, a collection of over thirty photographs, essentially of snow landscapes, taken in his hometown Tehran, between 1978 and 2003. In 1999, He also published a collection of his poems.
Riccardo Zipoli, from the Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
University of Venice
Ca' Foscari University is a university in Venice, northern Italy. It was founded in 1868 as the first Italian business college. The main building of the University, Ca’ Foscari Palace, is placed in a strategic position on the bend of the Grand Canal, in the heart of the city...
in Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
, has examined some aspects of the relations and interconnections between Kiarostami's poems and his films. The results of the analysis reveal how Kiarostami's treatment of this theme is similar in his poems and films.
Kiarostami's poetry is reminiscent of the later nature poems of the Persian painter-poet, Sohrab Sepehri
Sohrab Sepehri
Sohrab Sepehri was a notable modern Persian poet and a painter.He was born in Kashan in Isfahan province....
. On the other hand, the succinct allusion to philosophical
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
truths without the need for deliberation, the non-judgmental tone of the poetic voice, and the structure of the poem—absence of personal pronouns, adverbs or over reliance on adjectives—as well as the lines containing a kigo (a season word) gives much of this poetry a Haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
esque characteristic.
Reception and criticism
Kiarostami has received worldwide acclaim for his work from both audiences and critics, and, in 1999, he was unequivocally voted the most important film director of the 1990s by two international critics' polls. Four of his films were placed in the top six of Cinematheque Ontario's Best of the '90s poll. He has gained recognition from film theorists, critics, as well as peers such as Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, Nanni Moretti
Nanni Moretti
Giovanni "Nanni" Moretti is an Italian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor.-Life and work:Moretti was born in Bruneck, South Tyrol , in 1953 to parents who were teachers...
(who made a short film about opening one of Kiarostami's films in his theater in Rome), Chris Marker
Chris Marker
Chris Marker is a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée , A Grin Without a Cat , Sans Soleil and AK , an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa...
, Ray Carney
Ray Carney
Ray Carney, also known as Raymond Carney, Ph.D, is an American scholar and critic, primarily known for his work as a film theorist, although he writes extensively on American art and literature as well. He is known for his study of the works of actor and director John Cassavetes...
, and Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
, who said of Kiarostami's films: "Words cannot describe my feelings about them ... When Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature...
passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami’s films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place."
Critically acclaimed directors such as Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
have commented that "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." In 2006, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
s panel of critics ranked Kiarostami as the best contemporary non-American film director.
Nevertheless, critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...
have argued that "there's no getting around the fact that the movies of Abbas Kiarostami divide audiences—in this country, in his native Iran, and everywhere else they're shown." Rosenbaum argues that disagreements and controversy over Kiarostami's movies have arisen from his style of filmmaking because what in Hollywood would count as essential narrative information is frequently missing from Kiarostami's films. Camera placement, likewise, often defies standard audience expectations. In the closing sequences of Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees, the audience is forced to imagine missing scenes. In Homework and Close-Up, parts of the sound track have been masked, or drop in and out. It has also been argued that the subtlety of Kiarostami's form of cinematic expression is resistant to critical analysis.
While Kiarostami has won significant acclaim in Europe for several of his films, the Iranian government has refused to permit the screening of his films in his native Iran. Kiarostami has responded, "The government has decided not to show any of my films for the past 10 years... I think they don't understand my films and so prevent them being shown just in case there is a message they don't want to get out".
Kiarostami has faced opposition in the United States as well. In 2002, he was refused a visa
Visa (document)
A visa is a document showing that a person is authorized to enter the territory for which it was issued, subject to permission of an immigration official at the time of actual entry. The authorization may be a document, but more commonly it is a stamp endorsed in the applicant's passport...
to attend the New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
. Festival director Richard Peña
Richard Peña
Richard Peña is the American film program director of the prestigious Film Society of Lincoln Center noted for his organization of the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films series and Scanners .-Early life:Interested in film at a very young age, when Richard was just 12 years old, he was...
, who had invited him said, "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
world". Finnish
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
film director Aki Kaurismäki
Aki Kaurismäki
-Career:After studying Media Studies at the University of Tampere, Aki Kaurismäki started his career as a co-director in the films of his elder brother Mika Kaurismäki. His debut as an independent director was Crime and Punishment , Dostoyevsky's famous crime story set in modern-day Helsinki...
boycotted the festival in protest. Kiarostami had been invited by the New York International Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
, as well as Ohio University
Ohio University
Ohio University is a public university located in the Midwestern United States in Athens, Ohio, situated on an campus...
and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
In 2005, London Film School
London Film School
The London Film School is a private film school in London and is situated in a converted brewery in Covent Garden, London, close to a hub of the UK film industry based in Soho. The LFS was founded in 1956 by Bob Dunbar as The London School of Film Technique...
organized a workshop as well as festival of Kiarostami’s work, titled "Abbas Kiarostami: Visions of the Artist". Ben Gibson, Director of the London Film School, said, "Very few people have the creative and intellectual clarity to invent cinema from its most basic elements, from the ground up. We are very lucky to have the chance to see a master like Kiarostami thinking on his feet."
In 2007, The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center co-organized a festival of the Kiarostami's work, titled "Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker". Kiarostami and his cinematic style have been the subject of several books and two films, Il Giorno della prima di Close Up
Opening Day of Close-Up
Opening Day of Close-Up is a 1996 Italian short film directed by Nanni Moretti. It was screened out of competition at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.-Cast:* Fabia Bergamo* Paolo Di Virgilio* Paola Orfei* Fausto Polacco* Amleto Vitali...
(1996), directed by Nanni Moretti
Nanni Moretti
Giovanni "Nanni" Moretti is an Italian film director, producer, screenwriter and actor.-Life and work:Moretti was born in Bruneck, South Tyrol , in 1953 to parents who were teachers...
and Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living (2003), directed by Fergus Daly. Abbas Kiarostami is also a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation
World Cinema Foundation
The World Cinema Foundation is a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation and restoration of neglected world cinema.It was founded in 2007, inspired by the work of The Film Foundation in the United States, a similar venture which Martin Scorsese founded with George Lucas, Stanley...
. The project was founded by Martin Scorsese and aimed at finding and reconstructing world cinema films that have been long neglected. Austrian director Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke is a German born Austrian filmmaker and writer best known for his bleak and disturbing style. His films often document problems and failures in modern society. Haneke has worked in television‚ theatre and cinema. He is also known for raising social issues in his work...
has admired the work of Abbas Kiarostami as one of the best.
Honors and awards
Kiarostami has won the admiration of audiences and critics worldwide and received at least seventy awards up to the year 2000. Here are some representatives:- Prix Roberto RosselliniRoberto RosselliniRoberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
(1992) - Prix Cine Decouvertes (1992)
- François TruffautFrançois TruffautFrançois Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
Award (1993) - Pier Paolo PasoliniPier Paolo PasoliniPier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure...
Award (1995) - Federico FelliniFederico FelliniFederico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
Gold Medal, UNESCOUNESCOThe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
(1997) - Palme d'OrPalme d'OrThe Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...
, Cannes FestivalCannes Film FestivalThe Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
(1997) - Honorary Golden Alexander Prize, Thessaloniki Film Festival (1999)
- Silver LionSilver LionThe Leone d’Argento refers to a number of awards presented at the Venice Film Festival. The Silver Lion is awarded irregularly and have gone through several changes of purpose. Until 1995, Silver Lions were infrequently awarded to a number of films as second prize for those nominated for the...
, Venice Film FestivalVenice Film FestivalThe Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
(1999) - Akira KurosawaAkira Kurosawawas a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...
Award (2000) - Honorary doctorate, École Normale SupérieureÉcole Normale SupérieureThe École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...
(2003) - Konrad WolfKonrad WolfKonrad Wolf was an East German film director, son of Friedrich Wolf, brother of Markus Wolf....
Prize (2003) - President of the Jury for Caméra d'Or AwardCaméra d'OrThe Caméra d'Or is an award of the Cannes Film Festival for the best first feature film presented in one of the Cannes' selections ....
, Cannes Festival (2005) - FellowFellowA fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...
ship of the British Film InstituteBritish Film InstituteThe British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
(2005) - Gold Leopard of HonorLeopard of HonourThe Leopard of Honour is a life's work achievement award at the Locarno International Film Festival, an international film festival held annually in Locarno, Switzerland. The award has been given out since 1989 with an exception in 2001...
, Locarno film festivalLocarno International Film FestivalThe Film Festival Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. After Cannes and Venice and together with Karlovy Vary, Locarno is the Film Festival with the longest history...
(2005) - Prix Henri-LangloisHenri LangloisHenri Langlois was a French film archivist and cinephile. A pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema...
Prize (2006) - Honorary doctorate, University of ToulouseUniversity of ToulouseThe Université de Toulouse is a consortium of French universities, grandes écoles and other institutions of higher education and research, named after one of the earliest universities established in Europe in 1229, and including the successor universities to that earlier university...
(2007) - World's great masters, Kolkata Film FestivalKolkata Film FestivalThe Kolkata Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Kolkata, India, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1995, it is second oldest international film festival in India. The festival is organized by West Bengal Film Centre under...
(2007) - Glory to the Filmmaker Award, Venice Film Festival (2008)
- Honorary doctorate, University of ParisUniversity of ParisThe University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
(2010)
Film festival work
Kiarostami was a jury member at numerous film festivals, most notably the Cannes Film FestivalCannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
in 1993
1993 Cannes Film Festival
- Jury :* Louis Malle * Claudia Cardinale * Inna Churikova * Judy Davis * Abbas Kiarostami * Emir Kusturica * William Lubtchansky * Tom Luddy * Gary Oldman * Augusto M...
, 2002
2002 Cannes Film Festival
The 2002 Cannes Film Festival started on 15 May and ran until 26 May. The Palme d'Or went to the Polish-French-German-British co-produced film The Pianist directed by Roman Polanski.-Jury:* David Lynch * Sharon Stone* Michelle Yeoh...
and 2005
2005 Cannes Film Festival
The 2005 Cannes Film Festival started on May 11 and ran until May 22. Twenty movies from 13 countries were selected to compete. The awards were announced on May 21...
. He was also the president of the Caméra d'Or
Caméra d'Or
The Caméra d'Or is an award of the Cannes Film Festival for the best first feature film presented in one of the Cannes' selections ....
Jury in Cannes Film Festival 2005.
Some representatives:
- VeniceVenice Film FestivalThe Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
in 1985 - LocarnoLocarno International Film FestivalThe Film Festival Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. After Cannes and Venice and together with Karlovy Vary, Locarno is the Film Festival with the longest history...
in 1990 - Cannes1993 Cannes Film Festival- Jury :* Louis Malle * Claudia Cardinale * Inna Churikova * Judy Davis * Abbas Kiarostami * Emir Kusturica * William Lubtchansky * Tom Luddy * Gary Oldman * Augusto M...
in 1993 - San SebastianSan Sebastián International Film FestivalThe San Sebastián International Film Festival is an annual FIAPF A category film festival held in the Spanish city of San Sebastián .-History:The festival was founded in 1953...
in 1996. - Cannes2002 Cannes Film FestivalThe 2002 Cannes Film Festival started on 15 May and ran until 26 May. The Palme d'Or went to the Polish-French-German-British co-produced film The Pianist directed by Roman Polanski.-Jury:* David Lynch * Sharon Stone* Michelle Yeoh...
in 2002 - São Paulo International Film FestivalSão Paulo International Film FestivalThe São Paulo International Film Festival is a film festival held annually in São Paulo, Brazil since 1976. In 2004 Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami was a member of the jury.-International Jury Award:*2001: The New Country ...
(2004) - Cannes2005 Cannes Film FestivalThe 2005 Cannes Film Festival started on May 11 and ran until May 22. Twenty movies from 13 countries were selected to compete. The awards were announced on May 21...
in 2005 (president) - Capalbio Cinema Festival in 2007 (president)
Books by Kiarostami
- Abbas Kiarostami, Havres : French translation by Tayebeh Hashemi and Jean-Restom Nasser, ÉRÈS (PO&PSY); Bilingual edition (3 June 2010) ISBN 2749212234.
- Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami: Cahiers du Cinema Livres (24 October 1997) ISBN 2-86642-196-5.
- Abbas Kiarostami, Walking with the Wind (Voices and Visions in Film): English translation by Ahmad Karimi-HakkakAhmad Karimi-HakkakAhmad Karimi-Hakkak is a Persian literary figure and Iranist.Ahmad Karimi Hakkak was Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Washington for nineteen years. He is currently a professor and founding director of the Roshan Center for Persian Studies in the School of...
and Michael C. Beard, Harvard Film Archive; Bilingual edition (28 February 2002) ISBN 0-674-00844-8. - Abbas Kiarostami, 10 (ten): Cahiers du CinemaCahiers du cinémaCahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
Livres (5 September 2002) ISBN 2-86642-346-1. - Abbas Kiarostami, Nahal Tajadod and Jean-Claude CarrièreJean-Claude CarrièreJean-Claude Carrière is a screenwriter and actor. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he was a frequent collaborator with Luis Buñuel...
Avec le vent: P.O.L. (5 May 2002) ISBN 2-86744-889-1. - Abbas Kiarostami, Le vent nous emportera: Cahiers du Cinema Livres (5 September 2002) ISBN 2-86642-347-X.
- Abbas Kiarostami, La Lettre du Cinema: P.O.L. (12 December 1997) ISBN 2-86744-589-2.
See also
Kiarostami's assistants:- Jafar PanahiJafar PanahiJafar Panahi is an Iranian filmmaker and is one of the most influential filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave movement. He has gained recognition from film theorists and critics worldwide and received numerous awards including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Silver Bear at the...
- Hassan YektapanahHassan YektapanahHassan Yektapanah is an internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker and screen writer.He started his career as an assistant director, first with Jafar Panahi on “The Mirror” and then on Abbas Kiarostami’s award-winning film “The Taste of Cherry” .He made his own debut as a director with Djomeh,...
- Bahman GhobadiBahman GhobadiBahman Ghobadi is an Iranian film director of Kurdish ethnicity. He was born on February 1, 1969 in Baneh, Kurdistan Province. Ghobadi belongs to the so called "new wave" of Iranian cinema.-Biography:...
- Bahman KiarostamiBahman KiarostamiBahman Kiarostami is an Iranian film director, cinematographer, film editor, film producer and translator, son of the critically acclaimed Abbas Kiarostami....
(son) - Elaine Tyler-Hall
General:
- Intellectual movements in IranIntellectual movements in IranIntellectual movements in Iran involve the Iranian experience of modernity and its associated art, science, literature, poetry, and political structures that have been changing since the 19th century.- History of Iranian modernity :...
- Iranian New Wave (cinema)Iranian New Wave (cinema)Iranian New Wave refers to a new movement in Iranian cinema. It started in 1969 after the release of The Cow directed by Darius Mehrjui. It was followed by Masoud Kimiai's Qeysar, and Nasser Taqvai's Calm in Front of Others. They set off a trend that was cultural, dynamic and intellectual. The...
- Cinema of IranCinema of IranThe cinema of Iran is a flourishing film industry with a long history. Many popular commercial films are annually made in Iran, and Iranian art films win praise around the world....
- List of Iranian intellectuals
External links
- Biography of Abbas Kiarostami at Zeitgeist FilmsZeitgeist FilmsZeitgeist Films is an American independent film distributor based in New York City founded in 1988 by co-Presidents Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo. Films distributed by Zeitgeist are strongly auteur-driven by directors such as Christopher Nolan, Guy Maddin, Atom Egoyan, Todd Haynes, Nuri Bilge...
- Overview of Kiarostami's career, with emphasis on Ten and Certified Copy