ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

Bread and Alley (1970)
Kiarostami's earliest short is nevertheless one of his best, concerning a child who needs to pass through an alley that is guarded by a dog, and as usual for the director the simple wisdom of the story is brought forward subtly by de-emphasizing narrative and instead emphasizing time spent with his actors. The film is practically a study of the child's face as it waits patiently, impatiently, tries to think of ways out of the situation, grows bored, is scared, etc…the entire middle of the film is content with the variety of dissatisfied expressions playing on the child’s face as he is stuck in a situation (and, when it comes down to it, isn’t all of Kiarostami’s cinema about people’s reactions—actors and real people, or one as the other—to situations they are stuck in?).

Recess (1972)
Along with the next film and later The Traveller, this movie forms a loose early trilogy of Kiarostami's bleakest and most open ended films, this one concerning a student who is chewed out at school for breaking a window, and then who leaves for recess and is continually kept as an outsider (from a soccer game and even from crossing a traffic filled street) until he walks off into the blinding light of sun glinting off the concrete. Like the next film, this one also features very deliberate compositions from the director, giving it a more studied, slightly distanced and thought-out "art-house" feel.

The Experience (1973)
This was probably the weakest fictional short I've seen in the entire series, both over composed in terms of aesthetics and a bit too wandering and arbitrary in terms of story (about a child working and sleeping at a photographer’s shop and pining after a higher class girl who goes to a nice school). The emphasis on class hierarchy connects it with The Wedding Suit, but there is very little subtlety to the work, perhaps because unlike that film (and other Kiarostami works in general) this one does not rely on human, social interactions and is instead a 400 Blows-style narrative of young solitude. Recess is like that to a degree as well, but its simplicity of narrative, briefness of lengthy, and forward movement (it is, like many of the director’s work, structured around traveling onward) allowed the work to achieve an emotional poignancy in its loneliness and desolation that feels over-determined in The Experience. Of course, Kiarostami is talented, and even uncharacteristically "arty" sequences of the film can be quite beautiful: the child squatting above his reflection in a local well, driving a motor bike in a cramped circle in an alley (echoing a later scene in Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures), and the child watching two candles die down in front of him on a lonely night.

So Can I (1975)
The weakest of the shorts I've seen so far is another educational one for children where a child counters an animation ("A Kangaroo can hop!) by saying "so can I" and imitating it, until the teacher mentions a bird can fly and the movie cuts to an airplane. How much one should read into this is a mostly pointless game, although at first I was thinking about the limits of human physical imagination and the possibilities of human creative imagination, but now I focus on the kid’s attitude, countering the cloying teacher’s voice-over and lame animation with his own obstinate belief in his own abilities (until the end!).

The Traveller (1974)
Like Recess and The Experience, this is a dismayingly dark work about children, and like the others featuring a very serious appreciation of a child's depression. This one concerns (inevitably) a young boy and his friend as he tries to round up enough money to travel to Tehran to see a soccer match, through which the boy ends up stealing, cheating younger students, lying, throwing away the money he needs to travel home, skipping school, and finally sleeping through the match itself. But Kiarostami never judges, and a dream sequence (!) makes clear that the boy is not only plagued with guilt for the path he has taken to get to the game, but also has a number of other anxieties and problems that reach beyond his mother's low opinion of him and connects to Homework’s focus on dysfunctional, irresponsible home lives presided over by semi-literate parents who don’t understand their children. Like all of the director's shorts, this one has as much a sense of the vivacity, invention, and freedom of a (male) child's life as it does for his loneliness, repression, limitations, and delinquency. It would also make a good companion piece to Panahi's Offside, as it is somewhat of the same scenario but seen from a different gender and age.

Two Solutions for One Problem (1975)
One of my favorites; the problem is a damaged book returned to the owner, the first solution is a fight that breaks out between the children when the wrong is not admitted and rectified. Kiarostami shoots the fight with a Bresson-like essentialism with the impassive children mechanically performing their vengeful actions, and counters this strictness with the euphoric potential of a goofy and charming two-shot of the children with arms around one another. The wonderful short can be found on YouTube here.

Colors (1976)
A charming educational film for children about colors ("What is blue? The sky is blue!") that includes an unexpected but quite ingenious digression into a child's fantasy about racing cars using toys instead of the real thing.

The Wedding Suit (1976)
A delightful short feature about a trio of children who banter, lie, argue, and boast over a new suit being made for a rich kid, exploring class boundaries and preoccupations through extended, repetitious dialog sequences and a subtle emphasis on real surroundings such as the tiered shopping complex (also reflecting the film's focus on class hierarchy) the boys work at.

How to Make Use of Leisure Time: Painting (1978)
An instructional film about combating laziness through learning the craft of painting (as well as being a bit condescending to crafts-based trades and professions), but like Colors carries an emphasis on the objects and make-up of everyday things in life.

Solution No. 1 (1978)
A beguilingly simple landscape film of a man stranded on a highway mysteriously hanging onto a spare tire, with a cute surprise ending.

Toothache (1979)
A didactic educational film on why one should brush one's teeth, which becomes strange when the quasi-fictional character suffering toothache goes to the dentist, who then takes over the film by reciting to the camera facts about tooth decay, in the background the boy's (real?) discomfort, moaning and pain being impossible to ignore on the soundtrack, and sets up a dialectic between real, human suffering and scientific governmentality. The results of the combination are unclear and may have been somewhat unintended.

Orderly or Disorderly (1981)
So far my favorite of the shorts, Kiarostami juxtaposing "takes" of "scenes" done with order and done with disorder, such as children calmly entering a bus vs. children pushing and shoving to get on board, culminating in an "orderly" shot of a traffic intersection that degenerates into "disorder" as the populace refuses to follow traffic signals, the director exclaiming over the soundtrack at the behavior, and later even a police officer cannot prevent the supposed order of traffic regulation to function properly.

The Chorus (1982)
A fictional feature and so far the most overtly, if abstractly, political, about an old man who periodically removes his hearing aid so as to avoid the nuisance of complaining craftsmen or noisy streets, but also makes him deaf to his granddaughters who need to be let into the house after school...when he fails to let them in the crowd of young female schoolchildren grows and grows as they chant a rally-like mantra "Grandpa, open the door!"

Fellow Citizen (1983)
A short documentary feature about a single traffic cop who has to keep regular citizens out of a Tehran street due to laws enacted to reduce traffic, and Kiarostami heightens the limitations of the framing (almost entirely from a single angle/position) and shoots people through car windows and other frames to highlight this film's focus on the lies and storytelling people will concoct to try to get around strict laws. It is as much a denunciation of seemingly arbitrary policing of questionable laws as it is a dedication to stick-to-itiveness of the cop in the face of a continually absurd situation.

First Graders (1984)
A documentary feature (for the most part, as Kiarostami successfully blends fictional elements in the film, such as slight story arcs underlined by shifts in camera placement) about a class of first graders centered around disciplinary interrogations by a school administrator. A companion piece to Fellow Citizen in the way repetitious encounters explore the nature of the way children explain, rationalize, and perhaps lie about disruptive situations (it is key that Kiarostami does not show a single of the incidents discussed between the kids and the man, we only see their understanding and navigation of the off-screen events). It is also a companion piece to Homework in its use of strict aesthetic limits (shots of the school yard and the single office almost entirely dominate, as well as the mostly off-camera authoritarian figure, who is replaced by Kiarostami in that later film)) and emphasis on discipline (in the school yard everyone exercises in sync and kids are brought up front to be congratulated on good behavior).

Where Is the Friend's House? (1987)
Nothing caught me off-guard more than this "realist" director indulging in the magical night walk through the village, with the old man's stained-glass windows casting elaborate, beautiful shadows and colors on the walls of the town at the very height of the child's fraught nerves, high—and soon, dashed—hopes. The beauty of the old man’s glass is also linked to the Kiarostami finding value in old traditionalism, which much of the film critiques.

Homework (1989)
A sort of follow-up to First Grader but with a more active part for Kiarostami, this documentary is essentially a series of interviews between the director and first graders about why they don’t do their homework. The focus quickly gets sidetracked first to the predominant amount of illiteracy that exists in the parents of the children, but more importantly to the issue of punishment (always as “beatings”, whose specific violence or euphemistic possibilities is never elucidated) and encouragement (most kids don’t know what that means), there being much too much of the former and far too little of the latter. As always, one wants to liberally read subversive themes in a work such as this, and shots of the kids chanting anti-West and anti- Iraq mantras, as well as several children alluding to wanting to be soldiers or kill in the Iran-Iraq war does invite connections between later remarks in the film about the education system emphasizing close-minded, repetitious exercises that prevent the children from thinking for themselves, with imagination. As usual (in this series so far, at least), Kiarostami employs heavy repetition, spare mise-en-scène, and realistic locations to find similarities between disparate individuals stuck in the same social situation. As in Orderly or Disorderly the director is very much a presence in the diegesis, here both aurally asking questions and visually as in fake reverse-shots and in (also fake) reverse shots of the camera as a stand-in for the questioner. The two final interviewees are adults and seem somewhat unbalanced compared to the equality and breadth of variety of the children, but also help contextualize the education system beyond the specific individuals (in the case of the liberal parent who wants reform) as well as hint at the mask that covers the potential violence in many of the films (in the case of the father who seems normal but whose child is terribly, disturbingly frightened of everything, and who suggests that the problem with his boy can be fixed by the school and not by his parenting).

Through the Olive Trees (1994)
Like Life, and Nothing More, this film takes a previous Kiarostami film as a starting point to find the life behind the camera that becomes on camera. This film looks behind the scenes of that film to find a haphazard romance developed literally off-camera. Kiarostami very cleverly reveals that out of the frame of shots on Life, and Nothing More one of his non-professional actors was pursuing an unreturned love for another one of his non-professionals. The (fictional) director subtly tries to encourage the couple and play match maker, but the troubles between the two, which are as related to class issues (the man is illiterate and has no house, and even the "film's" "crew" treats him with bossy condescension) as they are to the earthquake that devastated the area (and killed off most of the family both the girl and the boy), are more powerful than the director's intervention and force the relationship play out at its own pace. The beautiful final shot, despite the triumphant music, summarizes the formal approach of Kiaorstami's film behind a film behind a film, that there are always gaps, off-screen space, and silences in any documentary or fictional film in which are all the ambiguities and potential of real life exist.

A Taste of Cherry (1997)
A most satisfying and sublime combination of Kiarostami's move towards character arcs and conventional (i.e. expected or almost "predictable") narrative with the openness of the Koker trilogy, its languour and use of driving and landscape mostly ambiently or abstractly, as well as the documentary interviews of the director's primarily non-fiction work. The film definitely prefigures the self-criticque to come in The Wind Will Carry Us through the subtle realization that the protagonist, who is driving around trying to find someone who, if our protagonist successfully commits sucide, will bury his body, or if he does not go through with it help him out of his pit, is only interested in and inquisitive about his passengers' lives because he is trying to take advantage of them. Like in Kiarostami's next film, this is definitely an expression of the filmmaker seeing a level, however subtle or unintended, of exploitation, or, if not that, at least unexpected, unexpressed or indirect intentions in his interviewing, and the majority of the film is this suicidal man chatting with his passengers. The somewhat infamous DV ending is perhaps the most refreshing element about the film, stepping back from the art-house discreetness of projects even as partially non-fiction as this and reminding one of the last two films of the Koker trilogy, seeing life in the film and film in life. There is something magical in the power of this beautifully amateur and pixelated DV to resurrect the protagonist, or suggest another level of existance, or another orbit of guiding factors in his life.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)
I haven't seen A Taste of Cherry yet, so the jump from Through the Olive Trees to this is a surprising one, as this movie feels much more "written", with its narrative surrounding the ethical and spiritual growth of an outsider, audience-surrogate protagonist, as well as the inclusion of highly emblematic "symbols" (the leg bone, the flipped turtle, the milk pail, etc.). Yet, as Jonathan Rosenbaum astutely points out in his rich review of this film, the movie also appears to be the most self-critical of Kiarostami's work, where for once the director surrogate is no longer the slightly ambiguous interviewer stand-in of Through the Olive Trees and is instead a fully-fledged protagonist whose intrusion into real lives and use of real suffering for his documentary purposes (he is a journalist) is the focus of the entire narrative. In a way, the film is disappointing because it does not seem to contain that subtle, powerful lack of distinction between fiction and reality of Kiarostami's other works, but the weaving of the self-critique into the portrait of this particular village in this particular area is still wondrous. This film also contains another "magical" interlude, the titular sequence where the main character recites poetry to a young woman in an underground cellar, which in its use of poetry, sexuality, gender, and outsider relations, is just as ambiguous as the night walk of Where Is the Friend's House? where the conservative older generation got a compassionate lament and the so-far wise younger generation showed its impatience.

ABC Africa (2001)
I was really looking forward to Kiarostami's return to documentary filmmaking, but was disappointed by the often conventional, heavy-handed, and cloying aspect of the film. That's not to say it isn't interesting. Perhaps most intriguing, in terms of both Kiarostami's past history and the director's new use of digital cameras, is the move away from a documentaries structured around characters talking/looking at the camera to one based almost entirely around spatial dimensionality, of the handheld cameras moving around inside a space. The camera also is no longer serving as a stand-in for the director's head/eye/mouth (as in Homework) and is instead part of the cameraman's hand. As Kiarostami is fascinated by the intrusion of a camera into the lives of his film's subjects, in the film's first third this hand-camera has an almost magnetic effect on the area, drawing and attracting children. Kiarostami repeats the technique of showing one cameraman filming another cameraman, and then cutting into the image of the camera-on-camera, in effect entering and leaving the subject of the documentary to document its own creation. All interesting aspects, but the content of the film never really captured me, although Kiarostami sometimes undercuts the ideology of the volunteer group who hired the director (in one sequence even cutting from the cries of a child suffering from AIDS to workers in the hospital laughing). The best sequence(s) in the film, is, again, the "magical" darkness scene that seems to be a characteristic of the director's films. Here it is a long stretch of a black screen, since the power to the hotel the filmmakers are staying at is cut off at midnight. This is also a rare scene where the documentary crew verbally talks about their production and their subject, and it is followed up the next day by another sequence that is more introspective, self-reflexive, and refreshingly loose.

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