Abbas Kiarostami

Contemporary Film Directors

by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Jonathan Rosenbaum

This penetrating study of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's life and work engages a cross-cultural dialogue between Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, an Iranian filmmaker, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, a film critic, both of whom have an intense interest in Kiarostami's work. A pioneer in Iranian cinema and considered one of the most controversial and influential filmmakers alive, Kiarostami has written or directed more than twenty films. He gained notoriety in the West in the 1990s with the breakaway films Close-Up and Through the Olive Trees and became the first Iranian director to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Taste of Cherry . He is also largely credited for his contributions to the Iranian New Wave. Abbas Kiarostami is the first full-length, English-language study of his work. A unique and resplendent collaboration featuring two distinct but complementing perspectives, the book places Kiarostami and his films in a national context and provides American readers with valuable insights into Iranian culture, Kiarostami's portrayal of women and politics, and his influence on other filmmakers.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Iran, Art

168 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 2003

About the author

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa is a filmmaker and a professor of cinema and television arts at Columbia College in Chicago. She is the author of several essays and articles on Iranian cinema.

Reviews

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

el análisis de la filmografía de este tío me ha cambiado toda la percepción del cine que tenía hasta ahora mis dieces especialmente a la señora Mehrnaz 🤌🏼

[Wissiann · Rating 3 out of 5]

برای پروژه‌ی پایانی واحد سینما، در ترم اول ارشد به سراغ فیلم‌های کیارستمی رفتم، قبل از اون اکثر جسته و گریخته کارهای کیارستمی رو دیده بودم، ولی الان وقتش بود که برم و عمیق کارهاش رو ببینم.
.
فکر کنم از تمامی کارگران‌های سینمایی ایران، کیارستمی بیشتر کتاب در مورد خودش و کاراش وجود داشته باشه. چه نویسنده‌های ایرانی و چه خارجی.
برای شروع اما من به سراغ این کتاب رفتم، دلیل اولم این بود که برای هر فیلمی بخش جدا وجود داشت، و من میتونستم با دیدن هر فیلم و نوشتن نظر خودم، به سراغ این کتاب بیام و نظریات نویسنده‌ها رو هم بخونم.
اما موضوع دوم همین نویسنده‌های کتاب بودن؛
دو نفر با پیش‌زمینه‌های مختلف فرهنگی و جغرافیایی.
یکی شرقی و دیگری غربی، و این برای من نکته بسیار مثبتی بود که در عوض کتاب فلسفه و کیارستمی، به سراغ این کتاب برم و گفت‌وگو های این دو نفر را پیرامون کار‌های کیارستمی مطالعه کنم.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the essay that kicks off his and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s book on the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostmami for University of Illinois Press’s “Contemporary Film Directors” series, Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses the poet and filmmakers Forugh Farrokhzad whose 1962 short THE HOUSE IS BLACK he believes (or did in 2001) to be the greatest Iranian film of all time, as well as being one that perhaps more than any other presaged the “New Wave” Iranian filmmakers who would come to international prominence around the beginning of the 1990s. Rosenbaum asserts of THE HOUSE IS BLACK that it presents a “potent blend of actuality and fiction that makes the two register as coterminous rather than as dialectical.” This notion of a coterminous interrelation of elements we might tend to think of as existing in polar opposition to one another, mobilized in a dynamic process, immediately causes me to think of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic, fundamental to which is both the idea of processes in which differential elements communicate dynamically (in direct opposition to Hegelian dialectic) and the idea that dialogue is fundamental to how discourse functions. In this light we might be well situated to appreciate how Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa’s book on Abbas Kiarostami finds an ideal method of approaching this dialogic filmmaker insofar as it could itself be said to represent a dialogue both between its authors and with its subject. This “Expanded Edition” of ABBAS KIAROSTAMI, published in 2017, continues a dialogue that was begun not when the first essays (one by each author) were produced in 2001, but more properly when in 1992 Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, who had seen some of Kiarostami’s earlir films in Iran prior to her emigration to America, attended screenings of WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE?, CLOSE-UP, and LIFE AND NOTHING MORE… at the Toronto International Film Festival, succeeding in persuading Rosenbaum to attend the first of those screenings. Both parties would go on to be ardent supporters of Kiarostami and over the next twenty-five years produce two editions of the seminal text currently under consideration. While I very much believe that the form of a dialogue is of extreme discursive advisability in reference to the undertaking in question, what it perhaps ends up making possible above all else is a cumulative emotional impact not common to works of criticism and scholarship, both an evolving, devotional form of solidarity and a temporal, durational magnitude having a great deal to do with this. That Kiarostami would die in 2016 speaks to the price the passage of time charges to us as well as to what it might mean for solidarity among adherents (if that’s not putting too fine a point on it) to move forward with the legacy of an artist in the aftermath of his, her, or what-have-you’s passing. Jonathan Rosenbaum is a fan of the dialogue as format for commentary. A much revered critic, Rosenbaum has often been called upon to do interviews or commentary tracks for supplementary features on DVDs and Blu-rays; he is outspoken about his preference for having somebody else join him when he assents to take on such responsibilities. Off the top of my head, I can recall the wonderful commentary track he and James Naremore provided for Criterion’s release of Orson Welles’s MR. ARKADIN, as well as an interesting interview featuring Rosenbaum and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Cohen’s release of Jean-Pierre Melville’s TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN. (Rosenbaum provides a solo commentary for Cinema Guild’s DVD of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s THE TURIN HORSE, in which he only speaks for a portion of the film’s duration and begins by telling us how much better it would have been had someone else been able to join him.) The structuring dialogue-based conceit from which ABBAS KIAROSTAMI is forged is one that Rosenbaum clearly finds more than merely congenial. We increasingly become aware that a laudable sense of ethical imperative drives it. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, an Iranian woman, is naturally an ideal interlocutor, well-placed as she is both to provide insights to which an American man could only ever have anecdotal access and to correct misunderstanding as they arise. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa studied at the School of Television and Cinema in Tehran and then went to pursue her education further in London. Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa actually both studied in London in the mid-70s, but never had opportunity to interact at the time. After her studies, Saeed-Vafa returned to Iran for a time and had opportunity to see some of Kiarostami's films then, including 1977’s REPORT, to which her response was not terribly positive. She found the treatment of domestic violence “disturbing” and the film in general “too dark for my feminist idealism.” She would subsequently move to Chicago where she had the opportunity, among other things, to program Iranian films at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film Center. Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa’s book commences with an essay by each author (written when Kiarostami’s last feature film was still 1999’s THE WIND WILL CARRY US). Following these essays we have a lengthy interview between the two authors from 2001 followed by an addendum from 2002, in which they are able to discuss Kiarostami’s remarkable video-film 10. The third section of the book is comprised of three interviews conducted by both authors with Kiarostami in 1998, 2000, and 2001, followed by the director’s written statement on the film 10 at the time of its Cannes premier. The fourth section is a brief discussion between Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa from 2009 on the subject of Kiarostami’s 2008 feature SHIRIN. This is followed by another dialogue between the two authors from 2017 in the aftermath of Kiarostami’s death. The book's final section mirrors the first, each writer providing an essay, Rosenbaum’s on the implications of watching Kirostami’s films at home, Saeed-Vafa offering a consideration of the director’s 2013 shot-in-Japan feature LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (preempted with a 2013 discussion between her and Kiarostami on the subject of the film in question). The Rosenbaum essay that kicks the book off begins by considering the implications of talking about an Iranian New Wave. Rosenbaum addresses the importance of Sohrab Shahid Saless’s 1973 film A SIMPLE EVENT. He tells us that Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa has sited the film in the past and Kiarosatmi has himself called it a major influence. (Later Saeed-Vafa tells us that among the many claimants in his homeland arguing against the importance of Kiarostami, there are many who insist that he stole everything from Saless.) Rosenbaum talks about Forugh Farrokhzad, as already mentioned, but insists that insofar as concerns international attention, Kiarostami’s 1990 documentary-fiction hybrid CLOSE-UP has to be considered the key event. That Kiarostami is also a poet as was Farrokhzad is of major importance. THE WIND WILL CARRY US is named for a Farrokhzad poem and contains a recitation of said poem during the “most important” sequence. Rosenbaum writes about how Kiarostami makes “incomplete” or “interactive cinema” full of calculated “narrative ellipses.” His early shorts were “childlike and experimental,” his work in general made possible by state funding and “the protection offered by the bureaucracy of Kanun (the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, a state organization founded by the shah’s wife).” After some time as a commercial artists and director of slick commercials, Kiarostami made his first short in 1970, BREAD AND ALLEY, “about a little boy trying to walk home past an unfriendly dog.” As universal a subject as they come. One such dog plagued my own childhood journey to and from school in one neighborhood in which my family resided. Over about fifteen years, under the umbrella of Kanun, Kiarostami perfected a playful sort of “pedagogical” cinema, often focused on the politics of the classroom, as such playing a large role in making films about children popular in Iran (something which would become a regular censor-deflecting ingredient in Iranian cinema). Rosenbaum draws a connection to “Lehrstücken,” Brecht’s “learning plays.” A tendency toward “ethical self-inquiry” comes to counterbalance the pedagogic dimension early on, placing scrutiny on the director and his machinations. Repetitions (of formal/stylistic strategies or mirrored situations) and “parallel constructions” have “humorous as well as analytic purposes, with implications that can be poetic as well as sociological.” Rosenbaum discusses the centrality in Kiarostami of a shot (often a “philosophical” wide shot of long duration) which presents itself as a question. There is a “quantum leap” between the documentaries FIRST GRADERS and HOMEWORK primarily related to how Kiarostami draws attention to his own presence and his own deceptions. WHERE IS THE FIREND’S HOUSE? comes between those films. This leads to explicit and implicit considerations of “media manipulation and exploitation” culminating in the nuanced self-critique of THE WIND WILL CARRY US. The prevalence of characters asking strangers for directions (which Rosenbaum discovered on a visit to Iran is a common exigency of everyday life in the country) and embarking on unresolved quixotic journeys speaks to core questions (the camera itself questioning), allegorical in nature, about life’s journey, this questioning often serving to undermine “false knowledge” and presumption. What is life? Does it have meaning? Life’s meaning is plural in Kiarostami, dependent on who is attempting to ascertain it and under what circumstances. The zigzag path and the peripheral detail have nearly cosmological import. Rosenbaum writes about the abundance in these minimalist, elliptical films of “Bruegelesque details,” and we might surmise that these speak to the living abundance of the external world at the heart of a vision attentive to "public and social space, which is the space not only of a car on the road but of an audience in the cinema.” Mr. Badii in TASTE OF CHERRY, attempting to coerce strangers into helping him end his life, is told by one interlocutor to consider never again being able to experience the taste of delicious fruit. Rosenbaum sees this echoed in the somewhat controversial closing sequence of the film, the only part of the film shot on video, wherein Kiorostami, his crew, and Homayoun Ershadi (the nonprofessional actor who plays Mr. Badii) are shown making their film on a hillside. Far from being an “it’s only a movie” moment, Rosenbaum suggests, we might more properly see it as a suggestion that cinema (making it, watching it) is analogous to the taste of cherry, part of the richness of being in the world. In her introductory essay, not surprisingly, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa showcases a greater grasp of national specificity throughout, but her sense of the formal and philosophical core of what Kiarostami’s cinema is up to is fairly consonant with Rosenbaum’s. She has exhaustive knowledge of the controversies Kiarostami has caused in Iran, often seen as a director serving a diplomatic role in his projection of a certain image abroad, but she believes his “unique style and humor are simple but radical, poetic, and philosophical.” She says that the more she revisits his work, the more she learns from it. Saeed-Vafa writes about the driver left alone at the beginning of CLOSE-UP while what would seem to be the main action is occurring in a home we do not enter. A man “looks at the sky, picks a couple of roses from a pile of garbage next to his car (a nice motif touching on notions of class and sentimentality), and kicks an empty spray can that we watch roll down the street.” Consideration of that (zigzagging) spray can will come up repeatedly throughout the rest of the book. This opening sequence constitutes “a microcosm of the Kiarostami universe, contains the very essence of his cinema.” Saeed-Vafa asserts that CLOSE-UP “changed the entire course of Iranian cinema.” In essence: “Iranian literature, culture, and language are full of multifaceted metaphors, symbols, allegories, and proverbs.” The preeminent text in this sense is THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. “Iranian culture and politics require a covert expression of subject and self,” and tactics are utilized to “conceal meaning and talk about larger issues—as in the poems of Hafiz—for sacred purposes, secret purposes, or both. That is to say, the mysteries of the system and the universe are understood and conveyed only through metaphor.” Like poetry, the cinema is “compressed, sparse, and metaphoric.” Kiarostami’s specific vision is “elliptical, fragmented, associational,” foregrounding “the sense of multiple realities.” Perhaps it is the fact that in the aftermath of the revolution cinema began to focus on “political, moral, and didactic issues” which speaks to the adaptation (and adaptability) of Kiarostami’s “pedagogical” method (critical though it may be). Swindler and liar often present themselves in Kiarostami, according to Saeed-Vafa, as agents of greater truths, just as the cinema presents itself as a means to truth by way of deception. She believes that Kiarostami is the only Iranian director “whose heroes are both innocent and corrupt.” Throughout the rest of the book, many of these key themes will be returned to: the benificent lie or deception, the coterminous integration of documentary and fiction elements, the private-public space in which people are together and alone (in a car with passengers, in a cinema), ellipsis and the strategic withholding of information, the importance of sound in giving life to offscreen sapce (the reason that Kiarostami, never a cinephile, studied the work of Robert Bresson, the uncontested master of such things as well as a filmmaker Saeed-Vafa fell in love with during her London years), the richness of the journey for its own sake, and perhaps above all the role of the viewer in creating the film. As Kiarstoami himself says concerning that latter point in one of the interviews: the goal is “to show without showing, to show what’s invisible, and to show it in the minds of the viewers rather than on the screen.” Rosenbaum in discussion with Saeed-Vafa: “He’s basically showing that there is more story than you ever realized—” Kiarostami and contemporary Iranian cinema have been of tremendous importance to me personally, something I wrote about at length in a piece I provided for the U.K. magazine UNDER THE INFLUENCE in 2016, shortly after Kiarostami’s death. Like Saeed-Vafa, I have tended to believe that 10 and SHIRIN are of especial importance, no doubt because they deal with women in a way his earlier films with international audiences did not. (In speaking to this, Saeed-Vafa writes about how shortly after the revolution, improperly attired women in imported films, such as those in Rossellini’s ROME, OPEN CITY, were scratched out by the censors.) Kiarostami speaks of how SHIRIN was a breakthrough for him on a personal level, providing him an opportunity to garner a sense, whilst filming women reacting to a non-existent film being screened in a movie theatre (when they were in fact in his apartment facing him and his camera), of the emotional lives of women and of their rich interiority. The audio track for the non-existent film the women are supposedly watching (deception) in this extremely rewarding and bravely experimental film, is inspired by the poem KHOSROW AND SHIRIN by Nezami Ganjavi. Saeed-Vafa: “At first it was about leaving out some portion of the plot or certain characters so that the audience would imagine them. Now he seems to be asking not so much ‘What is cinema?’ as ‘What kind of cinema is valuable?’” The landscape in wide shot was a question. Now the female face is a landscape-question. I also loved Saeed-Vafa’s essay on LIKE SOMEBODY IN LOVE (with its debt to Marquez’s novella “Memories of My Melancholy Whores”), a film I don’t think I adequately appreciated when I last saw it and which I revisted today after finishing the book. I did love the opening sequence the first time I saw the film, a sequence which Saeed-Vafa aptly describes as showing us “a web of relationships between the subjects and offscreen space and us as the audience, participating in this voyeuristic experience that is both enigmatic and unsettling.” If Rosenbaum often has a problem with what he interprets as the paternalism in Kiarostami’s films, watching the film again today, I believe very much that the elderly professor in LIKE SOMEBODY IN LOVE (played by Tadashi Okuno, a life-long extra in Japanese films here appearing in his first speaking part) should not have his wisdom devalued on account of his gender and even, wizened tone. He says poignant and monumentally important things about not asking too much of the beloved and how important it is to learn to love in a way that is not codependent. I have very often at times felt myself at odds with Jonathan Rosenbaum’s opinions, though I do not often hold it against him. There are not many critics with whom I experience terribly much congruence of perspective. Perhaps that is as it should be. Rosenbaum says in one of the interviews here that “the most important role of the critic is conveying information.” I think he has tended to do this commendably, but what I have always loved about him very much is the role he has continually played as a visible advocate for films and filmmakers who very much need such an advocate. I have also always tended to get more out of his books than the criticism he has published in THE CHICAGO READER, FILM COMMENT, CINEMA SCOPE, and related publications. If I find his reality-tunnel sometimes narrow in the extreme, that may indeed be all well and good, and I think I feel him very close here to conceding that the problems he has with LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE may be his problems more than they are the film’s. I am excited and passionate. I like to think my enthusiasm is elastic and available for works of art that may not speak to a perspective or values that are my own. I sometimes call myself a Dostoevskian idiot of a cinephile. It pleases me to enjoy. I would prefer to enjoy. At any rate, I have not yet seen 24 FRAMES, Kiarostami’s final film proper, and when towards the end of this exceedingly fine book, Mr Rosenbaum states that it “virtually enshrines [Kiarostami’s] basic methodology of both exploration and accomplished fakery,” that makes me excited and then excited to be excited, which is precisely how I would have it be, my zigzag journey predicated as it is on fealty to the cherries et cetera.

[Yü · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book on Kiarostami's work with diverse perspectives and comprehensive critics. I am still learning about Kiarostami and his films from this book after already reading three other books.

The two authors genuinely admire Kiarrostami's work, yet not shy away from raising their criticism. Jonathan Rosenbaum comes from a Eurocentric world (the US) where great works from non-European foreign films are sometimes overlooked; Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa is an Iranian and gives us a unique Iranian and female perspective that isn't common in film critics accessible to US film goers. Adding more insights are the several interviews conducted by the two authors with Kiarostami himself.

Another great aspect of the expanded second edition of this book is the new contents added 15 years later since its first edition. The book covers the entire filmmaking career of Kiarostami: from his first short film Bread and Alley to his last, posthumous feature film 24 Frames, including some discussions on his late interest and work in video-making, cross-discipline and installation endeavors.

Highly recommended for Kiarostami fans. Of other books I read, I also recommend Conversations with Abbas by Godfrey Cheshire (which consists of conversations with Kiarostami discussing his films one by one (including all the shorts) until The Wind Will Carry Us) and Lessons with Kiarostami by Kiarostami himself (a collection of discussions and remarks taking place during a seven-day film workshop, mainly covering conceptual ideas and principles rather than film analysis or specifics).

[Abtin Mainson · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there is some interesting information, the book is a little disorganised. Some questions are not connected to the others, which makes the book a little chaotic.

[Mars]

I don't know why I thought this would be a slog, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Would have finished it much faster if I didn't ration it out for as long as I could. Rosenbaum has a lot of interesting insights on Kiarostami's films (before he made 'Five') that I loved reading and comparing with my own. There's also a lot in this about Iranian cinema in general, especially in Saeed-Vafa's section, that seems like a very good introduction for a non-Iranian like me. I would be certainly using this as a reference in looking for more Iranian films to watch.

Edit: Read the Expanded Second Edition which has writings on Kiarostami's work later in life. Very good and insightful as the first part. I appreciated Rosenbaum's essay on watching Kiarostami's films at home, myself having watched all of his work at home through both legal and illegal means, in 1080p and in 360p. It's also very nice to hear more about how Kiarostami made Like Someone in Love in Saeed-Vafa's section: his way of choosing who to cast (the leads for their big eyes, so you'd see them instead of the subtitles), the deception that happens on set (misleading the old man, Tadashi Okuno, into thinking he was an extra in the film), and his thoughts on teaching and mentorship.

I'm very excited now to see Kiarostami's films I've yet to see, especially Shirin (after reading the very enlightening conversation between the authors).