Director Abbas Kiarostami, who died last year at the age of 76, strayed from the cinematic norm from the beginning of his career. When he worked on his very first short film, his cinematographer “was nagging and complaining the whole time” about this young director’s disregard for the visual conventions of the medium. This sense of experimentation would remain with the director 50 years later, the dense Like Someone in Love peppered with scenes where foreground and background are difficult to separate. Spectrum Culture will examine the master’s work over the next few months, shedding light on his best-known films as well as on more obscure titles that may be harder to come by.
As late as 1990, Kiarostami claimed that he had only seen maybe 50 films in his entire life. Given the element of deception in many of his films, we may take that claim with a grain of salt. Still, it’s no surprise that among the films he did admit to seeing were a group of Italian neorealist pictures that travelled to Iran when the budding artist was just 13 years old. You can see this influence in Kiarostami’s first film, the 10-minute “Bread and the Alley,” from 1970. It follows a boy walking through an alley with a loaf of bread and facing the obstacle of an aggressive dog. The boy appeases the dog with a piece of bread and makes his passage safely. It’s a simple enough tale that it perhaps becomes a political allegory, the difficulty of merely travelling from place to place a subtle commentary on the state of Iran before the revolution.
Perhaps just as allegorical is his second short film, “Breaktime” (1972), about a boy who’s disciplined at school after he breaks a window with a football. With echoes of Kiarostami’s first film, this boy meets a different obstacle on his way home: a group of children playing soccer. The boy, evidently not learning his lesson, steals their ball and takes it home.
The nearly hour long film The Experience (1973) seemed a further expansion of these early vignettes. A teenage orphan works as an errand-boy in a photo studio, where he sleeps after hours. The boy is smitten with a photo of one of their clients and devises a plan to work for the girl’s family as a servant, but the family refuses to hire him.
Though Kiarostami has dismissed this early film as a mere “love melodrama,” here is where the director begins to chart out the experimental approach to feature narrative that he would maintain throughout his career. Long passages of the film take place without dialogue. The film immerses us in the boy’s modest living quarters in the studio, emphasizing his alienation by shooting him through windows and doorways where we see his lonely existence. The boy’s quest also continues in the vein of what critic Alberto Elena calls Kiarostami’s “Law of Desire,” a personal quest frequently achieved (or attempted) by means of deception.
The Experience also introduces us to the director’s fondness for “dead time,” sequences in which characters are simply waiting or riding the bus. Such sequences may not advance plot, but, with a largely detached visual style, they convey to the viewer a real sense of how time passes for his characters.
There’s a reason these early films deal with children. Kiarostami got his creative start as a graphic designer making title sequences for Iranian films, which led to his work developing the film department for the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (known as Kanun) in Tehran. Kanun began as an initiative from the Shah’s wife. The institute continued to produce or co-produce Kiarostami’s films throughout the ‘80s, even after the Revolution, but Kiarostami and others would find a way to create subversive art under this State-sanctioned system.
In addition to the neorealists, Kiarostami was influenced by the artists of the budding Iranian New Wave, including poet Farough Farrokhzad’s masterful short film “The House is Black” (1962) and director Sohrab Shahid Saless’ 1973 feature A Simple Event. The distinct poetry and rhythm of Iranian film is evident in these works, which share Kiarostami’s narrative ambiguity and generosity of spirit. His films are often populated by the mischievous and deceitful, whether they be adults, as in the man who impersonates a movie director in Close-Up, or children, as in the minor transgressions of the young seen in his early films. Yet, fascinated with human failings, Kiarostami, much like Farrokhzad who observed the residents of a leper colony with dignity, never loses respect for his flawed characters.
Students of Kiarostami who hope to explore his work beyond the Criterion Collection will be happy to learn that a surprising number of the director’s lesser-known titles are hiding in plain sight on YouTube–with subtitles. Yet much of The Experience works even without subtitles. It’s an early sign from a master of cinema that these studies of the human condition are universal.
The post Oeuvre: Kiarostami: Early Shorts and The Experience appeared first on Spectrum Culture.