the real and the fake

In the fall of 2005, I had the opportunity to present Close-Up, the film by Abbas Kiarostami, to the freshman class at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. The spark of the film came from a real news story in Tehran: a man named Hossain Sabzian was arrested for conning a family into believing he was the famous film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In the film, which is not at all a documentary, all of the actual participants re-enact their real-life roles.

For the Tisch screening, I decided to extend the film's conceit into the real world: I pretended to be Kiarostami himself introducing the film in person. More than just a case of life imitating art imitating life, the idea was to put the students in the same situation as the conned family and then lead a discussion of the issues raised by the film.

All I did to create the persona of a Great Iranian Director was don a pair of sunglasses and use the word 'the' where a native English speaker would not. That's it: no fake accent, nothing else. I assumed that the students would figure it out during the film, but in that I was wrong. When I returned to the stage for the Q&A, the students had still not realized that I was not the real Abbas Kiarostami, and when I insisted I was a member of the NYU faculty, some of them persisted for several minutes in believing I was Kiarostami pretending to be someone named Jeff Strabone. When my identity was all cleared up—if one can make such a claim about identity—about 75% of the auditorium admitted, by a show of hands, that they had believed I was Kiarostami.

Tonight I attended the start of the MoMA's three-week Kiarostami film series. For the first time ever, the real Kiarostami and the fake Kiarostami were together in the same room, though I was surely the only person there having a pseudo-uncanny experience. On a more serious note, everyone in the New York area should drop everything and see these films. His major works include:
Where Is the Friend's House?* (1987)
And Life Goes On…* (1991)
Through the Olive Trees* (1994)
Close-Up (1990)
A Taste of Cherry (1997)
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)
Ten (2002).
(The starred films form a trilogy.)

Describing his work can be a challenge, as anyone who read A.O. Scott's article in today's New York Times has witnessed. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to start from the outside and work our way in. The thing one is most likely to see in his films is people endlessly driving around in cars. One of his films, Ten, consists entirely of ten scenes of a driver and her passengers. That's all there is, yet it manages to be his most emotionally intense film. His most famous shot is probably the aerosol can rolling down the hill for thirty-five seconds in Close-Up. Again, that's all it is: a can rolling down a hill for what seems like forever. Two of his recent films—Ten and Five—try to remove the participation of the director entirely from the film, and in other films—And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees—the protagonists are the fictional directors of ealier Kiarostami films. The Wind Will Carry Us, a film that draws on Iranian poetry and investigates the ethics of an urban documentary filmmaker working in a remote town, offers a humorous take on communicating with an unseen higher power—via mobile from the only hill that gets reception.

What does it all add up to? Kiarostami's work is a restless and relentless investigation of the possibilities and limits of film form, filmic time, directing, and the categories of narrative and documentary. He has an uncanny ability to extend time in such a way that stills it to tantalizing extremes. His is a cinema of stillness and contemplation, not necessarily for transcendental purposes but for exploring the properties of narrative expectation and the experience of time. (Sometimes, his aim feels like nothing more than cheek as in the maddening re-takes in Through the Olive Trees.) He wants to know things like, What is it to direct a film? to construct a narrative? or to sit in a movie theatre and experience time?

The Tisch students said they expected the rolling aerosol can in Close-Up to explode. They expected event. Instead, it came to a quiet stop. It was more a case of the humor of time and the thwarting of expectation. I have seen ten of his feature films so far, and they are all like that can: an extreme prolongation of expectation with no necessary closure, its reward instead being the experience of expectation. If 'unbearable' could ever be meant as a compliment, that is what I would call Kiarostami's work: unbearable cinema. And it would be unforgiveable to miss it.