Kiarostami’s Way: The Art of Return

Abbas Kiarostami was not the first Iranian filmmaker to gain global recognition, but he was the first internationally renowned Iranian auteur. The reasons for his acclaim may differ within      and beyond Iran, reflecting diverse perspectives. However, it remains essential and informative to view his films within the context of Iranian cinema. This does not mean localising his work, or semantics that are inaccessible to non-Iranian audiences, but rather exploring the deeply rooted local characteristics of his films that contribute to their global recognition. Kiarostami’s films resonate with audiences worldwide and respond to global, contemporaneous cinematic movements and discourse. Yet, Iranian viewers see them from a distinct vantage point. This distinctive quality sidesteps the notion of national cinema without losing its local appeal, and stays local in the global context.     

To begin, the 1979 revolution is an unavoidable key factor in shaping one of Kiarostami’s distinctive stylistic choices. A clear contrast emerges between his pre-revolution films, which were predominantly narrative-driven, and those made after the revolution, which display an intricate blend of documentary and fiction. His post-revolutionary style is one where documentaries are as fictive as the fictions are documentary. This shift can be traced back to his first post-revolution film, Qazieh-e shekl-e avval… shekl-e dovvom (First Case, Second Case,      1979), which he began making before the revolution. However, after the regime change, Kiarostami had to replace interviewees and adjust the discourse and perspectives in the film to align with the new political context. The film itself oscillates between these two modes: its narrative pauses intermittently, allowing real political or artistic figures to offer their opinions and take stances for or against the story’s development. It becomes a kind of cinéma vérité embedded within a fiction film. From this point forward, cinema itself becomes a question and a problematic element within Kiarostami’s work. The revolution essentially splits his cinematic oeuvre in two, creating a hybrid form where reality and fiction, life and play, truth and lie, and original and copy coexist. For Kiarostami, cinema becomes a truth machine that operates through lies.

This tension between documentary and fiction became a defining element of Kiarostami’s work. It became crucial for him to reveal the realities involved in shaping these stories, as the stories themselves shaped those realities in turn. Fact and fable are deeply intertwined, making it impossible to fully understand one without considering the other. Kiarostami’s cinema makes      the filmmaking process visible. Dramatic shifts in perspective create endless openings into, or revelations of, the world. In this way, there is a continuous, unresolved tension between the shot and what exists offscreen. This approach makes each film feel like an attempt to pull into the frame the elements overlooked or left out in previous films.               

After First Case, Second Case, Kiarostami himself begins to appear in his films, oscillating between the roles of documentary filmmaker and reporter. In the short film Be tartib ya bedun-e tartib? (Orderly or Disorderly, 1980), his voice is heard behind the camera. He is physically present throughout Mašq-e šab (Homework, 1989). In Klūzāp, nemā-ye nazdīk (Close-Up, 1990), he unexpectedly enters the film after the first scene. Blurring the lines between diegesis and documentary becomes especially pronounced in the Koker Trilogy: Khane-ye dust kojast (Where Is the Friend’s Home? 1987), Zendegi va digar hich (Life, and Nothing More… 1992) and Zīr-e Derakhtān-e Zeytūn (Through the Olive Trees, 1994). The trilogy begins with a boy looking for his friend’s house in Koker village, to return his notebook. Kiarostami then reconstructs his own journey to Koker in Life, and Nothing More…. Playing the role of a filmmaker, while making a film, becomes central in Through the Olive Trees. In Ta’m-e gīlās (Taste of Cherry, 1997), he once again makes an appearance, this time behind the camera. However, this is not the case in his other films, particularly those made after 2000, where he tends to gradually eliminate the role of the director by disappearing from the screen. As Tom Paulus reminds us:

“Kiarostami’s ‘presence’ will be a crucial concern in the films to follow that stage the role of the man with the camera in a way that is not dissimilar from what Godard and Rouch were attempting with their ‘cinéma verité’ in the early sixties. It is only at the beginning of a new, more experimental period in his work with the films shot on digital video that Kiarostami will start to stage his absence rather than his presence.”¹  

Homework

It is somewhat misleading to categorise Kiarostami’s innovations in the ‘80s and ‘90s as merely a “film within a film.” He’s using cinema to explore itself as the central question, creating a unique dynamic where the medium and the subject are intricately intertwined. Iranian critics have often criticised his films for their perceived lack of perspective or praised them for their miniature effects in imagery and visual structure.² However, I contend that his films exhibit a hybrid, labyrinth quality wherein characters and ideas continuously intersect and critique      each other, while also unpacking the contexts, intentions, and nuances that led to their creation. This reflects the impossibility of fully enclosing a world within one of his films. For example, Close-Up is a docufiction inspired by the case of Hossein Sabzian, who was charged with fraud after impersonating Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Despite Sabzian’s      admiration for Makhmalbaf, Sabzian admits that his own life resonates more closely with the protagonist of Mosāfer (The Traveler, Abbas Kiarostami, 1974). In Homework, a conversation about Avvalihā… (First Graders, Abbas Kiarostami, 1984) is heard offscreen. This technique is more radically explored in the Koker Trilogy. As François Truffaut once wrote, “When I was a critic, I thought that a successful film had simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of cinema.”³ Kiarostami advances this idea by demonstrating how to express an idea in cinema which is simultaneously an idea about the world, and vice versa. Close-Up is a clear-cut example of this approach.

A second camera begins to feature in Kiarostami’s films from Where Is the Friend’s Home? onward. In Homework, this second camera captures reverse shots and even glimpses of Kiarostami behind the camera. By Close-Up, the second camera becomes central to the film, specifically used to record Sabzian’s defenses when they are deemed unacceptable or incomprehensible by the court and judge. In the final scene of Taste of Cherry, the second camera intervenes at a crucial moment, shifting from a dark shot from inside a grave to a bright, open landscape. In Through the Olive Trees, Hossein Rezai’s love for Tahereh Ladanian unfolds within the film we are watching but remains outside the view of the filmmakers’ camera. In the last shot of this film, as Rezai runs after Ladanian and nearly disappears into the landscape, he turns back and runs toward the camera, as if the second camera were his true paramour. For this ostensibly minimalist filmmaker, the use of a second camera was not about fitting more details or space into the film. Creating an image, bound by the four walls of the frame, inevitably excludes many other elements and pushes them offscreen. One might say that for Kiarostami, cinema is not simply a substitute for the world, but includes it. As Bazin argues in his essay, Theater and Cinema, “what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal.”⁴   

These idiosyncratic stylistic elements should be considered within the larger context of world cinema and its evolving questions. Kiarostami was working during a period marked by an evolving understanding of auteurism. By then, the notion faced critical reassessments which (broadly speaking) can be traced back to Bazin’s idea about the attempt to efface cinema through cinema in De Sica’s neorealist films.⁵ After the decline of the French New Wave, filmmakers who had once been deeply engaged in the politics of auteurism began to critically interrogate the theory and practice. We see the decentralisation of the auteur in Godard’s collaborations and co-directions in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, films within a film such as La nuit américaine (Day for Night, François Truffaut, 1973) and Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights… (She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps, Philippe Garrel, 1985) and films foregrounding the artist such as 8 1⁄2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) and Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966). In the ‘70s, autofiction provided intense responses to questions of realism and the politics of authorship. This is reflected in La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore, Jean Eustache, 1973), Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Meetings with Anna, Chantal Akerman, 1978) L’Enfant Secret (The Secret Son, Philippe Garrel, 1979) and Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (We won’t Grow Old Together, Maurice Pialat, 1972). In 1982, Jean-Luc Godard released Passion and Scénario du film Passion. Each film has two components, revealing both a film and the creative process that gave rise to the film. In his article on dispositivism in contemporary cinema, Luc Moullet addresses the stylistic elements of Kiarostami’s work but does not connect them to the broader issues facing contemporaneous cinema, taking his style as an end in itself:

“In addition to ones based on plastic quality and script, the most evident dispositives are dispositives of structure. Take Abbas Kiarostami. A visual dispositive – the famous pathway shaped like Z made for the film – another more narrative one, the slow journey (The Traveler, Where is the Friend’s Home?), a third, more essential one, the film within the film, rather surprisingly close to deconstructive French cinema post-May 68, and another thematic one, the same village of Koker, which has become the center of Iranian cinema, and the evolution of the story through an accidental meeting. And, finally, this recent framework for making films using cars – in which everything happens and from which we see everything – which constitutes the masterplan of the last films on Koker, of Ten and The Taste of Cherry. Once the automobile is equipped for shooting, everything is in place for Kiarostami’s dispositives of repetition, paradoxically based on an object conceived to help us change places.”⁶

Where Is the Friend’s Home?

Kiarostami’s formal and technical choices address the challenges his contemporaries were grappling with. This includes autofiction, his appearance in his films and subsequent disappearance with the advent of digital cameras. He aimed to eliminate what he saw as unnecessary cinematic techniques, such as complex lighting and camera movements, with the ultimate goal of minimising or eliminating the role of the director. This challenged the traditional role of the auteur, a paradox that relied on directors being both present and absent in their work, a dual temporality that’s reflected in the notion of the “author’s signature”.

Stylistically, Kiarostami deployed a form of mise-en-abyme based on his idea of cinema as a truth machine working with lies.⁷ A process revealing the production of fabulation. It differs significantly from conventional mise-en-abymes, such as mirrors yielding infinite perspective or the infinitely circumscribed spaces within works. Kiarostami replaced this spatial depth with a horizontal movement through time rather than space. He integrates the offscreen space into the frame, but not spatially, differing from the mirror technique. Each film in the Koker Trilogy complements and extends its predecessor. A subsequent film will pick up on a tangent from a previous film and bring that into focus, yet these stories are not linear. Through the Olive Trees is about the making of the Life and Nothing More, disrupting the Trilogy’s chronology. Kiarostami’s mise-en-abyme is about moving forward while reflecting on the past, rather than spatial extension. This approach resembles the thematic repetition found in French post-New Wave cinema discussed above, but is executed differently. In Kiarostami’s films, it resembles a spiral, akin to looking in the rearview mirror while driving forward. In Close-Up, all these elements converge into a single film that continuously revisits and reinterprets itself from different angles.

Everything becomes more complex when we consider that Kiarostami employed an elliptical method in his filmmaking practice. Images are discrete, elements central to the diegesis are left out of frame. Lighting and camera movements are modest. This minimalist approach contrasts with the conceptual opening of the frame, where the narrative returns and a minor detail left offscreen becomes the focal point. Or a non-linear temporal montage shows the realities behind the scenes. Kiarostami’s mise-en-abyme reveals the unseen. How, then, can we talk about expansion in a cinema characterised by exclusion and ellipsis? These contradictions lie at the heart of Kiarostami’s cinema: a simplicity achieved through complexity, inclusion realised through ellipsis, truth conveyed through lies, and, importantly, a certain styleless-ness achieved through the most nuanced stylistic elements. In this light, we can reassess the meaning and function of the famous z-shaped roads, the car struggling to climb the hill, the chaotic yet meticulously designed path an apple takes before reaching a child’s hands, and many other emblematic features of his cinema. This is why I believe Kiarostami’s work transcends being merely the creation of a filmmaker with unique dispositives, as Moullet suggests. Serge Daney’s comparison of Kiarostami to Rossellini becomes clearer: both filmmakers reconstructed reality and documentary through fiction and were on the brink of a new era in cinema history (some might say on its ruins), each deemed to have reinvented cinema in their own way.⁸ 

Paisà

Through the Olive Trees

In Kiarostami’s cinema, we constantly encounter two contrary things within the same frame, from which we can extrapolate multiple meanings or qualities. The major problems of humanity are presented through the minutiae of daily life and the most immaterial questions are illustrated through the most tangible and mundane objects. Friendship is conveyed through a schoolboy’s notebook, truth is explored through a playful lie, life and death are encapsulated in a toilet, all while blending the sublime with the banal. In Where Is the Friend’s Home?, a delicate notion of friendship is set against a backdrop of familial and educational violence on harsh terrain. In Life, and Nothing More… a man carries what remains of a squat toilet after losing everything in an earthquake. Asked about his cargo, he replies, “It is not polite to say, but it is obvious what it is used for! Everyone knows what its job is. The ones who died are gone, but those who are alive need this valuable piece of porcelain.” Minutes later, we see a building decimated by the earthquake still housing an untouched oil lamp. Through the Olive Trees situates the desire to build a home and family within the context of public and collective disaster. In this film, Rezai’s affection for Ladanian is dismissed by her grandmother because he doesn’t own a house, yet Rezai finds solace in the earthquake, believing it has rendered everyone equally homeless. In Close-Up, while the taxi driver waits for Sabzian’s arrest, a fighter aircraft flies by as he finds flowers in the garbage.

Life and Nothing More

Despite the quotidian quality of Kiarostami’s characters, they exhibit a certain complexity, an intrigue in their evasiveness, playfulness, and reluctance to be completely straightforward. It’s as if they’re keeping secrets from both the spectator and the director. They talk at length, yet tend to beat around the bush rather than getting straight to the point. They skillfully compel the film to repeat a particular action or journey, to ultimately uncover a deeper truth or narrative resolution.

In Where Is the Friend’s Home? The schoolboy never provides a clear reason for his frequent and unusual visits to the nearby village. In Close-Up, Sabzian offers varying explanations for his visits to the Ahankhah’s, blurring the lines between his acting and authenticity. In Homework, the children say everything except what is expected of them. Their methods of evading direct answers (such as showing fear, crying, joking, or storytelling) are as significant as the answers themselves.

Based on interviews with the filmmaker, it is evident that Kiarostami mastered a unique approach to directing non-professional actors. He often employed subtle manipulations to elicit responses that would otherwise be unimaginable for them; as he has noted about directing the female café owner and the village teacher in Bād mā rā khāhad bord (The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999).⁹ This created a complex, indirect relationship through which he could achieve what direct approaches could not. Consequently, his characters are portrayed with a blend of realism and fiction: so real that one might encounter people like them on the streets, yet so fictive that their existence in reality seems improbable. This quality is a hallmark of Kiarostami’s realist style: something slightly more or slightly less than reality itself.

Additionally, Kiarostami had a keen interest in precarious yet decisive situations – the transient and temporary space of a car, being on the road, life in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, or moments of existential crisis. His films often explore these precarious states, suggesting that his characters, despite being caught in fragile moments, persist and return – even from beneath the debris or inside a grave. This contradictory aspect explains why many actors in his films had a conflicted relationship with their portrayals. Some were absorbed by their image, eager to revisit it, while others felt dissatisfaction and unease with their on-screen representation. This simultaneous fascination with and rejection of the image reflects the social psychology of post-revolutionary Iran. Amid the Iran-Iraq War’s brutal conditions and state propaganda saturated with martyrs’ images across cities, the image became existential, both a means of survival and a sign of death. A quality which subtly permeated Kiarostami’s work. Scenes in his films often depict people, not central to the narrative, gathering around the camera. However, once alone, these individuals might attempt to escape from the camera or reject their onscreen personas. For instance, Sabzian frequently criticised Kiarostami about Close-Up and how he was portrayed in the film¹⁰ and Mr. Ruhi from Life, and Nothing More… expressed dissatisfaction with his portrayal in Where Is the Friend’s Home? The Ahankhah family, especially the father, try whenever they get the chance to avoid being portrayed in the film as gullible people who fell for a simple trick, an intervention that further intensifies the sharp and narrow line a realist film must walk. This tension between “it’s only a film” and “it’s not just a film” encapsulates the essence of Kiarostami’s cinema: the fragile border between the frame and the world it represents.

Encounters between apparent opposites punctuate these films. Between children and the elderly, for example. Historians of Iranian cinema have pointed out that not only were women systematically denied main roles in films during the ‘80s, but younger people were also largely absent from leading roles, as they were expected to be on the front lines of the “holy” war with Iraq, typically only appearing in war films.¹¹ This reflects both the ethical and literal functions of the image in a period defined by a straightforward interpretation of realism, taking images at face value. In some of Kiarostami’s films, the elderly and children play central roles and inevitably encounter one another. We see this in Hamsorayan (The Chorus, 1982), Where Is the Friend’s Home?, and Life, and Nothing More…. Additionally, his films often feature conversations between people who are unequal in terms of power relations, such as metropolitan and provincial residents, wealthy individuals and the impoverished, adults and children, or car owners and passengers or hitchhikers. Kiarostami challenges these inequalities by making those in positions of power dependent on others and the use of a transient space as the primary mise-en-scène. This results in some quirky moments: children being seriously interviewed, children instructing adults or explaining natural events, a wealthy family treating a poor man like a celebrity, a Tehrani man begging the most underprivileged to assist him in committing suicide and covering up his grave, and a convict explaining to the court why the entire judicial system fails to understand his actions.

With Kiarostami, one often has to converse with numerous strangers to find the friend’s home. This starkly contrasts with the familial and reserved narrative structure prevalent in Iranian cinema during the early ‘80s, where characters were typically confined to a closed circuit of relationships for the narrative to function. Kiarostami’s cinema is characterised by strangers engaged in deep, metaphysical discussion in the most  transient spaces, such as in a car or on a bike. However, they are never seen together in the same shot. We occasionally see one side – either talking or listening – creating an offscreen space where the voices come from or go towards. There are also instances where they move away from the camera in a long shot, while their voices remain intimately audible. This duality makes us feel both close and far from them, as if Kiarostami plays a game of snakes and ladders, bringing them back into focus whenever they approach the edges of the frame. Bazin once remarked on the significance of what happens offscreen, writing, “When a character moves off the screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the décor which is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen.” ¹² For Kiarostami, this concept transcends mere aesthetics to carry an ontological weight. This helps explain why no one dies in his films, not even the elderly woman whose death is anticipated in Bād mā rā khāhad bord (The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999). In Taste of Cherry, when the camera delves into the dark interior of the grave, a small, grainy camera cuts to a bright and vivid image, retaining everything – including the film itself. Some Iranian critics of the time mockingly compared his films to a sort of paradise, suggesting they avoided the harsh realities of life.¹³ We might agree with them now, but for entirely different reasons.

Endnotes