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Home , Abbas Kiarostami, A Man and a Woman, Dariush Mehrjui, First Graders, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Through the Olive Trees

CHAPTER 26

WIND AND DUST: ’S

Nature serves art in most of the Iranian films I know, not the other way around (as in the cinema of spectacle), for the last thing one could call The Runner (1984), The Jar (1992), Nargess (1992), or Abadani-Ha (1993) is spectacular. One exception to this rule is ’s Gabbeh (1996), whose story is the merest excuse for a rhapsody of natural textures: of the titular carpets, of vast plains, rock formations, clouds, and even of the streams in which the nomadic tribesmen of southeast dip their colorful dyes. A sense of place is crucial, to be sure, in the films of Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016), who, along with Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beizai, , and , is the most esteemed of contemporary Iranian directors. The village of Koker in Northwestern Iran, for example—particularly an undulating hillside there—unites the pictures in Kiarostami’s loose trilogy around the devastating earthquake of 1990, Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), And Life Goes On … (1992), and (1994). But “place” here has nothing to do with groundless spectacle and everything to do with aesthetic grounding, with the visual communication of feeling and idea. Perhaps Kiarostami’s concern with place derives from his work as a documentarian. He was the head, both in the pre-revolutionary days of the shah and the post- revolutionary era of the Shiite Muslim ayatollah, of the filmmaking section of the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. (Kiarostami held this post from 1979 until 1988, when rightist hardliners dislodged him.) There he made such documentaries about school children as Case No. 1, Case No. 2 (1979), Regular or Irregular (1981), (1985), and Homework (1989). In all of these films, non-fictional location, rather than fictional narrative or even the “true story,” comprises the motivating foundation for everything that we see and hear—as in documentaries generally, which aptly take their name from the French word for travelogue, or the chronicling of a place together with its people. Even the first of Kiarostami’s fiction films, a short titled Bread and Alley (1970)— which came in the wake of Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969), the initiator of the New Wave of Iranian cinema—reveals this director’s predilection for place. Its story, about a boy and a minatory dog, is anecdotally slight, but the way in which the camera observes and negotiates the labyrinthine alleyways of central is visually telling. Like Bread and Alley, as well as the previously cited documentaries, Kiarostami’s first fiction feature, The Traveler (1974), also features a child in addition to a cityscape (which begins as a landscape). In this case, that child is a provincial boy who is on a desperate quest to reach Tehran in time to see a soccer match.

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Numerous Iranian movies have such child protagonists, just as did the Italian neorealist cinema; indeed, Kiarostami wrote the script for ’s White Balloon (1995), which featured a seven-year-old girl. No, Iranian filmmakers are not obsessed with children for their own sake (as, one could argue, François Truffaut was); they are trying to avoid the minefield of Islamic restrictions on the portrayal of adult male-female relationships. Kiarostami’s A (1997) does not feature a child, however, and it was almost blocked from export by the Iranian authorities because of its adult subject, suicide. (Four of his movies have been banned within Iran, but only one is now deemed unfit for showing anywhere in the world: Case No. 1, Case No. 2, an anti-authoritarian documentary about classroom discipline.) Islamic law not only prohibits suicide, it also forbids even discussion of this topic. Yet somehow A Taste of Cherry, which Kiarostami wrote, directed, and edited, made it to be the 1997 , where it became the first film from Iran to be awarded the Palme d’Or—an event, in its significance for the Moslem world, recalls Kurosawa’s Grand Prix at Venice in 1951 for , which first brought Asian art cinema to the attention of international audiences. Although its subject is suicide, A Taste of Cherry has a theme in common with both And Life Goes On … and Through the Olive Trees: the struggle of life against death, or death against life. And Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry, like all of his previous films, documentaries and fictional ones alike, acknowledges the means of its own creation. If Homework shows the director, his crew, and their equipment in addition to the school children being interviewed, Through the Olive Trees features an actor who plays Kiarostami as he shoots a scene, again and again, from the already- released And Life Goes On …—a proposal scene between a man and a woman, both non-professionals, whose romantic involvement had in reality begun when they were recruited more or less to play themselves in the earlier picture. And if Regular or Irregular puts Kiarostami on the soundtrack, commenting about the content as well as the form of the images in this about orderly versus disorderly children, the quasi-documentary Close-Up (1990) puts the actual persons involved in a real-life fraud—the duping of a wealthy family by a poor man impersonating the famous director Mohsen Makhmalbaf—in a cinematic reconstruction of the story. Some commentators see Kiarostami’s acknowledgment of the artifice of filmmaking, together with his blurring of the line between documentary and fiction, as nothing more than an obsessive directorial conceit that is didactic, manipulative, and by now—after over half a century of literary as well as cinematic homage to Brecht’s theory of distanciation—otiose. I see this director’s cinematic self-reference, however, as something more, and more profound: as his way of questioning, in so repressive a society as Iran’s, the truth not merely of the government’s pronouncements and propaganda but also of his own fictions and documentaries, of the very act of creating or chronicling, reshaping or recording. And nowhere is Kiarostami’s self-doubting authorship more artistically apt than in A Taste of Cherry, for this movie is concerned with individual self-doubt, self-ridicule, self-loathing, or just plain self-weariness so powerful that it would lead to self-annihilation.

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