LINKS
|
| Iranian Film Makers |
Abbas Kiarostami
One of the true masters of contemporary cinema, Iranian filmmaker
Abbas Kiarostami has won not only the admiration of audiences and
critics worldwide, but also the support of directors as distinguished as
Jean-Luc Godard, Nanni Moretti (who made a short film about opening
one of Kiarostami's films in his theater in Rome), Chris Marker, and Akira
Kurosawa, who has said of Kiarostami's "extraordinary" films: "Words
cannot describe my feelings about them and I simply advise you to see his
films... When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after
seeing Kiarostami's films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person
to take his place."
Though Kiarostami emerged in the West as a major filmmaker in the early
'90s--with films like Close-Up and Through the Olive Trees--he had
already been making films in Iran for two decades. Born on June 22nd
1940 in Tehran, Kiarostami was interested in the arts from an early age.
He won a painting competition at the age of eighteen, and left home to
study at Tehran University's Faculty of Fine Arts. As a designer and
illustrator, Kiarostami worked throughout the '60s in advertising, making
commercials, designing posters, creating credit titles for films, and
illustrating children's books.
In 1969--the year that saw the birth of the Iranian New Wave with
Dariush Mehrjui's seminal film The Cow--Kiarostami helped to set up a
filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of
Children and Young Adults. The department's debut production was
Kiarostami's own first film, the twelve-minute Bread and Alley, a
charming, neo-realist gem about a small boy's perilous walk home from
school. The department would go on to become one of Iran's most famous
film studios, producing not only Kiarostami's films, but also such modern
Iranian classics as The Runner and Bashu, the Little Stranger.
Though Kiarostami's films have been compared at various times to those
of Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Eric Rohmer, or Jacques Tati, they
remain uniquely Kiarostamian. Effortlessly simple and conceptually
complex in equal measure; poetic, lyrical, meditative, self-reflexive and
increasingly sophisticated, they mix fiction and documentary in unique
ways, often presenting fact as fiction and fiction as fact. (Kiarostami has
said "We can never get close to the truth except through lying.")
In the 28 years since Bread and Alley, Kiarostami has made more than
20 films, including fiction features, educational shorts, feature-length
documentaries, and a series of films for television. He has also written
screenplays for other directors, most notably The White Balloon, for his
former assistant Jafar Panahi.
But it was not until the late '80s that his films began to be shown outside
Iran. And Life Goes On (1992)--the first of Kiarostami's films to be
shown at the New York Film Festival--and Through the Olive Trees
(1994), the last two parts of what has become known as the Earthquake
Trilogy (started with Where is the Friend's House in 1987) were the
films that made Kiarostami's reputation in the West. In 1996 he was
honored with a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New
York, and last year he came to the Cannes Film Festival at the eleventh
hour with Taste of Cherry, only to walk away with the grand prize,
becoming the first Iranian director ever to win the Palme d'Or.
Voting Taste of Cherry the best film of the year in the international
edition of Time magazine, Richard Corliss wrote: "The film's artful
simplicity, its respect for each speaker's beliefs, its refusal to
sentimentalize: all underline the director's strategy of art. Let the rest of
the film world ride a rocket to excess; Kiarostami will find a quiet place
and listen to a man's heart, right up until it stops beating. And then he will
listen some more."
Back to top | Arts & Literature | Home Page |
|
|
|
|
|
