When Jean-Luc Godard pronounced that “Film
begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Kiarostami,” a good deal
of that statement was mere showmanship. By the early nineties Godard
had already been announcing the end of cinema for some time, and his
prognosis seems as dubious now as it did then, but his hyperbole accurately
reflected a general critical sense that a new filmmaker for the ages
had emerged, and Close-Up is the film that cemented his reputation.
Kiarostami had been directing brilliant shorts, features and TV movies
since before the 1979 revolution, and his 1987 feature Where Is
the Friend’s House? had been an international festival breakthrough
alongside other neo-neo-realist films of the Iranian New Wave. Close-Up,
however, was something different. Although deeply grounded in contemporary
neo-realism, being based on an actual incident and using many of the
participants and locations involved in the real story, the film is inflected
with a ingenious reflexivity and unexpected philosophical depth.
Many of the films that followed – Life and Nothing More,
The Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us –
expanded on Close-Up’s ruminations on the nature of cinema,
reality and existence, but this film set the pace with its eloquence,
surface simplicity and sophisticated play with artfully manipulated
image and sound.
The film tells the story of a man who impersonates the renowned Iranian
filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (director of The Cyclist, Gabbeh
and Kandahar and head of a veritable filmmaking dynasty that
includes his daughters Samira and Hana, son Maysam and wife Marzieh)
in order to insinuate his way into the home and lives of a wealthy Teheran
family. What seems to be a simple scam slowly reveals itself to be something
much more unusual and complex. Remarkably, all of the major participants
in the bizarre incident agreed to re-enact their experiences for Kiarostami’s
camera, and the director also brings Makhmalbaf himself along for the
ride. The extraordinary result is about as far as it’s possible
to get from the reality television Close-Up anticipates and
pre-empts. – Andrew Langridge
A dense and subtle masterpiece… Much of the implicit comedy here
comes from the way “cinema” changes and inflects the value
and nature of everything – the original scam, the trial, the documentary
Kiarostami is making. Werner Herzog has called this the greatest of
all documentaries about filmmaking, and he may not be far off –
if only because no other film does more to interrogate certain aspects
of the documentary form itself. – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago
Reader
Close-up
has
just been re-released in New York.
Close-up
from
Janus Films
|
