It doesn’t do justice to Shirin to call it the most conceptual
of Abbas Kiarostami’s films. But it probably wouldn’t
be an exaggeration to call it the most paradoxical. Not
the least of its paradoxes is the way that it simultaneously
confronts and defies the specter of commercial cinema,
qualifying at once as his most traditional feature and his
most experimental. By focusing almost exclusively on the
fiction of women watching a commercial feature that we
can hear but never see—a feature that in fact doesn’t exist,
apart from its manufactured soundtrack—one might even say
that Kiarostami, an experimental, non-commercial filmmaker
par excellence, is perversely granting the wish of fans and
friends who have been urging him for years to make a more “accessible” film with a coherent plot, a conventional music
score, and well-known actors.
What’s perverse about this is that the plot in question, while drawing from a traditional epic, a medieval romance
widely known in Iran, belongs to an unseen and imaginary film whose on-screen spectators are precisely those
well-known actors. (Both men and women comprise this imaginary audience of 110 individuals, although the only
viewers featured in close-ups are women.) Yet despite the
uses of a conventional plot and music and well-known actors,
none of the usual commercial rules for commercial movies
are met. Nevertheless, it’s a matter of justifiable pride that
Kiarostami manages to fool us with his illusion by using
virtually all the skills of a traditional commercial director. Even
if we’re non-Iranian viewers, unfamiliar with either the plot or
the actors (apart from Juliette Binoche, the only European in
the bunch), we’re essentially taken in by all the complicated
tricks employed. We accept that these viewers are in a
movie theater when Kiarostami is actually filming them all
in separate, small clusters in his own living room. And we
accept that they’re responding to an actual film even though
that imaginary film’s soundtrack was created afterwards. So
Kiarostami is perversely showing us he can craft a commercial
feature as competently as anyone, even if he’s using all that competence to subvert our expectations.
We don’t have to have any familiarity with the medieval
poem by Nezami Ganjavi (c. 1141-1209), Khosrow and Shirin, that the imaginary film is based on—a story built around a romantic triangle involving a princess (the title heroine), a prince who becomes a king (Khosrow), and an artist (a mason
named Farhad)—in order to appreciate the universality of the film experience being depicted. As if to prove this point,
Kiarostami did a preliminary three-and-a-half-minute sketch for this film, Where is My Romeo?, made for the Cannes
film festival in 2007, using the same or very similar footage but with the soundtrack of an already existing feature, and
a Western one at that, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968).
Kiarostami’s relation to commercial cinema has always
been a rather special one, because he enjoyed the luxury
of developing as a filmmaker in relative independence
from the usual commercial norms. Having worked in the
'60s as a graphic artist—first as a designer of book covers
and posters, then as a maker/designer of commercials and
credits sequences in the films of others—he was already
pushing thirty when the owner of the ad agency he worked
for, who also directed the state-run Kanun (the Center for
the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults,
founded by the shah’s wife), invited him to collaborate in
setting up that organization’s film unit. And for the next two
decades, nearly all of Kiarostami’s twenty-odd films were
state-supported educational films made for that unit.
It was only towards the tail end of this period, when
Kiarostami made his most influential feature, Close-up (1990)—his first Kanun feature focusing on full-grown adults,
a curious docudrama about the arrest and trial of a poor man
who was caught impersonating a famous filmmaker, Mohsen
Makhmalbaf—that he began to edge away from Kanun’s
agenda. But by that time he had already developed a playfully
deceptive kind of filmmaking that would serve him well on
his subsequent projects, part of which entailed turning nonactors
into actors, most of them children and young adults,
through various ruses of persuasion. (Prior to Shirin, the only time Kiarostami used a professional actor was when he
employed Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz as the director in the
1994 Through the Olive Trees.)
To outline the processes that eventually led to Shirin—which almost (but not quite) turns all its actors into nonactors—it might be argued that an important part of his
methodology involves treating his performers and his
viewers like children, bringing various versions of his ruses
to bear on other grown-up subjects. (One might argue,
in fact, that the art of treating viewers like children is very
much, by and large, the art of Hollywood. If Hollywood as
an institution was originally bent on entertaining more than
children, it has devolved more and more, over the years,
towards treating adult viewers as if they were all kids at heart,
in terms of both style and subject matter, at least when it
comes to action-adventure, big summer releases, and the
like.) Characteristically, this usually entailed working without
a fixed script—in many cases generating dialogue that was
spontaneous by addressing his actors offscreen and getting
them to respond.
In Close-up, Kiarostami exerted his methods of
persuasion on all his performers by convincing them to play
themselves while re-enacting the crime, arrest, and trial of
Hossein Sabzian. He also filmed his own initial meeting with
Sabzian in prison, but more ambiguously, he convinced his
participants to go beyond re-enactment when he staged
some events—most noticeably a meeting between Sabzian
and Mohsen Makhmalbaf—that hadn’t previous occurred,
and altered variously other details with the cooperation of his
cast for the purposes of the film. In Taste of Cherry, which
largely consists of dialogues between a driver (Homayoun
Ershadi, who also appears as an extra in Shirin) and various
passengers seated next to him, Kiarostami filmed the driver
and the passengers in separate shooting sessions, each time
occupying the adjacent seat himself, so that the drivers
and passengers never actually met. His method was either
to provoke various responses to his own actions from the
passengers or to get Ershadi to repeat his own lines. What
emerged from all this—resembling the famous Kuleshov
experiment whereby various fictions are created through
the juxtaposition of formerly unrelated shots—was a way
of fooling both actors and spectators, coaxing them all intoinvoluntary creative collaborations in the creation of various
fictions that had the appearance of documentaries. And
variations of these same techniques were used in The Wind
Will Carry Us (1999).
Shirin builds its own illusions in a related fashion, although
this time—as Hamideh Razavi shows in her very instructive “making of” documentary, Taste of Shirin—Kiarostami is
most often directing his actors as actors, whether these are
on-screen actresses pretending to be film spectators in his
living room or other actors recording their voices in a sound
studio for the imaginary film. Sometimes he’s offering simple
mechanical instructions (“Now, move your eyes to the left,
back to the right”; “Can you have a more interrogative
tone?”). But on other occasions he’s either asking his actors
to reduce the intensity of their acting (in his living room, “Let your eyes smile, not your lips!”, and, in the sound studio,
asking an actress to curtail her emotions until the end of her
speech) or he’s reverting to his older technique of producing
spontaneous, involuntary reactions (such as when he
suddenly kicks an empty film can across the floor of his living
room in order to cause an actress to flinch) —the same sort of
thing he did with nonprofessionals in his earlier features.
For all his experimentation, Kiarostami as a director has
always been interested in using cinema to create primal
experiences in which our imaginations are vital elements in
his bag of tools. I can recall one such experience when I once
had the privilege of spending some time in the same living
room where Shirin would later be shot, with several other
visitors, during the Fajr film festival in 2001. It was there that
he offered us a kind of theatrical presentation of some of
his recent still photographs of landscapes, exhibited to us in
succession to the accompaniment of Bach on his stereo.
During that same visit, I discovered one of his early
paintings hanging on the wall—a painting that, from a
distance, appeared to be one of those photographs. This
reminded me of something he said in an interview the year
before: “I personally can’t define the difference between
a documentary and a narrative film.” So even Shirin, which
might be described as the most fictional of all his fiction
films, is ultimately as much a documentary as the others, with
our own reflexes and emotions as spectators serving as an
essential part of his subject.
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Jonathan Rosenbaum is the coauthor, with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, of Abbas Kiarostami (University of Illinois Press, 2003) and the author of Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia (University of Chicago Press, 2010), among other books.