Ida Z's Film Class Notes: Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami

Kiarostami
1)began to write and direct films in the 1970s.
2) He came to international attention in the mid 1980s
with the first part of a trilogy called
11)Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987) about a boy returning his friend’s homework.
22) In the second part of the trilogy, Life, and Nothing More (1992), a man (resembling Kiarostami) drives with his son to where Where is the Friend’s Home was
shot to see if the children he filmed are OK after an earthquake.
33)In the third film of the Koker trilogy,
Through the Olive Trees (1994),
Kiarostami revisits an episode involving shooting a scene from
Life, and Nothing More.

The Guardian article about him Click Here

Criterion about Koker Trilogy:
Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for this wondrous, slyly self-referential series of films set in the rural northern-Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, the lyrical fables in The Koker Trilogy exemplify both the gentle humanism and the playful sleight of hand that define the director’s sensibility. With each successive film, Kiarostami takes us deeper into the behind-the-scenes “reality” of the film that preceded it, heightening our understanding of the complex network of human relationships that sustain both a movie set and a village. The result is a gradual outward zoom that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life.

Mast and Kawin point out that Kiarostami’s films are Neorealist in spirit and method, but are never violent or sentimental.

Taste of Cherry
We will see Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry in its entirety this week,
but I also want to share a clip from a film he made in 2003 called
Five Dedicated to Ozu.
The film consists of 5 long shots, each averaging about 16 minutes each and mostly utilizing a fixed camera.
As in a typical Ozu film, the camera never moves, zooms or pans. There is no dialogue and except for the first shot. People are not the focus of the film.