Close-Up (1989) by Abbas Kiarostami — Movie Discussion
Details
"Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-Up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event — the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf — as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves." (Criterion)
"Kiarostami's film has artichoke-like layers which, once peeled, are forever resonant. Nobody makes or has ever made movies with such mundane majesty... Like nearly every other Kiarostami film, Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life and death." (Village Voice)
"A window into the psyche of a complicated man and into the social and cultural reality of Iran, a little more than a decade after the Islamic revolution of 1979... Close-Up is perhaps the emblematic work of the so-called Iranian New Wave, summing up its methods and preoccupations and also bringing together two of its key figures, Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf." (Los Angeles Times)
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Let's discuss Close-Up (1989) by Iranian artist and filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, recently voted the 17th greatest movie of all time in Sight and Sound's prestigious survey of international film critics and experts.
The movie also ranked the 9th greatest of all time in the related poll of film directors. The director Werner Herzog called it "The greatest documentary on filmmaking I have ever seen." Martin Scorsese in an interview with Criterion cites Kiarostami as his main influence.
Please watch the movie in advance.
You can stream it here (there's a button for turning on subtitles) or rent it on various platforms online (for best quality.)
Check out other film discussions in the group on Fridays and occasionally Mondays and other days.
(We previously discussed Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and another Iranian film The House Is Black by Forugh Farrokhzad.)