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An Analysis of the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami as an Auteur

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AVANCA | CINEMA 2018

An Analysis of the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami as an Auteur

and Its Influence on Contemporary Filmmakers
Hosein Heydari 1
University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Vahid Rajabi 2
Faculty of Fine Arts (Department of Music and Drama),
University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Sajad Foroughi 3
University of Shahed, Tehran, Iran

Abstract the promotional posters and opening credits of two

The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami has been
subject to studies and attention of film scholars and
journalists alike since 1980s, with his minimalist and
unconventional methods havingespecially affected
aspiring young film directors. It thus seems necessary
to analyze his films to identify theirstriking auteuristic
elements. Kiarostami’s evolution may be studied
across four decades: the first, starting in early 1970s,
may be called the Experiential period. Short projects,
including documentaries aimed at young audiences,
in addition to his debut feature, constitute the bulk
of Kiarostami’s cinematic endeavors in this period;
withBread and Alley(1970), The Traveler (1974), Two
Solutions for One Problem (1975), and The Report
(1977), being the most important. The second decade
marks Kiarostami’s post-Revolution career, which I
call the Epistemological period.Where Is the Friend’s
House? (1987), Homework (1989), and Close-Up
(1990) are the three definitive films of this decade
where Kiarostami’s use of non-actors reached its
pinnacle. The 1990s, a decade of fruitful creative
output,is regarded as Auteurism period, when films
such asLife, and Nothing More… (1992), Through the
Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The
Wind Will Carry Us (1999) established Kiarostami as a
globally-recognized filmmaker. The emergence of the
new millennium saw Kiarostami experiment with digital
technology during what I call the Innovation period,
characterized by avant-garde methods of filmmaking
such as the disappearance of the director from
theproduction etc.Ten (2002) and Shirin (2008) best
exemplify this most recent period. It is hoped this paper
is a worthy addition to the literature on Kiarostami and
will serve as a reminder of the lasting impressionthe
Iranian auteur left on the film world.
Keywords: Kiarostami, Non-Actors, Auteur, Long
Takes.
Introduction
Abbas Kiarostami was born in 1940 in Tehran. He
majored in painting and art at the School of Fine Arts in
the University of Tehran. He began his career in 1962
by making television advertisements. Kiarostami’s
first professional cinematic experience came in 1968
when he created the opening credits of the Mohammad
Zarrindast film Satan’s Temptation. Significantly,
influential Masoud Kimiai films, Gheisar (1969) and
RezaMotori (1970) were also designed by Kiarostami. In
1970, upon the invitation of FirouzShiranlou, Kiarostami
joined the Institute for the Intellectual Development of
Children and Young Adults, played a crucial role in
founding the film department of the institute, and made
the first film produced by the institute: Bread and Alley
(1970) (Ghukassian, 1996 11).
As Jalal Omid states,
From this point on, Kiarostami was a children’s
filmmaker. His next steps were each a new
experience. Recess (1972) The Experience (1973),
and finally, The Traveler (1974), were films by making
which Kiarostami made his way into the group of
young filmmakers known as the New Wave of Iranian
Cinema (Iranian Cinema Vol.1, 677).
From the beginning, Kiarostami would take on most
of the tasks usually performed by a film crew, including
script writing, editing, photography, producing etc. in
addition to his main function as the director. To this
end, he followed the example of low-budget films
where the costs of pre-production and production were
lowered by using natural lighting and long takes and
eliminating set design and professional actors. These
choices resulted in a minimalist style influenced by
such filmmakers as YasujiroOzu and Robert Bresson.
“As regards domestic cinema, Kiarostami may be
considered a follower of such filmmakers as Sohrab
Shahid-Saless, ParvizKimiavi and Kamran Shirdel”
(Ghukassian 1996, 910). Poetic dialog is the common
feature between the aforementioned filmmakers.
The poetic language in Kiarostami’s work is arguably
inspired by the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri and Khayyam.
Starting from his early works, Kiarostami used children
non-actors as protagonists of his neither-documentary-
nor-fiction films, as it were.
The Most Important Characteristics of
Kiarostami’s Cinema
1. In Kiarostami’s works, the director is most often
invisible; this aspect of his films gives rise to two
adjacent, parallel points of view:the first one suggests
that film is an amalgam of light, sounds, music and
images, eliminating any of which damages a given
film as a whole. The other viewpoint is inspired by
arthouse cinema and states that cinema is what
Kiarostami creates and nothing else. Indeed, this

28

invisibility does not mean the absolute elimination
of the director from film, and it is argued that in this
mode of filmmaking, the director’s hand is, although
not in the conventional sense, but doubly at work
within the more obscure layers of the viewer’s mind.
2. The characters as well as well the audience
achieve intuition through nature. This is because
in the cinema of Kiarostami, man and nature are
not separable and are often alongside one another.
In this regard, Kiarostami is a follower of Shahid-
Saless. “On Shahid-Saless’ film, A Simple Incident
(1974) Kiarostami says: ‘I liked this film a lot. I
expected Shahid-Saless to make a film like this one.
It’s very much like him’” (Iranian Cinema Vol.1, 662).
Nature in Kiarostami’s cinema comes in two forms:
first, as an organic whole where man is shown to be
a part of nature. A good example of this is Life, and
Nothing More… (A.K.A. And Life Goes on, 1992)
where Kiarostami depicts man as dependent on
nature and, at times, human characters serve no
more than a prop-like function. In the second form,
nature is parsed into its parts and man, nature,
and everything thatsurrounds them are depicted
as separated and detached from one another.Ten
(2002) exemplifies this view of nature, in which the
automobile, as an object, is of equal significance
and function as the human characters.
3. Maze-like, endless roads are virtually ever-present
in Kiarostami’s cinema, to such a degree that, in
addition to automobiles, they have turned into clear
motifs in his films.
4. Another characteristic of Kiarostami’s cinema is
uncertainty. His characters are as quiet as those
in Theo Angelopoulos’ films, and when they do
speak, they give little information to the viewer. In
addition to their limited dialogs, they also behave in
a way that the viewer could never be sure whether
an event has indeed taken place. For instance, in
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), it is highly unlikely
anyone could have predicted the philosophical
despair of the protagonist.
5. Kiarostami’s compositions often contain one
isolated trees, as well. In The Wind Will Carry Us,
this lone tree doubles as a signpost and guide for
the film crew; again emphasizing Kiarostami’s idea
about equality of man and nature.
6. Proposing philosophical questions and leaving them
unanswered are an inseparable theme across the
work of the filmmaker. Kiarostami never attempts
to answer questions as an all-knowing sage; all
he cares about is asking the questions (Sanjabi
2013 15-22). “For this reason, his [Kiarostami’s]
cinema reminds one of Michael Haneke’s. Haneke,
in turn, has cited Kiarostami his favorite filmmaker”
(DonyayeTasvir, 2012).
7. Using the spaces outside the frame is another
technique in Kiarostami’s work, which is arguably
inspired by Robert Bresson’s minimalist cinema
(Eslami 2007, 234)
8. Artistic blending of documentary and fictional
cinema is an essential trait of Kiarostami’s work,
which is owed to a number of major requirements
Capítulo II – Cinema – Cinema
such as complete command of the rules of both
genres, and beautiful, intelligent use of non-actors
and poetry. Therefore, Kiarostami’s films are devoid
of complex narrative structures, and most often the
story can be covered within a scene or two. One
may go as far as to say his films enter the realm
of anti-narrative cinema (Ghukassian 1996, 72-4).
Experiential Period
Kiarostami’s career as a filmmaker began in earnest
with Bread and Alley in 1970. He says of this film: “I
wasn’t sure if I’d made a good film or a bad one; if
it qualified as cinema or not. After all, before the
premiere in the festival, when I screened it in private
for my friends, they all said it was bad. But it was finally
screened and, amazingly, people received it very well.
I didn’t know back then that it was possible for the
audience to like a film when the critics dismiss it” (Iranian
Cinema Vol.1 1028). Following The Experience (1973),
Kiarostami directed The Traveler in 1974, “which tells
the story of a ten-year-old boy who dreams of watching
a soccer game of the Iranian national team from up
close. Here, for the first time, Kiarostami successfully
tried dramatic narrative structure” (Ghukassian 1996,
152-4). Between 1975 and 1977, Kiarostami directed
So Can I, Two Solutions for One Problem, Colors,
and The Wedding Dress, the latter was an original yet
ordinary story in the form of a documentary. Next came
The Report, which tells the story of a tax collector who
is accused of accepting bribes. The Report is notable
for being the first film about suicide in cinema. Here,
Kiarostami portrays the difficulties of an average urban
life using a cinematography style that resembles a
news report; the film thus remains quite interesting for
its distinctive visual look (Iranian Cinema Vol.1,741).
Kiarostami’s last film during this period is First Case,
Second Case (1979) which marks his first cinematic
effort in post-revolution Iran. In this first period, in
addition to gaining hands-on filmmaking experience,
Kiarostami expresses his thoughts on such notions as
life, death, fear, etc. in the form of short, mid-length,
and feature-length quasi-documentary fiction films (in
which the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction is
blurred) through his signature minimalist style.
Epistemological Period
Following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, between
1980 and 1984, Kiarostami directed a number
of educational films. First Graders (1984) was
Kiarostami’s first attempt at managing a group of child
non-actors (Karimi 1986, 71-85). In 1987, Kiarostami
made his breakthrough film, Where is the Friend’s
Home?which brought the filmmaker global fame.
The film narrates the story of a little boy, Ahmad,
who realizes he has mistakenly takenhis friend’s
notebook home, andhis efforts to take the notebook
back to his friend, who lives in a close-by village;the
dramashapes up due to the unfortunate fact that
Ahmad does not know his friend’s address. The title
of the film is taken from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri.
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AVANCA | CINEMA 2018
Certain critics consider Friend’s Home to be the first
part of Kiarostami’s would be ‘Earthquake Trilogy,’ the
next two installments being Life, and Nothing More…
and Through the Olive Trees. Across the three films,
Kiarostami deals with life, death, transformation,
and how the life of the protagonist of Friend’s Home
continues after the destructive 1990 earthquake in
Rudbar, Gilan Province. In 1989, Kiarostami penned
the script of Ibrahim Foruzesh’sKey, and directed
Homework which deals with the problems a group of
school friends face in dealing with their homework, and
the way the students’ parents and teachers reward and
punish them (Iranian Cinema Vol. 2, 1099-105). The
film is considered an example of ‘truth-seeking’ cinema
or Cinéma Vérité. Kiarostami’s frank language and
direct involvement in the development of the narrative,
best manifested by his presence in the frame as he
asks questions and seeks answers, is reminiscent of
the style of such filmmakers as Chris Marker and Jean
Rouch in the 1960s.
Auteurism Period
In 1990, Kiarostami made Close-Up, the true story of
a man who impersonates the acclaimed Iranian director,
Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The film, which is conceived in
‘Reconstructed Documentary’ style, sees Kiarostami
using the very people involved in real-life situations
caused by thehoaxer, Hossein Sabzian. In this regard,
it is an unprecedented filmmaking innovation in the
history of cinema. The scene where Sabzian,the
protagonist, is confronted with Makhmalbaf, the figure
he impersonates, ranks as one of the most memorable
moments ever recorded on film.
For the sequence where the protagonist (Sabzian)
and Makhmalbaf roam the streets together on a
motorbike, the director decided to omit some of
the dialog exchanged between the characters by
creating the illusion that on-location sound-recording
was done inadequately, rendering bits of their voices
indistinct. The sequence itself and the trick with the
recorded sound is proof of a subtle, poetic humor [on
Kiarostami’s part] and serves as an effective method
in Iranian Cinéma Vérité (Ghukassian 1996, 88).
Although many critics and scholars consider
Close-Up to be a completely realistic work, Mohsen
Makhmalbaf calls it “completely personal.” He goes on
to suggest:
‘SocialistRealism’ in the Eastern Bloc, ‘Neorealism’
in Italy, and ‘Magic Realism’ in Latin America
demonstrate that realism is not a monolithic
phenomenon with a unanimously-accepted definition;
therefore, it loses the main meaning that the artistic
or philosophical subjectivity or solipsistic objectivity of
the philosopher or artist originally conceived; because
realism that is described by other qualities ceases to
be original and universal. Now, it is better that we
accept that realism in art is a lie, and the personal
touch is a more eloquent device in conveying
meaning (Majalleh Film Vol. 105,May 1991).
30
The film was praised by several renowned
filmmakers such as Italy’s Nanni Moretti, who was
affected by the film to such an extent that in 1996, he
made a short film calledThe Day of the Premiere of
‘Close-Up’(Il GiornoDéllaPrima di ‘Close-Up’, 1996)
(Elena 2005, 92).
In 1992, Kiarostami released Life, and Nothing
More..., the middle installmentof the Earthquake
Trilogy, which won him the Roberto Rossellini award
at Cannes Film Festival, Kiarostami’s first in a long
line of international awards. The trilogy’s concluding
piece, Through the Olive Trees, came a year later,
and employs the film-within-film style reminiscent
of the cinema of such figures as Jean-Luc Godard
and François Truffaut. The latter film represents
Kiarostami’s most difficult experience in working with
non-actors, about which he once famously said, “It
still gives me nightmares from time to time!” The film
uses an open ending and is considered to belong in a
category of films that defamiliarize the audience with
the classical narrative structure:
In Chapter 10 of their book Film Art, David Bordwell
and Kristin Thompson, elaborate at length on such
films that oppose the conventions of classical cinema
in a variety of ways. They argue, quite clearly and
convincingly, that the inner logic of films like Dreyer’s
Day of Wrath (1943), Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad
(1961) and Ozu’sTokyo Story (1953)depart from the
logic of classical cinema, mentioning the ways these
filmmakers overlook the established presumptions
and principles of classical cinema. Their argument
is quite enlightening in assessment of Through the
Olive Trees as, in this film, like Day of Wrath, doubt
overtakes uncertainty and the ending of the film does
not bring the storyline threads to a definitive close
(Eslami2007, 224).
Kiarostami next directed Taste of Cherry in 1997,
and the film went on to win, this time, the Palme d’Or
at Cannes. The film deals with such themes as journey,
the hereafter, death and the filmmaker’s recurring
motifs such as nature. Automobile is again the means
of choice to travel and long takes help realize the film’s
minimalist approach. The ending could be regarded
as a Brechtian ellipsis which reminds the viewer of
the artificiality – the filmness, as it were – ofthe film.
“Using off-frame spaces and deliberate elimination of
parts of the narrative, in addition to using non-actors,
a significant element of Kiarostami’s work, have been
given more emphasis in this film, and arguably establish
the Auteurism of his cinema” (Eslami 2007, 234).
Kiarostami returned in 1999 with The Wind Will Carry
Us, which won the Silver Lion at Biennale in Venice.
The wheat fields in the film have been interpreted as
the director’s tribute to that giant of world cinema,
Akira Kurosawa, by practically recreating the “Crows”
vignette in the Japanese director’s film, Dreams (1990).
In The Wind, we hear the voices of characters whom
we never see throughout the film (off-camera voices).
The third period of Kiarostami’s career saw him
become the prominent, world-renowned auteur whose
style and vision inspired many a young filmmaker to
create internationally successful films of their own.

Innovation Period
In 2002, Kiarostami made Tenusing unconventional
methods of screenwriting and direction. It consists of
ten vignettes and is about the difficulties and sufferings
of the woman who is driving and chatting with
passengers for the whole duration of the film. In this
digitally-filmed work, Kiarostami focuses on the modern
Iranian society and expresses some of his most glaring
concerns and sharp criticisms about its shortcomings.
Kiarostami’s compositions, decoupage, choice of
angles and use of bold shot-sequences result in one
of his most starkly distinctive films. The elimination of
director from the film set is one of several innovations
applied in this project. Kiarostami was not physically
present while filming took place. He simply briefed the
actors on what he wanted to see them do, and then
the camera installed on top of the glove compartment
shoots the inside of the car. A major characteristic of
this type of filmmaking is the low production cost. This
tendency toward minimalism, which was extremely
popular in the 2000s, is defined by preference of non-
actors over professional ones, use of long takes, tight
mise-en-scene, and elimination of set design and the
pre-production phase (Andrew 2005, 63-71).
Shirin (2008) was another important film in
Kiarostami’s oeuvre which saw him stop being an
onlooker and return to be an overseer again. The
viewer is virtually placed where the screen should be
and looks from inside the screen at the spectators and
their reactions. The film consists of the reactions of a
group of actresses who are watching a film (a version
of Nizami’sKhosrow and Shirin). The viewer is never
shown what the female spectators are watching, but
sees their reactions andhears the drama of the unseen
film. Writing on Shirinin his blog, Bordwell enthuses:
I don’t expect to see a better film for quite some
time…After a credit sequence presenting the classic
tale Khosrow and Shirin in a swift series of drawings,
the film severs sound from image. What we hear over
the next 85 minutes is an enactment of the tale, with
actors, music, and effects. But we don’t see it at all.
What we see are about 200 shots of female viewers,
usually in single close-ups, with occasionally some
men visible behind or on the screen edge. The women
are looking more or less straight at the camera, and
we infer that they’re reacting to the drama as we
hear it…That’s it. The closest analogy is probably
to the celebrated sequence in Vivre sa vie, in which
the prostitute played by Anna Karina weeps while
watching La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Come to think
of it, the really close analogy is Dreyer’s film itself,
which almost never presents Jeanne and her judges
in the same shot, locking her into a suffocating zone
of her own…[W]hat is the nature of this spectacle?
Is it a play? The thunderous sound effects, sweeping
score, and close miking of the actors don’t suggest a
theatrical production. So, is it a film? True, some light
spatters on the edge of the women’s chadors, as if
from a projector behind them, but no light seems to
be reflected from the screen. In any case, what’s the
source of the occasional dripping water we hear from
the right sound channel? The tale is derealized but it
Capítulo II – Cinema – Cinema
remains as vivid on the soundtrack as the faces are on
the image track. What the women watch is, it seems,
a composite, neither theatrical nor cinematic—a
heightened idea of an audiovisual spectacle.This
catalogue of female reactions to a tale of spiritual
love reminds us that for all the centrality of men to his
cinema, Kiarostami has also portrayed Iranian women
as decisive, if sometimes mysterious, individuals.
Women stubbornly go their own way in Through
the Olive Trees and Ten. The premises of Shirin
were sketched in his short, Where Is My Romeo? in
Chacun son cinema (2007), in which women watch
a screening of Romeo and Juliet. But the sentiments
of that episode are given a dose of stringency here,
particularly in oneline Shirin utters: “Damn this man’s
game that they call love!” ... Kiarostami built movie
production into the plot of Through the Olive Trees.
Now he has given us the first fiction film I know about
the reception of a movie, or at least a heightened
idea of a movie. What we see, in all these concerned,
fascinated faces and hands that flutter to the face, is
what we spectators look like—from the point of view
of a film” (Bordwell 2009).
A notable point on Shirin is the arrangement of the
probable spectators, which is done only based on
female actors. This choice on Kiarostami’s part may be
down to the following reasons:
1. Rejecting accusations of misogyny directed at him
following the release of Ten
2. Honoring the professional actors he had for so
many years overlooked in favor of non-actors
3. The restrictions regarding the way actresses can
present themselves in Iranian Cinema
4. The presence of the character ‘Shirin,’ a symbol of
imprisonment, enslavement, limitations imposed on
women, and all the suffering a woman undergoes
on a path the freedom of which she has always
been denied (Sanjabi 2013, 37).
Kiarostami’s Influence on Contemporary
Filmmakers as an Auteur
The Auteur Theory was proposed by French critics in
1950s and, gradually, critics from the rest of the world
took the idea and developed it. According to this theory,
a filmmaker should be judged based on the consistency
and development of the running themes in their works,
establishing that judging each film as anindependent
cinematic work and separate from the rest of the
filmmaker’s oeuvre, as was common in the past, is wrong
and will not result in an accurate evaluation. According
to these critics, a film is indeed produced as the result of
a collective collaboration, yet it is ultimately a personal
work and the director, as its true creator, stamps the film
with their personal quirks, worldview, and often, visual
style. In every filmmaker’s body of work, these theorists
assert,there invariably exist a distinctive line of thought
and particular recurring themes; it is the job of a film
critic, then, to discovering these thoughts, themes and
ulterior motives by reading between the lines, seeing
beneath the surface, and analyzing the mise-en-scene.
This style of critical analysiswas innovated by Andre
31
AVANCA | CINEMA 2018
Bazin in the mid to late 1940s, when American films
found their way back in France. It is telling that Bazin
proposed his ideas against the commonplace belief
at the time which dictated that a good film is a noble
drama with significant human subjects in which great
actors perform. His critical system was followed up
with diligence and unshakable passion by then-young
critics Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude
Chabrol,Eric Rohmer, et al. With the new framework and
the support provided by this group of critics, filmmakers
whose works had in the past not been taken seriously
due to being ‘entertaining,’ such as Alfred Hitchcock,
Nicholas Ray, Vincent Minelli, and Samuel Fuller, were
suddenly recognized as elite artists and thinkers whose
bodies of work were worthy of profound reflection and
meticulous analysis.
Film Magazine in Britain and Andrew Sarris in
the United States played significant roles in further
developing and promoting this theory. As Geoff King
explicates, there are two dimensions in a filmmaker’s
work that may render them an auteur:
[First,] distinctive thematic concerns have to be
identified across a director’s body of work…In many
of the films of Stanley Kubrick, for example, we find
a central theme of the alienation of humanity within
a range of overpowering institutional frameworks,
those of a technologically advanced future in 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968) or of the military in Paths
of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1987).
[Second,] a distinctive film style is also required.
A true auteur uses the medium in a manner that is
identifiable from one work to another as his or her
personal style. This serves, as Sarris puts it, as the
director’s ‘signature’…in the case of Kubrick, a cool
and detached style, in which the camera remains
distanced from the protagonists, often underpins a
theme of waning humanity (King 2002, 87).
Film theorist and scholar, Peter Wollen, adds that:
In time, owing to the diffuseness of the originaltheory,
two mainschools of auteur critics grew up: those who
insisted on revealing a core ofmeanings, of thematic
motifs, and those who stressed style and mise en
scène.There is an important distinction here, which
I shall return to later. The workof the auteur has a
semantic dimension, it is not purely formal; the work of
the metteur en scène, on the other hand, does not go
beyond the realm ofperformance, of transposing into
the special complex of cinematic codes andchannels
a pre-existing text: a scenario, a book or a play. As
we shall see, themeaning of the films of an auteur is
constructed aposteriori; the meaning –semantic, rather
than stylistic or expressive – of the films of a metteur en
scèneexists a priori. In concrete cases, of course, this
distinction is not always clear-cut.There is controversy
over whether some directors should be seen asauteurs
or metteurs en scène (Wollen2013, 62).
It is arguably clear that Kiarostami, in much the
same way as the original directors considered as
auteurs, had complete control over all aspects of
his films, while the said recurring motifs and visual
distinction shine through his work. Perhaps it was Jean
Renoir who best described the concept, simply saying,
32
“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he
breaks it up and makes it again.” Citing this quotation
as true, Kiarostami affirms that “I am also busy
repeating myself” (Ghukassian 1996, 52). Kiarostami’s
confession may indeed be true, especially as regards
the films he made during his auteurism period (1990s),
however he proved that innovation and experiment still
matter a great deal in his work.
Successful Films Inspired by Kiarostami
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s film 4 Months,
3 Weeks and 2 Days, winner of the 2007 Palme d’Or,
is one of the films considered as beingly directly
inspired by Kiarostami’s cinema. The filmmaker also
refused to score the film and, by using tight mise-
en-scene arrangements, long takes, and non-actors,
creates a claustrophobic, haunting atmosphere which
is a reflection of the character’s inner emotional
state. Mungiu states the following about his film and
the way the Iranian auteur’s cinema influenced him:
“Kiarostami has always been a filmmaking example
for me. His specific method in employing non-actors as
well as long takes, elimination of the complex stages
of production, and his tendency toward a minimalist
style of filmmaking, especially as evidenced in Taste
of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us and Where Is the
Friend’s House? and Ten attracted my attention. Of
course, my film is more about introverted urbanity,
while Kiarostami is fascinated by landscapes in nature
and traveling by automobile” (Film Magazine 2008).
Another acclaimed recent film whose director does
not hide his fondness of Kiarostami is Tsotsi(2005)
by the South African Gavin Hood. The film, which
won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film, narrates the story of the eponymous
character, a teenage hoodlum living in a poverty-
stricken Johannesburg neighborhood. In an interview
with Screen magazine, Hood declares his admiration
for Kiarostami, saying, “I first conceived the idea
for my film in 2000.Watching Where Is the Friend’s
House?and Through the Olive Trees was particularly
important as they made me think of working with child
non-actors and it became a major concern for me. I
have to say Kiarostami is the greatest screenwriter
of our time, and it’s such a shame that the ideas and
innovative techniques of this filmmaker have not been
appreciated the way they should” (Ibid 2006)
Laurent Cantet’sThe Class, winner of the 2008
Palme d’Or is one of the most influential films of world
cinema inspired by Kiarostami. The film deals with
violence in a modern landscape and its roots in the
early stages of individuals’ first experience of social
education in schools.Cantet does not hesitate to cite his
inspirations, stating, “Filmmakers such as Kiarostami
and Haneke were effectively my the examples I
followed—my guides. The themes of my movies come
from Haneke’s cinema and Kiarostami’s Where Is the
Friend’s House?and Homework. Of course, Kiarostami
employs elements of documentary genre in the latter,
while my film is a documentary-like narrative film which,
in terms of analyzing the existing relationships across
 Capítulo II – Cinema – Cinema

the micro-society in the film, that is, the big world of this
small classroom, the aim was to achieve, and depict, a
new vision of realism in cinema” (Ibid 2009).

Conclusion

Throughout his career, Kiarostami always followed

a specific pattern. His films could be regarded as an
amalgamation of the minimalist cinemas of Robert
Bresson, YasujiroOzu, and even such filmmakers
as Satyajit Ray and Chantal Akerman. Seeing
as a majority of Kiarostami’s works exemplify the
provisions of Auteur theory, namely, recurring themes
and motifs as well as a unified style and vision of
filmmaking – what Andrew Sarris called the director’s
‘Signature’ – then Kiarostami readily qualifies as a
genuine auteur. Themes such as life, death, fear,
alienation of the modern man, journey, etc. come to life
through a distinctive cinematic style using long takes,
dedramatization, intentional omission of parts of the
narrative, poetic dialogs, digital visual techniques and
absence of music, especially in films such as Life, and
Nothing More… and Taste of Cherry.Kiarostami never
gave in to the whims and conventions of mainstream
cinema andfaithfully adhered to the end to his life-long
passion for experiment and innovation.

End Notes
1
Ph.D. Cand. Arts Studies
2
B.A. Filmmaking
3
Ph.D. Cand. Arts Studies

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