Postscript: Abbas Kiarostami, 1940—2016

The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who died yesterday at the age of seventy-six, was simply one of the most original and influential directors in the history of cinema. He achieved something that few filmmakers ever have: he seemed to create a national identity with his own cinematic style. He was the first Iranian filmmaker who expanded the history of cinema not merely in a sociological sense but in an artistic one, and his tenacious, bold, restless originality—an inventive audacity that carried through to his two last features, made outside of Iran—focussed the attention of the world on the Iranian cinema and opened the Iranian cinema to other directors who have followed his path.

The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who died this week at the age of seventy-six, is pictured here in the nineteen-nineties.PHOTOGRAPH BY EVERETT

Art is born of a confluence of temperament and circumstances. It’s amazing that Kiarostami was able to work copiously and free-spiritedly within the rigid constraints imposed by the religious and political doctrines of the Iranian regime. Yet he also seemed to thrive on conflict, arising from his over-all sense of resistance to authority and defiance of norms, which he expressed subtly but decisively in dramatic action and in cinematic form. He was one of the greatest ironists and symbolists in the history of cinema, bringing out grand philosophical ideas and depicting independent-minded characters, while nonetheless apparently deferring to imposed conventions and expectations.

In the nineteen-seventies, Kiarostami made his earliest films under the auspices of the Kanun, or Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. They were didactic films, for and about young people. After the Islamic Revolution, he continued to make educational films, but a sense of his sly radicalism appears in the short film “Orderly or Disorderly,” from 1981, a sort of cinematic “Goofus and Gallant” of large groups, in which the orderly one appears terrifyingly dehumanized (and enforced by the authority of the police) and the disorderly appears lively and vital—but not without risks and conflicts. It’s also a reflexive film, in which each sequence is prefaced by a slate and a clap, as well as a film of passionate observation, expressing the sheer joy in seeing and filming the alluring details and large-scale patterns of daily life.

The first paradox of Kiarostami’s career is the clash between documentary and dramatic elements, between the observed and the imposed, between the discovered and the determined—and between the closed world of the movie shoot and the total one behind the camera. He worked mainly with non-actors whom he encountered on location, as in his 1987 feature “Where Is the Friend’s Home?,” the story of a schoolboy in the rural village of Koker who travels to another village to give a classmate a notebook, in the process defying parental authority, and other authorities as well. That region was devastated in 1990 by an earthquake; in the 1992 feature “Life and Nothing More,” Kiarostami dramatized his trip to Koker after the disaster to inquire about the movie’s young star, with an actor playing the director. One of the film’s key incidents is an encounter with a newlywed man who married his fiancée the day after the earthquake (they spend their first nights together in the shelter of ruins). Kiarostami followed that film with “Through the Olive Trees,” a story based on the life of the local mason who played the newlywed groom in “Life and Nothing More.” The director is a character, too, and he gets involved in the couple’s relationship. For that matter, the movie opens with an actor addressing the viewer, identifying himself as an actor playing a director who has come to Koker to choose an actress for a film.

Kiarostami’s narrative gamesmanship is fiercely and intensely political. Filming in a place of severe restrictions on what could be filmed, he declared, with his reflexive stories and distancing setups, that his fictions were fictions, that their contrivance should be apparent, that their censorious conventions should be noted, that their omissions should be glaring—and, at the same time, that his quest for truth on the basis of personal experience and artistic struggle is in no way diminished (even if rendered somewhat comical) by the narrow circumstances of his productions. What’s missing, and what Kiarostami highlights with his ingenious glints of ironic whimsy, are the intimate forces that are, in his view, the mightiest of all—sex and death.

Like such great Hollywood filmmakers as Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch, who worked under the restrictions of the Hays Code as well as studio dictates and social norms, Kiarostami was a symbolist, and perhaps the most original symbolist of all, because he was also one of the great cinematic naturalists. His films are marked by two main figures of style—extended views of people travelling and working in alluring landscapes and streets, and extended views of people talking in cars. His images of landscapes are among the most ecstatic and rapturous ever filmed, and he patiently observes his characters moving through them with a determination that’s as existentially committed as it is gracefully choreographic. For Kiarostami, cars are private places in public, crucial intersections of personal space with the random impingement of happenstance—and of political power, as it inhabits the very substance of ordinary people’s ways of living, talking, and thinking.

The greatest of Kiarostami’s Iranian films, “The Wind Will Carry Us,” from 1999, is the story of an urbane documentary filmmaker who travels with his crew to a remote Kurdish village that is built into a sharply sloping hillside. He wants to film the locale’s distinctive funeral rituals, and, learning that an elderly woman there is on the verge of death, he brings in his crew—but she’s in no hurry to die, and the filmmaker gets inevitably involved in the lives of the residents. What he finds is sex—not in the way that such a character in an American or European film might do so, through experience, but through the intimations and traces of the people he meets. The film is filled with the unseen—many characters are heard only from behind closed doors, and the movie’s most exotic erotic encounters involve an unseen couple who rendezvous in a pit dug into a distant hilltop for a cellphone antenna.

Because women can’t appear in Iranian films without head scarves, but because women in Iran don’t wear head scarves in the privacy of their own homes, Kiarostami didn’t film domestic scenes at all, on the ground that it would be “totally unrealistic.” Instead, he found ingenious and exquisite substitutes, conveying an impression of plein-air lyricism structured by the psychological dialectics of his characters’ arch (and mainly vehicular) disputations. But when, in recent years, he found the pressure on filmmakers in Iran to be unbearable, he made two dramatic features outside the country—“Certified Copy,” from 2010 (and starring Juliette Binoche), in Italy, and “Like Someone in Love,” from 2012, in Japan—and there, too, he found sex and power to be the source of personal conflict, and he found nature, biological nature and human nature, to be equally resistant to societal conventions.

Kiarostami was a fiercely political filmmaker, in the largest sense: he filmed the clashes of the deepest and most abiding forms of power against the ephemeral and enforced sorts of temporal power (even the sort endowed, in the name of religion, with the rhetoric of eternity). He filmed a world of conflict because, with his strong temperament and singular artistic determination, he found himself to be in conflict with authorities of all sorts. He also found himself to be in conflict, in the aftermath of Iran’s repressed Green Movement, with other Iranian directors (including his own former assistant, Jafar Panahi) who make films in overt opposition to the regime’s repressions. Despite Kiarostami’s praise of student protesters and denunciation of the country’s oppressive laws, his criticisms of filmmakers who seemed to be his allies (the specifics are here and here) left him open to suspicion that he was playing a balancing act of neutrality between the government and its opponents.

As unpleasant and ambiguous as the stories of those conflicts are, I take them as a sign of Kiarostami’s conjoined political and artistic radicalism—his rejection of movies that saw political struggles in local and practical terms rather than in absolute and philosophical ones, and of movies that didn’t reflect artistic invention at the height of such motivating ideas. Like most artists endowed with a supreme, epoch-dominating creativity, Kiarostami couldn’t settle for less—including in his own work—even at the risk of personal misunderstandings and public misconceptions. His last film, “Like Someone in Love,” which he made in his seventies, is a daring new direction in his cinema and in the world of cinema at large. In short, he kept on getting better, which makes his death all the more tragic.