The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 film “Close-Up” (which I discuss in this clip) is a courtroom drama of a special sort. It’s based on a real-life case of an unemployed Tehran movie buff, Hossain Sabzian, who impersonates the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. It features actual footage of the impostor’s trial, of Kiarostami’s inquiries into the case, and dramatic reënactments of the events leading to and including the arrest—performed by the participants themselves. The movie brings to the fore Kiarostami’s distinctive notion of the inextricability of being and seeming, of performance and life, of identity as a conscious construction. It also has surprising political implications.
An early scene, in which a journalist goes along for the ride with policemen who are about to make an arrest and actually involves himself in the inquiry in order both to facilitate it and to report on it, suggests his dire view of the officially permitted media. There’s a strange moment in that scene, in which the journalist discusses the neighborhood where the events take place, his own former neighborhood: just as he discusses unrest that made the neighborhood dangerous at the time of the revolution, Kiarostami’s camera shows a long, tall, blank, pale gray wall that nearly fills the screen. He makes it obvious, from the beginning of the film, that one of his subjects is the blanking-out of history, and that the very essence of the film—the reconstruction of recent events on the basis of, yet in distinction from, the official version of them that emerges from a court under religious authority—is an attempt to conjure historical awareness in the face of censorship, to recover the truth by means of art, and, along the way, to celebrate the cinema as the enterprise that allows citizens suffering injustices and oppressions to bring their suffering to light. The movie challenges the very system that turns an aspiring filmmaker such as Sabzian into a criminal.
P.S. Here’s the trailer for Kiarostami’s next film, “Like Someone in Love.”
