The Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami is known for uses of certain themes and cinematic techniques that are instantly recognizable in his work, from the use of child protagonists and stories that take place in rural villages, to conversations that unfold inside cars utilizing stationary mounted cameras. He often undertook a documentary style of filmmaking within narrative works, and frequently employs contemporary Iranian poetry in dialogue, movie titles, and in the thematic elements of his pictures.
The Kiarostamian style Though Abbas Kiarostami has been compared to Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Tati, his films exhibit a singular style, often employing techniques of his own invention (the so-called "Kiarostamian style").
During the filming of The Bread and Alley, his first film, Kiarostami disagreed with his experienced cinematographer about how to film the boy and the attacking dog. The cinematographer wanted separate shots of the boy approaching, a close up of his hand as he enters the house and closes the door, followed by a shot of the dog. Kiarostami believed that if the three scenes could be captured as a whole it would have a more profound impact, creating tension. That one shot took some forty days to complete. Kiarostami later commented that the breaking of scenes can disrupt the rhythm and content of the film's structure, stating he prefers to let the scene flow as one.
Unlike other directors he showed no interest in developing his directorial muscles by staging extravagant combat scenes or complicated chase scenes in large-scale productions. Instead, he attempted to use the medium of film in his own unique way. As he quoted in relation to his cinematographer's perspective on filming: "I did not follow the conventions of film making that he had become accustomed to".
Kiarostami appeared to have settled on his style when he made the Koker trilogy. Nevertheless, he continued experimenting with new modes of filming, using different directorial methods. Much of Ten, for example, was filmed in a moving automobile without Kiarostami present. He gave suggestions to the actors about what to do, and a camera placed on the dashboard then filmed them while they drove around Tehran.The Mac Weekly:With liberty for all: the films of Kiarostami The camera was allowed to roll, capturing the faces of the people during their daily routine, using a series of extreme close-up shots.
Kiarostami's cinema offers a different definition of film. According to film professors such as Jamsheed Akrami, unlike many other contemporary filmmakers Kiarostami has consistently attempted to redefine film by forcing the audience's increased involvement. In recent years he has also progressively trimmed down the size of his films, which Akrami believes reduces the film making experience from a collective endeavor to a purer, more basic form of artistic expression.
As Kiarostami quoted in relation to his individual style of minimalism: My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements that can be eliminated have been eliminated. This was pointed out to me by somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark. And it's something that we do – we bring out elements that we want to emphasise.Jean-Luc Nancy, "On Evidence: Life and Nothing More, by Abbas Kiarostami," Discourse 21.1 (1999), p.82. Also, cf., .
Self-referencing is a feature specific to Kiarostami's cinema. Stephen Bransford contends that Kiarostami's films do not contain references to the work of other directors, but do include a myriad of references to his own work. Bransford believes his films are often fashioned into an ongoing dialectic: one film reflecting on and partially demystifying an earlier film.
Fiction and non-fiction Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often mix fiction and documentary elements. As Kiarostami has said, "We can never get close to the truth except through lying."
Kiarostami has said of his film making: "An artist designs and creates a piece hoping to materialize some thoughts, concepts or feelings through his or her medium. The credibility of great Persian poets like Rumi and Hafez comes from the very fact that they are composed in such a way that they are fresh and meaningful regardless of the time, place and conditions in which you read them—and this means reading them while doing divination or simply as literature."
The boundary between fiction and non-fiction is significantly reduced in Kiarostami's cinema. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, writing about Kiarostami, and in particular Life, and Nothing More..., has argued that his films are neither quite fiction nor quite documentary. Life and Nothing More..., he argues, is neither representation nor reportage, but rather "evidence": [I]t all looks like reporting, but everything underscores (indique à l'évidence) that it is the fiction of a documentary (in fact, Kiarostami shot the film several months after the 1990 earthquake), and that it is rather a document about "fiction": not in the sense of imagining the unreal, but in the very specific and precise sense of the technique, of the art of constructing images. For the image by means of which, each time, each opens a world and precedes himself in it (s'y prédède) is not pregiven (donnée toute faite) (as are those of dreams, phantasms or bad films): it is to be invented, cut and edited. Thus it is evidence, insofar as, if one day I happen to look at my street on which I walk up and down ten times a day, I construct for an instant a new evidence of my street.Jean-Luc Nancy, "On Evidence: Life and Nothing More, by Abbas Kiarostami," Discourse 21.1 (1999), p.82. Also, cf., Jean Luc Nancy. Is Cinema Renewing Itself? Film-Philosophy. vol. 6 no. 15, July 2002.
Close-Up, for example, contains scenes from the real-life trial of a man charged with fraudulently impersonating a film director. To make the film, however, Kiarostami coaxed the antagonists to re-stage scenes occurring between them, including the arrest. While such a technique clearly precludes labeling the film as a documentary, by re-staging events between the deceiver and the deceived Kiarostami implicitly poses questions about the validity and significance of what the audience sees. Because these are the actual participants in a drama played out in criminal court, it dawns on the audience that these re-stagings are also part of the real life of these people, especially since both the impersonator and the family he fooled were interested in working in cinema. If these re-enactments constitute a kind of "evidence", this is less because they show us what took place to cause the arrest than because the audience is witness to a scene in which the actors are in fact continuing the story of their confrontation and/or reconciliation.
For Jean-Luc Nancy, this notion of cinema as "evidence," rather than as documentary or imagination, is tied to the way Kiarostami deals with life and death: Existence resists the indifference of life and death, it lives beyond mechanical "life," it is always its own mourning, and its own joy. It becomes figure, image. It does not become alienated in images, but it is presented there: the images are the evidence of its existence, the objectivity of its assertion. This thought—which, for me, is the very thought of this film [Life and Nothing More...]—is a difficult thought, perhaps the most difficult. It's a slow thought, always under way, fraying a path so that the path itself becomes thought. It is that which frays images so that images become this thought, so that they become the evidence of this thought—and not in order to "represent" it.Jean-Luc Nancy, "On Evidence: Life and Nothing More, by Abbas Kiarostami," Discourse 21.1 (1999), p.85–6. Wanting to do more than just represent life and death as an opposition, and instead to show the way in which each is inevitably and profoundly involved with the other, Kiarostami has devised a cinema that does more than just present the viewer with the documentable "facts," but neither is it simply a matter of artifice. Because "existence" means more than simply life, it is projective, containing an irreducibly fictive element, but in this "being more than" life, it is therefore contaminated by mortality. Nancy is giving an interpretation of Kiarostami's statement that lying is the only way to truth.
Themes of life and death Themes of life and death and the concepts of change and continuity play a major role in Kiarostami's works. In the Koker trilogy, for example, we see an ongoing life force in the face of death and destruction, and the power of human resilience to overcome and defy death. The film is set in the aftermath of the 1990 Tehran earthquake. Kiarostami expressed how important these themes are in his films, particularly in the film Life, and Nothing More..., directed soon after the disaster:
It is a very important film, Life, and Nothing More..., in that what was filmed was inspired by a journey I had made just three days after an earthquake. And I speak not only of the film itself but also of the experience of being in that place, where only three days before 50,000 people had died. For the survivors, it was as if they were reborn, having experienced death around them. The earthquake had happened at four or five in the morning, so in a sense everybody could have been dead and it was almost accidental that they hadn't died. So I didn't just see myself as a film director here, but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death. So this was a very big influence on me, and the issue of life and death from then on does recur in my films.
The theme of suicide is also important in several of his earlier films. He shows how the desire to self-harm is often counteracted by humanity and the need to help others in the face of death. This illustrates the ongoing life force and the power of life over death.
Taste of Cherry explores the fragility of life and rhetorically focuses on the preciousness of life. Badii, a middle aged apparently healthy and well off Tehrani (played by Homayoun Ershadi), cruises the city's outskirts in his Range Rover trying to find a stranger who will help him commit suicide. Conversations with people on the way gradually convince him of the positivity and preciousness of life. From the young Kurdish soldier who is spooked by the shuddering request to a middle-aged Afghani seminarian who is unable to dissuade Badii with religious sympathy to a Turkish taxidermist at a natural history museum who urges the glories of nature — the taste of cherries — as the prime reason not to kill oneself, Kiarostami evokes a high degree of emphasis on the different elements of life.
When the protagonist reaches his grave, a black screen evokes his symbolic death, but the finality of this ending is undermined by the video sequences that follow, which show the actor playing Mr. Badiei lighting a cigarette and the film crew resting. Again, life goes on, but in an off-screen elsewhere.