The Poetic Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami

We'd be remiss not to mention the July 4 passing of filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. He was 76. The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw remembers Iran's greatest cinematic poet. "His movies didn’t render up their meaning easily; they were replete with meditative calm, sadness, reflection, but also dissent, obliquely stylised confrontation and emotional negotiation – as well as his own elusive kind of playful humour."

Bradshaw considers Kiarostami's oeuvre in detail, moving from the early trio of films, sometimes called the Koker trilogy; to Ten and Taste of Cherry; the "quasi-documentary" and definitive Close-Up; to more recent (and more accessible) work like Certified Copy--with frequent collaborator Juliette Binoche (fun game: spot her among the female faces of his experimental film Shirin)--and Like Someone in Love (2012). Then there is The Wind Will Carry Us (1999):

At the beginning of The Wind Will Carry Us, we see the film-makers in their car driving through a sweeping but featureless landscape: a long and winding road, with a single tree. It is the kind of Beckettian scene in which Kiarostami sited his Taste of Cherry.

They have got lost looking for a village, which they think is supposed to be near a tree. The film-maker himself whimsically quotes a line of poetry, from Sohrab Sepehri’s The Token: “Near the tree is a wooded lane/Greener than the dreams of God…” It is a lyrical moment, gentle, unworldly, and yet with a sharp, ironic twist, like the jab of a needle. That was how Abbas Kiarostami’s own cinematic poetry worked.

And might you want to watch a beautiful scene from Through the Olive Trees (1994):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHxbuvuHOVU