Close-Up (1990)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Close-up |
| Original title | Persian نمای نزدیک Nema-ye Nazdik |
| Country of production |
Iran , France |
| original language | Persian |
| Publishing year | 1990 |
| length | 98 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Abbas Kiarostami |
| script | Abbas Kiarostami |
| production | Ali-Reza Zarrin |
| music | Kambiz Roushanavan |
| camera | Ali-Reza Zarrindast |
| cut | Abbas Kiarostami |
| occupation | |
| |
Close-Up ( Persian نمای نزدیک, Nema-ye Nazdik ) is an Iranian film from 1990, partly documentary and partly fictional . The basis for the director Abbas Kiarostami was a report in a magazine, according to which the unemployed printer and cineast Sabzian had pretended to be a famous film director ( Mohsen Makhmalbaf ) with a rich family and had been brought before a court as a fraudster. Kiarostami implements this plot for his film and lets the actual actors re-enact parts of the plot.
action
The film begins with a kind of framework in which the journalist Farazmand and two police officers who are supposed to arrest Sabzian take a taxi to the crime scene, the home of the Ahankhah family. Farazmand speaks enthusiastically about the report he wants to write about the case in the style of the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci . With the taxi driver, a former jet fighter pilot who initially mistook the journalist for a police officer, his talkativeness met with only moderate interest. After asking several passers-by about the house, at first only Farazmand goes into the Ahkankhah's house to avoid Sabzian becoming suspicious. The taxi driver asks the policemen if they don't have a car, which they reject without going into it. Only when Mr. Ahankhah steps outside do the policemen get out of the car and enter the house. The taxi driver is now alone, collecting flowers from a pile of rubbish on the street, steps at a spray can, which then rattles down the street in a long shot of about 30 seconds. After Sabzian's arrest, Farazmand borrows 200 tomans from Mr. Ahankhah to pay for the taxi and kicks the same spray can when he finally succeeds in his desperate search for a tape recorder in the neighborhood. Only later, in a flashback during the court hearing, the arrest inside the house, which was actually important for the development of the plot, is reproduced. The framework action is concluded with a shot that shows how the newspaper is printed, in which the journalist's report appears, while the title sequence is shown at the same time .
After the first section, which mainly deals with how the journalist makes the story his own until it can finally be printed in the weekly paper, the perspective of the filmmaker Kiarostami himself becomes the subject. After finding out about the case from the newspaper, he goes in search of Sabzian. He first visits the police in a barracks. From them Kiarostami finally receives the address of the Ahankhah family, whom he interviewed in the next scene. It turns out that the Ahankhah family are exasperated by the way Farazmand portrayed them in the report and are now hoping for a more appropriate portrayal. One of the sons, Mehrdad Ahankhah, speaks about how they were portrayed as simple people who did not see through the deception. He tries to explain the difficult situation that he and his brothers would find themselves in, because despite a good education as engineers they could not get a decent job, but had to sell bread. Sabzian would have given them hope to be able to work in the artistic field. He tells Kiarostami that Sabzian is incarcerated in Tehran's Qasr prison, where Kiarostami is now visiting him. Sabzian asks Kiarostami to make a film about his suffering. Kiarostami promises to do so and at the same time holds out the prospect of moving his process forward. In another scene, Kiarostami asks the judge for permission to film during the trial and to move the trial date forward.
After Kiarostami has received permission to film, filming begins in the courtroom. Sabzian is led into the courtroom with handcuffs. Kiarostami greets him and asks if he remembers the conversation in prison and if he continues to agree to the hearing. Sabzian agrees and adds that Kiarostami is his "audience". He explains to Sabzian about the two cameras that are supposed to record the court hearing. While one is a zoom lens that can follow what is happening from different angles, another with a close-up setting is aimed directly at Sabzian. Kiarostami instructs Sabzian to always turn to this camera if he does not feel understood by the court.
In a flashback during the testimony of the witnesses from the Ahankhah family, the story is now rolled out from the beginning. Mahrokh Ahankhah, an elderly lady, meets the unemployed printer Hossein Sabzian on a bus, who is reading the script for The Cyclist by the famous Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. They talk about it. Sabzian pretends to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Mrs. Ahankhah talks about her sons' enthusiasm for cinema, especially for Makhmalbaf's films. Before Sabzian leaves the bus, Ms. Ahankhah gives him her address.
Sabzian then visits the Ahankhah family and inspects the rooms of their house, as he says he wants to make a film there. At further meetings he begins to rehearse for this film with the two adult sons. Together with the family he goes to a Makhmalbaf film and in 1900 borrows Toman for a taxi ride and for a gift that the separated Sabzian wants to give his son.
However, the family becomes suspicious because Sabzian is not informed about a current award ceremony for Makhmalbaf. On his next visit, Sabzian is arrested by the police. Here the flashback follows the opening credits, in which the policemen and the journalist Hossain Farazmand drove in a taxi to the family house. However, the camera now shows the same thing from a different perspective, namely from the house of the Ahankhah family.
At the trial, Sabzian is charged with trying to cheat on the Ahankhah family or even planning to break into their home. Sabzian, who had already confessed to the deception, takes the position that he was interested in art. He also enjoyed the respect that was shown to him as a director. He vows to get well soon and finally the affected members of the Ahankhah family forgive him.
After Sabzian was released from prison, Mohsen Makhmalbaf picked him up on a motorcycle. He brings the Sabzian, moved to tears, to the Ahankhah family, where he presents a bouquet of flowers as a token of atonement.
Formal and content interpretation
Close-Up is seen as “perhaps Kiarostami's most complex film”, which hides a lucid meditation on appearance and reality behind the apparent simplicity and practicality of the presentation .
Abbas Kiarostami does not reproduce the plot directly and chronologically when depicting the events, but works with flashbacks, unexpected delays and changes of perspective. The expectations of the film viewer are disappointed when the camera remains outside on the street when Sabzian is arrested and films the taxi driver waiting there.
Like other Kiarostami films, Close-Up is self-reflective in that it addresses filmmaking. In the film, Kiarostami is concerned not only with content, but also formally with the role of the director. In an interview, Kiarostami described the two cameras as a kind of encounter between law and art during the trial. Accordingly, the film technology rests on these two cameras, the one that shows the court and the trial in legal terms and the camera of art that patiently traces the motives and sufferings of the Sabzian man.
The technique of filmmaking is also brought to the attention of the viewer at the end of the film, when the microphone has loose contact during Sabzian and Makhmalbaf's motorcycle ride, so that their conversation can only be partially understood. By omitting important plot elements as well as through the fragmentary and multi-faceted narrative style, Kiarostami tries to integrate the viewer “into a collective of narrative”.
With his mixture of documentary and fictional elements, Kiarostami explores the often fragile border between representation and reality in Close-Up. For the most part, the scenes in the film were recreated by the actors in the manner of a re-enactment . In an interview, Kiarostami said: “When I saw Close-Up last night, I couldn't remember which sentences I gave the actors and which came from them, and I like that. I think the ideal is that both sides form a closed unit. "
After a review on the “Top 100” film list on the “Arts & Faith” website, the docudrama offers a “close-up look” on the struggle for remorse and forgiveness and a reflection on self-expression and the effects of the cinema on our lives. One of the themes of the film is the mutual connection between fraud and the willingness to indulge in illusions. The American literary critic Norman N. Holland noticed in the film the strong urge of the protagonists to pursue their ideal self-image, which often deviates from reality. This drift is broken by "non-eventful moments" and delays in the course of action in the filmic representation.
When Kiarostami read the story of Hossein Sabzian in the weekly newspaper, he was in the process of preparing another film project, which, however, after consulting with his clients from the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon) in Tehran, in favor from Close-Up gave up. This film was also produced by Ali-Reza Zarrin from Kanoon .
Publication and prices
The film was released in 1990 in Iran and Canada, and on October 30, 1991 in France. In the USA it was only shown from the end of 1999. It was released on DVD in 2010 by The Criterion Collection .
- Special prize of the jury at the 8th Fajr International Film Festival , Tehran 1990
- Silver R at the 3rd Rimini International Film Festival, 1990
- Quebec Critics Association Prize at the 19th International Festival of New Cinema & Video in Montreal, Canada 1990
- Several prizes at the 5th International Film Festival in Dunkerque, France 1991
- FIPRESCI Prize at the 11th Istanbul International Film Festival, Turkey 1992
In Germany, the film was first shown on Arte on June 20, 1993 .
reception
Close-Up was voted fifth of the ten best films of 1991 by the Cahiers du cinéma . Although Close-Up was praised by many film critics and especially other film directors, such as Werner Herzog , it was only a modest success with the public. This contradiction was addressed by Nanni Moretti in the short film Il Giorno della Prima di Close Up (1996), which documents the day on which Close-Up opened in Italy and Nanni Moretti, as the owner of an independent cinema, looked in vain for viewers.
"A complex approach to social and human values, shaped by the multi-layered, also humorous examination of the term reality"
swell
- ↑ Cf. Jonathan Rosenbaum: "Abbas Kiarostami", in: Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), Abbas Kiarostami , University of Illinois Press, 2003, ISBN 0252071115 , pp. 1, 17.
- ↑ Bert Rebhandl: "Poetry and Modernity" In: Culturebase.net - The international artist database. ( Memento of the original from June 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Chris Darke: Light readings: film criticism and screen arts , Wallflower Press, 2000, ISBN 1903364078 , p. 62.
- ↑ Jonathan Rosenbaum: "Abbas Kiarostami", in: Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), Abbas Kiarostami , University of Illinois Press, 2003, ISBN 0252071115 , pp. 1, 16.
- ↑ Jonathan Rosenbaum: "Abbas Kiarostami", in: Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), Abbas Kiarostami , University of Illinois Press, 2003, ISBN 0252071115 , pp. 1, 14 f.
- ↑ Reproduced in Noa Steimatsky: Pasolini on Terra Sancta: Towards a Theology of Film, in: Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of realism: essays on corporeal cinema , Duke University Press, 2003, ISBN 0822330660 , p. 243, fn. 57.
- ↑ Janis El-Bira: Close-Up , Filmzentrale.
- ↑ Chris Darke: Light readings: film criticism and screen arts , Wallflower Press, 2000, ISBN 1903364078 , p. 62.
- ↑ Own translation from INTERVIEW: Films Without Borders: Abbas Kiarostami Talks About “ABC Africa” and Poetic Cinema, indieWIRE (May 7, 2002)
- ↑ T. Fredricks: “Close Up (Nema-ye Nazdik)” In: “Arts & Faith - The Top 100 Films”.
- ↑ Norman N. Holland: "Abbas Kiarostami, Close-Up, Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990."
- ↑ Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up at Film Forum. ( Memento of the original from March 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Web links
- Close-Up in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Close-Up in the Lexicon of International Films