Life and Something More: Abbas Kiarostami Remembered

Click here to listen to the episode

Abbas Kiarostami, born in 1940 in Tehran, turned to filmmaking in 1970 when he helped set up the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. He had made a half dozen shorts and one feature, The Report in 1977, before the Iranian Revolution changed the public face of his country. While many filmmakers moved away in search of more creative freedom, Kiarostami continued to direct. Around the early 1990s, his films suddenly found an international foothold at festivals via the Koker trilogy and his most famous work, Close-Up. In 1997, he won a Palm D’Or for Taste of Cherry, helping paint the way for Iranian filmmakers to find an audience abroad. His filmmaking only became more cryptic and complex, especially with his early adoption of digital cinema with Ten and the self-reflexive documentary, Ten on Ten. His final films, Certified Copy and Like Someone In Love, were his only made outside his native Iran. Kiarostami passed away on July 4, 2016. In this special episode of the podcast, Amir Soltani, Tina Hassania, and Carson Lund join the podcast to celebrate the life and work of one of the legendary filmmakers to emerge on the world cinema stage.

0:00-2:49 Opening
2:49-46:18 Abbas Kiarostami — Part 1

47:16-52:02 Sponsorship Section

52:48-1:32:07 Abbas Kiarostami — Part 2

1:32:10-1:33:22 Close 

Episode #9 - Godfrey Cheshire (Close-Up)

Click here to listen to the episode

"I really like films that engage with the world. Film to me is, persay, a medium. It’s not an end in itself. I like films that deal with human reality, the different problems we have in the world, the different cultures we have in the world, all the sort of compliexities we have going through life—political, romantic, psychological—and I think film is an incredible medium for showing that."

Godfrey Chesire has seen it all. From his early experiences with the Westerns of John Ford, to his experience of the American New Wave while abroad in Europe, to the discovery of Chinese and Iranian cinema in the 1990s, Cheshire has remained an essential voice about how to talk and think about cinema in an honest and humanizing way. So Peter is quite excited to take him back through a whirlwind tour of his career, from the alt-weeky The Spectator to the heyday of the New York Press, and through his experiences with Edward Yang and writing about the emergence of digital cinema. The two also discuss his documentary Moving Midway, a film that battles his own personal history and cultural history of the plantation, and end their discussion with Abbas Kiarostami's all-too-fascinating text Close-Up, which they easily declare the Citizen Kane of Iranian film.

0:00-1:27 Opening

1:27-4:47 Establishing Shots - Portrait of Jason Kickstarter

5:02-1:01:57 Deep Focus - Godfrey Cheshire

1:03:08-1:30:09 Double Exposure - Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami)

1:30:11-1:31:50 Close

Read Godfrey Cheshire at the New York Press, Film Comment, the New York Times, and The Criterion Collection (Many of Cheshire's articles are only available via digital archives—please contact me via email if there is a particular article you would like at feedback@thecinephiliacs.net). 

Watch Moving Midway on Netflix.