Kiarostami’s recent work has been increasingly minimalistic and experimental. Like the later works of Samuel Beckett, they can be maddeningly impenetrable while also being some of the most innovative and singular experiences available in modern art. Here are short reviews of four of his most recent films.
ABC Africa (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2001). ABC Africa is a spirited documentary about orphans from Uganda shot on handheld digital cameras. It works best when Kiarostami abandons narrative in favor of beautiful images of curious and spontaneous children dancing, singing, and playing. Kiarostami’s natural sense of poetry, rhythm, and composition carries the film, which would otherwise be only a minor work of cultural (rather than artistic) importance.
Ten (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2002). Ten is a novel experiment with cinema and the role of the director (Kiarostami apparently only minimally presided over the film, allowing it to unfold from the periphery) that also offers a uniquely intimate view into the life of women in contemporary Iran, which marks an important shift from Kiarostami's previously male centered filmography. Kiarostami's marginalization of himself actually allows a more philosophically consistent elucidation of the concerns of women.
Five (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2003). Ostensibly an homage to Ozu, these five static and extraordinarily long lasting shots play like five stanzas of a poem. Despite its audaciousness, this film can be dazzling if approached with the right mindset—particularly at the unexpected revelation in the final shot.
Shirin (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2008). In Kiarostami's most explicitly dialectical film, 114 female faces watch a film we can only hear; instead, Kiarostami asks us to “see” the film through the closeups of their expressive faces. Shirin is fascinating and provocative, if perhaps a little too self-consciously so. [114, I feel compelled remind, is also the number of sura in the Qur'an.]
I have yet to see Tickets, a film he directed along with Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi, or his latest film that premiered at Cannes this year, though I expect to be impressed by both of them in one way or another.
