Close-Up Director: Abbas Kiarostami Year: 1990 Length: 98 min. Country: Iran
When Close-Up was filmed in the autumn of 1989, Iran had undergone a decade of turmoil and hardships (including the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which killed a million people) since the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which had executed many of its political opponents. Though many hardline Islamists regarded cinema as a foreign toxin, with the result that a third of Iran’s movie theaters were torched during the Revolution, the nation’s new leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, a fan of Dariush Mehrjui’s Neorealist- style film The Cow, gave his blessing for cinema’s continuance. When, as a consequence, a group of young intellectuals in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance set about planning the resurrection of Iran’s film industry in the early ’80s, many previously popular forms of entertainment were banned. The result, somewhat ironic, was that cinema came to occupy a central and powerful place in Iranian culture, allowing filmmakers to enjoy an unequaled kind of prestige and celebrity — less like artists, in some cases, than cult figures.
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By this time, too, many Iranians were disappointed by the Revolution’s failure to erase the stark gap between rich and poor in Iran. And just as there were continuing divisions in society, there were new ones in the ranks of Iran’s filmmakers. When the government set out to revive cinema, it invited a number of pre- Revolutionary directors, including Kiarostami, Mehrjui, Beyzai and others, to resume work. At the same time, a new group of younger post-Revolutionary filmmakers, often with a more ideological bent and less tied to the artistic culture of the ’70s, began to emerge. Chief among these was Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who’d been released from prison by the Revolution.
As a young Islamist in the early ’80s, Makhmalbaf bitterly criticized the pre-Revolutionary directors, even suggesting that some were fit for execution (as a few lesser-known filmmakers had been during the Revolution). By the late ’80s, though, having left behind religious orthodoxy for his own brand of expansive humanism and embraced cinema as a means of helping free the Iranian mind, Makhmalbaf
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