for two qualities above all, beyond the general craft and intelligence of their making: Some were seen as adopting the ethos of Italian Neorealism in their shot-on-the-streets grittiness, their focus on issues of poverty and social justice, and their profound humanism; others were noted for their nuanced and compassionate stories about children. Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, as it happened, embodied both tendencies.
If those qualities had remained the principal defining attributes of Iran’s post-Revolutionary cinema, it’s possible that cinema would not have enjoyed the extraordinary surge it witnessed in the 1990s, when Iranian films won top prizes at most of the world’s leading film festivals. But Close-Up announced two new types of films that would help draw increased attention and regard to Iranian cinema, especially among critics: films that combined (and often blurred the lines between) the methods of documentary and fictional filmmaking; and films that concerned film, filmmaking and filmmakers, especially from the angles of their political, philosophical and social ramifications. Thus did Iran enter the realm of the chimeric, of cinematic reflexivity as both a discrete sub-genre and an artistic strategy for confronting the perplexities of post-Revolutionary Iran.
It was a turn of far-reaching implications. Yet while other Iranian directors subsequently ventured onto the same path, its most dogged and ingenious explorers continued to be the two directors at the center of Close-Up. Indeed, in that film’s aftermath, it almost seemed that Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen
Makhmalbaf embarked on a feverish competition to see who could make the most chimeric films. Kiarostami’s next movie, And Life Goes On, concerned a film director driving into an earthquake zone trying to determine the fate of the child actors from his previous film (a thinly fictionalized version of a trip Kiarostami made looking for the young leads of Where Is the Friend’s House?). That was followed by Through the Olive Trees (1994), which fictionalized the making of And Life Goes On, with two actors playing versions of Kiarostami. (These three films were later dubbed “the Koker Trilogy,” for the village devastated by the earthquake.)
Not to be outdone, Makhmalbaf — who would later claim that the trend was initiated not by Close-Up but by his previous film, Marriage of the Blessed (1989) — soon launched into an even longer string of cinema- centric films. His Once Upon a Time, Cinema (1992) offered a delirious comedic and satiric Cook’s tour of the entire history of Iranian cinema, while The Actor (1993) gave a screwball spin to a story meditating on marriage and on the interplay of actors and roles.
But these films were effectively just a warm-up for three masterpieces that arrived at mid-decade. In the intricately reflexive, emotionally stirring A Moment of Innocence (a/k/a The Bread and the Vase, 1996), Makhmalbaf played himself as a director trying to come to terms with his past as a youthful Islamist terrorist. That film’s riotous auditions, meanwhile, were filmed for Salam Cinema (1995), an allegory of cinema’s enrapturing social and psychological powers with Makhmalbaf playing a tyrannical
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