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It’s fascinating to consider the ideological factors that influence how film canons are formed, especially when it comes to films that depict unfamiliar cultures. Without thinking much about it, we tend to prefer American movies that suggest either that foreigners are just like us or that they’re devils from another planet .
I first saw Kiarostami’s new feature at the Locarno film festival last August; to me it was far and away the most exciting thing there. Most of the Locarno festival’s main films were projected on an enormous outdoor screen in the town square where thousands of people watched at once. Kiarostami’s film was not one of them, and festival director Marco Muller told me that the only reason was that Kiarostami himself feared the film wouldn’t work on such a grand scale.
There are a few basic differences between these two filmmakers. Kiarostami, born in 1940, has been active as a filmmaker since the reign of the shah–although it could be argued that he’s emerged as a major figure only quite recently, well after the revolution. Makhmalbaf, born a dozen years later, was a political prisoner of the shah for five years, from 1974 to 1979; he became a filmmaker only after his release, and has made ten features since 1981.
On the other hand, it’s far from mysterious that Makhmalbaf has not yet been accorded as much attention in the United States and Europe. Scorsese’s eclectic style succeeds commercially in the West largely because the ideological content of his movies is usually far from progressive. Makhmalbaf may use a similarly eclectic style to explore the contradictions and conflicts of Islamic fundamentalism, but his ideology, reactionary or progressive, has little to do with Western audiences.
The eighth and last of the drivers in this sequence essentially defines our angle on most of the remaining action in the film; practically everything else from here on is from the vantage point of this man or of his little boy.
What Kiarostami seems to have discovered in Close-Up, and elaborates on in And Life Goes On . . . , is a style that makes the most out of a certain middle-class voyeurism, both wittily and philosophically detached from and abidingly sympathetic to all the characters. The major instrument of that voyeurism in Close-Up is the cinematic process itself and the legal process that goes with it; in And Life Goes On . . . the middle-class man and his son provide the equivalent lenses.
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