In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
The collection Abbas Kiarostami: Early Shorts and Features contains 17 films made between 1970 and 1989, including films made both before and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. For a Kiarostami fan, this collection is fascinating for allowing a glimpse into how the director developed his distinctive style. He’s interested in the daily lives of ordinary people, particularly children, likes to use nonprofessional actors, and is willing to let a film’s action unspool naturally, with lots of long takes and a fondness for long shots that place the action within a specific context. These films also document changes in daily life after the Iranian revolution, and all were produced by Kanoon, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.
Kiarostami’s first film, “Bread and Alley” (1970, 12 min., B&W), is pretty much what it says on the tin: the camera follows a young boy carrying a large piece of flatbread down an alley, kicking a can as he goes, and encountering various obstacles. Cinematographer Mehrdad Fakhimi’s camera captures the play of light and shadow on this dialogue-free journey, which is accompanied by a bouncy instrumental soundtrack by Herayr Atashkar including the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” In “Breaktime” (1972, 15 min., B&W), a young boy is isolated in a hallway while his classmates are playing; it turns out he’s being punished for breaking a window with his ball. Then school ends and he heads outside with the other students, who are dismissed in orderly lines that quickly become chaotic. There’s no musical soundtrack or dialogue but great use of diegetic sound to set the scene (Herayt Atashkar did the film’s sound).
“Experience” (1973, 56 min., B&W) feels much more mature than the previous shorts, with more adventurous use of locations and camera movement, more characters, and more getting inside characters’ heads rather than simply focusing on their movements. The screenplay, by Kiarostami and Amir Naderi, is a character study of a 14-year-old boy finding his way in a world of adults. The lack of non-diegetic music and minimal use of dialogue showcases Kiarostami’s gift for visual storytelling and cinematographer Ali Reza Zarrindast’s skill at capturing evocative images in a variety of light conditions.
Kiarostami’s first (or second, depending on who you ask) feature film, The Traveler (1972, 74 min., B&W), follows the journey of a soccer-mad boy (Hassan Darabi) determined to get the money for a bus ticket to Teheran so he can see his favorite team play. It’s the first Iranian film to use synchronized sound recording and incudes much more dialogue than the previous films. His character is reminiscent of the girls in Jafar Panahi’s Offside (2006), but this kid’s problem is not his gender but his economic condition—his family is poor so he has to raise the fare by clever and sometimes dishonest means. The Traveler feels like a “real” feature film rather than an exploratory work, with many distinctive characters, a variety of settings, and greater use of cinematic conventions.
The brilliant color in “Two Solutions for One Problem” (1975, 5 min., color) really pops, especially if you’ve been watching the films in disc order. It’s a humorous tale, narrated by an unidentified adult and acted in pantomime by two schoolboys who engage in an arms race of non-verbal insults stemming from a torn notebook. “So Can I” (1974, 4 min., color) is Kiarostami’s first film made specifically for children and combines animation (by Nafiseh Riahi) with live action; one of the child roles is played by Kiarostami’s son Ahmad, who imitates the action he sees in the animations. “Colors” (1976, 17 min., color) is a children’s documentary exploring the many colors in everyday life. It’s a delightfully imaginative film enhanced by a lively soundtrack credited to Changiz Sayad.
A Wedding Suit (1976, 60 min., color) plunges you into the busy streets of Tehran, where is a comedy about the travails of a western-style suit custom-made for a teenage boy to wear to his aunt’s wedding. Class issues are on full display, as boys younger than the teenager getting the bespoke suit are out of school and working full time; the film’s main action stems from the desire of one of them to experience a life he can’t afford. “Tribute to Teachers” (1977, 17 min., color) is a straightforward documentary made for Iran’s Ministry of Education and featuring interviews with schoolteachers who talk about their work, with occasional interjections of heavy-handed narration. A gig’s a gig, I guess, and one pleasant aspect of this film is that many women are included, offering a break from the primarily male milieu of many Kiarostami films.
A rare Kiarostami film that doesn’t feature children, “Solution No. 1” (1978, 12 min., color) is about a man trying to hitch a ride to take a spare tire back to his car. Nothing is explained and the mock-heroic soundtrack makes it all a bit ridiculous (in an arthouse way) while also offering a mini-travelogue of the mountains north of Tehran. “First Case, Second Case” (1979, 45 min., color) begins in a classroom where someone keeps interrupting the lesson and several students are expelled from class for a week. Then things get didactic: a series of adults (including Jewish and Christian leaders) speaking straight to camera offer their opinion on a question of ethics: should one of the students speak up and lift the suspension, or remain in solidarity with their classmates and remain quiet?
“Toothache” (1980, 27 min., color) is a straight-up didactic film about the unfortunate consequences of poor dental hygiene, but self-aware enough to make fun of its own seriousness. You can see the differences caused by the 1989 Revolution, including that female teachers wear headscarves and baggy covering garments (male teachers were normally fitting Western clothes). “Orderly or Disorderly” (1981, 17 min, color) continues the overtly didactic tone by contrasting images of good (orderly) and bad (disorderly) behavior but includes meta touches like the director’s voice calling “Cut” and time stamps that remind you that this is a film. I marvel that Kiarostami’s filmmaking continued basically without a pause while his country underwent the political equivalent of an earthquake, so I guess he was an adaptable person who knew how to fly under the radar without completely selling out.
In “The Chorus” (1981, 17 min., color), Kiarostami concretizes the difference between life when you can hear and when you can’t. An elderly man dependent on his hearing aid exists in a rich sonic landscape as long as they are in his ears and turned on, but when they are disconnected or he takes them out, the film becomes as silent as his world. Annoyed by street noise, he turns them off, only to find that in a world of hearing people, that choice may have negative consequences.
The documentary “Fellow Citizen” (1983, 51 min., color) treats a topic near to my heart: the negative effects of private automobiles on urban life. Vehicle ownership in Iran increased massively after the oil boom of the 1970s, resulting in traffic jams and high accident rates. The government increased restrictions on private vehicles in Tehran, ] drivers tried to avoid them, and the result was some “interesting” encounters between drivers and the traffic officers charged to enforce the rules. First Graders (1984, 84 min., color) uses a hidden camera to document a school day for a class of first grade boys. It’s mostly upbeat: the boys are adorable and the adults they interact with are kind men who remember what it was like to be a child and try to help them grow up. In Homework (1989, 77 min., color), the director asks first and second grade boys (and one long-winded father) about homework and their home situations, leading to some interesting conversations since these children are too young to have a filter. It’s also more meta than the other documentaries in this question, as the interviewer and cameraman are both shown on screen. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: Eclipse Series 47
Technical details: 4-84 min.; color and B&W; various screen ratios; Persian.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (3 discs)
Extras: CD booklet with essay by critic Ehsan Khoshbakht.
Fun Fact: Kiarostami directed his first film when he was 30 after studying painting at the University of Tehran School of Fine Arts, then working as a painter and graphic designer, shooting commercials, and writing credit titles.
Parting Thought: Some of the documentaries in this collection are the equivalent of industrials but remain interesting today for the ways they track changes in Iranian society, including matters like clothing, jobs, resolving conflicts. Is it just me, or is capturing this sort of information, independent of the purpose of the documentary, one of the great unsung virtues of documentary filmmaking?
