Close-Up

Cinema is, at its core, an illusion. In its most rudimentary form, it is a trick on perception. When a series of still images of a single object are taken within at least a fifth of a second of each other, and are shown in a succession of around twenty-four for every second, we are given an illusion of movement. Everything stemming from there is, in essence, merely an augmentation of this illusion. The earliest example of this continuation is probably Méliès’ invention of the mask, the infant form of visual effects, which would come to be used to simulate perspective; for example, a key-hole or a pair of binoculars - in essence, creating an illusion of perspective. Méliès was also responsible for the advent of the cut, although it was James Williamson in his 1901 film Fire! who first conceived of the cut-on-action: we shoot the same action from two different perspectives so that we can create the illusion of continuity, and affect a false linearity of time and space. And indeed, we can go even further than this by not just creating the illusion of a continuity of time and space, but also a continuity of events: Edwin S. Porter in 1903 made use of parallel editing or cross-cutting for the first time with The Great Train Robbery, where, despite the fact that the two scenes were filmed days, perhaps weeks apart, by inter-cutting between the two, we are able to imply a concurrence of occurrence. Again, this is only a furthering of the illusion of continuity. There are innumerable other methods and techniques which build on the fundamental illusionary quality of cinema (the point-of-view shot, the movement of the camera, sound design, even the story itself just to name a few), but the largest, most constant, and most foundational sub-illusion which stems from the primary illusion of cinema itself is that of acting, at least in narrative cinema. Acting is an illusion; of course it is. But there is something about this particular illusion which goes deeper, and elicits more of my interest. Now, it should be noted that despite the fact that cinema is composed of and constructed by a series of illusions, the overall effect that these illusions produce is not in itself an illusion. Just because the means are illusionary, it does not mean that the results are illusionary. The finished product, when crafted with skill and integrity, is not a magic trick or a falsity, but, indeed, is something of the utmost truth. The best of all art purifies truth, gives it a form through which it can be expressed. All these ‘falsifying’ tools of cinema are used paradoxically. They harness the illusion of movement or the illusion of continuity or the illusion of concurrence, or the illusion of reality, to craft something which is often more accurate than lived experience itself. I placed a particular emphasis on the illusion of acting, the performance. The reason for this is quite simple: the illusion elicited from the actor is far deeper, and far more complex than that of any other previously-mentioned illusion. This is because whilst with the mask, or continuity editing, or parallel editing, you are working with the purely material means of the medium itself, with the actor, there is a human agency. You are not working with some inert, inanimate object; you are working with, and by default of the fact that you are filming them, are objectifying, a subject, a human being. When the actor reads his line, or turns his head, or walks from one end of the frame to the other end of the frame, he is necessarily expressing two concurrent realities. On one hand he is expressing a creative reality, an artistic reality, an affected reality, the illusionary reality of his performance; on the other hand, he is also expressing his own reality not as an actor, but as a human being. It is often claimed or stated by directors and film theorists (perhaps most famously Bresson), that the best performances are those where the performer in question has removed the influence of themselves from their performance, and have acted as automatons, or with intuition. They have quite literally momentarily sacrificed their own identity and assumed another. But, then again, it would be utterly erroneous to try and claim that any actor, no matter how good their performance, can absolutely and totally forsake the influence of themselves. There is no possible way in which one could act without consciousness, for acting without consciousness is not acting, merely living. Therefore, in all performances, one witnesses both the explicit expression of a character and the subdued and repressed expression of the self. There is an essential and constant dichotomy, indeed dialectic, that exists between an actor’s projections of experience, and an actor’s lived experience. And of course this dialectic exists in every element of the frame (the location, for instance, has both been shot in the context of the film, and exists on film within the suppressed context of real life), however, the interest here is lesser, for there is no humanness or consciousness in a location. The audience is merely witnessing an inanimate form being artificially placed into another context. With the actor, the audience, whether aware of it or not, is always witnessing a grappling between portrayal and self. It is a dynamic and vital constant. Abbas Kiarostami is perhaps the most significant proponent for the exploration of and challenging of the nature of these illusions in cinema. In his most significant work, he constantly challenges his audience with these illusions. His Koker Trilogy starts with the narratively standard and beautifully modest Where is the Friend’s House?, then goes deeper with Life, and Nothing More… which is about a director returning to the village of Where is the Friend’s House? after an earthquake and searching for its cast, and finally finishes with Through the Olive Trees which is a drama about the filming of Life, and Nothing More… which in itself is prefaced and post-faced by a short speech by the (imaginary) director of Through the Olive Trees talking about the film. In these three films, Kiarostami so richly layers and superimposes them that, in referring to one another, they extend past their insular tales of friendship, morality, and love, and consequently question the very nature of cinema, storytelling, art, and reality to its audience. In the latter two films of this trilogy, Kiarostami has highlighted this aforementioned dialectic between illusion and reality in cinema by focusing the overarching plot of the trilogy itself on said dialectic - and yet, paradoxically, Kiarostami is demonstrating his self-awareness and highlighting the inner realities of his films within the confines of an illusion. His explorations on the idea of art as illusion and reality still necessarily occur within an illusion (a narrative). He is, with a very deliberate dose of irony, drawing back the curtain from behind another curtain. Perhaps his most famous film, Taste of Cherry, does a similar thing with our notions of reality in cinema. At the most significant and most crucial point of the film, at the very decisive action itself, at the exact moment where the essential, pressing conflict of the film is to be resolved, Kiarostami suddenly flips the entire film on its head. We suddenly cut to footage of Kiarostami directing his own film, of his crew shooting one of the numerous landscape scenes in the film. Kiarostami reminds us that the essential conflict of the film which has seemed so crucially important to us the viewer, is not actually of any worldly significance, that it exists within itself, that it has been carefully constructed by various hands, using illusionary means to do so. It is not real. That’s not to suggest this as a cynical tossing-away of all the substance which has hitherto composed the film; rather, it acts as a kind of self-reflective lens through which to view this substance in a more novel and more potent fashion. But Close-Up takes this further than either example. The Koker Trilogy was just docufiction: its documentarian elements were narrative components, not actual documentary. Taste of Cherry, meanwhile, places a very firm and distinctive boundary between the binaries of the strictly narrative film, and its strictly documentarian ending. Close-Up, however, is not a film which operates with binaries. What is real in the filmic sense and what is real in the actual sense are indistinguishable. They are intrinsically imbued into one form. One cannot be separated from the other like it can in Taste of Cherry. It is like mixing two drops of ink together. The result is a complete and irrevocable qualitative shift. In Close-Up, reality, which throughout cinema’s entire history has always been repressed, helplessly bleeds into cinema. Kiarostami, by taking a real event, by re-casting all of its participants exactly, and by asking them to recreate this event, has taken the problem of the actor’s agency, has placed it under a microscope, and has intensified it tenfold. It goes without saying, but Kiarostami did not do what I just described so that he could create a hyper-accurate and minutely objective documentary about it; he did this specifically for the purpose of injecting this intensified element of human agency into it. This fundamental ‘humanness’, this ‘consciousness’ of the actor which I previously mentioned is what Kiarostami is playing with here. His performers are not merely acting characters, nor are they merely suppressing their own selves. They are doing this whilst acting themselves. Kiarostami is specially taking advantage of the impossibility of this task for the actor, and in doing so, is miking something infinitely more real than could be captured either through conventional performance or through documentary. The duality of performer and self is not only concurrent here, but it is also co-existent. They operate not only at the same time, but also in the same form. Again, this is most clearly expressed through the metaphor of the two drops of ink. We see actors who are not merely reading lines because the script dictates that they read lines, but actors who are reading lines with the intention of portraying their idealised selves, with the intention of defending themselves. Their performances are not merely an act of craft, but an expression of dignity. The result is flooring. Close-Up is at once an act of re-creation and creation. The veil of illusion is stripped bare, for Kiarostami has conditioned his audience not to indulge in the illusion of the film, but to indulge directly instead in the reality of the film. When the ‘actor’ in the film has finished reading his lines about how he wants to be an actor who acts out his own reality, he is suddenly reminded that that is what he is doing right now. It is at this point that not only the actor, but the film itself, folds under under its own weight. Everything from here is a kind of breaking-down. The experience causes our ‘actor’ to break down in tears, and marks the moment when the film ceases the be an inter-mingled, indistinguishable meshing of narrative and documentary, and instead becomes pure documentary. The ‘actor’, with a pot of flowers under his arm, who has impersonated a film director, rides on a motorcycle with the very man he has impersonated. It feels as though all boundaries have now been broken down. It feels like we are at once experiencing an affirmation of the individual, and a collective oneness of man. Now, what I’ve described here sounds enormously complex, and in some way, it absolutely is. But in reality, both aesthetically and literally, everything is remarkably simple. Kiarostami’s cinema is notably minimalistic both in form and in content, which diverges massively from the fervent, human complexity that always underlies his films. Although the structures of these films might be said to be rather complicated, actually watching them play out is a refreshingly simple experience. There is absolutely nothing superfluous at all about Kiarostami whatsoever. All of the ‘complexity’ tends merely to boil down to the fact that Kiarostami’s presentation of the human condition is so unadorned that his cinema does not go out of its way to dilute it for the sake of convenience. I think on an overall level, Kiarostami is one of the only filmmakers of the last fifty or so years whose oeuvre points towards a genuinely innovative cinema. Especially in a film world where most traditional boundaries have already been broken down, where everything seems to be normalised and homogenised, and where everything has been globalised, Kiarostami did something which was novel. The great artists are those who have exploited their pre-existing surroundings to craft beautiful things, but the greatest artists are those who have crafted and innovated their own surroundings to create a new beauty. Shakespeare abandoned the traditional archaic style of playwriting, and Da Vinci crafted entirely new techniques to accommodate the scope of his paintings. Monet, Cervantes, Van Gogh, Joyce, Mozart. In cinema, Griffith, Eisenstein, Dreyer Welles, Rossellini, Ozu, Bresson, Godard, Antonioni, Cassavetes. They are all characterised by their forging of novelty. Of course any gifted artist can create something meaningful, and of course anyone can create something novel, but to create something meaningful and novel is what separates the brilliant from the immortal. Art is transient. It is kinetic. It is dynamic. Without the hand of man to push this transience forward in a proper direction, it becomes stagnant. Kiarostami is not only one of the greatest directors of all time and especially of the last few decades, but he is also one of the most important directors of all time and especially of the last few decades. His characteristically self-aware approach to cinema, and the sheer delicacy and nuance of craft with which this approach has been made, roots the legacy of Abbas Kiarostami firmly within the continuance of cinema itself.