[Abbas Kiarostami.

Image by Mohammad Hassanzadeh via

Wikipedia]

Where is the Revolution: An Interview with Abbas

Kiarostami
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Abbas Kiarostami agreed to give an interview only reluctantly. I reminded
him insistently that the absence of a filmmaker with whom film is supposed
to end (see below), would be catastrophic for a project whose subject is
post-revolutionary New Iranian Cinema. Eventually, he agreed. Sitting
across from me, he grins ironically. Kiarostami says that ever since Alberto
Elena decided to quote Jean-Luc Godard, “Film begins with D.W. Griffith
and ends with Abbas Kiarostami,” on the cover of his monograph The
Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami,[1] that remark is mentioned every time
someone says or publishes anything about Kiarostami. He is at pains to
point out that Godard made this statement only in relation to Life, and
Nothing More (1992), also known as And Life Goes On, the second part of
Kiarostami’s Earthquake Trilogy, which is also known as the Koker Trilogy
(the other two parts being Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987) and Through
the Olive Trees (1994)). However, Kiarostami explains, the statements that Godard has
made about him in the last ten
or fifteen years clearly show that Godard no longer believes that film ends with Kiarostami.
I ask him what he means by that. He just smiles, waves his hand and says, joking aside,
that talking about New Iranian
Cinema is quite difficult for him. First and foremost, he has a problem with discussing the
idea of a New Iranian
Cinema “after the Islamic Revolution,” because this is tantamount to accepting the wrong
thesis (from his point of view)
that the revolution played a crucial role in the development of Iranian cinema. From him, this
theory is a falsification of
history. The Iranian New Wave had already arisen before the revolution. He is convinced
that those who earn their
daily bread in government and quasi-governmental film institutes spread rumors about the
benefits of the revolution for
fear that they might lose their jobs if they did not. For Kiarostami, the revolution actually
delayed the growth of a very
fruitful artistic movement that had already started decades before the 1979 Iranian
Revolution. One could even say
that Iranian art cinema grew despite and not because of post-revolutionary censorship,
nepotism, and dogmatism. The
only positive side of the revolution for Iranian cinema (and any form of art and literature in
Iran today) is its ability to
advertize films in the West and the rest of the world. Although Kiarostami sees this as a
"negative phenomenon.”
Kiarostami believes that the revolution had no influence whatsoever on his art. Although he
sees himself very much as
an Iranian citizen, he cannot relate to post-revolutionary cinema and does not see his films
as part of a post-
revolutionary cinematic movement. The revolution did not create a favorable artistic or
intellectual environment in
which he could make his films; the revolution was just an event—a historical event—that
passed him by, and he does
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Sep 07 2016by Shiva Rahbaran
From Tunis to Belgium with Ghalia Benali
Interviewed by Huda Asfour
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Where is the Revolution: An Interview with Abbas Kiarostami
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not regard himself as part of a genre that is sold as “post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.” In
other words, he is neither a
“revolutionary” nor a “post-revolutionary” filmmaker. He knows that he is often accused of
“escapism,” of not reflecting
the reality and the zeitgeist of post-revolutionary Iran in his films. He attributes this to the
fact that he strives not so
much to understand the phenomenon of the revolution as to get closer to the reality that
surrounds him. In pursuing
this goal, he “depicts” life in Iran sometimes in a very realistic and sometimes in an
otherworldly, poetic manner.
This milieu is vital to his art and, in a way, his reason for staying in Iran. In his view, many
important filmmakers such
as Golestan, Shahid, Saless, and Naderi have been unable to make the films that they
deserved to make precisely
because they left their native country and were unable to establish roots in exile. This is why
Kiarostami, despite much
hardship, has stayed in Iran.[2]
His beginnings as a filmmaker, he reminds me, go back to the 1960s and 1970s—the years
in which he worked with
the Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults) under
the management of Lili
Arjomand and the auspices of Queen Farah Dibah. I tell him that I am aware that his pre-
revolutionary films from these
decades, such as Nan va Koucheh (The Bread and Alley) and Gozaresh (The Report),
made respectively in 1970 and
1977, introduced him to the world as an important filmmaker of the Iranian New Wave.
However, it was only after the
revolution that he became known as a world-class cineaste: he was awarded the Palme
d’Or for his Taste of Cherry
twenty years after the making of The Report and eighteen years after the 1979 revolution.
Kiarostami reacts to this
observation with his unique sense of humor. Who knows, he muses, he might have won the
Palme d’Or just the same
without a revolution. There is no way of proving whether the revolution facilitated, however
arbitrarily, his success at
the Cannes Film Festival, since the revolution had already taken place by then. From his
point of view, the purported
connection between the revolution and his films has been fabricated by people who secure
their living through close
ties to the government and its “so-called” cultural institutions. These fabrications, Kiarostami
says, are enhanced
further as universal “truth” by the naive post-rationalizations of scholars, critics, and
academics in the West. They
have, however, no connection whatsoever to reality.
I seize on the clues I discern in this remark and invite him to help me find out the truth or
myth behind statements
about his role in New Iranian Cinema. He replies that reality is itself a fabrication and I am
reminded of his frequently
quoted aphorism: “Lie. The shortest way to truth is to lie.” After a short pause, he politely
agrees to be interviewed by
me and contemplates my questions with artistic and intellectual curiosity, in the hope of
getting closer to the truth.
A Note about the Interview
The interview with Kiarostami took place during three long sessions between January 2008
and May 2009 in his house
in north Tehran—a house filled with old Persian rugs, glass and ceramic ware, modern
European furniture,
Kiarostami’s own photographs and books, and, most importantly, as Kiarostami proudly
points out, two prints on the
living room wall by Kurosawa—dedicated to Kiarostami by the master himself.
Initially Kiarostami was not very keen on giving an interview and said that in the last ten
years or so he had not given
any inter- view for publication in Iran—on account of the shameful treatment he had
received at the hands of the
Iranian press after winning the Palme d’Or for Taste of Cherry in 1997.[3] He first suggested
giving me a photograph
as an answer to each of my questions (Kiarostami is a celebrated photographer whose work
was shown at a major
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007). He said that he distrusted
words as a means of
expressing the truth and felt he was “clumsy” with them. I reminded him that, his own
assessment notwithstanding, he
has quite a reputation among the connoisseurs of Persian poetry as someone who knows
how to work with words.[4]
We finally agreed that I would not record his interview. For this reason Kiarostami’s answers
to my questions are not
presented as direct quotations.
The Interview
Shiva Rahbaran (SR): I start by explaining to Kiarostami that the aim of this project is to
understand the
influence of the Islamic Revolution on New Iranian Cinema and the influence of this cinema
on the post-
revolutionary society in which it is produced. I want to approach this question from the
viewpoint of those
filmmakers who live and work in Iran. Iranian film, I suggest, has turned into an alternative
identity card for a
country that is mainly represented in the Western media by angry, chador-clad women and
bearded men
burning flags in front of Western embassies in Tehran. My first question is, how do
filmmakers in Iran see their
role in changing the rules of the game in Iran itself (and thereby creating pockets of
freedom), on the one
hand, and changing the perception of Iran in the West (and the rest of the world), on the
other?
Abbas Kiarostami (AK) does not deny his Iranianness at all. He says that he can only work
so long as he lives in
Iran, in the framework that he has created for himself in this corner of the world. During the
interview he refers to this
framework as his own self-made paradise. However, he cannot see any relation between
his films and post-
revolutionary cinema. He believes that the revolution has passed him by.
SR: How could he claim such a thing, I object, when his films are mostly highly realistic and,
like a delicate
seismograph, record the psychological and emotional condition of individual Iranians within
their social and
Where is the Revolution: An Interview with Abbas Kiarostami
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