[custom_adv] Abbas Kiarostami (22 June 1940 – 4 July 2016) was an film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer. An active film-maker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. [custom_adv] Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy (1987–94), Close-Up (1990), Taste of Cherry (1997) – which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year – and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). [custom_adv] Kiarostami had worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director and producer and had designed credit titles and publicity material. He was also a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. [custom_adv] He was part of a generation of filmmakers in the New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and includes pioneering directors such as Masoud Kimiai, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Dariush Mehrjui, Bahram Beyzai, Nasser Taghvai and Parviz Kimiavi. [custom_adv] These filmmakers share many common techniques including the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues. [custom_adv] Kiarostami had a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary-style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. He is also known for his use of contemporary persian poetry in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films. [custom_adv] Kiarostami has received worldwide acclaim for his work from both audiences and critics, and, in 1999, he was voted the most important film director of the 1990s by two international critics' polls. Four of his films were placed in the top six of Cinematheque Ontario's Best of the '90s poll. [custom_adv] He has gained recognition from film theorists, critics, as well as peers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Nanni Moretti (who made a short film about opening one of Kiarostami's films in his theater in Rome), Chris Marker, and Ray Carney. [custom_adv] Akira Kurosawa said of Kiarostami's films: "Words cannot describe my feelings about them ... When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami's films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place." [custom_adv] Critically acclaimed directors such as Martin Scorsese have commented that "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." The Austrian director Michael Haneke has admired the work of Abbas Kiarostami as among the best of any living director. [custom_adv] In 2006, The Guardian's panel of critics ranked Kiarostami as the best contemporary non-American film director.Critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum have argued that "there's no getting around the fact that the movies of Abbas Kiarostami divide audiences—in this country, in his native homeland, and everywhere else they're shown." [custom_adv] Rosenbaum argues that disagreements and controversy over Kiarostami's movies have arisen from his style of film-making because what in Hollywood would count as essential narrative information is frequently missing from Kiarostami's films. [custom_adv] Camera placement, likewise, often defies standard audience expectations: in the closing sequences of Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees, the audience is forced to imagine the dialogue and circumstances of important scenes. In Homework and Close-Up, parts of the soundtrack are masked or silenced. [custom_adv] Critics have argued that the subtlety of Kiarostami's cinematic expression is largely resistant to critical analysis.While Kiarostami has won significant acclaim in Europe for several of his films, the persian government has refused to permit the screening of his films. [custom_adv] In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Kiarostami was refused a visa to attend the New York Film Festival.The festival director, Richard Peña, who had invited him said, "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world". [custom_adv] The Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki boycotted the festival in protest. Kiarostami had been invited by the New York Film Festival, as well as Ohio University and Harvard University. [custom_adv] In 2005, London Film School organized a workshop as well as festival of Kiarostami's work, titled "Abbas Kiarostami: Visions of the Artist". [custom_adv] Ben Gibson, Director of the London Film School, said, "Very few people have the creative and intellectual clarity to invent cinema from its most basic elements, from the ground up. [custom_adv] Kiarostami and his cinematic style have been the subject of several books and two films, Opening Day of Close-Up (1996), directed by Nanni Moretti and Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living (2003), directed by Fergus Daly. Add your image here. Kiarostami was a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation. Founded by the director Martin Scorsese, its goal is to find and reconstruct world cinema films that have been long neglected. [custom_adv] Martin Scorsese said he was "deeply shocked and saddened" by the news.Oscar-winning film-maker Asghar Farhadi – who had been due to fly to Paris to visit his friend – said he was “very sad, in total shock”. [custom_adv] Mohsen Makhmalbaf echoed the sentiment, saying homeland cinema owes its global reputation to his fellow director, but that this visibility did not translate into a greater visibility for his work in his homeland. [custom_adv] “Kiarostami gave the homeland cinema the international credibility that it has today,” he told The Guardian. “But his films were unfortunately not seen as much in homeland. He changed the world’s cinema; he freshened it and humanised it in contrast with Hollywood’s rough version. [custom_adv] Though Kiarostami has been compared to Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Tati, his films exhibit a singular style, often employing techniques of his own invention.During the filming of The Bread and Alley in 1970, Kiarostami had major differences with his experienced cinematographer about how to film the boy and the attacking dog. [custom_adv] While the cinematographer wanted separate shots of the boy approaching, a close-up of his hand as he enters the house and closes the door, followed by a shot of the dog, Kiarostami believed that if the three scenes could be captured as a whole it would have a more profound impact in creating tension over the situation. [custom_adv] That one shot took around forty days to complete, until Kiarostami was fully content with the scene. Kiarostami later commented that the breaking of scenes would have disrupted the rhythm and content of the film's structure, preferring to let the scene flow as one. [custom_adv] Unlike other directors, Kiarostami showed no interest in staging extravagant combat scenes or complicated chase scenes in large-scale productions, instead attempting to mold the medium of film to his own specifications. [custom_adv] Kiarostami appeared to have settled on his style with the Koker trilogy, which included a myriad of references to his own film material, connecting common themes and subject matter between each of the films. [custom_adv] Stephen Bransford has contended that Kiarostami's films do not contain references to the work of other directors, but are fashioned in such a manner that they are self-referenced. Bransford believes his films are often fashioned into an ongoing dialectic with one film reflecting on and partially demystifying an earlier film.
