Abbas Kiarostami

Before his death in 2016, Abbas Kiarostami wrote or directed more than thirty films in a career that mirrored Iranian cinema's rise as an international force. His 1997 feature Taste of Cherry made him the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Critics' polls continue to place Close-Up (1990) and Through the Olive Trees (1994) among the masterpieces of world cinema. Yet Kiarostami's naturalistic impulses and winding complexity made him one of the most divisive--if influential--filmmakers of his time. In this expanded second edition, award-winning Iranian filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum renew their illuminating cross-cultural dialogue on Kiarostami's work. The pair chart the filmmaker's late-in-life turn toward art galleries, museums, still photography, and installations. They also bring their distinct but complementary perspectives to a new conversation on the experimental film Shirin. Finally, Rosenbaum offers an essay on watching Kiarostami at home while Saeed-Vafa conducts a deeply personal interview with the director on his career and his final feature, Like Someone in Love.

Abbas Kiarostami's films have taken their place alongside the masterworks of world cinema. Respected cinema historian Alberto Elena, using Iranian sources wherever possible, has written a comprehensive and instructive overview of Kiarostami's work.

Over the past two decades, Abbas Kiarostami - the Iranian film director of Where is the Friend's House?, Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, Close Up, A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love - has appeared regularly at festivals and on campuses, where he has worked closely for several days with young filmmakers, shepherding them and their projects, sending them out with cameras, then screening and discussing the results. Pieced together from notes made over a period of nearly ten years at several of these workshops, Lessons with Kiarostami is a distillation of Kiarostami's filmmaking techniques and working methods, and most importantly a series of practical guideposts for aspiring filmmakers.

Standing apart from celebrated Iranian ideals of war and martyrdom, revolutionary filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was known as a man who praised life and celebrated it in all his works. Creating films for more than 40 years during times of unending war and political turmoil, Kiarostami promoted the Sufi tradition of seeing God as part of nature and the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian ideal of environmental protection. Kiarostami’s self-image as a citizen of the world, his renunciation of war, and his concern for the future of nature cement his importance within the art form of poetic cinema. Addressing Kiarostami’s illumination of humanity’s self-destructive tendencies, author Julian Rice presents a detailed analysis of twelve individual films, from Homework (1989) to Like Someone in Love (2012). Departing from concerns of spectatorship or film in general, Rice’s book portrays the human and spiritual core of Kiarostami. Connected to all other humans and to the earth we all inhabit, Kiarostami’s vision remains a powerful message for film scholars and peaceful people everywhere.

A deflationary, anti-theoretical film-philosophy through the cinema of Abbas KiarostamiMathew Abbott presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostamis films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, NoAl Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostamis most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love.

What if you could take a Master Class from a Master of Cinema? In a new book, Mahmoud Reza Sani takes us inside such a class. He allows us to sit in on the beginning days of a workshop taught by critically-acclaimed and award-winning director Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Certified Copy, Like Someone in Love). In February 2012, Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Spain to receive the Ibn-Arabi trophy for a lifetime of artistic achievements. It was decided at that time that he would hold a 10 day film maker workshop for 35 students who had traveled from all over the world in eager anticipation to attend this once in a lifetime event. We join Kiarostami in class as he converses with the students and author. We listen as Kiarostami reminisces about some of his past experiences and offers insight into his cinematic style. We learn as he advises the students on how to shape their stories and find their voice, not only in the world of film but also in their lives. The book also includes the foreword 'Lessons of Refusal' written by famed French Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Belle du Jour)."

With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors—Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer—and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader’s theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Béla Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others. This key work by one of our most searching directors and writers is widely cited and used in film and art classes. With evocative prose and nimble associations, Schrader consistently urges readers and viewers alike to keep exploring the world of the art film.

Abbas Kiarostami (*1940 in Teheran) became known primarily for his films made in the seventies, which were awarded prizes at film festivals such as Cannes (Golden Palm 1997) and Venice. Despite large-scale solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the photographic oeuvre of this artist, who studied painting, has yet to be showcased in germanophone countries. Whereas Kiarostami's films contain haunting images of the human experience, he trains his photographic eye on untouched landscapes, often taking years to develop the images into series such as Snow White (1978-2004) and Rain and Wind (2007). This publication explores the correlation between photographic and filmic vision, between still and moving images. Exhibition schedule: Situation Kunst (for Max Imdahl), Kunstsammlungen der Ruhr-Universität, Bochum, October 6, 2012-January 20, 2013 - Museum Wiesbaden, March 29-June 30, 2013 - Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, July 14-September 29, 2013 - And further venues

Between 2006 and 2011, Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami released his selections from and adaptations of four masters of Persian poetry: Nima (1895-1960), Hafez, Saadi and Rumi (all from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). In 2015, shortly before his death, Kiarostami published two further volumes, the thematic anthology Night, his selections from a variety of classical and contemporary poets. These books are in addition to his three volumes of original verse: A Wolf on Watch (2005), With the Wind (2006) and Wind and Leaf (2011). In the Shadow of Trees brings together English translations of all these books.