“I’m speaking of my suffering, that’s not acting”

    What do we mean when we say a film is accurate or truthful? Can the camera ever tell the true story of something, or does the lens distort the truth? One might say a documentary; its aim is to tell a non-fiction story. But wait a minute; a director decides what to put in, leading to an even greater distortion—a falsehood that appears as truth. The truth (pun not intended) of the matter is cinema is a subjective medium, and there is no way to ever reach some sort of truth.

    The Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami took the matter head on in his brilliant film Close-Up. Although it was made in 1990, audiences in the States didn’t get a look at it until 1999, after he made a name for himself with Taste of Cherry. In Close-Up, Kiarostami tells the story of a man named Sabzlian, a poor man who one day is mistaken for the famous director Moshen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar, The Cyclist), and then poses as him for a while to exploit a family, promising them to make his new film in their house with their sons as the actors. He is eventually caught, and we watch the proceeding examination of his trial. But the most fascinating thing about Close-Up is that it is not a narrative film nor a documentary—it has both. Not only that, but the fictional scenes are played by the same people and in the same locations as the original events.

    What Kiarostami does so brilliantly is always make us question the scene at hand. Is this the actual scene being recorded, or a recreation. To add to that, the way Kiarostami shoots the scenes confuses the audience more. In the opening recreation of Sabzian’s arrest, Kiarostami has a moment where a taxi driver kicks a can and for a minute and a half, we watch it roll down the street—A nod to cinema vérité to show us what a documentary should do. But the irony of the whole arrest scene is we spend the entire time with this taxi driver, and not on the relevant action. Is Kiarostami capturing truth or is he playing with us? The sequence after us gives us more frustration. It is the first documentary scene of the film, and it has Kiarostami questioning an officer about the arrest. We are told exactly what happened, though we have just seen a recreation of it. Which is more true to us—the subjective story told by the policeman, or the subjective recreation of Kiarostami?

    One of the crucial elements of the entire film is Sabzian. He is such an enigmatic character, and the fact that he decided to let Kiarostami make this film shows a man of deep complexity. In the scene where he meets Kiarostami, he asks him for one favor: “Can you make a film about my suffering?” On the surface, that is probably what Close-Up is about—the suffering of a man who simply does not understand his place in the world. Sabzian is an actor in many ways. He first had to act as a famous director for this family. Then he had to act during the court in order to make himself appear sympathetic to the camera. And finally, he had to recreate himself, playing himself in the recreation.  The meta-acting of Sabzian is something that continuously makes him one of cinema’s most engaging characters.

    Ironically, the courtroom, which is where most of the drama of the film takes place, is wholly influenced by Kiarostami’s camera. He shows us the boom mikes and the clapper. He moves his camera around, looking for certain reactions or people to spring to life. He never lets it simply unfold in simple documentary fashion—and he is making sure we are aware that the camera is not telling an objective truth.

    The look of the film is also very strange. It is shot on dirt cheap documentary cameras. And not just the documentary scenes, but the recreation sequences as well. In fact, the only visual cue of the recreation scenes is that fact there are cuts and edits. Visually, they look similar and there is no way to tell if something is real or not. Whether Kiarostami originally planned to simply make the documentary at first, he obviously stumbled onto something bigger when he decided to do these amazing recreation sequences.

    To many people, the final sequence of Close-Up is one of the most beautiful yet puzzling sequences ever made. After being cleared of his name, Sabzian meets Makhmalbaf, and the two ride to the family’s house. Yet more than in any other scene, Kiarostami uses his camera to pull us toward his themes. Not only does he remove the sound, which the director comments on, but he pulls us to far away wide shots, very against the many close-ups that had been used in order to make us sympathize with Sabzian. Kiarostami is pulling us from the story and towards the themes he has set out. What is cinematic truth? How much control does a director have on making something objective? How can an objective film be made?

    Of course the questions don’t have answers, but it is important to pose them. This is what Kiarostami accomplishes with such passion in Close-Up. He uses cinema to question the idea of truth, and how we can ever come to terms with how we observe it. Dziga Vertov one argued that  cinema was the eye that records truth. Kiarostami would hardly agree.