Close-Up

The archive already holds France 1960, Japan 1954, Italy 1948, Sweden 1957, Germany 1927, Britain and America 1968, America 1972, Hong Kong 2000 and South Korea 2019. The 1990s are empty. So is Iran.

Today fills that slot, and the reason is more specific than a gap. Yesterday was 29 September. On that date in 2006, Hossain Sabzian died in Tehran — twenty years ago exactly. That August he had suffered respiratory failure on the Tehran metro, slipped into a coma and never woke. For the last years of his life he sold DVDs at a bus terminal in south Tehran.

Sabzian was a man who briefly became the subject of a film and was then forgotten by cinema. Close-Up gave him a genuine close-up — one of the rare cases in film history where a work actually changed the life of the person it filmed, even if the change did not last.

It pairs unexpectedly with today's other pick, Metropolis: a 1927 German industrial epic against a 1990 Iranian 16mm hybrid; one about a copy replacing a real person, one about a real person borrowing someone else's name. Sixty-three years apart, both ask what happens when an image starts acting on its own.

德黑兰，1989 年前后。一个叫 Hossain Sabzian 的男人在公交车上遇到一位女士，她手里拿着一本与 Makhmalbaf 的作品《The Cyclist》有关的书。Sabzian 告诉她：我就是 Mohsen Makhmalbaf——那部片子的导演。女士说她的儿子们很喜欢电影。

接下来的两个星期里，Sabzian 以导演的身份几次去他们家，说要用他们的房子拍一部新片，让两个儿子演角色。他还向其中一个儿子借了 1,900 tomans 当车费。

后来事情败露了。Ahankhah 家的父亲开始怀疑，尤其是当他看到杂志上一张 Makhmalbaf 更年轻、头发更黑的照片时。他请来记者 Hossain Farazmand 到家里确认，记者证实这个人不是 Makhmalbaf。警察上门把 Sabzian 带走，记者拍下照片，准备发一篇题为「假 Makhmalbaf 被捕」的报道。

Abbas Kiarostami 读到了这篇报道。他做了一件当时不太有人做的事：去监狱见了 Sabzian，帮他提前了开庭日期，并从法官那里拿到了拍摄庭审的许可。

影片由三种材料拼成：法庭上真实发生的审判；Kiarostami 让当事人重演此前发生的事；以及 Sabzian 本人面对镜头说话。所有角色都由本人扮演——包括法官、记者、司机和士兵。

Director and origins

Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran in 1940 and died in 2016. His career began at Kanoon, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults — first commercials, then short films for children, starting with The Bread and Alley (1970). Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987) brought his first international attention.

In 1989 he read the journalist Hassan Farazmand's report on the Sabzian case in the Iranian magazine Sorush and immediately suspended a feature then in pre-production to pursue it. The production company was Kanoon, the producer Ali Reza Zarrin, the cinematographer Ali Reza Zarrindast, and the editing was done by Kiarostami himself. The film runs 98 minutes, in Persian.

A film that belongs to no existing category

Close-Up is assembled from three kinds of material: the trial, filmed as it actually happened; reconstructions in which Kiarostami had the participants replay earlier events; and Sabzian speaking directly to camera. Everyone on screen plays themselves — Sabzian, the Ahankhah family, the journalist Hossain Farazmand, the judge, the driver, the soldiers.

The crucial point is that the film gives the viewer no signal as to which is which. There is no narration, no explanatory caption, no interviewer visible on screen. Kiarostami asked Sabzian to re-enact himself in front of a camera, which erases the line between acting and being: a man arrested for impersonating a director is asked by a real director to perform that impersonation once more.

The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum: 'No other film does more to interrogate certain aspects of the documentary form itself.'

The ending

In the final sequence Sabzian rides pillion on a motorcycle holding a boom microphone, the crew's car following. The sound in this passage is incomplete — the recording equipment failed and the conversation survives only in fragments. It is the most discussed few minutes in the film, and Kiarostami's last ambiguity: a man is finally inside a film, and the film cannot quite hear him.

After the trial, the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf appears and drives Sabzian to the Ahankhah house, stopping on the way to buy flowers. Meeting Mr. Ahankhah, he says: 'I hope he'll be good now and make us proud of him.' Sabzian smiles.

The man

Hossain Sabzian was born in 1954, had no prior record, and was a father in financial difficulty. At his trial he said repeatedly that he had posed as Makhmalbaf out of love for the man's films, in which he felt his own suffering reflected. To a friend who happened upon him at a bus station he said: 'I dreamt of being a general, but ended up a foot soldier.'

He later sold DVDs at a bus terminal in south Tehran and died in Tehran on 29 September 2006. The Iranian director Azadeh Akhlaghi made a documentary about him, The Film School of Hossein Sabzian, which premiered at the Busan Film Festival and was screened alongside Close-Up two weeks after his death.

Standing

The 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll placed it among 'The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time'. In 2022 it ranked 17th with critics, and joint 9th in the directors' poll — tied with Persona and In the Mood for Love, the latter already in this archive. Rotten Tomatoes records 89% from 19 reviews, averaging 8.5/10; Metacritic 92/100. Awards include the Quebec Critics' Award at the 1990 Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and Video, and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1992 Istanbul International Film Festival.

Notably, on its Iranian release the film was received almost uniformly negatively at home. It was recognised abroad first, and only later rediscovered by its own country.

Kiarostami's later work includes the final two parts of the Koker trilogy, Life, and Nothing More... (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994); A Taste of Cherry, which won the Palme d'Or in 1997; The Wind Will Carry Us (1999); and Certified Copy (2010).