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Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up

A significant portion of Kiarostami's 1990 masterpiece Close-Up is dedicated to this image and its variations. The man looking into the camera, Hossain Sabzian, has been arrested for impersonating Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbalf and having convinced a well-to-do family that their home and children are ideal subjects for his next picture. Kiarostami documents the trial (the source of this image), interviews all participants, re-stages (using non-actors portraying themselves) portions of the crime and orchestrates a tender encounter between Sabzian and Makhmalbaf himself that poignantly concludes the film.

If Close-Up is essentially about anything, and it's debatable whether or not it can be satisfactorily reduced or encapsulated, it is about Sabzian's performance as Makhmalbaf: his own interpretation of it, its impact on intended and unintended audiences, and the parallel attempts by the court and Kiarostami at discerning its meaning.

Here we are given a close-up of Sabzian in the courtroom as Kiarostami -- his off camera voice registers enough for the filmmaker to be considered another central character -- asks him to recount the ruse's disintegration. The close-up, however, is complicated by the background presence of an observer, a visual approximation/stand-in of the filmmakers, the court (he's clad in official garb, though his precise position is undocumented), and the audience. Throughout the film's last third, this repeated angle features the sober-eyed Sabzian recounting the details of his alleged crime while the figure behind him displays an array of responses, ranging from the pensive to the indifferent. The filmmaker could easily have isolated his ostensible subject and consequently limited his story's focus; instead he lends half of the frame to a mere observer at the proceedings. Despite the film's title, this frame inhabits the no-man's-land between the close-up and the two-shot.  Kiarostami's image presents explicitly the phantom occupants of any film's close-ups: the audience.

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Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires*


This is among the final images of the first episode (the translated title amounts to The Severed Head) of Feuillade's delirious, nearly absurdist 1915 silent epic, Les Vampires.

An assassin dispatched by the criminal society known as The Vampires absconds across the rooftops of Paris after a gruesome murder in a magistrate's antechamber. The sleek, slinky bodies of The Vampires (all clad in form-fitting black ensembles during their criminal exploits) ballet across the screen in marked contrast to frantic clodhopping of the journalists and authorities pursuing them. His prone stance embodies both stasis and action, and the stilled image leaves the speed of his movements ambiguous. The Vampires' violent, if aesthetically thrilling, disruption of bourgeois society is encapsulated in this image of a purely black, cat-like figure stalking across and against a strict geometry.

*Though I'm sure others have done it, I first came across a feature such as this at Glenn Kenny's blog, Some Came Running, and I'd like to give credit where it's due. I think it's a useful way of looking at films. It's admittedly a narrowed perspective, but worthwhile nonetheless, as a carefully selected, isolated image (one not selected by a distributor's marketing department) can speak volumes about a filmmaker and/or a film.