For this film, Mohsen Makhmalbaf announces a casting call: thousands of people turn up and there’s a riot to get in. Each participant is channelling their worries and hopes into the desire to be in a film. He interacts with them in this dictatorial way, which makes the film ultimately about power and authority. He demands that people cry on command. One woman becomes so frustrated that she does start to cry, so he says OK, you’ve made it. And she’s so happy, but then there’s the disappointment as she realises this was her moment on screen. She thought there’d be a script and a real film to make afterwards. It’s a devastating, beautiful film.
A scene from Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami.
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A scene from Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami.
Close Up, Abbas Kiarostami, 1990
A man pretends to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the director of Salaam Cinema. He insinuates himself into a family’s life out of loneliness, to make friends. At one point the family realise he’s not really the director and have him arrested. The film follows this man’s trial in an Iranian court, and then the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf meets the man and takes him to the family.
The impostor’s fragility ultimately embodies what it means to be poor and struggling in life, and through that you feel how sad it is that we live in a world where people are measured by wealth and power, and the cruelty that any human being could ever feel insignificant.
Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris, 1978
This was Errol Morris’s