Abbas Kiarostami’s Early Shorts and Features: Poetic Solutions to Philosophical Problems

Shirvanlou knew Kiarostami as a former employee of an advertising agency he had run, where Kiarostami created TV commercials and did graphic-design work. During this time, Kiarostami, who had originally studied painting, also crafted memorable title sequences for both Iranian mainstream and New Wave cinema. After Shirvanlou recruited him for Kanoon, Kiarostami played a major role in shaping its film department into a place where filmmakers could enjoy the artistic freedom and independence they sought—freedom often absent in Iranian mainstream cinema, which was dominated by small, privately owned studios and a successful star system. Kanoon was also one of the few places where daringly original animated shorts could be produced.

Histories of Kanoon commonly suggest that the films it produced fell into three categories: films for children, films with children, and films about children, with the latter two groups aimed at adult audiences. However, a closer examination of Kanoon’s filmmaking process reveals that no such formal categorization ever existed. The essence of that process was freedom; filmmakers could create whatever they wanted (sometimes, surprisingly, films not even about or for children, such as Close-up) based on very short synopses that they submitted. It was only after the final product was previewed that the Kanoon producers determined the potential exhibition setting for the film—ranging from local Kanoon centers to international film festivals or television broadcasts. (It was probably on television that I saw my first Kiarostami film, Where Is the Friend’s House?, and I immediately perceived it as a film made for children in the way it spoke to me directly. I also felt fully grown-up when I saw Close-up—again on TV—and understood it, even feeling moved by it, at the age of fifteen.)

Thanks to this freedom, Kiarostami could transition seamlessly from an educational live-action or animated short to a medium-length art-house film, and from there, embark on a feature-length investigative documentary. He could even shift tones, as his fictional works often contradicted or threw into question the hope and openness promised to children and young adults in his educational films. Yet there is a sense of purposefulness to this artistic polyphony, with a distinctive voice evident in each venture.

Because of this diversity of approaches, I find it less meaningful to consider Kiarostami’s Kanoon films chronologically than to group them according to the major stylistic and thematic concerns they introduced to his cinema—for instance, the journey narrative—which were fully established within his first few films. I will then look at how some of his films were shaped by the fully fledged cinema-ye motafavet (the Iranian New Wave of the 1960s and ’70s), both in their style and in their concern with examining economic inequality through the struggles of adolescents. Next, I’ll explore how some films engaged with the political issues of their time as the country entered its revolutionary phase, and finally consider the ways in which Kiarostami engaged with the specific meanings of the classroom as a space of discipline, power, and spectatorship.

Beginnings and Journeys

Kiarostami’s earliest films not only establish the rules of his world—some of which he would freely break later, as his career progressed—but also reflect some of the principles of Kanoon’s productions. In many of these films, a boy wishes to get from point A to point B and must overcome various obstacles. These didactic plots are enlivened with playfulness, fabricated barriers, and deliberate delays, showcasing the compositional skill of an accomplished graphic artist.

An example of a Kanoon agenda serving as the origin of a Kiarostami film is Colors (1976). In Kanoon centers, painting was one of the most common activities. At a time when the majority of Iranian films were still shot in black and white, this delightful short served as an invitation to pay attention, find inspiration, and draw connections between objects through color. Kiarostami’s fascination with explaining the world through visual codes drives the film, as the rhyming narration draws attention to nature, time, and urban life.

Another form that Kiarostami’s early experiences at Kanoon established is the journey narrative, which has a long tradition in Persian classical literature. He combined this with a rational approach to everyday problems. For instance, children doing grocery shopping was a common practice in Iran, but in Bread and Alley, for the first time, someone highlighted the difficulties of such a simple endeavor—showing children navigating a world designed for adults.

Tales of children left to face an indifferent and cruel world on their own aligned with Kanoon’s policy of taking children seriously and acknowledging their problems and rights. For Kiarostami, this was also an opportunity to project his own worldview onto children’s aspirations and fears.

In this short film, a young boy, afraid of a stray dog in the alley, is unable to return home with the bread he has bought. Eventually, he shares some bread with the dog and befriends it. Many of Kiarostami’s films, particularly his journey films, conclude with a humanist gesture that temporarily restores the order life requires. I call these moments “poetic solutions”—instances of transcendence in which Kiarostami abandons the initial premise or investigation he has undertaken, allowing the audience to be surprised by what has surprised him. These moments are driven by pure human emotions—affection, solidarity, kindness, and compassion—that emerge to overcome fear and despair. They are often marked by spoken poetry or nondiegetic music. I believe sometimes the entire narrative is crafted to build toward that moment of rare, moving beauty.

If in Bread and Alley a boy fears a dog, in Breaktime (1972) this anxiety is transmuted into a fear of others. The film is significant for establishing a typical Kiarostami character’s seemingly aimless wandering. Someone moves, observes, and then it’s over. A daringly abstract take on the meaning of freedom and restraint, the film cements another key theme in Kiarostami’s cinema, one that persists in other Kanoon films as well: an obsessive attachment to an idea or object that represents a dream for a young person. Here, it is a ball that has led to the boy being punished (for breaking a school’s window), ostracized, and even chased. He possesses the ball but has no playmates or game. Soccer and the journey link this film to Kiarostami’s first feature and best-known work from the prerevolutionary period, The Traveler (1974).

The Traveler revolves around Ghassem, a twelve-year-old boy from a small town in western Iran, who, despite his dire familial, financial, and educational circumstances, is determined to attend a national soccer match in Tehran. To gather money for the unauthorized trip, he swindles his schoolmates out of their pocket money, steals from his mother, and sells the net and ball of the soccer team he captains. In Tehran, exhausted from the long journey, queuing unsuccessfully for a ticket, chasing down a reseller, and then spending all of his money, he falls asleep and misses the match.

The film’s main themes are explicitly spelled out in a scene where two friends practice vocabulary: “Rebellion . . . obedience . . . ambition.” Ghassem longs to escape, even for a day, his grim and violent environment. The obsessive element—the soccer match—is merely a MacGuffin; it is the journey that matters.

Adolescence and Poverty

When Ghassem tries to talk to a Tehrani boy at a swimming pool, a glass wall separates them, preventing Ghassem’s voice from reaching him. The Traveler is unambiguous in its social criticism, portraying a country divided by economic class. Two medium-length fiction films offer further insight into Kiarostami’s examination of the world of young adults through the prism of class, in a country rapidly establishing its new petrodollar-backed middle class. They also mark the first time that Kiarostami’s films touched on the birth of desire and the discovery of sexual attraction. These films reveal a rare alignment with the aesthetic and thematic preoccupations of the Iranian New Wave, which was then at its peak—a cinema deeply concerned with issues of poverty and social injustice. Kiarostami was momentarily absorbed by the movement, but for most of his career, his films hardly fit common definitions of the New Wave.

The most precise and poignant consideration of adolescence and class can be found in Experience (1973), which showcases Kiarostami’s distanced style in full form and stands out as his most significant work exploring desire and rejection. Cowritten as a piece of autobiographical reflection by New Wave director Amir Naderi, the film follows Mohammad, a young working-class boy apprenticed to and living in a photographic shop while fretting over the possibility of working for the family of a well-off girl he has fallen in love with. The boy—excluded, ignored, and harassed—wants to grow up quickly to escape from daily misery. His journey toward adulthood is depicted through obsessive observations (of a man shaving, the back of a woman walking down the street) and rituals (visiting a public bath, smoking at the movies).

The film serves as a window into Mohammad’s world and, as its primary means of mise-en-scène, makes remarkable use of actual window frames, through which the story is both seen and hidden from the viewer. The masterful framing, brooding fade-outs, and darkly majestic night shots create a quiet yet profound image of seclusion. Both Experience (which benefits tremendously from the audacious black-and-white camera work of New Wave cinematographer Alireza Zarrindast) and Kiarostami’s other medium-length narrative film included in this set, A Wedding Suit (1976), are more ornate than his other works. These films do not hide behind simplicity; instead, they share New Wave cinema’s ease with revealing their visual and narrative intricacies.

A Wedding Suit is set in a three-story shopping center in downtown Tehran and, like Experience, frames action through shopwindows. However, here the reconfiguration leads to suspenseful, almost Hitchcockian results. Three teenagers, one of whom is employed in a tailor’s shop, work on different levels of the building. The other two boys pressure the tailor’s assistant to secretly lend them a suit fitted for the son of an affluent family. Like the title object in Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat,” the suit reveals the power dynamics of the characters’ relationships with one another, as well as with a society that remains apathetic toward them, suppressing their sexual, vocational, and social aspirations.

Political Allegories

Iranian film criticism after the Second World War was, for the most part, influenced by leftist ideas. A strong preference for films with social engagement and a “message” meant that most critics failed to recognize Kiarostami’s political shrewdness and his nuanced perspective on the tumultuous events of the late 1970s in Iran, which culminated in the revolution. This led to him being erroneously and scornfully labeled an apolitical filmmaker.

In reality, starting with Breaktime, his films are imbued with visible signs of political and social dissent. Remarkably, he achieved this without leaving his comfort zone—the classroom setting and the world of children—and by remaining faithful to his inquiring style, with its subtle, imaginative manipulation of recorded reality.

As the country underwent a radical political transformation from a deeply flawed capitalist constitutional monarchy to theocratic despotism, Kiarostami had to adjust his cinema to the tolerance level of the new rulers. Allegory is the oldest way of bypassing censorship, and even before the revolution, his cinema had offered some degree of political allegory in reference to the ongoing upheaval. For instance, in the Keatonesque Solution No. 1 (1978), a middle-class city dweller struggles with a flat tire high in the Alborz Mountains. He tries to hitch a ride back but, after being ignored by passing drivers, decides to roll the tire to his destination. Alongside Masoud Kimiai’s explicitly pro-revolution Journey of the Stone, made in the same year, Kiarostami intertwines resilience with the act of “rolling” the immobile, alluding to a revolution already in full force. However, true to his characteristic ambiguity and reserved perspective, Kiarostami refuses to take sides.

Kiarostami’s next film, First Case, Second Case (1979)—his first work to be indefinitely banned after the revolution—went into production before the revolution. However, as people were being interviewed for the film, the revolution took hold, and Kiarostami decided to record the opinions of some members of the new regime. The film depicts a teacher who is drawing a section of an ear on a blackboard (bringing in the theme of surveillance) when a student disrupts the class by banging his pen on his desk. The teacher demands that the students name the culprit. They refuse, and the teacher suspends seven pupils, stating they will be allowed back only if they identify the guilty party. Kiarostami films two outcomes of the scenario—naming names and sticking together—and shows the footage of both to parents, politicians, artists, writers, and even leaders of the Jewish and Christian communities, asking for their opinion.

The film serves as a discourse on key dilemmas of the Iranian revolution, such as betrayal versus camaraderie and moral values versus group integrity. Unsurprisingly, the paradoxical nature of the revolution that Kiarostami highlights in the film turned into tragic reality for some interviewees; even some of the new regime’s confidants who appear in the film fell out of favor, and were imprisoned, exiled, or in one case—that of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh—executed.

First Case, Second Case examines society’s leaders across various fields. The question of leadership became paramount in Kiarostami’s 1980s films. In The Chorus (1982), for instance, the focus is on elderly patriarchs unable to hear the young. The protagonist is an old man who, aggravated by the noise of his surroundings, turns off his hearing aid. When his granddaughter returns home from school, he cannot hear the doorbell. She throws pebbles at the window to no avail and hollers in vain. She is joined by classmates, they shout together, and, as their numbers grow, it becomes a full chorus. Only then does the old man finally hear.

The sense of urban chaos in The Chorus—dangerous driving, noise—not only intensifies but also becomes a metaphor for moral and political chaos in the following film, Fellow Citizen (1983). Kiarostami’s voice sets the scene at the beginning of this medium-length documentary: as a result of war and revolution, Tehran is in trouble . . . traffic-wise. Composed of exchanges between a traffic officer and citizens offering the flimsiest of excuses for entering a newly enforced limited-traffic zone, the film centers on negotiation—one of the last survival tools in totalitarian societies. It captures postrevolutionary confusion while subtly revealing the new hierarchies in Iranian society, where mullahs pass without being stopped by the officer. Portraying citizens as selfish whiners who are also vulnerable and wary, the film offers an image of a failed revolution, spiritually at least.

Another leadership documentary, First Graders (1984), is often considered a companion piece to Homework (1989) because of its focus on primary-school education. However, I detect a slightly different and troubling political thesis in it that sets it apart from other school films. The film follows a headmaster dealing with the daily problems of students. Initially, we only hear his voice and see his hand as he places it—like a blessing—on the shaved heads of children standing in line. Later, when the camera reveals the entire schoolyard, we see the headmaster, who is noticeably a hezbollahi—a religious, pro-revolutionary figure easily identifiable by his beard, gem ring, and untucked shirt. This seemingly stoic father figure radiates a disturbing air of authority. He addresses the students formally, yet his politeness carries a subtle tone of threat. He does not teach civility; instead, his work involves lengthy interrogations and passing guilty verdicts on the children.

Deliberately focusing solely on power, the film avoids showing any schoolteachers or staff, with the exception of the caretaker, and fixes on this godlike figure. The ending, in which the headmaster successfully persuades a student who wants to leave the school to stay, comes dangerously close to endorsing his authority. When he is shown cutting apples for the students and allowing them to smell a bouquet of flowers, he embodies the “supreme leader”—the concept that has plunged the country into theocratic dictatorship since the revolution.

School Films

For most of the seventies and eighties, the classroom was both Kiarostami’s laboratory and his microsociety. These films often resemble playful philosophy lessons for children rather than educational entertainment. For Kiarostami, the classroom, like the movie theater, was a space of observation—a place where spectators are seated and ordered to face in one direction, expected to follow a teacher’s narrative that claims to be true. With the camera positioned either as the teacher/filmmaker or the student/spectator, these films practice the art of looking.

Two of the finest examples from this period are Two Solutions for One Problem and So Can I (both 1975), both around five minutes in length. In the slapstick Two Solutions, a small boy accidentally tears the cover of his classmate’s book. Two approaches to the problem are shown: one involving a Three Stooges–like escalation of violence and destruction, and the other, the civilized way—or the poetic solution—in which the boy glues the torn book cover back together.

In So Can I, animated vignettes of different animals jumping, crawling, or galloping are shown to a child, who responds by saying, “So can I,” and who is then shown successfully imitating the animal’s movements—until it comes to flying. In its defense of human wisdom over instinctual imitation, the film proposes that humanity’s essence lies in inventiveness. To fly, one must build an airplane.

Another title incorporating animation for didactic purposes is Toothache (1980), which, in its own way, goes beyond the simple message of “brush your teeth at night.” Through relentless irony, the film engages the audience in a world that can become unbearably painful when it turns its back on human rules.

In this group of films, the only time the camera focuses on teachers rather than students—and the first time Kiarostami incorporates the interview format into his work—is in Tribute to Teachers (1977). The film digresses from the grandeur of a pompous voice-over to the dissatisfaction of one interviewee—a teacher who laments his poor welfare. Yet it maintains a genuine reverence for the profession and suggests that cinema itself is a form of teaching and learning.

The school films are often the most self-referential of Kiarostami’s works, exploring the medium of film in parallel with their subject. For instance, Orderly or Disorderly (1981) recalls the style of Jerry Lewis (whose The Disorderly Orderly, from 1964, was a major hit in Iran) in its exploration of space and order, as well as how a space can be figuratively and cinematically filled or emptied. It also incorporates elements of experimental film by making the viewer aware of its editing process and of the meaning of screen time, the latter emphasized through the use of an on-screen clock. Additionally, it allows the viewer to overhear conversations between the filmmaker and his cameraman on the soundtrack.

In this film about flow and stasis, congestion and movement, Kiarostami divides his attention between children (in school and beyond) and adults, swiftly expanding a problem seemingly specific to young people into one that affects an entire society. In a critique of Iranians who blame their rulers while refusing to take responsibility for their own actions, the film shows how the revolution has become an excuse for people to neglect their civic duties. The prerevolutionary political disobedience has now translated into postrevolutionary social disorder.

The frustration with Iran’s tumultuous conditions makes Homework Kiarostami’s most effective classroom film. Conducted as a visual investigation into students’ overwhelming volume of assignments, the film reveals how adults have failed to take responsibility even for children. On a cold, dry winter morning, curious and camera-aware children are on their way to school when they encounter Kiarostami, who asks them: “Have you done your homework?” When the camera reaches the school, the mood is set during the morning assembly, where students must repeat anti-West and anti-East slogans, mourn for the martyrs, and recite prayers. Ideological indoctrination is at work, while much of the actual educational burden is left to parents in the form of homework.

Through meticulous editing, Kiarostami—appearing for the first time on camera as the interviewer—creates a rhyming effect with some painful discoveries: the children are terribly lonely; many are raised by illiterate parents who cannot help them with their education; they are afraid to express what they love; they are encouraged to lose their identities in the regime’s propaganda machine; and, most importantly, they are physically punished at home.

We see a terrified boy who weeps incessantly and inexplicably. Suddenly, calmed by the presence of his friend, he breaks into reciting a poem. The film frees him from his unspoken agony. Aside from this ending, in which Kiarostami offers poetic release from this glum condition, the film serves as an X-ray of the frightened world of a generation already broken by the age of ten. Despite ongoing censorship, everything is spelled out with remarkable clarity. Kiarostami reveals a country punishing its children for the sake of undefined ideals.

Early in Homework, the voice of a passerby on the street asks Kiarostami what kind of film he is making. “I have no idea until I make it,” he responds. The seventeen films in this set are the works of someone who transforms a meandering journey into a coherent vision of the world, turns commissioned films into self-reflective philosophy, and uses the didactic format to venture into self-discovery. He makes films to see what awaits him at the end of the journey.

There is regenerative exchange between the filmmaker and his subject, between reality and fiction. In The Traveler, the young protagonist, Ghassem, uses a camera with no film to con people into paying to have their portraits taken, raising money for his trip to Tehran. His camera is empty, but Kiarostami’s is not. When the unsuspecting children are fooled into posing in front of Ghassem’s useless camera, they are instead forever captured on the director’s roll of film. A child’s lie becomes Kiarostami’s truth.

Related Films

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