Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Close-Up
1990 · Abbas Kiarostami · Close-Up on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch a discarded spray can roll slowly down a gutter. (camera)
During the arrest, the camera lets the police go and simply stays with the can bumping along the slope until it settles.
Payoff: The most quoted shot in the film is of a thing going nowhere in particular.
Watch Sabzian's face held close through long stretches of testimony. (camera)
A telephoto lens isolates his face against a soft, indistinct background, making the courtroom camera behave like a listener he has never had.
Payoff: The lens does the work of attention Sabzian says his real life never gave him. In the reading: icon of quality (affection-image). The reading calls this a qualisign, a face holding one quality, a man finally being heard.
Notice the film open with the arrest already underway. (structure)
Kiarostami starts mid-journey to the arrest, then loops backward, so you reconstruct the story out of order much as the court itself does.
Payoff: You're never handed the case in a straight line, only in the pieces the film chooses. In the reading: falsifying-narration. The reading calls this falsifying narration, laying out an account without marking which version you're inside.
Watch documentary trial footage blend into staged reenactment without warning. (cutting)
Real courtroom testimony and re-performed scenes are intercut so smoothly that the seam between what happened and what's being restaged nearly disappears.
Payoff: You're rarely told which mode you're watching, which is exactly what the film is about.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the can roll again. Kiarostami is teaching you to look at the ordinary until it speaks.