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.
Once you have seen it
Watch Sabzian explain why impersonating a director felt like respect. (performance)
In his testimony he says wearing Makhmalbaf's identity let him feel, briefly, worth listening to, a motive closer to an actor's than a con man's.
Payoff: His fraud reads less like a con and more like a desperate bid for dignity. In the reading: le faussaire (the forger). The reading names Sabzian the forger, someone with no settled self who makes a truth by performing one.
Listen for the radio mic cutting out on the closing ride. (sound)
As Sabzian and Makhmalbaf ride together at the end, the audio fades in and out, a malfunction Kiarostami chose to keep in the finished film.
Payoff: The apparatus that has been manufacturing truth all along admits it can't deliver all of it.
Watch the Ahankhah family reenact their own credulity and hurt. (staging)
The real family who were deceived play themselves a second time, performing the same trust and shame they felt when it actually happened to them.
Payoff: Asking someone to replay their humiliation this closely is its own kind of ethical wager.
Carry this in: Watch the can roll again. Kiarostami is teaching you to look at the ordinary until it speaks.