With the short Take Me Home, Kiarostami returned, following a decades-long break, to black and white imagery, as well as his early pictures’ main theme—childhood. Meanwhile, in the feature-length experimental 24 Frames, that would become his final work, the director set in motion his own photographs and other people’s famous paintings, imagining what happened before and after the moments they capture. Garage Screen presents a double screening of Abbas Kiarostami’s last films, completed posthumously by his fellow filmmakers.
76-year-old Kiarostami returns to childhood and black and white in his last short, accompanied by a smooth jazz soundtrack. In Take Me Home, a boy leaves a soccer ball on his porch, but it “runs” away. The viewer follows the ball as it rolls down the endless stairways of Italian streets, reminiscent of a Battleship Potemkin scene stretching over 16 minutes. Another movie instantly coming to mind is Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, a lyrical story of a boy and his friend—a giant red balloon. As Kiarostami’s death interrupted the work, the director’s colleagues completed Take Me Home using archival photographs of him and adding special effects.
Made in a quite similar technique, Kiarostami’s posthumous 24 Frames was completed by his son Ahmad. Using photographs of past years from his own archive as well as old masters’ canvases (like Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow), Kiarostami imagined what happened a few minutes before and after the moment captured in the photo or painting, shooting a film composed of 24 animated frames, four and a half minutes each. Like Walt Disney in Fantasia, says Ahmad, his father worked entirely for himself rather than the audience for the first time. Whereas Fantasia mixes painting, animation, and classical music, Kiarostami’s 24 Frames has synthesized a love for poetry, photography, and cinema.
Take Me Home
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
Iran, 2016. 16 min. 6+
24 Frames
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
Iran, France, 2017. 114 min. 6+
