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Article: Life lines. (interview with filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami)(Interview)
- Article from:
- Artforum International
- Article date:
- April 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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What the films of Abbas Kiarostami bring to the cinema is a few thousand extra years of history. While the images, it's true, still go by at twenty-four frames per second, they are dense with time - not only real and "reel" time, but the cumulative time of a millennial vision of culture. Kiarostami's most recent film, Taste of Cherry (1997), for example, follows a middle-aged man as he circles an industrial suburb of Tehran in search of someone to throw dirt on his body should he commit suicide, or to help him out of the grave should he be found alive. In discussing this austere journey along the borderline between life and death, the director alternately cites the medieval ...