criterionforum.org

One knew for quite a while that we would lose Rivette soon (and he was, to a large extent, already lost to himself -- given his inability to watch movies anymore). But Kiarostami's death is truly sad. From what I have read, this was far from inevitable -- it appears his cancer treatment in Iran was not really all that competent. I don't think he was ready to retire from a career he seemed to enjoy. I hope Criterion finally gets around to releasing the Koker trilogy as a belated goodbye present.

Folks might be interested in Jean-Michel Frodon's comprehensive and sensitive assessment of Kiarostami's career: http://www.slate.fr/story/120601/mort-abbas-kiarostami" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Rose Kuo posted the following on Instagram:

Someone sent this photo that they took of me talking to Abbas Kiarostami last year at the Festival Lumiere in Lyon, France. I hadn’t seen him in years. In 2001, Ian Birnie agree to let me mount a complete retrospective of Kiarostami's work for LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) under one condition: I had to persuade Kiarostami to attend even though he had declined all previous invitations to travel to Los Angeles. I was sent to San Francisco were he was appearing at the San Francisco Film Society (he had no issues with Northern California clearly) to secure his promise. I shadowed him and his large entourage led by Peter Scarlett for the better part of a week. Usually, this meant that I was assigned to a second, nearby table at restaurants were he was dining or I hung around the fringes of his group at bars and told to “wait for the right moment" with another—at the time—lowly programmer named Thierry Fremaux from the Lumiere Institute in Lyon. Finally, I was finally granted a 15 minute meeting at his hotel. He heard my pitch, agreed to come to LA, and then in closing, said that he had been admiring my bright yellow framed sunglasses all week… I guess not so anonymous after all. In the subsequent disastrous-but-with-a-happy-ending-sequence of events, I was was in the hospital after delivering my son in February 2001 when I got the call that all of Kiarostami's rare shorts from the Cinematheque Francais had been lost in transit. (They were never found.) When Kiarostami later landed in NY, he discovered that the pain he had been experiencing during flight was a severe ear infection. The doctor wouldn’t allow him to continue his travel to LA. We went on with the show that was nearly complete and absent its director. It was a huge hit. When I ran into Abbas last October, we were both attending the Festival Lumiere which was created by renowned Thierry Fremaux of Cannes. Life, it travels us in a circle. The postscript is that, in the photo, Abbas was telling, me about a movie that he was preparing to shoot in China. I told him that I was living there and we agreed to see each other this year in Beijing. R.I.P. Abbas Kiarostami.

Michael Kerpan wrote: From what I have read, this was far from inevitable -- it appears his cancer treatment in Iran was not really all that competent.

If this is the case then what are the chances that the US government (and certain political parties) are at least partly responsible? There have been several reports over the years how the sanctions severely crippled Iran's health care system. Especially for cancer.

Sanctions have indirectly led to serious healthcare concerns, specifically cancer treatment. This is the first report to evaluate Iranian cancer healthcare while under international economic sanctions.

Supposedly he needed to go in for treatment urgently, even though it was a major vacation period, with only minimal medical staffing (compared to normal).

This was absolutely devastating for me, as it was for many if social media is any kind of indicator. Watching Kiarostami as a teen in the 90s taught me a lot about film art, what it means to be a viewer, and how to "read" cinema. It feels like a particularly personal loss because he was one of the filmmakers whose work fundamentally altered my understanding of the possibilities of film during my formative years. Hard to believe such a towering figure is gone.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

Abbas Kiarostami death sparks debate on patient's right to be informed in Iran. Iranian film-maker had undergone four operations but did not know severity of his illness until shortly before he died in Paris.

Terrible, as the details emerge of his final days!...

What a horrible and inhuman practice, Jesus

Supposedly still fairly common in Japan even today -- and remained pretty standard within the scope of my lifetime here in the USA. However, happily now out of fashion here....

That's insane.

A little while back, I was reading up on the French humorist Pierre Desproges, who had a similar thing happen to him. He was playing golf and felt a pain in his back, had it checked out and it was confirmed to be some kind of growth/tumor, but the doctors didn’t know whether it was malignant or benign at that point. They operated on him, at which point the doctors discovered it was cancer in both of his lungs and his condition was terminal. Doctors conferred with his wife and they decided not to tell him it was cancerous/harmful, so he kept living life as if nothing was wrong - increasingly beset by fatigue and unable to meet professional obligations - until he became too ill to function at all and had to be hospitalized, dying a month or so after going into the hospital, and within a year of the original hidden diagnosis.

Apparently it's a widespread problem in the UK as well.

It's easy to throw stones, but the US healthcare system is not exactly a model of ethics and fairness either, and the even when it is, patients still have cultural and religious pressure informing their "choices".

Hell this was the premise of IKIRU.

hearthesilence wrote:Hell this was the premise of IKIRU.

Except when Mr. Watanabe went in for his exam he was given the key to the doctor's code words beforehand, so he was able to interpret the diagnosis correctly.

Zot! wrote:It's easy to throw stones, but the US healthcare system is not exactly a model of ethics and fairness either, and the even when it is, patients still have cultural and religious pressure informing their "choices".

Perhaps. But, in at least this respect, the medical profession in the US has improved significantly.

A moving tribute to Kiarostami by Martin Scorsese.

As an aside - does anyone know what Scorsese is referring to when he mentions what sounds like a video essay series called 24 Frames?

He mentions one that talks about King Vidor's The Big Parade and the artist Andrew Wyeth. I would love to see these, but I've looked high and low on YouTube, Vimeo, Google etc and can't seem to find it. Unfortunately the common coexistence of the term "24 frames" and "video essay" pulls up a ton of unrelated results. It sounds like Kiarostami and Scorsese are both big fans of it...

Thanks for the tribute from Scorsese.

Oedipax wrote:
As an aside - does anyone know what Scorsese is referring to when he mentions what sounds like a video essay series called 24 Frames?

Here's a Variety article from May discussing 24 Frames. It's an unreleased project Kiarostami was working on before his death, and he showed part of it Scorsese. The relevant bit is probably this:

Although the plot is currently being kept under wraps, Kiarostami previously said the experimental project would be based on 24 four-and-a-half minute films that he has been directing over the last three years.

I'm sure its status is up in the air now, understandably.

Oedipax wrote:He mentions one that talks about King Vidor's The Big Parade and the artist Andrew Wyeth. I would love to see these, but I've looked high and low on YouTube, Vimeo, Google etc and can't seem to find it. Unfortunately the common coexistence of the term "24 frames" and "video essay" pulls up a ton of unrelated results. It sounds like Kiarostami and Scorsese are both big fans of it...

Not necessarily what you were looking for, but in case it's of interest, Tag Gallagher on Vidor & Wyeth in Senses of Cinema:How to Share a Hill. And here's a post talking about a film by Vidor about Wyeth, which I haven't seen myself: Metaphor

Yeah, it sounds like he was talking about Metaphor which is quite good and is basically just a conversation between the two talking about Wyeth's influences.

Interview with Ahmad Kiarostami reveals that there's a (short?) film that will be released next year, and the family is in discussions with MK2 about bringing together and restoring his filmography.

Finally got around to seeing Like Someone in Love last night, and was floored -- I can't stop thinking about it, and it is probably my favorite of the five or so I've seen from Abbas. It makes his loss all the more sad, yet also strangely it fits as a final film -- of course if it were titled The End as originally planned people would be talking a lot about that. The final shot certainly has a sense of crushing finality!

Some Kiarostami news. This is from an interview with the late director's son Ahmad.

http://www.pardolive.ch/it/pardo/par...iarostami.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Are you also thinking about the preservation of his movies?

Yes, most of all we want his movies to be more available, there are some of them, like Zire darakhatan zeyton (Under the Olive Tree) for example, that are impossible to find online or on dvd. Then we are thinking about the restoration of his whole opera, even the short films he made for children at the beginning of his career. There’s one, for example, Rangha (Colours), I showed it to my daughter that is six years old and she asked me «Dad, where are the colours?», because it’s completely grey. So, we hope to give back colours to his legacy.

The Pacific Film Archive will be showing Through the Olive Trees on September 24. The print is credited to Curzon Artificial Eye.

pzadvance wrote:MK2, Kanoon Films to restore Kiarostami's first 20 films in 4K

There is a god.