“The films that I love are very straightforward stories, like really old-fashioned stuff.” — Paul Thomas Anderson

Posted on June 26, 2025 by sheila

There are many good contemporary film-makers doing fascinating bold work but Paul Thomas Anderson is what you might call “touched”. What other filmmaker now would even dare to make something like Magnolia? Who could even think that up? How was Magnolia even possible? How did he do it?

That entire lengthy section where everything is happening with every character simultaneously and he flows from one to the next to the next and the film doesn’t lose momentum – if anything it gains in momentum. And he does this with minimal dialogue. It’s more about rhythm, and music, and flow. That movie is insane. But then he can pull off something short and sweet (and sad) like Punch-Drunk Love. I haven’t even mentioned the mighty There Will Be Blood, another sui generis bizarro film, which doesn’t have a line of dialogue for the first half-hour. After which, it’s all talk-talk-talk. And … Upton Sinclair as your inspiration? Sign me up.

Anderson’s work excites me in a unique way, distinct from other filmmakers I love. My thought process is basically: “I can’t wait to see what he’s been ruminating about THIS time.”

After all of his great ensemble films, he comes out with the gorgeous Phantom Thread, a chamber piece, taking place in two locations only, featuring just three characters. I don’t know if I can put into words how much I love Phantom Thread. Oh wait, yes I can: I wrote the cover story for Film Comment on the film:

My first cover story for them. I put my heart and soul into this one, because the romantic aspect of the film touched me so deeply and because much of the commentary about the film – about Woodcock’s “toxic masculinity” and the “predatory” age gap (enough already: she is an adult woman. She makes her own choices.) etc. seemed a willful missing of the point, a need to shoehorn something into the dominant narrative, even if it doesn’t fit.. The weird thing was (or, it wasn’t weird to me, just to others) was I didn’t “relate” to Alma (Vicki Krieps), the young woman falling in love with Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis). I “related” to Woodcock, his rigidity, his staunch aloneness, his haunted nights, his desire for affection and yet his fear of it, his single-mindedness, and his damaged solitude. Love comes to him and it is difficult for him to bear it. He pushes it away. He is too fucked up. He can’t take it. And he NEEDS someone like Alma, to love him enough to stick around and wear him down. It’s fine if you don’t relate to that, but I fucking do. I’ve got a lot of bad road behind me. The assumption that women can only relate to women characters and men can only relate to men characters is not only not true but is irritatingly persistent and needs to be burned in the public square. There is no reason a man can’t see himself in a female character (I’d bet Window Boy could relate to Alma. I was a TOUGH NUT.) There is no reason a woman can’t see herself in a male character. Hamlet? Hello.

Here’s my cover story: Love After a Fashion.

I also was a guest on the Film Comment podcast, to chat with Violet Lucca about the film.

I was so obsessed with Inherent Vice I saw it three times in the movie theatre. Now, the best piece about the film, the one to read, is Kim Morgan’s at the New Beverly site. Don’t miss it. She digs so deep into the film she enters into its maze.

I wrote about it, too, although briefer, mainly adding on to what she already said.

Here’s the first piece I wrote and then … I wasn’t done, and decided to write a second piece, about one shot in the film that reminded me of a photo in one of those Time-Life books from back in the day, and how I would put money down that PTA was referencing it.

I also wrote about Licorice Pizza for Ebert.

I love his work dearly and cannot wait for his next dispatch.

One final thing: Marc Maron’s two-hour interview with him is a must-hear kind of thing.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged | 7 Comments

Happy Birthday, Hediyeh Tehrani

Posted on June 25, 2025 by sheila

I first encountered Iranian actress Hediyeh Tehrani’s work when I covered the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006 (it was my first real “gig”). was assigned to review Fireworks Wednesday. This was my introduction to Iranian film. Fireworks Wednesday was intriguing enough for me to institute a crash course. I saw as much as I could get my hands on. Fireworks Wednesday was a good “way in” too: It was directed by Asghar Farhadi, who would go on to win the Oscar for A Separation – and finally, recently, About Elly (which I consider equal to A Separation) was rescued from obscurity for a long-delayed U.S. release. Fireworks Wednesday was also my introduction to Tehrani – as well as to Taraneh Alidoosti – (she was also the “Elly” in About Elly, as well as the wife in The Salesman). But Tehrani was the one who intrigued me first, who pulled me in, who made me sit up and pay close attention. “Okay. Focus. This actress is GOOD.”


Hedieh Tehrani, “Fireworks Wednesday”

Continue reading →

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Personal Memory: or: What Dog Day Afternoon Means to Me

Posted on June 25, 2025 by sheila

When I was 12 or 13, I saw Dog Day Afternoon one night while I was babysitting, and it changed the course of my life. This is not hyperbole. It is partially responsible for me being who I am today, for me making the choices I made, for me accepting the things I valued most, for me even RECOGNIZING what I valued. It all goes back to Dog Day Afternoon (and East of Eden, which I’ll get to). Dog Day Afternoon also represented an immensely painful – and even traumatic – growth spurt happening (in retrospect) when I was too young to handle it or process it.

I was in middle school. I was way too young to see that movie, and I didn’t understand a lot of it. The whole sex-reassignment operation thing went completely over my head, but what I do remember – and what struck me then – was the raw power of Al Pacino’s performance. It knocked me flat. I had never seen acting like this before. The parents of the kid I was babysitting came home that night, and had no idea that the girl sitting on the couch was totally altered from the girl who had arrived at their house 4 hours before. The father drove me back to my house. My mind was AFLAME with thoughts not of Al Pacino, but of Sonny, the real-life character he played. So this is KEY in explaining the power the film had on my 12-year-old brain.

I clearly remember, on that short drive home, not just considering writing a letter to the real Sonny in prison, but planning on doing it, and wondering how I could figure out which prison he was in, so I could make sure he received it. I thought to myself during that short drive, “Should I ask Dad if he can look into this for me? I need to know the prison and there isn’t any Internet yet.” I don’t know what I wanted to SAY to Sonny, but I just knew I wanted to reach out and tell him how much I loved and appreciated him, and how I really felt for the struggle he had gone through. Al Pacino’s performance made me want to find “the real guy”.

The soul does not grow in a linear way. There are events in life that catapult you forward, where your soul skips a step, and expands to three times its former size. It hurts. It seems we are meant to grow in a slower more gradual way so that you can’t actually feel the growth spurt. Watching Dog Day Afternoon was a growth-spurt for me. It hurt. I walked around for days, aching. Aching for Sonny’s desperation, for Sonny being in prison just because he wanted to help that person on the phone, whom I had no idea what was going on with anyway … it didn’t matter. Sonny wasn’t a bad person. I ached for him. And, looking back, I can see that what was born in me through that movie and performance was empathy. A stepping outside of myself and my experience, and feeling – HARD – for others.

My soul did a quantum-leap, in one evening, and I was no longer the same clueless self-centered girl I had been. After seeing Dog Day Afternoon, for weeks afterward, I would lie in bed at night and actually press down on my chest with my hand, trying to soothe whatever was going on in there. (It is also worth it to mention that I had my first nervous breakdown when I was 12, right on the heels of getting my period. My docs now think that this was bipolar, slipping through the door along with menstruation, which is the way it goes often for girls. Thanks a lot, Mother Nature. Anyway, I was already in a heightened state, but – as I would come to learn – heightened states like this – as painful as they are – do bring you closer to some essential truth.) I couldn’t get the image of sweaty Al Pacino’s face out of my mind. He haunted me. I understood totally why the hostages would choose to stay with this man. I understood it completely. No WAY would I have left that bank if I had been a hostage.

(Another movie I saw too soon, around this same time, was East of Eden. Dog Day Afternoon and East of Eden were the one-two punch to my childhood. Rebel Without a Cause came maybe a year later, again, seen when I was babysitting. Plato’s death was one of the worst things I had ever seen in my life. I could not believe it had happened. The first “too soon” movie is the real Big Kahuna and that was Stanley Kramer’s Bless the Beasts and Children, which I watched on the little black-and-white television in our den when I was around 9 years old. It was the era when children spent large chunks of their day completely unmonitored. I thought the movie was going to be about kids and animals. The movie wrecked me to such an extreme degree that my helpless parents were actually worried. They hadn’t seen the movie and they had no idea what I was reacting to. I remember hearing my mother say, as I thrashed around in my bed sobbing, “WHAT was in that movie, Sheila. Please tell us.” But I couldn’t! How could I tell them that the sight of a herd of STATIONARY buffalo had made me cease to be an innocent child? How could I make them understand?? Bless the Beasts and Children was a moment from which I never fully recovered.)

I didn’t even know what the hell was going ON when I first saw Dog Day Afternoon, that night babysitting. What was “Attica” and why was he screaming that at the crowd? I needed to find out about that, too.

I asked Dad. Imagine poor Dad, sitting at the breakfast table with his 12-year-old daughter, and she suddenly says, out of the blue, “Did something bad happen at a place called Attica?” To his credit, he explained about the prison riot. Ohhhh okay so now I understood Sonny’s screams. I was 12 years old, starting to be obsessed with Casey Kasum’s Top 40, and also my rainbow-striped leg warmers and my friends and going to dances and doing my homework. But I was also researching Al Pacino, the real “Sonny”, Attica, and Sidney Lumet, trying to put it all together in my head: How had anyone CREATED this movie? It felt like a real event, it felt like news footage. I knew enough to know that what I was watching was the result of hard work of some kind, but it still baffled me and obsessed me. How does one go about creating something like Dog Day Afternoon?

There was another aspect to this: As I said, I did have a conception that this thing was MADE, and so I became fascinated by the real people involved. The same thing with East of Eden. I worked in a library after school, and my dad was a librarian, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that Elia Kazan (director of East of Eden) and Al Pacino had the Actors Studio in common. And so I started researching the Studio and forget it I was hooked. And 15 years later, I was going to grad school at the Actors Studio, taking classes with Studio people, attending sessions at the Studio. I trace ALL of this back to Dog Day Afternoon.

I have a great affection for the things in my life that I encountered “too soon”. There is, as always, a loss of innocence connected to such moments, and that’s why it hurt so much. That’s why I lay in bed at night, eyes towards the dark ceiling, thinking about Sonny in his prison cell somewhere, wanting to reach out to him personally, and pressing my hand down on my chest to calm everything down in there. I had never seen a movie like that before. It marked me with indelible ink.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

“I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.” — George Orwell

Posted on June 25, 2025 by sheila

Orwell was born on this day.

When Animal Farm was released in a new edition, Christopher Hitchens wrote specifically about the quote from Orwell shown in the title above. Very few people can “face unpleasant facts”. Hitchens:

A commissar who realizes that his five-year-plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact. So, for that matter, may a priest with ‘doubts’. The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the ‘power of facing’. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious. The ‘unpleasant facts’ that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

The “power of facing” will always be rare and therefore of extreme value, especially in a world awash in disorienting technology, nonstop calculated propaganda, lying rapacious politicians AIDED by said propaganda, not to mention intense pressure from all sides – right/left/secular/religious – to control language, to dictate which language is “allowed”: if you know your Orwell you know that limiting language means limiting THOUGHT. In fact, limiting thought is the whole point.

This is why “facing unpleasant facts” is a PRACTICE, like meditation, like any other regular mental training. You have GOT to be strong, even in times of peace, because you never know when you might need that “power.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Happy Birthday, Millie Kirkham

Posted on June 24, 2025 by sheila

Millie Kirkham had an unearthly high soprano voice, and recorded with some of the biggest stars of her era (and other eras and ours). Perhaps most famously, she provided the swoopy woozy soprano part on Elvis’ original recording of “Blue Christmas” in 1957.

Kirkham had appeared on songs recorded by Carl Perkins, Patsy Kline, Chet Atkins, Bob Dylan, need I go on? She sang on Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet”, Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over,” and Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” to name just a few. She was an in-demand backup singer. Her contribution to Ferlin Husky’s song, “Gone” is unmistakeable. I don’t need to tell you to listen for her. She’s obvious.

Elvis heard “Gone”, and fell in love with her voice. When he was planning his Christmas album in 1957, he said, “Get me that woman on Ferlin’s song.” He had a vision in his head of what he wanted for “Blue Christmas” (Jerry Schilling, in his wonderful book, said that Elvis has never gotten proper credit for being a wonderful producer. He knew what he wanted, he know how he heard the song, he knew how to put the right people together to make it come out. The image of him as some dummy just doing what he was told is incorrect.)

Millie Kirkham was pregnant when she sang her part on “Blue Christmas”, and it was her first time recording with Elvis. She showed up at RCA’s Studio B in Nashville. Elvis was not expecting a pregnant woman to stroll into the studio and it took him aback. Kirkham tells the story:

When we were doing the Elvis Christmas album I was six months pregnant the time with my daughter at the time. So still I kid her and tell her she was at the very first recording session I did with Elvis but that she just doesn’t remember it! Elvis looked a little surprised when I came in and said, “Please someone get this woman a chair!” when he saw me.

Several months later when I was doing another recording session with Elvis and I came in – and at that time I thought I was looking pretty slim and trim – I came strolling in and Elvis asked, “Did you ever have that baby?!” He had a great sense of humour, he was a funny guy.

The day of the second recording session, she happened to have a camera with her. There was one shot left. She and the Jordannaires – they had all worked together elsewhere – gathered to take their picture together, and Elvis popped over, saying, “Let me be in it.”

Team player.

58198631-1.jordmilel1

She sang with Elvis on many of his recordings and was a featured part of his live shows in the early 1970s.

“People are always asking me if I thought Elvis was a handsome man and my answer is ‘I am not blind you know’!”

Here Kirkham is, reminiscing about her career. It’s long, but well worth it. The stories she tells!

In the interview, she says of the phenomenal eternal success of “Blue Christmas”: “If I was gettin’ royalties, I’d be a rich old woman.”

Posted in Music, On This Day | Tagged | 4 Comments

“And the role of the fatal chorus / I agree to take on” — Anna Akhmatova

Posted on June 23, 2025 by sheila

“This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.”
— Anna Akhmatova, “Prayer”

Anna Akhmatova – born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko on this day – lived a life so epic – so tragic – the mind blunders around to even get a handle on it. She was a renowned poet in Russia prior to the Revolution, well-known in the cafe culture, and a major player in the bohemian Russian world. She was also a siren. Wives feared her, and they were right to. She drew people to her like moths to a flame. She had beauty, personality, self-possession – in short: personal charisma. You met her once, you never forgot her. There are a couple of famous “portraits” of her, which show her allure, the drive that male painters had to try to capture her. The first is by Nathan Altman:

But it is her liaison with Modigliani that was the most productive. He filled notebooks with sketches of her, sometimes using just one line to suggest her body. There’s an Aubrey-Beardsley-ish surreal-evocative quality to the most famous of these sketches:

You can look up the whole Akhmatova-Modigliani relationship – it was fascinating.

But it is not for all this she is known, primarily, although it’s part of her aura. She wrote about what was going on in Russia, poems about WWI, about death, about Russian life… and after the Revolution, with the good old Bolsheviks in charge, her work was suppressed. She struggled for years, writing poems that could never be published. Through all of this, her legend kept growing. Stalin “let her live,” mainly because she was too famous already to kill. (Similar to Mikhail Bulgakov’s experience.)

More about this extraordinary courageous woman after the jump:

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

“The energy doesn’t end at the hands. I want such intensity that it feels like light is streaming from every finger.” — Bob Fosse

Posted on June 23, 2025 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

His work as a director – in films as diverse as Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz, and Star 80 is getting a lot of chatter from film critics, and of course that makes sense. I love those films too. All That Jazz made a HUGE impact on me. I saw it when I was 13, 14, and was way too young for it (I was a young 13, 14), in fact much of it scared me to DEATH (which, considering the topic, is appropriate). I was already in love with show business. I already had dreams. So this opening number launched me into a fantasy world so intense I honestly didn’t come out of it until I was 35.

But it’s what he did as a choreographer that really interests me.

His style is a FINGERPRINT. It’s not an exaggeration to say he changed everything.

More after the jump:

Continue reading →

Posted in Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , | 16 Comments

“There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.” — Kris Kristofferson

Posted on June 22, 2025 by sheila

He lived a long life and was beloved and productive almost up to the very end. His death is yet another snipped thread with the past. I wrote about him when he died for my newsletter.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Music, On This Day | Leave a comment

“You don’t want to see ‘plots’. You want to see stories develop.” — Billy Wilder

Posted on June 22, 2025 by sheila

sc00072f2e
Billy and Audrey Wilder

It’s his birthday today.

I love him for his humor, his cynical pessimistic view of human beings – which, honestly, just feels realistic, his versatility with material (noirs, melodramas, war movies, comedies). Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, The Apartment, the prophetic Ace in the Hole. His life spanned from pre-Hitler Vienna to the early 2000s. His entire family was killed in concentration camps. He emigrated to the US shortly after Hitler took power.

Here’s a letter to Wilder from Alfred Hitchcock after seeing The Apartment:

I love his tips for screenwriters (#6 helped me enormously when I was writing my own script and problem-solving the final scene.)

Billy Wilder’s Tips for Writers

1. The audience is fickle.

2. Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.

3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.

4. Know where you’re going.

5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.

8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.

9. The event that occurs at the second-act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then —

11. — that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Taken from the essential “Conversations with Wilder“, by Cameron Crowe


These two are up to no good.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Directors, On This Day, writers | Tagged | 22 Comments

“Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.” — Abbas Kiarostami

Posted on June 22, 2025 by sheila

It’s the birthday today of the great Iranian filmmaking master. Paying tribute to him – and the country from which he sprung – feels right, albeit sad, in this terrible disgraceful week.

When Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami died at the age of 76, shock waves erupted through the film world. There was a general feeling: What are we supposed to do now? If you’ve seen just one of his films, you will know how unique they are, his radical insistence on distance (he can be very Brechtian), his deconstruction of various movie tropes, his interrogation of what is cinema – and why – and how – the recurring images and moods, with characters often driving around in cars, their faces seen through the windows, reflections of trees and buildings flowing over them like water.

certified-copy-from-car-2-1
Certified Copy – I reviewed the film here.

Like-Someone-in-Love
Like Someone in Love

His films defy description. The questions are more important than the answers. Seen as a whole, his is an extraordinary body of work, one of the most impressive in the last 50 years.

Kiarostami’s films that made it here (and most of them did after Taste of Cherry) were not just limited-release foreign films, or indie arthouse hits or glittering Cannes-festival winners. His films may have been SOME of those things some of the time. But what a Kiarostami film was ALL the time was an EVENT. Like Jean-Luc Godard’s films, like Terrence Malick’s films, like Wong Kar Wai’s films … there are only a few directors who inspire such reverence, such passionate interest over DECADES.

interstitialoverdrive-tasteofcherry-650
Taste of Cherry

Kiarostami was consistently inventive. He never stopped challenging himself (and us). His talent did not calcify as he grew older (as often happens with directors). Two masterful – and radically different – films as Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love coming out one after the other? It was thrilling to experience this in real time.

shirin108
Shirin

shirin154
Shirin

shirin-2008-abbas-kiarostami-2
Shirin

I have written a lot about Kiarostami over the years (full archive here), although there are many of his films I still have not seen (many are hard to find, in general). He lived and worked in Iran (surviving the Revolution and continuing to make films inside the Islamic Republic afterwards – not possible for many directors). It wasn’t until the end that he made two films outside of Iran, the glittering one-two punch of Certified Copy and Like Someone In Love). At the very same time that his former assistant Jafar Panahi was being persecuted and arrested, he was flourishing in a way that other Iranian artists could only dream of.

4-960x450

Jafar Panahi, the talented and persecuted Iranian filmmaker, is – as everyone knows – banned from making films (he’s made 4 since the sentence came down: he is a hero), banned from traveling, and forbidden from speaking to foreigners or giving interviews (he continues to give interviews). The man is a hero. Panahi needs no introduction and if you’ve been reading me for 5 minutes you know my feelings about his work and his life.

Panahi got his start as an assistant to Kiarostami. Kiarostami wrote some scripts for Panahi to film, and was instrumental in giving the younger man his start.

In recent years, as Panahi’s situation worsened, attracting international attention, Kiarostami – who has escaped persecution – would speak out in support of Panahi as well as all of the Iranian artists either in prison or silenced. When this happens, and when it happens from the main stage at Cannes or the Berlinale: it is a political act. People in Iran are watching. People in Iran see this, hear this, and know that there are millions of people “out here” who think what is happening is appalling. And no matter how much the censors in charge there want to stop the back-and-forth flow of information: it is too late. We hear from them, they hear from us. It’s the Internet age, bitches: you cannot control it.

In 2016, when Kiarostami died, Jafar Panahi reached out – through a translator who passed it on to the outside world – with a statement of tribute for his old mentor. It’s a beautiful reminiscence about how their friendship started and what Kiarostami taught him.

My favorite bit is this.

Later that afternoon, he asked me to ride with him to another location. Along the way, he stopped and gave me a handkerchief to use as a blindfold, which I did. He continued to drive for a while and stopped again. He helped me get off the car, held my hand, and, after walking me for a couple of minutes, asked me to remove the blindfold. I opened my eyes and saw what turned out to be the final shot of “Through the Olive Trees,” that majestic landscape! As I was stunned by the view, Mr. Kiarostmi told me, “That’s my vision. That’s how I see this place.”

The experience taught me a valuable lesson. I realized the importance of having a vision and how each filmmaker needs to develop his or her vision. The spot we were standing on was Mr. Kiarostami’s vision. He didn’t tell me that was the best vantage point. He just said that was his point of view, and I realized I had to have mine.

Kiarostami was an example to other struggling Iranian artists of what could be possible. His films were not as political as Panahi’s (it was Panahi’s politics, presented without euphemism, that got him into trouble), but they did not lack for social/political commentary and – therefore – controversy. (Taste of Cherry is about a middle-class man driving around a construction site looking for someone – anyone – willing to bury his body after he commits suicide. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the first film from Iran to be so honored, but in Iran, the censors went nuts because of suicide’s centrality to the plot.) Kiarostami’s roots in the Iranian cinema tradition were strong, and he wrote scripts for other directors (including Panahi), collaborating with others in the energized and inspirational “everyone does everything” atmosphere of Iranian cinema. But Kiarostami’s reputation was not local. He was an international star. He worked with Juliette Binoche twice (in Shirin and Certified Copy), he was a regular at Cannes and the Berlinale, one of the glittering lights of the film world for decades, a true icon.

The writers at Rogerebert.com, myself included, each wrote a tribute when Kiarostami died, collected here.

His final film, released posthumously last year, was an animated film called 24 Frames. It was on my Top 10 List. Still out there on the very edge of his talent and technology, pushing us, challenging us to see the world in different ways. Not just to look, but to SEE.

It’s indicative of the power of Kiarostami’s imagery, that when I shared the below screen-grab on Twitter and Facebook upon hearing the news of his death, putting it up with no text attached, people started sharing it, liking it, leaving comments like “I’m so sad.”

maxresdefault
“Close Up” (1999)

Because the image is instantly recognizable.

And once you’ve seen the film, that image will never ever leave you.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment