Close-Up

“Yeah, so the other movie that's really special to me that I wanted to mention is Close-Up. And I guess probably it's a it's a very widely appreciated film, but I think some people don't know it. And I actually got some friends of mine to watch it one night. Some friends of mine asked me for a film recommendation. I said, "Watch Close-Up, like there's no way you won't have a great time." And they were like, "No, we didn't kind of like, wasn't the right vibe." But anyway, it's an incredible film, and it's like the most incredible use of real people reenacting something that really happened to them. You can't believe that what you're watching is not real, that it's a reenactment. He used the real people who were in these situations to create the feeling of those situations again, and it's it really feels like you're there in this in these moments, and it's just full of magic. And I don't know, I guess it's probably him at his most powerful, Kiarostami, with this film, that and Where Is the Friend's House? Which is it's just beautiful. Yeah, and it's a very sad film too about, you know, film love and wanting to be someone that you're not and wanting to kind of disappear and, you know, things that we all deal with on a daily basis, I guess. So there's that one.”

“Close-Up, we don't have. Do you have Close-Up with you at all? No, we'll take Close-Up, yeah.”

“Let us go beyond across the pond to Iran. Close-Up. This is the story of a man in Iran who impersonated a filmmaker called Makhmalbaf, probably the second most notable Iranian filmmaker at the time, got arrested for it, and then the first and most notable filmmaker in Iran heard of this story. His name is Abbas Kiarostami, and he went and made a movie of this guy’s trial and hired this guy to play himself in the reenactment of the impersonation of Makhmalbaf that got him on his way towards jail. It is a movie that works as a fictional narrative. It is a movie that works as a documentary. It is a movie that works as a social service. I am not just saying that because I want to seem cool, that I like foreign films. This movie, there’s no other movie like this movie. It transcends what a movie is. I’m going to end there.”

“And then we have Close-Up. The mixing of fiction and documentary was so powerful that I was, like Safi Faye said, there was no boundary between, as African we don't have no limit between fiction and documentary. And, and Close-Up, it's really in alignment with that. It also opened me to the work of Makhmalbaf and, and how, how I was connected to, to people that I don't even know or imagine before, and how I was so close to that reality only because they, they frame it in a certain way and they show it in a certain way. Also free me, free me to just say to myself: I don't have to choose between documentary and, and fiction, I just want to just tell story as I really felt it, yeah.”

“We have Close-Up. So this movie, eh, we use this chromatic aberration font for High Maintenance. I, I stole it from Close-Up. Also from Close-Up, I stole a moment where there's a, a can rolling down a hill. It's just a moment where there's this can rolling down a hill and it's just like a little pause. I stole that moment directly from this film and put it in season 4, episode 6 of High Maintenance.”

“And Close-Up, the greatest movie ever made. We'll end on that one. Okay, why? Have you seen this? Kiarostami. Yeah, yeah, but you got to speak to the people. It's, I think Godard even said it, where it was, it was just like he ended cinema with, by making this film, the understanding of what cinema is, we don't really need to keep going.”

“Another director very important to me, and when I discovered him in the '90s that was a shock, it's Abbas Kiarostami, and my favorite of him is Close-Up. He was supposed to make another film and then he saw in the paper a story that someone pretended to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf, another Iranian director, just to be able to talk to people and say he was doing some casting, and people invited him home and he could, you know, have relationships with people. So he pretended he was someone else. One of the most beautiful sentences that the guy says when he asks him, "Why do you do that?" and he says, "Because I was alone." "And, but alone is not a pain." And the guy answers, "Do you want to talk about pain?" That made me cry. And this film is really, really fantastic, and the last scene Kiarostami goes and picks him up at the prison, they go on the scooter and they talk, and when he was in the editing room he just took a knife and all the soundtrack, he just ripped it up so we cannot listen to all the words. And this gesture is just like a huge movie maker gesture.”

“Heater. Never seen anything like this. It even takes a second to get your bearings and understand what's going on, but by the end you're like, "Wow, this is a wonderful piece of art." Never seen anything like it. Close-Up going in the bag.”