REFRAMING THE GAZE // KIAROSTAMI: BEYOND THE FRAME AT OKLAHOMA CITY MUSEUM OF ART

by John Selvidge

Museumgoers attending OKCMOA’s recent Kiarostami: Beyond the Frame may have noticed a poignant framing device as they crossed the exhibition’s threshold. Outside the gallery’s main door, acclaimed Iranian filmmaker’s Abbas Kiarostami’s first short, Bread and Alley (1970), played on a 12-minute loop. Once inside the exhibition proper, viewers were immediately confronted by his last film, Take Me Home , completed the year of his passing in 2016.

Shot on celluloid, black-and-white and neo-realist in style, Bread and Alley follows a young boy on his way home and dramatizes his fearful encounter with a street dog. While this film plays on our sympathies with both boy and dog in a mode of traditional filmic storytelling, Take Me Home consists of a series of more than one hundred of Kiarostami’s still photographs, taken mainly of outdoor staircases in southern Italy, which are brought to life by a digitally animated soccer ball moving through them. As the fabricated “ball” rolls and bounces for 16 minutes through these static images, it draws the viewer’s eye along a continuous downward trajectory from staircase to staircase through a delightfully impossible cityscape, its motion seemingly as playful and free as a soul in flight.

From one perspective, these two films couldn’t be more different, but from another they can be understood as variations on a theme central to Kiarostami’s films, that of a restless journey or quest, one undertaken simply but that grows more complex as it strives for resolution. For Kiarostami: Beyond the Frame , juxtaposing them from the outset helped establish a unity across the artist’s work as a filmmaker, photographer, and visual and conceptual artist. In this spirt, viewers familiar with Kiarostami were offered an inspiring new vista for considering the Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker as not reducible to a specific medium, but as an aesthetic polymath whose vision encompasses a range of expressive possibilities.

Thanks to OKCMOA’s retrospective of his films, screened in conjunction with Beyond the Frame at the museum’s in-house theater, I decided to springboard from OKCMOA’s stellar programming to my own self-imposed Kiarostami syllabus. Filling in the gaps of the films I couldn’t attend with the help of the Criterion Channel—at $11 a month, still the best streaming platform for my money, and for those who missed Kiarostami at OKCMOA, most of his films live there—I eventually watched more than a dozen features and as many shorts. I also read Godfrey Cheshire, the preeminent writer on Kiarostami, who introduced the film series with a generously accessible lecture. I wish I had the space to relate more of what I learned about the scope of Kiarostami’s filmmaking, his panache as a photographer, his soulfulness as a storyteller, and the complexity of his national, international, and conceptual frames of reference, but several of Beyond the Frame ’s majestic moments are worth remarking on briefly.

Comprising twenty life-size images of doors that Kiarostami photographed in his native Iran, France, Italy, and Morocco before altering them digitally (mainly by adding locks) and printing them on canvas, Doors Without Keys presents illuminated surfaces that seem to ask urgent questions about the inaccessible worlds beyond them. Accompanying ambient noises, like birds chirping and muffled voices, and short poems by Kiarostami, written on the exhibition’s mazelike walls and reminiscent of Rumi or Hafez, gave a metaphysical grandeur to the experience of standing on the other side of something unknown and ineffable. I’m reminded of the young boy’s devoted search for the correct door in Kiarostami’s feature Where Is the Friend’s House? , or the gate in Close Up that seems to divide two worlds and emblematize desire.

We might get a glimpse of that beyond with Sleepers, Kiarostami’s 2001 video installation that gives a nod to Warhol by projecting, onto a mattress at the viewer’s feet, a 93-minute film of a couple sleeping. Very possibly a vision of paradise—or at least souls at rest, free to dream. It’s worth meditating on how Kiarostami, as reported by Cheshire, wanted to leave space for audiences “to dream their own dreams—even to take naps” while watching his films. Further echoes of the filmmaker’s non-determinative relation vis-à-vis audience to his own works can be heard in Cheshire’s characterization of Kiarostami’s artistic sensibility as “forever in transit” and his oeuvre as a “cinema of questions.”

Fundamental to Kiarostami is the insistence that his art literally depends on members of his audience to complete it. Two works in the exhibition play with this idea by depicting the audience’s gaze directly. The first, the film Shirin (2008), concentrates exclusively on women’s faces for 92 minutes as they watch a film in a theater—or even more intriguing, the fabricated illusion of a film, never seen by Shirin’s audience, that does not actually exist despite the soundtrack and dialogue we hear or the shifts in light and color we see on its alleged audience’s faces as they react to it. The second, a series of photographs collectively titled Regardez-moi , captures museum visitors as they contemplate widely celebrated artworks from the Western canon and, through the camera’s eye, become merged with them to some degree. As amusing as these photos are, they can inspire a little vertigo. If, in some sense, we always stand within our minds at the threshold of our eyes, as our gaze constructs the world, then entering the frame ourselves and getting caught in the act of looking can seem uncanny. Or, like some half-aware dream of the world meditating upon itself, it might just feel like merrily bouncing home.

Kiarostami: Beyond the Frame and the Kiarostami Film

Retrospective were shown concurrently from October 15, 2022, to April 9 at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.