Abbas Kiarostami

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dwk
Joined: Sat Jun 12, 2010 6:10 pm

Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#76 Post by dwk » Mon Jul 15, 2019 5:36 pm

Someone at the Blu-ray.com forum posted a link to the PDF press book for Janus' Kiarstami retrospective, and, I hate to be the barer of bad news, but, with the exception of the Koker Trilogy, all the restorations were done by L'Immagine Ritrovata.

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Oedipax
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#77 Post by Oedipax » Mon Jul 15, 2019 10:26 pm

Taste of Cherry looks pretty good in my estimation (assuming the Japanese blu-ray release is using the same transfer/restoration). But now that I'm comparing screens from that with the old Artificial Eye disc, you can certainly see the L'Immagine Ritrovata look has been transferred over somewhat:

AE DVD #1
Japanese blu-ray #1

AE DVD #2
Japanese blu-ray #2

Now, these should be taken with a massive grain of salt - they're not exact frame matches, they're from different capture methods, and we don't know if this is even the same transfer (or the same grading of the transfer) that Criterion will be using. But nevertheless, I thought it might be interesting until we know more for sure.

So - less information in the highlights, and more of a general monochromatic color wash, as is seemingly the case with all the LUTs L'Immagine Ritrovata uses in their output. But huge improvements in the overall resolution/texture of the image, and before comparing, I thought the blu-ray image looked great.

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dda1996a
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#78 Post by dda1996a » Fri Jul 19, 2019 4:49 pm

IFC Center's complete Kiarostami retrospective has a ton of short films and shorter features listed. I can't see anything written on who has rights, but I hope this means Criterion has everything.

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whaleallright
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#79 Post by whaleallright » Fri Jul 19, 2019 11:29 pm

I hope they don't just tack a few shorts on each separate release, but rather stick all the Kanun shorts in one place, because they truly benefit from watching as a group, and in chronological order. Not only do they reveal Kiarostami's growing confidence and experimentation in film form, but they exhibit a set of coherent concerns that he elaborates in the features. Even a lark like 1978's Solution No. 1 is perfect and exhilarating in its own way.... That and other of his shorts were until recently incredibly rare and difficult to see. It makes me sad, though, that they will be seen by so many only after Kiarostami's untimely death. He should be around to witness their rediscovery and reevaluation.

I do wonder what the rights situation is with the shorts. It seems to have been cleared up and some are at least represented by MK2, but they were mostly made for a pre-Revolutionary Iranian state agency. IIRC Iran isn't a signatory to major global copyright agreements, so maybe it's just been decided that Kiarostami's family/estate is effectively the rightful owner for the purposes of worldwide distribution.

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dda1996a
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#80 Post by dda1996a » Sat Jul 20, 2019 1:58 am

It is weird IFC doesn't list who has rights. I'll look again though. His digital period is also present so I wonder what will happen with that. Maybe each one will be added as an extra? 10 and 10 on 10 seem to be in a weird spot as I doubt they'll get a single release for them (but then Buena Vista got one so who knows).

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FrauBlucher
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#81 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Jul 24, 2019 6:20 pm


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knives
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#82 Post by knives » Sun Jul 28, 2019 3:23 pm

Is there an english subbed version of Persian Carpet around?

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#83 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Tue Jul 30, 2019 4:52 pm

I don't know of any legitimate source for the whole feature (haven't looked at backchannels), but Kiarostami's segment is on the Cinema Guild DVD of Shirin.

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knives
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#84 Post by knives » Tue Jul 30, 2019 6:06 pm

Thank you. I've seen that, but I was hoping that the full version was available legally somewhere as there are a number of directors how I like whose segment likely wouldn't get released separately.

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ellipsis7
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#85 Post by ellipsis7 » Sat Aug 03, 2019 12:38 pm

I'm a trans woman. Kiarostami's films helped me escape a prison of the mind

Includes links to two manisfestations of Kiarostami Janus touring retrospective...
Tribute to Abbas Kiarostami runs 3-17 August at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Abbas Kiarostami: Life as Art runs 7 August to 21 December at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Bampfa)

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The Narrator Returns
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#86 Post by The Narrator Returns » Tue Jun 14, 2022 5:20 pm

The stars of Ten, documentary filmmaker Mania Akbari and her daughter Amina, have released statements saying that Ten is made up entirely of footage shot by Mania for a therapeutic exercise, which Kiarostami then falsely took credit for and released without their permission.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#87 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Jun 14, 2022 5:23 pm

I thought I saw some "making of" material that sure made it look like Kiarostami was involved. Am I suffering from false memories?

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Red Screamer
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#88 Post by Red Screamer » Tue Jun 14, 2022 6:00 pm

A cursory Google shows images of Kiarostami on set with Akbari. Amina Akbari's statement you link to also mentions Kiarostami being there. That doesn't tell the whole story, of course, and I don't pretend to know what happened between all of them. But the claim that this was private footage for a therapy session that Kiarostami only discovered after the fact is confusing to say the least.

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#89 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:12 pm

I found an article on this from 2020 (when those posts were first made). I'm dependent on Google Translate, but it seems Ahmad Kiarostami issued a long rebuttal mentioning the photos, and Akbari responded that they were staged after the fact. Ahmad brought up other issues with her account—like why she would use two cameras to shoot these therapy sessions, why the non-family members among the cast would cooperate with her, and the improbability that Akbari wouldn't realize Kiarostami was the credited director until the Cannes premiere—but she didn't respond to any of those, only saying that she'll provide more details in an upcoming book. Apparently Akbari's original post also claimed Kiarostami had sexually assaulted "countless women," but she quickly deleted that and only left up the claims about Ten.

(I feel it might be relevant that Kiarostami said the original concept for the film involved a therapist whose office is shut down following a client complaint and starts conducting sessions in her car.)

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ryannichols7
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#90 Post by ryannichols7 » Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:37 pm

naturally twitter has moved right through to the rush decision of cancelling Kiarostami and invalidating all of his works

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#91 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:52 pm

Kiarostami et al should be prioritizing a movement to promote Assassination Nation's visibility - it's their only hope! It's actually kinda fitting how badly the film bombed- the zeitgeist's just like nah, no interest in looking in the mirror and evaluating our skewed processes of vilification

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domino harvey
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#92 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jun 14, 2022 8:18 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:52 pm
Kiarostami et al should be prioritizing a movement to promote Assassination Nation's visibility
I mean, Kiarostami rising from the grave is about only second to him championing Assassination Nation on the plausibility scale, so

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#93 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jun 14, 2022 8:19 pm

I feel assassinated

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The Narrator Returns
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#94 Post by The Narrator Returns » Tue Jun 14, 2022 8:24 pm

This seems to be a very messy matter, especially because there are likely translation issues involved with the statements (most notably with Akbari's use of "raped", which may or may not be metaphorical or even the word she meant to use), but I don't think defaulting to "cancel culture strikes again!" statements is any more helpful or empathetic than condemning Kiarostami. It's just another way of rushing to judgment with the bonus of acting superior to people expressing honest sadness about the matter. And I don't think Sam Levinson will change my mind on the subject.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#95 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jun 14, 2022 8:36 pm

Levinson has stated that the villain of that film is a "lack of empathy" from every and all sides, which wouldn't make that default appropriate from his or the film's stance either (if people opted to watch the film instead of -ironically- passing judgment on it without seeing it first, they'd know that) - I fully agree with you, I was just doing my civic duty and jumping off ryan's post as an opportunity to boost my fav movie. It wasn't very tasteful though, nor does it have anything to do with Kiarostami or DVDs, so I am sorry for that

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domino harvey
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#96 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jun 14, 2022 9:04 pm

On a basic level, the new story as we know it doesn’t pass the smell test, so I feel fine doubting it until more compelling evidence arises (and I say this as no great fan of the film in question)

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Never Cursed
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#97 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Jun 14, 2022 9:06 pm

ryannichols7 wrote:
Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:37 pm
naturally twitter has moved right through to the rush decision of cancelling Kiarostami and invalidating all of his works
Oh no, famed scholar "some guy with a pop culture podcast" and influential media personage "most annoying Film Studies freshman possible" have decided a dead director who made movies decades older than them was a bad person! I don't think this behavior is even really any different from Film Twitter's baseline of amplifying every controversy surrounding some important figure, so why let them even ruffle your feathers on this? I say this because I get too annoyed at this stuff myself, for what it's worth

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ryannichols7
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#98 Post by ryannichols7 » Tue Jun 14, 2022 9:39 pm

Never Cursed wrote:
Tue Jun 14, 2022 9:06 pm
ryannichols7 wrote:
Tue Jun 14, 2022 7:37 pm
naturally twitter has moved right through to the rush decision of cancelling Kiarostami and invalidating all of his works
Oh no, famed scholar "some guy with a pop culture podcast" and influential media personage "most annoying Film Studies freshman possible" have decided a dead director who made movies decades older than them was a bad person! I don't think this behavior is even really any different from Film Twitter's baseline of amplifying every controversy surrounding some important figure, so why let them even ruffle your feathers on this? I say this because I get too annoyed at this stuff myself, for what it's worth
well I'd agree with you, but the problem is that Kiarostami's work is almost entirely controlled by Criterion in the US, a company who unfortunately does listen to that crowd (Knife on the Water hasn't been upgraded, Sixteen Candles went to Arrow instead, et al), and I only worry that this would have a strong enough ripple effect for them to not release The Wind Will Carry Us or the rumored complete Kiarostami boxset.

but they do also work closely with his family, so I really hope they'd ignore this sort of thing and go forth with it. because truly, film twitter is almost always baseless in every decision they make, and are totally selective (they 'cancel' other directors for signing the Polanski petition, but not Lynch or Scorcese), so they really can't be trusted.

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Never Cursed
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#99 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Jun 14, 2022 9:52 pm

That's all true, buuuuuuut those other, higher-profile films are accompanied by what I would call higher-profile controversies that garnered mass media attention. The controversies surrounding Polanski and the contents of the Hughes film were topics of public debate in the moneyed media world for decades before a combination of those discourses and changing social trends led Criterion to not move forward with those films (presumably). Any issues surrounding Kiarostami's conduct in the making of this film or these films are rendered obscure by the fact that, well, Kiarostami doesn't now attract media attention in the same way. If some big news/culture rag publishes some weepy thinkpiece titled "The Long Shadow of Abbas Kiarostami's Influence" or whatever in the next few days, I'll eat some crow, but I doubt the subject is even on their radar. In terms of business decisions, I think Criterion cares about getting yelled at by the thousands, not the dozens (as the response to the NYT article about black directors proves).

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dwk
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Re: Abbas Kiarostami on DVD

#100 Post by dwk » Tue Jun 14, 2022 10:00 pm

Rumor is 16 Candles was canceled due to an issue with Universal, who let Criterion have the higher profile The Breakfast Club as a consolation.

But, yeah, any Kiarostami controversy is likely to go under the radar of the cancellation mob.

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