KIAROSTAMI II: HOMEWORK / WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE?

Stuart Jeffries
Saturday April 16, 2005

Guardian

 According to  cinema historian and his biographer, Alberto Elena, the young Kiarostami painted to combat his loneliness…. Asked once what he learned at university, he replied: “That I was definitely not made to be a painter.” In 1969, he joined Kanun. “We were supposed to make films that dealt with childhood problems,” says Kiarostami. “At the beginning it was just a job, but it was the making of me as an artist. The important thing is that I didn’t work in commercial films. I look at these 20 years as the best period of my professional life.” Iranian film historians Shahzad Rahmati and Majid Sedqi argue: “Film-makers who worked at the centre faced no financial restraints or problems, and thus could easily engage in experimentation with audacity, vigour and intellectual innovations.” Especially during the final years of the last Shah’s reign, when the Iranian film industry was subject to restrictions, this was a creative oasis.

In The Report (1977),  Kiarostami pivots his camera from his focus on children and their deceptively complicated lives, to the lives of a married couple. The husband is woefully beset with problems, seemingly everywhere he looks. As a tax collector, he’s already burdened with unenviable tasks and responsibilities. But to this, he must add accusations that he’s receiving bribes. Even worse, at home his wife—who’s rarely seen in the same frame with her husband—is considering suicide.

In 1979. he made the 53 minute First Case, Second Case, a documentary about a teacher who sends a group of pupils out of the classroom when one of them does not own up to talking behind the master’s back. Kiarostami showed this film to the Shah’s educational experts and filmed their opinions. Shooting was nearly complete when, on February 1, Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Tehran from exile and 10 days later declared an Islamic republic.

Kiarostami set about remaking the film, junking the commentaries and changing its structure. He decided he would make the film into a dramatised dilemma: First Case involved pupils refusing to name the guilty party; in Second Case one of the pupils names the culprit and is allowed to return to the classroom. All the new observers, including the new education minister, were filmed commenting on the two cases, many taking the film as a parable about the Shah’s secret police. First Case, Second Case was immediately awarded a prize at the Tehran Festival of Films for Children and Young Adults; shortly afterwards, though, the government banned it because its presumed message was deemed subversive and because some of the commentaries came from members of political parties (communist, democratic national front) which had been declared illegal. As a result, the film disappeared from view for decades.

In 1983, Kiorostami directed the autobiographical comedy Fellow Citizen. Caught up in Tehran’s insane bottlenecks and gridlock, a traffic cop tries to enforce the rules and regulations. Having done so, he then proceeds to demonstrate the flexibility of the law and the flexibility of…the traffic cop himself! Kiarostami, who was a traffic cop in his own youth, exploits the situation’s maximum comic possibilities in this disarming documentary portrait.

After the revolution, Kiarostami continued to make films about children. The last one he made for Kanun was called Homework (1989), and was born of fraught personal experience – his relationship with Parvin Amir-Gholi, the art designer he married in 1969, was collapsing.  “An internal revolution was taking place in my household: I was getting separated from my wife and was going to take care of my two sons,”  In the film’s opening sequence, Kiarostami explains to the headmaster of the school where he wants to film: “I’ve had problems helping my son with his homework… That’s why I decided to bring my cameras here, to find out whether it’s just my son’s problem or if it has something to do with the actual education system.” Some critics took the film as a denunciation of Iran’s repressive and disciplinarian education system. But it was also informed by Kiarostami’s own memories of school which, he admitted in one interview “are still traumatic.”

 Homework was initially banned for three years in Iran, and subsequently only screened for adults. “After I made Homework I was forced to leave Kanun because they disagreed with the film,” he says.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

On the surface at least, Homework shows Kiarostami’s documentary methods at their simplest. “It’s not a movie in the usual sense,” we hear him saying offscreen to another adult as we see several boys on their way to school. “It’s a research work. It’s a pictorial research on students’ homework.” He goes on to explain that he got the idea to do this while helping his own son with his homework, and shortly afterward we see the boys reciting elaborate religious chants while performing calisthenics outside in what looks like winter weather. (Because the sexes are segregated, no girls are in sight. In fact, we never see any females in the film; we only hear one woman later on, delivering expository narration about questionnaires sent by the filmmakers to the boys’ parents.)

Then the movie settles down to its main bill of fare: interviews with a succession of grammar-school boys by Kiarostami himself about how they do their homework — whether their parents help, punish, or encourage them, whether they like doing it more or less than watching cartoons on TV, and so on. The most striking thing about these interviews is their formal presentation: the boys are filmed frontally, as in passport photos, and though Kiarostami is heard more often than seen, there are periodic cuts to the camera and cameraman supposedly filming the boys.

Late in Homework there’s an even more ambiguous and ironic play with documentary film rhetoric than the inserts of the camera when the film returns to the boys’ extended Islamic chants and calisthenics outdoors.

Kiarostami films pupils standing in serried ranks in a playground chanting a prayer, which breaks down as the increasingly distracted children start playing around while continuing to recite, thereby undermining the massed display of religiosity. Kiarostami cut the soundtrack to this scene after complaints from religious groups angered that the recital of the prayer was robotic and ultimately not very  devout.

    Offscreen the narrator, presumably Kiarostami, says, “In spite of all the attention of responsible people to arrange this ceremony properly, it was not performed correctly. So in order to show the proper reverence, we preferred to delete the sound from the filmstrip.” At this point the sound is abruptly turned off as the camera pans across the crowd of boys thumping their chests and declaiming, eventually arriving at the figure of the male teacher leading them in the foreground. 

As simple and charming as most of Homework is, it winds up telling us a great deal about Iran in the 80s — everything from what some little boys think of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq to what some Iranian parents think of education in America and Canada. (According to one father interviewed, homework is never assigned at American and Canadian schools.) There’s also the boy who cries during his interview, in part because he’s frightened of the filmmakers. (Kiarostami also reportedly filmed his own son, though it’s unclear whether he appears in the picture.)

Where is the Friend’s House?

GODFREY CHESHIRE, ROGEREBERT.COM

He began attracting notice outside Iran with the feature film “Where Is the Friend’s House?” (1987). Come the Revolution, he, like many Iranian filmmakers, hunkered down and waited for the storm to pass. When authorities of the Islamic Republic decided to revive the cinema in the mid-80s (the Ayatollah Khomeini had hailed its potential for moral education), Kiarostami was among the filmmakers invited to resume making features.

His first under the new regime, “Where Is the Friend’s House?,” was a spare, witty, poetically resonant tale of a conscientious schoolboy determined to return a friend’s notebook to keep him from being expelled. Told from its young hero’s point of view, it placed the boy’s small story in the social context of rural Iran, with sweeping shots of the landscape. Cited as one of the essential films made for children. it helped launch the child-centered film’s hugely successful post-revolutionary career.

 

Where is the Friend’s House?

Kiarostami once told Cahiers du cinema, “In Where Is the Friend’s Home? the child who is looking for his friend didn’t find the house, but instead he earned his friendship.