Lessons with Kiarostami
[4][5][6][7] Writes Mike Leigh: "Here he is, one of the greatest of us all, the originator and master of the minimalist epic, the visionary who has raised the cinema of humanity to an unprecedented level of purity, the reluctant teacher who modestly confronts you with truths so profound that they will blind you with their luminous clairvoyance, the outrageous provocateur with an exhilarating capacity to make statements about his ideas and methods at which you will be so shocked that you will likely howl out loud, albeit joyfully."[4] Writes Iranian film expert Godfrey Cheshire: "As someone who was fortunate enough to have known Abbas Kiarostami and had long conversations with him about film, I've often wished that other admirers of his work -- or just anyone who loves cinema -- had had the same opportunity to listen to him discourse at length on the art that he knew so well.Those who shared this captivating experience included students who attended the workshops he conducted around the world over the couple of decades prior to his untimely death in 2016.Writer-filmmaker Paul Cronin attended many of these sessions, recorded Kiarostami's words and has assembled them into a very cogently organized, book-length master class on the craft of filmmaking according to the Iranian auteur.But they also amount to a comprehensive philosophy of filmmaking that endlessly illuminates the work of one of cinema's greatest poetic humanists.