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24 Frames



For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life. Setting out to reconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph is taken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images—most of them stark landscapes inhabited only by foraging birds and other wildlife—and digitally animated each one into its own subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minute vignette, creating a series of poignant studies in movement, perception, and time. A sustained meditation on the process of image making, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of the giants of world cinema.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• 2K digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with director Abbas Kiarostami's son Ahmad Kiarostami, who helped finish the film after his father's death
• New conversation between Iranian film scholar Jamsheed Akrami and film critic Godfrey Cheshire
• New short documentary about the making of the film by Abbas Kiarostami collaborator Salma Monshizadeh
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Bilge Ebiri

Newsnayr wrote: Mon Jul 04, 2016 9:32 pm

aox wrote:IMDB doesn't indicate, but did he have any projects he was working on cinematically?

He wasn't able to begin shooting the Chinese film he was planning, but 24 Frames, a series of 24 4 and a half minute shorts edited together, is scheduled to be released next year.

Kiarostami's very last film "24 Frames" premiered a few days ago at Cannes. Here's a review. Sounds as if it's very much in the vein of "Five".

Janus has acquired the US and UK rights to Abbas Kiarostami's final film 24 FRAMES and

The Criterion Collection will restore select Kiarostami films later in 2018. 

Janus Trailer for 24 Frames

[https://vimeo.com/252210624]

Loved this, found it by turns calming, slyly funny, meditative, and moving. Death portends in many of the segments, but love and humanism prevail. I watched this at ~5:00 a.m. which seemed to be a perfect time of day for it. (I wish I could say the sun came up in perfect synchronization with Frame 24, but alas.)

Side note: I think I may finally understand ASMR videos?

In the midst of a career, this film would likely have ended up a curio or a footnote, but as a last work it's a fittingly low-key farewell and gains a lot of resonance. I loved the way the frames were gently rhymed , and varied between opulent screensavers, little mysteries and micro-narratives. And most of the frames are haunted by death, with a strong theme of hunting and predation running through them.

I can see why the other animated paintings that were left out just wouldn't have fitted very well: they seem much more gimmicky, both because they're all images that are culturally oversaturated, and because there's no ambiguity about which is the 'seed' frame. Part of the fun of Kiarostami's own images is trying to guess where the originating image falls within the continuum, and recognizing that there are often any number of 'perfect frames' that could be extracted from the ebb and flow of his elaborations (and, indeed, of life).

I have to say that, for the final work of one of the most important contemporary filmmakers, this is an extremely scanty package of extras (maybe half an hour in total). The interview with Ahmad Kiarostami is really good, but lasts barely ten minutes. The 'conversation' is even shorter, and has a lot less to say, with Godfrey Cheshire contributing little. The short film offers some images of the process of creation (including a lot of the later-abandoned paintings), but is very slight.

A disappointingly lightweight package. I would have welcomed a more technically detailed interview with Kiarostami's key collaborators on the project, or a look at his photography in general (and his previous attempts to integrate those two sides of his artistic output, such as Five Dedicated to Ozu or Roads of Kiarostami - neither of which are even mentioned, as far as I recall).

Just to say 24 FRAMES is a superbly resonant & oneiric film for these locked down times we live in, especially with the DTS-HD 5.1 soundtrack channelled through a proper audio system...