24 Frames

Seconds before and after would have been good enough. It might then have been a great short film of 12-13 minutes. As it is, impossible to sit through and monumental waste of time.

As contemplative as watching ocean waves eternally roll in, as soaring as listening to Ave Maria while pigeons flutter about, as mysterious as daydreaming while clouds billow past, and as somber as watching death come from nowhere to stop life in its tracks, yet knowing that nature will simply continue on. Maybe these are the images an artist nearing his own end has in mind, an homage to the beauty of life in its simple, underappreciated moments, and at the same time, a calm acceptance of death.

I loved the concept of this film, particularly in the life that Kiarostami breathed in to Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow in frame 1, but found that what followed a little too similar, and that not knowing the source of inspiration for 21 of the next 23 frames to be a detractor. It's certainly immersive and meditative, demanding patience of the viewer or a frame of mind that allows simple images to wash over oneself, but at 114 minutes, nearly 5 minutes a frame, it seemed too much for me.

The final frame, containing the kiss between Teresa Wright and Dana Andrews at the end of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) played in very slow motion on a computer screen, while trees sway outside in the darkness, is stirring, powerful stuff. The only thing we have are these moments when we cling to one another, and if only we could slow them down. I just wish the music selected for this piece was something more poetic than Andrew Lloyd Weber's Love Never Dies, and that it hadn't taken so long to get to it.

Abbas Kiarostami was probably Iran's most famous director ever. He died in 2016, right after completing the experimental "24 Frames". This movie features several scenes - many of them containing animals, snow or water - simply depicted as their own free-standing stories. No dialogue except for music, and no people except those who pass by. Characteristic of Kiarostami's frequent blending of simplicity and complexity, as well as his common theme of life and death. Like Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, he was a director who revolutionized cinema.

This movie will not be for everyone. The absence of narrative and the single shots test your attention span. But if you want to see what a movie can be at its best, then this will be the film for you.

I find it puzzling that some critics found this last work by Abbas Kiarastam, made as he knew he was approaching the end of his days, disappointingly uncinematic. 24 Frames seems to me the logical end point for the arc of the career of one of the fundamentally cinematic artists. Surely, the Kiarastami aesthetic can best be boiled down to an Ozu style static camera mounted on a car window, a still, pensive acknowledgement of a world in flux.

Or perhaps one can see this work as an inversion of that aesthetic. For here, Kiarastami uses digital animation to bring movement to still images: a painting, a post-card, and 22 of his own still photographs, trying to inject temporality back into a "frozen moment". The movement comes mostly in the form of animal life, a nature that seems very much in peril. The few contributions by human characters are generally destructive, as if the humans think they live in frozen moments, a world that cannot end. Kiarastami seems to be trying to remind the viewer of the fragility of life in this world, how quickly we may be approaching it's end, as of course, he was approaching his as he made the film.

Most people want to compare this movie to non-narrative visual art, and that's not what I saw. Really, it reminded me more of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, another collection of short stories which feels meticulously plotted yet like an illusion that vanishes when you try to make literal meaning out of it. The two are the best evocation of the era when short story collections mattered to normal people and vice versa. There are almost no humans, but the movie is full of perfectly observed character moments that are orchestrated with thematic precision. This is the Winesburg, Ohio of avant garde filmmaking, and probably a better cinematic version of that book's accomplishments in micro-observation than the adaptation.