Misc

Read note below to see the importance of this work to Kiarostami himself:

Part 1:


Part 2:



Recess a.k.a Breaktime (1972, 14 mins). A boy is punished at school for breaking a window. At recess time, he leaves the school with his soccer ball, and wanders through alleys, finally ending up running by the side of the highway as cars roar by. A quietly daring and disconcerting film, ostensibly small but hinting at several possible (and possibly grave) outer stories.

AK: You may not believe it but my ideal film is my second film, Breaktime. This film is way ahead of Taste of Cherry in terms of form, audacity, avoidance of story-telling, and indeterminate ending. But the reaction of the critics at the time was so incisive and bitter that it hurled me toward recounting a story and making my next film, The Experience, which was a love melodrama.

The Experience (1973, 60 mins). Not at all a melodrama, as AK too modestly suggests above, but a coming-of-age story about a poor errand-boy (orphan?) who works in a photographers office, and is smitten from afar by a well-off girl who waits for a schoolbus. He borrows a suit without asking (like in the later film The Wedding Suit) so he can walk past her house and impress her. He tries to get a job working in her home. An adaptation of a story by AKs friend and influence, the early Iranian New Wave filmmaker Amir Naderi (The Runner).

This was one of my favorite films in the series, open-ended and elliptical. Virtually all our time in this hour-long film is spent with the boy, who is lonely and quite friend-less. For the first time, we notice in Kiarostami the superb use of ambient sound. Although it's virtually without dialogue, this is not a quiet film. There are long uneventful passages on the streets of Teheran, accompanied by precise, vivid sounds. (The sound was dubbed, not live; AKs next film, The Traveller, was the first in Iran to be shot with live sound.)