Zang-e Tafrih

The second movie of Kiarostami, made in 1972. It calls in my mind some of the very first movies of Brakhage, especially The Way to Shadow Garden. In both cases, a minimalistic gem, nothing explained, a personage without history, without motivation, with the unique role of putting in value a disconcerting universe.

Is it the admirable end of Breaktime a negative stasis (like in the movie of Brakhage)? Well, it is somehow a way to the Gardens of Shadow, too, though I think it is, much more, something else: it is an end refusing to be the end (as the movie actually has no beginning, also). This fourteen minutes movie dares to eliminate the story from its structure! It is a shame that Breaktime passed unobserved, because it was marking a new age in the history of cinema.

Others can undoubtedly comment more effectively than I on the technical aspects of this film, or what it means relative to Kiarostami's emerging voice. Those are certainly fascinating things, given that it was just his second short, made a year before his first feature length film. To me it shows just how much interest he took in children from the very beginning, how much he loved them. He finds a human story in the little events in a day of a boy's life, and is able to evoke feelings buried in the audience's psyche. The pain of being punished, chased, or walking along in a dangerous place. The boy has done wrong by breaking a window and stealing a ball, but he had my full empathy, because this is sometimes what kids do. You can feel a little growing up taking place for him in the crucible of the world here, just as Kiarostami was growing as a filmmaker.