Zang-e Tafrih

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.

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.