Why Did Abbas Kiarostami Film Often Use Long Takes?

If I had to pick one film of Abbas Kiarostami’s for film students, I’d point straight to 'Close-Up'. It feels like a masterclass in the blurry line between documentary and fiction, and for anyone studying narrative ethics, performance, and editing it’s pure gold. The way Kiarostami lets real people play versions of themselves, then folds their testimonies and reenactments into a single cinematic event—that’s a living lesson in how form can interrogate truth. When I first taught a film club screening, we paused on sequences to talk about camera positioning, the camera’s moral stance, and how simple long takes force viewers to engage differently. Students can rehearse exercises: remake a short scene twice (once as documentary, once as fiction), then splice them together and discuss what shifts. Also pair 'Close-Up' with 'Taste of Cherry' to contrast social choreography with existential minimalism. Mostly, watch it slowly—take notes on who Kiarostami puts center frame and why, how the cuts betray or confirm our assumptions, and how silence functions like a character. It’ll make you rethink what a film can do to a story and to a life.

On a rainy festival night I sat in a tiny theater and watched 'Taste of Cherry' in near-silence, and that experience taught me a lot about why Abbas Kiarostami's style sticks with people. He stripped cinema down to essentials — long, steady takes, everyday locations, and a patient pace — but instead of making things boring, he created room for thought. His camera often sits outside characters' private dilemmas, inviting you to fill the gaps. That open space is a kind of moral pedagogy: you aren't told what to feel, you work it out. Kiarostami's other big move was blurring fact and fiction. Films like 'Close-Up' and 'Where Is the Friend's Home?' fold real events, non-professional actors, and staged scenes into a seamless, almost documentary texture. That makes emotional truth outweigh plot mechanics, and it taught filmmakers to trust authenticity over artificial drama. His use of cars as moving stages, minimal sound design, and frames that let landscape breathe influenced not just Iranian cinema but the whole slow-cinema conversation I follow. I keep thinking about how his restraint feels like generosity — he gives viewers intelligence and silence to participate. Every time I rewatch his films I notice a new detail: a roadside tree, a pause, a child's glance. It leaves you quieter and oddly more curious, which is why Kiarostami still matters to me.

I still get a little thrill when I tell friends that 'Close-Up' clocks in at 98 minutes. It’s a tidy runtime for a film that feels like it expands the borders of documentary and fiction at the same time. The first time I watched it was on a rainy afternoon with coffee getting cold beside me. The 98-minute length meant I could sink into Kiarostami’s patient rhythms without it dragging; there’s enough time for the characters and courtroom sequences to breathe, and for the ethical questions to settle in. If you’re curious about pacing, know it doesn’t rush — the runtime supports a slow-burn unraveling of events. If you prefer planning your viewing sessions, 98 minutes is perfect: not a whole evening commitment, but long enough to feel substantial. For anyone dipping into Iranian cinema, 'Close-Up' is a compact but powerful entry point that rewards attention.

One of my favorite little triumphant facts to bring up at film nights is that the film which won the Palme d'Or is 'Taste of Cherry'. Cannes crowned it in 1997, and it always feels like a neat bookmark when I talk about modern Iranian cinema—Kiarostami's quiet, probing style really knocked people sideways then. The movie follows a man quietly wandering, looking for someone to bury him when he intends to end his life; the whole thing is soaked in long takes, patient conversations, and that peculiar blend of documentary realism and poetic ambiguity that Kiarostami mastered. I first saw it on a rainy evening with cheap coffee and a notepad, and I still recall pausing to scribble down lines of dialogue. If you like films that give you space to think and leave threads untied, 'Taste of Cherry' is a gift. It also pairs nicely with 'Through the Olive Trees' for a deeper dive into his recurring themes about fate, choice, and the act of looking itself. Watching it feels less like being told a story and more like being invited into a very intimate, moral puzzle, and that’s why it stuck with me.

Watching Kiarostami's films feels like sitting on the edge of a quiet street in a village I've never been to, listening to people talk about things that seem small but mean everything. His camera treats ordinary life as if it's the only important thing in the world: children's errands in 'Where Is the Friend's Home?', a man's slow search in 'Taste of Cherry', or the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction in 'Close-Up'. Those long takes and minimal cuts force you to pay attention to gestures, to silence, to the textures of light on mud walls. I first saw 'Close-Up' on a rainy evening and felt oddly complicit—he invites you into moral puzzles without spoon-feeding conclusions. He portrays Iranian society not as a monolith but as a patchwork of intimate scenes—family obligations, social codes, the small kindnesses and strictures that govern behavior. There's a persistent humanism: people are neither idealized nor reduced to stereotypes. Gender relations, religious presence, and economic hardship are all present but filtered through human stories rather than headlines. For instance, the child's persistence in 'Where Is the Friend's Home?' reveals how social duty and personal conscience intersect in everyday life. On a sweeter note, I love how his films preserve the sound of ordinary conversation—the clink of cups, the murmur of neighbors—which makes the world feel lived-in. If you want a cinematic portrait of Iran that respects nuance and trusts your capacity to feel complexity, Kiarostami's work is a gentle but persistent teacher. It stayed with me long after the credits rolled.

I still get a little giddy when I track down a pristine restoration of a favorite film, so here’s what’s worked for me with Abbas Kiarostami’s movies. I’ve found that The Criterion Channel is a reliable first stop — they’ve carried restored Kiarostami titles like 'Close-Up' and 'Taste of Cherry' at various times, and their Blu-ray releases are often the gold standard for restorations. If you prefer owning physical copies, checking The Criterion Collection’s shop (or the BFI shop in the UK) for their restoration releases is a smart move, since those discs usually include newly scanned prints and solid subtitles. For streaming, MUBI often programs restored world cinema and cycles through Kiarostami films, so I check their schedule regularly. Libraries and universities can surprise you too: Kanopy (linked to many library systems) has popped up with restored editions for me on occasion. Finally, use a service like JustWatch to quickly see where a specific restored title is available in your region — it cuts down on wasted searches and tells you whether a title is streaming, for rent, or available to buy. Happy hunting — there’s nothing like a clean, quiet Kiarostami print to get lost in.

Watching 'Taste of Cherry' felt like being handed the keys to a completely different kind of movie theater. I was in my mid-twenties then, scribbling notes in the margins of a battered film journal, and the way Abbas Kiarostami let the camera linger—the long takes inside a car, the sparse dialogue, the attention to small gestures—punched a hole through everything I thought cinema had to be. He trusted silence and ordinary landscapes to carry weight, and that trust forced me to do some real work as a viewer: to sit with uncertainty, to imagine outcomes, to supply emotions that aren’t spelled out. Beyond style, 'Taste of Cherry' shifted film culture by legitimizing a minimalist, human-centered cinema on the world stage; winning the Palme d'Or made festivals and distributors look harder at Iranian filmmakers and other storytellers who were working quietly but profoundly. The film’s open-endedness and moral ambiguity nudged later directors toward riskier choices—films that don’t comfort you with neat conclusions but instead leave a question echoing in your head. Watching it again now, I still get that curious, slightly uncomfortable sense that the film respects my imagination—and that, more than any technical trick, is its biggest gift to cinema.

I get a little excited whenever someone brings up Kiarostami, because his use of non-professional actors is one of the things that makes his films feel so alive. If I had to pick one film that most famously features non-professional performers, it'd be 'Close-Up'. In that film Kiarostami literally casts the real people involved in the incident at the center of the story — they reenact themselves, blurring documentary and fiction in a way that still makes my skin tingle. Beyond 'Close-Up', Kiarostami regularly worked with non-actors: the lead in 'Taste of Cherry' was Homayoun Ershadi, who wasn’t a trained actor when Kiarostami discovered him; and the children in 'Where Is the Friend’s Home?' are non-professionals too, which gives those scenes a natural, spontaneous charm. I love watching how their unpolished reactions create a kind of honesty scripted performances rarely achieve. If you haven’t seen 'Close-Up', watch it with minimal context and let it unsettle you a little — it’s like being let into someone else’s private memory.

I still get a little thrill when I tell people who did the music for 'The Wind Will Carry Us' — it's Hossein Alizadeh. Watching the film late one evening, the score's sparse, resonant tones felt like another character: patient, ancient, and quietly insistent. Alizadeh is a towering figure in Iranian music, known for the tar and setar, and his touch here is more about mood than melody. Kiarostami uses sound and silence as storytelling tools, and Alizadeh's compositions slide into that space perfectly. The music isn't constantly foregrounded; it appears as subtle threads that tie the rural landscape to the film's contemplative pace. If you like hearing traditional Persian timbres woven into minimalist film scoring, this is a beautiful example. If you haven't listened to Alizadeh beyond the film, try searching out his solo pieces or ensembles — they give you a fuller sense of why Kiarostami invited him into the project. For me, the score still lingers whenever I think of those long, patient shots.

Lingering shots? Oh, they’re like the slow-burn spices in a cinematic stew—subtle but transformative. Directors deploy them to let a moment breathe, whether it’s the quiet aftermath of a betrayal in 'The Godfather' or the vast emptiness of space in '2001: A Odyssey'. It’s not just about showing; it’s about making you feel the weight of time. Like when Wong Kar-wai holds on a character’s face in 'In the Mood for Love', you don’t just see their longing—you absorb it. These shots force audiences to sit with emotions, almost uncomfortably, until the scene’s essence seeps into your bones. And then there’s world-building. Think of Hayao Miyazaki’s gentle pauses in 'Spirited Away'—those extra seconds on a flickering lantern or a train gliding over water aren’t filler. They’re invitations to live inside the film’s universe. Lingering shots can also subvert expectations; a horror movie might stretch a hallway shot to unbearable lengths, making you dread what isn’t happening. It’s a gamble, though—too long, and you lose the crowd. But when it works? Pure magic. I still get chills remembering the final shot of 'Memories of Murder', where the actor’s face says everything without a single line.