24 Frames

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.