24 Frames – first look review

This posthu­mous essay film from Iran­ian direc­tor Abbas Kiarosta­mi opens on a shot Pieter Bruegel’s famous paint­ing, ​‘The Hunters in the Snow’. In the fore­ground, men stand on a tree-lined verge, while down below in the val­ley, vil­lagers ice skate on a frozen pond. After about 30 sec­onds of con­tem­pla­tive still­ness, a strange thing hap­pens: smoke begins to puff out of a chim­ney pot on a house in the mid­dle dis­tance. Then, a bird is seen soar­ing through the air and lands on a tree. All of a sud­den, one of the dogs trail­ing the hunched hunters begins to wan­der between them before reliev­ing itself on the stump of a tree. Then, every­thing returns to still­ness and a fade to black.

24 Frames is Kiarostami’s hushed port­man­teau trea­tise on the past, present and future of cin­e­ma. Using dig­i­tal ani­ma­tion tech­niques and super­im­po­si­tion, he brings a series of pho­tographs to life for a few moments, mere­ly as a way to spec­u­late on how life may have car­ried on in each instance. Each image tells a minia­ture sto­ry, but as a view­er you’re forced to sus­pend dis­be­lief and accept that these banal scenes are in fact works of pure fiction.

These sto­ries include crows fight­ing, hors­es fight­ing, trees sway­ing, wolves feast­ing, ducks danc­ing and lots more birds fight­ing. Kiarosta­mi attempts to enter into the spir­it of each image, using details as clues and the land­scape as a dra­mat­ic stage. Some of these minia­ture dra­mas end with a sim­ple les­son, hark­ing back to the edu­ca­tion­al films the direc­tor made ear­ly in his career that were aimed large­ly at young peo­ple. Yet he always tries to remain with­in the bounds of the plau­si­ble, nev­er stray­ing into fan­ta­sy or anthro­po­mor­phism just because he can.

And that’s one of the most intrigu­ing things about the film: where mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar block­buster pro­duc­tions now use this type of image manip­u­la­tion to cre­ate digital/​live action hybrid fan­tasies, Kiarosta­mi is doing the same thing, but instead at the ser­vice of poet­ic real­i­ty. The tone is most­ly one of absurd humour, as it draws aware­ness to the hilar­i­ous sound of ducks quack­ing, or even the fact that most birds have no sense of mor­tal­i­ty, espe­cial­ly when it comes to scav­eng­ing for food.

Beyond the frame, a care­ful lat­tice of ambi­ent sounds help these pic­to­r­i­al land­scapes to spring into life. The third image, of cows wan­der­ing across a beach on a stormy day, is the first real brain teas­er – it’s hard to tell if the crash­ing waves have all been immac­u­late­ly ani­mat­ed, or if this is in fact a mov­ing image with added ani­mat­ed live­stock. As with 2003’s Five Ded­i­cat­ed to Ozu or 2008’s Shirin, this is film­mak­ing that demands intense delib­er­a­tion as to what’s hap­pen­ing beyond the frame, as much as it does to what’s hap­pen­ing inside. It is occa­sion­al­ly a lit­tle repet­i­tive, but this is a mel­low, media­tive swan­song, and Kiarostami’s ongo­ing pub­lic dia­logue with cin­e­ma will be sore­ly missed.