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The actress says that she is the author of most of the material and that Kiarostami plagiarized it.
Somehow, I am particularly interested in filmmakers from countries with a culture or politics that tramples on expressions of individuality or beauty, from countries where women or entire societies are oppressed by the system. It must be especially tough for sensitive individuals to observe reality and translate their observations onto film. Kiarostami seemed to me like this kind of filmmaker, but if the allegations are true, then Kiarostami is the very antonym of his art,
which brings us to the question of art versus artist. Namely, how one's art doesn't necessarily reflect their sensibilities and how the celebration of life in film can figuratively speaking, turn into the celebration of death in real life.
But there's more to it. Interestingly enough, Farhadi was also accused of plagiarism by his former student Azadeh Masihzadeh. There is a theory that the Iranian government is sponsoring a plot to denigrate auteurs. Auteurs, that is, those who could be potentially threatening to the image of the Iranian government and society in the world. And let's recall that Iran deals harshly with films that are not to the government's liking, vide Panahi getting banned from filmmaking. This brings us to yet another point worth talking about
: Not Iranian censorship in particular, but
censorship in general, and how it can affect artists by mutilating (and therefore transforming) their works. One only has to think about von Stroheim or Welles to see how money-motivated censorship is close to politically-motivated censorship in countries like China. Now we're close to discussing whether any sort of censorship is a good thing, including self-imposed one ("I won't watch a film by a rapist director" versus "I won't watch a film with real animals dying"). This brings other questions:
1. Does the preceding have any impact on how you view Kiarostami and his art, meaning do you separate art from an artist? What about the (that) artist?
2. Should there be the benefit of the doubt in situations like this? (The removal of Ten from Kiarostami's retrospective at the BFI.)
3. How ironic can life be, as Kiarostami is known for creating docufiction? Did he get to the point where he couldn't see the difference between life and fiction anymore? Or is real life in film impossible at all, as any documentary, including Direct Cinema, means intrusion into real life with a camera, which changes it?
4. What is freakin' true anymore? And can we really tell anyway?
But there's even more to this. There's a documentary on the making of
Ten called
10 on Ten. According to Akbari, yes - Kiarostami falsified the documentary on the making of the film. It is also the most detailed description of the filmmaking process in his entire filmography, something never seen before or later. Further,
Ten is shot in poorer quality than the rest of Kiarostami's filmography, Mania Akbari explicitly says it's because she shot the footage herself, earlier, with a small camera she was given.
But if she shot it, and he edited it, who is really the author? Who was the director, really? Who was the auteur here?
Kiarostami is no longer alive. But there are definitely things one can talk about here other than a simple guilty-not-guilty dichotomy.
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