‘Close-Up’: The movie that altered Martin Scorsese’s mind
A cinema obsessive in every sense of the word, it is a wonder that Martin Scorsese has had any spare time to sleep since the 1970s. If the director isn’t crafting a litany of classic films, he is immersing himself in the many delights of global cinema.
While it is not uncommon for directors to want to stay on top of their competition, Scorsese doesn’t tend to work in that way. Rather than viewing other films and filmmakers as rivals, or looking to one-up whatever the most acclaimed project of the day is, the New York native instead soaks up a countless array of different films in order to provide a degree of artistic inspiration, or even a life-changing philosophy to his own work and even his personal life. He is, after all, a lifelong fan of the cinema at heart.
Every cinema fan has that one film that completely changed their outlook on life; that infallible piece of art which seems to speak directly to your soul. In fact, for many people, Scorsese’s work fills that role. From Taxi Driver to Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Gangs of New York, among various others, the director’s filmography is practically bursting with inarguable classics which have completely transformed the art of filmmaking.
For Scorsese himself, though, the film that managed to change his outlook came in the form of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up. Released back in 1990, the same year that Scorsese unveiled his gangster masterpiece Goodfellas, Kiarostami’s trailblazing work blended fiction and documentary, centring around Hossein Sabzian, a cinephile who impersonated Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to steal money from the Ahankhah family.
The film is a mix of reenactments, embellishments, and real-life footage from the trial of Sabzian, who played himself in the film. As Scorsese reflected, during a 2006 interview with Raffaele Donato, “A lot of that film was staged, but brilliantly—in many scenes, you have absolutely no idea that it’s planned or acted, because Kiarostami is so attuned to the situation of this man, Sabzian, and his obsession with Makhmalbaf and with movies.”
That foggy relationship between truth and fiction, between documentary and movie, certainly captured the imagination of Scorsese, and the filmmaker has repeatedly spoken of his undying love for Kiarostami’s film. In fact, speaking to Jim Jarmusch in 2006, he revealed the extent of the film’s inspiration quality. “That one, for me, refocused my whole way of thinking, watching this film Close Up,” he revealed.”
“You must see this film, it’s on DVD,” he pleaded with Jarmusch. “Kiarostami, an Iranian film. It hit me just as strongly as the first time…I can’t say for the first time because I was five years old when I saw neorealist films for the first time, but, it has that emotional impact, I feel,” Scorsese concluded.
Speaking to the enduring influence of the revolutionary Iranian film, Scorsese drew upon its blending of fact and fiction in the creation of his own docu-fiction films, namely 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue, which saw the filmmaker tackle Bob Dylan’s infamous 1975 tour.
