‘The Bread and Alley’: an early Abbas Kiarostami gem
Throughout film history, many great filmmakers made terrible starts to their journey in cinema, which they later disowned. Famously, Stanley Kubrick hated his first feature – Fear and Desire – so much that he tried to remove all the copies he could find. However, there are few artists who show signs of genius from the very beginning, and Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami was definitely among the latter, as is evident in his first film – The Bread and Alley.
The 1970s were crucial for Iranian cinema, especially due to the emergence of the revolutionary Iranian New Wave. At the beginning of the important decade, Kiarostami contributed to the formation of a film department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Not only that, the department’s debut film – The Bread and Alley – showed signs of the innovations that would soon change cinema forever.
Labelled by Kiarostami as “the mother of all my films”, The Bread and Alley is a relatively simple short about a boy who tries to get home with a loaf of bread but is scared by a hungry dog that guards the alley. Incorporating various neorealist techniques, Kiarostami demonstrates his intuitive understanding of child psychology while translating the perceived fears experienced by a child to the visual narrative – especially by capturing the way the world appears to him.
While discussing the production with Synoptique, Kiarostami revealed: “The Bread And Alley was my first experience in cinema, and I must say a very difficult one. I had to work with a very young child, a dog and an unprofessional crew, except for the cinematographer, who was nagging and complaining all the time. Well, the cinematographer, in a sense, was right because I did not follow the conventions of filmmaking that he had become accustomed to.”
The filmmaker added: “The story itself is only twelve minutes long, so there was not much need to break up the time. But I was also aware that breaking up a time frame in order to show the passage of time makes filmmakers submit to clichés and conventions. Therefore it was an interesting challenge for me to bring cinematic time and real-time close to each other as much as possible without employing those conventions.”
During the filming, Kiarostami had to work through various obstacles – including waiting more than a month for a specific shot and changing the dog thrice – which helped him gain invaluable experience. More importantly, The Bread and Alley was a significant step in the right direction because it challenged the visual grammar that was widely accepted at the time. Fans who are familiar with Kiarostami’s later masterpieces can easily see that this 1970 short is a fascinating origin point for all of his greatest works.
Watch the film below.
