Close-Up

“The other movie that's really special to me that I wanted to mention is Close-Up and I guess probably it's a it's a very widely appreciated film but I think some people don't know it and I actually got some friends of mine to watch it one night some friends of mine asked me for a film recommendation I said watch Close-Up like there's no way you won't have a great time and they were like no we did kind of like was in the right vibe but anyway it's an incredible film and it's like t...”

“Close-Up. We don't have. Do you have Close-Up with you at all? No. We're saying Close-Up. Yeah.”

“Let us go beyond across the pond to Iran. Close-Up. This is the story of a man in Iran who impersonated a filmmaker called Makhmalbaf... Abbas Kiarostami... Went and made a movie of this guy’s trial and hired this guy to play himself in the reenactment of the impersonation... It is a movie that works as a fictional narrative. It is a movie that works as a documentary. It is a movie that works as a social service... This movie, there’s no other movie like this movie.”

“Close-Up. The mixing of fiction and documentary was so powerful that I was like Safi Faye said, there was no boundary between—as African we don't have no limit between fiction and documentary. And Close-Up, it's really in alignment with that. It also opened me to the work of Makhmalbaf and how I was connected to people that I don't even know or imagine before... It also free me to just say to myself I don't have to choose between documentary and fiction.”

“We have Close-Up. So this movie, we use this chromatic aberration font for High Maintenance, I stole it from Close-Up. Also from Close-Up I stole a moment where there's a can rolling down a hill. It's just a moment where there's this can rolling down a hill and it's just like a little pause. I stole that moment directly from this film and put it in season 4 episode 6 of High Maintenance.”

“And Close-Up, the greatest movie ever made. We'll end on that one. Have you seen this? Kiarostami. Godard even said it, he ended cinema by making this film. The understanding of what cinema is, we don't really need to keep going.”

“Another director very important to me, Abbas Kiarostami, and my favorite of him is Close-Up. He saw in the paper a story that someone pretended to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf, another Iranian director, just to be able to talk to people. One of The Most Beautiful sentences that the guy says when he asks him 'why do you do that?' and he says 'because I was alone and but alone is not a pain.' This film is really fantastic and the last scene, Kiarostami goes and picks him up at the prison.”