10 on Ten
Abbas Kiarostami’s recent features satisfy few of the usual expectations about narrative films. Yet in 10 on Ten–a documentary about his most recent feature, 10, showing twice this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center–he appears to be slavishly living up to those expectations.
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“Making of” documentaries have been a cottage industry around the world for some time, not simply as DVD “extras” but as promotional tools. In Iran alone, almost any feature of any prominence seems to be accompanied by a documentary that includes an interview with the director and numerous production details. The ways 10 on Ten differs from most of these is that Kiarostami made it himself, he’s the only one appearing in it, and the running time, 87 minutes, is only two minutes shorter than the film it’s about. In other respects he’s offering the usual goods–a careful, step-by-step account of how he conceived and made 10, using clips from it (as well as from Taste of Cherry and ABC Africa) and even an extended outtake.
Kiarostami goes on to say that he used DV in Uganda as preparatory “travel notes” for ABC Africa, then decided to stick with that footage when he realized that it caught his documentary subjects being more natural and spontaneous than they would have been in front of cumbersome film equipment. This led him to choose DV when shooting 10, and we eventually learn in the chapter on location that he decided to use only two DV cameras mounted on the dashboard of a single car because he was convinced that the film’s structure was more important than either its subject or its “story.”
In 10 on Ten he imitates himself much more mechanically here than he ever does in 10 or Five, as when he takes his DV camera outside his parked car to show us ants moving on the ground, a ploy borrowed from The Wind Will Carry Us. He also tends to position himself against Hollywood–understandable even when he suggests that Hollywood may create more serious problems in the world than the American military–but at times he almost implies that there are only two way of making films, Hollywood’s and his own.
