London’s Close-Up Turns Twenty

In 1989, a report on the arrest of Hossein Sabzian, who had tricked a middle-class Iranian family into believing that he was the renowned director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, prompted Kiarostami to drop everything and make a film about the case. Close-up (1990) is an amalgam of documentary footage from the trial, interviews, staged reenactments featuring Sabzian and members of the family as themselves, and ultimately, a meeting between Sabzian and Makhmalbaf.

“Close-up seemed to combine the social concern of Italian neorealism, to which the new Iranian films were often compared, with the French New Wave’s cerebral self-expression and formal idiosyncrasy, and to project the whole into the vitalizing context of a postrevolutionary Islamic culture,” wrote Cheshire. “The film’s key innovations—the unorthodox mix of documentary and fiction, the self-reflexive musing on cinema and its impact, the simultaneous exaltation and questioning of the auteur—may have had certain precedents in both world cinema and Iranian culture, but Close-up fused them in a wholly new and original way.”

Established in 2005 as a library of books on cinema and films on a variety of formats on Sclater Street—just off Brick Lane and near Shoreditch High Street Station—Close-Up opened its forty-seat theater ten years later. Cinephiles have been meeting up in the café and bar ever since, and from Saturday through July 26, Close-Up will screen fifty new short films about the venue made by directors such as Ruth Beckermann, Luke Fowler, Andrew Kötting, Chris Petit, and Ben Rivers.

Close-Up is also reviving the Liberated Film Club that artist Stanley Schtinter oversaw at the theater in the late 2010s. The idea was to have a special guest (Laura Mulvey, for example, Dennis Cooper, or John Akomfrah) introduce a screening—even though neither the guest nor the audience knew what the film would be. Over the next year, the Club will reconvene twice monthly to present a film that has been “lost, banned, or made in impossible circumstances,” and the guest programmers include Peggy Ahwesh, Erika Balsom, New York’s Light Industry, Toby Jones, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sukhdev Sandhu, John Smith, Peter Tscherkassky, and Ana Vaz.

On July 27, Ehsan Khoshbakht—one of the four codirectors of Il Cinema Ritrovato and the curator of this year’s Locarno retrospective, Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945–1960—will introduce The Movie Orgy (1968), directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins), produced by Jon Davison (Starship Troopers), and billed by AGFA, who have preserved the film from the original 16 mm reels, as “the world’s first found footage megamix.” Talking to Dante for RogerEbert.com in 2016, Simon Abrams noted that his “cinematic collage has no narrative, but plenty of thematic ‘points of contact,’ to use a phrase film coined by critic J. Hoberman. It’s a hallucinatory blend of surreal violence, droll humor, and madcap counter-culture ideology.”