In Memoriam

“We experienced much in this troubled world.”
- Hafez / KiarostamiAbbas Kiarostami, the most world-renowned Iranian filmmaker, painter, writer, director, film editor, poet, photographer, and graphic designer was born on June 2nd, 1940 in Tehran. He passed away on July 4th, 2016 — thirteen days after his seventy-sixth birthday and in the midst of several unfinished works. We were together in February 2016 when he mentioned he would be going to the hospital for an operation. Abbas wanted to make a plan for his remaining works, should something happen. Since I had made In Praise of Being Seventy, a documentary based on interviews with him, Aydin Aghdashloo, and Mohammad Ehsaei, I said we would make Seventy-Seven when he came back — two sevens look nice together. “Like the signs of the sergeants,” he said. I also said that in three years would make In Praise of Being Eighty. “I often think about death,” he said. I reminded him that he narrated his fear of death in Taste of Cherry, which won the Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival. “So you have overcome the fear you talked about in that film,” I said. He laughed.
I met Abbas in 1971. That was when I went to the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (more commonly called Kanoon) along with Morteza Momayez to learn from him. Abbas had made The Bread and Alley and was preparing to make Breaktime. He had also co-created a film with Arapik Baghdassarian, but after a while he removed his name from the film. I knew that he had studied painting in the School of Fine Arts, University of Tehran and had worked in advertising studios. In the early 1960’s he earned a living as a poster and book cover designer at Seven Studio and elsewhere, until he went to TabliFilm where he created about 150 commercials. He then moved to Negareh (Firouz Shirvanlou’s advertising agency) and designed posters and title sequences. In 1969 he and Shirvanlou joined Kanoon, where his membership led to a long-lasting connection with cinema and children.
During the 1990s, Seyed Jamal Beheshti consulted Abbas Kiarostami when he conceived of a comprehensive address and telephone directory of people and businesses. This was to combat the neglected duty of the Telecommunication Company of Iran within the private sector. Still in love with graphic design, Kiarostami created one of the most creative and memorable Iranian advertising campaigns. Seyed Jamal Beheshti’s account of the story is interesting:
“… He said he would return to the advertising domain only once as to not interrupt his filmmaking. At that point, he had just finished producing Through the Olive Trees and had won     international awards for it.
First Book was the name he chose for the Iranian Yellow Pages in collaboration with Mohammad Ehsaei. He said the title crossed his mind on a road trip to Rudbar while visiting the location of Through the Olive Trees. He asked Mohammad Ehsaei to create an everlasting wordmark in the most beautiful, simple fashion, yet with the potential to create ambiguity and mystery. After     Ehsaei gave his proposals to Kiarosatmi, he knew the wordmark would be a tremendous success.
He immediately put all his effort into the obscurity of the logo — he kept two letters and removed characters. His plan was to bombard the media with this mysterious mark — through the ground, air, and sea, and make them thirsty to know the complete wordmark. Forty-five days later, he gave me a list of all possible words that could be written with the two letters and requested someone spray these words on the numerous hoardings throughout the city.
In the last phase, he added a descriptive sentence (urban information directory) to the logotype     and suddenly told me he had done all he could for the First Book advertising, and nothing more was needed.”

Traces of genius are clearly evident in the title sequences he designed in his early years. He adapted the layman writing and illustration of fortune-tellers for Hakim-bashi and designed an innovative composition for The Window where the titles are all white handwriting engraved on the film’s primary images in a laboratory.
The titles of The Report, which is considered his first feature film, appear on a stack of papers in a typewriter. What makes this design attractive is its connection with the film’s story, which is about a middle-class civil servant who is a tenant in Tehran.
The title sequence of Qeysar appears as writings tattooed on the skin of working-class thugs. The nakedness of the bodies — with tattoos of women and men, lions, Rostam, and a mistress — refers to the public bath and the blood that is shed there due to murder.
Later he moved towards simplicity in his films. One of the last title sequences he designed for Gradually by Reza Mirkarimi shows a hand that simply writes names.
Beyond all of these simple patterns, there was an inquietude, as he said, which led to the creation of numerous photos, short films, and installations that demonstrate original ideas and experiences. This is what made him a creative, world-class designer. Trees, snow, doors and windows, roads, raindrops on the windows, the composition of photos and paintings of the Louvre Museum, and more trees. It seems that trees have occupied his mind. He once said that when he sat by the grave of his father near the hills and fields around their house in the Shemiran District, before so many buildings were constructed, there was a tree he loved so much — the symbol of life and growth by the grave of a person he loved and who had been lost. The tree was always present in his films, photos, installations, and the picturesque poster he designed for the 11th Khaneh Cinema (The Iranian Alliance of Motion Picture Guilds) Ceremony. He turned the tree and the road into his unique elements.
The poster he designed for a film he directed entitled A Wedding Suit is a masterpiece among Iranian posters and breaks all the common rules of his time. While universities insisted on teaching the design of posters as flashy and readily legible, he designed a monochrome brown poster with a tag on the collar of a striped child’s jacket. This was not at all legible from a distance. The structure of the posters he designed for Rashid and Black and White reveal the innovation and modernism of a young designer who courageously quoted Arthur Rimbaud many years later in the first page of his book Hafez / Kiarostami: “One must be absolutely modern.” He was so from the very beginning, he acted so, and he taught so to others.
I have several memories of his presence in Kanoon and of designing posters after that. My first collaborative experience with Abbas was for the poster of The Traveler. He gave me the image and told me to put the text in a simple fashion in the center of a white space.
For the Homework poster design he told me: “Do you remember how much we were annoyed by homework? It is still the same for our children. Use a small, sharp pencil.” So I used the famous built-in eraser pencil, which was common among the two generations before and after me, with its end chewed on, beside a red pencil sharpener.
In those days, various monochromatic flyers were stuck to the walls of the streets and overpasses each night (for example, the words “wedding dress” in Nasta’liq calligraphy with a telephone number and nothing more). He told me: “Have you noticed how much these advertisements capture attention? I want the title of Homework to be written like that: Nasta’liq with empty space inside.” Today, this poster is famous.
In Close-Up he gave me the positive frames of all the film’s characters and some frames of Sabzian, the main character, and told me to write Close-Up with large font size on the top of the page-like the name of the toothpaste with the same name- and to put the rest of the pictures underneath it.
In Life and Nothing More he handed me the photo of one of the movie’s scenes which was the poster of a man smoking pipe in a café hung on a cracked thatched wall and said: “The picture itself says all that needs to be told.”
In all these cases, he asked me why I had not signed the works. “Both of us or none of us,” I said. “The work belongs to the one who has given the original idea.”
“You know very well
wshich tale I want to retell
about which pains”
    Ahmad Shamlu–

The world has lost one of the best poets of design and cinema. Due to medical error or fate, I do not know.

“Blood must surge
through a reddening heart”
        - Hafez / Kiarostami*