Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema

In Tehran, a man named Hossein Sabzian is arrested for posing as the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a family who believed he would put them in his next film. Kiarostami reconstructs the case with the real people playing themselves and films the trial. It is a documentary and a drama at once, and it never tells you where one ends.

Why it’s here: The film asks why a man would pretend to be a director and what that says about who gets seen. What's punk is Kiarostami giving a petty fraudster the dignity of explaining himself, with the trial as theatre. What's pedagogical is the structure: reality and reenactment collide, and you see that every film is a construction. A natural companion to the Godard, Bresson and Bazin books in the catalog.

A day in Soviet cities, from dawn to a night at the cinema, with no actors, no story and no title cards. A cameraman climbs towers and rides trams while the film shows its own making: the editor at her table, the audience in their seats, a camera that is also a character. Vertov, the director, called it a film language of its own. It is regularly named among the greatest films ever made.

Why it’s here: It's a film about how a film is made, shown as it is made. What's punk is the refusal of story and the joy of cutting reality into a new order. What's pedagogical is that it hands a young viewer the whole grammar of editing, framing and montage without a word of explanation, a perfect fit for the Reel Workshop and DoCR's filmmaking-first launch. Note: silent, 68 minutes, and state-backed, since it celebrates the Soviet project in the late 1920s. Vertov's editor was his wife, Elizaveta Svilova, who appears on screen. Companion to Film Form / Film Sense and In the Blink of an Eye in the catalog.