![]() The interactions described above occur in the opening seconds of the film, and already we’ve seen and heard the children but have only heard the adults. Kiarostami understood better than most that cinema is not a visual but an audiovisual medium, comprised of image and sound Kiarostami’s cinema, in particular, is as much about what we don’t see as what we do. Calling the film a “visual study,” however, would be selling it short by half. Taken at face value, Kiarostami’s description of his feature documentary Homework ( Mashgh-e Shab, 1989) is accurate enough the bulk of the film entails he and his small crew visiting a poor public school in Tehran and interviewing schoolboys, one after another, about their homework. “You could say it’s a visual study of pupils’ homework assignments.” When an adult passerby stops to inquire about the film moments later, Kiarostami skirts politely around his own intentions - the theme will emerge only through the process of filming, but it has something to do with a problem he encountered while helping his son with his homework - before offering the man a vague summary of what he knows so far. A resounding “Yes!,” and off they go to school, where the director and his crew will soon join them. “Have you done your homework?” Kiarostami asks them, in turn. Or so Abbas Kiarostami tells a group of schoolboys who approach him on the street and ask what he’s filming.
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