When A Still Life Isn't Entirely Still: '24 Frames'

The late Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami often talked about the audience "completing" his movies, which of course implies that he left his work deliberately incomplete, as if to tease the imagination. "I make one film as a filmmaker," he once said, "but the audience, based on that film, makes 100 movies in their minds. Every audience member can make his own movie. This is what I strive for."

None of this is to suggest or are half-finished or lazily conceived, but Kiarostami always wanted viewers to be aware of what they were seeing. The ending of , for example, in which he shattered the fourth wall, caused such an uproar because we're so accustomed to accepting the reality of images or stories without anyone calling attention to the essential artifice of their creation. Sometimes Kiarostami was rigorous in blurring the line between truth and fiction, as in his documentary hybrid , and sometimes he merely accommodated the mysteries of human behavior. But the common denominator was his encouraging us to think through the experience.