One Of The Greatest Movie I've Ever Seen

Your professor should have selected A Taste Of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, or Through The Olive Trees, instead of Close-Up, to explore Kiarostami's use of mise-en-scène and aesthetics, because those films actually present a clear sense of those elements.

Kiarostami intentionally avoids using traditional mise-en-scène, because he feels the technique is overused and oftentimes disingenuous.

His directorial trademark is the use of spacial simplicity and minimalism, which undermines, reduces, and sometimes negates mise-en-scène.

He is a modern master of distilling a scene and/or image down to its barest, simplest, lyrical essence, while simultaneously retaining the complexity and secretive nature of the essence.

I sincerely hope you elect to watch at least one more Kiarostami film, and re-watch Close-Up.

It is unnerving to think that an entire class - 35 students? 60 students? - of college students who love film enough to enroll in film courses, and possibly major in film, will dismiss Kiarostami simply because they are unfamiliar with or disinterested in a simplistic, minimalistic technical film style.

One of my observations about Close-Up that has not been mentioned yet -

Hussein Sabzian is a lonely fellow trapped in an uninteresting life, lacking security, lacking stimulating entertainment, lacking creative outlets. Cinema is his escape. He grasped the opportunity to step out of his life and into someone else's by pretending to be Makhmalbaf, just as We The Viewers grasp the opportunity to step out of our lives and into someone else's when we watch films and when we do impersonations of our favourite actors/actresses, when we randomly act out character idiosyncrasies that titillate us or recite specific dialogue that we think is "cool", when we re-enact [oftentimes esoteric] film moments in our real life for personal amusement.

The only difference is, most of us are Americans and Europeans, and when our film adventures are finished, we return to a reality filled with a limitless number of creative outlets, we are allowed to mimic and impersonate, we're supported when we re-enact something, our friends laugh with us and at us, etc, whereas Sabzian is arrested, must endure hour-after-boring-hour of legal procedures and public humiliation in court, nobody is amused with him, nobody around him seems to really care about the power of cinema, they don't care how Makhmalbaf's films makes Sabzian feel good about himself, they ridicule him, and, although he does meet Makhmalbaf, he ultimately returns to his reality of poverty and boredom and lack of creative outlets.

The film illustrates the vast the cultural differences between people who perceive film as a life-long creative-intellectual-self-enriching outlet, and people who view film as nothing but a quick way to be entertained-and-once-the-film-ends-the-brain-must-stop-thinking-about-it (and it's ironic that the wealthy and educated Iranian family are not fanatical about films, yet the uneducated poor villager is fanatical about film), which further illustrates Kiarostami's perception of how different class systems perceive film, and of how film is perceived and received in Iran (general disinterest and dismissiveness, creative outlets are swept into the dust bin and emptied) versus Europe/the US (mega-interest, fascination, mega-part-of-lifestyle, mega-respect).

Close-up is a close-up of regular film goers and how we view and treat cinema, which represents on a larger scale the vast differences between how people of different economic, religious, and political backgrounds view films, and on an even larger scale the vast difference between how art and being artistic is treated in the West versus the East.

"I prefer films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap." - Abbas Kiarostami

Human emotion is so boring,innit?

You should have watched cool masterpieces of cinematography like "The Dark Knight" or "Scarface"