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Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami (22 June 1940 – 4 July 2016) was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer. An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy (1987–1994), Close-Up (1990), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Taste of Cherry (1997), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. In later works, Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012), he filmed for the first time outside Iran: in Italy and Japan, respectively. His films Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Close-Up, and The Wind Will Carry Us were ranked among the 100 best foreign films in a 2018 critics' poll by BBC Culture. Close-Up was also ranked one of the 50 greatest movies of all time in the famous decennial Sight & Sound poll conducted in 2012.

Kiarostami had worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director, and producer and had designed credit titles and publicity material. He was also a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. He was part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and emphasized the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues.

Kiarostami had a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary-style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. He is also known for his use of Persian poetry in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films. Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often a mix of fictional and documentary elements. The concepts of change and continuity, in addition to the themes of life and death, play a major role in Kiarostami's works.

Early life and background
Kiarostami was born in Tehran. His first artistic experience was painting, which he continued into his late teens, winning a painting competition at the age of 18 shortly before he left home to study at the University of Tehran School of Fine Arts. He majored in painting and graphic design and supported his studies by working as a traffic policeman.

As a painter, designer, and illustrator, Kiarostami worked in advertising in the 1960s, designing posters and creating commercials. Between 1962 and 1966, he shot around 150 advertisements for Iranian television. In the late 1960s, he began creating credit titles for films (including Gheysar by Masoud Kimiai) and illustrating children's books.

1970s
In 1970 when the Iranian New Wave began with Dariush Mehrjui's film Gāv, Kiarostami helped set up a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) in Tehran. Its debut production, and Kiarostami's first film, was the twelve-minute The Bread and Alley (1970), a neo-realistic short film about a schoolboy's confrontation with an aggressive dog. Breaktime followed in 1972. The department became one of Iran's most noted film studios, producing not only Kiarostami's films but acclaimed Persian films such as The Runner and Bashu, the Little Stranger.

In the 1970s, Kiarostami pursued an individualistic style of film making. When discussing his first film, he stated: Bread and Alley was my first experience in cinema and I must say a very difficult one. I had to work with a very young child, a dog, and an unprofessional crew except for the cinematographer, who was nagging and complaining all the time. Well, the cinematographer, in a sense, was right because I did not follow the conventions of film making that he had become accustomed to.

Following The Experience (1973), Kiarostami released The Traveler (Mossafer) in 1974. The Traveler tells the story of Qassem Julayi, a troubled and troublesome boy from a small Iranian city. Intent on attending a football match in far-off Tehran, he scams his friends and neighbors to raise money, and journeys to the stadium in time for the game, only to meet with an ironic twist of fate. In addressing the boy's determination to reach his goal, alongside his indifference to the effects of his amoral actions, the film examined human behavior and the balance of right and wrong. It furthered Kiarostami's reputation for realism, diegetic simplicity, and stylistic complexity, as well as his fascination with physical and spiritual journeys.

In 1975, Kiarostami directed two short films So Can I and Two Solutions for One Problem. In early 1976, he released Colors, followed by the fifty-four-minute film A Wedding Suit, a story about three teenagers coming into conflict over a suit for a wedding.

Kiarostami then directed Report (1977). With a 112-minute runtime, it was considerably longer than his previous work. The film revolved around the life of a tax collector accused of accepting bribes; suicide was among its themes. In 1979, he produced and directed First Case, Second Case.

1980s
In the early 1980s, Kiarostami directed several short films including Toothache (1980), Orderly or Disorderly (1981), and The Chorus (1982). In 1983, he directed Fellow Citizen. It was not until his release of Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987) that he began to gain recognition outside Iran. These films created the basis of his later productions.

The film tells a simple account of a conscientious eight-year-old schoolboy's quest to return his friend's notebook in a neighboring village lest his friend be expelled from school. The traditional beliefs of Iranian rural people are portrayed. The film has been noted for its poetic use of the Iranian rural landscape and its realism, both important elements of Kiarostami's work. Kiarostami made the film from a child's point of view.

Where Is the Friend's Home?, And Life Goes On (1992) (also known as Life and Nothing More), and Through the Olive Trees (1994) are described by critics as the Koker trilogy, because all three films feature the village of Koker in northern Iran. The films also relate to the 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake, in which 40,000 people died. Kiarostami uses the themes of life, death, change, and continuity to connect the films. The trilogy was successful in France in the 1990s and other Western European countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and Finland. But, Kiarostami did not consider the three films to comprise a trilogy. He suggested that the last two titles plus Taste of Cherry (1997) comprise a trilogy, given their common theme of the preciousness of life. In 1987, Kiarostami was involved in the screenwriting of The Key, which he edited but did not direct. In 1989, he released Homework.

1990s
Kiarostami's first film of the decade was Close-Up (1990), which narrates the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. The family suspects theft as the motive for this charade, but the impersonator, Hossein Sabzian, argues that his motives were more complex. The part-documentary, part-staged film examines Sabzian's moral justification for usurping Makhmalbaf's identity, questioning his ability to sense his cultural and artistic flair. Ranked No. 42 in British Film Institute's The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, Close-Up received praise from directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nanni Moretti and was released across Europe.

In 1992, Kiarostami directed Life, and Nothing More..., regarded by critics as the second film of the Koker trilogy. The film follows a father and his young son as they drive from Tehran to Koker in search of two young boys who they fear might have perished in the 1990 earthquake. As the father and son travel through the devastated landscape, they meet earthquake survivors forced to carry on with their lives amid disaster. That year Kiarostami won a Prix Roberto Rossellini, the first professional film award of his career, for his direction of the film. The last film of the so-called Koker trilogy was Through the Olive Trees (1994), which expands a peripheral scene from Life and Nothing More into the central drama. Critics such as Adrian Martin have called the style of filmmaking in the Koker trilogy as "diagrammatical", linking the zig-zagging patterns in the landscape and the geometry of forces of life and the world. A flashback of the zigzag path in Life and Nothing More... (1992) in turn triggers the spectator's memory of the previous film, Where Is the Friend's Home? from 1987, shot before the earthquake. This symbolically links to the post-earthquake reconstruction in Through the Olive Trees in 1994. In 1995, Miramax Films released Through the Olive Trees in the US theaters.

Kiarostami next wrote the screenplays for The Journey and The White Balloon (1995), for his former assistant Jafar Panahi. Between 1995 and 1996, he was involved in the production of Lumière and Company, a collaboration with 40 other film directors.

Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) award at the Cannes Film Festival for Taste of Cherry. It is the drama of a man, Mr. Badii, determined to commit suicide. The film involved themes such as morality, the legitimacy of the act of suicide, and the meaning of compassion.

Kiarostami directed The Wind Will Carry Us in 1999, which won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival. The film contrasted rural and urban views on the dignity of labor, addressing themes of gender equality and the benefits of progress, by means of a stranger's sojourn in a remote Kurdish village. An unusual feature of the movie is that many of the characters are heard but not seen; at least thirteen to fourteen speaking characters in the film are never seen.

2000s
In 2000, at the San Francisco Film Festival award ceremony, Kiarostami was awarded the Akira Kurosawa Prize for lifetime achievement in directing, but surprised everyone by giving it away to veteran Iranian actor Behrooz Vossoughi for his contribution to Iranian cinema.

In 2001, Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, traveled to Kampala, Uganda at the request of the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development, to film a documentary about programs assisting Ugandan orphans. He stayed for ten days and made ABC Africa. The trip was originally intended as research in preparation for the filming, but Kiarostami ended up editing the entire film from the video footage shot there. The high number of orphans in Uganda has resulted from the deaths of parents in the AIDS epidemic.

Time Out editor and National Film Theatre chief programmer, Geoff Andrew, said in referring to the film: "Like his previous four features, this film is not about death but life-and-death: how they're linked, and what attitude we might adopt with regard to their symbiotic inevitability."

The following year, Kiarostami directed Ten, revealing an unusual method of filmmaking and abandoning many scriptwriting conventions. Kiarostami focused on the socio-political landscape of Iran. The images are seen through the eyes of one woman as she drives through the streets of Tehran over a period of several days. Her journey is composed of ten conversations with various passengers, which include her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute, and a jilted bride and her demanding young son. This style of filmmaking was praised by a number of critics.

A. O. Scott in The New York Times wrote that Kiarostami, "in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema...He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk."

In 2003, Kiarostami directed Five, a poetic feature with no dialogue or characterization. It consists of five long shots of nature which are single-take sequences, shot with a hand-held DV camera, along the shores of the Caspian Sea. Although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is "more than just pretty pictures". He adds, "Assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration."He notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery.

In 2005, Kiarostami contributed the central section to Tickets, a portmanteau film set on a train traveling through Italy. The other segments were directed by Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi.

In 2008, Kiarostami directed the feature Shirin, which features close-ups of many notable Iranian actresses and the French actress Juliette Binoche as they watch a film based on a partly mythological Persian romance tale of Khosrow and Shirin, with themes of female self-sacrifice. The film has been described as "a compelling exploration of the relationship between image, sound and female spectatorship."

That summer, he directed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Così fan tutte conducted by Christophe Rousset at Festival d'Aix-en-Provence starring with William Shimell. But the following year's performances at the English National Opera was impossible to direct because of refusal of permission to travel abroad.

2010s

Certified Copy (2010), again starring Juliette Binoche, was made in Tuscany and was Kiarostami's first film to be shot and produced outside Iran. The story of an encounter between a British man and a French woman, it was entered in competition for the Palme d'Or in the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian describes the film as an "intriguing oddity", and said, "Certified Copy is the deconstructed portrait of a marriage, acted with well-intentioned fervour by Juliette Binoche, but persistently baffling, contrived, and often simply bizarre – a highbrow misfire of the most peculiar sort." He concluded that the film is "unmistakably an example of Kiarostami's compositional technique, though not a successful example." Roger Ebert, however, praised the film, noting that "Kiarostami is rather brilliant in the way he creates offscreen spaces." Binoche won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance in the film. Kiarostami's penultimate film, Like Someone in Love, set and shot in Japan, received largely positive reviews from critics.

Kiarostami's final film 24 Frames was released posthumously in 2017. An experimental film based on 24 of Kiarostami's still photographs, 24 Frames enjoyed a highly positive critical reception, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 92%.

Film festival work
Kiarostami was a jury member at numerous film festivals, most notably the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, 2002 and 2005. He was also the president of the Caméra d'Or Jury in Cannes Film Festival 2005. He was announced as the president of the Cinéfondation and short film sections of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

Other representatives include the Venice Film Festival in 1985, the Locarno International Film Festival in 1990, the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 1996, the São Paulo International Film Festival in 2004, the Capalbio Cinema Festival in 2007 (in which he was president of the jury), and the Küstendorf Film and Music Festival in 2011. He also made regular appearances at many other film festivals across Europe, including the Estoril Film Festival in Portugal.

Individualism
Though Kiarostami has been compared to Satyajit Ray, Vittorio De Sica, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Tati, his films exhibit a singular style, often employing techniques of his own invention.

During the filming of The Bread and Alley in 1970, Kiarostami had major differences with his experienced cinematographer about how to film the boy and the attacking dog. While the cinematographer wanted separate shots of the boy approaching, a close-up of his hand as he enters the house and closes the door, followed by a shot of the dog, Kiarostami believed that if the three scenes could be captured as a whole it would have a more profound impact in creating tension over the situation. That one shot took around forty days to complete until Kiarostami was fully content with the scene. Kiarostami later commented that the breaking of scenes would have disrupted the rhythm and content of the film's structure, preferring to let the scene flow as one.

Unlike other directors, Kiarostami showed no interest in staging extravagant combat scenes or complicated chase scenes in large-scale productions, instead of attempting to mold the medium of film to his own specifications. Kiarostami appeared to have settled on his style with the Koker trilogy, which included a myriad of references to his own film material, connecting common themes and subject matter between each of the films. Stephen Bransford has contended that Kiarostami's films do not contain references to the work of other directors, but are fashioned in such a manner that they are self-referenced. Bransford believes his films are often fashioned into an ongoing dialectic with one film reflecting on and partially demystifying an earlier film.

He continued experimenting with new modes of filming, using different directorial methods and techniques. A case in point is Ten, which was filmed in a moving automobile in which Kiarostami was not present. He gave suggestions to the actors about what to do, and a camera placed on the dashboard filmed them while they drove around Tehran. The camera was allowed to roll, capturing the faces of the people involved during their daily routine, using a series of extreme-close shots. Ten was an experiment that used digital cameras to virtually eliminate the director. This new direction towards a digital micro-cinema is defined as a micro-budget filmmaking practice, allied with a digital production basis.

Kiarostami's cinema offers a different definition of film. According to film professors such as Jamsheed Akrami of William Paterson University, Kiarostami consistently tried to redefine film by forcing the increased involvement of the audience. In his later years, he also progressively trimmed the timespan within his films. Akrami thinks that this reduces filmmaking from a collective endeavor to a purer, more basic form of artistic expression.

Fiction and non-fiction
Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often a mix of fictional and documentary elements (docufiction). Kiarostami has stated, "We can never get close to the truth except through lying."

The boundary between fiction and non-fiction is significantly reduced in Kiarostami's cinema. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, writing about Kiarostami, and in particular Life and Nothing More..., has argued that his films are neither quite fiction nor quite documentary. Life and Nothing More..., he argues, is neither representation nor reportage, but rather "evidence": "[I]t all looks like reporting, but everything underscores (indique à l'évidence) that it is the fiction of a documentary (in fact, Kiarostami shot the film several months after the earthquake), and that it is rather a document about 'fiction': not in the sense of imagining the unreal, but in the very specific and precise sense of the technique, of the art of constructing images. For the image by means of which, each time, each opens a world and precedes himself in it (s'y précède) is not pregiven (donnée toute faite) (as are those of dreams, phantasms or bad films): it is to be invented, cut and edited. Thus it is evidence, insofar as, if one day I happen to look at my street on which I walk up and down ten times a day, I construct for an instant a new evidence of my street."

For Jean-Luc Nancy, this notion of cinema as "evidence", rather than as documentary or imagination, is tied to the way Kiarostami deals with life-and-death (cf. the remark by Geoff Andrew on ABC Africa, cited above, to the effect that Kiarostami's films are not about death but about life-and-death): "Existence resists the indifference of life-and-death, it lives beyond mechanical 'life,' it is always its own mourning, and its own joy. It becomes figure, image. It does not become alienated in images, but it is presented there: the images are the evidence of its existence, the objectivity of its assertion. This thought—which, for me, is the very thought of this film [Life and Nothing More...]—is a difficult thought, perhaps the most difficult. It's a slow thought, always underway, fraying a path so that the path itself becomes thought. It is that which frays images so that images become this thought, so that they become the evidence of this thought—and not to 'represent' it."

In other words, wanting to accomplish more than just represent life and death as opposing forces, but rather to illustrate the way in which each element of nature is inextricably linked, Kiarostami devised a cinema that does more than just present the viewer with the documentable "facts," but neither is it simply a matter of artifice. Because "existence" means more than simply life, it is projective, containing an irreducibly fictive element, but in this "being more than" life, it is therefore contaminated by mortality. Nancy is giving a clue, in other words, toward the interpretation of Kiarostami's statement that lying is the only way to truth.

Themes of life and death
The concepts of change and continuity, in addition to the themes of life and death, play a major role in Kiarostami's works. In the Koker trilogy, these themes play a central role. As illustrated in the aftermath of the 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake disaster, they also represent the power of human resilience to overcome and defy destruction.

Unlike the Koker films, which convey an instinctual thirst for survival, Taste of Cherry explores the fragility of life and focuses on how precious it is.

Some film critics believe that the assemblage of light versus dark scenes in Kiarostami's film grammar, such as in Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us, suggests the mutual existence of life with its endless possibilities, and death as a factual moment of anyone's life.

Poetry and imagery
Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, of the University of Maryland, argues that one aspect of Kiarostami's cinematic style is that he is able to capture the essence of Persian poetry and create poetic imagery within the landscape of his films. In several of his movies such as Where is the Friend's Home and The Wind Will Carry Us, classical Persian poetry is directly quoted in the film, highlighting the artistic link and intimate connection between them. This in turn reflects on the connection between the past and present, between continuity and change. The characters recite poems mainly from classical Persian poet Omar Khayyám or modern Persian poets such as Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad. One scene in The Wind Will Carry Us has a long shot of a wheat field with rippling golden crops through which the doctor, accompanied by the filmmaker, is riding his scooter in a twisting road. In response to the comment that the other world is a better place than this one, the doctor recites this poem of Khayyam:

They promise of houries in heaven But I would say wine is better Take the present to the promises A drum sounds melodious from distance

It has been argued that the creative merit of Kiarostami's adaptation of Sohrab Sepehri and Forough Farrokhzad's poems extends the domain of textual transformation. Adaptation is defined as the transformation of a prior to a new text. Sima Daad of the University of Washington contends that Kiarostami's adaptation arrives at the theoretical realm of adaptation by expanding its limit from inter-textual potential to trans-generic potential.

Spirituality
Kiarostami's "complex" sound-images and philosophical approach have caused frequent comparisons with "mystical" filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson. While acknowledging substantial cultural differences, much of Western critical writing about Kiarostami positions him as the Iranian equivalent of such directors, by virtue of a similarly austere, "spiritual" poetics and moral commitment. Some draw parallels between certain imagery in Kiarostami's films with that of Sufi concepts.

While most English-language writers, such as David Sterritt and the Spanish film professor Alberto Elena, interpret Kiarostami's films as spiritual, other critics, including David Walsh and Hamish Ford, have rated the influence of spirituality in his films as lower.

Poetry, art and photography
Kiarostami, along with Jean Cocteau, Satyajit Ray, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Derek Jarman, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, was a filmmaker who expressed himself in other genres, such as poetry, set designs, painting, or photography. They expressed their interpretation of the world and their understanding of our preoccupations and identities.

Kiarostami was a noted photographer and poet. A bilingual collection of more than 200 of his poems, Walking with the Wind, was published by Harvard University Press. His photographic work includes Untitled Photographs, a collection of over thirty photographs, mostly of snow landscapes, taken in his hometown Tehran, between 1978 and 2003. In 1999, he also published a collection of his poems. Kiarostami also produced Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, which premiered in Aix-en-Provence in 2003 before being performed at the English National Opera in London in 2004.

Riccardo Zipoli, from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, has studied the relations and interconnections between Kiarostami's poems and his films. The results of the analysis reveal how Kiarostami's treatment of "uncertain reality" is similar in his poems and films.

Kiarostami's poetry is reminiscent of the later nature poems of the Persian painter-poet Sohrab Sepehri. On the other hand, the succinct allusion to philosophical truths without the need for deliberation, the non-judgmental tone of the poetic voice, and the structure of the poem—absence of personal pronouns, adverbs, or over-reliance on adjectives—as well as the lines containing a kigo (季語, a "season word") gives much of this poetry a haikuesque characteristic.

Kiarostami's three volumes of original verse, plus his selections from classical and contemporary Persian poets, including Nima, Hafez, Rumi and Saadi, were translated into English in 2015 and were published in bilingual (Persian/English) editions by Sticking Place Books in New York.

Personal life
In 1969, Kiarostami married Parvin Amir-Gholi. They had two sons, Ahmad and Bahman. They divorced in 1982.

Kiarostami was one of the few directors who remained in Iran after the 1979 revolution, when many of his peers fled the country. He believes that it was one of the most important decisions of his career. His permanent base in Iran and his national identity have consolidated his ability as a filmmaker: When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground and transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit. And if it does, the fruit will not be as good as it was in its original place. This is a rule of nature. I think if I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree.

Kiarostami frequently wore dark spectacles or sunglasses, which he required because of a sensitivity to light.

Illness and death
In March 2016, Kiarostami was hospitalized due to intestinal bleeding and reportedly went into a coma after undergoing two operations. Sources, including a Ministry of Health and Medical Education spokesman, reported that Kiarostami was suffering from gastrointestinal cancer. On 3 April 2016, Reza Paydar, the director of Kiarostami's medical team, made a statement denying that the filmmaker had cancer. However, in late June he left Iran for treatment in a Paris hospital, where he died on 4 July 2016. The week before his death, Kiarostami had been invited to join the Academy Awards in Hollywood as part of efforts to increase the diversity of its Oscar judges. Ali Ahani, Iran's ambassador to France stated that Kiarostami's body would be transferred to Iran to be buried at Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. However, it was later announced that his body would be buried in Lavasan, a resort town about 40 km northeast of Tehran, based on his own will, after it was flown back to Tehran from Paris. His body was returned to Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on 8 July 2016, while a crowd of Iranian film directors, actors, actresses and other artists were in Tehran airport to pay their respects.

Mohammad Shirvani, a fellow filmmaker and close friend, quoted Kiarostami on his Facebook wall on 8 June 2016: "I do not believe I could stand and direct any more films. They [the medical team] destroyed it [his digestive system]." After this comment, a campaign was set up by Iranians on both Twitter and Facebook to investigate the possibility of medical error during Kiarostami's procedure. However, Ahmad Kiarostami, his eldest son, denied any medical error in his father's treatment after Shirvani's comment and said that his father's health was no cause for alarm. After Kiarostami's death, Head of the Iranian Medical Council Dr. Alireza Zali sent a letter to his French counterpart, Patrick Bouet, urging him to send Kiarostami's medical file to Iran for further investigation. Nine days after Kiarostami's death, on 13 July 2016, his family issued a formal complaint of medical maltreatment through Kiarostami's personal doctor. Dariush Mehrjui, another famous Iranian cinema director, also criticized the medical team that treated Kiarostami and demanded legal action.

Reactions
Martin Scorsese said he was "deeply shocked and saddened" by the news. Oscar-winning Iranian film-maker Asghar Farhadi – who had been due to fly to Paris to visit his friend – said he was "very sad, in total shock". Mohsen Makhmalbaf echoed the sentiment, saying Iran's cinema owes its global reputation to his fellow director, but that this visibility did not translate into greater visibility for his work in his homeland. "Kiarostami gave the Iranian cinema the international credibility that it has today," he told The Guardian. "But his films were unfortunately not seen as much in Iran. He changed the world's cinema; he freshened it and humanized it in contrast with Hollywood's rough version." Persian mystic and poet Jalal al-Din Rumi's 22nd niece Esin Celebi also expressed her condolences over the demise of Kiarostami in a separate message. Iran's representative office at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO also opened a memorial book for signature to honour Kiarostami.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Twitter that the director's "different and profound attitude towards life and his invitation to peace and friendship" would be a "lasting achievement." Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif also said Kiarostami's death was a loss for international cinema. In a statement, French President François Hollande praised the director for forging "close artistic ties and deep friendships" with France.

Media, such as The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Independent, Associated Press, Euronews and Le Monde also reacted to Kiarostami's death. The New York Times wrote: "Abbas Kiarostami, Acclaimed Iranian Filmmaker, Dies at 76" and Peter Bradshaw paid tribute to Kiarostami: "a sophisticated, self-possessed master of cinematic poetry"

The crowd that had gathered for this service in Paris held a vigil by the River Seine. They then allowed the waves of the Seine to carry away photos of Kiarostami that the crowd had left floating on the river. It was a symbolic moment of saying goodbye to a film director that many Iranians have come to passionately appreciate.

Funeral
Artists, cultural authorities, government officials, and the Iranian people gathered to say goodbye to Kiarostami on 10 July in an emotional funeral, six days after his death in France. The ceremony was held at the Center for the Intellectual Education of Children, where he began his film-making career some 40 years before. Attendees held banners with the titles of his movies and pictures of his most famous posters, as they praised the support Kiarostami contributed to culture, and particularly to filmmaking in Iran. The ceremony was hosted by famous Iranian actor Parviz Parastooie, and included speeches by painter Aidin Aghdashlou and prize-winning film director Asghar Farhadi, who stressed his professional abilities. He was later buried in a private ceremony in the northern Tehran town of Lavasan.

Sexual assault and plagiarism allegations
In August 2020, Mania Akbari, who starred in Ten, accused Kiarostami of plagiarism, stating that he edited private footage shot by Akbari into the film without her permission. In her 2019 short film Letter to My Mother, Amina Maher, daughter of Akbari, who also appeared in Ten, said that her scenes in Ten were filmed without her knowledge. In 2022, Akbari and Maher revealed that they had been asking distributor MK2 (company) to halt circulation of the film, to which MK2 has yet to respond. Consequently, the British Film Institute removed Ten from a Kiarostami retrospective.

In 2022, Akbari accused Kiarostami of raping her twice, in Tehran when she was 25 and he was about 60, and in London after Ten had premiered.

Reception and criticism
Kiarostami has received worldwide acclaim for his work from both audiences and critics, and, in 1999, he was voted the most important Iranian film director of the 1990s by two international critics' polls. Four of his films were placed in the top six of Cinematheque Ontario's Best of the '90s poll. He has gained recognition from film theorists, critics, as well as peers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Nanni Moretti, and Chris Marker. Akira Kurosawa said of Kiarostami's films: "Words cannot describe my feelings about them ... When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami's films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place." Critically acclaimed directors such as Martin Scorsese have commented that "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." The Austrian director Michael Haneke had admired the work of Abbas Kiarostami as among the best of any living director. In 2006, The Guardian's panel of critics ranked Kiarostami as the best contemporary non-American film director.

Critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum have argued that "there's no getting around the fact that the movies of Abbas Kiarostami divide audiences—in this country, in his native Iran, and everywhere else they're shown." Rosenbaum argues that disagreements and controversy over Kiarostami's movies have arisen from his style of film-making because what in Hollywood would count as essential narrative information is frequently missing from Kiarostami's films. Camera placement, likewise, often defies standard audience expectations: in the closing sequences of Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees, the audience is forced to imagine the dialogue and circumstances of important scenes. In Homework and Close-Up, parts of the soundtrack are masked or silenced. Critics have argued that the subtlety of Kiarostami's cinematic expression is largely resistant to critical analysis.

While Kiarostami has won significant acclaim in Europe for several of his films, the Iranian government has refused to permit the screening of his films, to which he responded "The government has decided not to show any of my films for the past 10 years... I think they don't understand my films and so prevent them being shown just in case there is a message they don't want to get out".

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Kiarostami was refused a visa to attend the New York Film Festival. The festival director, Richard Peña, who had invited him said, "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world". The Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki boycotted the festival in protest. Kiarostami had been invited by the New York Film Festival, as well as Ohio University and Harvard University.

In 2005, London Film School organized a workshop as well as the festival of Kiarostami's work, titled "Abbas Kiarostami: Visions of the Artist". Ben Gibson, Director of the London Film School, said, "Very few people have the creative and intellectual clarity to invent cinema from its most basic elements, from the ground up. We are very lucky to have the chance to see a master like Kiarostami thinking on his feet." He was later made Honorary Associate.

In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 co-organized a festival of the Kiarostami's work titled Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker.

Kiarostami and his cinematic style have been the subject of several books and three films, Opening Day of Close-Up (1996), directed by Nanni Moretti, Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living (2003), directed by Pat Collins and Fergus Daly, and Abbas Kiarostami: A Report (2014), directed by Bahman Maghsoudlou.

Kiarostami was a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation. Founded by the director Martin Scorsese, its goal is to find and reconstruct world cinema films that have been long neglected.

Selected honors and awards
Kiarostami has won the admiration of audiences and critics worldwide and received at least seventy awards up to the year 2000. Here are some representatives:

 * Prix Roberto Rossellini (1992)
 * Prix Cine Decouvertes (1992)
 * François Truffaut Award (1993)
 * Pier Paolo Pasolini Award (1995)
 * Federico Fellini Gold Medal, UNESCO (1997)
 * Palme d'Or, Cannes Film Festival (1997)
 * Honorary Golden Alexander Prize, Thessaloniki International Film Festival (1999)
 * Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival (1999)
 * Akira Kurosawa Award (2000)
 * honorary doctorate, École Normale Supérieure (2003)
 * Konrad Wolf Prize (2003)
 * President of the Jury for Caméra d'Or Award, Cannes Festival (2005)
 * Fellowship of the British Film Institute (2005)
 * Gold Leopard of Honor, Locarno International Film Festival (2005)
 * Prix Henri-Langlois Prize (2006)
 * Honorary doctorate, University of Toulouse (2007)
 * World's great masters, Kolkata International Film Festival (2007)
 * Glory to the Filmmaker Award, Venice Film Festival (2008)
 * Honorary doctorate, University of Paris (2010)
 * Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to World Cinematography (BIAFF – Batumi International Art-house film Festival, 2010)
 * Japan's Medal of Honor (2013)
 * Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2014)
 * Honorary Golden Orange Prize, International Antalya Film Festival (2014)

Books by Kiarostami

 * Havres : French translation by Tayebeh Hashemi and Jean-Restom Nasser, ÉRÈS (PO&PSY); Bilingual edition (3 June 2010) ISBN 978-2-7492-1223-4.
 * Abbas Kiarostami: Cahiers du Cinéma Livres (24 October 1997) ISBN 2-86642-196-5.
 * Walking with the Wind (Voices and Visions in Film): English translation by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Michael C. Beard, Harvard Film Archive; Bilingual edition (28 February 2002) ISBN 0-674-00844-8.
 * 10 (ten): Cahiers du Cinéma Livres (5 September 2002) ISBN 2-86642-346-1.
 * With Nahal Tajadod and Jean-Claude Carrière Avec le vent: P.O.L. (5 May 2002) ISBN 2-86744-889-1.
 * Le vent nous emportera: Cahiers du Cinéma Livres (5 September 2002) ISBN 2-86642-347-X.
 * La Lettre du Cinema: P.O.L. (12 December 1997) ISBN 2-86744-589-2.
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, A Wolf on Watch (Persian / English dual language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2015)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, With the Wind (Persian / English dual language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2015)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, Wind and Leaf (Persian / English dual language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2015)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, Wine (poetry by Hafez) (Persian / English dual language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2015)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, Tears (poetry by Saadi) (Persian / English dual language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2015)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, Water (poetry by Nima) (Persian / English dual language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2015)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, Fire (poetry by Rumi) (four volumes) (Persian / English dual language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2016)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, Night: Poetry from the Contemporary Persian Canon (two volumes) (Persian / English Dual Language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2016)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, Night: Poetry from the Classical Persian Canon (two volumes) (Persian / English Dual Language), English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2016)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, In the Shadow of Trees: The Collected Poetry of Abbas Kiarostami, English Translation by Iman Tavassoly and Paul Cronin, Sticking Place Books (2016)
 * Kiarostami, Abbas, Lessons with Kiarostami (edited by Paul Cronin), Sticking Place Books (2015)
 * Mohammed Afkhami, Sussan Babaie, Venetia Porter, Natasha Morris. "Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art." Phaidon Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-7148-7352-7.

title: Abbas Kiarostami


text:
The Shooting Star

The Shooting Star (L'Étoile mystérieuse) is the tenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised daily in Le Soir, Belgium's leading francophone newspaper, from October 1941 to May 1942 amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin, who travels with his dog Snowy and friend Captain Haddock aboard a scientific expedition to the Arctic Ocean on an international race to find a meteorite that has fallen to the Earth.

The Shooting Star was a commercial success and was published in book form by Casterman shortly after its conclusion; the first Tintin volume to be originally published in the 62-page full-colour format. Hergé continued The Adventures of Tintin with The Secret of the Unicorn, while the series itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition. The Shooting Star has received a mixed critical reception and has been one of the more controversial installments in the series due to the perceived antisemitic portrayal of its villain. The story was adapted for both the 1957 Belvision animated series, Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, and for the 1991 animated series The Adventures of Tintin by Ellipse and Nelvana.

Synopsis
A giant meteoroid approaches the Earth, spotted from an observatory by Professor Decimus Phostle; he and a self-proclaimed prophet, Philippulus, predict that the meteoroid will hit Earth and cause the end of the world. The meteoroid misses Earth, but a fragment of it plunges into the Arctic Ocean. Phostle determines that the object is made of a new material which he names Phostlite, and arranges an expedition to find it with a crew of European scientists. Accompanied by Tintin and Snowy, their polar expedition ship, the Aurora, is helmed by Tintin's friend Captain Haddock. Meanwhile, another expedition is funded by the financier Mr. Bohlwinkel, with a team setting out aboard the polar expedition ship Peary; thus, Phostle's expedition becomes part of a race to land on the meteorite.

On the day of the Aurora's departure, Bohlwinkel has a henchman plant a stick of dynamite on the ship, but the dynamite is found and eventually thrown overboard. In one of the shipping lanes of the North Sea, the Aurora is almost rammed by another of Bohlwinkel's ships, but Haddock steers out of the way. Further setbacks occur when Aurora has to refuel at Iceland, going to the port of Akureyri, where Haddock is informed that the Golden Oil Company (which is owned by Bohlwinkel's bank and has a fuel monopoly) has no fuel available. He and Tintin then come across an old friend of his, Captain Chester, and Tintin comes up with a plan to trick Golden Oil into providing the fuel they need by secretly running a hose to Aurora from Chester's ship, Sirius. As they are getting closer to the Peary the Aurora receives an indistinct distress call from another ship and the crew agrees to alter their course to help; however, Tintin exposes that the distress signal is a decoy to delay them, and they resume the journey. The Aurora intercepts a cable announcing that the Peary expedition has reached the meteorite but not yet claimed it. While the Peary crew rows to the meteorite, Tintin uses the Aurora's seaplane to get to and parachute onto the meteorite and plant the expedition's flag, thus winning the race.

Tintin and Snowy (who followed on the plane) make camp on the meteorite while the Aurora's engines are repaired after developing trouble. The next day, he finds immense explosive mushrooms, and discovers that Phostlite accelerates growth: his apple core grows into a large tree while a maggot turns into a huge butterfly, and he and Snowy are menaced by a giant spider that escaped from his lunch box, before the seaplane arrives again. A sudden seaquake shakes the meteorite to its core and it starts sinking into the sea. Tintin gets himself, Snowy and a piece of Phostlite to the pilot of the seaplane in the plane's life raft, as the meteorite itself finally disappears into the sea. Thereafter, Bohlwinkel learns that he is expected to be tried for his crimes. As the Aurora returns home, Captain Haddock steers the ship toward land to refuel not with oil, but with whisky.

Background

Amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, Hergé became the founding editor of Le Soir Jeunesse, a children's supplement in Belgium's leading newspaper, Le Soir. Hergé's previous employer, the Catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle (which had originated The Adventures of Tintin through its own children's supplement, Le Petit Vingtième) was no longer allowed by the German authorities to continue publishing; Le Soir, in contrast, was allowed to stay open under the administrative control of the occupying military government. Le Soir Jeunesse serialized most of The Shooting Star 's immediate predecessor, The Crab with the Golden Claws, but ceased publication due to paper shortages in 1941. The Adventures of Tintin was then moved to Le Soir itself, where The Crab with the Golden Claws was concluded and the subsequent four Adventures (including The Shooting Star) were serialized.

During its initial serialization, The Shooting Star featured the United States as the primary antagonists; explaining this, Hergé asserted that the story revolved around the theme of "the rivalry for progress between Europe and the United States". Although not disliking Americans themselves, he had a strong disdain for American big business, and had exhibited anti-American themes in earlier works, in particular in Tintin in America. During serialisation of The Shooting Star, in December 1941, the U.S. entered the war on the side of the Allies, thus coming into direct conflict with Germany. All of the scientists featured were from Axis, neutral, or occupied countries which might be a reflection of the strip's anti-Allies political slant. Hergé biographer Harry Thompson stated this should not be interpreted as a strong anti-Ally bias, for the only two nation-states in Europe that were part of the Allies at that point were the Soviet Union and United Kingdom, and that the characters of Haddock and Chester were British.

As he had done for other Adventures of Tintin which featured sea travel, Hergé was careful to obtain as much data about ships as possible in order to make his portrayals more realistic. The design of the Aurora was based on the RRS William Scoresby, while that of the Peary was most likely based upon another Antarctic ship, the RRS Discovery. The seaplane on which the expedition travels was based on the German Arado 196-A. Hergé nevertheless later criticised his own efforts in this area, saying that if Aurora had been a real ship, it would probably be unseaworthy.

The Shooting Star shared plot similarities with The Chase of the Golden Meteor, a 1908 novel by pioneering French science-fiction writer Jules Verne. As in Hergé's story, Verne's novel features an expedition to the North Atlantic to find a meteorite fragment containing a new element. In both stories, the competing expedition teams were led by an eccentric professor and a Jewish banker, and Verne's novel had a Doktor Schultze to Hergé's Professor Schulze—both from the University of Jena. Hergé denied deliberately copying Verne's story, saying that he had only read one of the French novelist's works; it is possible that the influence from Verne came via Jacques Van Melkebeke, Hergé's friend and assistant, who was a fan of the genre. The Swedish expedition member Eric Björgenskjöld physically resembles a real person: Auguste Piccard, who later became Hergé's inspiration for Professor Calculus.

Antisemitism
Under Nazi control, Le Soir was publishing a variety of antisemitic articles, calling for the Jews to be further excluded from public life and describing them as racial enemies of the Belgian people. Hergé biographer Pierre Assouline noted that there was a "remarkable correlation" between the antisemitic nature of Le Soir editorials and The Shooting Star depiction of Jews. Within months of the story's publication, legislation was passed to collect and deport Jews from Belgium to Nazi concentration camps. Thus, The Shooting Star reflected trends in the Belgian political situation at the time. However, the story was not the first time that Hergé had adopted such a perspective in his work; he had recently provided illustrations for Robert de Vroyland's Fables, a number of which contained antisemitic stereotypes, reflecting the racism in much of de Vroyland's book. Similarly, his depiction of the character of Rastapopoulos, who was introduced in Tintin in America, has been cited as being based upon antisemitic stereotypes.

When The Shooting Star appeared in Le Soir, Hergé featured a gag in which two Jews hear the prophetic news that the end of the world is near. They rub their hands together in eagerness, and one comments: "Did you hear, Isaac? The end of the world! What if it's true?" The other responds: "Hey, hey, it vould be a gut ding, Solomon! I owe my suppliers 50,000 francs, and zis way I von't haf to pay vem!" Hergé omitted this scene from the collected edition.

The character of Blumenstein displays antisemitic stereotypes, such as having a bulbous nose and being an avaricious, manipulative businessman. Hergé later dismissed concerns over this Jewish caricature, saying "That was the style then". In his assessment of Franco-Belgian comics, Matthew Screech expressed the opinion that Blumenstein was an anti-American stereotype rather than an anti-Jewish one. Similarly, reporter and Tintin expert Michael Farr asserted that Blumenstein was "more parodied as a financier than Jew". Conversely, Lofficier and Lofficier asserted that both anti-Americanism and antisemitism were present, and that it is the United States and International Jewry who were the "ruthless opponents" of Tintin. Nazi apologists and revisionists such as French Holocaust denier Olivier Mathieu used The Shooting Star as evidence that Hergé was an antisemite with Nazi sympathies.

To graphic novel specialist Hugo Frey, the competing expeditions are presented as a simplistic race between good and evil, wherein Blumenstein displays the stereotypes of Jews held by advocates of the Jewish World Conspiracy presented in works such as the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Frey writes that Blumenstein's "large and bulbous nose ... rounded forehead, receding black hair, and small beady eyes" were stock antisemitic imagery in the 1930s and 1940s, as promoted by those such as journalist Édouard Drumont, whose antisemitic Paris-based newspaper La Libre Parole was influential in Brussels. According to Frey, Blumenstein's depiction as an overweight cigar-smoker reflected the antisemitic stereotype of Jews as being financially powerful, while he suggested that the scene in which Blumenstein learned that he was to be tracked down for his crimes recalled the contemporary roundup of Jews in Nazi Europe. Frey contrasts Hergé's complicity with the antisemites to the actions of other Belgians, such as those who struck against the Nazis at the Université libre de Bruxelles and those who risked their lives to hide Jews.

Publication

The Shooting Star was serialised daily in Le Soir from 20 October 1941 to 21 May 1942 in French under the title L'Étoile mystérieuse (The Mysterious Star). Tintin's previous adventure, The Crab with the Golden Claws, had been serialised weekly until the demise of Le Soir's children's supplement, Le Soir Jeunesse, before continuing daily in the main newspaper itself; the earlier serial had ended the day before The Shooting Star began. The Shooting Star was the first Tintin adventure to be serialised daily in its entirety. As with earlier Adventures of Tintin, the story was later serialised in France in the Catholic newspaper Cœurs Vaillants, where it first appeared on 6 June 1943.

On page 20 of the published book, Hergé included a cameo of the characters Thomson and Thompson and Quick & Flupke. The story also introduced Captain Chester, who is mentioned in later adventures, and Professor Cantonneau, who returns in The Seven Crystal Balls.

On 21 May 1942, The Shooting Star concluded serialisation. Less than a week later, the occupied government proclaimed that all Jews in Belgium would have to wear a yellow badge on their clothing, and in July the Gestapo began raids on Jewish premises, followed by deportations of Jews to Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, resulting in around 32,000 Belgian Jews being killed. Hergé later recalled: "I saw very few Jews wearing the yellow star, but finally, I did see some. They told me that some Jews were gone; that people had come for them and sent them away. I didn't want to believe it".

The earlier Tintin albums reproduced the newspaper strips, which had come to appear weekly in Thursday supplements, two-page allotments of three tiers to a page. War shortages reduced the space for the strip by a third, and later the supplements disappeared completely; the comic appeared daily in the main newspaper as a four-panel strip. For publication in book form, Casterman insisted that Hergé must adhere to a new album format of four sixteen-page signatures, which gave sixty-two pages of story plus a cover page. Though the format reduced the page count, it maintained the same amount of story by reducing the size of the panels reproduced. As The Shooting Star progressed, Hergé cut up and laid out clippings of the strip in an exercise book in preparation for the new layouts. It was the first volume of The Adventures of Tintin to be originally published in the 62-page full-colour format that thereafter was the series standard (as opposed to first being published in a black and white newspaper strip reproduction format that all prior books had done). Casterman published the album in September 1942. Unlike the previous books in the series, because it was printed immediately in colour, it did not need to be totally redrawn. The 177 daily strips from the original serialisation were not enough to fill the 62 pages Casterman had allotted, so Hergé added large panels, such as a half-page panel of a giant telescope on page three. Hergé wanted to include a small gold star inside the "o" of "Étoile" on the cover page, but Casterman refused, deeming it too expensive.

In 1954, Hergé began making various changes to the story for its re-publication. Aware of the controversy surrounding the depiction of Blumenstein, he renamed the character "Bohlwinkel", adopting this name from bollewinkel, a Brussels dialect term for a confectionery store. He later discovered that, by coincidence, Bohlwinkel was also a Jewish name. Trying to tone down the book's anti-American sentiment, he also changed the United States to a fictional South American nation called São Rico, replacing the U.S. flag flown by the Peary's crew with that of the fictional state. In 1959, Hergé made a new list of changes to be made to the artwork in The Shooting Star, which included altering Bohlwinkel's nose, but the changes were postponed and never made.

Adaptations
In 1957, the animation company Belvision Studios produced a string of colour adaptations based on Hergé's original comics, adapting eight of the Adventures into a series of daily five-minute episodes. The Shooting Star was the sixth to be adapted in the second animated series; it was directed by Ray Goossens and written by Greg, a well-known cartoonist who was to become editor-in-chief of Tintin magazine.

In 1991, a second animated series based upon The Adventures of Tintin was produced, this time as a collaboration between the French studio Ellipse and the Canadian animation company Nelvana. The Shooting Star was the eighth story to be adapted and was a single twenty-minute episode. Directed by Stéphane Bernasconi, the series has been praised for being "generally faithful" to the original comics, to the extent that the animation was directly adopted from Hergé's original panels. Bohlwinkel was tactfully kept nameless in the adaptation and his arrest is shown.

In 2010, American cartoonist Charles Burns authored X'ed Out, a graphic novel with a variety of allusions to The Adventures of Tintin. In one scene, the protagonist Nitnit discovers a warehouse containing white eggs with red spots, akin to the mushrooms in The Shooting Star, with the cover of Burns' book paying homage to Hergé. In 2015, the original front cover sketch of the book was sold for €2.5 million to a European investor, Marina David of Petits Papiers-Huberty-Breyne, at the Brussels Antiques and Fine Art Fair.

Critical analysis
Pierre Assouline remarked that Hergé's attention to accuracy lapsed in The Shooting Star. For instance, the meteorite's approach toward Earth caused a heat wave, while the meteorite itself proceeded to float on the surface of the ocean. In reality, no such heat wave would have been caused, while the meteorite would have plunged to the sea floor, causing a tsunami. He noted that the concept of madness was a recurring theme throughout the story, and that there was "an unreality in the whole adventure". Fellow biographer Benoît Peeters asserted that The Shooting Star was "of great power and brilliant construction". Elsewhere, Peeters wrote that the book was "notable for the entry of the fantastic into Hergé's work".

Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier deemed the antisemitism a "sad moment" in the series, awarding the story one out of five stars. Nevertheless, they felt that the "pre-apocalyptic ambiance is stark and believable", and that the giant mushrooms on the meteorite were a "strange anticipation" of the mushroom-clouds produced by the atomic bombings in 1945. Focusing on the characters of Professor Phostle and Philippulus, they asserted that both resembled Sophocles Sarcophagus from Cigars of the Pharaoh and that the former was "in the Jules Verne tradition" of eccentric professors. According to philosopher Pascal Bruckner, Tintin experts find Philippulus a caricature of Marshal of France Philippe Pétain, who demanded the French repent imaginary sins when he took power. Philippe Goddin stated that the strips for this story "kept the reader daily on tenterhooks in a story replete with new twists and humour".

Harry Thompson described The Shooting Star as "the most important of all Hergé's wartime stories", having "an air of bizarre fantasy" that was unlike his prior work. He observed that the character of Professor Phostle was a prototype for Professor Calculus, introduced later in the series. Michael Farr asserted that the apocalyptic setting of the story reflected the wartime mood in Europe. He characterises the opening pages of the story as being "unique in work for the feeling of foreboding they convey", adding that "Hergé daringly eschews the strip cartoonist's recognised means of denoting a dream, deliberately confusing the reader". He felt that the "flow of the narrative is less accomplished" than in other stories, with "spurts and rushes followed by slower passages, upsetting the rhythm and pace".

Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès psychoanalysed The Shooting Star, describing it as "the final attempt of the foundling [i.e. Tintin] to rid himself of the bastard [i.e. Haddock] and to preserve the integrity of his former values", pointing out that the first thirteen pages are devoted purely to the boy reporter. He also argued that Phostle and Philippus represent two-halves of "an ambivalent father figure" within the story, with the former prefiguring Calculus "more than any other previous character". He suggests that when hiding on the Aurora, Philippus can be compared to The Phantom of the Opera, as he steals a stick of dynamite and climbs up the ship's mast before threatening to detonate the weapon. Apostolidès believed that the shooting star itself is "more a religious mystery than a scientific one" and that Tintin is therefore "the perfect one to figure it out in some religious way—that is, unrealistically". Apostolidès analysed the political component of the story in terms of "the incarnation of unregulated capitalism against the spirit of European values", arguing that Hergé was adhering to "a utopian vision that, in 1942, smacks of pro-German propaganda".

Literary critic Tom McCarthy believed that The Shooting Star represents the apex of the "right-wing strain" in Hergé's work. He highlighted the instance in which Tintin impersonates God in order to give commands to Philippus as representing one of various occasions in The Adventures of Tintin where "sacred authority manifests itself largely as a voice, and commanding—or commandeering—that voice is what guarantees power". McCarthy further observes that the image of a giant spider in a ball of fire, which appears near the start of the story, reflects the theme of madness that is again present throughout the series. Discussing the political elements of Hergé's series, McCarthy also noted that in the original publication of the story, the spider which climbed in front of the observatory telescope and was thus magnified greatly was initially termed Aranea Fasciata; he saw this as an intentional satire of the threat to Europe posed by fascism.

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title: The Shooting Star