24 Frames, the final film of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, is an experimental endeavour consisting of 24 still images delicately extended into a feature length film. These images, mostly Kiarostami’s photographs, are stretched through animation and sound to capture their wider moments. Kiarostami died in 2016 and the film premiered this year, at Cannes, before coming to VIFF.
The film turns still images, which would normally persist on gallery walls or fridge doors, into fleeting moments with four and a half minute shelf lives. Once their time is up, they no longer remain in their frames but fade out from the screen and into the audience’s memory. For most of the frames, we do not know what the supposed original image was. In the first frame, we see a Pieter Bruegel painting (The Hunters in the Snow) and then the imagined scene that follows. However, for Kiarostami’s photographs you cannot be sure if the base image begins the sequence, ends it or falls somewhere in between. This further removes the vignettes from their source material, morphing something ephemeral into their very structure.
The fleetingness of these new moments is not only due to their limited screen time but also comes from what Kiarostami introduces into them. The frames are overwhelmed with fluttering birds, cows meandering by and dogs darting off. The weather is pronounced as well, with thick snow floating down, or sudden rainstorms striking or dark clouds passing. Then there are all those endless waves, crashing and receding. These manipulations build a rich atmosphere but also grow into a compendium of poetic ruminations on time, ethereality, and death.
The movement endowed to these images does not fully take over, though. Instead, it sits in contrast to a persisting stillness. We see this clearly in the Paris frame where pedestrians trickle past the foreground while a group of tourists remain still, clearly unedited from the original photograph, in the mid-ground. We are thus reminded that these are not films, shot to re-enact the photographs, but the photos themselves with movement added. This builds a spatiotemporal tension between stillness and movement, or perhaps between life and death.
This tension is felt within the spectator as well, at times surrendering to the images and other times wondering when they would move on. Even when you are enraptured by a frame, the eye oscillates between the stillness and the movement, watching rolling waves one second and a stone railing the next. Kiarostami even plays with our eyes, attracting us to some rambunctious crows in the bottom right of a frame and then sending a plane across the sky in the top left. This tension seems to be how Kiarostami makes good on his promise at the start of the film, to interrogate what artist see in a single moment. He questions what a moment is reduced to: is it still or moving, captured or constructed?
The film becomes more haunting than the images by its posthumous nature and the recurring representations of death. Moose run from a crackling gunshot; a deer is killed; birds are clutched in the jaws of wild dogs. Most strikingly, we have a frame of cut down logs with two trees left standing behind them. The logs remain unanimated and still, while the trees are allowed to twitch in the wind. When we hear a distant chainsaw and crackling trunks crash to the ground, we become increasingly aware that the moving, living trees in the background will soon join the still, dead logs in the foreground.
24 Frames is a rich film (I have not even attempted to tackle the final frame with a limited word count) but also a demanding one. However, if you can let its stillness win you over enough to revel in its delicate movement, it will be a rewarding film most of all.

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