Talk:Abbas Kiarostami

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Abbas Kiarostami article.
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Past discussions
  1. Archive 1
  2. Archive 2

Contents

[edit] Minor edits

I changed

  • life and death and change and continuity --> "life and death, along with change and continuity"
    • This isn't perfect, but otherwise it would be "life, death, change, and continuity".

Overall, a very comprehensive article which I enjoyed reading. I will make the following recommendations:

  • Merge the "Early life" and "Personal life" sections into a "Biography" section that should come first.
  • Cut down on the external links -- 3 to 5 will probably do.
  • I'd like to split out one of the longer sections, but it is difficult to say which one. Perhaps the Filmography section could be split out and made into a list along with synopses and images, like (for want of a better example) List of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.

I'll watch the page and make new comments as and when I can think of them. - Francis Tyers · 09:09, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More controverys info

Abbas caused controversy in his native Iran at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2005, when in accepting his award he exchanged kisses with French movie star Catherine Deneuve. The ordeal sparked a significant upset back at home, where such an action between an unmarried man and woman verges on a punishable crime. As a result Kiarostami chose to stay out of the country for several few months until the controversy settled down. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ernst Stavro Blofeld (talk • contribs) 14:26, 28 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Changes made according to peer reviews

  • Transliteration: The names of the films are all in English. So the problem you are refering to must be in names of people. There are some names that are used every where like director's name and we have to live with them (I used the names according to the common form in festivals and IMDb; e.g. Sohrab Shahid-Saless).
  • Main photo was replaced by a free one.
  • I tried to reduce the number of short paragraphs.
  • The order of the notes and secondary literature are now according to WP:LAYOUT.
  • I worked out the external links according to WP:EL.
  • I also tried to fix some misusage of coma and some grammer mistakes.

I will continue copyediting while looking forward to more comments and suggestions. Sangak 20:05, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GA review

First off, I'd like to note that, overall, I find the article deserving of GA status. However, it contains quite a few minor problems, which I'll discuss below. Some of these problems are unfortunately serious enough for me to place it on hold.

  1. The main issue: the "Fiction and non-fiction" and "Themes of life and death" sections contain many statements which may be construed as original research. You have several options here—rewrite some of it, provide more references or move some of the text to the talk page and think about it/mess with it a little.
  2. The article is very long. I'm mostly OK with it, but this will definitely raise objections during a Featured Article candidacy.

More minor problems:

  1. Please check all film names and make sure they conform to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (titles).
  2. Please add access dates to all web references—this is very important, particularly if you intend to go for FA.
  3. There are still some run-on sentences, such as the following, from "Individualism":
    According to film professors such as Jamsheed Akrami, Abbas Kiarostami unlike many other contemporary filmmakers has consistently attempted to redefine film and film medium by lowering its full definition and forcing audience's increased involvement. In recent years he has also progressively trimmed down the size of his films which Akrami believes reduces the film making experience from a collective endeavor to a purer, more basic form of artistic expression.[33]
  4. In "Poetry and photography", the paragraph on Riccardo Zipoli's paper is quite long, and, most importantly, lacks a citation to the work! :)
  5. It would be nice to make the text in "Secondary literature" small.
  6. A good round of copy editing would be a good idea before FAC.

It may not seem so from my comments, but this is an excellent article—so much so, it can get better :) Once these issues have been addressed, I'll have another look. Best wishes, Fvasconcellos 00:40, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

OK—after another round of edits by Sangak, I've re-read the article and found nearly all of the issues I raised to have been addressed. While there are still a few minor problems that a good copyedit would take care of, a few redundancies, etc., I believe this article does meet the GA criteria, and I am therefore passing it. Fvasconcellos 01:48, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Size of the article

I tried to trim the section on the cinematic style article. The original section was moved to a separate article. The size of the current article is 54 kb. This is quite OK in the acceptable range in FA assessment. Sangak 19:35, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Overlinking

First of all, congratulations on the promotion of this article: thoroughly deserved.

I hope you will, however, consider my remarks about excessive wiki links. Please see WP:CONTEXT. Looking at the pattern of linking in this article, I wonder whether the editors have really understood what the purpose of a link is meant to be: I almost get the impression that the links are used as a sort of highlighting device. But that's not what links are for. A good example is provided by the links to child and protagonist in "child protagonists"—obviously an important theme in AK's films. If there were an article on child protagonist, that would be a useful link; but a link telling us that a child is

the offspring, of any age, of two people, or an individual who has not yet reached puberty ...

isn't really very helpful: Wikipedia is not Wiktionary.

For some reason (perhaps the editing was by a different person) the greatest density of irrelevant links is in the lead and the Personal life section. I've mentioned some of the worst examples in my archived FAC Comment. In Personal life I noticed competition, painting, drawing and crayon. Later in the article there are links to prostitute, bride and sound. Any reader clicking on sound will learn that:

"Sound is a disturbance of mechanical energy that propagates through matter as a longitudinal wave. Sound is characterized by the properties of sound waves, which are frequency, wavelength, period, amplitude, and speed."

Fascinating stuff if you want to learn about physics; but not really relevant in the context of Kiarostami's film-making!

I'm not saying all this to be negative: I genuinely think the article would benefit from the removal of these links. It's a case of "less is more"—but don't just take my word for it: re-read that page on WP:CONTEXT. It may help you to become even better WP editors than you already clearly are. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 16:48, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I removed all those links. They were mostly added by copyeditors who reviewed the article. Sangak Talk 21:54, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
Also, the year in film links seem to be randomly peppered throughout, I'd lose those too. B movie is in WP:FAR for length and number of fair use images, it only had 17 at the time, yet this article has 19 and is half the size B movie was. I'd recommend cutting way back. And some wikilinks need disambiguating. Otherwise, it's some excellent work and I'm glad to see another quality director get the prestige treatment. Doctor Sunshine talk 19:11, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Much, much better now. I'm still not sure why poet, photographer and painter are all linked, though: these are commonly understood words, so nothing is gained by linking to them. I can just about see the justification for linking to graphic designer, which is perhaps less well-known. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:17, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Omar Khayyam

You'll find the FitzGerald translation I suggested in this Guardian article. It really is quite well known in English, so I think it would be preferable to the uninspiring version currently in the article.

You can find the original (Guyand kasān behesht bā hur xoshast) & translation at http://www.okonlife.com/poems/page1.htm. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:03, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

We have now four translations (including the one in the article + the one on the FAC page, Guardian, the other website). I was reading and thinking about them for some time now. I don't like any of them. The one in the article is not nice either. They've just destroyed the beauty in the original poem. Please change it with any one you like and also include the citation. Thanks. Sangak Talk 20:56, 5 March 2007 (UTC)


[edit] "Secondary literature"?

The list of "secondary literature" includes "Slavoj Žižek, Lacan: The Silent Partners (Wo Es War)." I'm not familiar with this book, but I am very vaguely familiar with Žižek. He can be amusing in small doses but I've never seen him say anything coherent and substantial about anything. This may of course be my failing (as might my utter inability to take Freud or Lacan seriously). Anyway, neither Žižek nor the book appears to be mentioned anywhere else in the article. What's it doing in this list? As it is, its mention looks uncomfortably like an undergrad's attempt to impress his or her teacher.

(Perhaps other items in the list of "secondary literature" are also unmentioned; I didn't check.) -- Hoary 02:27, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree (and you're probably right about other books in the list). --Mel Etitis (Talk) 10:35, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyedit

This article, or a portion of it, was copyedited by the League of Copyeditors in September 2007. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
  • Copyeditor(s): Gprince007 16:45, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Honors and awards section cleanup

I think that so many honors and awards (nearly 70) need not be listed.....i feel only the prominent 10-15 should suffice. Any thoughts??? Gprince007 06:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Prominency is a difficult thing to quantify.
At the best we could list the 10-20 awards which are the oldest established awards, or awards given by foreign juries, or something of the sort which makes them exceptional. Then put the rest on a separate page and link it.
Thats pretty common for Hollywood and Bollywood articles.xC | ☎ 20:29, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
One could make an additional entry, with such heading as "Awards received by Kiarostami". In this way the main entry on Kiarostami may directly refer to a limited number of awards, and for a complete list the readers are to be referred to the last-mentioned entry. Since Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, one must strive completeness; any selection, no matter how judicious, leads to incompleteness — the fact is, Kiarostami has been awarded all those awards and we should not be invoking the incorrect impression that he may have received only, say, 20 of those awards. Ultimately, such manipulation of facts (no matter how lofty the motivations) is a form of contrivance of historical facts, and we should not be in that business. The suggestion that the present list might be experienced as too long for a casual reader of the entry, is well taken however. --BF 10:08, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
The number of awards listed is ok as it is....there is a link to "the list of awards won by kiarostami" also which gives the complete list....so i guess we shd let the page be as it is....the present version of the awards section is pretty concise and easy to read...Gprince007 (talk) 11:44, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] youtube link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_links#Linking_to_YouTube.2C_Google_Video.2C_and_similar_sites Nothing here states that the "Persian Carpet" Youtube link cannot be on the page. I agree with User:BehnamFarid. Icarus of old (talk) 13:23, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I too will agree that the use of this link is acceptable. Perhaps if the link section becomes unnecessarily long there might be reason to remove it down the road, but for now it gives a reader an opportunity to sample his work. If articles on painters/photographers/designers, etc can have examples of their work and sound files (including especially music) can now be embedded, then surely external links to videos for those related artists should be used. Hell, even encouraged. SteveCoppock (talk) 16:14, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
While thanking the above individuals for support, just should like to add some remarks concerning that short clip which in my opinion just shows the true genius of Kiarostami. Firstly, any Iranian now alive (in particular those older than 30 years) knows the background music, not just as some music but as something that is integral to his or her being; the music is from the Golha series and the woman speaking is Roshanak. Secondly, the way the patterns of the carpet are shown are reminiscent of the way in which a small child views these patterns while playing on a carpet — most people that I have known, and this certainly applies to myself, has at some stage during their childhood played with a toy-car on a carpet, "driving" along the "roads" on a carpet (just think of all those flowers, trees and the birds, which a small child fantasises as representing real flowers, trees and birds in the course of its fanciful "driving"). We see that through a combination of a heavenly music and a specific way of filming, Kiarostami just transposes the viewers to their childhood. Interestingly, although the carpet in the film is beautiful, it is not an expensive one; in Farsi it is called a Khersak (a small bear) which is relatively inexpensive. Why this choice? one might ask. I suggest that it is because people do not use their most expensive carpets outdoors, say, during family picnics in their gardens. Consequently, by his specific choice Kiarostami has created yet another condition with which most people easily identify; use of a very expensive carpet would have just distracted for being unrealistic. I can certainly mention several more things (for instance about Hafez' Ghazal being read and its relationship to what Kiarostami displays), but suffice by saying that although throughout the film one sees moving shadows of tree leaves and branches on the carpet, Kiarostami never shows us any trees; when at the end he shows us the entire carpet, we only see the moving shadow of a tree covering the carpet. Didn't we all wish to see the tree itself? The more one thinks about Kiarostami's creations, the more one realises what a great master he really is in delving so deeply, and seemingly effortlessly, into the deepest recesses of human emotions and memories. Before closing, while writing this piece I discovered that there is already a Wikipedia entry concerning Golha. For the interested, I have now added an external link to this Golha entry through which one can listen to some original recordings of Golha. Kind regards, --BF 21:07, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
ps) Kiarostami's fascination with automotive cinema should be kept in mind; its appears that even in this short film he drives a car of sorts, with neither the car nor the driver in view. --BF 13:43, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_links#Linking_to_YouTube.2C_Google_Video.2C_and_similar_sites states that linking is fine as long as the links abide by the guidelines on WP:COPYRIGHT. WP:COPYRIGHT#Linking to copyrighted works states that "if you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work". I believe that the movie is copyrighted work and an external website (in this case youtube) is carrying the movie clip in violation of the creator's copyright. So thats why we shd not link to it. I suggest that we remove the link because it is copyright violation .....Gprince007 (talk) 08:51, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Dear Gprince007, you say that you believe, but where is your belief based on? What if I say that I do not believe in your beliefs? Moreover, YouTube can take care of itself. If you are concerned, you could always write to YouTube and tell them what your beliefs are and why (they have a service whereby people can write to them and tell them about whatever they wish). But until then, I insist on having the link where it is; I have made the link on the basis of good faith and I do not share your beliefs on the subject matter (I say this without implying that I must be right and you must be wrong — stated mildly, personally I am not sympathetic towards vigilantism, as I believe that we have already the institutions that enforce law and order; as responsible citizens we can always inform the law-enforcement agencies of our concerns and therefore should resist the temptation of taking the law in our own hands). We shall notice the changes in due course, if and when YouTube also believes that your belief on the subject matter conforms facts. Kind regards, --BF 10:27, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Pls dont take this issue personally....but we are writing an encyclopedic article here....and wikipedia takes its copyrights seriously. Pls read my above thread carefully and pls go thru WP:COPYRIGHT#Linking to copyrighted works carefully. It clearly states "if you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work". I have also deleted a huge discussion thread which was posted above becos wikipedia is not a forum to discuss personal views (see Wikipedia:Not#Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought). Just to be double sure i posted this youtube query at Wikipedia:MCQ#Youtube link to a video in Abbas_Kiarostami and the answer was to remove youtube link. Gprince007 (talk) 15:10, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Do whatever you wish to do, but not on my turf. What right have you got to delete my text on the talk page? You are not a morality police and must stop behaving like one here!!! You may do whatever you wish in the confines of your own home, but not here, which is a public space. I am free to write about whatever I like on Wikipedia talk pages so long as I do not cross the bounds prescribed by the laws restricting freedom of expression. No one has got the rights to apply censures here on what amounts to intellectual intercourse amongst people discussing arts and sciences. You seem even not to know the difference between a Wikipedia main entry and a Wikipedia talk page. Please stop crossing my path; I do not find such encounters very pleasant, so let us part in peace. --BF 18:12, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
As a member of WIPO and a signatory to its treaties, Iran's copyright laws must be respected internationally by other WIPO members, one of which is the United States, where this encyclopedia is hosted. As such, we cannot link to any site that is hosting Persian Carpet (or any other copyrighted work) without permission from the copyright holder. Without clear indication to the contrary, we have to assume that such permission has not been given to YouTube, therefore we cannot link to it. Sorry. -- Hux (talk) 20:41, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Dear Hux, I have never stated anything contrary to your statement. However, I object to the suggestion that the video on YouTube has been placed there in violation of copyright laws. If a person believes that this is not the case and that copyright laws have been violated, then that person should write to YouTube and raise the issue with them. So long as the video is on YouTube, I trust that it is there entirely lawfully (I am not aware of any indication to the contrary; a mere suggestion that something might be in violation of some law is not sufficient, not here and not elsewhere). So, may I request you to respect my position and do not remove the YouTube link until such time as the matter has been officially clarified by YouTube? Thank you. --BF 21:33, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
I agree - We cannot assume any such thing. The burden is not on Wiki editors to prove the content of an outside site is in violation of copyright law. The material is not posted on Wikipedia, so it is therefore not our concern. That would be akin to saying you won't listen to a radio station until it provides you with proof that they have permission of the copyright holders. As the host, the burden is on YouTube to give right's holders the means to challenge a perceived copyright trespass. Which they do. SteveCoppock (talk) 17:29, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Everyone who is supporting the use of the link is missing the point. We don't care what YouTube does about the link, for we are not YouTube. But the copyright policy on links makes it pretty blindingly clear that linking to copyright violations is prohibited. As for the video itself, the opening sequence identifies the production company as the Farabi Cinema Foundation, not some random guy with a YouTube account. Once it's pretty clear the uploader doesn't own the copyright, asking for proof the uploader didn't have permission is simply rediculous, as it's not actually possible. Indeed, the Wikimedia Foundation's system for determining whether previously copyrighted material hosted on Wikipedia was published with permission requires the exact opposite. The idea that a foundation-established policy can be sidestepped by linking to the violation is also rediculous, especially given the basis for our copyright policy (US law), which makes such linking a copyright violation unto itself. Someguy1221 (talk) 02:47, 13 April 2008 (UTC)