Images become cinema in “24 Frames,” the last movie from the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016). “I always wonder to what extent the artist aims to depict the reality of a scene,” he reveals in the opening text. “Painters capture only one frame of reality and nothing before or after it.” This wondering led him to digitally transform 24 still images into short, visually and thematically linked sequences that make up this alternately charming and frustrating labor of love, which he worked on during the final three years of his life. (It was completed under the supervision of one of his sons.)
It opens on the painting “Hunters in the Snow,” one in a series of seasonal landscapes by Pieter Bruegel the Elder dating from 1565. On the left side of the canvas, a group of men and dogs can be seen walking near people clustered close to a fire and a line of buildings; the right side of the painting shows a smattering of structures in the near distance and, beyond these, still more distant people skating and milling about on lakes of dark ice. Over the next few minutes, the painting begins to stir as smoke streams from a chimney, snow falls, a dog urinates against a tree and crows caw and fly.
The addition of these modest sounds and movements is intriguing but adds no insight and certainly no beauty to the Bruegel, which needs no such interventions. The rest of “24 Frames” is more appealing. It consists of 23 segments that turn Kiarostami’s own photographs, many in starkly beautiful black and white, into animations of about four and a half minutes. Filled with desolate vistas, a feathered and furred menagerie, and multiple aperture-like windows, these fragments quickly establish a moody tone and over time become dolorous refrains. Each section is divided by fades to black and individual titles (Frame 2, Frame 15) that create a kind of countdown effect.
A fine-art photographer as well as a filmmaker, Kiarostami could set your heart to leaping with cinematic landscapes that sometimes linger longer than his stories: a rough, dusty hill delineated by a zigzagging path in “Where Is My Friend’s House?”; two travelers motoring through a swaying field in “The Wind Will Carry Us.” It’s no surprise then that the images in “24 Frames” are consistently pretty and at times striking, harmoniously composed and filled with visual tension that make the shots vibrate even before something — birds, horses, an unfortunate deer or an opportunistically placed cat — starts moving in them. Many of the views are organized around an obvious center point, a leafless tree or bush, for instance, roughly set in a brilliantly white wintry expanse.
At other times, Kiarostami flattens the picture, turning it into a stack of horizontal wedges. In one frame, a slab of darkly brooding sky seems to loom down on a skeletal railing that runs across the shot, cleaving it in half. Beyond the railing, water (ocean, sea or lake) surges and, with a bird, gives the image a frisson of drama. Repeatedly, a movement — a bird raising its head, a horse its hooves — turns an image into a tidy narrative fragment. Every so often (a watery panorama with a balustrade, tall poles and complaining gulls), the compositions seem to nod at Yasujiro Ozu, the Japanese filmmaker to whom Kiarostami dedicated “Five” (2003), another experimental work.
“24 Frames” can’t help but be affecting because it is Kiarostami’s final movie. But it’s intellectually uninvolving, and its technical limitations prove frustrating. In a few shots, snow or rain falls, for instance, on the same left-to-right diagonal, creating a distracting pattern that suggests the software wasn’t altered for each photograph. This synthetic quality may be an intentional imitation of life; certainly it’s obvious that Kiarostami was thinking a great deal about cinema. Intriguingly, while winter and all it implies loom large here, they are gently offset by a glimpse of the film “The Best Years of Our Lives” playing on a computer as the sounds of a deeply unexpected love song fill a lonely room.