As a young man, Mr. Kiarostami studied painting and was an accomplished graphic designer.
More recently, Mr. Kiarostami has explored digital filmmaking, even comparing the use of a small digital camera to writing with a pen.
The setting is Tokyo, brooding sumptuously, and the filmmaker is Abbas Kiarostami, an Iranian by birth and nationality but a distinguished citizen of world cinema.
" Mr. Kiarostami then made "Through the Olive Trees" ("Zir-e darakhatan zeyton, " 1994), a love story based on a scene in "Life and Nothing More .
Creating an artful, oddly affecting hall of mirrors, Mr. Kiarostami filmed the actual trial of the imposter but also restaged events, casting some of the real-life participants.
One of the pleasures of exploring Mr. Kiarostami's career is noting the resonances between his films and the director's reshuffling of themes and motifs to new creative ends.
The defendant even compares himself to the protagonist of Mr. Kiarostami's "The Traveler" ("Mossafer, " 1974), about a boy so desperate to attend a soccer match that he steals and cheats.
Mr. Kiarostami neither sentimentalizes tradition nor glorifies modernity, but by the conclusion, when a bone floats down a river while goats graze amid flowers, wisdom accompanies the shock of poetry.
Mr. Kiarostami's most recent film, "Like Someone in Love" (2012), shot in Tokyo, will open in New York and Los Angeles on Feb. 15, to be followed by a national release.
The picture has a mournful, slow rhythm, rather like that of prayer or a stately ballad, and clearly Kiarostami is saying something about the value of putting down roots versus modern restlessness.
When last we saw the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, he was capturing the songs of Ugandan street children with his digital video camera, delighting in the portability and intimacy of the new technology.
"A Close-Up of Abbas Kiarostami, " opening on Friday at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, will offer an in-depth retrospective, from rare early shorts and features to more recent experimental films and elegant narratives.
Films from his "experimental period" include "ABC Africa" (2001), an impressionistic documentary about Ugandan orphans, and "Roads of Kiarostami" (2006), a meditation on the image of the road, a recurring motif in his films and landscape photography.
Making his first narrative feature outside Iran, the writer-director Abbas Kiarostami embraces the sensuous beauties of the Tuscan landscape and the freedom to show a man and a woman openly flirting, quarrelling, and possibly going to bed together.
The result is, in effect, a visual journal, with Kiarostami himself and his associate toting cameras and filming each other at work on location, as if to filter the report through an understanding of who he is and where he comes from.
"Taste of Cherry" closes with an astonishing, ambiguous nighttime scene in which lightning seems to battle literal and metaphorical darkness, followed by a coda in which we see Mr. Kiarostami and his crew at work on the film, signaling that although the story may have ended, the storyteller remains.
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