In Close-Up, what begins with a magazine story about a man who impersonates a well-known film director gradually becomes an unveiling of Kiarostami’s involvement in shaping the events and their filmic representation. In the process, the temporal seriality of one kind of adaptation collapses into a direct-cinema filming of events as they occur, while the doubleness of the imposture at the heart of the story dissolves with the protagonist’s discovery of a new sense of himself. One kind of authenticity yields to another, a response to a neo-realist surface giving way to a deeper grasp of the protagonist’s psychological embeddedness in a social reality where cinema can play an instrumental role. A feeling of authenticity becomes both a means and an end; it is first created by the rhetoric through which Kiarostami leads us into his world, yet it is finally assured by our acceptance of the vision he has worked to attain. Kiarostami disrupts authorship in Close-Up by undermining common expectations about authorial self-expression; authorial ownership and closure are subverted by the director’s engagement with his subject and his actors in a process of discovery, such that our sense of authenticity derives from recognition of the world of the film as that in which we live.