As part of the collective endeavor to explore the modalities and challenges of the narrative in the Persianate world, this article reconsiders Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), a film characterized by a special cinematographic feature. While accounting for what appears to be a story of swindling and identity theft, Kiarostami keeps the viewer in a state of uncertainty about the nature of what he sees, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, truth and lie, through particular narrative and cinematographic choices. Previous scholarship has focused mainly on the aesthetic implications of the staging and its effects on the viewer. The present study proposes a different type of analysis by discussing specific narrative devices from the perspective of cultural anthropology, with particular attention to the recurrence of the zāher/bāten paradigm, suggested as a cipher by Kiarostami himself early on in the film. The examination of the discursive and aesthetic mobilization of these notions brings to light a subtle game of back-and-forth between the desire to disclose deeper meanings and the will to preserve ambiguity and intimacy, allowing for “soft epiphanies” to arise.

Recently it has been demonstrated that there are differences between sheep and goats in respect to adaptation to a calcium-restricted diet. It was the aim of the present study to evaluate whether species-specific peculiarities also occur when calcium homoeostasis is challenged by lactation. Therefore, we investigated the time courses of plasma parameters related to calcium homoeostasis (calcium, phosphate, calcitriol, the bone resorption marker CrossLaps® and the bone formation marker osteocalcin) during the transition period in multiparous animals of both species and compared the results to data from a former study carried out with dairy cows. As in cows, plasma calcium and the ratio of bone formation to bone resorption decreased at parturition in goats while plasma calcitriol increased. On day 10 post partum the bone parameters of goats reached prepartum values again, which was not the case in cows. Sheep were found to experience a challenge of calcium homoeostasis already 10 d before parturition, reflected by a very low ratio of bone formation to bone resorption, which was not accompanied by an increase in plasma calcitriol. Additionally, sheep and goats which had been in milk for 3 months were sampled, dried-off and sampled again 6 weeks later. In dried-off animals there were no detectable differences in parameters of bone metabolism. In conclusion we could show that the contribution of bone mobilisation to the compensation for the enhanced calcium demand due to lactation differs between the three ruminant species.