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‘I remember touch Pictures came with touch’ -Daft Punk, ‘Touch’   In the 1990s, three important pre post-reality films about identity, imitation, and grief came out: Steven Soderberg’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989-1990), Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue (1993) I saw the American indie film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape and the French-Polish art house Blue as a teenager I saw the Iranian docu-fiction, Close-Up, in 2012 All three films are definitively 90s movies to me All three films examine the line between reality and fiction, the enactment of roles, and the place and performance of identity Yet they are also concerned with veracity during a decade that had one last grasp on reality   In Close-Up, Hossain Sazbain, film-lover and devoted fan of the celebrated post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbāf, assumes the identity of the director When Sazbain’s ‘scam’ is discovered, he is put on trial for identity fraudulence A true story, Close-Up consists not simply of reenactment or accurate portrayal, but the representation and staging of truth in/as cinema In the film, the fourth wall is cracked open, so that reality and fiction, on-screen and off-screen, are spun from all directions, creating a seamless, interconnected effect that forecasts the digital age, where screens and performances run on continuous loop and no one is really anyone off-camera     For Sazbain everything is in a name Appellation alone produces identity and political freedom Like the beloved American idiot (an early incarnation of Forrest Gump) ‘Chance the Gardener’, who is mistaken for the upper class ‘Chauncey Gardiner’ in Hal Ashby’s American satire Being There, being does not require actually (real) being Sazbain’s being resides in the appropriation of a name that certifies cultural esteem and artistic invention Assuming someone else’s identity provides him with a role in life and an escape from a repressive political system However, Sazbain does not try to impersonate Makhmalbāf in any literal way, for he’s never actually seen or met him Instead Makhmalbāf