An Analysis of Female Otherness in Asghar Farhadi’s Cinema from Emanuel Levinas’s Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the fundamental assumptions in the representation of women’s role in Farhadi’s cinema, by looking at the tradition of Iranian cinema and in the context of female otherness in the views and opinions of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s views have always been considered by many thinkers to be close to the traditional view about women. By looking at the works of Farhadi, one can look for a similar view in Farhadi’s cinema. Although Farhadi’s cinema is often associated with ideas about a modern representation of the Iranian woman, this analytical study will be controversial about how the male subject of his cinema confronts this aspect and how the woman is identified in these works as the victim and at the same time as the source and the beginning of creating problems. The results of this study show how much of the emphasis of today’s discourse in Iranian cinema on the victimization of women is itself an intervention in the construction of the image of women that the male intervening subject has created, and how Levinas’s approach can be a way out of this intervention and show a way of communication between the subject and the other that does not lead to the subject’s encroachment of the other