Asghar Farhadi's cinema within the context of interaction ritual: An analysis on The Salesman, About Elly and A Separation

In Iran, despite the oppressive regime in the country, cinema has been considered as a savior in enlightening the people. Directors have continued to produce even if they have been enduring heavy restrictions. To avoid censorship, allegoric narration has become the style preferred by the Iranian directors to narrate their stories and concerns. Since they have not been able to openly criticize the regime and the state, they have turned their lenses to ordinary stories of everyday life and complicated human relations, and thereby providing insightful observations on the country's sociological structure. In the mainstream Iranian cinema, dominant tendency has been to narrate didactic stories where an idealized typology is used to draw an individual who is conscionable, sensitive to follow the religious roles and chooses to do the good no matter what happens. The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, on the other hand, seeks to present characters and relations wherein individuals conflict with their own selves and beliefs, may choose the 'wrong' to protect his/her interest or status due to the pressures of the situation, and forced to present more than one and conflicting selves. He brings to the scene the conflicting sides of the relationships, damaged selves and confrontations embedded in dramatic stories. Farhadi is considered to be a very successful director in presenting the audience with profiles of ordinary people and their ordinary stories that we encounter in everyday life. With this particular quality, Farhadi's movies are woven with stories suitable to be read using the concepts and perspectives provided by Goffman's theoretical tool kit. When observed with Goffman's perspective, the fact that the ordinary characters of Farhadi are forced to perform a constant self and impression management causes the audience to question the events, situations and choices of the people who have been exposed to them. As the story develops, the audience may grow sympathy to the characters otherwise he or she detested in the very beginning. By giving every character an equal right to speak, Farhadi enables us to see them as a "humans of their situation." This experience emphasizes to the audience that the goodness and badness are contingent upon the situation as well as the answer to the question of who is good and who is bad are not easy to answer. Sociologist Erving Goffman argues for participant observation of individuals' everyday life as a method to reach the truth of social life. Goffman as a sociologist and Farhadi as a director both have similar thoughts and make similar conclusions in observing everyday life of the individuals. By emphasizing the fact that individuals engage in impression management and self-construction even in very ordinary moments, Goffman tries to show that self-identities are contingent and temporary. He takes interest in how these temporary self-identities are communicated to others and underlies that the only aim the person has in this relationship is the successful communication of the selves. Goffman's sociology seeks to investigate the interactions between individuals and the strategies they develop to achieve a successful self-presentation. Similar to Goffman's participant observation method, Farhadi too frames in on ordinary people's stories with all the dimensions surrounding them and tells us about their reactions and strategies. Taking advantage of these similarities, this thesis analyzes Farhadi's cinema from Goffman's perspective.