The Analysis of Relation between “telling” and “other” in Abbas Kiarostami Cinema from the Perspective of Emmanuel Levinas’ Ideas

Through the confrontation between the two traditions of phenomenology and structuralism in the film critique, this study adopts Emanuel Levinas’ ideas to investigate the realization of ‘the Saying’ in Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema. Having examined Levinas’ approach to the concepts of Otherness and language, this study also demonstrates the ways through which the Cinematic Phenomenology seeks the notion of the irreducibility of the Individual to the Total through certain attitudes towards the film form and insistence on realism that also happens to be the main feature of Levinas’ philosophy. Such irreducibility, however, includes the irreducibility of the very subject too, in terms of its being appeared to be the Other’s Other. In the meantime, the struggle for realism in the phenomenological tradition of film has opened up the potentiality for the subject to be in crisis. As this study shows, the notion of ‘the Said’ has overwhelmed ‘the Saying’ in the first stage of Kiarostami’s carrier as a filmmaker while the latter Kiarostami reveals such strong elements
of ‘the Saying’ that the subject now may let the Other interpret independently and loom out as a collocutor to the degree that the existence of such subject faces crisis. This crisis in the latest stage of the Kiarostami Cinema could be read as the crisis of the Real as confused with the Unreal