Exposition, Opening Scenes, Neo-Formalism, The Past, Asghar Farhadi

The screenplay’s opening scene is a significant part of the film`s narration, which reflects the screenwriter’s technique in setting off the story by shaping its opening scenes. This expressive method of the opening scenes and the exposition depend hugely on the screenwriter’s style, which shapes the conceptual aspects of the film. In a screenplay, opening scenes have a narrative and a visual aspect and thus make up the exposition’s main elements. The expression method used by the screenwriter to begin his narration creates various opening scenes. This research aims to study structural and narrative elements in addition to visual aspects or stylistic systems in the exposition and opening scenes that create concepts and meanings. In other words, the present research aims to highlight that expressive and visual elements could be analytical in screenwriting. Archival studies along with a descriptive/analytical method are used in our analysis. This study’s main issue is how expressive and semantic features of the exposition and the opening scenes are explained based on the study or by the stylistic and narrative system extracted from the Neo-Formalist approach. The theoretical framework is based on the Neo-Formalist approach, which examines the narrative and stylistic structures of the films. The stylistic system is related to all elements that form the image, which is called, as Thompson puts it, ‘cinematic material’ and includes mise-en-scène, graphics, sound, camera, and editing. To implement its theoretical findings into practice, this research studies the narrative structure of exposition and opening scenes in the screenplay of The Past (2009), written by Asghar Farhadi. The analysis of The Past indicates that exposition and opening scenes, due to stylistic and narrative system analysis, encompass meanings and an expressive function. And they can be analyzed separately. The analysis of The Past shows that the screenwriter can use most cinematic materials to create stylistic elements. Analysis of the work’s stylistic and narrative systems reveals specific characteristics of the writer’s style, which shows how Farhadi employs both systems to create an appropriate opening scene that serves to convey the story’s underlying themes. In The past, a specific implied meaning could be inferred through stylistic and narrative elements that originate from both stylistic and narrative systems.