Abstract

Based on G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy, namely on his idea about modernity as a time of separations, but also on his writings about arts and tragedy — foremost the ones concerning the tragic character Antigone —, this article investigates the cinematographic operations undertaken by Persian director Asghar Farhadi in the film A separation (2011), winner of an Oscar and three prizes in the Berlin Film Festival. We understand, for this purpose, the work not as a continuity with a metarealistic and self-reflexive cinema typical of Iran in the 1990s, but rather as a rupture, a contemporary return to the tragic. This comeback, in spite of simply obeying the narrative schemes inherited from Greece, inserts itself in the domain of an art constructed by the distances and intervals founded by framing and montage. In this logic, beside from the immediate reference, a judicial conflict between a husband and a wife, the title’s “separation” is universalized, concerning also procedures between the individual and the nation, life and death, genre and class differences or, ultimately, audiovisual’s founding dialectics, the one between the audible and the visible.KeywordsAsghar Farhadi; Iranian Cinema; Tragedy; Hegel; Dialectics.