An Analysis of the Relationship between Face and Ethics in Cinema within the Framework of the Immanuel LevinasCase Studies: Close-up and A Separation

The theoretical spheres of discussion, as to the often querulously argued issue of ethics are and have always been rather a matter of speculation than examination, i.e. usually encountering abstract problems more than the concrete ones. Examining the ethical regimes in the cinema is an instrument to approach the issue in a more pragmatic fashion that brings it out as something we involve daily. The present study is another step along this path, using one of Emmanuel Levinas’s best-known keywords, the Face, as its main ethical issue. To Levinas, what the Face represents is the ambiguous yet ethically explicit mean of an encounter between the self, or subject, and the “Other”. The Face is the very spot where the “Other” appears as an ethical command addressing the subject, while Levinas’s literature leaves us undecided whether it is some concrete issue, in terms of the physical face or another abstract notion. In this research, it is pointed out how the cinema did not recognize otherwise in an unethical way. It is also possible to conceive a relationship between the master and the slave between a powerful subject and “Other” in the cinematic image. Many films have such images that their ideological function is supposed to trigger a feeling. Here, the other person does not have a moral decree. The face is ideologically more important than anything else, and it makes the audience more active. It is influential on masses, and not the individuality of the audience. It affects the presence of the audience as one of the many that are desired. In this type of work, and especially in the scenes of events, the crowds of the crowd, although apparently present, have no faces, and the crowds of enemies are part of a massive story that reveals itself as evil. However thoughtful cinema does not consider the concept of “Other” and its filmmakers who do not have an ideological look. We test the idea by examining two famous movies of the Iranian Cinema, i.e. Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Close-Up’, and  Asghar Farhadi’s ‘ A Separation. The present study is to define clear specifications with the movies that comply more perfectly with the Levinas’s ideas are quite distinguished. This distinction, of course, contains the refusal as to assimilation of the “Otherness” in the strong influence of the Subject or Self and trying to start a conversation with the “Otherness”. The complication worsens when what Levinas calls the Third Party enters in the Subject-Other relationship and we are no more dealing with the “Other”, but the “Others” who are each Others to one another. Here begins the issue of justice and law, and also what we have tried to explore through the two movies in which we can find clear concerns about the relation of individuals to each other just as to the courts of law. This is how ethics could be more practically examined in our social life and the philosophical issues regarding ethics turn more accessible.