Narrative Structure in the Iranian Screenplay: An Analysis of Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman’

Neilan, Chris

Abstract

Since the emergence of Syd Field’s Screenplay in 1979 and the modern screenwriting gurus that followed, Western cinema has undergone a profound conventionalisation process, deifying the single protagonist quest narrative, with its roots in Aristotelian three-act structure and Campbell’s Monomyth (1993), to the exclusion of other equally valid narrative models. The result has been a homogenisation of meaning in Western cinema, and a preponderance of what Dancyger & Rush call ‘restorative three act structure’ (2002: 22), a comforting model rooted in determinism.

Iranian filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi demonstrate a mastery of the storytelling tropes that underpin the conventional Western models of narrative structure, however their stories often divert from and subvert that model, creating fundamentally different meanings at the narrative level. Farhadi’s films confound narrative expectation in a number of key ways, offering models of meaning-making unavailable to Western filmmakers who follow the restorative model. This feeling of difference, this essay argues, is to be found in the story shapes these filmmakers employ, and the meanings which those shapes create.
Through a deep analysis of Farhadi’s The Salesman (2016), this chapter reveals structural diversions underpinning significant works by the mentioned filmmakers, and through an analysis of the meanings created by these narrative shapes will suggest new structural models that Western filmmakers can use in order to divert from the conventional, restorative model.

Citation

Neilan, C. (in press). Narrative Structure in the Iranian Screenplay: An Analysis of Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman’. In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Screenplay Theory. Bloomsbury Publishing

• Deposit Date: May 4, 2025
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Screenplay Theory
• Keywords: screenwriting, Asghar Farhadi, Iranian cinema, narrative structure
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/4282239
• Contract Date: Jul 17, 2024