Towards a Poetics of Childhood Ethics in Abbas Kiarostami’s Cinema

Abstract

Abbas Kiarostami set out his cinematic experience with works for children and about them. Despite the significant place this early phase of his oeuvre possesses in Iranian cinema, little has been done to analyze the ethical relations in these works. The major claim of this research project is that there are two major ethical conditions at the heart of the poetics of ethics in Kiarostami's films about children. In these films, children are either engaged in an act of care in order to fulfill their responsibility toward the other, or attempt to go beyond this “responsibility" by resisting and refusing the codes and laws of the “other" in order to reach a sense of individuality or singularity towards freedom. Both these seemingly opposed acts have a relation with what Emanuel Levinas calls “the encounter with alterity". This article will first attempt to offer a modern definition of ethics and will then investigate the claim that Kiarostami's cinema did not aim to suggest definite and absolute ethical statements but engaged the audience in the ethical questions it proposed. In other words, the article unfolds how the paradigms of this modern ethics is represented in the filmmaker's works, and subsequently illustrates children's role in relation to adults, families, and the educational system, and finally claims that children, encountered by the suppressive and indifferent world of grown-ups, keep finding a way to evade this dominant discourse – a way that may lead to victory or defeat.