INTERTEXTUALİTY İN ASGHAR FARHADİ’S THE SALESMAN

Farhadi’s The Salesman, which won the Best Screenplay award at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and the Best Foreign Language Film in the 89th Academy Awards, got universal acclaim and behooved for academic debates. The intertextual references in The Salesman optimized with the film’s explicit references to Arthur Miller’s drama play, The Death of a Salesman. However, the director, Asghar Farhadi, includes more subtle intertextual references to attract the audience to some masterpieces of art. This study introduces referenced sources to emphasize parallels between Farhadi’s film and other literary and artistic works to determine the central themes of the movie in order to evaluate the protagonist and antagonist’s actions thoroughly and accurately. Out of The Death of a Salesman, the film establishes intertextual relations with plays such as Hamlet by Shakespeare and Out at Sea by Slawomir Mrozek, “The Cow” —a short story—by Gholam-Hossein Saedi, Gilemard—a novel—by Bozorg Alavi, and movies such as Shame by Ingmar Bergman and The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola. These intertextual relations are the film’s central conflict that should be evaluated in the realm of the challenge between tradition and modernity. In addition, of course, various manifestations of such resistance are reflected in the facedown between the past and the future.