Prince Ehtejab (Film)

1974. Dir: Bahman Farmanara.


Context:
Based on seminal novel by Houshang Golshiri.
Golshiri's novel is ostensibly set in the context of the decadent Qajar aristocracy (1789-1926)—as one ominous servant of the dynasty, Morad (Hossein Kasbian), keeps bringing to one of its last descen-dents, Prince Ehtejab (Jamshid Mashayekhi), the news of his cohorts dying, one after the other.
Farmanara's visual narration of the story gave a particularly poignant spin to its contemporary accent—all too evident in Golshiri's novel but far more pronounced in Farmanara's imagining of it. What is paramount in Farmanara's adaptation of Prince Ehtejab is the labyrinthine convolution of three generations of murderous decadence narrated and woven into each other. Memories of Prince Ehtejab's grandfather and father join his own translucent presence to form a multiplicity of successively degenerate reminiscences of each other, each engaged in one mode of murderous banality or another. [Dabashi, M&M]

"Heads chopped off and piled on each other to make a pyramid, that was the enduring memory of the Qajar dynasty—eyes gorged out, bodies torched, living human beings buried alive, young men castrated, young women raped, visionary government ministers like Amir Kabir murdered in the prime of their noble endeavors, corrupt politicians put to preside over the livelihood of defenseless people. The record of the Qajar dynasty was one of systematic abuse of a nation at large, overburdened with cruel and unusual punishment for the slightest transgression against the whimsical, sickly, and torrid reign of terror historically identified with foreign invasions and inbred tyranny. The savagery with which the Babi movement was suppressed during the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar was reminiscent of the legendary cruelties of the founding figure of the Qajar dynasty, Agha Muhammad Khan. The public rape and execution of young children who had dared to sing satirical songs ridiculing Agha Muhammad Khan while he laid siege to the city of Kerman led parents to hide their children in chimneys and between walls, covered with bricks and mortar for fear of their lives. Agha Muhammad Khan's generals would bring young people from Kerman to his court on top of a hill where he would have their ears cut off, their eyes gorged out, their throats slit, and their dead bodies tossed down the hill. Women were raped and murdered, children sold into slavery, men blinded and slaughtered. When Lotf Ali Khan Zand was brought to Agha Muhammad Khan, he had his servants sodomize him savagely and then blind him. None of these savageries were depicted in Golshiri or Farmanara's Prince Ehtejab. But all of them were at the forefront of its readers' and viewers' minds as they considered the sickly figure of Prince Ehtejab, brilliandy portrayed by Jamshid Mashayekhi in one of the legendary roles in Iranian cinema."

"The terror at the heart of Prince Ebtejab had both a local and a colonial genealogy. Iran's dynastic history concluded its medieval longevity with the Qajar monarchy, which coincided with the rise of colonial modernity in Iran. As Qajars terrorized us in our nightmares, colonial modernity robbed us of our historical agency—by suggesting the possibility of that agency in its modernity and yet ipso facto denying it by the colonial manner of delivering it. What this miraculously important film did for the restitution of Iran's historical agency was not limited to its grasp of historical despotism immediately beneath the surface of our collective unconscious; it was equally critical in confronting our systematic de-subjection in the face of colonial modernity."

"There is a cathartic release in the exercise, for it is as if both Golshiri and Farmanara take a mischievous, childlike pleasure in first identifying the source of a collective terror and then erasing it."


The Film:
Prince Ehtejab is tortured by the remembrance of his ancestral cruelties—the brutal asphyxiation of a disobedient family member on one occasion (his tied-up hands are used as an ashtray by the murderer prince), the massacre of a group of protestors in another. The ghostly character of his remembrances of things past assumes a generational depth and Prince Ehtejab traces the declining days of a decadent dynasty into the collective subconscious of a nation.

Prince Ehtejab is the iconic personification of two corrosive forces—congenital corruption and diseased memory—sitting in a dark dungeon of a room, compelled to remember that cruel history. (Almost a Borgesian touch?) Prince Ehtejab reeks in corruption and soaks in his memory of it, and by the time that Golshiri's pen and Farmanara's camera pay him a visit, the criminality in his blood is degenerating from a historically murderous tendency into an immediate and personally homicidal urge aimed at his wife and servant.

As suggested by his name, Prince Ehtejab is ostensibly impotent both sexually and politically. His wife, Fakhr al-Nisa, maintains an obvious moral and intellectual superiority over him, and as a result he much prefers the company of his servant girl, Fakhri, who is forced to accommodate the vulgarity of his dysfunctional sexual advances. He forces Fakhri to dress like his wife so that in her disguise he can claim to have a wife that, he knows all too well, he can actually never have.

As a psychoanalytical treatment of a historical trauma at the very core of our collective consciousness, Prince Ehtejab works through a simple suggestion of dream narration, in which the very act of telling the nightmare of the prince's memory structures its meaning and significance. Keep in mind that Prince Ehtejab is not a character but a persona, and as such he is a narrative device through whose memorial remembrances Golshiri and Farmanara tell this collective nightmare. Prince Ehtejab is both the narrator and the object of the narration, both the memory of the trauma he represents and the memorial evidence of his own testimony.

Golshiri's sinuous narrative, twisting and turning around its own insights, and Farmanara's tortuous imagery, probing the exterior of his set designs as if they were the labyrinth of his characters' consciousness, come together both to simulate that collective memory and make it visible.


Reception:
At the Tehran International Film Festival of 1974, Farmanara won the Grand Prix.

Houshang Golshiri (Culture/History)

1937/38?-2000.

One of the most gifted and influential writers of his time, Golshiri was born in Isfahan and raised in Abadan, and thus brought a fresh and unexpected vision to the Persian fiction of his time, which had become increasingly based in Tehran. Golshiri's family returned to Isfahan, where he finished high school, and where he went on to attend the University of Isfahan. Upon graduation, he began teaching at various elementary and high schools in the region. His increasing political activism landed him in jail in 1962. By the mid-1960s, Golshiri had published a potpourri of poems and short stories, and then was instrumental in establishing Jong-e Isfahan, a progressive literary journal that quickly moved to the vanguard of Iranian fiction. Between 1965 and 1973, Jong-e Isfahan was among the leading literary journals of the time, initiating some serious critical discussions about the nature and function of fiction.

Golshiri had begun writing fiction in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s his short stories and poems were appearing in various literary journals. His first collection of short stories, Mesl-e Hamisheh (As Always, 1968), announced a major literary voice—confident, defiant, with detailed attention to a range of prose and narrative techniques. But it was not until the publication of Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) that the Tehrani literary critics had to pay a visit to Isfahan. This novel was adapted into a film by Bahman Farmanara in 1974: see Prince Ehtejab.

Golshiri's second novel, Christine va Kid (Christine and the Kid, 1971), was not as critically acclaimed as Prince Ehtejab, but as an experiment in autobiographical narrative it was a tour de force of unparalleled daring and experimentation—staccato phrases, broken and unreliable memories, miniature-like narrative depictions, implication of the reader in the narrative, and many other similar tropes. His political activities then once again landed him in jail for about six months in 1973.

At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, Golshiri was active in organizing the famous "Ten Nights" of poetry and prose readings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran, a watershed of revolutionary mobilization against the Pahlavi regime. In the summer of 1978, he was invited to attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. While in the US he gave a series of lectures to Iranian students across the country.

Bahman Farmanara (Director)

Born: Tehran, 1942.

Raised and educated in Iran, Bahman Farmanara received his higher education at the London School of Music and Dramatic Arts and then at the University of Southern California. In 1966 he returned to Iran and began a career with the National Iranian Radio and Television. His first film was 'Nowruz and Caviar' (1971), a documentary about the famous Iranian delicacy and the poverty of its producers. His first feature film, 'Qamar Khanom's House' (1972), was a complete flop. Soon after that, Farmanara began working at a film production company financed by the royal family. But by 1974, he had quit that dubious distinction and directed Prince Ehtejab, based on the novel by Houshang Golshiri.

At the beginning of the revolution, Farmanara made another film based on Golshiri's story 'Tall Shadows of Wind' (1979). And after the revolution Farmanara moved to France and then to Canada, where he established a film distribution company. In the early 1990s, family matters brought him back to Iran, where he began teaching at the Tehran College of Cinema and Theater. By the end of the decade, Farmanara made a triumphant return to cinema with his wise, mature, confident, and caring Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (2000). Two years later, his House Built on Water created yet another storm of controversy with the censors.