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.
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