Pardis Dabashi:
An Aesthetics of Humiliation: Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Art Cinema and the Visuality of Political Embarrassment
The history of Iran in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was in several salient respects a history of humiliation. Since the early nineteenth century, Iran had become a zone strategically negotiated over by the British, Russian, and eventually French empires, who were in mutual competition for power and influence in Central and West Asia, as well as control over Iranian oil. Neither officially colonized nor fully independent, Iran gradually became militarily and financially beholden above all to Britain, who, having ultimately succeeded in gaining majority ownership of Iran’s oil industry, collaborated in 1953 with the CIA to oust the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had momentarily succeeded in nationalizing it.
How, this paper asks, does the Iranian art cinema of the 1960s and 70s respond to this history of humiliation and defeat by external imperial projects? With a particular focus on Bahman Farmanara’s masterpiece Prince Ehtejab (1974), this paper examines how political humiliation was not only being explored in terms of content but also inscribed at the level of form. A film about a tubercular prince haunted by a sense of inadequacy and impotence relative to his wife and notoriously brutal grandfather, Prince Ehtejab folds a thematic examination of Iran’s history of monarchic humiliation into a meditation on the history and technical specificities of the cinematic medium itself. If to be humiliated, Farmanara suggests, means to be judged as performing poorly and under the pressure of that judgment not–as some theorists of shame argue–to revolt against one’s oppressors but instead to do petty and gratuitous violence toward the less powerful, then Prince Ehtejab suggests that the avant-garde response to this self-destructive feedback loop is to revel in formal excellence, to outperform it.