The House is Black
One of the Ten Best Films of 1997
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
The House is Black.
I mainly have to take it on faith that Forugh Farrokhzad
(1935-’87) is the greatest Iranian poet of the 20th century. My
involvement with her only film goes much deeper: after seeing this
22-minute 1962 documentary about a leper colony a few years ago at the
Locarno film festival, I resolved as a member of the New York film
festival’s selection committee to get it screened there, and finally
succeeded last year after agreeing to subtitle it in collaboration
with several Iranians. After premiering in New Y ork, the subtitled
print showed at the Film Center twice in early October on its way back
to the Swiss Cinematheque.
Thanks to my work on the film, I had plenty of opportunity to
experience the overwhelming poetry of Farrokhzad’s sounds and
images—including the extraordinary sound of her voice and the no
less remarkable configurations of her words in relation to he r sounds
and images—even if I could only appreciate the power of her written
poetry secondhand. But if the greatness of some films can be measured
by how much they change one’s view of the world, few have altered
mine as much as this precious work.
Perhaps the most formative film I saw as a child was Tod
Browning’s Freaks (1932): its view of deformity, which
combines compassion and horror, has been definitive for most of my
life. But The House Is Black, whose radical and poetic compass
ion for lepers eschews any sense of horror or voyeurism or
sentimentality, changed all that. Whether this vision is specifically
Iranian is a question I’m not equipped to answer. It’s worth
noting that when the film was made, its reception in Iran was far from
unanimously positive; given its subject matter, I doubt it could
comfortably enter the mainstream anywhere on earth. On the other
hand,I suspect that part of my attraction to Iranian and Taiwanese
films stems from their resistance to Western values, which implies
they have a great deal to teach me. An Iranian friend who loves The
House Is Black as much as I do told me that she didn’t much care
for Yang’s Taipei Story because it reminded her too much of
various Iranian films that inveig hed against westernization—which
implies in turn that national characteristics are merely one of the
many lenses we look through when we watch movies. With or without its
Iranian character, The House Is Black remains the most
successful fusion of cinema and poetry that I know. I suspect this is
true less for formal reasons than because of Farrokhzad’s
irreducible sureness in what she has to say.
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