House is Black - Khaneh siah ast (Forough Faookhzad)

House is Black - Khaneh siah ast

Director: Forough Faookhzad

Duration: 00:21:58; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 82.772; Saturation: 0.030; Lightness: 0.416; Volume: 0.131; Cuts per Minute: 36.037

Essays by:
Doug Cummings, February 13th, 2005
Filmjourny.org
http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/2005/02/13/the-house-is-black/#more-529
“There is no shortage of ugliness in the world. If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more.”

Thus begins the narration in Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1962), a landmark short film (roughly 20 minutes) by one of Iran’s most venerated modern poets, a woman killed at the age of 32 in a car accident whose writing still permeates Iranian culture. (Her poem “The Wind Will Carry Us” is prominently featured in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 film of the same name.) In the 2001 book Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Hamid Dabashi cites The House is Black as the beginning of an adventurous decade of Iranian filmmaking that would culminate with Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow in 1969: “[The House is Black] must be considered by far the most significant film of the early 1960s, a film that with its poetic treatment of leprosy anticipated much that was to follow in Iranian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.” Mohsen Makhmalbaf has called it “the best Iranian film [to have] affected the contemporary Iranian cinema,” and in the liner notes of Facets Video’s new DVD (to be released on February 22), Chris Marker compares the film to Luis BuÒuel’s Las Hurdes.

Farrokhzad’s film may be a “poetic treatment of leprosy,” but it’s also a factual and clear-eyed documentary on the daily routines in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran. By confronting the gruesome effects of the disease on people, it gradually strips away the potential for shock and reveals the human souls beneath the physical symptoms, who are busy persevering, playing, learning, living.

One of the striking counterpoints to the film’s potentially depressing subject, and perhaps the element that gives it the greatest depth, is Farrokhzad’s narration, spoken in hushed, compassionate tones by the director herself. Its evocative language incorporates Koran quotes and Old Testament psalms and oscillates between thanksgiving for the beauty of creation and lamentations for physical suffering.

Farrokhzad’s opening shot is emblematic of her approach–a medium shot of a woman with leprosy with her face partially covered by a veil, the camera slowly and compassionately zooming in to a close-up of her reflection in a mirror. The viewer not only looks at the woman, but shares the woman’s gaze at herself, a mark of the film’s implicit empathy.

And Farrokhzad’s command of the medium continues throughout; though The House is Black is the only film she ever directed (other than a minor commercial), it is brilliantly rhythmic, cutting scenes together thematically and pictorially rather than spatially, and using natural sounds (a squeaky wheel, a bouncing ball, a man walking on crutches) to provide the meter for exceptional montage sequences. Her fluid tracking shots through the colony’s school rooms and prayer halls are graceful and observant, and she artfully punctuates them with everyday details–plants in the sun, drying dishes on a window sill, old shoes and bottles resting together.

Intercut with Farrokhzad’s narration is a male voice (perhaps the film’s producer) who provides objective facts about leprosy and its treatment; it’s contagious and not hereditary, nor is it incurable. “Leprosy goes with poverty.” And the film equally balances empathy with an emphasis on the scientific care needed to heal people as it compiles images of medical treatments and physical therapy.

Running times for the film vary depending on the informational source, but in his informative essay included with the DVD, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (who helped write the subtitles) cites the official length as 22 minutes and adds, “though it doesn’t appear to be quite complete–one abrupt edit looks like a censor’s cut, and a few stray details visible in some other versions are missing–this is the best version of the film available in North America.” The Facets DVD clocks in at roughly 15 minutes (and includes two Makhmalbaf shorts and a featurette on Farrokhzad), but also appears to have been struck from a PAL source, thus making it about 36 seconds shorter than the film print used.

This is undoubtedly a difficult film to watch, but it’s one that is all the more generous and compelling for being exactly that. Addressing her subject directly with a sensitive but unflinching gaze, Farrokhzad breaks through the repugnant aura that has often haunted victims of the disease and affirms their resilience and human beauty.

Hamid Dabashi (2007). "Forough Farrokhzad; The House is Black" in Hamid Dabashi, Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema. Mage Publishers, Washington, DC. pp. 39-70: ISBN 093421185X
http://www.amazon.ca/Masters-Masterpieces-Iranian-Cinema-Dabashi/dp/093421185X

Film reviews:
http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/classic/houseblack.shtml
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0336693/
-----------------------------------------------------------

Tabriz, Iran

The opening scene begins with a black screen. A solemn male voice begins narrating with punctuated sentences. We see no images. He is preparing us for something to come.:
"There is no shortage of ugliness in the world"
"If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more"
"But man is a problem solver"
"On this screen will appear an image of ugliness ... "
"a vision of pain no caring human being should ignore"
"To wipe out this ugliness and to relieve the victims..."
"is the motive of this film and the hope of its makers"
The black screen cuts into a back shot of a woman wearing a head dress gazing at a rectangular mirror hanging on the wall. We can only see the reflection of her face in the mirror, staring back at herself. Her face is clearly deformed, though only the upper part of her face is showing. Her left eye looks closed, while her right one is wide open, examining her own reflection in the mirror. The mirror stands over a shelve. Next to the mirror is a black tea pot, balancing the frame and taking some attention from the image of the woman in the mirror.
The camera zooms into the mirror image. We see clearly the intricate flowery decoration inscribed on one side of the mirror. We get a better look at the the deformed left eye of the woman. Her right eye wonders around and gazes down, as if thinking of something.
This is an incredable scene, invoking several issues pertaining to representation, empathy, suffering trauma and beauty.
On Authorship and trauma
Authorship is a process of archiving. We all write things in our own diaries, notebooks, on scrap paper, and on our computers. Documents and documents of unfinished ideas. These are all part of potential projects or translate into 'authored projects'. We also collect things that we think are special. It is sometimes a personal predicament to personalize things we collect, store and archive.
These things become part of us, of our lives, experiences and memories, sometimes even extensions or prosthesis of our own bodies. Archiving is part of our subjectivities, a process of giving giving significant meanings in our lives.
In this digital age of webblogs, facebooks, electronic archives, our names, information and work, has become easily accessed by others. Imagine googling your name and finding all kinds of strange websites referencing an article that you have written or work you have produced, giving new forms of meaning and new form of life to it. Imagine the shock of finding the first hit on your name on Campus watch. This made me think of the process of archiving as a form of trauma to the author, a traumatic event, which in fact threatens the integrity of the subject.
This opening scene made me think of several references, related to a discussion we had with the Pad.Ma team in Beirut about authorship and trauma. Even though our discussion aimed to interrogate the legal complexity of authorship and intellectual property, this theme of trauma emerged as reaction to reading Kafka's entries from his diaries (link to file, Kafka intellectual property).
This particularly made me think about the relationship of trauma to writing and archiving; the trauma of seeing ones name on a piece of paper, a document or on a google search result. I am interested in how the notion of subjectivity emerge in relation to the negotiation of such trauma. Can one think of writing as a process of constantly negotiating trauma? Is archiving a process of fragmentation of the author?
While thinking of the young boy in Kafka''s text looking for the first time onto his plagiarized essay reminded me of the classical Lacan's psychoanalytical essay "The mirror Stage. The Mirror stage for Lacan representing the first developmental experience of the 6 month old child seeing herself in the mirror, creating the image in ones psyche of the integral subject. It is the formation of the coherent imaginary, from the fragmented real. ...
[work in progress]

Iran

women

This scene begins with a number of children reading in their books. The focus on children is a central trope in this film. The film starts with it and ends with it.
"I thank you, God"
"for creating me,"
"I thank you, God"
"for creating my caring mohter, my ? father"
"I thank you, God for creating the flowing water and the fruiting trees"
"I thank you for giving me hands to work with"
"I thank you for giving me eyes"
"to see teh marvels of this world"
"I thank you for giving me ears"
"to enjoy beautful songs"
"I thank you for giving me feet"
"to go wherever I will"
FF voice begins narrating:
"Who in this hell praising you, O Lord?"
"Who is this in hell?"

Sequence with dancing man and images of different people in the colony
ends with a man pacing towards the camera and back.

Medical experience of leprosy in the colony
I have shown this film several times in my classes, while teaching a course titled social preventive medicine to first year medical students at the American University of Beirut. I have used the film as a form of a 'poetic treatment of leprosy' and, in turn, an eye opener to the relation between social suffering and medicine. The film functions as an essay, which both visually and thematically presents us with a complex multi-layered treatment of the issue of social suffering of individuals living in the leper colony in Northern Iran. In this sequence one can see how the representation of the everyday, fuses with the poetic treatment of the image.
The sequence following the little girl being pushed in the cement car, while going through the various everyday activities is of particular visual significance to this fusion of the poetic and the everyday.
The film has been considered one of the cornerstones, which have defined Iranian New Wave Cinema. Both its poetic and humanist treatments of leprosy represents an interesting challenge to negotiate in terms of annotating and archiving. However, this platform allows us to dissect these multiple layers of the movie.

"And Farrokhzad's command of the medium continues throughout; though The House is Black is the only film she ever directed (other than a minor commercial), it is brilliantly rhythmic, cutting scenes together thematically and pictorially rather than spatially, and using natural sounds (a squeaky wheel, a bouncing ball, a man walking on crutches) to provide the meter for exceptional montage sequences. Her fluid tracking shots through the colony's school rooms and prayer halls are graceful and observant, and she artfully punctuates them with everyday details–plants in the sun, drying dishes on a window sill, old shoes and bottles resting together."

This is the last sequences in the film. It takes place back in the classroom. The kids are asked a number of questions by their teacher. Here the teacher turns to one of the younger kids and asks him:
"You, name a few beautiful things"
The kid pauses and thinks...
"The moon, the sun, flowers, playtime"
The shot shows a number of the other kids enjoying the answer..
The teacher tunrs to another kid and asks him:
"You name few ugly things"
The kid pauses ...
"Hand"
"foot...head"

The teacher asks a student:
"Write sa sentence witht eh word 'house' in it"
The shot moves to the front of the class where the teacher faces one student.
The student ponders ...the camera shows a shot of the other kids in class awaiting his answer.
The scene cuts into a shot of a number of people walking. There loks no end to were the crowd ends. One man, taller than the rest, wearing dark glasses and a hat, leads the people twoards the camera, while it zooms out.
The two wooden gates of the lepor colony are shown. On then is written in black:
"Juzam Khaneh" or Lepor house orLepor colony. The two gates close...
the scene cuts back to the classroom. The young man is still pondering about his sentence.
He faces teh blackboard and writes:
"Khaneh Syah ast" "--The houe is black"
Narration retunrs:
"O overrunning river driven by the foorce of love,"
"flow to us, flow to us"

Pad.ma requires JavaScript.