The House is Black

You will need to watch Forough Farrokzhad’s “The House is Black” three times to properly appreciate this film. Since this documentary is only 22 minutes long, you can accomplish this in about an hour. The first viewing will fill you with revulsion and horror. The second time you watch the movie, a great sadness will afflict you. Only on the third viewing will the lyric beauty of the picture become apparent. A proper appreciation of “The House is Black” requires the viewer to traverse all three states of mind. The film begins with an epigram: “There is no shortage of ugliness in the world. If a man closed his eyes to it, there would be more...” The first image in the picture shows a woman whose face is ravaged beyond recognition by leprosy peering at herself in a mirror. A woman’s voice recites poetry from what seems to be the Holy Qu’ran, praise to God for creating the beauties of the world and lamentation for being trapped in a place that seems to be hell. For about eight minutes, we are shown images of lepers in various forms of decomposition -- flattened noses, twisted lips, faces thick with impassive, mask-like scar tissue, hands and feet reduced to bony stumps, eyes rotting in eye-sockets that seem to have melted. One leper dances and sings while children watch him. Leper boys in school read from shabby-looking text books. We see food being prepared and disfigured mothers suckling their children. The narrator recites verse that seems to come from the Psalms: “I have been made in a strange and frightening form...you knew me in the womb.” There is a five minute account of leprosy’s nature and etiology, an actual documentary passage in the film featuring images of physical therapy, debridement of hideous-looking wounds, eye-drops administered to festering eyes and needles and syringes extracting blood. Then, we see a leper woman being married and a wild kind of dance, two face-less men wrestling to the joy of disfigured onlookers, a dog caring for its newborn puppies and a beautiful little girl being pushed across a dusty yard in a wheelchair by a shuffling leper. We see the bride preparing herself for her wedding by putting on eye-shadow -- her face is a chalky swollen mask with lips that seem completely dead and alien to her face. These images are intercut with shots of leaves fallen onto an expanse of shallow, murky water, the camera passing along the pond as the woman’s voice intones a poem about the evanescence of life. The film ends with a classroom catechism, a staple of many Iranian films -- such a scene is central to Kiastoarami’s “Where is the Friend’s House” and many of the features made by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The teacher asks a boy: “Why should we praise God for giving us a father and mother?” He answers: “I don’t know for I have neither.” The teacher asks another child: What things are beautiful? The child says: Stars, the moon, the sun, flowers, playtime. The teacher asks: “What is ugly?” The same child says: “Feet, hands, heads.” And all the leper-children giggle and laugh. The teacher asks a confused man with his hair falling-out to write a sentence using the word “house.” After a long pause, the man’s twisted hand writes: “The house is black.” The camera withdraws, pulling back from a great procession of lepers as they approach a threshold, a kind of clay and mud gate that stops their forward march. Someone pulls the gate shut and on it, written in Arabic, are the words “Leper Colony.” The film is shot in grainy black and white. Many of the images remind me of footage taken in Hiroshima after the atomic blast: grainy pictures of horrible wounds. Forough Farrokzhad was, perhaps, the most important feminist poet in Iran and she is apparently revered today - I presume that some of the biblically-cadenced verse in the film was written by her. She died in a car accident when she was only 32 and seems to be famous for the candor and intensity of her erotic poetry. A brief interview with her sister, made quite recently and an “extra” on the disc, contains some images of the woman -- we see a dark-haired woman with a large nose and huge black eyes, dressed like a Vogue model, without veil and head-scarf. She looks fashionable, intense, modern, beautiful. What has happened to the world since 1962? (The Facets DVD containing “The House is Black” also features two other short documentaries by Mohsen Makhmalbaf -- the first about a school that was blown away is extraordinary: we see a huge landscape riven by immense canyons and, then, attend school with twelve boys and their teacher -- the same Persian catechism scene -- and learn that in a dust storm the tent-school was blown away and one of the boys had his head “fractured”. The little film is only nine minutes long and exceedingly simple but it is memorable -- the little scholar with the fractured head bawling his poems to the camera makes a powerful impact. The other documentary is about a painter and I must confess I found it completely impenetrable -- it ends with a chorus of barking dogs with the soundtrack looped to suggest that they are singing while the film shows us a pack of the animals jumping up and down.)