  
Director: Foroogh Farokhzad
A revelation of staggering force, lyrically composed by one of the 20th century's leading poets, Forough Farrokhzad. Her first and only film, it depicts the lives and bodies of people tragically deformed by leprosy. A film of stirring and powerful images, and a beautifully, tragically poetic narration that heavily influenced the modern Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who called it "the best Iranian film." It provides, in the film's own words, "a vision of pain no caring human being should ignore." In Farsi with English subtitles.
Review:
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.
-- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Readers' Critic
Region 1. Black & White, Color, Closed Captioned. Run time: 48 mins. DVD Features Booklet with with essays by Chris Marker and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Director bio & interview. Two short films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Number of discs: 3.
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