Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts

Leprosy and the Dialectical Body in Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1964)

Rosa Holman

In her documentary, Khaneh siah ast (The House is Black, 1964), Forugh Farrokhzad adopts the poetic voice-over and the rhythmic soundscape as a way of evoking a lyrical and dialectical understanding of human existence, and in particular the experiences of embodiment. Despite the images of physical suffering in Farrokhzad’s short black-and-white film about leprosy, it is the voice-over and the use of sound that redefine the experiences of those who have had their bodies characterised as abject and contaminated. The ‘lived body’ that emerges in Farrokhzad’s documentary is both a site of profound banality and poetic beauty. With Farrokhzad’s legacy persisting in the poetic realism of contemporary Iranian cinema, so too representations of disability continue to be informed by the strategies of lyricism, ambivalence and the innovative use of sound and voice.

Farrokhzad’s influence on pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has been widely recognised in the scholarship on the poet and filmmaker (see Rosenbaum 2005; Dabashi 2007; Naficy 2011). Her poetry and documentary, as part of a broader movement of Iranian literary modernism and New Wave cinema, have powerfully shaped the reality aesthetic of contemporary Iranian cinema and infused it with a particular kind of Persian lyricism. But Farrokhzad’s influence has not only extended stylistically, but also in the continuing foregrounding of physical disability in poetically realist Iranian art cinema.

Disability was a recurrent theme in the films of the 1980s and 1990s, with the eight-year-long Iran/Iraq war represented as leaving a legacy of physical and psychological damage. Children in particular were portrayed as bearing the brunt of such turmoil, struggling with impairment, poverty and, frequently, the absence of any real parental support.¹ Certainly in the films of Majid Majidi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf children with disabilities were frequently forced into homelessness and institutionalisation. The experiences of young boys with blindness in particular were centralised in Makhmalbaf’s Sokut (Silence, 1998) and Majidi’s Rang-e Khoda (The Colour of Paradise, 1998). In both cases the vision-impaired youth were portrayed as possessing an acute awareness and gifted understanding of sound, emanating from both the natural world and musical instruments. While such films certainly need to be interrogated for their representations of vulnerability, like The House is Black, they also attempt to redefine notions of ‘ability’ and ‘debility’. For it is not the children themselves who are portrayed as being incapacitated by their blindness, but society at large that is shown to be suffering from its own form of myopia. Such a misrecognition and mismanagement of what is perceived to be ‘disability’ incarcerates individuals in oppressive ‘house(s) of blackness’ and deprives them of the most basic human rights.

This chapter is interested in contextualising Farrokhzad’s film as an example of Iranian New Wave cinema and in examining how her poetry underpins the documentary, thus maintaining a dialogue between Farrokhzad’s written oeuvre and her cinematic production. It proposes that Farrokhzad’s use of rhythm in The House is Black situates leprosy, not as an ‘individual pathology’ to be endured in isolation, but rather as a symptom of a ‘discriminatory environment’ (Ellis 2008: 3). While so much critical discourse has focused its analysis on the ‘abject’ visuals in Farrokhzad’s film, this chapter contends that the filmmaker persistently privileges sound as a means of representing the rhythms and cycles of the body, irrespective of the body’s apparent status as ‘disabled’ or ‘diseased’.

Situating The House is Black

Forugh Farrokhzad was born in 1935 in Tehran to a middle-class family, marrying her second cousin, Parviz Shapur, at sixteen and a year later giving birth to their son, Kamyar. When the couple divorced after three years Farrokhzad lost custody of Kamyar and was denied all contact after the separation (see Milani 1992). In 1955 Farrokhzad was hospitalised following a nervous breakdown, the same year her first collection of poetry, Asir (Captive), was published. Thereafter Farrokhzad made several trips to Europe (in 1956, 1960 and 1964) where she continued to write poems, short stories and letters, taking employment as a translator in Munich. She published two more collections of poetry between her sojourns, Divar (The Wall) in 1956 and Esyan (Rebellion) in 1958. At this time she also began working at the Golestan Film Workshop, first as a secretary, and later as an assistant, an editor and finally as the director of The House is Black. Once filming had concluded on the documentary Farrokhzad permanently adopted one of the children appearing in it, Hossein Mansouri. Farrokhzad’s fourth and most famous collection, Tavallodi digar (Another Birth, 1964), was seen as a major turning point in the poet’s career and established her as a key contributor to Iranian modernist poetry. Tragically Farrokhzad died in a car accident on 14 February 1967, aged 32. Her final volume of poetry, entitled Imam biyavarim be aghaz-e fasl-e sard (Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season), was posthumously published in 1974. Her poetry has been persistently hailed as radical and innovative in part because of its representation of the female body and women’s desire. Against the intersecting programmes of State-prescribed liberalism and ingrained traditionalism, Farrokhzad’s poetry reclaims the body, not as a projection for male-orientated fantasies of eroticism or purity, but as a vehicle for autonomy and agency.

Farrokhzad’s poetry emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a larger movement of cultural modernity in Iran. After the disposal of the popularly elected Prime Minister, Dr Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953, Muhammad Reza Shah consolidated Iran’s diplomatic ties with the United States, encouraging industrialisation and attempting to quash leftist political parties and liberal dissidents (see Afary 2009: 202).² In 1957 the Shah increased the powers of the secret police (the SAVAK) and created a culture of brutal intolerance towards political opposition. As part of the State-devised White Revolution launched in 1963, the government instituted various land reforms and expanded women’s civil rights. Such developments were influenced in part by the increasing pressure from the Kennedy administration to democratise Iran. As many scholars are quick to note, the conflicting narratives regarding the Shah’s programme of modernisation make it impossible to either entirely applaud or condemn the process of liberalisation (see Kia 2005; Afary 2009; Degroot 2010). Women were certainly enfranchised by reforms to education, health and increased access to the workplace, with eight women even being admitted to Parliament in September 1963 (see Afary 2009: 207). And despite the centralised and often circumscribed nature of women’s organisations under the Shah, various scholars still emphasise the important legislation introduced during this period, which extended women’s legal rights in marriage and divorce (see Kia 2005; Afary 2009). While many intellectuals supported aspects of the Shah’s modernisation, there was still much suspicion and opposition to the monarchy’s dictatorial approach and tight reign over Iranian cultural life. To depict the poverty or misery that many Iranians suffered during this time was completely at odds with the Shah’s aims of projecting a democratic and modernised national image. Artists and intellectuals were subjected to harsh penalties for contravening the State’s programme of censorship and repression. Freedom of expression thus became a central concern for the intellectuals, artists and writers of this period who were caught between the opposing programmes of liberalism and cultural prescription.

Cinema was no exception and several films in the 1960s representing the ‘realistic portrayal of the underside of institutionalised disability and their political contexts’ were interpreted as ‘direct attacks on the government and its failed social service programs’ (Naficy 2011: 127). Interestingly, Farrockhzad’s documentary was favourably received by the State, even attracting the ‘royal seal of approval’ (Naficy 2011: 87). The Shah’s wife, the Empress Farah Pahlavi, was a patron for the Society to Assist Patients of Leprosy and a special screening of the film was organised for the monarch. But despite the Empress’s interest in the cause and charitable support for the organisation, leprosy remained a disease associated with social stigmatisation and isolation in Iran during the 1950s and 1960s. Mycobacterium leprae, which causes the disease, is transmitted through breathing, a fact that only served to heighten fears concerning contagion and physical contact with leprosy sufferers. However, unlike tuberculosis, most individuals have a genetic immunity to leprosy and ‘prolonged and intimate contact with a contagious individual is required for a susceptible person to acquire the disease’ (see Sehgal et al. 2006: 9). There are also varying strains, degrees of severity and forms of leprosy. Sufferers may experience skin lesions with eventual loss of sensation, which in some cases causes damage to the peripheral nerves. The introduction of sulpha drugs in the 1940s temporarily offered the first ‘effective medical cure’; however, by the 1960s a drug-resistant strain of leprosy returned and it was again thought to be an incurable and ‘intractable illness’ (Buckingham 2006: 959). With the loss of nerve sensation, limbs become susceptible to accidental damage, deterioration and ulceration, and in severe cases, require amputation. Untreated leprosy may also eventually damage the eyes, nose and palate, resulting in the loss of speech, sight or hearing.

It is the association of leprosy with deformity and contagion that has resulted in the historical isolation, institutionalisation and stigmatisation of leprosy sufferers worldwide. Leprosy sufferers were often relegated to ‘asylums’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is their confinement and ostracism that Farrokhzad interrogates in her short film. The original Persian word used to describe leprosy, khoreh, meant ‘something which eats or destroys the tissues, indicating the destructive character of the disease’ (Azizi and Bahadori 2011: 426). The Arabic term jozam has long since been substituted as the word for leprosy. Records from the Qajar period (1785–1925) indicate that leprosy sufferers were encouraged to live in their own colonies outside of major cities and that ‘by 1920, there were three leper colonies in Iran, in Arpadarrassi and Khalkhal in Azarbaijan (northeastern Iran) and near Mashhad, Khorasan Province (northwestern Iran)’ (Azizi and Bahadori 2011: 427). By 1933 the Bababaghi leprosarium in Azarbaijan province was well established and became a place of permanent settlement for sufferers around Iran. In 1957 the Anjoman-e Komak be Jozamian (Society for Assistance to Lepers) was established in nearby Tabriz to assist those in the Bababaghi leprosarium. It was this charity that commissioned and partly funded The House is Black, at a time when conditions were at their worst.

Farrokhzad conducted an initial research trip during July 1962, accompanied by Dr Abdolhossein Radji, the head of the charitable society for supporting lepers (see Milani 2014: 146). She returned to Bababaghi three months later to begin production. The documentary was filmed over twelve days with a small crew, including its producer, Ebrahim Golestan, and director of photography, Soleiman Miasian. It was apparently made without any shot list or script (see Ghorbankarimi 2002), although certain scenes have been obviously staged (see Rosenbaum 2005: 15; Naficy 2011: 85). The film won the Grand Prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1963 and was shown at the Pesaro Film Festival in 1966. It received only a limited release in Iran but attracted generally positive reviews (see Naficy 2011: 87). However, despite its critical acclaim within contemporary scholarship, Farrokhzad’s film was initially not influential within Iran. Its impact and elevation as a modernist Iranian cinematic work came later and was due to the screenings and scholarship carried out after the 1979 Revolution, both in Iran and within the diaspora.

Filmed in black and white and running for just over twenty minutes, The House is Black opens with a close-up of a woman with significant facial deformity, gazing at herself in the mirror. This is followed by scenes of leprosy sufferers involved in all the prosaic activities of everyday life: eating, resting, engaged in conversation, brushing their hair and so on, while Farrokhzad’s voice-over melancholically recites her own poetry and various biblical quotations. There is a distinct shift early in the film when a male voice-over (often identified as Golestan’s) provides more factual information on the condition of leprosy and its treatments, while individuals are shown being examined by doctors and undergoing various forms of physical therapy. The film then reverts to its previous mode with disjointed scenes of the leprosy colony, with Farrokhzad’s voice-over again reciting poetry.

Various scholars (for example, Rahimieh 2010; Naficy 2011; Jahed 2012) have attested to the importance of Farrokhzad’s relationship with the producer, Ebrahim Golestan. In particular Hamid Naficy argues that Farrokhzad’s development of cinematic poetic realism was significantly influenced by Golestan’s own production practices and his collaborative approach with other writers and filmmakers. Working as an activist, writer, translator and then filmmaker, Ebrahim Golestan formed the Golestan Film Workshop (GFW) in 1955. Naficy writes, ‘The GFW became a lively intellectual salon where employees and fellow intellectuals…would read and discuss poetry and other matters late into the night’ (2011: 79). With little scripting, the blurring of documentary and fictional film modes and the recording of synchronous sound, Golestan’s works broke new cinematic ground with their heightened reality aesthetic and lyrical quality. Farrokhzad was first employed as a secretary at the GFW in 1956, but was soon working as an assistant, actress and editor on various projects. Her first experience of working directly with film was editing Golestan’s documentary Yek atash (A Fire, 1958–61). She also codirected and co-edited Ab va garma (Water and Heat, 1961).

While Naficy’s identification of a ‘GFW house style’ must be taken into consideration when examining Farrokhzad’s development as a filmmaker, it may also be worth noting the more international cinematic developments in avant-garde and modernist cinema. There has been some debate regarding the degree of influence that cinematic movements such as the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism have had on the emergence of a national form of cinematic poetic realism in Iran, both in terms of the 1960s New Wave cinema and the New Iranian cinema that emerged in post-revolutionary Iran during the 1990s and 2000s (see Chaudhuri and Finn 2003; Naficy 2011; Jahed 2012). In making the link between European avant-garde filmmaking traditions and Farrokhzad’s own filmmaking practices in the 1960s it is important to avoid re-instating the centrality or hegemony of Western filmmaking theory and practice. Instead, it may be valuable to observe how The House is Black emerged in correspondence or dialogue with other modernist cinematic practices. The fact that Farrokhzad’s film won the Grand Prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1963, at a time when German cinema was undergoing its own cultural and formal transformation, is arguably significant. The recognition that The House is Black received in Europe later implies that Farrokhzad was working not only as a key member of the Iranian New Wave, but was also contributing to the emergence of a more global, transnational form of cinematic modernism.

The affinity between the Iranian New Wave cinema of the 1960s and its European counterparts is marked both in terms of the production processes and the interdependence of film criticism and practice. Parviz Jahed contends that like the French filmmakers who began their careers as critics and intellectuals, documenting their conceptual innovations in journals such as Cahiers du cinéma, so too filmmakers such as Golestan, Farrokh Ghafferi and Houshang Kavousi also published scholarly reviews and railed against the status quo of the popular film farsi before embarking on their careers as practitioners of art cinema (2012: 86). The fact that several filmmakers of this period trained in France and incorporated the practices of casting children and non-professional actors, also contributed to the ‘hybrid form that involved fictional and documentary elements’ (Naficy 2011: 128). In relation to the ‘avant-garde documentaries’ of the New Wave, filmmakers also began experimenting with ‘editing timed to music’ (Naficy 2011: 129) as a means of breaking with the official style of documentary-making. Similarly, Farrokhzad was also beginning to investigate the use of rhythm and music in Water and Heat (1961). As Naficy writes, ‘the differences between the section she directed on heat and the section on water, which Golestan directed, revealed her keen sense of rhythm and her affinity for sound, an affinity she amply demonstrated in designing the sound for Water and Heat, which included her own voice singing a lullaby’ (2011: 81). He thus points not only to Golestan’s influence in the context of particular production practices, but also to the way in which Farrokhzad differentiates herself from Golestan’s style and consolidates her distinct brand of poetically realist cinema, in which the treatment of sound is central.

The House is Black is most frequently described as a ‘poetic documentary’. (Rosenbaum 2005: 15). Hamid Dabashi states that the ‘poetic realist’ mode of documentary ties together ‘fact’ and ‘fantasy’ (2007: 61). He is careful to assert that by using the term ‘poetic’ he does not refer to light-heartedness or sentimentality, rather he is referring to what is intellectually and philosophically informed; ‘poetic truth is thus no mere aesthetic claim. It posits an epistemic claim, a theorem of its own; it possesses a thematic autonomy that defines its particular take on reality’ (2007: 62). Dabashi asserts that The House is Black is a form of visual poetry, an argument taken up by various critics who contend that Farrokhzad uses a kind of editing to generate this form of visual lyricism. Maryam Ghorbankarimi argues that the ‘medical’ part of the documentary is edited with a conventional ‘narrative edit’, ‘creating a sense of continuity in a linear, sequential series of images’ (2010: 141). Alternatively, the rest of the film employs a faster-paced montage technique, favouring jump cuts and tight close-ups. There is a detectable tension at work in this cinematic mode between Farrokhzad’s self-portraiture and the desire to document the external, socio-cultural world. The House is Black is thus invested in both subjective, personalised enunciation of Farrokhzad’s poetry and the collective, located world of inhabitants of the leprosy colony.

Voice and the Rhythmic Body in The House is Black

Farrokhzad begins The House is Black with a blank, dark screen, with a male voice-over warning the spectator: ‘On this screen will appear an image of ugliness, a vision of pain no human should ignore.’ Despite the fact that the voice-over problematically refers to ‘naghsi az yek zeshti’ (‘an image of ugliness’), the film as a whole generally works against prescribed and regressive notions of beauty/ugliness and disease/health. The strategy of beginning with a blank screen and a voice-over arguably points to the limits and confines of the image and underscores the more evocative and dignifying power of the voice to conjure the experiences of ‘pain’ and suffering. Nasrin Rahimieh astutely observes that as a film, The House is Black is acutely aware of its parameters, that it ‘records its own limitations and captures a remarkable self-awareness on the part of the artist’ (2010: 128). Susan McCabe also argues a similar case in her analysis of modernist cinema and its paradoxical desire to both employ cinema as a means of ‘corporeality’, ‘bodily rhythms’ and the ‘movement of the lived body’, while simultaneously recognising the ‘unavailability’ of the bodily experience as mediated through ‘mechanical reproduction’ (2005: 3, 4). McCabe goes on to argue that the use of montage editing in modernist film ultimately ‘ruptures fantasies of wholeness’ and gestures towards the modern malaise of hysteria. Farrokhzad is undoubtedly cognisant of the constraints of cinematic reproduction, but more specifically she draws our attention to the limits of the visual image. Farrokhzad privileges the cinematic voice as the more powerful and poetic medium, capable of suggesting the corporeality of the body. In contrast to McCabe’s understanding of modernist cinema, where montage ruptures the coherence of the body, Farrokhzad’s own employment of montage and jump-cuts, far from suggesting fragmentation and hysteria, actually points to the rhythms of the ‘lived body’ – the beating of the heart, the whisper of the breath, the thumping of a foot against the earth. The use of poetic voicing and a rhythmic soundscape enables Farrokhzad to more purposefully evoke her central ‘epistemic claim’ (to employ Dabashi’s phrase) that the human body – irrespective of gender, class, ethnicity or ability – is suffused with the experiences of suffering and joy. Disability precludes neither beauty nor enjoyment of life. While often the source of pain, frailty and immobility, the (disabled) body is also centralised as the foundation of pleasure, desire and catharsis.

But Farrokhzad’s film avoids sentimentality through its central dichotomy: a tension between darkness and light, suffering and pleasure. Reciting her own poetry and fragments of biblical text, Farrokhzad’s off-screen voice often intones plaintively and mournfully over the images of daily life at Bababaghi leper colony. An early classroom scene in which boys are shown solemnly praising God, is reminiscent of Farrokhzad’s poem ‘Jomeh’ (‘Friday’) in Tavallodi digar (Another Birth, 1964), in which the speaker despairs of their isolation and imprisonment.

An empty house

A depressing house

House with doors barred to the onrush of youth

House of darkness and dreams of the sun

House of solitude, divination and doubt

House of closets, curtains, pictures and books. (2010: 65)

There are parallels between this poem and the documentary, most obviously the phrase, ‘khaneye tariki’ (‘house of darkness’), which closely resembles the film’s title, Khaneh siah ast (The House is Black). The house, or rather the classroom and the leprosy colony more generally, is characterised in this section of the film by its gloom, dimness and atmosphere of despondency. Farrokhzad’s voice can then be heard intoning; ‘Who is this in hell praising you, O’Lord? Who is this in hell?’ The classroom also appears to be a space completely ‘barred to the onrush of youth’ and pervaded by ‘darkness’, ‘divination and doubt’. It is not the disease, but rather the prevailing socio-cultural discourses and practices relating to leprosy that sequester these young boys into a ‘hell’, forcing them to perform ‘empty’ rituals and maintain their ‘depressing’ isolation. Just as Michael Oliver’s ground-breaking work on the definition of disability demonstrated the necessity of reframing impairment as ‘a particular form of social oppression’ (1996: 22), so too Farrokhzad points to the social construction of leprosy, and the manner in which the systemic segregation of its sufferers imprisons them in a ‘house of darkness’.

One of the most striking examples of the use of sound in the film immediately follows the first classroom scene, when a man is shown singing, creating his own accompaniment through the clicking of his fingers and the tapping of his bare foot on the paving stones. The camera begins with a close-up of the man’s twisted and deformed foot beating the ground and gradually pans up his body, only very slowly revealing the source of the powerful chanting, when the camera arrives and frames the singer’s face. Despite the manner in which leprosy has transformed the body, the forceful and evocative sounds emanating from the singer reveal how oral forms of self-expression, such as singing and chanting, allow the social actors to reclaim their identity outside the discourses of disease and pathology. The man’s chanting continues as a sonic thread through the film, sometimes as a rhythmic accompaniment to the other scenes of daily life at the colony. At other times Farrokhzad repeats the scene, splicing it between static scenes of leprosy suffers, centralising it as a key cinematic moment. Farrokhzad undoubtedly employs montage-editing techniques in The House is Black, but she uses such devices not to infer the fragmented nature of subjectivity, but to evoke the very corporeal rhythms and cycles of the human body. She evokes this sense of bodily rhythm not only through the use of voice, but also via the twang of a string being continually pulled, the squeak of a wheelbarrow and the repetitive thud of a ball hitting the earth.

In The House is Black, Farrokhzad represents the bodies of the leprosy sufferers, not simply as abject sites of suffering and existential malaise, but as vehicles of ordinary pleasure, love and enjoyment. A young girl, already evidencing the first signs of disease via a rash of lesions across her angelic face, smiles as an older woman vigorously brushes her luxurious thick hair. In another scene, a significantly deformed woman applies make-up before she is presented in a marital ritual. The intense drumming and singing in this scene shifts the emphasis to the emotion and pleasure of this familiar rite. In another scene a boy grabs a crutch and guilelessly uses it as a toy with which to play with another child. In all of the abovementioned scenes, disease and disability are ever-present but do not preclude the possibilities of pleasure, play and fulfilment. This is not to say that Farrokhzad sanitises or conceals the suffering of the leprosy inhabitants, only that she refutes the notion of the ‘abject’ body and refuses to represent the individuals as ‘contaminated’ and thus undesirable. As Nasrin Rahimieh writes, Farrokhzad’s film interrogates the ‘practice of mistreating those who have been disabled as a result of disease, even worse, condoning mistreatment and ostracization as culturally normative’ (2010: 129). The ‘abject’ is thus reframed by Farrohzad, in that it becomes the marker of the prejudicial and regressive attitudes towards disease and disablement. Just as Farrokhzad railed against the notion that women’s bodies must be segregated, veiled and pathologised in her poetry, so too her film interrogates the policy of quarantining leprosy sufferers and assigning them the role of the impure ‘other’. The House is Black thus treads a delicate line, at once trying to redefine the experience of leprosy, while also demonstrating the inhumanity with which it sufferers have been treated.

Poetic Ambivalence: The House is Both Black and White

One of the most critically analysed scenes of The House is Black depicts a man pacing an alleyway, almost obsessively touching the window ledges as he strides to and fro. Farrokhzad’s voice can be gradually discerned naming the days of the week. While this scene certainly reveals the claustrophobic, monotonous and severely quotidian nature of existence inside the leprosy colony, it also introduces the notion of temporal structures: the length of a day, a week, the passing of the seasons.

Fig. 1: A man is depicted pacing back and forth, while Farrokhzad is heard reciting the days of the week.

This emphasis on the cyclical and repetitive nature of human existence becomes most pointed when Farrokhzad interchanges two scenes; one showing a woman breastfeeding her baby, the other depicting a dog carrying a puppy in its mouth. Farrokhzad’s voice-over is heard: ‘Leave me, leave me, my days are but breath. Leave me before I set out for the land of no return, the land of infinite darkness.’ Several short scenes follow, edited together as a montage: children devising a game with crutches, birds flying in a sweeping arc overhead, two men playfully wrestling, before Farrokhzad’s voice-over continues: ‘Oh God, remember my life is wind and you have given me a time of idleness, and around me the song of happiness, and the sound of the windmill, and the brightness of the light have vanished.’ When we return to the man pacing the alleyway, Farrokhzad continues: ‘Lucky are those who are harvesting now and their hands are picking sheaves of wheat.’ Interestingly, there is tension at play in these scenes, where the voice-over works against the assumed meaning of the visuals. Instead of celebrating ‘new life’ in those scenes of the baby breastfeeding and the puppy being held by its mother, Farrokhzad intones about ‘the land of infinite darkness’. Instead of finding joy in the two children inventing a game with an implement like the crutches, Farrokhzad’s voice-over dwells on the ‘light’ that has vanished. Overlaying such scenes with a deeply melancholic voice-over demonstrates that sound and image need not work harmoniously towards one unifying form of meaning, but may operate dialectically. Sound is thus not used as a supplementary medium supporting the dominance of the visuals in The House is Black, but as a powerful medium in its own right, which creates additional, subtle and often paradoxical layers of meaning.

Farrokhzad appears to be pointing here to the impermanence of human existence and the fact that all life must end in death. Her melancholic voice-over evokes the opening line of the poem Tavallodi digar (‘Another birth’) in which the speaker laments: ‘Hame hasti man ayeh tarik-ast’ (‘All my existence is a dark chant’). Certainly towards the end of the film both the visual and the verbal references to ‘tariki’ (‘darkness’) intensify, becoming more frequent and pressing. In one of the final scenes, a man walks on crutches through an orchard towards the spectator. As his body nears and eventually merges with the frame, total darkness engulfs the screen and nothing is heard but the rhythmic clump of his crutches hitting the ground. Accompanying this scene is the female voice-over, which is heard once again dwelling on the transience of human existence and the futility of seeking freedom and fulfilment: ‘Maanande fakhteh baraye ensaaf minaalim va nist Entezaare nur mikeshim va inak zolmat ast’ (‘Like doves we cry for justice and there is none. We wait for light, and darkness reigns’).³ Pessimism and existential despair dominate this scene with both the literal frame and the metaphoric allusions of the voice-over pointing to the hopelessness, confinement and suffering of the colony’s inhabitants.

Fig. 2: A man on crutches walks through the orchard at the Bababaghi leprosarium.

Farrokhzad resists, however, presenting a totalising and nihilistic vision of disability in The House is Black. The rhythmic thumping of the crutch once again infuses the scene with a sense of the body’s powerful perseverance, even in the face of debility and the inevitability of death. And after several beats while the screen remains dark, a boy’s voice is heard off-screen, reading from a text in which the luminosity of Venus is discussed. The screen is then filled with the natural daylight of the classroom, which appears particularly bright after the intermission of darkness. The teacher asks a student: ‘Chera baayad baraye daashtane pedar va maadar khoda ra shokr kard? Tou begu’ (‘Why should we thank God for having a father and mother? You answer’), to which the boy poignantly replies, ‘Man nemidanam. Man hich kodam nadaram’ (‘I don’t know, I have neither’). The teacher then turns to Hossein Mansouri (the boy Farrokhzad went on to adopt) and instructs him, ‘Tou esme chand ta chize ghashang ra begu’ (‘You, give me the name of four beautiful things’) to which Hossein answers: ‘mah, khorshid, gol, bazi’ (‘moon, sun, flower, game’). Hossein’s response again centralises the notion of a cinematic poeticism. The onomatopoeia of the four words spoken by the boy, ‘mah, khorshid, gol, bazi’, become a form of spontaneous, elliptical and oral poetry.

Whether the boy was instructed to speak the words by Farrokhzad, or the answer was voluntarily and spontaneously devised, is not important. What is central here is the tension between the constraints of the traditional documentary structure and the possibilities of a different form of cinema, in which poetry ‘underpins’ the structure and maintains the dialogue between Farrokhzad’s written oeuvre and her cinematic production. The teacher then instructs a different student to write a sentence with the word ‘khaneh’ (‘house’) in it. The boy’s anxious contemplation is interrupted by a scene in which a crowd of leprosy sufferers approach the camera, only to be suddenly enclosed by gates, on which is written ‘jozam-khaneh’ (‘leprosy colony’). The final scene of the film then concludes with the boy carefully writing ‘Khaneh siah ast’ (‘The house is black’) on the blackboard. And while the film is inevitably preoccupied by blackness, the experience of suffering and the curtailment of human rights, each time The House is Black appears to be inclining towards complete existential and aesthetic ‘darkness’ Farrokhzad reintroduces ‘light’ both cinematically and metaphorically. This cinematic tension between ‘suffering’ and ‘beauty’ relate directly to Farrokhzad’s own poetry and her consistent interest in dignifying and complicating the experiences of the human body.

Eschewing the visual polarities of ‘darkness’ and ‘light’, impurity and purity, disease and health, Farrokhzad uses sound as a means of pointing to a third and more dialectical understanding of human embodiment. Unable to totally surrender her film to the ‘darkness’ of existential despair or the optimism of a ‘saccharine’ ‘humanism’ (see Dabashi 2011), Farrokhzad positions The House is Black within the realms of poetic ambivalence. Most importantly her ongoing identification with her subjects and her desire to represent their experiences via the practices of poetry and the lyrical voice-over, demonstrates the manner in which such institutionalised ‘house(s) of blackness’ deprive leprosy sufferers of their rights to dignity, freedom and social inclusion.

NOTES

1 See, for example, Pouran Derakhshandeh’s Mute Contact (1986), Little Bird of Happiness (1987), Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Peddler (1987) and The Silence (1998), Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (1998), Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (1997) and The Colour of Paradise (1999).

2 Dr Mohammad Mossadegh had been popularly elected as the Iranian Prime Minister in 1951 and had passed the Nationalisation Law, through which his government intended to reclaim total control of Iranian oil resources. Refusing to bow to compensation for their previous exploitation through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, by 1952 Iran’s diplomatic ties with the United Kingdom were severely compromised. Mossadegh also challenged the authority of the Shah to choose the Minister of War, in a move to recoup Prime Ministerial powers as outlined in the 1906 constitution (see Momayesi 2000). However, Mossadegh’s attempts at nationalisation and democratic reform threatened both Western interests and Iran’s monarchical power structure. The Truman administration, attempting to protect their own oil interests, quickly became involved and attempted to mediate a solution between Iran and the United Kingdom. When talks failed the new Republican government, headed by President Eisenhower, assisted the Shah in staging a coup and removing Mossadegh (see Ruehsen 1993).

3 This chapter quotes the official subtitles as they appear in the production widely distributed by Facets Video, although it is acknowledged that there are frequent discontinuities between the English translation and Persian transliteration of the dialogue provided here.

FILMOGRAPHY

Farrokhzad, Forugh (dir) (1964) Khaneh siah ast (The House is Black). 20 minutes. Studio Golestan. Iran.

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