The House is Black

It’s perhaps logical that studies of film, from the silent period to the present, focus somewhat disproportionately on images and the visual. There’s no denying, after all, that the moving images of film are, despite their illusory status, fundamentally moving. From the very first scenes shot by the Lumière Brothers and their teams at the end of the nineteenth century, viewers have found themselves pulled in by the sight of what is at once “real” and an obvious trick of light and chemicals. As in Marianne Moore’s critique of poetry, moving pictures have provided fertile terrain for the continued inspection and exploration of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”

Forough Farrokhzad’s 1962 documentary film, “The House is Black” (Khane siah ast) seems to be of a similar order. From the very beginning, Farrokhzad makes it clear that her wish is to juxtapose visual “ugliness” with the gradual emergence of beauty and grace. As her focus is a neglected leper colony near Tabriz, Iran, the film is also a call to ethics. Her viewer, at one level at least, is to see the images, feel compassion for the people that fill the frame, and do something to ease their suffering. We are confronted with images of ugliness and called on not to close our eyes. The film also includes more clinical scenes, in which people suffering from leprosy have their lesions filed off and their symptoms treated, a nod to the efficacy of early intervention in treating the disease. Beyond this, as critics have pointed out, there is the sense, made clearer by the film’s end, that there is little that separates the viewer from the leper, and that we are all similarly alone and vulnerable in the world.

There is also an important meta-poetic component to Farrokhzad’s one and only film project, and it is one that is largely independent—or at least of a different order—from the images she shot over twelve days in the Bababaghi Hospice. In the most obvious sense, there is a poetic voiceover in which Farrokhzad recites a mixture of her own verses and translated passages from the Bible and Qur’an. These tend, perhaps predictably, to have an overtly religious tone, although at no point do they devolve into anything like official or even mainstream piety. Her verses breathe life into long-established, even traditional notions of grace, faith, and beauty. One is reminded of Alice Oswald’s recent version of Homer’s Iliad, in which she strives “to retrieve the poem’s enargeia, […] as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping.” In the “House is Black,” I would say, Farrokhzad lifts the roof off much more than a church, but then she’s dealing with much more than an ancient epic poem.

Apart from the poetry (to which I’ll return), there is also the editing of the film, which juxtaposes sounds (and images) in ways that give “The House is Black” a dramatic rhythmic effect. Apart from these more conventional filmic details, however, I’d like to suggest that Farrokhzad does something even more important in the film. My main point today, in fact, is that while it is true that “The House is Black” pushes at the very boundaries of a priori systems of both cinematic and a poetic meter, she also manages to tug at the outer limits of rhythm itself—the latter understood as an arithmetical and temporal phenomenon as well as a form-giving interruption of flow. In a strictly Blanchotian sense, Farrokhad’s film “flirts with disaster,” insofar as Blanchot speaks of rhythm as disaster (citing Archilochus) and the danger of its own enigma.” Put another way, I’m suggesting here that Farrokhzad sets poetry against itself, and sound against sense, to develop, or at least point to, what is anterior to both. This doesn’t undermine in any way the overtly ethical thrust of the film, but it does, I would argue, place “The House is Black” on much deeper artistic and philosophical footing.

Toward the end of Farrokhzad’s short life (she died in a car accident at 32, less than five years after the release of her film), she spoke of her poetry moving away from the experience of an external world and into herself, a kind of deep poetic reckoning with an interior world that finds expression in later poems such as “Ramideh,” the last stanza of which ends with a reference to the sort of daemonic madness (divanighi) that connects her to traditional Persian lyric even as its accompanying alienation (biganghi) places her on difficult footing vis-à-vis the world around her.

Turning to the film itself, I’d like to begin, somewhat paradoxically, at the end. It’s here that Farrokhzad offers three verses that have found steady and much deserved repetition: “O overflowing river, driven by the breath of love, . . . come toward us, come toward us.” This is clearly a sort of prayer, but to whom? And for what? What is the overflowing river driven by love’s breath? What is this breath (nefes)? How does it relate to ancient, Biblical notions of life and spirit (nefesh)? What does it mean to be touched or (one might imagine) swept away by this river? These are perhaps open questions for specialists in Persian literature and culture to solve, and I’d like to speak only to the mechanics of what Farrokhzad gives us. As the door to the Bababaghi Hospice closes, the residents are walking toward the film’s viewers. The door closes and cuts off this movement, which we might understand as an interruption or break in flow. In this way, form is given, order is imposed: we are enrhythmed, like water caught up in cupped hands. The Iranian state has even given us a name for this form—“leper colony” (jazam khane)—and it reliably gives us the boundary of an inside and an outside. In like manner, it is worth pointing out, an entire tradition of Persian language and literature (among others) provides forms for poetic expression: breaks in flow that form assemblages: genre, tradition, meter, rhythm. After the door closes, the film then cuts back to a classroom, where a young man has been asked to go to the board to write a sentence using the word khane (house). After much thought, he haltingly writes “Khane siah ast” on the chalkboard. The screen then goes black, and Farrokhzad utters the lines I have just presented. In the original version of the film (that is, without subtitles), there is of course only blackness as a backdrop for Farrokhzad’s poetic prayer. It is as if we have stepped into the “black house” (or were always already there), a place where language finds itself stripped down to its most elemental aspect: prayer, invocation, the vocative. Here, in this black sphere anterior to reference (or even absence), we enter into direct address with the infinite, the unparsed—that overflowing river—and we call to it, from a position of vulnerability, dispossession, and responsibility. What I’m suggesting here is that beyond a statement about leprosy, aesthetics, and ethics, “The House is Black” also offers a profound theorization of poetry and language itself, even if we bracket off, as I prefer to do, Martin Heidegger’s own statements on poetry, houses, and Being. Moving into more openly Semitic terrain, it is likely closer to the heart of things to point out that Farrokhzad comes tantalizingly close to Paul Celan’s Meridian speech notes on “breathturn”(Atemwende), where he speaks of “the ancient—double movement of the poetic: as the world is delivered in the world, something—what? becomes world-free.” Building on this, we might ask, what remains “other” to world in “The House is Black?” There is the overflowing river, but as metaphor it seems to be wholly rooted or “delivered” in the world. To get a sense of where the film takes us (as if to the edge of a cliff, or the threshold of a door), it is necessary to look at what Farrokhzad does with rhythm itself in the film.

In an early scene of the film, we are presented with a blind man pacing alongside a building, touching the wall with his hand with every other step. When he reaches the building’s end and touches air, he turns around and walks back, touching the wall with his other hand. To emphasize the rhythmic character of the scene, Farrokzhad begins to recite—in time with the man—the days of the week:  shanbe, yekshanbe, doshanbe, etc. Thus, there is the appearance of linear counting here, one day after another, but it exists as a closed loop, much like the man’s repeated journey alongside the wall, as when Farrokhzad reaches Friday (jome-eh) she begins with Saturday (shanbe) again. Quick cuts to images of household objects and stationary people at windows amplify this effect. But there are those moments—tense and thrilling—when the man touches air, and in the seconds before he turns around to repeat his rhythmic journey, he greets the limits of all the counting and measurable beats. No interruption of his flow of movement, no house to push back against his hand: it is a frightening place, one of possibility, and he (and we with him) chooses to turn around and walk back. But we are left to wonder about this breathturn moment and the man’s precise footing vis-à-vis number, order, and form at the time-space. It can arguably be read, I believe, as Farrokhzad’s entire film condensed into one brief scene.

Later in the film, there is another breathturn moment, this time much longer. We see a group of boys playing at recess. One boy bounces a ball in time, turning a full circle with each bounce. It’s a playful scene but also one tightly regimented in terms of time and rhythm. Bounce, turn, bounce, turn, bounce, turn. The boys around him watch with expectation, waiting for something to occur. The boy then picks up the ball with both hands and smiling broadly, tosses it to his friends. From here, the rhythmic bouncing and sense of expectation are immediately transformed into an explosion of joyful play. The scene is now a flurry of smiling faces, hands batting at the ball, and bare feet dancing around the earth. Mostly there are giddy smiles, the free flow of children at play. Here too is a moment beyond the counting of beats and even the rhythmic clapping of adult celebration. It is a scene of uninterrupted flow, a ball bouncing around on a current of childish joy. The scene ends abruptly with the coming of nightfall, a man on crutches making his slow, methodical way to us, and Farrokhzad reciting a poem of captivity and containment, of mortal form. We are back to touching the wall as we pace back and forth beside it, our human, bodily frailty pressing us into the earth.  

“The House is Black” is a deeply Iranian movie that calls attention to a specifically Iranian social problem; its spoken elements similarly deal with a long tradition of Persian poetry and themes easily recognizable for its Persian-language viewers. That said, there is a profound theorization of poetry itself at work here that intersects with ideas on poetry and ethics from Europe, Africa, and North America during the same period. Over roughly twenty-one minutes, Farrokhzad constructs a powerful relation of face with the other, both with respect to the lepers whose plight she wishes to document, and with what underlies poetry itself. “The House Is Black” is a film filled with striking images, but working underneath these and all around is the force that sound exercises: from the rhythmic beats and markings of time to a more overflowing sense of human being, one lived as a prayer for both love and life.