La casa es negra (Forugh Farrokhzad, Irán, 1962)

Hace tiempo que tenía ganas de empezar un nuevo blog. Quería uno que encuentre útil y me dé alguna satisfacción sin conumirme tanto tiempo. Hace rato que venía pensando uno en el que pueda describir en un par de líneas algunas de esas películas que uno jamás imaginó poder encontrar antes de conocer ese universo de torrents y e-links. Acabo de ver este pequeño documental iraní que da nombre al blog y no pude contenerme. Forugh Farrokhzad fue una poeta iraní que en 1962 filmó este documental de 22 minutos, su única obra fílmica, sobre una colonia de leprosos. La primera referencia que dispara la mente es Freaks, de Tod Browning, por el retrato de las deformidades de la anatomía. Pero La casa es negra es más un poema que un documental. Farrokhzad cambia el ritmo del montaje todo el tiempo y juega con las imágenes mientras narra un poema en el que plantea un diálogo con Dios. De visión incómoda, La casa es negra por momentos me daba ganas de taparme las orejas y gritar, como hace uno de los leprosos en una escena del documental, y también de cerrar los ojos por la impresión que me daban algunas de las imágenes de Farrokhzad. Pero las primeras líneas de la película son "El mundo está lleno de fealdad. Aún habría más si el hombre apartara la mirada. Van a ver en pantalla una imagen de la fealdad, un retrato del sufrimiento, que sería injusto ignorar. Por respeto al hombre, debemos luchar contra esta fealdad, aliviar este sufrimiento. Esa es la esperanza que ha inspirado esta película."

Jonathan Rosenbaum, uno de los críticos más importantes del mundo, dijo esto sobre la película:
"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."

Por último, dejó un link con la biografía de Forugh Farrokhzad