411. Khaneh siah ast/The House is Black (1963)

Running Time: 22 minutes
Directed By: Forugh Farrokhzad
Written By: Forugh Farrokhzad
Main Cast: (narration): Ebrahim Golestan, Forugh Farrokhzad

IRANIAN NEW WAVE

This won't take long, trust me. "The House is Black" is a twenty-two minute short, documentary that covers the everyday life of a leper colony. I must say that as I delve deeper and deeper into the pages of the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" book, I'm finding out a lot about my own tastes. For example, the other day I discovered a disdain for experimental films. Today, I'm starting to think there aren't any good short subjects out there either.

To summarize the plot here would be kind of pointless. Like I said, it takes us inside the gate of a leper colony and shows us some of the unfortunate individuals who are forced to deal with this terrible disease. We see kids who suffer with the illness, playing and gathering at school and adults who go to clinics and try to get help for this curable ailment. The title comes directly from the film, when a boy is asked to write a sentence using the word "house", he comes up with "the house is black" - showing just how bleak these poor souls are. For the most part, the film plays like a poem and I wasn't surprised when I read the entry in THE BOOK and found out that Forugh Farrokhzad was indeed a poet. The narration (mostly from her) is more of a prayer than a narration and only briefly does the poetic language break to actually give us a little bit of info about the lepers themselves. Apparently, Farrokhzad's motive in making "The House is Black" was to erase some of the ugliness in the world and show that even these deformed human beings have personalities of their own and have a future of their own and to shed a little light on a disease that is mostly hidden in darkness.

You know, I'd love to be able to come here and sing this film's praises and say things like, "This film was just a breath of fresh air and it really made me feel for these poor people and the oppression that they have to endure." I'm not saying that those are untrue statements, I'm simply saying that it just didn't hit me as hard as it apparently hit others. I saw a twenty-two minute film that didn't educate or sympathize with lepers, but rather pitied the poor people that had the disease. If I had leprosy and I saw this movie, I think I might be a little offended. I mean, I'm in agreement that these people deserve a little bit of pity and sorrow, but to ramble on for even twenty-two minutes and spout off poetry and prayer, it just makes it that much more bleak.

I don't know, maybe I just didn't take the film the way I was supposed to and I know it didn't impact me as much as it did others (most notably the contributors to THE BOOK). I feel for anyone who has any type of debilitating disease, but "The House is Black" didn't make me anymore sympathetic than I already would have been. If they really wanted to make a film and educate people about the disease and take us inside a leper colony and dropped all the poetic crap, that would have been one thing, but this was something else. Actually had they approached it like Peter Watkins approached "The War Game", it could have been a really special little gem - as it is, it isn't.

RATING: 4/10 I appreciated the education and such, but ultimately this just wasn't up my alley. If it had been a little more powerful and a little more eye opening, I may have gone with the "unrateable" rating, but "The House is Black" is certainly rateable.

MOVIES WATCHED: 368
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 633

December 14, 2011 10:18pm