Junichiro Tanizaki, in the book In Praise of Shadows, writes: ‘the quality that we call beauty…must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows’. Like Tanizaki, Forugh Farrokhzad recognized the beauty and abundant offerings of shadows – as resisting fixed and totalizing meanings, softening a landscape, inviting repose and tranquility, harboring that which we seek to flee, evidence of having lived. In her artwork Farrokhzad routinely lays bare loneliness, anguish, melancholy, and destruction, while calling tenaciously for empathy, plurality, and an earnest engagement with the shadows in and around us.

Through a reading of The House is Black, I seek to consider how, through poetic means, this film puts into practice the term radical openness. Throughout this chapter I consider the following questions: How does Farrokhzad's mediapoem engage with the senses and what does this depiction generate? How can literature and film operate as a site of critical discourse and offer a vocabulary of opacity and rhizomatic plurality? By what means does Farrokhzad's film disrupt and decenter by enacting generative ruptures – in audience comfort, narrative, and genre traditions? And why does this matter? Ultimately, I seek to study the manner in which The House is Black can serve as an embodiment of the ongoing practice of radical openness.

Film Background

The House is Black was filmed in a geographically and socially marginalized leper colony, Bababaghi Leprosarium, in Tabriz, northern Iran. In 1962 Farrokhzad traveled there with a small crew to shoot the film over a span of twelve days. As Mohammad Hossein Azizi and Moslem Bahadori write, ‘in 1957 the ‘Society for the Support of Lepers’ was established in Tabriz to help the lepers of the Bababaghi Leprosarium…During the 1960’s, the living conditions of the lepers at the Bababaghi leprosarium were very unfavorable’.