Fereshteh: Sometimes I want to put on make-up, or wear beautiful dresses, or fall in love. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m living in a small can, even though I completely believe in our organization and its ideas. Do all the revolutionaries of the world look like us? Their faces, their rooms, their appearances, are they similar? Do they wear overcoats and Chinese shirts like we do? Do they read the histories and philosophies of other countries like we do? If I had been arrested last night, who would have helped me?
Nasrin: What is the matter with you? A few minutes ago, you were talking about a life in hiding, and now you are saying something else.
Fereshteh: I think the way we look is very revealing. Anyone can figure me out, just by looking at the way I dress. That’s not good, it’s even dangerous.
* * *
This conversation between two characters in the film The Hidden Half can be read on multiple levels. Fereshteh, the protagonist, is an eighteen-year-old college student who arrives in Tehran in 1978, the period of Iran’s Islamic Revolution; Nasrin, her comrade, is the leader of a women’s cell of the leftist political organization that Fereshteh has joined. With violent tensions rising in Tehran, the scene speaks on one level to her fears. The Maoist uniform that identifies her as a counterrevolutionary now endangers her.
On another level, Fereshteh’s question speaks to a greater concern, one that she carries with her throughout the film: What makes someone a revolutionary? Who embodies revolutionary work? More specifically, her question takes a gendered tone: Who is a revolutionary woman? What does she look like, act like, think like, dress like? How can one recognize her?
To uncover broader answers to such questions, we can nevertheless look to the particular – in this case, the cinema of one culture, representing a particular period in time. We look here to Tahmineh Milani’s The Hidden Half (2001) and Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black (1963) as ethnographic sites. While seemingly quite different films – The Hidden Half is a 21st-century fictional melodrama; The House Is Black is a short yet moving documentary commissioned decades earlier – they share a common provenance and significance. Both works by prominent Iranian women directors, they provide us with strong images of revolutionary women, including the directors themselves.
Some revolutions are easy to spot. They arise out of certain places and events, at critical moments in history. This was the case in Iran in the years leading up to and after 1979. To be sure, women have played no small role in these significant political and cultural revolutions. But small revolutions occur every day, often in quieter or hidden ways. These invisible insurrections, performed often by women, are the revolutions I seek to uncover in discussing these films.
The Hidden Half (2001)
In the scene that opened this piece, Fereshteh has already been involved for some time with a counterrevolutionary group opposing the Islamic Revolution. No one can question her resolve. To oppose the threat of university closures, she and her comrades hand out flyers, sell papers, and meet to engage in critical political discourse. Though donning a masculine demeanor and uniform – except for the traditional headscarf – these women are youthful, idealistic, hopeful. This is embodied most clearly in the character of Zohreh, the most spirited of the group, who teases Fereshteh when she catches the eye of Roozbeh, a handsome older man whose group of high-minded intellectuals meets in the same café.
Nasrin, who we learn was formerly imprisoned for political activities, takes a hard line in her leadership of the group. Despite Zohreh’s protestations that “joking is an important part of life,” Nasrin insists that “joking is the work of idles and not of us, who have serious goals.”
To say nothing of love.
The serious goal Nasrin represents is the goal of any Marxist revolution: transformation to a classless society. Fereshteh wholeheartedly shares this goal, but as she and Roozbeh exchange gazes across the café, suddenly she wonders what the work of revolution is for: “Where does love have a place?” The question is spoken with childlike sincerity, and with the hope and expectation for an answer. Nasrin, unwilling to entertain distractions from the group’s work, puts an end to this conversation and submits a request to the organization’s leaders for an official response.
A few scenes later, Fereshteh and Zohreh are chased through the streets by Islamist vigilantes. When they are separated, Fereshteh finds safety in the home of Roozbeh, where they meet for the first time. Roozbeh introduces her to a friend and writer, Ms. Pahlevan, who takes aim at Fereshteh’s political activities, calling her a “lamb.” To Pahlevan, Fereshteh and her comrades tote political slogans but lack substance; they can quote the leaders of revolutions in Russia, Chile, and Vietnam but know nothing of their own country, their own history.
Fereshteh holds her own against Pahlevan, asserting that she and Roozbeh “are like the middle-class intellectuals of Russia in 1917, who stood in the way of revolution.” But behind her retorts we see her uncertainty. The following scene brings us Fereshteh’s questioning of Nasrin: “Do all revolutionaries in the world look like us?” The answer, hopefully obvious to the reader, is no. In this moment, in her questioning, Fereshteh is waging a quiet revolution of her own. Against a backdrop of violence and political upheaval, we see Fereshteh struggle to justify – to herself and others – her desire for a happy life, for beauty, and for love.
In this same moment that we see Fereshteh’s inner conflict, Nasrin delivers the organization’s official answer to her question about romantic love: “Love for someone from the opposite sex is an instinctive love, and it is valuable . . . but when we are in the middle of a struggle, we must have the ability to abstain from it.” Love, the leaders of the revolution make clear, can only interfere with one’s revolutionary intentions and duties. If that was allowed, Nasrin argues, “there wouldn’t be a struggle.” This was not the answer Fereshteh wanted. Without love, what cause is there to wage a revolution? What reason is there to endure a struggle? She longs to find a way for love and revolution to exist in the same place.
The Hidden Half
Fereshteh, who is also a poet, is already in love with Roozbeh when she meets him in his office to discuss her poetry. Roozbeh is harshly critical of her work, which focuses on her relationship to the working class – a relationship that, we will learn, is born out of her personal experience. Nevertheless, he asks her to make him a promise: “Do whatever your organization asks you to. Write whatever you want. Devote everything you have to your organization – except your eyes. Yes, do whatever you want, but with open eyes. Keep your eyes to yourself. It is very painful to die of blindness.”
Willful blindness, and the secrecy that results, are what ultimately drive Roozbeh and Fereshteh apart. Nevertheless, we are left to feel that love and revolution – their improbability of sharing space – are most to blame. It seems that neither love nor revolution can grow where both exist denying the presence of the other. Roozbeh, who is married when they meet, is revealed to have been a member of the Tudeh Communist Party during the 1953 coup d’etat. In that earlier revolution, Roozbeh’s lover was killed. Roozbeh married, though he never loved again, until he met Fereshteh, who bore an unmistakable resemblance to his lost love. Fereshteh, for her part, is too quick to judge, and runs from Roozbeh with only half the story in tow. Their misjudgments are not exposed until twenty years later, when they meet by accident at a funeral, their love unconsummated but never unrequited: “You either don’t find it, or when you find it, it’s too late,” Roozbeh confesses finally.
The Hidden Half
When we first meet Fereshteh in the film, she is a wife and mother. After the darker days of the revolution – which saw universities closing, the organization fragmenting, and comrades being imprisoned or executed – she has discovered happiness, safety, and family with Khosro, her husband whom she loves: a kind and steady man who supported and stood by her after her expulsion from the university and ultimate exile. Her life, though it looks much different now, is forever affected by her encounter with Roozbeh.
The Hidden Half
The majority of The Hidden Half unfolds as a flashback, in the form of a letter in which Fereshteh reveals to her husband the story of her former life and love. Khosro, a judge, is set to hear the testimony of a woman awaiting conviction for a crime. By writing down her story, Fereshteh imparts to Khosro an important message: he must listen to the woman’s whole story before making a judgment, especially to the hidden parts. Fereshteh, in this new life, no longer wears the Maoist green, though she remains a revolutionary. The question is whether we can recognize her – and hear her.
The House Is Black
It is not coincidental that Fereshteh is both a revolutionary and a poet in The Hidden Half. Persian poetry has a long and rich history in Iran, and this legacy finds a new medium in Iranian cinema. Directed by Farrokhzad, one of Iran’s most famous poets, The House Is Black is a stunning example of this meeting of forms. Filmed in a leper colony outside Tabriz, the film opens with a male voiceover:
There is no shortage of ugliness in the world. If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more. But man is a problem solver. On this screen will appear an image of ugliness, a vision of pain no caring human being should ignore. To wipe out this ugliness and to relieve the victims is the motive of this film and the hope of its makers. [emphasis added]
The voice belongs to Ebrahim Golestan, a writer and filmmaker and Farrokhzad’s lover, who encouraged her to pursue film. Just as Roozbeh makes Fereshteh promise never to succumb to blindness, here is a man’s voice instructing us to look with open eyes. Yet it is Farrokhzad who duly takes up this work and her “eye” that we imagine behind the camera. Thus, the film leaves us with the impression that it is a man who instructs the eye, but it is a woman’s eye that sees. The first long shot gives further credence to this impression. In it, a woman gazes into a mirror; the veil half-covering her face both exposes and conceals her disfigurement. As the woman gazes into the mirror, she seems to look back at Farrokhzad’s camera, seeing us.
Save for a brief interlude in which we hear a clinical-sounding explanation of leprosy, the rest of the film is narrated by Farrokhzad’s voice, reading her own poetry. Amid scenes of everyday life – play, celebration, learning – images of disfigured skin, missing limbs, and exposed bones betray the lepers’ suffering. By inserting herself into the scene poetically, not personally, Farrokhzad simultaneously remains separate from it. The result is a presence that is empathetic while resisting voyeuristic exploitation. For although Farrokhzad had known suffering in her life, the film speaks with an awareness that Farrokhzad – a beautiful and accomplished woman – did not presume to know this suffering.
What makes it difficult to look at these images is not that they appear grotesque, although we might prefer to think so. What actually makes them difficult to look at is this piercing fact, revealed five minutes into the film: leprosy, when treated properly, is curable. Like many social ills, there is a solution to this problem – recall “man is a problem solver” – but that solution means first seeing, then changing how we live. This is what we cannot stomach. Farrokhzad takes this weight on herself, so we can look safely – from a distance. In one scene, her poem reads:
Where would I escape from your face?
Where would I go from your presence?
If I hang on to the winds
of the morning breeze,
and reside in the deep of the sea
your hand will still weigh on me.
The House Is Black
The “your” addressed here is the face of God, whose presence the speaker, Farrokhzad, cannot escape. The lines overlay the image of a young girl who holds a doll as she is pushed through a crowd in a wheelbarrow. These faces of the lepers, too, we sense Farrokhzad cannot escape. What she sees creates a weight for her that will remain.
The House Is Black
The House Is Black has been viewed as an allegory for Iran (Rahimieh, 2010; Saljoughi, 2017), a nation that, like every other, is still in a process of becoming. The metaphor comes through most clearly in the final scene, set in a schoolroom full of children. A teacher instructs a boy to write a sentence with the word “house” in it. The scene cuts to an image of the entire community, hands joined, walking slowly toward the doors of the enclosure. The doors close on the leper colony. Cutting back to the schoolroom, the sequence ends with the boy composing this titular sentence on a chalkboard: “The house is black.” Saljoughi, writing most convincingly, argues that the film presents us with a vision of “future collectivity” that has yet to come. What this possible future looks like we cannot yet imagine – yet we sense it will take a certain kind of revolution to get there.
The House Is Black
Other writers have called The House Is Black a work of radical humanism (Rosenbaum, 2022). A radical and humanistic film it certainly is, but I would go further. The film is the work of a woman, a poet, who is revolutionary in her courage. She enters a space that most of us would never dare to go, and what she sees there most of us will tragically fail to see. Farrokhzad does not need to weaponize her words and images to do revolutionary work: only a truly loving human portrait could accomplish so much in such a short film. Farrokhzad shows us that in art, perhaps, love and revolution can together exist.
Nearly forty years separate these two films, and in that time, Iran experienced a complete political and cultural transformation. Since then, Iranian cinema has provided a site for revolution in its own right. Since 1979, Iranian film directors have employed ingenious storytelling tactics, delivering hidden narratives that evade detection by government censors. For suspecting and unsuspecting audiences, these narratives seep into individuals’ lives and, over time, can find themselves reflected in the culture at large. But to truly understand the messages they tell, we have to look beyond what is obvious.
Milani and Farrokhzad have both been widely celebrated for their talents, in and beyond Iran. But what is revered is also often feared. Milani’s film was banned due to its depiction of revolutionary activity, and Milani herself sentenced to prison until she was finally pardoned. Farrokhzad, who died tragically in a car accident at age thirty-two, was marginalized during her short life and her poetry banned for more than a decade after the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
Yet it is this revolutionary woman, perhaps, who should be most feared. The woman who shows us what we do not want to look at, speaks what we do not want to hear. Who is this woman, and how can you recognize her? As Fereshteh writes in her letter to her husband: “I beg you to go and listen to her words, to all of her words.”
References
Rahimieh, Nasrin. 2010. “Capturing the Abject of the Nation in The House Is Black.” In Dominic Parviz Brookshaw and Nasrin Rahimieh, eds., Forough Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran: Iconic Woman and Feminine Pioneer of New Persian Poetry (pp. 125–136). I. B. Tauris.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 2022. “Radical Humanism and the Coexistence of Film and Poetry in The House Is Black.” https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2022/06/tradical-humanism-and-the-coexistence-of-film-and-poetry-in-the-house-is-black/
Saljoughi, Sara. 2017. “A New Form for a New People: Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 94/32 (1): 1–31.
