Documenting Lepers’ Lives: The House is Black (1962)

Two men in hats on a rubble heap, one playing a wall-attached string instrument

I watched the Iranian film “The House is Black” to see if it would be useful for my Music and Pandemics course. It has a couple of short musical examples, but they didn’t really have enough context to be useful for a teaching purpose.

And yet, I want to make a plea to you, dear reader, that you take the 21 minutes to watch this amazing film about a leper colony, a film created in 1962, the year before I was born. Feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad made only this one film, but her documentary about ugliness and beauty and grace and humanity – and isolation – and disfiguring disease is truly transcendent.

Her film is a profound meditation on the resilience of humanity and the power of community in the face of disfiguring disease and social exclusion. Through stark and compelling visuals, poetic reflections, and moments of shared joy—a few of which are marked by music—the film challenges viewers to confront our own perceptions of beauty, grace, and shared humanity. The message of the film is that we humans are not limited to our disease-prone body; perhaps the most important things to all of us everywhere are the moments of joy, the beloved doll, and the connectedness one to another.

“On this screen will appear an image of ugliness, a vision of pain that no caring human being should ignore,” she warns us at the beginning of the film. Disfigured bodies, and the care that they need, are dealt with unflinchingly. Well, that’s not true. Farrokhzad may not have flinched from showing the care of a diseased foot, even returning to it, but I flinched. The hands, yes, pressing the hands to straighten them out makes sense. It’s even akin to the treatment that mom went through, though she had a different disease. But the dead flesh on the foot, yikes, that was hard to see. Why look? Because, as she says, we should care enough to know.

Superimposed over the glimpses of life in the leper colony, we get segments of Farrokhzad’s poetry. “Remember that my life is wind. I have become the pelican of the desert, the owl of the ruins, and like a sparrow I am sitting alone on the roof” (12:03). We watch members of the community at games, and Farrokhzad reminds us again that “Remember my life is wind, and you have given me a time of idleness, and around me the song of happiness...” (13:32). These poetic evocations help us to process what we’re seeing. They aren’t a narrative per se, but rather the evocation of meaning that goes in tandem with the visual element. More lyrical than prosodic, Farrokhzad reaches to us at a visceral level to command our engagement and provoke us into understanding of what we are seeing, and ultimately, it is to be hoped, into acceptance of the shared humanity of these scenes.

Music appears in a few segments of the film. It accompanies the scenes of play, work, grooming, and childcare (14:17-14:43). This is self-made music, internal to the community, not from outside, and not complex, but rather a simple thrumming of an instrument I don’t recognize. The community does, though: we see the dancing feet of a member of the community in time to the thrumming. “Let’s listen to the soul who sings in the remote desert,” says  Farrokhzad, “The one who sighs  and stretches his hands out saying: Alas, my wounds have numbed my spirit.” Numbed my spirit, perhaps, but not deadened it. There is still a capacity to dance, and to love.

We have a bit of singing at (15:09), but it is a momentary lead-in to visions of more personal grooming: a mother (one presumes) with her daughter, and a woman with deformed hands applying makeup to her eyes. These images are accompanied by an exhortation that vanity is in vain: 

“O the time-forgotten one, dressing yourself in red, and wearing golden ornaments, anointing your eyes with kohl, remember you have made yourself beautiful in vain, for a song in the remote desert, and your friends who have denigrated you…”

The question of beauty is particularly fraught, of course, in the environment of a leprosarium.

The third musical example of the film is a bit of ceremony, with drum (15:52-17:10) interlaced with singing mixed with murmurs as the crowd moves in what seems to be procession. The procession  segues directly into a chamber ensemble environment, with visual closeups of a strummed fretted string instrument (an Iranian Tar), a double reed, and a flute-like instrument, as well as the pervasive drum, shown toward the end of the section. This music is met with enthusiasm – the audience smiles, indulges in clapping along, and dances. The film seems to argue that music is integral to community, and I can get behind that sentiment! With music driving the gathering, we are led to see these people not as patients, but as engaged participants in an inclusive community.

We may know that this is a leper colony, but the film doesn’t make that point explicit until the gates close in on the inhabitants at 20:30. By that point, we have been so engaged with the life of these people that the closing gate – the separating out, the quarantine, the segregation – comes as a disturbing rejection of our shared humanity.

Which is probably exactly the message that Forough Farrokhzad meant to convey.


The House is Black (1962) by Farough Farrokhzad, available https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-house-is-black

Note: Nowadays leprosy is called Hansen’s disease to avoid the stigma associated with the terms “leper” and “leprosy.” I use the former term since it is the language used in the film’s translation. The disease is still relatively common; the CDC points out that 250,000 around the world are diagnosed with Hansen's disease each year. But it is also treatable, a point that Farrokhzad emphasized in her narrative.

Scoring for Calm or for Excitement? Smalley et al. (2023) on choices of sound in digital nature experiences (10/25/24)

I’m lucky enough to live on a farm, so wandering around in nature is something that comes as a matter of course for me, but I’m interested in how “digital nature” fits into the modern soundscapes we inhabit, and came across the Smalley et al. article while looking for a different reference. It was an interesting read, so here’s my summary!

Great Egret in a Florida waterway

Alexander J. Smalley et al., “Soundscapes, music, and memories: Exploring the factors that influence emotional responses to virtual nature content,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 89 (2023): #102060, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1787215/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The idea of visiting nature in a digital environment is popular, and was doubly so during the period of shelter-at-home recommendations during the first outbreak of the COVID pandemic. During that time, the authors of Smalley et al.’s “Soundscapes, music, and memories” got the idea of testing how the digital delivery of nature was actually working in terms of its emotional deliverables: cognitive reset, restorative potential calm, excitement, and awe. (They cite Kaplan & Kaplan 1989 on attention restoration theory, and Ulrich et al. 1991 on stress recovery theory as influences on their thinking). They had n=7636 participants, so provide a robust quantitative assessment of the field.

They noted that while we’ve done a lot of work to understand how viewing nature works, we’ve done less to understand how hearing such nature-scapes works in that digitally mediated environment, and they developed a clever plan to test the parameters that matter, using four different audio setups: silence, only music, only nature sounds, and a combination of music and nature sounds.

Since most documentaries have historically relied on big bold orchestral scores, they commissioned a “wall-of-sound” score (à la Hans Zimmer) to accompany their 3-minute digitally-generated nature scene, and (in collaboration with BBC Soundscapes for Wellbeing) measured the video’s impact with and without natural sounds layered in. (The natural sounds included things like bird song, water sounds, and the like.)

They were also interested in memory and its intersection with “affective outcomes triggered by digital nature content,” but noted that nostalgia (more particularly), being so often tied to specific musical cues, may not have been operational, given the newly generated score.

They found that:

The inclusion of music in our scene was associated with greater feelings of excitement (where it was the highest rated condition for this outcome), lower levels of calmness, and no significant change in restorative potential, awe, or nostalgia, compared to the silent control.

Music, in other words, is doing something, but it is not actually doing the restorative work of nature. To create excitement, we may be seeing “rhythmic entrainment” – the body responding to the upbeat rhythms of the music – and/or “emotional contagion,” in which the listener identifies with “the energy and excitement expressed by the music.”

But, since music meets only one of the positive parameters that “nature videos” can head for, the authors emphasize “the importance of multi-sensory depictions of nature.” Restoration and reset, and even awe at the beauty of the world, are supported by the hearing of the sounds that surround it.

My take-away is that video with nature sounds is the best choice if you’re trying to invoke a state of calm and get ready for another round of writing (ha!), but nature with music is better if you need that energy boost to clean the house.

Why Sound? (9/30/24)

While my current book project on Thalbach nuns centers on the question of sound and ceremony, my fascination with sound and soundscapes also helped to get me through the duties of my administrative years. As I pondered systematizing my thoughts, I toyed with several strategies (and blog titles, for that matter), and settled on Silences and Sounds as an overarching theme for the topics I want to engage with over the next long while. Today’s post explores sound as a critical element in my way of being in the world.

Why wallow in sound?

• Because I’m a musicologist; sound is my operational focus
  
• Because making sense of senses is a fundamental human activity 
• For the resolutions of jangling discords into bliss, like in this Corelli example from Op. 3 No. 1

Corelli, Op 3 No. 1...

• (If the clip won't launch, you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrg3uPORvV8, 1:09-1:31)

Other reasons I'm interested in sound:

• Because … noise, and beauty, and the serenity made manifest in an adagio
• Because I get unutterably curious about representing one sense in another medium. I write ekphrastic poetry, for instance, turning image or melody into the flow of words.

 

On one side, a photo of a gull; on the other, an imagistic poem about gulls feeding after a storm

• Because the outdoors has its own array of noises: crickets, early morning birds, wind through the trees
• Because there is a seasonality to sound, one that I’d like to ponder on some more

An ear and a cupped hand to capture sound

• Because back in the day after a particularly nasty virus, I transmogrified from having super-acute hearing to subpar acoustical detection skills. Surgery helped, but I still sometimes ache for that loss. As a result I think a lot about how one relates to the presence and absence of such stimuli and about the way sound impacts how we perceive the world.

• Because Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt testament touches my soul even though the writing is raw and the human deeply flawed 
• (IYKYK. If you don’t know, here’s a translation [CW suicidal ideation]:https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Heiligenstadt_Testament) 
  
• Because sound persists in memory, shaping and governing the stories we tell ourselves about being our truest selves. 

What are the critically important elements of sound in your life?

Introduction (9/29/24)

 

Buch der Kunst, dadurch der weltlich Mensch mag geistlich werden (Augsburg : Johann Bämler, 1491.08.23), München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4 Inc.c.a. 827, https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/view/bsb00013341?page=42%2C43 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

As a monastic historian of the late Middle Ages and early modern eras, I have a natural interest in sound. I come from musicology and am researching historical soundscapes – the world of song and instrument, but also the world of noise and of aural/oral symbols. I ask how that acoustical and symbolic realm shaped people’s lives. 

Wordsworth captures something important, I think when he describes “beauty born of murmuring sound,”* and beauty is part of what I seek to understand. Music making and music enjoyment drew me into questions about the past. I may be a lapsed french horn player, but I can still enjoy a good Mahler horn lick, or the sweet-sounding cornetti in a Monteverdi production, or the singing of chant in a deeply resonant cloister hall.

But fascinating too is the press of activities with their less-ordered noises. We can ask with Shakespeare, “What stir is this? What tumult’s in the heavens? / Whence cometh this alarum and the noise?”** and think on the arrival of Joan of Arc in the context of Henry VI Pt 1. Shakespeare here treats sound as a marker of beginnings and endings (and sections and segments, for that matter). Other forces too announce themselves through the audible: the complexities of the bustling marketplace, the thunk of a closing door, or the tolling of bells.

Eco-acoustical experiences also hold meaning – sometimes external, sometimes self-generated. I’ve often considered the huffing outrage of a disturbed deer on my pre-dawn walk, or indulged myself with the soothing amorphousness of the sound-cloud (shhhhhhHhhhhHhhh) associated with waterfalls, or the dramatic crack and hiss of summer storms. Sound shapes our experiences, both indoors and outdoors. I’m curious about how people tried to organize and understand that sensory experience in the context of both their daily and their ritual lives. Silence too has its place in this realm, suggesting the quiet peace of a morning walk or the sudden absence of sound in a cleverly syncopated passage in a Haydn symphony, or the conscious decision to let words drift away in favor of some inner insight.

The question of sound and ceremony drives my current book project, which is centered on the women’s convent of Thalbach in Bregenz on the shore of Lake Constance. Thalbach was founded in 1346 as a household of “devoted sisters” (like nuns but without formal vows), and in the very late 16^th century became Franciscan Tertiaries when the bishop demanded it. I’m investigating their active involvement in civic ceremonies. For instance, they are often called on to sing at families’ gravesides and to “walk over the graves” in procession. Thus, they make a nice case study for looking at the three-way intersection of music and sound, identity, and social context. After all, women performing collectively in the 15^th century, supported by their fellow townsfolk. How cool is that?

I live on a hobby farm (Fish! Chickens! 12-foot weeds!) with my husband Tom. We have successfully homeschooled our three children through to their college days and now delight in their post-collegiate adventures and identities. I’m a lark, which does help with getting writing done. So does the coffee, which is one of the delights of life. I read, as much and as often as I can, and occasionally more than that. I’m hoping to use this blog to motivate my own focused reading (and writing) practice as I get ready for more sustained writing of chapters, conference papers, and books.

Given the blog’s function as an expansion-of-perspective tool, what do YOU think I should be reading – on sound, on silence, on monastic life, on life’s meaning?

* Wordsworth, “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45559/three-years-she-grew

** The arrival of Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Henry VI part 1, I.4 https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-vi-part-1/read/1/4/