The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1963)

Forough Farrokhzad, generally regarded as the greatest Persian poet of the 20th century, made her first film in 1963. It proved her last; she died four years later. Yet the movie in question, a 22-minute documentary made to increase awareness of leprosy in Iran, prefigures not only the essay film but seemingly the whole of the Iranian New Wave. "There is no shortage of ugliness in the world," says the male narrator who opens the film before Farrokhzad takes over the reading. "If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more."

The House is Black certainly contains "ugliness," featuring shots of diseased colony residents in various states of physical decay, but Farrokhzad never turns away from these people. Just as important, she does not look upon them pityingly, either. The film, in black-and-white with bright frames from the desert sun, uses subtitles without outlines, making reading them practically impossible. Throughout the film, she reads from the Old Testament, the Koran and her own poetry, the words so haunting, grim yet hopeful that I downloaded a copy of the subtitles to read along with the YouTube video. However, I could have gotten by without them: this is a film told with such simple visual grace it's no wonder one of the world's great modern art movements practically sprang out of it.