Man's Favorite Short

Short Film Poetry
The House Is Black
By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Forugh Farrokhzad's 20-odd-minute black-and-white 1962 documentary about a leper colony in northern Iran is the most powerful Iranian film I've seen. Farrokhzad (1935-'67) is commonly regarded as the greatest Persian poet of the 20th century; her only film seamlessly adapts the techniques of poetry to its framing, editing, sound, and narration. At once lyrical and extremely matter-of-fact, devoid of sentimentality or voyeurism yet profoundly humanist, the film offers a view of everyday life in the colony — people eating, various medical treatments, children at school and at play — that's spiritual, unflinching, and beautiful in ways that have no apparent Western counterparts; to my eyes and ears, it registers like a prayer.

When It Rains

One of my all-time favorites, this beautiful 12-minute short by Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, The Glass Shield), made for French TV in 1995, is a jazz parable about locating common roots in contemporary Watts and one of those rare movies in which jazz forms directly influence film narrative. The slender plot involves a Good Samaritan and local griot (Ayuko Babu), who serves as poetic narrator, trying to raise money from his ghetto neighbors for a young mother who's about to be evicted, and each person he goes to see registers like a separate solo in a 12-bar blues. (Eventually a John Handy album recorded in Monterey, a "countercultural" emblem of the '60s, becomes a crucial barter item.) This gem has been one of the most difficult of Burnett's films to see.

First published in the Chicago Reader

Jonathan Rosenbaum
© FIPRESCI 2006

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