Author: DC (Page 543 of 1086)

 

‘Jordan Belson died in September, 2011 at the age of 85. In his later years, Belson was an intensely private, almost hermetic, figure. The 30 films he made as an independent, artisanal filmmaker are suffused with mystery, navigating inner and outer spaces via slowly mounting flames of deliquescent light, shimmering starfields, and rainstorms of color.

‘The question of how he made those images was also a closely guarded secret. Throughout his life, Belson let slip few fragments of information regarding his filmmaking process. He was careful to distinguish his work from animation, for instance—even though his earliest films were made via traditional animation methods—insisting, “I don’t use liquids or models. I use mechanical and optical effects; and instead of using an animating table, I call my setup an optical bench.” The only extant description of that optical bench is in Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema. Belson’s primary means of image-making was a purposefully rudimentary, handmade apparatus, a cobbled-together array of a “plywood frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed motors, and variable intensity lights.” New modes of vision required new techniques to depict them, and Belson continually sought to refine his methods in order to produce unique effects. Séance (1959), for example, provides one of the first cinematic examples of a flicker effect, predating the work of both Peter Kubelka and Tony Conrad. For Light (1973), he introduced cascades of flickering and undulating particles that had not appeared in previous films. One need only to see the pulsing galaxies of Allures (1961) (which may have, in fact, used animation techniques) or the celestial terraforms of Samadhi (1967) to acknowledge the yawning gap between the simplicity of Belson’s setup and the profound complexity of the imagery he achieved. …

‘Having studied painting at the California School of Fine Art (now San Francisco Art Institute) and Berkeley, Belson brought together a keen understanding of materials, color, and form to his moving abstractions. Like his painter-turned-filmmaker friend Harry Smith, Belson was spurred to start making films after taking in screenings of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and Hans Richter at the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s. Belson also marshaled a number of systems of esoteric knowledge—Eastern religion, alchemy, Jungian psychology, and intoxication—to imbue those abstractions with meaning beyond the kinetic play of their surface beauty. While undeniably cosmic, Belson’s films are not without their representative qualities. Though he acknowledged the hallucinatory qualities of his 1960s films, Belson held fast to the idea that the flaming, spinning mandalas and spacescapes in his works were representations of an inner consciousness. He claimed, “I first have to see the images somewhere, within or without or somewhere. I mean, I don’t make them up.” At another juncture, Belson said that Samadhi “is intended to be a real documentary representation, as accurately as it was possible to make, of a real place and a real visual phenomenon that I perceived—just as I am looking at you right now.”

‘The otherworldly beauty of Belson’s private spectacle also caught the eye of Hollywood filmmakers looking to imbue their productions with the patina of the metaphysical. Stripped of their original contexts, however, Belson’s transcendental explorations transmuted into sci-fi effects fodder, even in such mildly enjoyable hokum as Robert Parrish’s Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969), and Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977), in which Belson’s imagery is the seduction tool employed by lusty A.I. super computer Proteus, who, upon acquiring sentience, also develops the hots for Julie Christie. While those examples merely repurposed older Belson footage, Philip Kaufman hired the experimental filmmaker to create special effects for his adaptation of The Right Stuff (1983), which recounted the origins of the American space program. Belson shot over 20,000 feet of footage for The Right Stuff—enough for a feature film—of which roughly three minutes were shown in the finished work. Belson was tasked with creating images of pilot Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier, the Earth, and starfields. He was also asked to recreate the mysterious shimmering “fireflies” that John Glenn reported seeing outside the cockpit of his Apollo spacecraft. (Not entirely coincidentally, Belson’s 1964 film Re-Entry had been inspired by astronaut Glenn’s post-orbit return to earth in February of 1962, and its soundtrack used snippets of Glenn’s radio communications.)

‘For The Right Stuff’s “fireflies” sequence, Kaufman intercut medium close-up shots of a bewildered Glenn (played by Ed Harris) surrounded by Belson’s light flecks with scenes of aborigines singing and dancing around a sparking fire. The camera follows the blaze’s embers as they lift into the night air. The resulting sequence creates the impression that the primitive ritual being enacted on terra firma is aiding Glenn’s journey in the heavens. Regardless of the fact that the film never mentions that “fireflies” were later determined by NASA to be light-reflecting ice particles outside of Glenn’s MA-6 capsule, the invocation of a primitive mysticism via a questionable portrayal of indigenous practices is far removed from Belson’s subjective investigations of human consciousness and perception in his own work. A director with a steadier aesthetic hand, Terrence Malick, studied Belson’s films while working on this year’s Tree of Life, and even approached Belson about creating new work for the project. …

‘Belson would go on to embrace the creative capacities of video editing in Mysterious Journey (1997) and his last work, the aptly-titled Epilogue (2005)—the latter piece commissioned for the Hirshhorn Museum’s landmark “Visual Music” exhibition that same year. In October, a never-before-seen work of Belson’s debuted at the memorial screening. Perhaps this rediscovery marks the beginning of Belson’s own eternal return, his re-entry into a mediascape that bears his aesthetic influence more than his physical imprint.’ — Gregory Zinman, The Brooklyn Rail

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Jordan Belson, 1926 – 2011
Jordan Belson @ IMDb
Jordan Belson @ Light Cone
Notes on Jordan Belson – Raymond Foye
RE-ENTRY: Thoughts on Jordan Belson: 1926–2011
Le cinéma cosmique de Jordan Belson
DVD: ‘JORDAN BELSON: 5 ESSENTIAL FILMS’
THE UNKNOWN ART OF JORDAN BELSON
Jordan Belson @ Matthew Marks Gallery
Jordan Belson: Sentience in Celluloid
Review: Phenomena by Jordan Belson; Samadhi by Jordan Belson
Jordan Belson @ letterboxd
SAMADHI by Jordan Belson
The Secret Paintings of a Hermetic Filmmaker
Making Films for the Inner Eye: Jordan Belson, James Whitney, Paul Sharits
The Search for Lost Transcendence: Cosmic mysticism in Jordan Belson’s films and painting
JORDAN BELSON: VISUALIZING INNER AND OUTER SPACE

 

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Extras

STiCKY DoT MANDALA ViSioNS [FoR JoRDAN BELSoN]

Jordan Belson Paintings 1950–1965

Watch here

 

Tribute to Jordan Belson

 

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Quotes
from Raymond Foye/The Brooklyn Rail

 

Film was just a few years old when I was born so it seemed the most modern revolutionary medium I could use. My films are always arbitrary mindstuff: nothing domestic.

In my work I am proceeding from the belief that anything can be animated. I’m interested in what underlies reality.

There are certain givens in my symbols that are based on practice, or just based on things as they are.

Non-Objectivism: To construct real events in an unreal world. As opposed to most concepts of abstraction where they are trying to get away from the physical world, in most cases.

Many of Kandinsky’s images are like visual letters, or a telegram.

Non-objective art wasn’t non-objective, people just didn’t yet know what the object was.

Each atom contains a simplified blueprint of what’s taking place in the cosmos. Protons and electrons moving around the nucleus, like planets around the sun. In this image green below is earth and sky above is blue, but that is not always the case. These relations and terms are relative in the work.

The tangibles and intangibles are mixed in the metaphysic. The image as a container of wisdom and knowledge.

I’ve tried to develop a sure sense of proportion so that if it’s not right, I can detect it. Granted I may not know what to do about it right away….

Intuition is the basis of my aesthetic judgment. The more you allow intuition to speak to you the closer you are to the truth, and the origins of the universe. I feel I’ve given up a lot of ways of thinking about certain things in order to be closer to intuition.

I try with my work to establish a sense of the monument: a spiritual location, like the great temples, the Acropolis. Symmetrical, beautiful lighting, the most advanced architectural thinking operates on a much higher plane than most modern art does.

There are monsters in my work. I used to despair at this. But then I realized I can’t eliminate them. They’re just part of the trip. The key is just don’t let them think they’re in control. The bardo plane contains all these awful gods and demons. They’re just projections.

 

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10 of Jordan Belson’s 30 films

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Bop-Scotch (1952)
‘In 1952, Belson animated a little masterpiece Bop Scotch, which applied the three-frame exposure of his other animation to objects found on the street. Moving around a manhole cover makes it seem to turn and following the swirling lines in a decorative paving seems to make them sway. Daisies dance and a rock seems to hop about from hollow to hollow in a patterned surface. The effect is enchanting and it became a very popular film.’ — Film Affinity

Trailer

 

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‎Mandala (1953)
‘Mandala came out only one year after Bop-Scotch but already showed a marked progression for Belson, who began honing in on what would become his own unique visual perspective. The film is more along the lines of what one traditionally expects of Belson’s work, namely, visually-centered compositions with circular objects at the heart of the screen growing, moving, and dissipating into a cinematic ether. We see geometric patterns of circles move around to the sound of a gamelan, the flow of the animation undulates between smooth and staccato movement. At one point, it appears as if the sun and the moon are swaying in orbit from one another amidst a backdrop of swirling grain.

‘Although Belson’s works operate as stand-alone films, that is to say visual-temporal stimulation crafted to approach a meditative state devoid of outside interference, one might liken his approach to some of the writing of Jung, who describes, in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, that “the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state– namely through a the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.”

‘Belson employs the seamless, constant movement allowed by the filmic medium to distill the audience’s interaction with his art work down to this “instinctive impulse”. As a concentrated temporal passage, Mandala projects a series of circle-based arrangements not to his own ends but as a way of conveying this self-healing to the audience. As we perceive the film, “we are driven to the conclusion that there must be a transconscious disposition in every individual which is able to produce the same or very similar symbols at all times and in all places.” Jung described this as a “collective unconscious” and Belson achieves a similar experience for his audiences through the non-representational images projected within the sealed space of the theater.’ — arkheia

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Raga (1958)
‘An early animated film by Jordan Belson.’

Watch the film VOD here

 

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Allures (1961)
‘I think of Allures as a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena – all happening simultaneously. the beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way.’ — Jordan Belson

Watch the film here

 

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Re-Entry (1964)
‘Belson uses colorful abstract gaseous images of light against a black background as a visual recreation of Bardo or the three states of being at the moment of death as defined by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “Belson aligns the three stages of Bardo with the three stages of space flight: leaving the earth’s atmosphere (death), moving through deep space (karmic illusions), and reentry into the earth’s atmosphere (rebirth).’ — WorldCat

 

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Samadhi (1967)
‘Is it possible to create a film that both induces and reproduces a transcendental experience? This thought fascinated Belson and other avant-garde filmmakers of his time, such as James Whitney and Stan Brakhage. The melting pot of counterculture, psychedelics and Eastern philosophy of the late Sixties set the scene in which these filmmakers would create their films. Belson recalls the revolutionary transformation and impact of psychedelics on the arts at the time, having himself experimented with LSD and mescaline: “It somehow set the stage for insights…The new art and other forms of expression reveal the influence of mind expansion”.’ — Sophie Pinchetti

 

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World (1970)
‘A combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena—all happening simultaneously. The beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way.’ — Jordan Belson

Excerpt

 

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Chakra (1972)
‘In Chakra, I was able to transfer the traditional order of the chakras into a film, starting with the first (lower) chakra and working up to the seventh (top) chakra…’ — Jordan Belson

Trailer

 

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Music of the Spheres (1977)
‘Belson’s works often provoke responses that rely heavily on abstract comparisons to the cosmos and outer space but this is perhaps one of his most celestial films. The opening titles even circle around a planetary surface, suggesting a kind of gravitational pull toward the center of the frame which winks at Belson’s predilection for centered compositions. While the fascination with cosmic imagery is ever-present, the audience’s geographic orientation is constantly thrown into question through repeated zooms both in and out of various objects. The soundtrack, offering a lush arrangement of marimbas, bells, and arpeggiated synths, plays off of the wondrous images Belson concocts on the screen. Shimmering colors evoking the Aurora Borealis, faintly-perceivable molten lava, splashing embers, and rushing waterfalls. Finally Belson zooms out from the serene texture of light reflecting on the surface of a lake to reveal our location within a tropical paradise. An entire universe contained within the sparkling glimmers of luminescence – a perfect metaphor for Belson’s filmography.’ — arkheia

Excerpt

 

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Fountain of Dreams (1984)
‘Belson’s imagery is ever enchanting, celestial colors dissolving into one another in a luminous and abstract dance. The gentle accompaniment of Liszt’s music blends with the swirling lights into a lovely cinematic synesthesia.’ — letterboxd

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Ferdinand, Hey. Ah, you’re heading up here. Is Belgium locked down too? I don’t even know. The lockdown here is annoying, but, frankly, other than art galleries being closed, which majorly sucks, and the obnoxious govt. permission form one must fill in and print out and put somewhere on one’s person before walking out one’s door, it doesn’t feel hugely different than before. ‘Discontents’! I’m very proud of that book. I think it lays out and represents the queer punk era very well in its own way. I really want to get it reprinted somehow. I need to look into that. Big up, sir. ** David Ehrenstein, I think I can guess who you would refer to as God. Let me check. *click* Yes, I was right! ** Jack Skelley, Trade of all Jacks. (1) Thanks for the ©. It’s pretty. (2) Agreed. (2 again) Exactamundo. (3) No one does rhetorical jives better. (4) Ditto. (5) I’ll pay especially close attention to any  mysterious tastes that might make appearances in my mouth. (5 1/2) Yes, I do think there was a huge drop post-Peter Green, although I do really like the first post-Green album ‘Kiln House’ a lot. Then the dreary Bob Welch era, although some of Danny Kirwin’s songs during the period are really good. I love Danny Kirwin. He was my big rock star crush when I was young. Then I think the remade FM as Nicks/Buckingham showcase era is mostly solid but utterly unremarkable. (6) No, it’s your playground. I’m just playing. ** Dominick, D!!!! Yes, we decided that ‘Jerk’ should really be preserved for future generations, ha ha, or whatever, since it’s been our most successful piece, and one of our best ones for sure. Oh, Billie Eilish’s performance wasn’t so exciting in and of itself. She just wandered around singing and stood on the hood of a car prop. I just think she and her songs are interesting and that something is going on in them. I feel like she could evolve into an even more interesting artist. That’s it, I guess. I don’t know who Bimini is, but I trust you that that was unforgivable. Love using his time machine option on Jackie Beat who used to be the meanest, scariest, most exciting trans/drag performer in Los Angeles fifteen or so years ago before she lost weight and remade herself into a merely okay, toned down, audience-friendly act, G. ** T, Hi, T. Thanks a lot for thanking them. And thanks re: our lockdown thing. Yeah, this has to be the last one. Trudging along. I hope you’re sprinting through your world. Take care. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. You must have had very, very low expectations about the Grammys. Yeah, the ‘WAP’ bit towered far above everything around it. Interesting/weird that rock was so completely sidelined apart from the borderline nap-inducing Haim. Well, there was that ‘Snuff/Gore (in quotes)’ post here a few days ago. That doesn’t count as ‘torture porn’? If not, are you offering to make such a post? I would be more than interested if you or whoever wanted to, of course. ** Golnoosh, Hi, G. Thank you, thank you so much again! I’m glad you finally got to see the comments. I didn’t know that invisibility problem is persisting. Ugh. Aw, thank you so much for the kind words and the humbling comparison, my friend. Have the bonnest day! ** Scott mcclanahan, Hi, Scott! Thank you, and it’s so great to see you! My pal Zac and I were talking about you exorbitantly the other day and wondering when you might publish a new book. Any hints? Take care, great sir, and much respect to you! ** Jeff J, Hi. Yes, I ended up going for the final day of the ‘Jerk’ shooting. I think, ultimately, it worked out okay. Gisele came around. There’s one key puppet show scene that’s shot in a problematic way, but mostly it looks pretty good. We’ll see when we start the editing next week. And it was melancholy to see the very last ‘Jerk’ performance. It’s been alive and touring for more than ten years. Crazy. A little novel progress sounds like plenty under the circumstances, so … great! I’ve only read a little Bruce Chatwin, but I liked what I read. Do you think I should read more of him? ** Okay. Today the blog focuses on the very beautiful and singular films of Jordan Belson, whose work you may or may not know, but, if not, now you can, and knowing his stuff is highly recommended. See you tomorrow.

Introduction

 

Forough Farrokhzad is one of Iran’s most famous and influential poets. Her poetry and persona gave permission to me and many other Iranians to write openly and daringly about longing and desire. Forough Farrokhzad’s life was turbulent and transgressive, not just because she broke the social norms expected of Iranian women in the 1950s and 60s, but also because she published poetry which questioned the traditional structures of religion, marriage, and gender norms. Indeed, when she was a journalist in her youth, her pseudonym was bot shekan – ‘idol-breaker’. Although the publication of her poetry has been banned since the foundation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry is still a best-seller on Iran’s black market. She still has a very strong fan base in Iran, especially within the Iranian queer community and her younger brother, Fereydoun was openly gay and a famous entertainer. (Although, tragically, a few years after the Islamic Revolution, he was murdered in his apartment in Germany.) Like most Iranians, I also prefer to refer to Forough Farrokhzad by her first name, Forough.

Below is a picture I took from a street bookseller in April 2018, in the Tajrish Square of Tehran, selling The Complete Poetry of Forough Farrokhzad with ‘Private Letters’. It is in the same row as other popular books in the Iranian book market: Sohrab Sepehri’s Complete Poetry, and a Persian translation of Mein Kampf. The rows beneath the top row include some of Iraj Pezekshad’s novels, including his canonical masterpiece: Dayi Jaan Napel’on (Uncle Napoleon), Farsi translations of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince.

 

 

Forough was born in 1935 to a middle-class family in Tehran. Her father was Colonel Farrokhzad, and her mother, Touran Vaziri-Tabar. Forough was one of their seven children and soon earned a reputation for competing with boys and defeating them. She climbed walls, jumped, and ‘howled’. Once she entered school, she became infatuated with the poetry of Ferdowsi, especially his Epic of Kings, and other classical Persian poets, such as Hafez and Rumi. At the age of sixteen, Forough married Parviz Shapoor and within a year, gave birth to their son, whom she lost two years later in the custody battle due to her love affairs.
—-The opening line of the poem Sin is: ‘I have sinned a pleasurable sin’. Forough wrote this poem about her affair with Naser Khodayar, the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine, who published derogatory pieces about Forough after their affair ended abruptly in 1954, until Farrokhzad’s family asked him to stop. Shortly after this public shaming in September 1955, Forough had a mental breakdown and attempted suicide, after which she was hospitalised in Rezai psychiatric clinic and received electroshock therapy, which also resulted in some magazines and newspapers to mock her by describing her as ‘insane’.
—-Her first poetry collection The Captive (Asir in Farsi) was published in 1955. The Captive consists of forty-two poems, most of which deal with sexual desire from the female point of view in a sorrowful tone, all composed in classical Persian poetic form. She was so prolific that only a year after that she published her second poetry collection The Wall (Deevar in Farsi).
—-In 1958, her third poetry collection Rebellion (Osyan in Farsi) was published. Although this collection is quite similar to her first two collections and is usually lumped with them under Forough’s early poetry and erotica, there is a shift towards existential matters such as God, life, and death. In this collection, Forough starts to question the figure of God, whilst adopting a more celebratory tone when describing her sexual desires and adventures, unlike the previous two collections, she does not have an apologetic tone towards God, but rather a more interrogating one.
—-In the same year, Forough Farrokhzad met and fell in love with another celebrated Iranian writer and film producer, Ebrahim Golestan. Despite the fact that he was married, they embarked on an intense and passionate love affair.
—-In 1962, Forough made her cutting-edge documentary The House Is Black, about the patients in a leprosarium in a deserted town in Iran. This poetic and unflinchingly realist film brought her universal recognition by winning the Best Documentary Award in the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1963. Hamid Dabashi states that with this film, Forough Farrokhzad ‘set Iranian film on a creative path from which it has not diverged.’ Below are three photographs I took in 2018 from the screening of the film at Mosaic Rooms in London:

 

 

Forough Farrokhzad’s fourth poetry collection Reborn (1962) is distinctly different from the previous three collections in terms of form, style, and content. The poems are not composed in the classical Persian rhyme schemes, instead Forough has adopted the Nimaic blank verse – the poetic form in free verse pioneered by Nima Youshij that was dominating the Persian poetry scene. This collection and her fifth collection Let Us Believe in the Dwan of the Cold Season (posthumously published in 1974) elevated Forough’s reputation from a ‘sensual poetess’ to one of the greatest poets of Persian modernism.

On the 13th of February 1967, returning from visiting her mother, Forough swerved her jeep in order to avoid hitting a school bus. She was thrown out of the car and her head hit the cement. She died immediately at the age of 32.

 

 

Hamid Dabashi describes Forough Farrokhzad as ‘the most celebrated woman poet in the course of the Persian poetic tradition and a seminal modern Persian poet, regardless of gender.’ Farzaneh Milani says about Forough that ‘her work has been among the most popular in modern Persian literature.’ Shaahin Pishbin explains that ‘Farrokhzad challenged, or even threatened, the normative values of her culture; innovative and exemplary, her place in the canon of modernist Persian poetry is well-established.’
—-Erotic poetry has always been an integral part of Persian literature. Passion is a common theme in the works of ancient Persian poets such as Hafez, Rumi, and Khayyam, but Forough Farrokhzad is the first woman who published her erotic verse. She is considered to be the pioneer of poets who wrote about female desire through the female gaze in Iran.

 

 

Note: Although I have translated a poem from Forough for this essay, all English translations of her poems have been taken from Sholeh Wolpé’s book Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad:

 

 

The Captive (1955), The Wall (1956), and Rebellion (1958)

Pleasure, in particular sexual pleasure, is one of the main themes of Farrokhzad’s early poetry, although this pleasure is often stained by a fear of God in her first two collections, in Rebellion, she started to adopt a more interrogating and fearless tone towards God and religion, for instance, the final stanza of Rebellious God is

Tired of being a prude, I’d seek Satan’s bed at midnight
And find refuge in the declivity of breaking laws.
I’d happily exchange the golden crown of divinity
For the dark, aching embrace of a sin.

Despite her early poetry being dismissed and mocked as traditionally-versed erotica, some of Forough Farrokhzad’s early poems are modern, feminist, and transgressive in terms of content in that they unashamedly explored and expressed female sexual desires in the 1950s and often questioned traditional concepts such as religion and marriage. A good example of this is a poem called The Ring, from Forough Farrokhzad’s debut poetry collection The Captive (1955). The Ring is a belligerent critique of the institution of heterosexual marriage. In the last stanza, the woman who has been married and congratulated and celebrated due to her marriage and ‘lustrous’ gold ring, is now mourning her status que and defines marriage as ‘slavery’:

… this band –
so lustrous and aglow –
is the clamp of bondage, of slavery

 

Reborn (1964)

Forough Farrokhzad’s fourth poetry collection Reborn (1964) is drastically different from her previous collections in that it has a modernist structure, and in terms of language and the use of literary devices it is much more innovative and original as it is full of eccentric extended metaphors, tangible vibrant and eerie imagery, and linguistic witticisms that have become a part of Farsi. Below is an instance of a strong extended metaphor and image from Those Days:

Those days are gone.
As uprooted plants wilt in the sun,
those days, too, rotted in sunlight.

—-In this collection, her lengthiest, Forough Farrokhzad’s feminism comes across as more confident and confrontational, especially with one of her poems called Wind-Up Doll in which she blatantly questions male authority, female subordination, and gender binaries:

one can cry out: I love!
In the oppressive arms of a man
one can be a robust, beautiful female

—-A few lines after this blunt criticism of the heterosexist power structures, she critiques the close-mindedness that can be caused by religion:

One can spend a lifetime kneeling,
head bowed,
before the cold altar of the Imams,
find God inside an anonymous grave,
faith in a few paltry coins.
One can rot inside a mosque’s chamber

Forough Farrokhzad’s renouncement of the institution of marriage and her blatant criticism of religion constitute only a few political elements of her poetry. Indeed, Jasmin Darznik correctly describes Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry as ‘at once political and poetic, particular and universal’.

 

 

Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season (1974)

Forough Farrokhzad’s fifth poetry collection Iman Biavarim be Aghaaze Fasl-e Sard (Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season) was written in 1965 but was posthumously published in 1974 and solidified her reputation as one of the greatest poets in Iran.
—-The first poem in the collection is the title poem, a great example of modernist poetry due to its content and techniques. The sense of doom, apocalypse, frustration, disappointment, and gloom in this long free verse has been expressed through unique and cryptic images. Jasmin Darznik has likened this poem to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Below is an extract:

Hollow human.
Hollow, trusting human.
Look at his teeth singing as they chew,
and his eyes devouring as they stare,
and how he passes the wet trees:
patiently,
heavily,
lost,
at the hour of four,
at the very moment his blue veins,
wrapped about his throat like dead snakes,
pound his angry temples
with those bloodied syllables:
Salaam.
Salaam.

Many believe that this poem, and the whole collection was a dark prophecy of Forough Farrokhzad’s sudden and tragic death; especially the famous final poem of the collection The Bird Shall One Day Die and its final lines that have become a Persian proverb:

Preserve the memory of flight.
The bird shall one day die.

Many also claim that this dark collection was a prophecy of Iran’s political future, especially in the light of the Islamic Revolution as the poem is imbued with dark political symbolism, particularly one of its most well-known poem I Pity the Garden. The fable of the garden of Eden is one of the most famous fables from the Quran, and it is not just a part of the narrative of Christianity, but also an integral part of Islamic and Middle Eastern discourse. In this thought-provoking and dark poem, Forough Farrokhzad criticises and ‘pities’ the garden that constitutes the narrator’s family. This garden that is ‘dying’ includes nuclear familial figures such as ‘father’ ‘mother’ ‘brother’ ‘sister’ and the narrator who is observing and mourning the decay and emptiness of it. Below is an extract from I Pity the Garden:

Mother is a sinner by nature. She prays
all day, then with her “consecrated” breath
blows on all the flowers, all the fish
and all over her own body.
She awaits the Promised One
and the forgiveness He is to bring.

My brother calls the garden a graveyard.
He laughs at the plight of grass
and ruthlessly counts the corpses of the fish
rotting beneath shallow water’s dead skin.
My brother is addicted to philosophy.
He sees the healing of the garden in its death.
Drunk, he beats his fists on doors, and walls,
says he is tired, pained, and despondent.

My sister was a friend to flowers.
She would take her simple heart words
– when mother beat her ¬–
to their kind and silent gathering.

She now lives on the other side of town
in her artificial home, and in the arms
of her artificial husband she makes natural children.

Just like any other text, Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry is also open to interpretation. The intensity, urgency, and immediacy of her poems make them even more so. Whatever readings of her poetry, one thing’s for sure: her poetry, vision, and persona created a new way of seeing, writing, and expressing that is as necessary today as it was in the 1950s. Her untimely death always begs the question of what might have been had she lived longer.

 

Rome 1956. Forough (on the left) with her ‘artistic soulmate’ Behjat Sadr (on the right). Behjat was an Iranian Modernist artist who died in 2009.
Photo Source: Photo Source: (last accessed: 10/10/2018)

 

Referenced and cited works:

Meetra A. Sophia, ‘Forough Farrokhzad: Twelve Poems; Notes and Translation by Meetra A. Sofia’, American Poetry Review, 35.1 (2006)

Michael C. Hillmann, A Lonely Woman: Forough Farrokhzad and Her Poetry (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987)

Hamid Dabashi, ‘Why Iran Creates Some of the Best Films’, BBC Culture (16/11/2018)

Jasmin Darznik, ‘Forugh Farrokhzad, Her Poetry, Life, and Legacy’, The Women’s Review of Books, 23.6 (2006)

Jasmin Darznik, ‘Forough Goes West: The Legacy of Forough Farrokhzad In Iranian Diasporic Art and Literature’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6.1 (2010)

Forough Farrokgzad, The Captive (Tehran: Amir Kabir Press, 1955)

Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season (1974)

Forough Farrokhzad, Rebellion (Tehran: Amir Kabir Press, 1958)

Forough Farrokhzad, Reborn (1964)

Forough Farrokhzad, ‘The House Is Black’ (Studio Golestan, 1962)

Forough Farrokhzad, The Wall (Tehran: Amir Kabir Press, 1956)

Mahrokhsadat Hosseini, ‘Feminist Culture and Politics in Iranian Women’s Post-Revolutionary Poetry (1979-2017)’ Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2.7 (2018)

Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992)

Farzaneh Milani, Words, not Swords: Iranian women writers and the freedom of movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011)

Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Shaahin Pishbin, ‘Forough Farrokhzad and the Persian Literary Canon’, Iran Namag, 1 (2017)

Amir Hussein Radjy, ‘Overlooked No More: Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian Poet Who Broke Barriers of Sex and Society’, The New York Times (30/01/2019)

Sholeh Wolpe, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2007)

 

 

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p.s. Hey. And today the blog receives the great gift of this guest-post by the very wonderful writer Golnoosh Nour introducing the works and life story of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. I had never heard of Farrokhzad before, and maybe you have or haven’t, but, in any case, this is golden opportunity to explore her beautiful poetry, so please do so in your respective fashions. As always, it would be an excellent thing if you can say a word or two in the post’s regards to our generous guest-host. Thank you, and thank you greatly, Golnoosh! ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. Thanks for chiming in, man. ** Ferdinand, The generosity was/is all yours, sir. Everyone, A little corrective from your weekend’s host, Ferdinand: ‘In my intro I mistakenly called it a revenge porn film, I meant to say a revenge rape film. English is my second language so I tend to swop some syllables like C with S hence some mispelling in the text.’ Thank you so much again. It was a hit in all respects. ** Paul K – Wake Island, Hi, Paul. Thanks a lot for coming in here. It’s great to see you! I saw Chris’s mention of his episode and that thematic right before I launched the weekend’s post, and, yeah, synchronicity city. Excited for the episode. Huge fan and addictee of Wake Island, as I think you know. Thanks again, and big respect. ** David Ehrenstein, It’s something if you get the chance to watch it. ** Chris Kelso, Hi, Chris! That is rather astonishing that ‘Vernon Subutex’ was nominated for the Booker. Very, very weird. But good. Yeah, cosmic alignment or something on the Wake/Chris thing for sure. It would be dreamy to be on Wake Island, but he had Diarmuid Hester talking about my stuff not so long ago, so I suspect I am maxed out as a potential Islander for the time being. Thanks for thinking that! ** Dominik, Hi, D!!!! Well, you’re almost to the deadline, right (?), so there’s that little prize at least. My weekend? Well, Gisele Vienne and I are making a film of our now-retired theater piece ‘Jerk’, and I spent a day watching/supervising the last day of filming. That went well. I wandered about to see what the confinement is like and it seems pretty soft. A bunch of stores closed, but lots of people out and about like usual. I decided for some weird reason to scroll/fast-forward through a replay of the Grammy Awards, I guess to see what normal people listen to and to put some musical context to all the current stars’ names that I’ve read about but never heard. Jesus, what a dreary, watered down, retro bunch of conservative nothingness, except for a very few fun-ish things (Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Billie Eilish, and … yeah, just them). And I wrote some, etc. Okay not an amazing couple of days. Ha ha, lama farm, I’m so there. Love giving Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Black Pumas, Doja Cat, Post Malone, Bruno Mars, and Anderson .Paak permanent laryngitis, G. ** Bill, Oh, you met Jon Rose! Wow, that’s interesting. Good stuff, his. The lockdown is annoying but, so far, it could have been worse. A bunch of Parsians did storm out of the city on Friday, but not as many as in previous lockdowns. The streets are still reasonably packed. ** ian, Hi, ian. I’m hanging in here, you? Spring is springing here too, a little fitfully, but still. Our little lockdown ‘reward’ is that our curfew got changed from 6 pm to 7 pm. Oh, gee, that makes everything totally okay! Ha ha. ** Jack Skelley, MaJACK Mountain! Hey, that’s not bad. Am I the first to tag you as such? Should I copyright that? Strangely, or not (?), I remember some of the Disneyland trips when I was blasted by acid better than some of the clean and sober visits. I hereby order you to spend at least an hour this week eating Mexican food — meatless — and then astral projecting the taste into my mouth. Wait, that sounds scary, never mind. You can ‘go your own way’ to quote the worst incarnation of Fleetwood Mac. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Well, at the time, during their early days, Dury, Costello, and Lowe were put in the punk category by quite a number of people, and I don’t remember any of those three complaining. Other than ‘Vernon Subutex’, which I quite liked, I haven’t read any of the later Despentes books, few if any of which are translated. People I know here say her work is not as exciting as it used to be. ** _Black_Acrylic, Aw, you look happy in that picture, and very daylit. Very nice to gander at. Oh, man, thank you for the alert about the Styrene doc being on youtube. I’ll go watch that post-haste before it gets taken down. Yeah, thanks a lot buddy! Everyone, The new documentary about the very great Poly Styrene is up on YouTube, fuck knows for how long, so I strongly recommend hitting this link and watching it ASAP if you’re interested. ** John Newton, Hi. No, I’ve never met her as far as I know. Well, I guess if she and I were very likeminded, collaborating might be possible, but I’m pretty spoiled by working with Zac who almost seems to share the same brain with me sometimes, so I don’t know if I’d want to collaborate with someone where there isn’t a deep innate mutual understanding. Mm, maybe Catherine Breillat’s fiction would qualify as in the same realm? I’d have to think about it to suggest others. Nothing pops into my head instantly. Good luck with your busyness. I’m going to angle for busyness this week. Best way to get through a lockdown for sure. ** ae, Hi. Oh, no, I haven’t received that package yet. I really want to, though. Hopefully any second. Thank you a million for sending it. I’ve gotten pretty good at staying sane through lockdowns. If I wasn’t a writer and okay with solitariness, I might go nuts, though, it’s true. May any incompetence around you this week melt. ** Okay. Please spend the local portion of your day with Golnoosh’s lovely post. Thank you. See you tomorrow.