Session 6(b): Changes and Challenges
Session 6B: Changes and Challenges
Chair: Emma Jeffries
The “Eye/I” of Isolation in Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House is Black
Elif Bezal
State University of New York at Binghamton, USA
Forugh Farrokhzad is one of the greatest Iranian poets of the 20th Century. She is known not only for her poetry but for her film about a leper colony, Khaneh Siyah Ast (1963) (The House is Black), which is considered to be the most significant Iranian film of the early 60s. My research contends that it is the portrayal of Farrokhzad’s isolation that is hidden behind the isolation of the leper colony. In her poems “Green Delusion” and “Another Birth,” Farrokhzad describes the intensity of isolation and social alienation. In The House is Black, the isolation and social alienation of leper colony also portrays Farrokhzad’s similar experience in her life.
A sense of alienation from one’s environment is exhibited in Farrokhzad’s poetry. The speakers in Farrokhzad’s poems frequently personify alienation from their environments and they allow us to witness pain. By directing a film about an alienated group of people, she depicts her own alienation in her poems and in her life.
Most critics find The House is Black to be a successful fusion of cinema and poetry, yetthis project explores the reasons for Farrokhzad’s success with her film in relation to her poetry and her life. This paper and my short film attempt to think through the correlation between the word image and the visual image by presenting a view different from that of critics on the poetry and film of Forugh Farrokhzad. Farrokhzad’s film is the crucial and critically ignored element in contextualizing her poetry. This paper’s purpose is to acknowledge the neglected collaboration between her words and images.
Reading Change and Continuity within Images of Women
Sandra Sudjudi
Department of Media and Information Studies Curtin University of Technology Western Australia
Images have the potency to offer different angles and enrich our interpretation about the performance of a cultural transformation. This article shows how reading the discourses facilitated by the images reveal the continuity of women’s role in society despite the significant change of policy about women. The study uses media representations of women from the national family planning program published by the Indonesian government during 1986–2003. During the New Order era (1965-1998), contraception was first introduced nationally in the 1970s and the promotion contextualised women within the family ideology. Contraception did not liberate and empower women for independence. Their representations were located within their biological nature of mothers and wives. In 1998, when the regime was replaced by the Reformation, policy about women moved (from women’s affairs as issues limited to a biological nature) to deal with the construction of gender in Indonesian society for equity and equality in women’s rights. Applying the framework of visual social semiotics, this study shows that while there is a change in the resources used to create meaning via the representation of images, the composition and verbal components in the images are still a continuation of the ideal women from the New Order.
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