Update: The day before my Curating Moving Images class would see these program notes, Alfred Leslie passed. He was a lion who impacted a lot of things in his long life, including the fledgling Orphan Film Symposium in 2001. His energy and intellect shaped the way I think about the work.
Here’s the screening note that went with the 2001 Orphan Film Symposium session that coupled The House Is Black (1962) and Alfred Leslie’s film Birth of a Nation 1965. Although the Farrokhzad poetic documentary about lepers is memorable in any context, it resonates differently in this idiosyncratic pairing than in the teary setting of “The Decaying Body” quartet we screened on the first day of the Curating Moving Images class.
The 2001 symposium program listed the session as beginning with a talk by Alfred Leslie, “The Artistic ‘Paraphrasing’ of Lost Films,” followed by a screening of his paraphrased version of this film. Next, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum introduced his undistributed (bootleg, one might say) VHS copy of The House Is Black, with the English subtitles as they existed then. A discussion and Q&A followed.
Leslie was the sole rights owner of his film and he himself made the “paraphrase” edition for his 1997 VHS commercial release entitled Beat and Beyond: The Films of Alfred Leslie (distributed by Facets Multimedia). Rosenbaum and his Iranian colleagues had not established the rights situation with Farrokhzad’s film (indeed it was an orphan), but were able to show it in this educational, not-for-profit setting at the University of South Carolina. In 2005, Facets Multimedia released a DVD edition of The House is Black (also identified by its original Persian title, transliterated as Khānah siyāh ast). In 2019, Cineteca di Bologna restored the film with Ecran Noir productions and the producer Ebrahim Golesta; currently available from Criterion and Janus Films.
However, the 22-minute version of Alfred Leslie’s Birth of a Nation 1965, existed for a while only on the out-of-print VHS Beat and Beyond. As I discovered when I tried to recreate the “Rescue Operations” screening in the classroom, Leslie’s authorized DVD version contained a radically different work, running 40 minutes rather than 22. The disc was released as Alfred Leslie: Cool Man in a Golden Age: Selected Films (Lux, UK, 2009), which included Pull My Daisy (1959) and some newly-discovered outtake fragments from it. The Museum of Modern Art’s program adapted the title, “Cool Men in a Golden Age: Alfred Leslie and Frank O’Hara,” which Charles Silver organized on Daisy’s fiftieth anniversary. The DVD’s audio track for Birth has a different recording, using must longer and more profane text from the Marquis de Sade. There were new end credits and different fonts for the subtitles. It no longer worked very well as a pairing with The House Is Black. The tone of the newer paraphrase (which was more like a new work) was more abrasive.
If one wanted to show these works, it would require some effort to verify which versions are which. There is considerable variability in how they are packaged and formatted. Catalogs and published descriptions are often inaccurate. The running times on Birth of a Nation 1965 are variously listed as 22, 24, 39, 40, and 41 minutes. The date of the re-edits are listed as 1988, 1997, and 1998, among others. Film prints do not exist for projection, although the original was shot on 8mm film and blown up to 35mm for exhibition. Leslie shot ten hours of footage and made a two-hour release print. He said some eleven minutes of footage, and few minutes of soundtrack on tape, survived the 1966 fire that destroyed most of his life’s work. The film is variously listed with the titles Birth of a Nation 1965, Alfred Leslie’s Birth of a Nation, or simply Birth of a Nation. (I remain puzzled why the artist chose to evoke the 1915 racist epic The Birth of a Nation, since his 1965 film doesn’t appear to reference it in any way. Another curator’s challenge: how to make sure people don’t think you’re showing D. W. Griffith’s atrocity?)
Here’s what he writes on page 141 of the online book version of Alfred Leslie: Cool Man in a Golden Age (2009), an autobiography in verse.
As for The House Is Black, it has been presented with differing points of emphasis. A film by a woman (quite young) in an era when such was rare, especially in documentary. A sponsored film. A work by a filmmaker otherwise recognized as the greatest Persian-language poet of the modern era. The DVD liner notes assert that the film, produced before the so-called Iranian New Wave of the 1970s, has, since its rediscovery “heavily influenced the modern Iranian cinema of such great filmmakers as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who called it ‘the best Iranian film.'” No less. I prefer to introduce it to first-time viewers more modestly, letting its power surprise them. Often when a film is introduced as the best thing ever, a masterpiece, something you’ll never forget, and so on, the viewing experience that follows is disappointing.
Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the Chicago Reader in 1997 about “the most powerful Iranian film I’ve seen.” This documentary is by Forugh Farrokhzad, “commonly regarded as the greatest 20th-century Persian poet. It’s her only film and its subject is a leper colony in northern Iran. . . . At once lyrical and extremely matter-of-fact — without a trace of sentimentality or voyeurism yet profoundly humanist — Farrokhzad’s view of everyday life in the colony . . . is spiritual, unflinching, and beautiful in ways that have no apparent Western counterparts; to my eyes and ears, it registers like a prayer.” The House Is Black has since been restored by Ebrahim Goleston and distributed by Criterion.
Farrough Farrokhzad died in a car crash in 1967, at age 32. She was raising a son she adopted from the leper colony seen in her film. Several documentaries have been made about her, including the English-language I Shall Salute the Sun Once Again (Mansooreh Saboori, 1998) and a German film about her adopted son Hossein Mansouri, Moon Sun Flower Game (Claus Strigel, 2007).
Alfred Leslie lived and worked (painting, writing, editing video) in the East Village with his longtime companion Nancy de Antonio until his passing in January 2023, age 95. He first began shooting 16mm film when he was 14, meaning he created work through eight decades.
I last spoke with him in October 2020. We talked about the planned restoration of Pull My Daisy, which the Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives were delayed in doing because of the pandemic restrictions. A final email came November 7th: “Never got around to dealing with whatever my archive is. But Nancy thought you and NYU might be interested. I was a student there around 1948 on the GI bill.” Damned Covid-19 delayed everything, and indeed was the cause of his death.
- “Alfred Leslie, Artist Who Turned Away From Abstraction, Dies at 95,” New York Times, Jan. 29, 2023.
- Artforum obituary, Jan. 30, 2023.
- Teri Tynes, “Multiplying Perspectives: Alfred Leslie and The Cedar Bar,” Art Papers, July/Aug. 2002.
- Teri Tynes, “A Conversation with Alfred Leslie on The Lives of Some Women,” Walking Off the Big Apple, July 3, 2012.
- Elizabeth Sobieski, “Alfred Leslie: The Last of the Really Great Abstract Expressionists, Now a Master of 21st Century Digital Art,” Huffington Post, June 3, 2014.
Concluding on an emancipatory note, Paul Cullum gets the last word. His report on the second Orphan Film Symposium gives Alfred the last word. (And Patty Zimmermann the first, with her words as epigraph: “Hollywood films are the home movies of global capital.”)
Paul Cullum, “Orphanistas!“ L.A. Weekly, April 18, 2001, laweekly.com/orphanistas.
If all films are both an objective record and an exposé of their origins, then orphan films may be the truest. Whatever their primary intention, they give us a world where men and women don’t speak of sex in veiled algorithms, where the corporate state is often naked in its ambitions and where raw propaganda is unmediated by all the sophistication an age can muster. This is the reason to preserve the filmic record and is the task to which the so-called Orphanistas have applied themselves. It’s easy to dismiss the politics of Gone With the Wind, but who knows what secret truths might still be harbored in How To Give an Enema? As Alfred Leslie concluded in his toast at the closing-night dinner — voicing a sentiment he inherited, it turns out, from David Niven: “Strike a blow for freedom!”