In January of 2002 Harvard Film Archive will screen in the section "
Directors in Focus" the films AVETIK, KOMITAS and ON THE OLD ROMAN ROAD by
Don Askarian (Berlin). During last two last months the retrospective and special screenings of
the films by Don Askarian took place on Cine World Festival Sarasota, USA and on the Asiaticafilmmediale, Rome, Italy. For more information, please contact
in Germany: Frau Gaby Schein, Askarian Film, Niebuhrstr.69, !0629 Berlin,
Tel./Fax: 030-3246023, e-mail:
askarianfilm@web.de
See please below the calendar of The Harvard Film Archive.
The most important Armenian-born
director since Sergei Paradjanov, Don Askarian has created a body of films
that explore the history and spirit of his native land. He does so in a
modern idiom, inflected with surrealist overtones and powerful
imagery--often described as magical realist--that embrace the extremes of
beauty and brutality. Born in 1949 in Nagorno Karabakh, in the former
Soviet Union, Askarian traveled to Moscow to study history and art and
worked as an assistant film director and film critic before being
imprisoned in 1975. Emigrating to West Berlin in 1978, Askarian began to
create his meditations on Armenia from his home in exile, beginning with
an adaptation of Chekov’s The Bear, in 1984. Since that time, he has
directed a range of works, from documentaries to biographical essays to
fiction features, that have been honored at festival screenings worldwide.
KOMITAS
January 21 (Monday) 7 pm
January 23 (Wednesday) 7 pm
Directed by Don Askarian
West Germany 1988, 35mm, b/w and color, 96 min.
With Samvel Ovasapian, Onig
Saadatian, Margarita Woskanjan
German with English subtitles
The monk soghomon soghomonian, known as Komitas, was a renowned Armenian
composer and conductor who became a symbol of Armenian cultural unity
through his orchestral and choral performances and his late
nineteenth-century travels throughout the countryside, in which he
collected peasant songs for generations eager to preserve their cultural
heritage. In 1915, however, the musician’s career ended abruptly after a
nervous breakdown precipitated by the Ottoman Empire’s devastation of an
estimated three-fourths of the country’s population. Wracked with pain and
subjected to the abuses of nineteenth-century psychiatric hospitals,
Komitas lost his mind and withdrew into his own world of tortured memories
for more than twenty years. Director Askarian dedicates his beautifully
constructed, ambitious, and impressionistic portrait of Komitas to those
who lost their lives
AVETIK
January 21 (Monday) 9 pm
January 22 (Tuesday) 7 pm
Directed by Don Askarian
Germany/Armenia 1992, 35mm, color, 84 min.
With Alik Assatrian, Mikhael
Stehanian, Karen Janibekan
Armenian with English subtitles
Hovering between the realms of poetry and history, this stunningly
photographed, elegiac work--shot mostly in long takes--mixes cryptic
metaphor and fantastic symbolism to tell the story of Avetik, an Armenian
filmmaker exiled in Berlin. Director Askarian employs dreamlike images--a
crumbling, ancient stone chapel gradually reduced to nothing by the
rumbling vibrations of passing military vehicles; a ghostly cemetery of
carved tombstones in which a woman takes a starving sheep in her arm and
breast-feeds it back to life--to reflect the history of his homeland and
shades of his own exile in Germany. In sensuous, lyric tableaux, Askarian
explores German racism, the 1915 Armenian genocide, the disastrous
earthquake of 1989, tranquil childhood memories, and images inspired by
erotic medieval poetry.
ON THE OLD ROMAN ROAD
January 22 (Tuesday) 8:45 pm
January 23 (Wednesday) 9 pm
Directed by Don Askarian
Germany/Armenia 2001, 35mm, color, 76 min.
English and Armenian with English
subtitles
Askarian’s most recent project is another meditation on the artist in
exile. Like the filmmaker Avetik and the real-life composer Komitas from
his previous films, Levon--a writer of Armenian extraction now living in
Rotterdam--is caught between memories of homeland and the realities of
contemporary life. From his Dutch domicile, Levon reminisces about his
brother-in-law (a hairdresser who robs dead Turks), a brilliant Kurdish
musician, a red-bearded executioner, a seventeen-year-old girl with
chestnut-colored skin, and a Turkish Apollo with eight wives who likes to
bury himself in hot ash. His memory is also populated by beautiful
thoroughbred horses, stray dogs, camel drivers, soldiers, and Turkish
policemen. These poetic, almost surrealist scenes of magic love and
political cruelty are contrasted with the reality of present-day
Rotterdam, presented in the guise of a modern crime story with Armenian
terrorists and a Kurdish tragedy.
