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Two
films at MFA evoke the agony of Armenia
By
Robert Garrett
Special to the Globe
It's been called the forgotten genocide, the killing of
perhaps 2 million
Armenian by Turks beginning in l915, during World War I. The country that
was Armenia, once located in what is now northeast Turkey, has vanished
from the map. The Soviet republic of Armenia, where many of the survivors
settled, is one-sixth the size of the original Armenian nation.
Approaching a subject as big and horrific as genocide is
never easy to do. French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann succeeded in his
exhaustive, and exhausting documentary on the Holocaust, "Shoah." Lanzmann
was a tenacious researcher, but he also had the advantage of plentiful
archival footage and scores of witnesses. And of course most of his
audience was well aware of the fact of the Nazi
"Final Solution."
By contrast the agony of Armenia seem to have fallen
through lie cracks of distant history. Two recent films try to redress
that. “Komitas," by Soviet Armenian filmmaker Don Askarian (now
based in Berlin), is an impressionistic portrait of an Armenian monk and
composer who went mad after the destruction of his country. "Back to
Ararat", named after the holy mountain of Armenia, is a documentary
by Swedish filmmaker Pea Holmquist. The effect of both films is mixed.
"Komitas" takes the death of millions of
Armenians as a given, and instead of reciting facts ft attempts a highly
personal meditation. As the grief-stricken Komitas, actor Samvel
Ovasapian wanders through a lush countryside punctuated by ancient stone
houses and churches, presumably that of Soviet Armenia. Although Komitas
is also shown as a patient In a menial hospital, there's very little
plot. The camera, as If It too were bereaved, very slowly follows
Komitas and lingers on a series of disconnected and surreal Images. Some
of the images are striking (the ground appears to breathe, a room
spontaneously catches fire, three drummers play as if in a trance). The
filmmaker seems to be groping for an expression of a horror beyond words
or Images. Yet the visual metaphors draw attention to themselves
they're weighty and often indecipherable. At one point,
Komitas comments that art "isn't worth anything" when measured
against genocide. Yet the film itself is self-consciously artful, and as
the metaphors pile up we're deflected from the message.
"Back to Ararat" is at its best when it
interviews survivors of 1915
(children then. they are now In their 80s) and when it takes us
to the beautiful but empty countryside in Turkey that once was
Armenia. An old woman who still lives there describes herself as "a
refugee in my own country." Survivors who now live in Germany and
New York describe how. Armenians were shot, thrown down wells, stabbed or
forced on death march to Syria that,
for many, ended In being burned alive in caves. The government of Turkey
still denies that massacres of three-quarters of the civilian population
took place and talks Instead about "resettlement" and wartime
Inhumanities that occurred on both sides. In the film, a spokesman for a
Turkish-American group waved away the suggestion of genocide as
"hearsay." The film would have done well to stick to straight
historical documentary. Instead, it loses its focus by shifting to
present-day politics. There's an Interview with an Armenian extremist
who shot a Turkish diplomat, and a lengthy portrait of a young Armenian
couple living in New York who quixotically hope their homeland will be
liberated from Turkey.
THE
BOSTON GLOBE THURSDAY.
June 8, 1989
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