Even though the Armenians, an Indo European people in west Asia, were the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion, they are probably best known for being the first genocide victims in modern history. Traditionally centered around the 16,854 foot peak Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey, Armenians speak of one two languages, east Armenian, spoken today in the independent state of Armenia as well as Iran, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine and the central Asian republics, and west Armenian. West Armenian, which is still spoken among the significant Armenian diaspora in Europe and North America, was also spoken in the 5 easternmost vilayets of what used to be the Ottoman Empire, the most important of which was Van along the Persian frontier between the vilayets of Erzurum and Mosul. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, as the declining Ottoman Empire was beginning to disintegrate, and finally came crashing down after the First World War, the Committee for Union and Progress, better known as the Young Turks, which began as a secular and progressive movement to democratize the ailing sultanate, and which later degenerated into an ethnonationalist abomination dedicated to purifying the empire of its non-Turkish subjects, through forced relocations and outright mass murder, largely eliminated the west Armenian people from the history of southwest Asia.
As is drearily familiar in history, the Turks make excuses for this dark moment in their history. It never happened, they say, but if it did happen, the Armenians deserved it. In 1915, in the above mentioned vilayet of Van, the Armenian people staged as uprising against the Ottoman authorities. Whether the uprising was an act of self-defense against an already planned massacre, or the first shot in a war of independence that would eventually be supported by Russia, just over the border, is still disputed. That the war was going badly for the Ottoman Empire is not. Not only had the British landed a massive invasion force on Gallipoli near the capital of Istanbul, the Russian Army had just won a decisive victory at the Battle of Sarikamish, humiliating the important Young Turk leader Enver Pasha and threatening to cut Istanbul’s access to the oil fields around the Caspian Sea. Since there was a significant number of Armenian volunteers serving in the Russian Army, and the Sultan knew that the Czar still had designs on his capital city, the ancient capital of Orthodox Christianity, and the strategy of the British had evolved from “prop up the Ottoman Empire” to “carve up the Ottoman Empire,” Enver Pasha assigned his brother in law, a brutal thug named Djevdet Bey, to oversea the destruction of the Armenian Christian population in and around the city of Van. Even though a small Armenian force about the size of a brigade fought valiantly, and the Ottoman Army was forced to retreat from the city itself, the West Armenians were doomed. Over 50,000 thousand died in Van. Over a million Armenians in eastern Anatolia perished in a series of death marches by a combination of disease, summary execution, and starvation. Hitler itself is rumored to have remarked when planning the Holocaust that “nobody remembers the Armenians.” Although the quote is disputed, it does accurately describe what happened. Until recently, nobody did.
In 2002, the acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan and his wife, the actress and Armenian nationalist Arsinée Khanjian, assembled a talented cast which not only included Egoyan’s regulars like Bruce Greenwood and the brilliant Greek Canadian actor Elias Koteas, but also Charles Aznavour, a prominent French singer of Armenian descent, the talented young French Canadian actress Marie-Josée Croze, and the legendary Christopher Plummer, probably the most famous Canadian actor of them all, and shot Ararat. A complex, and subtle movie about the defense of Van and the effect of the genocide on the Armenian diaspora in Canada, Ararat was panned by most film critics and subsequently bombed at the box office. I looked far and wide for reviews by critics under thirty or by videobloggers on YouTube, but found almost nothing. To paraphrase Hitler, nobody remembers Ararat, that movie about the Armenian genocide. Shot on a budget of $15 million dollars, it barely got back $3 million dollars at the box office. To this day it hasn’t been screened in Turkey, no big surprise, and as far as I know in Italy. It did win 5 Genie Awards in Canada and was a significant factor in Israel’s decision to give Egoyan a David Dan Prize for film, risky considering their long alliance with Turkey, but to this day, Ararat hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. It deserves a lot. Ararat is a difficult film, and probably not for everybody, but if you enjoyed Egoyan’s much better known films Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, you will enjoy this film even more. Ararat is Atom Egoyan’s masterpiece.
Ararat is centered around prominent American abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky. Born Vostanik Manoug Adoian near Van, he escaped the Armenian genocide with his three sisters and his mother, who starved to death along the way, to Russian held territory, eventually reuniting with his father in the United States, There he studied at the New England School of Art and Design in Boston, becoming an associate of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning. Gorky, who was never quite able to get over the death of his mother, and who even denied his Armenian ancestry, claiming to be a Georgian aristocrat, committed suicide in 1948 at the age of 44. Gorky is probably best known for his painting The Artist and His Mother, which took him ten years to complete. While The Artist and His Mother is not painted in the style of the virgin and child, which might seem appropriate for what is essentially an icon of the first Christian people in southwest Asia, it is soaked in the memory of the Armenian genocide. A solemn work showing Gorky as a young boy of 9 or 10 standing next to his seated mother, a woman in her late 20s or 30s with her hands whited out, and what looks to be a crudely drawn white apron, its most striking characteristic is the mother’s eyes. Large, black, dead, they bring to mind David Gilmour’s song Shine on You Crazy Diamond, which mourns the mental illness of his former bandmate Syd Barrett. “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.” Gorky himself, holding a bunch of flowers, barely looks any more alive himself, his eyes sentient, but only barely. Based on a childhood photograph taken in Van in which he is depicted standing beside his mother, Gorky painted two versions, one of which is displayed in the Whitney, the other in the National Gallery in Washington DC. But if the eyes of Gorky and his mother seem deathlike, they also seem strangely eternal, the severe gaze of Justinian and Theodora in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, a remnant of a west Asian and Byzantine Orthodox Christian civilization that is no more.
In Ararat, the adult Arshile Gorky, the artist, has no spoken lines. Gorky as a child, the icon, does. The problem is that the life of the real Gorky in Armenia and his escape over the border to Russia is obscure in its details, seen only through a glass darkly. Enter Ani, an art historian in her 40s played by Arsinée Khanjian, who has written a book on Gorky that, in spite of her professed devotion to historical accuracy, contains a good deal of speculation. Ani, who has a young adult son named Raffi and a young adult stepdaughter named Celia, is a widow twice over. Her first husband, father to Celia, who’s of French ethnicity, died under mysterious circumstances similar perhaps to Gorky. Her second husband, an unnamed Armenian Canadian and father to Raffi, died in violent, but very clear circumstances. An Armenian patriot, he was gunned down by the police after he tried to assassinated the Turkish Ambassador to Canada. At the start of the movie, Ani has attracted the attention of a famous director named Edward Saroyan and a screenwriter named Rouben, who want her to serve as a historical consultant to a film about Gorky’s childhood during the Van uprising of 1915. Saroyan has no intention of making a realistic movie depicting Gorky’s childhood accurately. On the contrary, he intends to use all the poetic license his status as a prominent member of the Armenian diaspora and famous movie director will allow him. He does not intent to show Gorky reunited with his father. His fate will remain a mystery. Nor does he intend to show Gorky’s mother dying of starvation. She will remain a shimmering memory of the Orthodox Christian civilization lost. What’s more, young Arshile Gorky will play a heroic role in the Van uprising, running mail through Turkish lines for an American Protestant doctor and missionary and fighting on the front lines in Van against the Turks. Ani is both upset at the screenplay’s lack of historical accuracy and intrigued by the idea that Saroyan will bring Gorky’s story to a larger audience.
Atom Egoyan’s most famous films, Exotica and the Sweet Hereafter, explore incest, approaching the idea of inappropriate family relations through a fractured narrative and a series of unreliable perspectives. Ararat further explores the theme of incest, not in terms of an abusive relationship between a parent and child but through the lens of an isolated, and inward looking Armenian diaspora. While Raffi and Celia are lovers, and technically step brother and step sister, the relationship is not incestuous. Quite the contrary, it’s the opposite. Celia is not related to Raffi, either by family DNA or ethnicity. In fact, she’s a jarring outsider, a French Canadian determined to come between Raffi, Ani and Ani’s desire to keep her son locked into his narrow Armenian heritage. Ani, who has no trace of English or French blood, and looks almost like a Byzantine icon from the 6th Century, maintains an emotional hold over her adult son, subconsciously pushing him to compare himself to his father, who was both a terrorist and yet a hero to the Armenian diaspora. Celia, whose own father died out of despair either by accident or suicide after being rejected by Ani, is determined to honor his memory, even though he had no connection to the Armenian genocide or her lover’s increasingly obsessive identification with his immigrant roots. She follows Ani on her book tours, heckling her from the audience, asking ever more invasive and inappropriate questions. Ani is contemptuous of Celia’s lack of professional training in art, yet as we learn later, Celia has a more intuitive sense of Gorky’s life than she does.
After Saroyan’s film wraps, Celia, who lives in a magnificent greenhouse where she grows illegal marijuana, persuades Raffi to travel to Turkey to hunt down the spot near Van where Gorky and his mother shot the photo. While it may seem that Celia is encouraging Raffi to further explore his ethnic heritage, her motives are far less altruistic. She wants to manipulate him into meeting up with a contact in Turkey in order to smuggle heroin into Canada. The trip is a success. Raffi actually finds the original source of Gorky’s photo, a stone image carved into the side of an ancient fourth century church, and explores the country around the magnificent Ararat. But upon his return to Canada he is detained by a customs agent named David, an elderly man on the verge of retiring. In exchange for being allowed into Van and the countryside around Ararat, David had to agree to carry three cans of “film” back to Canada for Celia’s contact. Raffi has no idea that the Turkish soldier who allowed him into Van is a drug smuggler. Even more interesting, he has no idea that David has a connection to Saroyan’s film through his son Phillip. Phillip, who’s gay and often at odds with his more conservative father is the lover of Ali, a half Turkish Canadian played by Greek actor Elias Koteas, who plays the role of the thuggish Djevdet Bey.
Egoyan makes an inspired choice casting Koteas, who’s of Greek descent and who along with Mia Kirshner was the breakout star of Exotica, as a Turkish fascist and war criminal. It would be like casting a Jewish actor as Hitler or a Cherokee actor as Andrew Jackson. The Irish actor Richard Harris did play Oliver Cromwell in the 1970 film, but the script bizarrely turned Cromwell into a leftist hero. Koteas gets just about everything right about Ali. Ali initially has little connection or identification to his Turkish roots. He’s just thrilled to get a major part in a film by a world famous director. That Saroyan is of Armenian descent means nothing to him. Nevertheless, as he descends into the role of Djevdet Bey and increasingly explores the monster’s rationalizations for organizing the genocide, Ali becomes an Armenian Genocide denier himself, even though he had barely been aware of the history only a few weeks before. Somehow Koteas uses the gap between history and historical fiction, motivation and memory, to put himself into the shoes of a man who believes he is the victim even as he wields complete power of the people he imagines himself victimized by. “What’s going to happen to your people you brought upon yourselves,” he says to the 10-year-old Gorky after giving detailed instructions to one of his soldier about how to crucify another child. It’s important to get the nails in the bone, not simply in the flesh. “Your mother taught you you were better than me, that Turks are vindictive barbarians.” Koteas nails the role so well Djevdet Bey could be an Israeli soldier in Gaza today.
As David interrogates Raffi about the film cans, we begin to notice that David and Djevdet Bey and Raffi and the young Gorky begin to resemble one other, David and Djevdet Bey representing the repressive state and Gorky and Raffi its victim. Which is reality? Which is fiction? Or are they both both reality and fiction? In a flashback, after Ali confesses his skepticism of the genocide to Saroyan, played by Aznavour, whose parents were real life survivors of the Van genocide and who hid Jews from the Nazis in Paris during the Second World War, we begin to get closer to the reality of genocide. It’s not only losing your people and losing your land, Saroyan tells Raffi or even losing the ability to find a language to express their memory, it’s the idea that someone would hate you and your people enough to want to exterminate you. After Raffi, who works on the set as a chauffeur and a production assistant, drives Ali back to his apartment, he desperately tries to get Ali to understand the implications of his genocide denial and increasing ethnocentrism, but it’s futile. Ali doesn’t back down. Instead he patronizingly tells Raffi to get over the past. We’re both Canadians now, he insists. You’re not an Armenian. I’m not a Turk. Nobody’s going to touch your family. You’re safe. North America is a new identity, a new start. That North America is also a landscape of genocide against the Indians, and that Raffi and Ali are both settlers on stolen land never occurs to either of them. They are both first generation Canadians still fighting the emotional battles of the old world. It will be up to their children to confront Canada’s own crimes against humanity.
Raffi, however, does get a new start, a second chance at life, redemption. He not only explores the history of his people more deeply than the film does, he is in fact released from the historical burden of the Armenian diaspora. While Celia attempts to destroy Gorky’s masterpiece by slashing it with a pocket knife, giving way to despair as surely as her father did, David, who might have played the role of a North American Djevdet Bey, turns out to be something much different. Djevdet Bey turned the power of the Ottoman State against innocent people. David releases Raffi from the iron hand of Canadian justice, even though Raffi is unintentionally guilty of drug smuggling. David does find heroin in the film cans, but he is unable to turn Raffi over to the police. Eventually David confesses that the photo of his own son he kept in his office made it impossible for him to play the part of Javert, his son, the son, without knowing it interceding with the father to spare someone else’s son in an act of Christian mercy. Raffi, who bears an ethnic burden he didn’t chose, benefits from a benevolent father figure he doesn’t really deserve. Even more so, when pressed by his own son why he let Raffi go, David explains that the more Raffi tried to explain why he had the film cans, the closer he got to the truth, a truth that up to that point David never knew existed but which he now cares deeply about. The film, in turn, somehow manages to express the horror of the genocide in Van, even though it’s neither history nor a realistic film. By depicting Ottoman atrocities in so clumsy a way, our consciousness of the gap between fiction and reality let’s us approach reality by the means of an obvious fiction. It’s not really necessary to approach memory any particular way, Egoyan seems to be saying, or even honestly. You just have to keep talking until you say what you feel you have to say. Your heart will lead you back to the truth.
