Ararat: an Egoyan masterpiece

Catholic New Times, Feb 9, 2003 by Rosemary Ganley

Ararat, written and directed by Atom Egoyan. Starring David Alpay, Charles Aznavour, Arsinee Khanjian and Christopher Plummet.

With this immense project, the passion, intelligence and artistry of filmmaker Atom Egoyan come to their apex. He is driven by the need to tell the world the tragic and mostly unknown story of the 1880-1915 persecution of the Armenian minority in Eastern Turkey by the Ottoman Turks, which culminated in a massacre beginning in April 1915. Over one million Armenians were tortured and killed.

"I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the suffering of the Armenian race in 1915," wrote U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, in 1915.

The very word "genocide" was invented in 1944 by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, to describe the Armenian horror: the razing of towns and churches, the mass slaughter of men and the massacre of women and children.

To retrieve this necessary memory, Egoyan has written and directed a powerful feature film, Ararat, named after the 16,000-foot mountain--now 16 miles inside Turkish borders--but symbolic of Armenian identity. Egoyan weaves together multiple timelines: a modern one in Toronto; the 1930s in Paris; and the years of the Great War itself, when the allies turned a blind eye to the genocide taking place under their noses by the Turks in their campaign of "ethnic cleansing."

Armenian in root himself, Egoyan seeks to draw into the light and to restore to collective memory of the horrible events that the world has ignored and that the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge.

Drawing on righteous moral indignation, however, is not enough to make art. Egoyan is a master storyteller.

A modern Canadian family, Armenian in its roots, is rent by estrangement. The mother, Ani, (Arsinee Khanjian), an art history professor deals with the pain of the past by lecturing on the work of a massacre survivor and painter, Gorky Arshile (Simon Abkarian), who witnessed the terror as a child walking with his mother in a forced march of Armenians and saw her die of starvation. Gorky, in his Paris apartment in 1934, just 19 years after the catastrophe, works from a photo but, in agony, erases his mother's hands.

Ani's son, Raffi (David Alpay), is angrier, seeking to know who he is and what has been hidden from him.

Egoyan portrays the horrors of 1915 in brief, poignant, recurring images. He achieves the artist's intent to communicate suffering without exploitation or pathos. He even anticipates the ultimate need for reconciliation by moments of connection. A film producer forgives a thickheaded actor who is effectively playing a loathsome Turkish officer for expressing, off-camera, his doubt of the truth of Armenian claims. In another scene, veteran customs officer named David (Christopher Plummer) decides to accept the assertion by Raffi that what he is bringing into Canada is mere film footage from Turkey, not heroin.

Modern Armenia is an independent republic in South-West Asia, east of Turkey. It has four million people, and gained its independence from the crumbling Soviet Empire in 1991. It struggles with over half of the population below the poverty line and 20 per cent unemployment.

But Armenia is recovering and showing to the world its history, both for its own sake and for the sake of a world in need of such reflection. Gifted Armenians in the diaspora, such as Egoyan, serve these great goals through their art.

For more information visit www.miramax.com/ararat and www.genocide1915.info.