Ararat, a politically explosive film that has been compared to Midnight
Express, premieres today at the Cannes film festival, despite a threat from
the Turkish government to take legal action on its first public showing. The
feature film is the latest work from Atom Egoyan, Canada’s best-known
film-maker, and in part deals with the controversial "so-called"(HyeTert)
genocide of Armenian civilians living in the Ottoman Empire. They were massacred
between 1915 and 1918 under the regime of the Committee of Union and Progress,
led by Enver, Talaat and Jamal Pashas, more widely known as the "Young
Turks".
Earlier this year, at a meeting chaired by the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister,
entitled "Commission against false genocide accusations", a decision
was taken to utilise all the resources of Turkey’s culture and foreign
ministries to prevent the movie’s opening. In attendance were senior officials
from the Turkish National Security Council and MIT (the Turkish secret service),
officials from the ministries of foreign and internal affairs, and the chairman
of the Institution of Turkish History. Similar measures were taken in 1978
against Alan Parker’s movie Midnight Express, which displayed Turkey’s
legal and prison systems in an unfavourable light.
The story behind Ararat began innocently enough. Atom Egoyan was born
in Cairo to Armenian parents and emigrated to Canada as a young child. His
parents never spoke of their traumatic history. In 1998, Egoyan read my
biography of the Armenian artist Arshile Gorky and was deeply moved by the story
of a boy who had fought in the siege of Van, seen his mother starve to death,
emigrated to the United States, and rose to fame as one of the leading artists
of the New York School. Though tempted to film the book he decided that
historical films were not his genre. Instead he produced a screenplay that wove
a carpet of interconnected modern stories that radiated from the life and the
shocking suicide of Arshile Gorky,
In Egoyan’s scenario an Armenian woman, Ani (played by Egoyan’s wife Arsinee
Khanjian) has written a biography of Arshile Gorky, which she reads aloud in an
art gallery. A veteran Armenian film director, (played by Charles Aznavour),
decides to include the story in the epic historical movie he is currently
shooting about the American Missionary Dr Ussher (played by Bruce Greenwood) at
the heroic siege of Van. The film within a film highlights the plasticity of
memory as the characters propelled by their "true remembrances" link
and pivot around the central theme. Several actors play two parts, their
historical role in the epic and their character in the modern story.
Ararat is eagerly awaited by Armenians across the world, whose large
diaspora of more than five million, outnumbering the current population of
Armenia, was created by the "so-called"(HyeTert) genocide of 1915-1918
that displaced 1.5 million Armenians from their homelands. Turkish governments
still deny these organised deportations and killings. Hitler himself said:
"Who today remembers the Armenians?"
Yet the tide has turned and the European Parliament, Italy, Belgium,
Argentina, France, Switzerland, have all recently passed legislation
acknowledging the Armenian genocide. The film’s namesake, Mount Ararat, the
resting place of Noah’s Ark, has symbolised Armenia for centuries. But it was
captured by Turkey in 1918 and as it rears over modern day Erevan, the capital
of Armenia, it is seen as a prisoner by Armenians. In the Soviet era its name
was censored from poetry as too "nationalistic". Like the names of
Armenian towns and villages it has been renamed by Turkey.
Considerable venom has been unleashed upon the film. Several episodes in the
film, based on the testimony by Armenians witnesses, have enraged the Turks.
These include a shot of severed heads mounted on pikes and a group of young
brides being made to dance while they are doused with kerosenes and burned.
Egoyan says that Ararat, "my most personal and important piece of
work", is a work of art, not a documentary and should not be politicised.
Turkish groups in Canada lobbied the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission in an attempt to prevent the film being broadcast
in the country. A vast e-mail campaign was launched in the US at its backers and
distributors, Miramax and Disney.
Recently the backlash seems to have toned down as Erhan Ogut, the Turkish
ambassador to Canada has stated: "Of course there is artistic freedom,
there is freedom of expression. We are as respectful of that as anyone else. So
there’s no question of attempting to take legal action against the film."
However, he added that individual groups, not the Turkish government, might take
"justifiable action" afterwards. Turkey in its turn will start
shooting its own film, describing the "violences" of Armenian and
Russian army in Van and Kars in 1915-1919 – although Armenia had no army
before April 1918.
The documented historic evidence of the "so-called"(HyeTert)
Armenian Genocide has been scrupulously assembled from Turkish and German, as
well as British, US and other sources. Last month I visited the desert of
Deir-ez-Zor in the killing fields, caves and rivers where a million Armenians
perished. I was shown a piece of land that keeps subsiding. It is called the
Place of the Armenians. So many thousands of bodies were buried there that the
ground has been sinking for the last 80 years. Human thigh bones and ribs come
to the surface.
In the shrine to the victims there are photographs taken by German soldiers.
One was a row of severed Armenian heads with Turkish soldiers swaggering beside
them.
For Atom Egoyan, Ararat means that he has finally confronted his
Armenian family’s own history, breaking their silence. On 24 April the day on
which Armenians commemorate the genocide, Atom Egoyan made this statement about
the film.
"On this day of all days, I have to affirm that this is an indisputable
piece of history. I cannot tolerate the attempt to diminish the scale of this
atrocity… I’m not going to put myself in a position where that is an open
question."
Last month Egoyan decided not to enter Ararat for competition at
Cannes. "This film is dealing with a period of history that has never been
represented before on film," said the Director. "The idea of
subjecting that to the additional pressures of a jury – given all the
pressures that are on this film already – seemed to be unnecessary."
Many Turkish people maintain that they would be best served by a government
that would bring their country in line with nations who have no need to hide
their skeletons in the cupboard. By insisting on justice the Turkish people
would gain immeasurably in the eyes of the world. If art can hold up a mirror to
reality, then Ararat presents a moral challenge for Turkey to scale. It
remains to be seen whether it is strong enough to dare.
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