Aurora, Audie and Roman: Enactors and Reenactors

AURORA

Aurora 

Just two weeks ago, I was in Armenia.  On the last day, we visited the impressive Genocide Memorial, chronicling the tragic events of 1915.  As a Jew and old enough to have been alive through most of the Holocaust, the story of Armenian genocide really resonated, even more so because they have never had closure on the systematic slaughter of so many: a Non-Event Perpetrated by Those Who Must Not Be Named. We were rushed through the museum adjacent to the Memorial, and, since it was close to closing time, didn’t get much of a chance to see anything in detail, but I was struck in passing by what looked like some gruesome newsreel footage as awful as a lot of the World War II Nazi films of Jews being slaughtered or packed into boxcars.  Upon inquiry, I was advised to Google “Ravished Armenia.”

I did that later and found this footage on YouTube, but it turned out to be twenty minutes of surviving clips from a now-lost silent Hollywood movie made about the genocide, based on the harrowing memoir of a survivor named Aurora Mardaginian.   Her story is still in print, and online as well.  The latest printed edition, published as Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiginian, (2014), edited and with an introduction by the film historian Anthony Slide and the shooting script of the original film, came out just in time for the Armenian Genocide centennial commemorated this year.

I have read a lot of memoirs of holocaust survivors, and Mardiginian’s story is as gruesome a chronicle as any of them: the systematic murders of entire families, multiple rapes, sexual slavery, wholesale slaughter often preceded by torture, targeting an entire people for extermination, not because of anything they did, but for what they were born into, much as Jews were by the Nazis. 

When Slide interviewed Mardaginian shortly before her death, she revealed to him that she had sanitized the story somewhat—for instance, the death of a group of girls by crucifixion (an irony for nice Christian girls), was actually carried out by impalement on the low crosses through their vaginas.  But Slide’s introduction revealed even more: Aurora didn’t live this nightmare once, but twice, because she played herself in the film version too.

She had arrived in the United States in 1917, with her original name Arshalouys Mardigian, after a long odyssey including her escape to Russian-held territory, passing through Petrograd during the chaos of the October Revolution. She was 14 when her ordeal began, and only 16 when she immigrated. By this time, America was fired up by the plight of the Armenians, and Aurora soon met an American screenwriter, Harvey Gates and his wife who realized her potential for the cause of Armenian relief.  Since she as yet spoke no English, the Gates got her to dictate her story in Armenian, and an interpreter helped them to transcribe it.  The Gates then had it published, and sold the film rights to William Selig.

Aurora was persuaded to go out to California to star as herself, and act as a consultant on the film.  The former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and an outspoken critic of the Genocide, Henry Morgenthau, also played himself in a brief vignette. 

Aurora (2nd from right) playing herself in the movie, with actors as her family

And so, Ravished Armenia, otherwise known as Auction of Souls, was made and raised millions for the Armenian refugees.  Something of its impact can be gleaned from a press release reproduced by Slide:

“‘RAVISHED ARMENIA’

The story of the girl who survived

Is the greatest motion picture achievement in theme, human interest, seriousness of purpose and thrilling development of dramatic conception ever attempted”

That was the good part.  Aurora had to sue to get the money owed her for the project, and soon returned to New York.  She lived on to marry, have a son and die at age 94 in California, but, given her early experiences, it is not surprising that for the rest of her life she displayed severe symptoms of P.T.S.D., harboring fears that Turks would come to assassinate her in revenge for the memoir and movie. She eventually became a virtual recluse, and died alone, estranged from her son. 

By now, we know well that enduring an experience as she did makes it difficult to survive whole and sane.  I still have scary childhood memories of tattooed Holocaust refugees, wandering around at a Jewish summer resort, who seemed to me at the time to be very weird people.

In Aurora’s case, for all the money raised, it seems beyond my comprehension to have escaped alive, been through such an ordeal, and then have to reenact the whole thing all over again.  Even considering the fact that she was treated well on the set, and it was make-believe (she was even given a romantic interest in the film), was it possible that the reality and the make-believe didn’t merge?  She had to act with American actors portraying family members; actually, she had witnessed many of the real ones’ deaths.  Slide quotes Aurora about her terror of confronting American actors dressed like Turkish forces for the first time.  Later, she broke an ankle during filming, but continued anyway.

Where can we draw the line between reenactment and reality?  Is it ever justifiable to make someone experience such horrors again, even for the sake of charity? 

AUDIE

Audie, 1945, Most Decorated WW II soldier

Aurora was not the only person to play their selves in a movie reenacting traumatic events in their own lives.  In 1955, Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II, played himself in the film of the war memoir he had written with David McClure, To Hell and Back. True, by this time, Murphy had been kicking around Hollywood for a number of years, with relatively little success, but in playing himself, he hit pay dirt.

Like Aurora, he had his war experiences behind him by the age of 21, having enlisted in the army at 17, and ten years had passed between his very honorable discharge from the army, and six between the publication of the memoir, and the film, and he was certainly far more savvy about the ways of the film industry.  He had subsequent success as an actor starring in westerns for another twenty, and also was successful as a country-western songwriter.

To Hell and Back had the biggest box office gross until the release of Jaws.  Contemporary critical views have been less kind, the consensus being that it in itself is a period piece: not to World War II, but the way of making war movies in the 1950’s.  Perhaps, because war movies are a genre unto themselves, and because Murphy’s role was proactive, he could avoid confusion between real life and action movie.  He was never a great actor, but his presence in this reenactment gives it an authenticity that an over-the-top recreation by another actor would lack (he allegedly wanted Tony Curtis to play him before accepting the role himself

Audie Murphy plays himself, 1955

Murphy was forthright about his own P.T.S.D. resulting from the war: he slept with a gun under his pillow, became temporarily addicted to sleeping pills and had a hair-trigger temper. However, he was able to benefit from his disabilities and later became an advocate for the recognition of P.T.S.D. as a legitimate condition, unlike Aurora’s promotion as a fundraiser by others.  He died at the relatively young age of 47 in a plane crash.

ROMAN

Roman, 2009

The celebrated film director Roman Polanski, like Aurora, was a Genocide survivor, who had experienced the Holocaust as a child and young teenager in Krakow, Poland, managing to escape during a roundup and then passing as a Catholic Polish child with a sympathetic family.  Like so many survivors, P.T.S.D. would mark him, and the cause was double, with the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson gang in 1969.  The biography of this talented filmmaker is full of evidence of this, from the brilliant quirkiness of his films (think Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown) to the “statutory rape” charge of 1977.

Polanski had been given the opportunity to direct Schindler’s List, but had declined, partly because the action took place in and around Krakow.  He had certainly skirted around Holocaust subjects in the intense psychological drama Death and the Maiden, (1994) though the Fascism here was Latin American.  He finally tacked the Holocaust directly in the superb film The Pianist in 2002.

This movie is someone else’s memoir, Wladyslaw Szpilman, which took place in Warsaw, not Krakow, with the protagonist played by Adrian Brody, though Polanski has had numerous acting roles over his career.  For me, it’s the best Holocaust film ever made, and I invite the reader to read Clive James’s masterful review and analysis of it, available online.

Adrian Brody in "The Pianist"

Roman Polaski on the set of "The pianist"

The parallels and resonances between Polanski’s own experiences in the Holocaust in this film can perhaps be summed up by a statement made by Thomas Kretschmann, who played the sympathetic German officer, Captain Hosenfeld, in an interview with Carlo Cavagna:

“……if you have the chance to meet with Polanski on set, you want to know things. I tried the whole time to get information out of him, out of his own experiences. He was very closed. He didn't talk very much about himself; he didn't talk very much about the scenes. He wanted you to be a part of it, but he didn't want to take the whole thing apart. He just went with you around the corner and played around with the lines a little. Then after the film was done, he opened up. He took me to the first [screening]. Afterwards he says, "This scene happened to me. This scene I watched. This scene…" You get the feeling that the whole thing is packed with stuff out of his own life. But he didn't let you know. I think he didn't want to be distracted. He said all the time, "Concentration is my big passion. I need concentration! I need concentration!"

So The Pianist isn’t a reenactment, but it’s more: the chronicle of two individuals, just guys, faced with the mundane task of day to day survival in an untenable dehumanizing situation: the making of P.T.S.D.

__________________________________________________________

Though the full text of Ravished Armenia can be found online at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ravished_Armenia

I recommend:
Anthony Slide (ed.), Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi Press, 2014.

The preserved footage of Ravished Armenia is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3nTw2D07Lk
the film is blurry, the inter titles and music are both modern.

A surprisingly good discussion of the Armenian Genocide is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide; it has a great bibliography and good links to other sites.

For a modern discussion of "To Hell and Back, see Matthew Sweet 2009 Guardian review at:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/dec/03/audie-murphy-to-hell-and-back

And Murphy's own promotion when the film came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF1F1kRTpWE

Clive James' wonderful on The Pianist is at: http://www.clivejames.com/polanski-pianist

And interviews with both Thomas Kretschmann and Adrien Brody are at:http://www.aboutfilm.com/features/pianist/interview.htm

But you can hear Polanski's take on the film in a bonus interview with the DVD of The Pianist.