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| Poster for "The Promise" (I don't think the tagline does the film justice |
Humans are a weird and invasive
species. Not only have we taken over the
world, but we have this recurring urge to for segments of us to gang up on
other segments, and laminate them out of existence. The number of genocides, not to mention mere
wars over our long history is ridiculously large, and one generation never
seems to learn from the last. We must be
hard-wired for periodic slaughter.
It’s
interesting that the Jewish Yom Ha Shoah and Armenian Genocide Commemorations
happened on the same day this year, April 24th. The flood of Holocaust memory films and
shows continue, but this April saw the general release in the U.S. of the first
epic film to treat the Armenian tragedy: The
Promise. Directed by Terry George, it stars Oscar Isaac as an Armenian
medical student, Charlotte le Bon as an Armenian-French girl who has returned
to Turkey with her American reporter-boyfriend (Christian Bale), and Marwin
Kenwari as a righteous Gentile (i.e. Turk).
The
plotline follows the meeting of these four characters in pre-World War I Istanbul,
and tracks their fortunes during the genocidal year 1915, as the systematic
persecution and killing of Armenians escalates, culminating in the siege
against Armenian holdouts atop Musa Dagh, and the rescue of its surviving
defenders by the French navy. There’s a love triangle among three of them (the
girl, the Armenian student and the reporter). Two, the righteous Gentile and
the French girl, die, while the other two live.
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| Franz Werfel |
Because of
political pressures, little has come out in mass media film or television about
the Armenian slaughter, principally because the Turkish government has always
refused to use the G word, and has effectively stonewalled any attempts to
depict this particular holocaust in public media. In the 1930’s the Czech-German-Jewish
novelist (and Holocaust escapee) Franz Werfel published a sprawling novel
entitled The Forty Days of Musa Dagh about
the Armenian defense on the
eponymous mountaintop (which actually lasted 53 days). The book did not fare well in Germany in 1933
and onwards given Hitler and his famous quote: “who, after all, speaks today of
the annihilation of the Armenians?” as he began his rampage in Poland, but it
was translated into English in 1934, and widely read after that. Not surprisingly, it became extremely popular
in Polish and Lithuanian Ghettoes among young Jewish resistance groups.
There had
been various attempts over the years, principally by MGM, to make a Musa Dagh movie, initially with Clark
Gable as the hero, but political pressure saw that none of these plans ever
came to pass, nor did subsequent projects by Sylvester Stallone or Mel Gibson.
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| Contemporary Newspaper Advertisement for "Ravished Armenia" |
I know
there were a few other films that dealt, at least tangentially, with this
Genocide topic. I’ve seen three: firstly, there was Ravished Armenia, from Aurora Mardiginian’s harrowing memoir as a
survivor, in which she herself starred as a reenactor; I’ve already written
about this bizarre project (6/6/2015).
Maybe the Turks didn’t protest this one, which came out in 1919 because
the country was in such turmoil after world War I.
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| DVD Cover for "Ararat" |
The second
was made by the Canadian-Armenian film director Atom Egoyan in 2002. Ararat,
the name of the Iconic Armenian mountain, as well as the resting place of
Noah’s ark, is its title. This film is
fascinating, and at times very powerful, but gets drowned by its complex plot
that takes up too many issues to comfortably resolve in a two-hour timespan.
They include a movie being made about the Armenian Genocide, a
much-fictionalized icon in the person of Armenian artist Arshile Gorky, homosexuality,
drug-smuggling—or not, and multiple fragile familial relationships. For non-Armenians, a least, the polemics
become strident, and just as the viewer becomes involved in one plot-thread,
another deflects attention. For this outsider, the most powerful scenes involved
the filming of the movie, with past and present effectively blurred, and the
enigma of whether Raffi, the young protagonist was actually smuggling drugs in
his film cans, and if this was the price he had to pay for actually visiting and
filming ruined Armenian sites in Turkey.
The
Promise is the third. To the best of
my knowledge, this is the only one that has had a wider distribution. The driving force behind its making was the
late Kirk Kerkorian, billionaire, entrepreneur, and movie mogul, whose family
origins were Armenian, and who, in his later years, funneled substantial funds
to charities and aid for the country of his forbearers. I guess it took a billionaire to both stand
up to the Turkish government and finance the project. Terry George, the director, already had a
track record for genocide-themed films: he directed the award-winning Hotel Rwanda (2004), that dealt with the
saving of more than a thousand refugees by a hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina
during the lethal Hutu-Tutsi war in 1994. Perhaps because so much of Hotel Rwanda was tightly focused on the
Schindler-like story of one man who was able to save all the refugees holed up
in his hotel, as well as the fact that the events had occurred only ten years
before the film was released, made it a sort of moral cliffhanger.
The
Promise, though it doesn’t have all the conflicting plotlines of Ararat,
aims more at being an epic recounting that horrible year of 1915. By giving a sweeping view, and having one or
two of the four protagonists present during the key episodes, it becomes the
sort of Armenian version of the miniseries Holocaust,
which basically uses the same device in its telling of two Germen families, one
Jewish, the other eventually Nazi, whose varying members managed to have been
everywhere awful, from Babi Yar to Buchenwald, and from the euthanizing of a mentally
impaired family member early on to the mass gassings at Auschwitz. The thing is, though, Holocaust, was a miniseries, allowing plenty of time for all the
horrors to have their own focus, it was much publicized, and it was only 35
years later than the event. This put it
relatively early in the Holocaust film game, and it was shown on German television, with great impact.
The
Promise is, at least, a good start.
The Armenian Genocide is a nearly forgotten event here, except among
those of Armenian heritage. I knew about
it because I had Armenian friends in college, read Franz Werfel’s novel in
college, included Ararat, along with Hotel Rwanda in a class I taught on
Holocaust and Genocide film and so took the time to read up on it, a visit to
Armenia, and being in Yerevan two weeks after the commemoration of the Genocide
centenary.
Maybe, The Promise will be the act of defiance against the boogeymen
perpetrators that will open the door to more movies about this particular episode
of mass murder. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is prime miniseries material. The life of Aurora Mardaginian from Turkey to
Hollywood would make a fascinating biopic, and I wish someone would film Chris Bohjalian’s
wonderful and thoughtful novel, The
Sandcastle Girls, published in 2012.
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| View of Ararat from Yerevan: You can't get there from here |
As it rests now, the Armenians still
have to live with a million and a half MIAs. You can see Mount Ararat from
Yerevan, but you can’t go there.
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You have to see "The Promise" in a movie theater; it's worth the admission price.
"Ararat" is available on DVD, but you have to buy it.
Surviving footage from "Ravished Armenia," heavily edited, is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTnCaW-Uo_s&t=71s
There is a very good article on "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in Wikipedia:
(you can google it).
There is also a recent translation of the Franz Werfel novel: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (translated by Geoffrey Dunlap), Vera Mundi Press, 2012
An article by Paul Salopek on the Armenia and the events of 1915 is at
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/04/armenia-massacre-turkey-kurds-history/ (this is part of his wonderful, ongoing series, entitled "Out of Eden." Its homepage is: http://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/#section-0
For a very graphic documentary on the Armenian tragedy, see: 1915 AGHET - The Armenian Genocide. It is very graphic, made up of eyewitness quotes and footage.
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