Film Review

In his latest film, Academy award-nominated director Atom Egoyan shows us why history is still a nightmare for the Armenian people. His multilayered, extremely self-conscious movie Ararat opens with close-up shots of the New York studio of Arshile Gorky (Simon Abkarian), one of the prominent figures of abstract expressionism. The camera brushes over Gorky's studio, pausing on Armenian artifacts (miniature khackars, holy crosses carved on rock) scattered among brushes, paints, flowers, and a photograph of the artist and his mother. The image, a source for the painting on which the artist works, was taken in old Van, the city in eastern Anatolia that had been the ancient capital of Greater Armenia, just days before this past century's first genocide befell the Armenians.	1
However, the movie is neither a linear narrative on the Armenian genocide, still a rather little known chapter of the past century, nor a biography of Gorky. Scenes from Gorky's life and purposefully cartoonish renderings of events in 1915 are just two of the many interwoven stories through which Egoyan problematizes the entertainment industry's abilities (or rather disabilities) of narrating that which is not narratable. In this respect, the director posits himself against the Hollywood tradition of grand narratives of mass tragedies, the most familiar in recent times being Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). Spielberg, instead of suspecting his medium as a truth-reconstructing apparatus, was obsessed with showing how the experience of Holocaust "really" was. Egoyan ambitiously seeks to reverse that traditional narrative by challenging the notion that film could ever offer such a reality. Moreover, Egoyan demands the same kind of ambition from his audience.	2
"I love making images, yet I'm suspicious of them … I am suspicious of what I am trying to add to this culture, and would expect a lot of people are as well," Egoyan said in a recent interview in Cinemascope magazine. His caution echoes in the film as well. Two characters, the half-Turkish actor Ali (Elias Koteas) and his driver Raffi (David Alpay), raise similar issues as they talk about a scene from the film-within-the-film (also called Ararat, a fictive film about Armenian genocide that follows the standard narrative structure of the historical epic) in which Ali portrays Djevdet Bey, who was in charge of carrying out the massacres in Van. In response to Ali's admission that his character would be easy to hate, Raffi responds: "Sure, but I'm also kind of suspicious of stuff that's supposed to make me feel anything. Egoyan, like Raffi, resists the predictable temptations of grand narrative.	3
A modern meditation on memory and intergenerational trauma, Ararat tells the juxtaposed story of four families, all lost in their nightmarish personal and national histories and all trapped in some sort of denial. What unites these unrelated characters to each other is a complex web of relationships surrounding the production of the film-within-the-film, intended by its fictional director Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) as a cinematic recapturing of the Armenians' tragic history. Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), an art history professor who has just finished a book on the most famous genocide survivor, Gorky, lectures on the painter's life and work. She spends considerable time on one of Gorky's masterpieces from his figurative years "The Portrait of the Artist and His Mother," and argues that it alludes to the theme of genocide. Raffi, Ani's son by her first husband and the boyfriend of Celia (Marie-Josée Croze), Ani's stepdaughter by her second husband, is torn between his mother, who denies her personal responsibility, and his girlfriend, who thinks Ani's involvement with another man was the reason why her father committed suicide. At the same time, Raffi obsessively tries to understand the motives of his own father, who was killed trying to assassinate a Turkish diplomat, thinking that his action would put an end to the denial of Turkish authorities.	. . .