ARMENIAN GENOCIDE FEATURED IN ARARAT
Ararat, directed by Atom Egoyan, is a film about a film. We see only a few scenes staged for the background film, entitled “Arara,” which might have been an exciting epic about the death of one million Armenians in 1915 by the government of Turkey, which forced them on a death march to what is now called Syria. Instead, the foreground film is largely about members of an Armenian family in Canada who are haunted by the memory of the genocide. The one most transfixed by the genocide appears to be eighteen-year-old Raffi (played by David Alpay), son of a father who assassinated a Turkish diplomat and his mother Ani (played by Arsinée Khanjian), an art historian. The father later apparently committed suicide when Raffi was very young, perhaps the original source of the young man’s angst, but in any case, we see how the genocide has produced conflict within the Armenian community. Ani is promoting her recent book about an Armenian artist named Arshile Gorky (played by Simon Abkarian), who depicted a sorrowful family of the genocide on canvas, and she soon becomes a technical adviser to the film within the film. Raffi, meanwhile, went to Turkey to provide film footage for his mother’s book tour. When he returns to Canada, he is stopped by a customs official named David (played by Christopher Plummer) because he is carrying four reels of film marked “UNEXPOSED,” and he refuses to allow the official to open the reels. Clearly, nobody travels with unexposed film, but David does not want to ruin the handsome young Armenian’s life by calling a dog to identify the contents. Through interrogation, Raffi admits that by another person gave him the reels, so he believes that they contain unexposed film. Accordingly, David, who is prolonging his last day of work before retirement with the interrogation, lets Raffi go, even though the contents were obviously contraband. Thus, the plot of the foreground film is uncomplicated. However, the foreground film is a prop for the background film, which deals with the Armenian genocide. One of the characters in the background film plays a Turk, is half-Turkish, and presents the official Turkish government’s view that war was in progress, and the Russians were threatening Turkey, so many died. Raffi replies that the Armenians were Turkish citizens who posed no threat. The film, which is more propaganda than plot, ends with a title, indicating that documentation of the atrocities of the genocide are in a book by Dr. Clarence Ussher, entitled An American Physician in Turkey (1917). If only the background film had been made! MH
KENNEDY’S SUPPOSED KILLER CONFESSES IN INTERVIEW WITH THE ASSASSIN
President Lyndon Johnson, interviewed for the Warren Report on the assassination of President John Kennedy, expressed the view that there was a conspiracy involving several persons, not a lone gunman. His remark was deleted from the report. In addition, many witnesses who might have refuted the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy were dead within a very few years. Kennedy’s assassination, in short, is the major unsolved crime of the twentieth century, ripe for several cinematic treatments. Executive Action (1973) and JFK (1991) are now joined by Interview with the Assassin, written and directed by Neil Burger. When the story begins, Ron Kobeleski (played by Dylan Haggerty), an out-of-work photojournalist, is about to interview Walter Ohlinger (played by Raymond J. Barry) a man living on his block in San Bernardino, for a story about a crime that he wants to confess. Ohlinger has leukemia and expects to live only a few months, so he wants his confession on videotape for posterity, but not for the police. The crime, of course, is the assassination of Kennedy; he claims that he shot the fatal bullet from the grassy knoll and that Oswald was picked as the fall guy because he was “stupid.” Ohlinger claims to have been hired by his commanding officer in the Marines, but he does not know who hired him. To corroborate his story, Ohlinger gets a shell casing from the fatal bullet from his bank safety deposit box, and Kobeleski then asks a lab to authenticate when the shell might have been ejected. They go to Dallas to walk where Ohlinger went on November 22, 1963, but the main corroboration would be to locate Ohlinger’s former CO, who is not easy to find. Then Kobeleski realizes that he might be a target because of what he now knows, and the suspense in Interview with the Assassin builds, similar to The Blair Witch Project (1999). Titles at the end say that Kobeleski was arrested, tried, and convicted of conspiracy but died in prison of multiple stab wounds, while the shell casing from the lab was stolen and disappeared. Laughter greeted the trailer of the film in earlier weeks, but the plausibility of the fictional plot leaves some filmviewers hoping that some day the truth will eventually emerge. MH