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