just out on Aljazeera --my thoughts on Fatih Akins new epic film on Armenian genocide, premiered earlier this month in Venice: The key issue in telling any epic story of dispossession, exodus, catastrophe or Holocaust is precisely the manner in which the story is to be told in the literary and cinematic context when all such grand narratives have become suspect. By virtue of a sustained course of more than 100 years of poignant and powerful remembrance, the Armenian tragedy has advanced far too deeply into our political consciousness for a tired old cliche kind of cinematic narrative to do justice to it. If a director is not aware of that fact, he walks perilously between tragedy and kitsch. Filmmakers like Atom Egoyan and Arby Ovanessian, poets and novelists like Peter Balakian, scholars like Marc Nichanian, Anahid Kassabian, David Kazanjian, and many more have already pushed the boundaries of narrative far beyond any point of return and registered the emotive history of the Armenian Genocide in a visual and verbal vocabulary in tune with the crooked timber of our world. Akin is too late and his narrative too visually self-conscious and archival to come anywhere near the emotive complexity of that universe.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 12:35:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015