Holocausts in Art

I recently watched Atom Egoyan's film Ararat, which deals (not quite directly) with the Armenian genocide. Egoyan is himself of Armenian descent, and after The Sweet Hereafter I have been a fan of his work. (Even so, it took me a couple years to get around to seeing this film--my Netflix list is very, very long.) I've seen some reviews complaining that this movie "could have been Egoyan's Schindler's List," given the superficial resemblance of genocide at the heart of both stories. But Schindler's List was about doing good in a time of great evil; Ararat is about the weight of the past on those who cannot escape the burdens of history. Different subjects altogether, and I think that taken solely as a work of art, Ararat stands very well on its own.

But one of the responsibilities of this burden, as the movie makes very clear, and as Egoyan clearly believes, is the duty to show the world what happened during the Armenian genocide. (Here is a Wikipedia article on the subject.) The trouble with Egoyan's effort, as I see it, is that no one has ever made a version of Schindler's List dealing directly with the Armenian story. What Egoyan presents is a multilayered tale (including a film within a film in which a director is making a movie that does in fact aim to tell the story of the genocide) about a young man whose mother is an art historian who has written a book about an artist whose mother was a victim of the genocide (see how complicated these story-threads already are?); about an actor in the film, a Turk playing the worst of the Turks; about a Customs inspector trying to wrangle a secret out of the young man; and about the young man's half-sister, who has her own crusade, her own truth she is trying to reveal to the world.

I know an Armenian and was discussing the movie with him. I asked if he had seen Ararat and he said "I think every Armenian has seen it." But what he wanted to know from me was how the movie played to someone unfamiliar with the subject of the genocide--he has lived with this knowledge all his life, and therefore comes to the movie with full awareness of its background and viewpoints; I saw the movie simply as a work of art, and liked it very much on that basis. But as a testament to the atrocities of the Armenian genocide, I think that Egoyan was too much the artist and not enough the historian.

If there had been some Armenian version of Schindler's List, then Egoyan's work might have succeeded better--then, you see, there would have been room for a more complex treatment of the peripheral themes. But to an audience that knows nothing of the genocide, Egoyan's attempts to be even-handed only succeed in muddling the history lesson. He is, for example, scrupulously fair in allowing the Turkish actor (played by Elias Koteas, whom I always confuse with Christopher Meloni because they could be brothers) to express his view that the genocide might not have been a genocide, that it was simply one of the horrors of a more straightforward civil war. In his director's commentary, Egoyan notes that he lifted direct quotes from the official Turkish position on the genocide question (Turkey's ongoing denial that it ever happened is one of the things that most rankles Armenians today) and assigned them to Koteas's character. So I'm sure that what the character says resonates with an Armenian audience very differently than it does with me--to my ears, it all sounded reasonable. Koteas's character then goes further: he says to the young Armenian man, in essence, Listen, we were both born here in Canada and what's past is past; let's go share this bottle of champagne and be friends. In his commentary, Egoyan nearly shudders in horror at the idea; to me it sounds like the only way through such difficulties.

But then, denial of the truth is one of the principal themes of the film, and Egoyan is very interested in how people's lives are affected when they can't get at the truth of something, or when others try to deny what they believe is true. This, again, is a great subject for a film--but it interferes with the history lesson Egoyan was trying to get across. He urges viewers to go and research the subject themselves and make up their own minds, which is fair enough as far as it goes, but really, how many people will actually do that?

In short, Ararat makes for a curious object lesson. It tries to be both a polemic and a work of art, but it can't be both. If someone else had first made the polemic, then there might have been room for the work of art; but Egoyan really should have made up his mind which was more important to him, to tell the tale of the Armenian genocide or to tell the tale of the people affected by it. Films are surprisingly compact things, more like short stories than novels, and in most cases they really only have room to do one thing well. Egoyan's artistic ambitions ended up sabotaging his desire to tell a story that needs telling. Which is a shame, really, because that just leads to a sense of disappointment with the film itself, which then spreads to the subject matter and leaves me that little bit less anxious to do the research myself and determine what happened. This too would probably make Egoyan shudder with horror, but there it is.