Egoyan and the urge to forget Memory, resolution are director's themes in film, Ararat
The Ottawa Citizen - 6 Septembre 2002

By Jay Stone

There's a scene in Atom Egoyan's new film, Ararat - about the long-disputed genocide by Turkey of one million Armenians during the First World War years - in which a Turkish-Canadian character says that maybe the genocide happened and maybe it didn't, but anyway, it was a long time ago and it's time to move on. The character seems to be speaking for the Turkish government, which denies the event, or perhaps for the world, which seems to have either forgotten it or maybe never heard of it.

"I think he's speaking for a lot of people. Actually, to be perfectly honest, he speaks for a side of myself as well," says Egoyan, on the eve of last night's opening of the Toronto International Film Festival. Ararat, an epic that stretches across the years and the world, was the opening night gala of the festival.

"There is a dream fantasy that we can just move on that's incredibly appealing. It is a new country and it happened a long time ago and it is time to move on. The thorny question that persists is, 'Do we learn from what happened? Are we able to rectify past horrors?'

"So what he is saying is very appealing, and I think in an ideal world we would be able to move on. But we do have to find resolution." Resolution is one of the themes of Ararat, which is probably Egoyan's most ambitious movie and certainly one of the most deeply felt. It's structured - in typical Atom Egoyan fashion - in several layers: it's a film within a film in which a present day Armenian director, played by Charles Aznavour, is making a movie entitled (hold on now) Ararat, about the Armenian Holocaust. The re-creations of the horror, which are graphic and disturbing, take place on a movie set that is difficult to distinguish from a "real" movie set.

Meanwhile, several characters connected to the movie have histories that are as troubled as the grand canvas of history. Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan's wife and like him a Canadian of Armenian descent, plays a consultant on the fictional movie who is also an historian specializing in the work of Arshile Gorky, a real-life Armenian artist who survived the genocide. She is estranged from her son, who also works on the movie. A customs officer (Christopher Plummer) who stops her son at the border carrying back cans of film from Turkey is cut off from his own son, a gay man who is having an
affair with a Turkish-Canadian actor who is working on Ararat - he plays the villain - and who is the one who thinks it's time to move on. The story thus unfolds in layers, with the personal stories being fed by the larger tragedy and at the same time being analogies of it. "We've been looking at a way to address this issue for a long time," Egoyan said. "The issue was how to find an approach."

Egoyan says he initially wrote an historical film, but decided that he was not the kind of director to make that type of movie, and furthermore, such a movie would not address the issue that was most interesting to him: The denial of the event. To Egoyan, the challenge was to dramatize what he terms "the transmission of trauma," the way a cultural holocaust of this scope is passed on through the generations, how it can even define them.

"It was definitely part of my upbringing," said Khanjian, whose grandparents were orphaned by the tragedy. "My sense of identity was being Armenian and a major part of that was the history of the genocide.... The trauma of being a
survivor is a major part of one's identity and takes its toll."

Ararat takes place partly in Canada, whose legacy of multiculturalism and relative racial harmony adds another layer to the film that Egoyan was striving for. The "flashback" sequences, which are really the second Ararat movie, revolve around the siege of the city of Van, where a ragtag army of Armenians held off the Turkish army for many weeks. An American missionary, Clarence Ussher, was stationed in Van and wrote a book about the siege that is partly the basis of Egoyan's movie. It is also true that Arshile Gorky, one of the founders of the Abstract Expressionist movement, was a survivor of the siege of Van and one of his paintings, The Artist and His Mother, plays a prominent role in Ararat.
The film's attention to historical detail, its cast of hundreds, is unusual for Egoyan, whose films are typically smaller in scope, although he did return to Armenia to film the personal voyage of Calendar, a 1993 movie. In 1994, Exotica won the International Critics Prize at Cannes and in 1997, The Sweet Hereafter garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Egoyan has also directed opera, wrote an opera (Elsewhereless) and has mounted several art shows, including an exhibition in Montreal called Hors d'Usage, a show in which taped-recorded
memories of Montreal are played.

Memory is one of the themes of Egoyan's work; in Ararat, the customs officer and the young man with cans of film create between them a narrative that changes history in a way. "History's not just about telling something," Egoyan says. "It's also about someone else needing to listen." In the same way, his telling of Ararat is only part of the story. "It's not just a question of needing to remember: remembering the Holocaust and remembering Rwanda and remembering Cambodia. The question is not just how to remember, but how to remember in a way that we don't allow it to happen again."