Kevin Murphy talks with Atom Egoyan and Arsinée Khanjian about Ararat

Atom Egoyan. Photo by Miguel Villalobos.

Weighing in as the reigning provocateur of the past two decades of Canadian cinema, Atom Egoyan once again trumps the field with his latest film, Ararat. By far his most personal, political and ambitious film to date, Ararat revisits questions of history, memory and cultural identity in the contemporary electronic age that Egoyan has pioneered in such earlier films as Next of Kin and Calendar.

Ararat, a region of Armenia, is also the name of the largest and highest volcano in far eastern Turkey, bordering Armenia, Iran and Iraq. Egoyan’s film addresses the 1915-1917 genocide in the region of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, a chapter in history that has been largely unacknowledged, even disavowed to the present day. (Indeed, the lack of attention given to the Armenian genocide has been attributed to bolstering Hitler's confidence that Germany could "get away" with killing Jews.)

For Egoyan and his wife, actor-collaborator Arsinée Khanjian, as well as for generations of geographically and historically displaced Armenians and Turks, the story of the Armenian genocide and its legacy is one that must be remembered and articulated to fully understand their cultural identities.

Self-consciously working within a genre of films about filmmaking, Egoyan sets at the center of Ararat a “film within a film,” also called Ararat, in order to probe the complexities of reenacting past events. As much as Egoyan aims with urgency to bring to international recognition one of the darkest chapters of the history of the Armenian people, his film ultimately unfolds as a poetic and self-reflexive meditation on the intimate moments of remembering and telling stories and an ode to the creative process.

Shot over 9 weeks in Toronto and Alberta, Canada, the project brought Egoyan and Khanjian together with Charles Aznavour, Eric Bogosian, Elias Koteas, Christopher Plummer, and Bruce Greenwood — who plays an actor cast as Clarence Ussher, an American doctor who ran a mission in Turkey, and upon whose memoirs the historical “film within the film” is based — among other notable cast and crew.

A large and passionate community of Armenian Canadians rallied support for the production and participated as extras in the emotionally taxing historical reenactment scenes. For Egoyan, this enthusiastic response to the film constitutes “living proof” of the endurance of collective memory. As the characters in Ararat grapple with the meanings and truths of the past, Egoyan harnesses their creative impulses to explore his conviction that “if history is in the telling, then life is in the making.”

Amid the frenzied hometown reception of Ararat’s North American premiere at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival, Atom Egoyan and Arsinée Khanjian eagerly discussed with Filmmaker the rigors of wrestling and reconciling with history.

LEFT: Left to right: Martin (Bruce Greenwood, who plays Clarence Ussher in Saroyan’s film), director Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour) and screenwriter Rouben (Eric Bogosian) at the premiere of Saroyan’s Ararat, the historical film-within-the-film. RIGHT: Ani (Arsinée Khanjian), foreground, on the set of Edward Saroyan’s Ararat.

Filmmaker: Ararat examines how fragile and difficult our relation is to the past and to memory. How do the various characters in Ararat function to make sense of the past?

Atom Egoyan: I was interested in creating a community of people who were all involved in the making of artifacts which they believe will communicate to others an experience that would otherwise be lost: Ani (Arsinée Khanjian), has written a book on the life of [the Armenian-American artist] Arshile Gorky, and she concentrates all her attention on the material this book contains to speak about her personal trauma; Edward Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), a film director, is making a film [about the Armenian genocide] based on a screenplay by Rouben (Eric Bogosian), adapted from the memoirs of Clarence Ussher (Bruce Greenwood); and Raffi (David Alpay), Ani’s son, is making a digital diary.

Each of these people, in a way, believe that they need to make something to compel others to believe their story. In a world where the process of oral tradition is very fragile, something that is objectified assumes a status. But of course, that object is also vulnerable, ultimately. It’s vulnerable to interpretation and also to aesthetic quality.

What if Edward Saroyan, making the first film on the Armenian genocide, marshalling all these resources — what if that film doesn’t quite do it? Or what if Ani’s book isn’t well received? And interwoven into all of these stories is the one masterpiece that has emerged from this trauma: Arshile Gorky’s portrait The Artist and His Mother. This is something which endures. And it is at the center of the film.

Filmmaker: The purpose of these objects — Edward’s film, Ani’s book, Raffi’s video diary — is to describe, reconstruct or make sense of history, but each is filtered through the personal experiences and biases of the characters.

Egoyan: The film is very much about interpretation. People have the right to interpret an object. They have the license to interpret something as they wish. The fact that a struggle to interpret history motivates the personal dynamics and drama between characters emphasizes how vulnerable the material, these artifacts, can be. Nothing is fixed.

We are attracted to making things because we think that they become immutable, but they are all subject to interpretation. Look at Gorky’s painting. It took so long for anyone to understand that painting in the context of Gorky’s own history. Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, wrote a book on Gorky and never even mentioned that Gorky was a survivor of the Armenian genocide.

Ararat examines how something on the scale of genocide can be forgotten, how things get misinterpreted and how agendas and expediency motivate people’s decisions to remember things in the “right” way. And not only are we dealing with that in a historical context —with the reproduction of historical events, such as in [Edward’s film] — but I was really fascinated in showing that these artifacts and experiences are also passing through these characters’ lives in the present and are related to issues of family, to relationships between parents and kids.

LEFT: Clarence Ussher (Bruce Greenwood) in a scene from Edward Saroyan’s Ararat. RIGHT: Ani (Arsinée Khanjian) lectures on Arshile Gorsky’s painting, The Artist and His Mother, in Ararat.

Filmmaker: The film-within-the-film is also called Ararat. Was your intention to offer a commentary on the pitfalls, responsibilities and dangers of representing the past or your memory of it, something that you have a passionate stake in?

Egoyan: The most important thing to remember about the film-within-the-film is that it is being made by the child of a survivor. Edward Saroyan is an older man who has been raised with stories of someone who witnessed it, and who passed on these stories to her son — who we gather has become a well-known director, probably past his prime at this point — who has felt this sense of duty to somehow honor his mother’s spirit.

So it only made sense to me that the images that he produces are going to reflect the heightened way that he’s received those stories, and the sense of responsibility he feels in making sure people have a sense of what happened. You know, the opposite of denial is the need to display, and we see that throughout the film — you overcompensate, you use whatever platform you have to hammer your point home.

I think that Edward’s film goes maybe too far in making sure that there’s absolutely no room for misinterpretation. I wasn’t trying to be ironic with that film or to make fun of it, because that would have been cruel and unnecessary, but what I was trying to do was to put the viewer into the frame of mind that a child listening to these stories would see them.

Arsinée Khanjian. Photo by Miguel Villalobos.

The most interesting thing for both of us, I think, and Arsinée probably was a more direct recipient of these stories than I was during my childhood, but we’ve shown the film to some Armenians and they said, “That’s exactly how I remembered it” — when in fact they haven’t remembered it because they were not there. They remember hearing stories of it.

So, while I was shooting those scenes, all the pressures that were placed on me as a filmmaker — showing these events for the first time, and all the expectations that people had of me — I channeled into Edward’s film. And that was very liberating because I was able to then treat the contemporary material with a degree of artistic freedom that I probably didn’t feel as I was shooting the film-within-the-film. And I think that that’s what gives it its particular tone. But it’s an important tone to present in this movie, because it’s about showing the different ways in which people chronicle their relationship to trauma.

Arsinée Khanjian: And also, it’s about how the memory of that trauma has evolved in generation after generation.

Atom, when I hear you speak about Edward’s film, of the film-within-the-film, it’s a very judgmental element regardless of what you say, in terms of his reasons for doing it. It’s interesting that this most contradictory sort of relationship with the Edward character — on the one hand your identification with his project, but also a criticism of what that project represents — I don’t know if this works in creating a work of art, but certainly that tension is in itself very interesting.

Egoyan: We don’t know ultimately where Edward’s film is going to end up. It might go straight to cable. We don’t really know what market it’s intended for, and we don’t know what its critical reception will be. What we’re dealing with here is the notion of desecration. Genocide ultimately is an act of desecration and the making of art is an attempt to enrich experience by finding a way of transcending and elevating experience into something which can be shared, and which has meaning which other people can project value into. So that presupposes that the work is great. [laughs] And that’s a risky thing to do. I mean, what if Edward’s film is not a great work? Then what does that mean? Does that mean that the genocide will not enter into people’s consciousness because the film doesn’t get seen?

And also, I think, the danger of that type of representation in terms of the Armenian genocide, specifically, is that it doesn’t deal with the most defining elements of that event, which has been the denial. I think that Edward’s film, while showing what happened, does not in any way give the viewer the sense of what continues to happen, because that event continues to be forgotten.

LEFT: Raffi (David Alpay) and his girlfriend Celia (Marie-Josée Croze) in Ararat. RIGHT: David (Christopher Plummer), the customs officer in Ararat.

Filmmaker: Which is where you pick up.

Egoyan: Which is where I pick up. And that is what the project of my Ararat is. But I could not have undertaken my Ararat without having Edward’s Ararat as something to respond to. All the actions of the contemporary characters are based on a response to the historical artifacts that Edward presents. Now, if that film had existed already — I mean, this is the thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot — if that film had existed in people’s consciousness, if there had been a historic epic about the Armenian genocide that everyone knew, then I might have been able to tell my story in a different way. But I had the double duty of having to [create] that artifact as well as create the response to that artifact.

Filmmaker: Before you introduce the film-within-the-film, there is a scene of an idyllic Armenian village, which the viewer assumes is your footage before the camera draws back to show Edward’s film set. And the scene of Arshile Gorky (Simon Abkarian) in his studio is bathed in the same sort of warm lighting and music as Edward’s film, so there is a degree to which you are complicit with Edward’s project and paying homage to what he’s doing.

Egoyan: Absolutely, yes.

Filmmaker: But then you also do have that remove where you can step back through Ani’s character and ask questions about poetic license, and you also question Edward’s altering history to accommodate his personal or emotional experience as well as the demands of the marketplace.

Egoyan: Yeah, it was very important that if the viewer chooses to be absolutely respectful of Edward’s film, that my film would allow them to do that and not punish them for emotionally projecting into something they need to see. That was the most delicate part of this process — because I could have easily veered his movie into the realm of parody.

Before making this film, I looked at a number of films about filmmaking. There’s a whole sub-genre, from Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, to the Vincente Minnelli film Two Weeks in Another Town, to the Kiarostami films, to Fellini’s 8 1/2, to Truffaut’s Day for Night, to David Mamet’s most recent, State and Main, and Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion. It just goes on and on and on. Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, which I haven’t seen recently, is probably the closest [to Ararat] in that it deals with the notion of atrocity and film. Interestingly, what I noticed in a lot of these films is that when you see the actual artifacts within the film you understand exactly what the point of view is towards [the subject] — and then, usually, it is ridiculed in some way. If you look at something like Living in Oblivion, for instance, you understand what the limits of that film are. And it is easy to separate yourself and look at it very clinically.

With Ararat, I wanted to somehow create a tone where it was possible to do that — [to separate yourself and look at the images very clinically], because they [could be] emotionally loaded for you. But I also wanted to provide an experience [of empathy] at the same time. So Arsinée is absolutely right. I do have a very ambiguous approach, but I was trying to be as sincere as possible to the way [Edward] would have made those images and what those images needed to serve, while identifying the limitations of that type of representation.

Filmmaker: In the film, Edward is an aging director who is making his film at a point in his career well past his prime. What does this say about the decision to do this kind of film now?

Khanjian: There is something to be said about “Why now?” When you look at any testimony of this nature, there is something which goes beyond the personal [motivation] of the artist or the filmmaker that becomes its justification — [such as] a warranting or approval of some sort from a community. I mean, you are speaking hopefully as an artist from your personal perspective, but you know that you are also rendering a kind of approbation through the work.

When you look at most films that deal with the memory of the Holocaust and so on, they are often done by directors later on in their lives. It’s interesting that in the middle of a career, or what is perceived as an artistic career as such, few directors tackle the subject of genocide, which is such a difficult issue because of the political nature of speaking not only on behalf of yourself but also on behalf of a collective.

[Atom], up until now you can argue that [each film you made represents] your unique personal view of whatever subject you were exploring and there was no collective accountability [at stake]. But with this film, there is a collective experience as well as a personal experience that is attached to the history of it. So it is interesting to me that you are doing it at this point in your career and not when you are over 60, let’s say, where age is an indication of a maturity. I don’t know, correct me on this: Is there any director who has dealt with the Holocaust in his 40s?

Egoyan: Spielberg, obviously. He was in his 40s.

Khanjian: Nooooo.

Egoyan: Yeah, he was in his mid-40s maybe. But what is interesting in terms of Edward, and it had never occurred to me, is that when you make a film at that point in your life you are sort of at a point where you feel that, in your lifetime, things may not change. And so that infuses the images with a sense of anger that there has been no change [within your lifetime]. And that’s what we see in his film. I mean, for someone who was raised on these images, who was probably told by his mother not to forget, he had a duty to use his talent at some point to tell that story.

Khanjian: Then there is an [implicit] assumption that age provides him with a kind of wisdom because he has lived a life, that this person has now arrived at the authority because they have gone through life — as opposed to his inability to fully understand the subject in his youth

Filmmaker: That’s an interesting point, because the younger characters in the film, Raffi and Celia (Marie-Josée Croze), challenge the ideas and actions of the older characters; they take radical action and are ultimately victimized — much like Raffi’s dead father, who was a terrorist or freedom fighter.

Egoyan: Exactly.

Filmmaker: The younger characters, who have the same project in a way as Ani and Edward — to come to terms with a traumatic history — veer towards self-destructive behavior.

Khanjian: That is the real onus of the film. As we are talking about the trauma being passed on in different shapes and formations over generations, with each generation we are losing immediate touch with the memory of it. So the younger generation is very much in that [predicament] where they know that they should have, and they will have, feelings and opinions and a relationship with this trauma, but they are less and less equipped to address it in a way that they can either institutionally justify or create a productive outlet. They have all the responsibility and the guilt perhaps without having the means to productive action. And that’s their frustration.

Egoyan: That’s the predicament of youth. But the predicament of the older generation is they are assumed to have wisdom. I’m not sure if [the older characters in the film] are actually displaying the patience that their experience would presuppose. You’re either very patient because you want to be generous to the experience you’ve accumulated, or you feel you don’t have the time to deal with issues anymore because your time is precious and limited. That’s the paradox of age in a way. The project is not only dealing with notions of different times, but it’s intergenerational. It’s important to show the predicament of these different generations dealing with the burden of their respective histories.

Khanjian: And in a way, to make history an urgent matter in the present. [History] is the very time frame where the present is formed — wedged between the past and the future. History is not something of the past. History is something of the present. And without that, there is such an incredible void — human nature cannot function without that relationship. So hopefully the film is able to deal with this whole argument about [how easy it is to] forget the past — as if history can be accused of being old and therefore inappropriate for novelty.

Filmmaker: In the film, you couch that argument within the predicament of the homosexual characters, Philip (Brent Carver) and his Turkish-Canadian boyfriend Ali (Elias Koteas), who is cast as Jevdet Bay, a Turkish soldier, in Edward Saroyan’s Ararat. Each of them denies history — in Ali’s case, the history of the Armenian genocide, and in Philip’s case, his estrangement from his disapproving father, David (Christopher Plummer) — in order to justify their own desire.

Egoyan: For somebody from Ali’s background to feel comfortable with his sexuality is really remarkable. I just think that it’s an amazing leap that Ali has made in feeling comfortable in his skin.

Filmmaker: Ali’s voice in the film is a voice that is all-too-familiar today, especially among American adolescents. It is unfashionable today to have a romantic or overly sentimental engagement with history or tradition.

Khanjian: Because we have come to look at history out of convenience, not out of necessity. And we have really tried very hard to get away from the psychology that is involved and the human dimension that is involved within the individual and the past, the heritage, the history of that heritage and legacy in that sense.

The discussion of convenience is a very interesting one because the whole subject of the denial that we’re dealing with in the film is not only affecting the Armenian survivors and later generations; the denial is also affecting the Turkish population in the world; there are 65 million Turks today who for “modern” reasons or other political conveniencies are cut off from their history. They have absolutely no access to history — history books are completely [censored]. They have no record of anything that happened in 1915 within the Ottoman Empire. The problem with that, I would say, is that from a more universal perspective, you will never have a chance to make a proper connection that requires a human dimension, because you are going to mystify [history] as something perfect. And history is not perfect, it’s filled with human behavior that is so dreadful that we can be ashamed, horrified, and feel sort of alienated.

But in terms of what you are saying also, what Ali’s character brings up in the film from his perspective of having a Turkish [and homosexual] identity in Canada, is actually something that relates to all viewers, regardless of their cultural background, in terms of what their responsibility is once they become aware of a history.

Egoyan: What is so complex about Ali’s character is that he has no history of [the genocide]. So how can he be accused of denial? Can a person who does not know of an event be a denier?

Khanjian: That’s the question: At the moment he is exposed to and has knowledge of this history, does this mark the moment of his responsibility? And in what way should he address it?

Egoyan: The question is tough to digest. And that’s one of the big issues of the film — given the nature of our culture and the speed at which things move, how much time do we give each other to digest the monumental types of decisions we have to make?

Khanjian: In the absence of history.

Egoyan: [Especially] in the absence of history. The tendency is to come up with that explosive point that’s going to drive it home. I mean, the most extreme examples are the reactions of Celia and Raffi, but in fact, what you do is actually put the other person on the defensive. So the [question raised in the film is] of communicating information, and also giving the receiver, the viewer, the listener, the spectator, time to absorb and wrestle with the issues. And that’s why, I think in the midst of all of this drama, I give so much time to the scenes of Raffi’s interrogation by the customs officer. They take their time, because David (Christopher Plummer), the customs official, has understood that this is going to take time.

It’s a project of the film not only to raise these issues but to find a tone and a rhythm which allows the viewer the ability to meditate on these issues as the film itself is unfolding. It’s a sort of carefully guarded union of a certain polemic with a meditative ability to be self-reflective. It’s very ambitious, but I also really believe that because of the performances and the extraordinary nuances which the actors have submitted themselves to these issues, there is a huge capacity and ability for the viewers to project themselves into the film.

Khanjian: The viewer — specifically if they are not of Armenian background or Turkish background — is going to be [put in the position] at least to question the responsibility of having to listen.

Egoyan: Exactly. And every character in the film is called on to be a witness at some point to someone else’s experience. And our sense of what their character is is based on their ability to serve the responsibilities of being a witness. Or to reject those responsibilities, as we ourselves are being called on to witness the drama. And it’s very self-conscious that way, and formally I avoided dirty singles to isolate the character in the frame and deprive him and the viewer the comfort of knowing that someone else if listening.

The cinematographer, when talking to the director, says, “Do you want it dirty or clean?” And it’s a very interesting term because dirty means, “Do you want the frame to be corrupted by the presence of someone else,” which allows the viewer’s relationship to that single to be somehow comforted by the physical presence of someone else in that frame. [The dirty single] places the energy of that discourse between the two characters, and it essentially lets the viewer off the hook to an extent — as opposed to the more iconographic sort of representation of a face without the location of a conversation. And in any sort of coverage situation, I mean, when someone poses a response to a question, if you don’t cut back to the person who is receiving that and you rest on the person who makes the statement, then the viewer is way more implicated in having to first of all imagine how that character is responding, and also to respond themselves. So the editing became a really interesting alchemical process in this movie, because of the number of witnesses and the nature of the evidence that is being given.

Links:

Egoyan's official site at www.egofilmarts.com.

http://www.cdca.asso.fr/cdca/cdca-egoyan_eng.htm

The Egoyan Nucleus
http://members.cruzio.com/~akreyche/atom.html

For additional production info, see
http://www.allianceatlantisfilms.com/arat_presser.asp

Actor Bruce Greenwood also maintains an Egoyan archive with a variety of links at http://www.brucegreenwood.com/atom/atom.htm

Bogosian fans, proceed immediately to the actor's own site,
http://www.ericbogosian.com/letter28.html

Box office data on the films of Atom Egoyan:
http://www.the-numbers.com/people/directors/AEGOY.html

For early Egoyan films on DVD, see
http://www.zeitgeistfilm.com

For additional information about the Armenian genocide, check out
http://history1900s.about.com/cs/armeniangenocide/
http://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocidefaq.htm

Also see: Atom Egoyan on the work of Shirin Neshat.