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ABSTRACT
Daldal analyses Atom Egoyan's film Ararat (2002) in terms of its ‘truth claims’ and its ostensible critique of the politics of denial of the Turkish authorities. Her essay is not an apologia for Turkish attitudes but claims that, while searching for the ‘truth’ amid denial and deception, the film creates its own ‘official history’, which is presented as the history, mostly based on nostalgia and ‘post-memory’. The Armenian diaspora still relies heavily on the genocide in order to build consciousness and cohesion, and Ararat contributes further to the need for sacred codes, sacred lands and sacred myths. Although the Turkish denial of the genocide is unacceptable, by demonizing the Turks and Turkey, the film contributes to the preservation of that denial, which has been helpful in the creation of diasporic Armenian identity.
Notes
1Atom Egoyan, Ararat: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press 2002), 1.
2For a detailed analysis of Turkey's denial, see Taner Akçam, Türk Ulusal Kimliği ve Ermeni Sorunu (Istanbul: Iletisim 1992).
3For more information, see Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism, 5th edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1999).
4According to Kracauer, cinema comes from photography and, in that sense, is linked to the physical world. Cinema is the ‘redemption’ of physical reality. But for cinema to be true to its premises, it should refrain from telling a dramatic story that will turn it into a novel or theatre; only a documentary approach with a ‘slight narrative’ can protect cinema's mimetic basis. Siegfried Karacauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1997).
5Hamid Naficy, Recurrent Themes in the Middle Eastern Cinema of Diaspora (Los Angeles: Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA 1995), 26.
6See, for example, Mim Kemâl Öke, The Armenian Question (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Printing House 2001).
7Egoyan, Ararat, viii.
8‘Post-memory’, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, is a particular form of memory whose connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection (remembrance) but through an imaginative investment and creation: Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1997).
9Jonathan Romney, Atom Egoyan (London: British Film Institute 2003), 11.
10Edouard Saroyan was also the name of the pianist played by Aznavour in François Truffaut's famous Shoot the Pianist made in 1960. It is unclear why Egoyan made this reference to Truffaut's film, which has little in common with Ararat except for the fact that Aznavour was cast in both of them.
13Egoyan, Ararat, vii.
11Egoyan, Ararat, ix.
12Romney, Atom Egoyan, 181.
14Egoyan, Ararat, vii.
15Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2001), 284.
16Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2003).
17Naficy, Recurrent Themes in the Middle Eastern Cinema of Diaspora, 26.
18Quoted in Romney, Atom Egoyan, 180.
19Quoted in Romney, Atom Egoyan, 186.
20 Ararat, dir. Atom Egoyan, DVD, Miramax Home Entertainment, 2003.
24Clarence Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey (Astoria, NY: J. C. and A. L. Fawcett 1990), 90.
21Clarence Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey (Astoria, NY: J. C. and A. L. Fawcett 1990).
22Clarence Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey (Astoria, NY: J. C. and A. L. Fawcett 1990), 79.
23Clarence Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey (Astoria, NY: J. C. and A. L. Fawcett 1990), 10.
25Qutoed in Egoyan, Ararat, 135.
26Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Oxford and Providence, RI: Berghahn Books 1995), 222.
27Quoted in Taner Akçam, Dialogue across an International Divide: Essays towards a Turkish-Armenian Dialogue (Toronto and Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute 2001), xi.
28Romney, Atom Egoyan, 173.
29‘The “Young Turks” who lived long enough to witness the coming into being of the Turkish Republic saw many of their dreams fulfilled—it was a regime based on a popular materialist-positivist ideology and nationalism …’: M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995), 216.
30Hagop Mintzuri, İstanbul Anilari 1897–1940 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi 2002). Translations from the Turkish are by the author unless otherwise stated.
33Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 318–19.
31Baskin Oran, Atatürk Milliyetçiliği: Resmi İdeoloji Dişi Bir İnceleme (Ankara: Bilgi Yayinevi 1990).
32Taner Akçam, İnsan Haklari ve Ermeni Sorunu (Ankara: İmge 1999), 475.
34Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey, A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris 1993).
35Akçam, İnsan Haklari ve Ermeni Sorunu, 476.
36Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1969).
38Jacob M. Landau, Exploring Ottoman and Turkish History (London: Hurst and Co. 2004), 22.
37These ideologies are analysed in detail in Yusuf Akçura, Üç Tarz-i Siyaset, ed. E. Z. Karal (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu 1976). Üç Tarz-i Siyaset was first published in the Cairo newspaper Türk, nos 24–34, 1904, and later reprinted as a pamphlet in 1912.
39G. S. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915 (New York: John Wiley 1996), 45.
40Erik Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Rôle of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905–1926 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1984), 17–18.
41Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 44.
45Landau, Exploring Ottoman and Turkish History, 28.
42Landau, Exploring Ottoman and Turkish History.
43Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London: Croom Helm 1980), 191.
44Landau, Exploring Ottoman and Turkish History, 44–5.
46Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge 1993), 39.
49Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 254.
52Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, 207.
47Stefanos Yerasimos, Birinci Dünya Savaşi ve Ermeni Sorunu (Ankara: Tübitak Matbaasi 2002), 12.
48Graber, Caravans to Oblivion, 64.
50Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 131.
51Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 129.
53Akçam, Dialogue across an International Divide, 44.
54See Hilmar Kaiser, Eberhard Count Wolfskeel von Reichenberg, Zeitoun, Mousa Dagh, Ourfa: Letters on the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ and London: Gomidas Institute 2004).
55Akçam, Dialogue across an International Divide, 52.
56Akçam, Dialogue across an International Divide, 59.
57Akçam, Türk Ulusal Kimliği ve Ermeni Sorunu, 112.
58Akçam, Dialogue across an International Divide, 48.
59Graber, Caravans to Oblivion, 153.
60Egoyan, Ararat, ix.
61Hirsch, Family Frames.
64Hirsch, Family Frames, 21.
62Hirsch, Family Frames.
63Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, 7 vols (Paris: Gallimard 1984–92).
65Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000).
66Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 69.
67Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 87.
68Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 88.
69Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 91.
70Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 98.
71Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 454.
75Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 467.
72Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 455.
73Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 455.
74Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press 2000), 484.
76Hirsch, Family Frames.
77Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed Books 2004).
78Akçam, Dialogue across an International Divide, 21.
79Romney, Atom Egoyan.
80Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books 2001).
81Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books 2001), 50.
84Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 15.
82Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books 2001), 50.
83Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread and Nationalism, revd edn (London and New York: Verso 1991).
88Akçam, Dialogue across an International Divide, 12–13.
85Anderson, Imagined Communities.
86Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993).
87Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993), 213.
89Akçam, Dialogue across an International Divide, 12–13, 24.
90Egoyan, Ararat, viii.