CoMo No. 15: Armenia (July, 2023)

[sally]

[niminy-piminy]

YAWNING (Hamlet Hovsepian, 1975) #ArmenCoMo
https://youtu.be/6OSfDyP75IQ

ITCH (Hamlet Hovsepian, 1975) #ArmenCoMo
stream → https://ubu.com/film/hovsepian_itch.html

[sally]

armenia or armenian-adjacent notables....

sergei parajanov
artavazd peleshian
don askarian
hamo bek-nazaryan
henrik malyan
harutyun khachatryan

[sally]

the house that built tsoghik - mariam oganyan (2020) #ArmenCoMo

short film about an armenian female architect of the 50s

link to film: here

[sally]

Զարե / zare - hamo bek-nazaryan (1927) #ArmenCoMo

not as gripping on the melodrama front as the earlier namus, since this one is more about state oppression/corruption and every villager is an innocent saint (whereas namus was condemning the patriarchy even within the village traditions) but the scenery is still stunning and everything looks gorgeous....








it is however, decidedly icky....

[sally]

earth of people - artavazd peleshian (1966) #ArmenCoMo

watching a few of his again because i can't remember what i've seen...and gonna end up watching this again in the future because i'll forget it by tomorrow....

[sally]

albertine ou les souvenirs parfumés de marie-rose - jacques kébadian (1972) #ArmenCoMo

Jacques Kébadian was born in France in 1940, the son of Armenian parents. For him, Armenia is a symbolic, imagined place, pieced together in the accounts of those who survived the genocide, in his grandmother’s watercolours, and in the love stories that resisted the diaspora. A ghost land, like the one Giovanni Vitrotti films in a travelogue a few years before the Genocide.

altho this one is firmly french post-68


watch here with eng subs: https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/ ... dian-1972/

[sally]

found this article: https://evnreport.com/magazine-issues/a ... directors/

although it's quite hard to translate the female directors listed into a google search...so far only managed to find one, but it was nice

lantern - aida sahakyan (1988) #ArmenCoMo




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hMFgMl2Rcc

[sally]

mountain vigil - artavazd peleshian (1964) #ArmenCoMo

[niminy-piminy]

WE AND OUR MOUNTAINS (Henrik Malyan, 1969) #ArmenCoMo

Landscapes of Collective Fate: The Political Resonances of Nature in Armenian Cinema
(Vigen Galstyan, 2022)
→ https://www.academia.edu/87641960/Lands ... ian_Cinema



During the closing scenes of Henrik Malyan’s 1969 magnum opus, We Are Our Mountains, the film suddenly shifts genre and turns into a road movie — of sorts. The group of shepherds who have been under investigation for the “theft” of a few sheep embark on a two-day trip from their mountain enclave to the capital, taking their herds to the slaughterhouse and themselves to face the court. As they make their way down from the heights, accompanied by their investigating officer, the shepherds act out the possible court proceedings, imagining how the Soviet judicial system may judge the extent of their purported “crime”. Some of the men try to reason their way out of what is essentially a comedy of errors, while the others assume the inflexible position of the State, for which any violation of law is a direct breach against the system’s raison d’être.



For local audiences watching the film in 1969, this absurdist situation would have been tinged with a palpable anxiety that Soviet citizens were all too familiar with. The memory of Stalinist repressions was not far in the past and any action deemed – even on a symbolic level – to be a transgression could still have tragic and cruel consequences. Like Beckett’s Godot, the State is a key character in Malyan’s film that, while never made visible, is omnipresent in almost every scene. But the film’s greatest achievement are not the subtextual, anti-system jibes that pepper Hrant Matevosyan’s script. Rather, it is the way that We Are Our Mountains gradually reveals a power that transcends the Kafkaesque mechanics of officialdom. That entity is the land itself. With the help of his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Sergey Israelyan, Malyan constructs lusciously deep-focus vistas of the rolling mountains and ravines that seem to stretch to infinity, perennially escaping the grasp of the camera or anything else that tries to contain them.



These awe-inspiring locations in Armenia’s north-western Tavush region inescapably evoke the sublime and the film is replete with characters who constantly reiterate how their very existence depends on the whims and vicissitudes of nature’s cycles. And yet, Malyan’streatment of Matevosyan’s script escapes the expected dichotomy of man versus nature. Having acknowledged the unfathomable magnitude of the natural environment, the villagers simply go about their business by working with the unwritten laws of the land. While distinctly uneven, this is a relationship that is infinitely more harmonious and productive than the one the villagers have with the State, which sees both nature and its citizens as objects of conquest and subjugation.



As the title makes explicit, We Are Our Mountains posits the locals as an extension of the land, and uses the possessive pronoun to frame the location not as abstract space, but as place. Instead of the wilderness of the European Romanticist tradition, we see here a territory hewn by centuries of continuous human engagement. As such, this land appears as the antithesis to the technocratic madness of the twentieth century so ingeniously encapsulated in the montage prologue compiled by the great Artavazd Peleshian (cleverly cast by Malyan in the role of the film’s daft “victim”, Revaz). In contrast to the fragmenting, rupturing, and exploding world of modern civilization — that unsurprisingly goes bang with the atomic bomb — the director presents us with a mode of life where people and nature still operate as a unified ecosystem.



Constantly evoked throughout the film, this idea is potently embodied in the closing scenes. As they trek down the dirt road towards the city, the shepherds are suddenly hailed from the peaks above them. Having spotted the convoy, herdsmen from the neighbouring village invite them over for a barbecue. The shouts of the invisible shepherds reverberate through the gorge, and it appears for a moment that the mountains and the rocks have suddenly gained speech and are conversing with the film’s protagonists. This allegorical dialogue, which condenses the entire plot into a few shot/countershot images is echoed by a visual device that frames the characters like a chain of interlocking peaks (a form also employed by the film’s poster). Even the antagonist of the film — Sos Sargsyan’s pedantic but conflicted policeman — assumes the position of the shepherds, shouting “We’ve stolen… Stolen!” The filmmakers’ critical imperatives here couldn’t be more transparent. In their connection to land, the villagers assume a strength that defies the autocracy of the State.



The provocation of this message was even more palpable coming right after the student revolts in France, the failed anti-Soviet uprising in Czechoslovakia and the consistent push in the Armenian arts to foreground hitherto repressed narratives of national identity and history during the 1960s. In fact, Malyan’s film was one of three seminal works released in 1969, which helped to consolidate a cinematic model or language for Armenian self-representation on the screen that had been percolating since the first Armenian feature — Hamo Bek-Nazaryan’s Namus (1926). Radically different in style and philosophical worldview, Sergei Parajanov’s Colour of Pomegranates and Artavazd Pelechian’s We shared with Malyan’s chef d’oeuvre a fundamental preoccupation with the role of the landscape in the construction of the Armenian cultural imaginary. The key here, however, was not this fixation per se, but the way these films formulated a specific idea of the natural environment as a collective paradigm for being in the world.

[sally]

symphony of silence - vigen chaldranyan (2001) #ArmenCoMo

this film is really really bad

but peleshian? again? is he in every armenian film?




this is peleshian, right?

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Gotta quick use my Klassiki subscription I was planning on cancelling this month!

[sally]

oh....i signed up for klassiki when it first started and the films were free. then my email got hacked and even today my antivirus gives a warning for that site, so.....no chance in hell i'm giving them my money or details anymore, at least until the antivirus stops complaining about them, totally suspect site if they can't even sort out their legit status......

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Haha, good to know. Though it's too late for me.

[sally]

ah well, i keep checking every so often and the minute the site stops getting flagged as 'suspicious' i'll subscribe. until then there's plenty streaming all over the place, even if i do have to watch some of them without subs....

adaptation - mane baghdasaryan (2017) #ArmenCoMo

not sure what this was going for, but you get to see glimpses of yerevan....

[sally]

anush - ivane perestiani (1931) #ArmenCoMo

not sure how a georgian director ended up at armenkino making a film based on an armenian classic by the national poet (hovhannes tumanyan) but he also did a couple of ukrainian films as well so i guess everyone was just pootling around the whole soviet region during those times. anyway, despite being so rooted in armenian culture, this film feels georgian.....in that it's very well directed and absolutely gorgeous, one of the best of this type of silent genre (i should invent a new word for it! )....just total lush romance set in stunning natural landscapes. beautiful, and a crime that it isn't on letterboxd (i mean the ending is a little rushed, but their flirting and fleeting gazes were totally intoxicating)

watch here: https://kinodaran.com/play/436

all you need for a movie is a cute girl, a cute guy and tree blossoms against an open sky (but for purists there are actually guns as well)

[sally]

documentarist - harutyun khachatryan (2003) #ArmenCoMo

no idea what was going on here, it was soooooo male (women exist solely to be comfort-bitches of hero-men) maybe some self-pitying self-critique of misery-porn directors? violence of life, violence of filming it? camera analogous to a gun, film to sharpened knife and filming the (actually real? i really suspect) dead body and funeral of his first cameraman? i dunno, but the ending was totally unbearable, stop wallowing in it man.

[sally]

parvana - valentin podpomogov (1970) #ArmenCoMo

magpies!!!!






https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3NjbYBlCfI

[sally]

the father - henrik malyan (1973) #ArmenCoMo

just soviet-goodboy patriarch negotiates the claims of the past and modernity but ultimately asserts himself. malyan is a good director (and i did enjoy the scene where papa went to such lengths (heights) to avoid handing over a bribe) and maybe i missed some subtleties, but this film seems totally regime-compliant?

[rischka]

aww yr stuff looks so cool i wanted to participate too so i watched calendar (1993) but i don't know if it counts. lol



so this prick (the filmmaker) is shooting churches in armenia w his armenian wife as interpreter and gets so jealous of her talking to the driver in armenian



that they break up and he's dealing with it by hiring escorts to talk in foreign languages on the phone near the calendar he shot of armenian churches



i am dying. and it's only half over. atom egoyan IS armenian, vaguely, but never lived there. but there are many beautiful armenian churches in the film!! so i tried.

it's very funny and painful to watch ♥ and i love the mismatched sounds and homemade look



also this pagan temple this is the first egoyan film i've watched so i'm very curious now! this is CRINGE as the kids say

[niminy-piminy]

i don't know if it counts

ofc it counts!
even if the relation to Armenia would be much vaguer, it would still count

[rischka]

armenian churches are cool

[sally]

armenian churches are cool

thought i'd watched calendar but haven't logged it so may (re)watch.....in the meantime re: for armenian church fanatics

MUST SEE FOR BIRD VOCALIZATION LOVERS!
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS DESIGNED TO IMITATE BIRDS

THE SILENCE OF ANI (Francis Alÿs)
https://letterboxd.com/film/the-silence-of-ani/

https://vimeo.com/141804238

[niminy-piminy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani

Ani is a ruined medieval Armenian city now situated in Turkey's province of Kars, next to the closed border with Armenia.

Between 961 and 1045, it was the capital of the Bagratid Armenian kingdom that covered much of present-day Armenia and eastern Turkey. The iconic city was often referred to as the "City of 1,001 Churches," though the number was significantly less. To date, 50 churches, 33 cave chapels and 20 chapels have been excavated by archaeologists and historians. Ani stood on various trade routes and its many religious buildings, palaces, and sophisticated fortifications distinguished it from other contemporary urban centers in the Armenian kingdom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagratid_Armenia

Bagratid Armenia was an independent Armenian state established by Ashot I Bagratuni of the Bagratuni dynasty in the early 880s following nearly two centuries of foreign domination of Greater Armenia under Arab Umayyad and Abbasid rule.

Capitals:
Bagaran (885–890)
Shirakavan (890–929)
Kars (929–961)
Ani (961–1045)

[sally]

the power of evil - mikhail gelovani, patvakan barkhudaryan (1928) #ArmenCoMo

another (half) georgian armenian silent

only a brief flash of ararat to remind you where you are then it's straight in with the madness

[sally]

girl from moush - gariné torossian (1994) #ArmenCoMo


https://vimeo.com/296698699

[sally]

akhtamar - ernest martirosyan, sebouh sargsyan (1969) #ArmenCoMo

oh, hello gorgeous armenian short film that doesn't need subtitles (no dialogue virtually) ♥♥♥

According to a tale, an Armenian princess named Tamara lived on the island and was in love with a commoner. This boy would swim from the shore to the island each night, guided by a light she lit for him. Her father learned of the boy’s visits. One night, as she waited for her lover to arrive, her father smashed her light, leaving the boy in the middle of the lake without a guide to indicate which direction to swim. He drowned and his body washed ashore and, as the legend concludes, it appeared as if the words “Akh, Tamara” (Oh, Tamara) were frozen on his lips

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0FR7Xu2EnA

[sally]

return of the poet - harutyun khachatryan (2005) #ArmenCoMo

A work of tactile sensuality, it nominally depicts the step-by-step creation of a monumental statue of the poet that ends up traveling on the back of a truck through the Armenian countryside.

armenia is basically one giant archaeological site that suffers living people

[sally]

ravished armenia - oscar apfel (1919) #ArmenCoMo

hollywood re-enactment of armenian genocide based on memoirs by AND STARRING aurora mardiganian, and the fragment that remains is utterly beautiful in its excess of repetitive horror and tragedy, almost godard-ian in cinematic instruction...

but how magnetic and perplexing these movies of people re-enacting their own traumas for the screen (audie murphy, the 15:17 eastwood boys etc)

[niminy-piminy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of ... n_genocide

Despite agreement about what happened during the Armenian genocide and who was responsible, there is still substantial differences of interpretation of the causes of the genocide and how it relates to prior anti-Armenian massacres.

Studies also balance between objective causes as well as the subjective paranoia of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) leaders who ordered the genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee ... d_Progress

The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), later the Union and Progress Party, was a secret revolutionary organization and political party active between 1889 and 1926 in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey.

From 1913 to 1918, the CUP ruled the empire as an authoritarian one-party state and committed genocides against the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian peoples as part of a broader policy of ethnic erasure during the late Ottoman period.

Beginning as a liberal reform movement, the organization was persecuted and forced into exile by the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II's autocratic government because of its calls for democratization, secularization, and reform in the empire. Inspired by revolutionary groups such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, the CUP had developed into a clandestine revolutionary group by 1906,

Grand Vizier Kâmil Pasha and his War Minister Nazım Pasha wished to ban the CUP, so the CUP launched a preemptive strike: a coup d'état known as the Raid on the Sublime Porte on 23 January 1913.

...
xxx
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Following Ottoman defeat in WWI, its leaders escaped into exile in Europe, where many were assassinated in Operation Nemesis in revenge for their genocidal policies