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August 25, 2007 — From the Arts & Culture section
To see the printed version of the newspaper, complete with photographs
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Newsreel
1. Celebrated painter, former National Gallery director mourned
2. Ahmadinejad applauds Tjeknavorian’s symphony
3. Big coup for first-time director Eric Nazarian
4. Get the kids ready, Taline’s comin’
5. Musa Ler oral traditions now in print in English and Armenian
6. History: The 74 years of Musa Dagh (by Michelle Ekizian)
7. More than the truth: About Werfel’s epic (by Michelle Ekizian)
8. Q & A with Ed Minasian, author of Musa Dagh (by Michelle Ekizian)
9. A Musa Dagh dialogue with Michelle Ekizian (by Chris Zakian)
10. Rocky’s next battle: The making of Musa Dagh? (by Chris Zakian)
11. Installation: Sarkis Zabunyan: Reinventing the aura (by Raphy Sarkissian)
12. Poetry Matters: Tekeyan’s brilliant darkness (by Lory Bedikian)
13. Film: People’s stories told (by Alexander Tavitian)
* To its credit, A Story of a People in War and Peace tells the story
of people, not the story of a people
14. Design: The alternate worlds of Narbeh Nazarian (by Lory Tatoulian)
************************************** *************************************
Newsreel
1 . Celebrated painter, former National Gallery director mourned
Painter Edward Isabekyan, People’s Artist of the Republic of Armenia
and longtime head of the National Gallery, passed away this week. Mr.
Isabekyan was 93. His celebrated works of art include depictions of
the heroic struggle of Armenians during the Great Patriotic War (World
War II). In addition to heading the gallery from 1967 to 1986, Mr.
Isabekyan also shared his love of the arts by teaching aspiring
artists and future art historians. In celebration of his 90th birthday
a few years ago, the Tekeyan Cultural Union and the Artists’ Union of
the Republic of Armenia celebrated his career with a night of
testimonials from his colleagues, arts community leaders, and
government officials.
2. Ahmadinejad applauds Tjeknavorian’s symphony
Celebrated Iranian-Armenian conductor and composer Loris Tjeknavorian
was honored by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who attended the
performance of the maestro’s Tehran Orchestra at the Vahdat Hall in
downtown Tehran Sunday night. "The Prophet of Love and Hope" symphony
was orchestrated by Mr. Tjeknavorian and dedicated to the prophet
Muhammad. The symphony, composed by Mehdi Shojaei, combines music and
lyrics. It inspired President Ahmadinejad to take the stage after the
performance to congratulate Tjeknavorian.
3. Big coup for first-time director Eric Nazarian
Armenian Reporter contributor, writer-director Eric Nazarian’s debut
film, The Blue Hour, has been chosen by the San Sebastian
International Film Festival as the recipient of the festival’s New
Director’s Prize. The honor means the film will have its premier at
the festival taking place in Spain from September 20 to September 29.
The Blue Hour is an ensemble drama set in a working-class community by
the Los Angeles River. It is made up of four stories about a Mexican
graffiti muralist, an Armenian camera repairman, an African-American
blues guitarist and an English pensioner. It stars Alyssa Milano from
the TV series Charmed, veteran actor Clarence Williams III from the
60s TV show The Mod Squad, Emily Rios from the Sundance Award-winning
film, Quincenera, veteran British actor Derrick O’Connor from Pirates
of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and Dutch actor Yorick van
Wageningen from The New World. "The film is about how similar we are
as people regardless of our different backgrounds. It is also about
people in Los Angeles who don’t communicate, yet share very brief
moments of connection," says the 31-year-old filmmaker.
connect:
thebluehourmovie.com
4. Get the kids ready, Taline’s comin’
Children’s favorite singer Taline (Reporter Arts cover May 5, 2007) is
making her way around France and the East Coast of the United States
next month. The popular singer is set to mesmerize her young listeners
and their parents in Chicago on October 7, Boston on October 14, and
Lyon on October 21.
connect:
5. Musa Ler oral traditions now in print in English and Armenian
A newly published bilingual book of the folktale Grateful Animals has
just been released by Abril Books. The book, based on the oral
traditions of the villagers of Musa Ler, was written by educator Sona
Zeitlian, who has published five volumes of children’s books. Grateful
Animals was illustrated by art teacher Alik Arzoumanian. Zeitlian’s
book is based on recordings she made of the story as told by Musa Ler
natives, who were relocated to Ainjar, Lebanon. Grateful Animals is
about woodcutter who rescues a snake, a monkey, a lion and a rich
merchant, who are all trapped in the same pit.
connect:
[email protected]
*** ************************************************** **********************
6. History: The 74 years of Musa Dagh
by Michelle Ekizian
* Edward Minasian. Musa Dagh: A chronicle of the Armenian Genocide
factor in the subsequent suppression, by the intervention of the
United States government, of the movie based on Franz Werfel’s The
Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Nashville, Tennessee: Cold Tree Press, 2007.
385 pp. Illustrated. ISBN: 9781583851593
The world of the 1930s had all but forgotten the Armenian massacres of
1915, and their one and a half million victims annihilated by the
Ottoman Turkish government. It was the time of the Great Depression,
and most people had problems of a more recent vintage to worry about.
But the year 1935 held out a glimmer of hope for those who did
remember: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) announced it was preparing to make
a movie of Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. The epic novel
published a year earlier was based on a true-life incident of
resistance during what would come to be known as the Armenian
Genocide.
That movie was never made. The reason it wasn’t made has become the
emblematic tale of the numerous frustrated attempts to portray and
acknowledge the Genocide in a high-profile, public way. The
cause-and-effect narrative of threatening protestations from the
Turkish government, appeasement from U.S. officials, and pressure
exerted on an American industry, has become all too familiar to
Armenian-Americans, and resonates to the present day. The "Hollywood
factor" has made the Musa Dagh episode the stuff of legend: most
Armenians know of it, refer to it, feel outrage over it. Until now,
however, there hasn’t been a definitive telling of the story.
Edward Minasian’s recently published book, Musa Dagh, fills that
deficiency. Minasian delves into the documentary evidence — the MGM
archives, U.S. State Department records, Franz Werfel’s official
papers — and tracks down surviving players in the story for their
first-hand insights, to show how the ambitious plans for a 1930s
motion picture version of Musa Dagh were aborted. He also reveals the
continuing collusion of the Turkish government, the U.S. State
Department, and Hollywood studio executives to thwart successive
attempts to mount the film, up through the 1960s. The twisting,
turning odyssey of hopeful starts (often championed by major Hollywood
figures) and crushing terminations (invariably orchestrated from the
behind the scenes) would itself make for an intriguing movie plot.
While censorship of Hollywood products has long since ceased to be a
threat — these days movies actually thrive on controversial points of
view — Edward Minasian’s book reminds us that the U.S. State
Department and its willingness to succumb to Turkey’s bullying has not
changed since the 1930s. What has changed — and what deserves credit
for some of the recent advances we have seen in Genocide recognition
— is the presence in Washington of a resourceful and active voice for
the Armenian-American community, and the rise in Turkey of a new
generation willing (at least in some quarters) to question its
government and the prevailing "official" history.
Other constants of the last 70 years are the deep desire among
Armenians to commit the dramatic story of Musa Dagh to film in the way
it was originally intended, and the continuing hope that such a
project would convey the truth of the Armenian Genocide to the public
on a scale as yet unachieved.
* Musa Dagh revelations
Werfel divided his novel into three main sections, which he titled
"books," each annotated with quotes from the biblical Book of
Revelations. Minasian also faintly echoes Revelations in each of his
six books: an example is Minasian’s Book III, "Babylon on the Pacific
and on the Potomac," which sets the stage for the "revelations" culled
from Minasian’s research.
Minasian’s writing style combines an historian’s eye for detail with
a dash of showmanship. A World War II veteran who came of age during
the era of the great Hollywood moguls of the 1930s and ’40s, he’s able
to give a first hand perspective on some of the figures and events he
chronicles. Perhaps because he is a product of that less cynical time,
Minasian takes to heart the acts of deception and trickery he relates
involving the entertainment and political arenas; a writer nourished
on the scandals of our own day might dismiss these as simply par for
the course.
He portrays the first generation of Armenian-Americans emerging from
the Depression as a closely-knit group, whose pride in their ancestral
heritage is overshadowed by a dutiful desire to move forward in
America. (One wonders whether, had Armenian-Americans been less
impressionable, they could have formed a coalition to combat the
internal politicking against the movie — in the way Jewish groups in
the 1960s quelled dissenting voices during the making of Exodus, about
the founding of Israel.)
The story of the Musa Dagh film begins in 1933, when Louis B. Mayer,
general manager of MGM’s studio in Culver City and first
vice-president of Loew’s Inc. (the studio’s headquarters in New York),
found himself so moved by Werfel’s book that he opened negotiations to
acquire the screen rights. These were eventually purchased for
$20,000. The project gained an enthusiastic supporter in the person of
MGM’s supervisor of production and Loew’s second vice-president,
Irving Thalberg, who would remain the project’s strongest advocate
until his own early death.
In Armenian circles, grapevine talk championed Hollywood’s sole
director of Armenian heritage, Rouben Mamoulian, as the candidate to
helm the movie.
MGM studio producer and Mayer’s son-in-law David O. Selznick
recommended in a memo that the picture be made with Clark Gable in the
central role of Gabriel, and suggested placing the burden of
complicity on one representative Turk rather than on an entire nation.
Then, in a spirit of true American magnanimity, Selznick further
suggested that the Turkish ambassador in Washington should be informed
of the movie plans, as a matter of courtesy.
But opposition from that front had started earlier, when Turkey’s
Ambassador Mehmet Munir Ertegun Bey noted a brief news item on the
possibility of the film production, and expressed his concern to the
U.S. State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs Division.
As a result, Major Frederick L. Herron, foreign manager of the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA, better
known as the Hays Office) became the point man for matters concerning
Musa Dagh. In defense of the project, Herron reassured the State
Department by describing the story as a domestic love triangle that
would not contain anything offensive to the Turkish ambassador or his
countrymen.
However, the Turkish ambassador’s objections were only temporarily
eased. Ertegun saw red when an in-depth article appeared in the
Washington Herald describing Hollywood’s plans to portray "Christians
who combined against Turkish massacres in Armenia." From that point on
a flurry of communications ensued with the State Department — and
Minasian wonderfully conveys the chain of officials all aflutter, full
of vacillating and paranoid judgments. Lost in all this back-and-forth
correspondence, it becomes clear, is the true content of Werfel’s book
and its broader humanitarian meaning, which Werfel himself described
as a "search for humanity everywhere, and to avoid barbarism."
Minasian’s chapter on the "Cabal of Conspirators" takes readers to
the year 1935 and an unprecedented development in Hollywood history.
Though it had been common practice for studios to obtain permission
from a foreign government to permit filming in its country, never
before had permission been sought for the initiation of an American
film project. But the stakes seemed grave. Eventually, Turkey
threatened to cut off not only the distribution in Turkey of the Musa
Dagh movie itself, and not only of all MGM movies, but of all
Hollywood-produced films if the project went ahead.
In different contexts, such threats have become a familiar refrain
in our own era: part of the background noise accompanying any
assertion about the Armenian Genocide. But in the 1930s they were new,
seemed credible, and were not so easily dismissed.
* A cadaver in anatomy class
>From 1934 through 1966, MGM initiated numerous failed attempts to make
the movie; at least 12 screenwriters had created scripts and synopses
of Musa Dagh — amounting to more than 100 submissions to the studio.
Minasian uncovers an MGM office memo from the end of the studio’s
tenure on the Musa Dagh project which reads: "This book has been
worked on and reworked more than a cadaver in an anatomy class."
Speculating on the long on-again, off-again history of the movie,
Minasian wonders whether Loews/MGM was periodically bribed to keep any
Musa Dagh project from advancing beyond the pre-production phase.
However, in the two decades following World War II, two political
developments ensured the American government’s support for any issue
that Turkey found troublesome. The Truman Doctrine in 1947 and the
alliance against the Communist bloc marked the start of this
"insurance policy," and Turkey’s leverage increased in 1959 when its
government agreed to allow an American ballistic missile base on
Turkish soil.
Despite official trepidation to pursue the project, some artistic
souls ventured to crack the opposition hovering around Musa Dagh
during the 1950s Cold War era. Minasian mentions Stanley Kubrick,
Carlo Ponti, Elia Kazan, Henri Verneuil, and Elliot Kastner as among
the luminaries who threw down gauntlets in support of the project.
But a bright ray of hope for producing a blockbuster movie came in
1962, thanks to the celebrated MGM producer Pandro Berman, who
remarked: "the project was announced by MGM 40 times in 40 years … And
each and every time aroused Turkish indignation to the point it had
become routine."
Berman had real credibility, and with his assistant Hank Moonjean
(Henry Momjian) he envisioned a star-studded, epic treatment for the
film, along the lines of other movies of the day, with Guy Green as
director and writer, Omar Sharif as the hero Gabriel, Audrey Hepburn
or Leslie Caron as his French wife, Dahlia Lavi or Julie Christie as
the young Armenian girl, and Ralph Richardson or Alec Guinness as the
village priest. But Berman’s dreams ended in 1965, when the MGM
hierarchy described Musa Dagh as "irrelevant."
It was in response to this attitude that Armenian community activism
at long last reared its head. In 1969, Archbishop Torkom Manoogian, at
the time Primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of
America in New York, telegrammed MGM on behalf of major Armenian
organizations with an offer to rally the Armenian community to counter
Turkish protests: "If the movie had been made as planned in the
1930s," he wrote, "who knows, it may have deterred Hitler and the
Jewish Holocaust." The message did receive a serious reply from the
studio, but no promises, and despite a fresh screenplay the project
remained on the shelf.
Armenians, however, were about to become significantly more
influential in the destiny of the film.
* Armenians at the helm
The year 1970 saw the purchase of MGM by Armenian-American
industrialist Kerk Kerkorian, and shortly thereafter, the sale of the
Musa Dagh screen rights to John Kurkjian, a retired Armenian-American
real estate businessman in Los Angeles. With two Armenians at the
helm, it seemed as though the movie would finally receive its just
due.
Unfortunately, Kurkjian proved a novice at filmmaking. His inability
to raise the funds for the movie’s projected budget of $7 million from
the Armenian community further weakened the production, and his
partnership with MGM ended in 1976. Kurkjian did eventually make his
film — the low-budget 40 Days of Musa Dagh that one can still see
kicking around the dusty video racks of Armenian bookstores — but it
was hardly an auspicious affair.
Minasian’s canny eye catches a change in the political and
bureaucratic assault on the picture around this time. From the 1930s
through ’60s Musa Dagh had been the Turkish government’s bête noire,
suppressed with the collusion of the U.S. State Department. But in
light of the Kurkjian production, Minasian suggests that Turkey’s
fears about the project may have been motivated at least in part
because of the association with MGM: a film produced by such a dynamic
and powerful entity could certainly be expected to have an impact on
the general public. But the political risk would be much less with a
cash-strapped independent production. When Kukjian was abandoned by
MGM to venture alone into the realm of low-budget movie-making, the
veil of Turkish threats lifted.
Ironically, at the same time MGM was severing its association with
Musa Dagh, an outspoken generation of filmmakers more sympathetic to
causes of human justice, was emerging. The 1970s saw the popular
success of Midnight Express, a movie about the drug world set against
the backdrop of the brutal Turkish penal system. Turkish protests
ensued — but proved ineffective in the Hollywood of the time.
It is deeply regrettable that during this more "open" period, a
suitable motion picture version of Musa Dagh could not be made —
either as a big budget studio blockbuster or as a finely made
independent film. Irony piles on irony in this phase of the story: MGM
was actually owned by an Armenian at the time; the Armenian-American
community, so proud and eager at the prospect of seeing this story
made into an epic movie, proved unwilling to invest its financial
resources in the venture. All of which regrettably left John Kurkjian
to pick up the pieces and proceed with the production on his own, as
everyone around him — the studio honchos, fellow Armenians, and (one
can only imagine) Turkish officialdom — all stood by and watched him
founder.
* Curse or blessing?
Minasian traces the saga to recent years — by which time the present
author became caught in Musa Dagh’s tribulations. In 1989 a German
television producer became involved with the book’s screen rights. Now
a man in his 80s, he continues to cycle in and out of Armenian
communities — partnering occasionally with Hollywood-based producers
— always on the lookout for potential funders. But like so many
proposals over the years, nothing substantial has come to light.
As one reaches the end of Minasian’s account, one can’t help but
wonder whether the entire Musa Dagh project lives under some kind of
curse. Or perhaps — in some twisted, paradoxical way — its
tumultuous history has merely been a prologue for the realization of
the dream in our own era: an era more receptive to issues of genocide,
an era of greater Armenian prominence in the surrounding culture, and
an era of unparalleled technical capability in film. Providentially,
today’s mainstream Hollywood is also home to an astonishing number of
accomplished Armenians in fields like screenwriting, producing, studio
administration, and casting, who are eager to tell their people’s
stories. Werfel himself had the village priest in his novel say, when
the villagers were rescued after surviving their ordeal: "The evil
only happened … to enable God to show us His goodness."
So maybe we’re on the verge — finally — of seeing this movie done right.
If that’s so, Edward Minasian has some advice to offer: "The history
of Musa Dagh in Hollywood serves as a lesson for future attempts at
the movie," he writes, and goes on to lay these out in his book.
Prospective filmmakers should (a) be prepared to deal with Turkish
pressure; (b) provide a budget worthy of an epic film; and (c)
counteract any protests with a publicity campaign that will not only
diminish the opposition, but create an enthusiastic audience for the
film. He also advises that the Armenian Caucus in Congress and
Armenian political action groups need to stay alert throughout the
filmmaking process.
Minasian’s research into the attempts at making a motion picture
based on the story of Musa Dagh is truly meticulous — his extensive
reference notes testify to the sea of documentation he waded through
— and his treatment surely settles all the matters of fact that have
long since passed into hazy legend in Armenian circles. Now, thanks to
Edward Minasian’s Musa Dagh, we know exactly what transpired between
Hollywood, Washington, and Ankara that caused the film project to be
aborted time and again over the course of four decades.
And with that knowledge in hand, maybe we can all move forward and
make this picture.
* * *
Michelle Ekizian is resident composer for the Interfaith Committee of
Remembrance at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Her
current projects include an opera on the life of Arshile Gorky, and a
multi-media concert presentation "Songs of Light and Peace: a
cross-over opera for a world divided." She lives in Mamaroneck, N.Y.
******************************************** *******************************
7. More than the truth: About Werfel’s epic
by Michelle Ekizian
* Franz Werfel. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Reprint of the 1934
Viking Press edition; English translation from the German by Geoffrey
Dunlop.) New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003. 842 pages. ISBN:
9780786711383.
Of his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Franz Werfel said:
"Everything I have written is the truth — more than the truth,
because an epic represents the truth colored by imagination."
Werfel’s seminal literary account of what would eventually come to
be known as the Armenian Genocide is actually based on one of the few
"happily ending" episodes of that human catastrophe. The historical
incident at Musa Dagh — a thwarted attempt at ethnic cleansing — was
already heavily documented in the writings of a survivor, Rev. Dickran
Andreassian, upon which Werfel drew. His task as a novelist was to
flesh out the facts contained in this already dramatic source
material, and convey the human story of a self-contained community
that fell victim to the evacuation of its homeland by the Turks in the
summer of 1915.
An Austrian Jew with an uncanny premonitory vision of the disaster
awaiting his own people, Werfel set out in 1929 to depict the
dramatic events at Musa Dagh. His own service in the Austrian army
from 1914 to 1917 gave him a critical perspective on the tragedies of
the First World War.
But what compelled him to write the book was the sight of maimed
orphaned children working in a carpet factory, which he saw during a
1929 visit to Damascus with his wife, Alma Mahler.
The children, survivors of the Armenian Genocide, left an indelible
impression on Werfel’s compassionate soul. They symbolized the
"incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian nation," Werfel wrote, and
he became consumed by thoughts of the Armenian holocaust. He
researched the Armenian heritage at the Mekhitarist monastery in
Vienna, and drew maps of Musa Dagh and its terrain. From articles by
Andreassian, Werfel encountered eyewitness accounts of the actual
survivors and the leader of the resistance at Musa Dagh, Movses Der
Kaloustian (who settled in Anjar, Lebanon, and later became a member
of the Lebanese Parliament).
His creative genius percolating with a plot worthy of an action
thriller, and an Everyman hero who would guarantee salvation for his
compatriots, Werfel began to write his novel in 1932, and finished in
less than a year.
The book was first published in German in 1933; an English
translation published the following year by Viking Press reached a
record-breaking sale of 85,000 copies in 1934, and was designated as a
December choice for the Book-of-the-Month Club. The New York Times
called the novel "a story which must rouse the emotions of all human
beings." In Germany, Werfel found himself labeled an "undesireable"
under Hitler’s regime; but his novel continued to be sold in secret.
During the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939-40, the book helped to
inspire uprisings in the Warsaw ghetto.
The novel includes among its characters good-willed Turks as well as
belligerent ones; Armenians motivated by love and virtue, but
sometimes motivated by darker passions, as well. All and all, as
William Saroyan so astutely observed in his 1934 review of the book
for the Saturday Review, Werfel created a novel "full of the breath,
the flesh and blood and bone and spirit of life."
* Characters and plot of Musa Dagh (spoilers ahead)
In an idyllic mountainside village along the Syrian coast inhabited by
Armenians for thousands of years, a community of some 5,000 Armenians
resisted the Turkish government’s enforced death march into the Syrian
desert by claiming the top of the mountain called Musa Dagh ("the
mountain of Moses") as their refuge, from which they warded off the
Turkish army. Out of desperation, the villagers created two huge white
banners with red lettering to wave toward the Mediterranean Sea below.
On the 40th day of the siege, a miraculous rescue appeared in the form
of a French armored cruiser.
(In the real-life incident, the length of the siege was 53 days, but
Werfel altered it to 40 days to strike a Biblical parallel.)
The story’s protagonist, Gabriel Bagradian, had lost sight of his
ancestral roots over the preceding 23 years; but by fate of
circumstance he finds himself returning from Paris to his homeland,
and protecting his re-discovered community from the government that
has targeted it for extinction. In the process, Gabriel’s newfound
national fervor estranges him from his Parisian wife Juliette, while
his 13-year-old son Stephan discovers his Armenian ancestry — only to
lose his life at the hands of a band of Turks.
The backstory of the Armenian massacres is best captured in the
figure of Iskuhi, a survivor of the death marches and of a sexual
assault, who winds up at Musa Dagh, and becomes a source of
inspiration for Gabriel. Another character, Greek-American journalist
Gonzague Maris, is led to Musa Dagh as an adventurer, but finds there
an attraction to Juliette.
The interplay of good and evil on both sides of the defense involves
the compassionate intervention of a Turkish benefactor, Agha Rifaat
Bereket, his friend Neizime Bey (part of a secret Islamic order, the
Thieves of Hearts), and kindly Turkish villagers who, in a
heartwarming incident, embrace a lost Stephan.
Human beneficence is exemplified in the character Krikor, the wise
apothecary of the Armenian village, and through two Armenian priests,
Ter Haigasoon of the Armenian Apostolic church, and the Protestant
pastor, Fr. Nokhudian, who chooses to lead his flock on the marches
into the desert, in the hope that salvation will meet them.
Likewise, humanity’s dark side is portrayed not only by Turks, but
through the troubled Armenian renegade Sarkis Kilikian and his
disciples — who at the climax of the resistance attempt to destroy
their own people through a crazed torching of the mountain campsite.
Their plans for a mass murder go awry, however, when the French
cruiser spots the flaming mountain and its white banners flapping in
the wind.
In the end, while Juliette, Iskuhi, and throngs of rescued villagers
are taken on board the French naval vessel for passage to a safe
haven, Gabriel remains atop Musa Dagh to commune with his native soil
and his dead son buried beneath it. Alone, with a Turkish sniper
stalking him, he comes upon his son’s grave — and there becomes the
final martyr of Musa Dagh. As the gunshot pierces his body, Gabriel
falls over the grave, takes up his son’s cross, and holds it to his
heart.
Now wouldn’t that make a great movie?
****************************************** *********************************
8. Q & A with Ed Minasian, author of Musa Dagh
by Michelle Ekizian
Q: What got you interested in researching the history of the thwarted
attempts to make a movie of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh?
Minasian: In 1976 I met my half-sister Peprone for the first time.
She told me about Haig, my three-year-old half-brother who had died of
typhus on the death march in 1915. I was shocked. I decided to
translate my anger and frustration into something more constructive.
Having read Werfel’s novel and being a movie buff, I was always
curious as to its history in Hollywood and Washington.
Q: What was the most surprising fact you uncovered in your research?
Minasian: Most surprising of all was to discover that there had been
so many attempts to make a movie of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
Another surprise was to learn of the many prominent producers,
directors, screenwriters, and actors who very much desired to be in
the production.
I should mention that I was initially overwhelmed by the four
"grocery carts" of Musa Dagh documents contained in the archives at
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; I had expected just a bookshelf full. And to go
through Werfel’s handwritten notes was also surprising — and one of
the most thrilling moments during my research.
Q: You are obviously a great fan of Werfel’s novel. Why is the book
still important today?
Minasian: The fate of Werfel’s novel in Hollywood and Washington is
a case of our own government’s intervention in the movie business to
appease a foreign government — in this case one that was guilty of
genocide. It should be the concern of every American citizen when a
celebrated novel is subjected to censorship as a motion picture, due
to the prejudice of a foreign government.
As for the novel itself: Just as The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
restored my ethnic soul, I believe if every young Armenian earnestly
read it, they would appreciate their ancestral heritage. I look to the
next generation of Armenian-Americans to pick up the gauntlet and
fight the good fight in honor of our Genocide martyrs, by never
resting until Werfel’s masterpiece reaches the silver screen as the
Academy Award-winner it deserves to be.
Furthermore, the historical victory at Musa Dagh was made possible
due to the unity of the Armenians — transcending partisan politics,
religious denominations, and economic differences.
Q: Tell us about your background as an historian and an Armenian-American.
Minasian: I was a history major at the University of California, and
it was in History 101 where I learned the fundamentals of research. I
taught history and government for 13 years on the high school level,
and for 29 years at Laney Community College. My master’s thesis was
about Armenian immigration to the United States. I served for five
years as president of a faculty association, and have served in many
Armenian organizations. In my younger days, I was active in American
political campaigns.
Q: How did you gather the information for your book? How long did it
take you to see it come to publication?
Minasian: It took a lot of legwork and travel, phone calls, letters,
interviews, "vacation" time, taping, note-taking, filing, and much
editing. My basic research, off and on, took many years while I was
teaching and engaged in organizational activities. I began to write my
manuscript after I retired.
Q: And all of this at a time when there was no help from computers
or the Internet! Thanks Ed; you have written an amazing chronicle that
will serve as a source of information and inspiration for future
generations.
* * *
Edward Minasian will be present for a book-signing and presentation
titled "Ed Minasian’s Musa Dagh Day" at Borders Bookstore, 120
Crescent Dr., in Pleasant Hill, Calif., on Sunday, Sept. 9, at 4:00
p.m. For information, call the store at (925) 686-4835.
*************************************** ************************************
9. A Musa Dagh dialogue with Michelle Ekizian
by Chris Zakian
Armenian Reporter: Michelle, you’ve been involved for several years in
an ongoing attempt to revive the Musa Dagh movie project. What do you
think it’ll take to make it a reality, after all these years?
Ekizian: There’s a quote I’m fond of in the Werfel novel. In the
early chapters, when the plans for the resistance are underway, the
village priest Ter Haigasoon says to the story’s protagonist, Gabriel:
"This is the time for people to come together."
That should be the motto for this project. If the Armenian-American
community wants see the epic story of the resistance at Musa Dagh
materialize in the form of a major motion picture, we’re going to have
to bring together all our influence, all our pull, all our talent —
and of course some significant resources. But it’ll be worth it.
AR: The Musa Dagh story has inspired you as a composer, as well,
hasn’t it. Can you tell us about that? And what kind of response does
the story get from audiences?
Ekizian: Few stories have the emotional intensity of Musa Dagh. I
think this "gravitas" is something audiences in our post 9/11 world
can find solace in. The story works as an action-adventure vehicle —
but it’s not just quick-cutting and pounding drum tracks. Musa Dagh
asks an audience to realize the value of the human spirit. In my
musical explorations I’ve attempted to capture the story’s spiritual
essence — but imagine how powerful it would be using all the elements
of cinema.
Whenever my compositions devoted to Musa Dagh have been performed,
I’ve witnessed audiences embrace its drama, its epic sweep, its
emotional depth. My symphonic suite with texts — narrated by Eric
Bogosian — saw its premiere at last season’s Interfaith Concert of
Remembrance in New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
This spring, my new 40-minute music video, The Place of Beginnings:
Songs of Peace (a musical meditation on the story of the resistance at
Musa Dagh) was shown as part of the Scarsdale public school system’s
Human Rights Day curriculum — and the kids really caught on.
AR: How can someone view that video?
Ekizian: Sponsor a screening — just contact me at [email protected].
AR: From a video or concert to a blockbuster movie is a giant step.
Do you think it’s really in the cards?
Ekizian: Considering the past history, sure, it remains to be seen.
But believe me: this story resonates with today’s public
consciousness. Most importantly, it resonates with the youth. There is
a real interest out there for stories like this — a real thirst. And
for a certain segment of the population, "Musa Dagh" is almost like a
brand name. So with all that going for it, can a movie be far behind?
AR: Can’t wait to see it.
connect:
[email protected]
************ ************************************************** *************
10. Rocky’s next battle: The making of Musa Dagh?
by Chris Zakian
PARAMUS, N.J. — With the theatrical release last December of Rocky
Balboa, the sixth installment in the inspiring series about the
perpetual-underdog Philadelphia boxer, it was hardly surprising to see
filmmaker Sylvester Stallone spotlighted in newspapers across the
country.
What was surprising was an announcement elicited from Stallone by
Denver Post writer Michael Booth, regarding the star’s dream project.
Acknowledging that his action-hero days are likely behind him, the
60-year-old Stallone said that he would like to devote more of his
career to writing and directing: "less in the public eye, but
providing something for the public," is the way he put it.
Then Booth wrote: "So what is the Stallone Surprise, the project
he’s always wanted to write or direct?"
Here’s the answer he got — which certainly set Armenian hearts aflutter.
"For years Stallone’s wanted to create an epic, and the book that
intrigues him is Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, detailing
the Turkish genocide of its Armenian community in 1915. (After futile
attempts to turn the novel into a movie, filmmakers finally succeeded
in 1982, but it was a low-profile production.)
"French ships eventually rescued some Armenians, and Stallone has
his favorite scene memorized: ‘The French ships come, and they’ve
dropped the ladders and everybody has climbed up the side. The ships
sail.
"The hero, the one who set up the rescue, has fallen asleep,
exhausted, behind a rock on the slope above. The camera pulls back,
and the ships and the sea are on one side, and there’s one lonely
figure at the top of the mountain, and the Turks are coming up the
mountain by the thousands on the far side.’"
Fittingly for Rocky Balboa, the interview ended with a punch.
"The movie would be ‘an epic about the complete destruction of a
civilization,’ Stallone said. Then he laughed at the ambition. ‘Talk
about a political hot potato. The Turks have been killing that subject
for 85 years.’"
It was a small irony, appreciated only by Armenians, that this news
came to light in the same week that newspapers ran obituaries for
music impresario Ahmet Ertegun, whose father, Turkey’s ambassador to
the U.S. in the 1930s, had used his influence to have the plug pulled
on the earlier motion picture treatments of Musa Dagh.
Of course, there’s a long road separating a filmmaker’s quip about a
dream project, on the one hand, from an actual theatrical release, on
the other. Who knows whether Stallone’s ambition will ever see the
light of day?
But Armenians — like Rocky — are used to the underdog role. They
suffer setbacks, but always come back swinging. If not Stallone, then
surely someone else will fulfill the long-held Armenian dream of
putting Musa Dagh on film in the way it deserves.
Regrettably, there will be no "Hollywood ending" to lift our spirits
at the story’s conclusion.
************************************* **************************************
11. Installation: Sarkis Zabunyan: Reinventing the aura
by Raphy Sarkissian
The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of
authenticity. –Walter Benjamin
An art book is a museum without walls. –André Malraux
PARIS — Imagine being at the Louvre and encountering The Crucifixion
of Grünewald that is in actuality at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar.
Such was the virtual museum simulated by Sarkis Zabunyan in his
multi-media set of installations entitled Encounters with Uccello,
Grünewald, Munch and Beuys.
This hybrid project of Sarkis was realized on the occasion of
Arménie, mon ami, the official Year of Armenia in France. The
exhibition was curated by Marie-Laure Bernadac and paralleled
Inclinaison, a second project by Sarkis at the Bourdelle Museum.
The four site-specific installations at the Louvre included real
time video projections, film, audio soundtracks, neon light, found
objects, altered readymades and the artist’s selection of five objects
from the Department of Decorative Arts. At the Bourdelle Museum,
Sarkis had invited Patrick Neu and Jean-Marie Perdrix to exhibit their
works along with his.
Given their diverse specifics, both of the exhibitions of Sarkis
were richly connected to the artistic praxes and theoretical issues of
our times, addressing the nature of the work of art through a broad
range of mediums and within the diverse cultural spheres of the far
past and present. By the same token, the institutionalized framework
of the museum was quested. As the approach of Sarkis was
simultaneously medium-specific and curatorial, these projects
interlocked pairs of oppositional tropes of modernity: originality
versus reproduction, fabrication versus simulation, and creating
versus curating.
Through an elaborately orchestrated undertaking, Sarkis used the
medium of real-time video transmission to project four works located
at four different museums. While the image of The Battle of San Romano
of Paolo Uccello arrived from the Louvre itself, a projection of
Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece was transported to the
spectator from the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar. While the apparition
of Werkkomplex of Joseph Beuys was rooted in the Hessian State Museum
in Darmstadt, The Scream of Munch was electronically delivered from
Oslo. These ephemerally appropriated images were brought in dialogue
with such artifacts as a 10th century Byzantine carved memorial stone
(Khatchkar), an 11th-12th century Syrian gilded glass wall tile, and a
14th century bronze horseman from Scandinavia.
Hence by means of various technological conduits along with rare
objects and readymades, this project cogently eradicated geography and
cultural boundaries, reallocating the concept of André Malraux’s
"museum without walls." While in 1936 Walter Benjamin argued that
photographic reproduction lamentably strips the work of its "aura," in
1938 André Malraux expressed his positive idea that the capacity of
the photograph to be reproduced would radically transform the "aura"
rather than terminating it, generating possibilites of new experiences
through such venues as the easily accessible pages of the art book.
Addressing the notion of the "aura" Benjamin wrote: "Even the most
perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its
presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it
happens to be." In these projects of Sarkis, the model of Benjamin’s
aversion of mechanical reproduction due to its termination of the
artwork’s "aura" became juxtaposed with Malraux’s positive greeting of
photography. As such, the broad diversity of the mediums of Sarkis
pleaded for a principal reconsideration of Benjamin’s and Malraux’s
reverse canons.
In Leidschatz, a metaphor for a socially shared treasure linked to
suffering and grief, Sarkis paired a projection of Uccello’s Battle of
San Romano with a wooden box filled with audiotape ribbons that nested
this German term in neon. As tangled audiotape ribbons of the music of
Wagner, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg were subjected to the changing
neon colors of the text, this melting pot of Sarkis came across as a
parable of Aby Warburg’s concept of art history as a study of a broad
range of cultural products. The reference to Wagner – a composer and
theorist – recalled the musician’s enterprise for a radical synthesis of
music, theater and the visual arts. That synthesis was centered upon
the concept of the "complete work of art," what he termed as
Gesamtkunstwerk.
By encasing Wagner’s music recorded on tape within a gilded crate
and pairing that with a projection of Uccello’s painting, Sarkis
provided a hightech analog of Wagner’s philosophy. Fluctuating neon
colors, however, seemed to deflect the Romanticism of Wagner, tapping
on the quixotic dimension of that aesthetic dictum. The neon text also
evoked the lineage of such conceptual artists as Joseph Kosuth,
Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman and Mario Merz. By employing various
technological mediums as trenchant sensorial means, Sarkis overlapped
Benjamin’s notion of the demise of the aura with Malraux’s contrary
position.
Referring to concepts of "beginning" and "touch," Au commencement,
le toucher included a horizontal cross assembled through six screens,
displaying impressions that included the artist’s hand in touch with
negative photographic plates of Jesus in the Isenheim Altarpiece, the
monumental polyptych of Matthias Grünewald. The sterility of blue
hands here replaced Grünewald’s use of dark, sedated and fiery colors
that enunciate the gray-black sky, greenish flesh, blood, death and
resurrection. This coloristic reversal rendered the somber tone of the
original painting serene and surreal, as its elegiac theme was shifted
to immaterial palpability. Color, touch, painting and technology were
probed through video art.
The third work qualified the notion of sleep with those of color and
abandonment. Consisting of shelves filled with sheets of colored felt,
Sommeil abandonné coloré invited the viewer to ruminate on the
Werkkomplex of Joseph Beuys at the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt.
The cathartic rituals, "shamanism" and cultic practice of Beuys
through public performances were invested in the mourning and psychic
healings from the traumas of the Holocaust and World War II, though
his practice was inextricably doomed to the fallacies of mere
spectacularization. Though Sarkis here makes use of the installation
of Beuys rather than his performances, this work at the Louvre echoed
the philosophy of Beuys materialized through his performances. Postwar
desire for memory, the repression of memory produced by psychological
and sociopolitical conditions of social trauma, or the mere spectacle
that art may fall into as a consequence of performances at once
validate and problematize the legacy of Beuys. Within this
installation of Sarkis, concepts of sleep, abandonment, the Occident
and the Orient were interplayed through the poetics of color, Syrian
glass, wood, felt and a bronzy bell.
A two-minute film, Au commencement, l’oeil de Munch depicts the
formation of a fictional eye of Munch. Beginning with a pointillistic
process, it shifts to gestural mark making. It portrays a hand tracing
a circular form that is hard not to read as a reference to the ocular
globe at a certain point. It is minimal but not Minimal; now it is
abstract, now not abstract at all; now it is purely optical, now it is
explicitly tactile; it continues shifting this infinitesimal "now" to
an infinitesimal "then" mercurially, as traces of paint progressively
constitute a retinal circumference and region; it is neat, as it is
chaste from the sensory overload of our media-glutted age that has
relentlessly rendered painting problematic. Yet the accompanying
Scream of Munch and the electronic devices "enabling" and surrounding
this formation of the image of the eye inculcate a reinvention of art
making, wherein traditional and current mediums need not be mutually
exclusive.
Exclusion and exclusivity, however, are the very functions of the
museum. And herein lies the conundrum of Sarkis: the artist as the art
maker and ad hoc curator whose agenda inexorably conflates the
metaphysical, redemptive aura of Beuys with the institutional critique
of Marcel Broodthaers, who had denounced the self-mystification of the
avant-garde and critiqued the gallery and museum as primary sites of
commercial interest. As Sarkis overlaps these two paradigms, he
rearticulates the contemporary fashion of installation work.
Marie-Laure Bernadac insightfully associates the project of Sarkis
with the Library of Aby Warburg. Warburg’s practice took the form of
sociological and cultural studies and has come to be one
exemplary – albeit imperfect – model of an attempt that sought to redefine
and expand the discipline of art history. This project of Sarkis comes
across as a provocative metaphor of Warburg’s philosophy.
"As in the past, so too now, the museum has become a cathedral where
we submissively pay homage to the dogmas of art, and where we either
passively yield or actively embrace an orthodoxy imposed from on
high." So wrote David Freedberg on The Play of the Unmentionable, the
1990 installation conceived and curated by Joseph Kosuth at the
Brooklyn Museum. Encounters with Uccello, Grünewald, Munch and Beuys
of Sarkis was another play of the unmentionable, inciting the beholder
to reconstruct the aura, to experience what words alone could not say.
For many, Sarkis Zabunyan’s method for inventing art may provide
endless possibilities of new, genuine and liberatory experiences, and
is therefore imperative for reinventing the aura. For others, such a
museum with and without walls may register as an ineluctable
postmodern symptom. In either case, these projects ingeniously
allegorize the aesthetic aporia of our post-medium epoch.
* * *
Raphy Sarkissian teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
******************************************* ********************************
12. Poetry Matters: Tekeyan’s brilliant darkness
by Lory Bedikian
Historically an ode was strung to music and sung for all to hear. Over
time, this poetic form became a lyric of emotional depth either
exalting or praising some person or thing, among many other
definitions and variations.
Throughout my schooling, we were taught the English odes of Marvell
or Coleridge, but the odes I most cherished were those of Keats,
namely "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on
Melancholy."
Only through the expansion of my education was I able to encounter
the odes of Pablo Neruda, odes written with simplicity, visceral
images, earthiness and insight. Neruda’s odes to objects seem to hold
the most imaginative resonance, odes in which objects become vehicles
to commentaries on the poor or on our own insignificance (or
significance, depending on one’s interpretation), such as in "Ode to
the Onion" and "Ode to Clothes," two favorites which should be reread
for their many layered meanings.
Among those poets who were never presented to me, but whose work I
had to discover on my own, is Vahan Tekeyan, who survived the Armenian
Genocide and is known as one of the most important voices in Armenian
Literature. His work covers a range from poems speaking about the love
of one’s country, lost love, or anger and regret. Some of his most
riveting images are in poems such as "Sacred Wrath" where "The lambs
transformed to wolves, doves to snakes, / saw lilies become thistles
and/ violets change to poison vine and root."
Although best remembered for his nationalist verse such as "To the
Armenian Nation," "The Country of Dust," or "Coat of Arms," Tekeyan
has also authored a collection of odes. In some of these poems —
"Ode to the Sun," "Ode to Verlaine," "Ode to Joy" — an even more
distinct tone of Tekeyan’s emerges.
In "An Ode to Darkness" the reader experiences Tekeyan’s duet of the
unfolding of night alongside the progression of the poem. Like so many
of his poems, the stanzas are small rooms of specific suggestions and
minimalistic metaphors.
An Ode to Darkness
This glorious bridge of blackness, this night
engulfs me in its magic arc,
a vaulting span of sky, this dark
flecked with intoxicating starlight
makes everything recede, appear so far
away tonight I forget the past. In thrall
I forget everything, even you, my heart,
and for a moment can’t recall
anything except the immense wash of dark, I
feel a tremor rise through me, up
through trees, to the sail of the sky.
And my heart heaves, stirs,
lifts me to the threshold of the stars
where your sweet voice calls.
The opening stanza presents the darkness as a "glorious bridge of
blackness," thus connoting a sense of passage, of transport, and to
take this even further, of freedom from what we leave behind. The
"night" brings the speaker "magic" along with "intoxicating starlight"
which suggests that the speaker has been led to a mystical place of
exhilaration. This introduces the tone of the ode, which is of praise
and exaltation.
And this celestial escape — in the second stanza — "makes
everything recede, appear so far / away tonight I forget the past,"
again suggests that it is through this natural phenomenon that the
speaker finds lightness of the soul, in the darkest hours on earth.
The turn in the poem comes in this stanza’s third line, when the
speaker makes an address: "I forget everything, even you, my heart."
If we can assume that the heart, traditionally, holds the symbolism of
one’s deepest joys and despairs, then the darkness has saved the
speaker from those extremes of emotion. Tekeyan’s speaker repeats that
they cannot "recall / anything except the immense wash of dark."
The penultimate, or third, stanza brings perhaps a second, more
climactic turn where the speaker appears to become one with the
natural world, claiming "I / feel a tremor rise through me, up through
trees, to the sail of the sky." The internal tremor, or upheaval,
instead of being contained within the self, climbs through the
speaker, the trees and to the sky which creates a direct lineage from
the person to the darkness praised.
In the closing of the poem the heart returns, although not directly
addressed as in the second stanza, and now is remembered again by the
speaker since it "heaves, stirs, / lifts" the speaker back again to
"the threshold of the stars," the place of exaltation. The last line
seems to be one of Tekeyan’s most mysterious, since earlier the heart
was addressed as "you," but now the heart has just become an object
again and suddenly we hear the speaker say, "where your sweet voice
calls." If not the heart, which heaves and stirs, then the "you[r]" in
the last line must be the darkness, since it is the home and
"threshold of the stars." The reason the closing creates surprise,
enchantment, has to do with Tekeyan’s choice to address the darkness
as "you[r]" just as he had addressed the heart, and since the darkness
had not been addressed directly throughout the entire verse, we feel
as though we have entered a private moment between the speaker and the
speaker’s beloved. The heart and darkness have now changed places for
the speaker and the darkness has ultimately become the beloved, even
more so than the heart.
Tekeyan’s "An Ode to Darkness," may linger where a "sweet voice
calls," but instead of dabbling in sentimentality, it brings us
instead to an understanding where a loss of self-centeredness
coincides with an affinity toward nature and its shrouded
illuminations. Through Tekeyan’s ode we turn darkness around and in
place of thinking of an unknown, an abyss, we can reinterpret this
"bridge of blackness" as a tunnel toward emotional rebirth and toward
reconnecting with the natural world, worth all the praise we can give
it.
Sacred Wrath: The Selected Poems of Vahan Tekeyan, translated by Diana
Der-Hovanessian from the Armenian, edited by Diana Der-Hovanessian and
Marzbed Margossian, Ashod Press, 1982.
* * *
Lory Bedikian received her MFA in Poetry from the University of
Oregon. Her collection of poetry was recently selected as a finalist
in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.
************************************ ***************************************
13. Film: People’s stories told
* To its credit, A Story of a People in War and Peace tells the story
of people, not the story of a people
by Alexander Tavitian
Perhaps the most distinguished film screened at this year’s Golden
Apricot Film Festival as part of the Armenian Panorama program was A
Story of People in War and Peace. This was due, in large part, to the
film’s participation earlier this year in the Tribeca Film Festival
where it won an award for Best New Documentary. The film, directed by
Vardan Hovhannisyan, who views himself as a one-time amateur
filmmaker, splices together clips shot by Hovahnnisyan himself during
the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Also included are interviews with some of
the soldiers he had originally documented.
Although the film depicts the Armenian nation during one of its
greatest trials, it is the study of individuals and their reactions to
the horrors of war that makes A Story of People in War and Peace
notable. After watching the film, one is left with unique impressions
made by each of these individuals and their stories. Had the title
been "A People" rather than simply "People," it may have been
regrettably similar to the rest of the films in its category, which
focus more on the collective experience rather than the individual
one.
For example, in Georgy Pardzhanov’s Children of Adam, lengthy shots
meditate on members of the Yezidi community as they engage in daily
routines that help sustain their culture and traditions. No
personalities are uncovered in the film, yet this is compensated for
by a sense of the community’s camaraderie and the significance they
lend to the performance of joined traditions.
Similar is Grigor Harutyunyan’s On the Wheels, which documents a
group of Armenian merchants traveling into Turkey. This film also
gives a holistic depiction of a group experience, with many shots
capturing the entire group as they travel by bus toward their
destination. In this way, the audience continuously finds itself
engaged in a people rather than a person, and although this tendency
is not always to the detriment of the films, it often limits the level
of empathy and emotional engagement the films are able to garner.
Even the film Momik, a documentary about a renowned Armenian artist
from the Middle Ages, avoids outlining a distinguishable personality,
a protagonist of sorts. Instead it places Momik’s accomplishments
within a pan-Armenian context; they are products of a group, a nation,
not an individual.
Films usually convey emotions and ideas by establishing the
audience’s identification with a protagonist; the audience, in turn,
participates in all of the protagonist’s experiences. While many films
manifest a subversion of this literary approach and emphasize only the
cinematic technique — occasionally to great success — such a choice
is not identifiable in the films mentioned above. Instead, they seem
to result in a lack or even absence of focus.
An example of this is the film Callshop in which director Edgar
Grigorian observes how international calling stations in Germany serve
a cultural and ethnic intersection. He does this by cutting between
ongoing conversations held in numerous languages by numerous people at
a single calling station. The end result, however, stings of
superficiality. This stems from the filmmaker, who comes to no
conclusions, makes no statements, and has little to offer in the way
of understanding the phenomenon. But it also comes from his subjects,
who appear to be acting and whose side of the conversation is often
devoid of emotion.
Once again, this comes in great contrast with the touching humanity
found in each of the ex-soldiers interviewed in A Story of People in
War and Peace. May more films revolve around such individuals.
************************************ ***************************************
14. Design: The alternate worlds of Narbeh Nazarian
by Lory Tatoulian
The CBS Studios in Studio City can be regarded as the locus where
Americana has been defined for decades, delivering our favorite
sitcoms and TV shows that have interlaced themselves in our daily
lives and collective American heritage. Television is the purveyor of
fantasy life, drawing us into the realm of heightened reality, where
we have come to intimately know the lives of such people as Mary Tyler
Moore and Gilligan.
One man who works to create these alternate worlds is Narbeh
Nazarian. For the past 25 years, Narbeh has been working as a
production designer, creating huge sets and television environments
for popular TV shows and movies. As a production designer, he is a
master in artifice, continually creating montages of landscapes,
buildings, and video images for our viewing pleasure.
Currently, Narbeh is wrapping up the tail ends of the show On the
Lot for Fox Television. It is a new reality TV show that is produced
by Stephen Spielberg, Mark Barnett, and Dreamworks TV. In the series,
undiscovered filmmakers engage in a competition to see who can win a
Dreamworks Studio development deal.
Narbeh explains that throughout the course of the summer, while
shooting On the Lot, he had to design 36 different sets every week.
"Logistically, it is very challenging to work on shows like this. Each
set has to look completely different for all six short movies that
were made. Not only did I have to create a different look I had to
work with six different crews for each film," Narbeh said.
Not only was the workload demanding, but Narbeh had the extra
challenge of constantly changing the style in order to suit the genre
that the filmmaker was requesting. "One week I made sets for horror
films, the next week it was comedy or actions films. Based on the
script, I designed the setting and made sure my crew executed what I
had envisioned."
The scope of a production designer’s work is vast and encompasses
many disciplines. A production designer has to inherently posses the
faculties that allow him or her to think both linearly and
artistically. Narbeh noted that his job is more than "just building."
He is also expected to really understand the specifics of
architectural design, carpentry, film technology, and art. His
interdisciplinary range allows him to adapt to different technologies
and mediums to whatever project he is working on.
Along with his knowledge and craftiness, Narbeh has to regulate
teams of people that are appointed to carry out his master plans.
"Normally in my crew I have an art director, decorator, and
construction crew that materialize what I design." What goes on behind
the scenes is a circuitous operation that is often frenetic and
complex; but it is a process that ultimately yields a polished quality
once it is aired.
From hammering to manipulating images on the screen, for the past
six years, Narbeh has been heavily involved in designing sets for
reality TV shows. As the expected vicissitudes and trends of the
industry go, Narbeh rode the wave of the reality TV phenomenon and has
been in this type of broadcasting ever since its popularity soared.
Narbeh became involved in this new format and has been assiduously
working on some of the most highly rated reality TV shows on
prime-time television.
Before designing for On the Lot some of the more recent design
projects he has led include the television shows Big Brother and The
Contender. He has had a prolific run in the TV industry and has had
his signature designs grace the sets of over 22 reality television
shows in the past six years. "Every show I’ve done has required major
builds such as completely renovating mansions or building contraptions
that are suspended six thousand feet into the air." One of the first
reality shows he worked on was called Bachelorettes of Alaska. "It
was an awesome experience building sets six thousand feet from the
ground on the hills of Mount Alaska while overlooking glaciers,"
Narbeh said.
Narbeh notes that the bulk of his work requires much bigger
commitments than some of the feature films that are currently being
made. He mentioned that when he was working on the show Big Brother he
had to build and strike 33 different sets in just nine weeks. "We were
building and designing sets around the clock. One set would be a golf
course, then we’d tear that down and build a cemetery, the next week
it would be something entirely different."
Before Narbeh plunged into the world of reality TV, he had a
multifarious career that ran the gamut of design. During the infant
stages of his career, he began working as a specialty designer, which
involved fabricating props and specialty items for feature films. He
worked on blockbuster movies in the 1980s that are now revered as
cultural icons such as Back to the Future, The Running Man, and The
Abyss.
* The Magical Kingdom
After his success with pop flicks, he briefly navigated his career
away from cinema and instead entered the magical kingdom. For three
years, Narbeh worked for Disney in amusement park designs. He was the
lead designer for the props, lighting, and architectural interiors for
the creation of Euro Disney. After his European enterprise, he then
helped design the "Sunset Boulevard Street" feature at Disneyworld in
Florida and was the lead lighting designer for Toontown in Disneyland.
"I can say that I was responsible for all the lighting fixtures at
Toontown," Narbeh said.
When Mickey and Goofy became too banal, he then ventured into the
hyperreality of video games. "I helped design interactive video games
when they were first introduced in the early 1990s." Narbeh reflects
on how quickly technology has evolved from its primitive state to its
advanced programming. He laughs at the fact that the work he was doing
just a couple of years ago is now deemed obsolete and archaic. He
remembers when he was designing video games and how he used to shoot
everything on film and then take the footage and go through the
arduous process of digitizing it. "We used to call this the granola
effect; this doesn’t really apply anymore," he smirks as he explains.
In the early 1990s champions of high art began to regard independent
film as the cornerstone of true aesthetic. Narbeh made his mark in
this trend with a more peculiar position. He first got into film by
designing robotic costumes for independent movies. Moviemakers revered
his work so much that he eventually created his own Robotic Costume
Company. This obscure endeavor was the impetus that eventually led him
into designing major sets for films and commercials.
* Family man
Narbeh alternates his time between work and family. His wife Houshik
also possesses creative sensibilities. For 10 years she was the
artistic director at Sony Music. She has now assumed a more demanding
responsibility, which is the 24-hour job of taking care of their two
7-year-old twins, Vem and Nairi. Narbeh remarks on how much he loves
being with his wife and children. He jokingly comments on how his
children have "unfortunately" inherited the creative gene. "Both my
kids are inventive. Vem can go back and forth between the tangible
process of building things to the ultra-artistic approach to
creation." Narbeh then explains his daughter Nairi’s temperament. He
makes comparisons between his daughter and a famous modern dancer:
"Nairi is total free spirit and she is always engaged in some abstract
project. She is like Idasora Duncun, exploring her creative bounds."
Perhaps artistic talent is transgenerational in the Nazarian family,
because ever since Narbeh was a child he has always been painting and
building things. His father Garekin was an engineer in Tehran and
painted as a hobby. Narbeh feels that he has followed in his father’s
footsteps and has always aimed to have the hyphenated career of
technology and science.
When he first arrived in the United States in 1976, he majored in
math and engineering at Cal State Northridge. Realizing that he didn’t
like engineering, he stumbled upon industrial design. "When I found
industrial design, I knew it was the perfect marriage of all that I
wanted to do." He began to flex his design abilities in the early 80s
when he and Vahe Berbrian and Ara Madzounian had the Armenian
Experimental Theater in Los Angeles. "When we would stage productions,
I always automatically became the set designer."
These humble beginnings soon launched him into a professional path
that he is now absolutely passionate about. "Every day is a challenge.
I get a call in the morning and they’ll say we need a design by
tomorrow night. I have 30 hours to design, build, procure, and shoot
the show," Narbeh exclaimed. "That challenge is an adrenaline rush
that keeps me here."
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